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  I went back over to Tommy and rifled through the dead vampire’s pock­ets until I found his cell phone. I dialed infor­ma­tion and had them give me the num­ber that I wanted. Four rings later, she picked up the phone.

  “This is Roslyn,” Roslyn Phillips’ sul­try voice filled my ear.

  “Hello, Roslyn,” I said. “One of your girls is out here in the woods. She and a cou­ple of her friends had a nasty run-in with a black bear. At least, that’s what you can tell the cops.”

  I told her what had hap­pened and where to find Jasmine.

  “Who the hell is this?” Roslyn asked when I finished.

  “I think you know exactly who this is,” I said. “And you owe me, remem­ber? So quit ask­ing ques­tions and get your ass out here.”

  “Gin?”

  I hung up with­out answer­ing her. Because I knew that Roslyn Phillips had got­ten the mes­sage and that the vam­pire would come and bring help for Jas­mine. Roslyn did owe me—bigtime. Because she knew exactly what I’d done before I’d retired. She knew that I was an assas­sin. Hell, I’d even killed her brother-in-law, who’d been abus­ing her sis­ter and young niece. Roslyn talk­ing about such things was partly the rea­son that Fletcher Lane had been mur­dered in the first place—because the wrong per­son had learned about the old man and the fact that he was my handler.

  I’d con­fronted Roslyn about all that at Fletcher’s funeral a few weeks ago. I’d told the vamp in no uncer­tain terms that she would do what­ever the hell I wanted her to until she’d worked off her debt to me—or else. And as much as I’d loved the old man, that would be a bloody long while indeed.

  But I pushed Roslyn Phillips out of my mind and went about eras­ing any trace that I’d been here in the clear­ing tonight—including retriev­ing my sil­ver­stone knives from Billy’s cool­ing body. Because while I might offi­cially be retired from being the assas­sin the Spi­der, that didn’t mean that I was going to be stu­pid or sloppy enough to leave any evi­dence behind.

  As I worked, every once in a while, I looked over to check on Jasmine.

  “Don’t worry, sweet­heart,” I mur­mured even though she couldn’t hear me. “The cavalry’s on the way.”

  Sure enough, thirty min­utes later, I heard the sharp crackle of heavy foot­steps on the fallen leaves, and I knew that Roslyn had arrived with help for Jas­mine, who was still uncon­scious. From my hid­ing place on the far edge of the clear­ing, I saw the bob of flash­lights through the trees and heard the hoarse shout of voices.

  “Over here!” a man rum­bled. “I see them!”

  “Where?” Roslyn Phillips’ con­cerned voice drifted over to me. “Jas­mine! Jas­mine, are you okay?”

  After that, things went pretty much as I’d expected them to. Cops arrived on the scene to try to fig­ure out what the hell had hap­pened. Not that they would work too hard at that though, since the major­ity of the mem­bers of the Ash­land Police Depart­ment were known for their ram­pant lazi­ness, avarice, and love of bribes.

  Men and women moved through the clear­ing, col­lect­ing evi­dence. Jas­mine was packed up and carted off to the clos­est Air ele­men­tal healer to get patched up. The coro­ner was called to come out and col­lect Tommy and Billy. And so on and so forth.

  Once Jas­mine had been sta­bi­lized, I saw no need to hang around any longer. Because I just killed peo­ple, after all. I didn’t patch them up after the fact. I fig­ured that I’d done my part by keep­ing Jas­mine from get­ting dead in the first place.

  So still softly whistling, I headed back through the woods to Fletcher Lane’s house to start unpack­ing my boxes, feel­ing more cheer­ful than I had in weeks.