Tangled Threads Read online

  Swipe-swipe-swipe.

  The giant didn’t even get a chance to untangle himself from the tree before I palmed another knife and started in on him. He was half turned toward me, so I couldn’t slam my blades into his heart and put him down immediately the way I wanted to, but I cut up the right side of his thick, muscular chest like I was butterflying a slab of meat. The giant screamed and staggered back, but I kept right on going with him, opening his stomach from one side to the other, blood and intestines spilling across the white marble floor. The giant screamed again, his feet going out from under him, and slumped to the floor. I drove my knife into his throat, cutting off his hoarse cries of pain, before yanking it back out. He toppled over and joined the valet on the floor, both of them dead.

  Trent stared at me, his eyes flicking around the room as if he was considering whether he wanted to fight or run. He should have run.

  I started toward the giant, not giving him the chance to decide. Trent turned and headed for the door, but he’d forgotten that the dead valet was lying on the floor behind him. Trent stumbled over the other man, and his head cracked against the closed door. That was all the opening I needed to ram both of my silverstone knives into his back. One blade slipped between his ribs, ripping into his lung, while the other plunged into his heart. Trent screamed once and wobbled back and forth for a moment, his brain struggling to catch up with his fatal injuries. When that happened, the giant crumpled to the floor. I pulled my knives out of his back, knowing that he’d be dead soon enough.

  And then there was one.

  I turned around and headed toward the last man breathing. Pete scrambled up to his feet, reached around to the small of his back, and came up with a gun. He smiled and leveled the weapon at me. I was too far away to get to him before he pulled the trigger, and we both knew it. I reached for my Stone magic, ready to push the power out into my skin, head, hair, and eyes, ready to turn my body into a hard, impenetrable shell—

  A wolf whistle sounded. Pete whirled around at the sound, and a bright, bluish white ball of Ice magic slammed into his chest, knocking him all the way across the room. His body hit the far wall and slid off. He didn’t get up after that.

  I walked over to where he’d fallen. Jagged shards of elemental Ice stuck out of Pete’s torso, making it look like a dozen skewers had been driven into his chest. And he thought that I’d shish-kebabed him earlier with my knife. He’d been dead before he’d hit the wall, and his eyes were still open wide with shocked disbelief and agonizing pain.

  I turned to look at my sister. Bria stood in the open doorway of her bedroom, her hand outstretched, the cold glow of her Ice magic still coating her fingers. She was a strong elemental in her own right, and she’d had more than enough power to take out Pete with that one blast.

  “Nice,” I said. “Very nice.”

  Bria dropped her hand, and the cool caress of her Ice magic faded away. “Well, I couldn’t very well let him shoot you, now, could I?”

  I shrugged. “I thought you might, after the fight we had earlier.”

  Something like hurt flickered in Bria’s blue eyes, but I didn’t have time to think about how much I’d pissed her off again. Instead, I went up the steps and cracked open the door, listening. The suites were spaced pretty far apart, but I’d kicked the door shut, and the men had let out a couple of screams before I’d killed them. Slamming doors weren’t uncommon in hotels, but yelps of pain were another matter.

  But the walls must have been thicker than I thought, because I didn’t hear any movement out in the hall. No whispers, no running footsteps, no other doors opening or slamming, nothing. No one seemed to have heard the commotion at all, or if they had, they just didn’t care what it was. Good. That meant we had some time to clean up the scene and get the hell out of here. I didn’t know how many more men Dekes might have in the hotel, either on the staff or his own goons, but Bria and I had definitely worn out our welcome. Best to get while the getting was good.

  I closed the door and locked it again.

  “Sorry I wasn’t more help. I had earplugs in, or I would have heard your elemental alarm and woken up sooner,” Bria said, moving around the room and staring at the dead men. “Who are these guys?”

  “Some of Randall Dekes’s men. Remember Pete and Trent from the restaurant?”

