Unraveled

by Jennifer Estep

  That was Tucker all right. My eyes narrowed. “What do you mean go out with him? Were the two of them . . . involved?”

  He shrugged. “As involved as Mab ever got with any of her one-night stands. Tucker was the only one that she ever had back for seconds and thirds, though. She told me once that the two of them were old friends, that she’d known him ever since she was a kid, and that they’d grown up together. That was one of the reasons why he stuck out to me.”

  “And why is that?”

  McAllister gave me a look like the answer should have been obvious. “Because most of the people that Mab knew for any length of time wound up dead, usually by her hand.”

  Well, that was certainly true. Mab had never been shy about roasting people with her Fire magic for the slightest infraction. Still, I kept quiet, waiting for him to continue, but the lawyer stared back at me with a puzzled expression, obviously not understanding my sudden interest in one of Mab’s old lovers.

  “That’s it?” Phillip growled. “That’s all you know about the Circle?”

  “I told you already. I don’t know anything about any stupid Circle—” McAllister stopped and tilted his head to the side, studying me with new interest. “This is really important to you, isn’t it, Blanco? This Circle . . . they’ve really pissed you off.”

  “You might say that.”

  I kept my face blank, but McAllister smelled blood in the water, and like any shark he went straight to it.

  He smiled, the sinister expression creating deep lines at the corners of his eyes. For the first time, well, ever, he seemed genuinely happy to be in my presence. “Now that I think about it, I might know more about Hugh Tucker after all, along with this Circle that he belongs to.”

  “But?”

  “But, as you know, I’ve been under a lot of stress these past several months, preparing for my upcoming murder trial. My memory’s not what it used to be.”

  Liar. His memory was probably better than mine, but I recognized the negotiating tactic for what it was. I sighed. “What do you want, Jonah?”

  “I want out.”

  “Out of what?”

  “Out of Ashland, out of my trial, out of this damn prison you’ve stuffed me in,” he growled. “I want to start over somewhere that no one knows me. I don’t even care where at this point. I just want out of here.” His gaze darted around the office, and his mouth twisted with disgust before he focused on me again. “You make that happen, and I’ll tell you everything I know about Hugh Tucker and the Circle.”

  He sat back against the couch and crossed his arms over his chest, giving me a smug, toothy smile, absolutely sure that I would give in to his demands.

  For a moment, I was tempted—so damn tempted. Because the Circle already knew every single thing about me, and I was scrambling to play catch-up. I didn’t even know who any of them were, besides Tucker, and my friends and I hadn’t been able to find a trace of the vampire since the night that Deirdre Shaw had died. If I could at least identify the members of the Circle, then I could study them—kill them—before they lashed out at me again or, worse, my friends.

  And I could finally get the answers to all my questions about my mother.

  I opened my mouth, ready to give in to McAllister’s ridiculous demands, but then I glanced over at Phillip, who was still standing by the patio doors, his gun clutched in his hand, keeping watch. And I remembered how pale he’d looked, lying on the marble floor at the Briartop museum, slowly bleeding out after being shot by one of the giants that McAllister had hired to rob the museum and steal Mab’s will from the vault. I remembered how much pain Phillip had been in. I remembered how Eva had cried over him and how worried Owen had been about his best friend.

  And just like that, I shut my mouth. Nobody fucked with my friends and got a free pass, not even to satisfy my burning curiosity about my mother and the Circle. I might be an assassin, but there were some lines that I wouldn’t cross.

  Besides, Jonah McAllister was not the least bit trustworthy. As badly as I’d screwed him over by revealing his involvement in the Briartop heist to all of Ashland, I had no doubt that he would be more than happy to feed me a passel of lies and scamper out of town, secretly laughing at me the whole time. Even if I threatened him, even if I tortured him, even if I cut him to ribbons with my knives, he was stubborn enough and hated me enough to hold out and not tell me a damn thing.

