I leapfrogged from one alley and side street to the next, until I ended up crouching behind a weeping willow at the far end of the parking lot in front of the club. I peered through the swaying screen of long green tendrils.
From the outside, Northern Aggression looked like an office building, plain and featureless, except for the sign mounted over the entrance—a heart with an arrow through it. Roslyn’s rune for her club. Since it was midafternoon, the neon sign was dark, but when the crowds came out tonight, it would glow a bright red, then orange, then yellow, as though the pierced heart were a living, beating thing, pulsing in agony from the wound it had received.
A guy was standing by the entrance, his arms crossed over his chest and his eyes sweeping from left to right and back again. I didn’t recognize him as one of the bouncers, and he wasn’t wearing a gold heart-and-arrow rune necklace that would mark him as one of the hookers, bartenders, or other club workers. He shifted on his feet, his unbuttoned black suit jacket flapping around enough for me to get a glimpse of the gun holstered on his belt. Well, that certainly clued me in to the fact that he was up to no good. I grinned. Me too.
But I left the guy alone, since there was no way I could sneak up on him without him seeing me coming, given the open, empty pavement that stretched between us. Instead, I darted from tree to tree, skirting around the edges of the parking lot until I had worked my way over to the back of the building.
Another man was stationed at this entrance, a younger guy who had his head down and his eyes glued to his phone instead of keeping a watch out for me. Careless fool.
Lucky for me, a line of Dumpsters stretched from my position all the way up to the back door where the guy was standing, so I was able to use the containers as a screen between the two of us. It took me less than a minute to move from the edge of the lot to the Dumpster closest to him. But there was still about a twenty-foot gap between this container and his position at the door, which would give him more than enough time to let out one good, long, loud scream if he saw me coming.
So I reached down, picked up a loose bit of metal, and chucked it over his head. The metal hit the wall off to his right and then tink-tink-tinked across the pavement, and the guy finally looked up from his phone. He cursed and swiveled in that direction, his free hand yanking the gun from the holster belted to his waist.
I skirted around the Dumpster and crept up behind him, moving fast. I was so focused on the guy that I didn’t see the broken glass littering the pavement behind him until it was too late.
Crunch.
At the sound of my boots hitting the glass, the guy brought his gun up and pivoted toward me, but I was close enough to surge forward, dig my fingers into his hair, yank his head back, and cut his throat. His legs went out from under him, and he died with a raspy whisper, his phone and gun slipping out of his suddenly slack fingers and clattering across the pavement.
I moved over to the west corner of the building and pressed myself up against the wall, wondering if the noise of the phone and the gun tumbling end over end would carry all the way around to the front of the club and trying to guess which side the first man might approach from. But a minute passed, then another, and the other guard didn’t come to investigate, so I figured that it was safe for me to slip inside the club.
I tried the back door, which was locked, so I reached for my magic and made a couple of Ice picks. Less than a minute later, the door snicked open. I tossed the picks down onto the ground to melt away, eased inside the club, and closed the door behind me.
A long hallway stretched out in front out me, with rooms and corridors branching off on either side. I didn’t know where in the club Roslyn and her captors might be, so I tiptoed down the hallway, peering into every room I passed, careful to keep up against the wall at all times, where it was less likely that the bamboo floor would creak and give away my position.
But no one haunted the back of the club. No hookers were in the locker room, putting on their makeup and heart-and-arrow necklaces and getting ready for another night of sin. No bouncers were carrying around cases of liquor to restock the elemental Ice bar out front. No one was waiting in Roslyn’s office to talk to her. They must be out in the main part of the club, then.
I had started to slide down another hallway, to see if I could get a glimpse of what was going on out there through one of the many peepholes that were cut into the walls, when a toilet flushed in a men’s room off to my left. I moved forward and stopped outside the door. A few seconds later, the door opened, and a familiar figure stepped out into the hallway: Silvio Sanchez.
He was once again wearing a gray suit, and he paused long enough to straighten his matching tie, which gave me plenty of time to strike. But instead of cutting his throat like I had done to the other two men, I snaked my arm around his lean waist and pressed the point of my knife against his neck, right where his carotid artery was. Silvio stiffened, but he did the smart thing and didn’t try to fight back. If he had, I would have fileted him like a fish.
“Blanco?” he asked.
“Surprise, surprise,” I hissed.
Silvio tried to step away from me, but the scrape of my knife against his throat persuaded him to stand still.
“Where’s Roslyn? How many more men are in the club?”
“Just me and two more,” he said. “That’s everyone who’s inside. I swear.”
He didn’t say anything about the men waiting outside, but I hadn’t expected him to. Still, his head count lined up with what Roslyn had told me, so I decided to let Silvio keep breathing—for now.
“Where?”
“Out in the front part of the club. In the middle of the dance floor. He wanted to be able to see you coming.”
I didn’t have to ask who he was. “Well, that was smart of him. Otherwise, he’d probably be dead already.”
“He hasn’t hurt her, if that’s what you’re worried about,” Silvio said, trying to save his own neck and his boss’s too. “He just wanted to talk to you. There’s no need for this to get violent.”
“Oh, this has already gotten violent,” I drawled. “Just ask the man you stationed by my car or the one at the back door here. Oh, wait. Silly me. You can’t, because they are indisposed at the moment. Forever, actually.”
Silvio swallowed, his Adam’s apple bumping up against the edge of my knife, but he didn’t respond to my taunt.
“While you’re here, I am curious about one thing,” I said.