  Bria looked at the bodies, and her face tightened with recognition. “They didn’t stay in jail very long, did they? They must have come looking for us as soon as they made bail. But how did they know where to find us?”

  “Callie said that Dekes has his hands in everything in Blue Marsh, remember?” I said. “Besides, Pete recognized you at the restaurant, and we checked into the hotel under your name. So it was just a matter of Dekes finding which hotel you were staying at and then sending in Pete and his boys to do their thing. The fact that we were here at the Blue Sands just made it that much easier, since Dekes owns the hotel.”

  “Yeah, but why come after us?”

  I shrugged again. “Any number of reasons. Maybe word got back to Dekes that you were a cop, and he didn’t want you sniffing around while he tries to take over Callie’s restaurant. More likely, though, he knew his boys got their asses handed to them earlier, and he told them to get their payback—or else. You know how it works. If you or your men show any sign of weakness or incompetence, the other sharks smell the blood in the water and start circling around. Dekes can’t afford to show any chinks in his organization, not now when he’s so close to building his new casino. And from what I heard him say before he came into the suite, Pete was exactly the kind of guy who would relish hurting two women, whether it was on Dekes’s orders or just his own sick idea.”

  Bria surveyed the blood and bodies that littered the once-pristine suite. After a moment, she sighed and shook her head.

  “Now what?” she asked. “Because these dead guys aren’t just going to disappear. Not with Sophia back in Ashland. And we can’t just leave them here. Like you said, the room’s in my name. Besides, we both know that you aren’t going to call the cops and explain all this to them.”

  I pretended I didn’t hear the chastising tone in her voice and stood there, thinking, my eyes flicking around the room just as Bria’s had a moment before. Finally, my gaze lit on the patio doors, and an idea popped into my head.

  “Uh-oh,” Bria muttered. “I know that look. You’ve thought of something. The question now is exactly how bad is it, and do I really want to know about it?”

  “Don’t worry, baby sister. It’s nothing too dark or sinister—this time. We’re going to get rid of these bodies easy peesy.”

  Her eyes narrowed with suspicion. “And how the hell are we going to do that?”

  I smiled at her. “We’re going to dump the bastards in the pool.”

  9

  Bria changed into jeans, sneakers, and a T-shirt and packed up our things. My clothes were dark enough to hide the blood that had spattered onto them, so I got to work. The first thing I did was go out into the hallway, grab the luggage cart that had been left by the elevator, and roll it into the suite. Then I stripped off the linen jacket the valet was wearing and wrestled his body onto the cart. I put him on the bottom and piled Pete on top of him, to hide the valet’s wounds. As a final touch, I threw the valet’s jacket over Pete to cover up his injuries as best I could.

  “Are you sure this is going to work?” Bria asked, eyeing the haphazard way I’d stacked the bodies on the cart. “They’re going to get rug burn from their hands and feet dragging off the side like that.”

  “Well, they’re dead, so I doubt it will bother them,” I replied. “Now let’s roll them onto the elevator.”

  Bria helped me push the cart out of the suite and down to the end of the hall. I stabbed the button for the elevator. Since we were on the third floor, we didn’t have to wait too long for it to arrive. Given the late hour, the car was empty. Even if someone had been inside, I was going to cheerfully say my friends had had too much to drink and t
hat Bria and I were taking them to their room. Not the best excuse I’d come up with, but I didn’t have time to be more creative or clever.

  For once, my luck held, and we made it down to the ground floor without seeing anyone. Given the fact that the hotel didn’t have any security cameras in the hallways, elevators, or common areas, I didn’t have to worry about a guard spotting us on a screen somewhere and coming to see what we were up to.

  I stepped outside and checked to make sure no one was using the pool, but the area was deserted. Even the bonfires had burned out on the beach. I craned my neck up, looking at the many stories above me, but I didn’t see anyone else out on their patio. The night was as still, dark, and quiet as it was going to get.

  “Still clear inside,” Bria murmured from her spot in the doorway, looking back into the hotel. “But are you sure you want to do this? Someone’s bound to hear the noise.”