  No, I couldn’t risk him lying, spinning some story, and sending me on some wild-goose chase. I wouldn’t risk it. And I especially wouldn’t insult Phillip and his suffering like that.

  “Well, Blanco?” McAllister crowed, still so confident that I was going to give in to his demands. “What do you say?”

  I shook my head. “Never going to happen, Jonah. Never going to happen.” I got to my feet and headed toward the patio doors. “Come on, Phillip. Let’s go. We’ve wasted enough time here.”

  Phillip followed me, although we hadn’t taken three steps out onto the lawn before McAllister hurried after us.

  “Wait! Wait!” he called out, scrambling to catch up to us.

  I whipped around and snapped up my knife, and McAllister had to pull up short to keep from ramming reindeer-first into the blade.

  “No, Jonah,” I growled. “I don’t have time to wait, and I especially don’t have the time, patience, or energy for you to try to work your weaselly wiles on me. You might know some dirty little details about Tucker from seeing him with Mab, but you drew a complete blank when I first mentioned the Circle, which means that you don’t know anything about them at all.”

  He opened his mouth to protest, but I cut him off before he could get started.

  “I’ll admit that torturing you for what little information you might have would be fun, a nice diversion after the shitty couple of weeks that I’ve had, but I couldn’t trust anything you would scream out. And frankly, I have better things to do than getting your blood on my clothes tonight.”

  He wet his lips again, his eyes darting left and right, as if he expected more assassins to suddenly appear out of the icy drizzle. “And what about me? What do I do now?”

  “For all I care, you can stay right here in your mansion, stewing in your own juices just like you have been for months now. Although it won’t be long before Fedora realizes that you’re not nearly as dead as she wants you to be.” I stared him down. “What do you think will happen then?”

  I slashed my knife through the air right in front of his throat, just in case he didn’t get the point.

  He gasped and staggered back. “She’ll come back.”

  I nodded. “That she will, and I imagine that next time, she’ll make sure that you’re good and dead before she leaves.”

  His face paled, making him look even more skeletal than before, as that horrifying fact slowly sank in. Dead man walking in more ways than one.

  “Enjoy your life, Jonah,” I snarled. “What little is left of it, anyway.”

  I gave him a mock salute with my knife, then turned and stalked off into the night.

  * * *

  Once again, Phillip followed me, although we hadn’t taken five steps before McAllister started hissing at me.

  “Blanco!” he said, his sharp voice dissolving into a bitter wail. “You can’t do this! You can’t leave me here! Not again! I can’t take it! Not again!”

  I kept right on walking.

  Phillip glanced over his shoulder. “You should be happy,” he murmured. “McAllister is leaning against the doorframe and clutching his chest like he’s about to have a heart attack.”

  I snorted. “He’d have to have a heart first.”

  Phillip grinned, but he kept looking at me out of the corner of his eye. “I know why you told him no,” he said. “But don’t make this about me. McAllister’s not the one who shot me.”

  “No, but he set up the whole art h
eist, and you got hurt as a result of his plan. Not to mention the innocent people who died just because he wanted to hide the fact that he was embezzling from Mab’s estate and didn’t want Madeline to find out about it. That makes him responsible for the whole shebang. And now he wants a get-out-of-Ashland-free card for all of that? For some tenuous information about Tucker that probably won’t tell me anything that I don’t already know about the vampire? No—no way.”

  Phillip didn’t say anything else as we crossed the lawn, and the only sound was the crunching of the ice-coated grass under our boots. After the warmth and light of Mc­Allister’s office, the night seemed colder and blacker than before. The drizzle picked up again, turning into more of a steady, icy rain, and our breaths hovered around us in chilly clouds. Or maybe it was just my own sense of failure that made everything feel dark, dreary, and desolate.