  “I doubt that, given how many folks I saw sucking down mai tais earlier. They’re either in their rooms sleeping off their buzz or holding on tight to their honeys right now. Even if they do hear something, they’ll probably just think it’s some late-night skinny-dippers out having a little fun. Besides, I don’t see how we have much of a choice,” I said. “As you pointed out, Sophia isn’t here to clean up the mess like she usually is, and we can’t exactly leave the bodies in the room with your name on the bill. So let’s go. Heave-ho. These guys aren’t getting any warmer.”

  Bria sighed with either resignation or agreement. I couldn’t tell which exactly, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to know.

  We pushed the cart out onto the patio and up to the edge of the pool. Thankfully, the wheels didn’t squeak. We started with Pete, since he was on top. Bria grabbed his legs while I took hold of his shoulders.

  “One, two, three,” I whispered.

  Together we rolled his body off the valet’s and into the deep end of the pool. Bria was right—the splash was louder than I’d thought it would be, but there was nothing I could do about that now. We quickly pushed the valet into the pool as well before shoving the cart back toward the door. Ten . . . twenty . . . thirty . . . I counted off the seconds in my head as we worked. It took us ninety seconds to dump the bodies and make it back to the door. But no lights snapped on around the pool and no one came outside to investigate, so I figured we were safe enough to do the same thing to the other two goons.

  Only one giant would fit on the cart at a time, so we had to make two more trips. One by one, we hefted their bodies onto the luggage cart, took it downstairs, and dumped the giants into the pool, trying to make as little noise as possible. By the time we finished, the four bodies looked like overgrown lily pads bobbing up and down in the pool, and the shimmering blue water had turned a muddy pink from the blood still oozing out of the men’s wounds. It wasn’t the best or most discreet body dump I’d ever done, but hopefully no one would notice the dead men until morning. I planned for us to be long gone by then.

  “Now,” I said, pushing the cart away from the pool for the last time. “Let’s go upstairs and tackle the room.”

  The suite was equipped with everything, and the kitchen was fully stocked right down to a box of rubber gloves and a wide assortment of cleaning supplies under the sink, probably so the maids wouldn’t have to push their carts into the room and disturb the guests any more than necessary. I grabbed a pair of gloves, a bucket, some rags, and a bottle of bleach.

  Since I’d killed three of the men right inside the door, most of the blood was limited to the marble floor there. The stone had already taken on a darker, more somber sound as the blood had started to dry on top of it. I splashed bleach over the whole area and wiped it down three times, while Bria straightened up the rest of the room, making sure she cleaned up all the melted traces of her elemental Ice blast. I also wiped down the luggage cart with bleach and cleaned our fingerprints off the brass rails.

  It was after one in the morning when we finished. I stepped back and surveyed the suite with a critical eye. The area wasn’t as pristine and spotless as it would have been if Sophia had been here and used her Air elemental magic to sandblast the blood into nothingness, but the bleach would muddle whatever evidence it didn’t outright destroy. This wasn’t the first murder scene I’d cleaned up on my own, and it wouldn’t be the last.

  Besides, nobody but Randall Dekes knew that the men had been sent to our suite in the first place. He couldn’t exactly complain to the cops that we’d gotten away with murder, not without implicating himself. Despite how rich and powerful Dekes was, I doubted that even he would want to deal with the hassle of four dead bodies, how they’d gotten that way, and where they’d come from. When the cops got around to questioning him, the vampire would probably claim he’d never set eyes on any of the men before—even if everyone already knew they worked for him.

  Blue Marsh might be hundreds of miles away from Ashland, but sociopathic assholes were the same no matter where you went.

  I stuffed the gloves, rags, and empty bottle of bleach I’d used into a plastic bag and shoved the whole thing into my suitcase to dispose of at another, safer location. I also stopped long enough to put a fleece jacket on over my T-shirt, hiding the bleach stains on my dark clothes. Then Bria and I locked the suite and left. On our way to the elevator, we left the luggage cart in the hallway where I’d first found it.