  Phillip had shot through the lock on the iron gate and shoved it open on his way into the mansion, so we stopped at the entrance and looked up and down the street. But there was no sign of Fedora, the giants, or the SUV, and all the neighboring houses were still dark. No one had heard the gunshots or seen us skulking around. Good. One less headache to deal with tonight.

  Phillip and I hurried down the street and slid inside my van. I cranked the engine, turning the heat up as hot as it would go, but the warm air did little to dispel the frigid despair and weariness that filled my body.

  “So now what?” Phillip asked. “You’re not really going to leave McAllister out here all by himself, are you?”

  I looked over at Phillip.

  He held up his gloved hands.“Don’t get me wrong. Being murdered in his own home couldn’t happen to a nicer guy. Frankly, I’d like to strangle him to death with my bare hands for what he put Eva, Owen, and everyone else through that night at Briartop.”

  “But?”

  “But I know how important finding out about this Circle is to you, and especially learning the truth about what your mom was involved in. I would feel the same way, if it were me.” Phillip drew in a breath and slowly let it out. “I’ve always felt the same way about my own parents. I looked for them for years, but never got anywhere. It took me a long time to accept the fact that they were probably dead. Or just didn’t care enough to try to find me themselves.”

  He growled out the last few words, but I could still hear the hurt in his voice. His shoulders slumped, and his body seemed to deflate, like air slowly leaking out of a balloon. He stared out the windshield instead of looking at me, but a muscle in his jaw ticked, as if he were grinding his teeth to keep from showing any more emotion. Something that I had more than a little experience with, especially these past few weeks.

  Phillip had been abandoned as a toddler and had grown up in some bad foster-care situations before finally running away and living on the streets. That’s where he’d met Owen and Eva, and the three of them had formed their own family, along with Cooper Stills, Owen’s blacksmith mentor. Phillip didn’t know anything about his parents, although he thought that one of them must have been a giant and the other a dwarf, given his own enormous strength.

  I reached over and squeezed his gloved hand with my own, telling him that I understood his pain, anger, and frustration. He looked at me out of the corner of his eye, squeezed my hand back, and slipped his fingers out of mine.

  “Enough of that,” he said, his voice a little lighter than before. “Wouldn’t want Owen to get jealous.”

  “Someone has a rather high opinion of himself.”

  “Always.” Phillip grinned at my teasing, then jerked his head at the mansion again. “But what are you going to do about McAllister? If Tucker and the rest of the Circle want him dead, then he has to know something about them, right? Maybe he just doesn’t realize that he does.”

  The thought of what the slimy lawyer might or might not know sent little spikes of pain shooting through my temples. I rubbed my aching head. “I don’t know. I just don’t know anymore. Maybe McAllister knows something, maybe he doesn’t. Maybe Tucker just wants McAllister dead to prove a point. To prove that he can reach out and kill me and anyone else he likes anytime he wants to.”

  “But?” This time, Phillip asked the question.

  “But you’re right. I have to do something about him, as much as it pains me.”

  I sighed, pulled my phone out of my jacket pocket, and hit a number in the speed dial. He answered on the first ring, as though he’d been sitting by his own phone, waiting for my call. He probably had been. He was annoyingly efficient that way.

  “Yes, Gin?” the smooth voice of Silvio Sanchez, my personal assistant, filled my ear. “I take it that something happened with Jonah McAllister.”

  I glanced over at the mansion. McAllister had disappeared back inside, shut the patio doors behind him, and cut off all the lights, as if that would keep him safe.

  “You might say that. Someone tried to kill him.”

  Through the phone, I could hear Silvio pounding away on his keyboard. Even though it was after nine o’clock, he was still busy working, although I had no idea what or why he was typing right now. Most sane people would have been sprawled across the couch, watching TV or reading a good book, but the vamp was always available and always on his computer, no matter how late I called.

  “Hmm,” Silvio murmured. “Well, that’s not an entirely unexpected development. You thought that the Circle might come after him to keep him quiet.”

  “I don’t think that he actually knows anything about them,” I said. “That’s the real problem.”

  I filled the vampire in on everything that had happened, including Fedora’s assassination attempt on the lawyer.

  When I finished, Silvio kept typing for several more seconds before finally stopping. “I’ve made a note to see if Bria and Xavier can get me the traffic-camera footage from the area in the morning. Perhaps we can at least get a license plate on the SUV they were driving.”

  “I applaud your efforts, but I’m not holding my breath.”

  Detective Bria Coolidge, my baby sister, and Xavier, her partner on the force, had been helping me with my search for the Circle, especially Bria, who wanted answers about our mother just as badly as I did. Over the past few weeks, Bria and Xavier had scoured all sorts of police databases, trying to find info on Tucker and anyone he might be associated with. But so far, the two cops had come up empty, just like me, Silvio, and the rest of our friends.

  “So what do you want to do about McAllister, Gin?” Silvio asked. “There are any number of options available to you.”

  He was right. Since I was the head of the underworld, I could do anything I wanted to with Jonah McAllister, from going back inside his mansion and killing him myself, to having any number of underworld flunkies do it for me, to simply leaving the lawyer to simmer in his own fear, paranoia, and misery the way I had been for the last several months now.

  That was the real kicker, the brutal, bitter irony of this whole situation. Everyone thought that I was the big boss, that I was the head honcho, that I was the one in charge, but I knew the dark, dirty truth. That I was just a front man, just a puppet, just a convenient prop for the Circle to hide behind while they merrily continued on with their own machinations behind the scenes. I’d told Tucker that I would never, ever work for the group the way that Mab had, but the Circle was still using me all the same. The thought further soured my mood.

  “Gin?” Silvio asked again. “What do you want to do about McAllister?”

  I looked back at the mansion, which was as dark and silent as all the others on the street now. No doubt Jonah was still wide-awake, though, hiding in a closet somewhere and clutching a gun. The lawyer was probably still wearing his garish Christmas sweater and silverstone vest, desperately hoping that Fedora wouldn’t come back and finish him off.

  I doubted that she’d be back tonight since she thought that she’d already kill
ed him, but she would come back, and I had to prepare for that. If McAllister did know something about the Circle, something he might not even realize that he knew, then I wanted another chance to pry it out of him.

  Oh, I didn’t think that I could stop Fedora from killing McAllister if she was truly determined to do it. I couldn’t watch or protect him 24-7, not even if I dragged him kicking and screaming to a safe house somewhere. But even if Fedora did succeed in offing the lawyer, then maybe I could at least learn more about her, which might lead me back to Tucker and the rest of the Circle. At this point, I’d take whatever bread crumbs I could get.

  “Gin?” Silvio asked for a third time.

  “Call Jade Jamison and ask if she can spare a couple of folks who work out in this neighborhood to keep an eye on McAllister. She probably already has some cooking, cleaning, and other people in the mansions out here, especially this time of year.”

  Jade Jamison was an underworld figure who ran a variety of cleaning and other service businesses throughout Ashland. In this neighborhood, cooks, housekeepers, gardeners, and even security guards would be as invisible as holiday snowmen, and no one would give them a second look. Not McAllister and hopefully not Fedora, when or if she came back to try to kill him again.

  “But tell Jade that I only want her folks to watch Mc­Allister,” I added. “I don’t want any of them trying to save him if he gets attacked again by Fedora or someone else. He’s not worth their lives, and neither is any information that he might or might not have.”

  “Roger that.” Silvio started typing again. “Anything else?”

  “Nah. Although this can all wait until morning. You should go to bed. Get some rest.”

  “Mmm-hmm.” The vampire started typing even faster than before, completely ignoring my suggestion.

  I sighed, knowing that I couldn’t stop him from calling Jade the second we hung up. Silvio didn’t like to procrastinate about anything, not even for a few hours. It was one of the things that made him such a great assistant, even if it sometimes annoyed me.