  Checking out of the hotel was a calculated risk. When the bodies were found, the cops would be sure to look at the guest list and who had left when. Our departing this late at night might draw some unwanted attention, but I wasn’t overly concerned. I could always manufacture some reason for why we’d had to leave in the middle of the night—an illness, a family emergency, a problem at the Pork Pit. Besides, I doubted the cops would look too hard at us. After all, we were two women. How could we possibly have had the brawn and brains to kill four men and dispose of their bodies in the pool? And the fact was that we simply couldn’t stay here where we’d be sitting ducks for more of Dekes’s men—or the vampire himself.

  We made it down to the registration desk without any problems. I stepped up to deal with the paperwork while Bria got the night bellman to load our luggage onto another cart—one that hadn’t been used to haul around dead bodies. The clerk behind the counter was a college girl who looked barely old enough to drink.

  “Are you arriving or departing?” she asked in a voice that was way too perky for this late at night.

  “Checking out,” I said, matching her chipper tone. “The hospitality wasn’t quite what I had in mind.”

  I’d thought there might be a few more of Dekes’s men waiting in the lobby to help Pete just in case we got past him, but the area was as quiet and empty as the pool on the back side of the hotel had been. That didn’t mean I didn’t keep an eye out, though, as I stepped outside at the front of the building. Behind me, Bria pushed along the cart that held our luggage. The valet on night duty was slumped over a podium, his white linen jacket draped over his shoulders like a blanket. He jerked awake at the sound of our footsteps and the wheels of the cart rolling across the cobblestones. I palmed one of my silverstone knives, just in case he was part of Dekes’s crew, recognized us, and decided to do something stupid like scream.

  But the valet just blinked at us with sleep-crusted eyes. He didn’t know who we were, and he didn’t care. He started to get up, but I marched over and scanned the rows of keys on the metal rack behind him. It didn’t take long for me to spot a solid gold key ring shaped like a dollar sign. The dollar sign wasn’t a rune in this case, not really, but it was still one of Finn’s favorite symbols.

  “No worries,” I said in a bright tone, plucking Finn’s keys off the board. “We’ve got it. We’re in a bit of a hurry, so just tell me where the garage is.”

  The valet started to protest, but the hundred bucks I slipped him was more than enough for him to jerk his thumb over his shoulder. He’d already gone back to his half doze before we’d rounded the side of the building. The dark openi
ng of the garage waited up ahead.

  “Careful now,” I told Bria in a low voice. “Let me go first. Dekes might still have a guy or two down here, waiting in a car to drive Pete and the others back to whatever hole they crawled out of.”

  Bria nodded, leaving the luggage cart at the entrance, and I stepped in front of her. Together, we eased into the parking garage. All around me, the concrete let out low, uneasy mutters. Even here at an upscale hotel, the stone resonated with sharp notes of fear, worry, and paranoia. Not surprising. Most people didn’t like parking garages, since they were great places to get mugged—or dead.

  But no one was lurking behind the thick concrete posts or in the midnight shadows that filled in the spaces between the rows of luxury cars. That didn’t mean we didn’t run into trouble, though.

  Because Finn’s convertible was a mess.

  The windshield had been hit in at least three places with a baseball bat or tire iron, and deep, jagged cracks crisscrossed the glass like the thick, silvery threads of a spider’s web. The side mirrors had been knocked off, the radio had been busted, and the leather seats had been ripped to ribbons. Dents covered the car’s hood, while scrapes sliced down the sides where someone had used his key on the slick silver paint.

  Looked like someone had told Pete what car we were driving, and the four dead men had decided to bust it up for fun before they came up to the suite and did the same to us.

  Bria let out a low whistle. “Finn is going to freak when he sees this.”

  Freak was an understatement. I could already hear Finn bitching about how he’d lent us his brand-new baby, and we’d gotten it busted up in less than twenty-four hours. Although that was something of a record, even for me.