Elemental Assassin [9] Heart of Venom

by Jennifer Estep

  I didn’t know how long she’d been dead, but the stench of rotting flesh wafted up out of the pit, turning even my stomach. The bright sun only intensified the putrid scent, making it shimmer up like sickening heat waves. Flies swarmed all over the woman, and bits of her flesh hung in tatters on her arms, where the crows and other carrion birds had picked and raked at her skin with their beaks and talons. Other animals had been nibbling on her too, judging from the bits of bone that peeked out here and there among the rest of her decomposing skin.

  All around her, the rocks in the bottom of the pit alternated between shrieking with all of the terror, fear, and agony the girl had endured and chuckling with the sly, dark malice of the people—the monsters—who’d done this horrible thing to her. Both sounds made me sick to my stomach.

  I wondered if she’d been one of the college girls Grimes had kidnapped, how long he’d tortured her, and if this grisly death was her reward for finally escaping him. Well, at least the poor thing wasn’t suffering anymore—but I was going to make damn sure that Grimes did. For her and all the others he’d done this to.

  Owen stared down at the body. “Eva has a shirt that same color. She had it on the other day when she went to class.”

  Warren and I didn’t respond. We all knew that ours was a dark, dangerous, violent city, but this—what Grimes did to these girls—was cruel, even by Ashland standards.

  Owen shook his head, as though that simple motion would fling away his troubling thoughts and the horrible sight before us. He bent down and studied the ground around the trap. “There are a lot of boot prints here. We must be getting close to the camp.”

  “close enough.” Warren spat on the ground again. “close enough.”

  There was nothing that we could do for the woman, so we left her where she was, staked at the bottom of the pit.

  Maybe when this was all over, I’d come back and give her a proper burial.

  We walked for ten more minutes before Warren put a finger to his lips and crouched down on his knees. He held his rifle and satchel down by his side and slowly started moving forward. Owen and I tightened our grip on our own weapons and bags, stooped down, and followed him. The three of us crawled up to the top of a stone ridge, then got down on our bellies and slithered forward so that we could peer over the edge of the rocks.

  Harley Grimes’s camp lay below us.

  This particular ridge dipped down into a steep, rocky hillside that ran for about two hundred feet before flattening and spreading out into a clearing in the middle of the forest. The camp looked to be about half a mile wide from west to east and also that deep from north to south before the trees took over again on the far side of the clearing.

  A large rectangular building perched on the far west end of the camp, and the gray cinderblock structure had the low, squat, utilitarian feel of a barracks. From what I remembered from Fletcher’s file, that was where most of Grimes’s men stayed, each one with his own little cot, like they were in the military instead of a vicious mountain gang. Another building to the right was made out of the same cinderblocks, although it was a much smaller square. Steam escaped from a couple of metal pipes set into the roof. I breathed in deeply, and a whiff of cooked meat and some sort of stewed vegetable drifted over to me. Grimes’s version of a kitchen or mess hall.

  My suspicions were confirmed a few seconds later when a couple of men pushed out of the double doors that fronted the building. Both were carrying tin cups and matching plates of food that they took over to some wooden tables that had been set up between the kitchen and the barracks.

  Like the rest of Grimes’s men, they wore old-fashioned suits, and they took the time to remove their hats and shrug out of their jackets before they sat down to eat. Murmurs of their conversation drifted up the ridge, but the words were indistinguishable, so I examined the rest of the area, comparing it with the maps in Fletcher’s file.

  Not much seemed to have changed since the last time the old man had been up here to spy on Grimes. A couple more cinderblock buildings dotted the landscape, some used to store the guns that Grimes ran, while others housed the cash, gold, and valuables that he took in exchange for them. At least a dozen men moved in and around the structures, chopping wood, hauling boxes here and there, and doing whatever other chores they’d been assigned. I even spotted two guys tinkering with a rusty old jalopy that had been parked to one side of the kitchen, as though they were trying to get the ancient car to rumble to life.

  At the east end of camp was another, larger building

  made out of gray clapboard, with snakes of copper wiring peeking out from the sides and back like the quills on a porcupine. More steam drifted up from that area, and I breathed in again. This time, I got a whiff of something sour. No doubt, that was the spot where Grimes and his men brewed up their mountain moonshine. It didn’t surprise me that they made their own hooch. In fact, it seemed to fit in perfectly with Grimes’s old-fashioned gangster mentality, and I was willing to bet that his homegrown moonshine was stout stuff, all the better to rile up his men when they went down into Ashland on one of their tears.

  But it was the structure in the center of the camp, directly across from us, that held my attention, a three-story plantation house. Unlike the other plain, faceless structures, it was a beautiful building, with an elegant, airy design. The white paint gleamed like a pearl in the midday sun, while the glass windows glimmered like diamonds next to the black shutters. A porch wrapped around the front of the house, which was surrounded by a wide, grassy yard and a white picket fence. A variety of pink, red, and white roses twined through the fence slats, their delicate petals and thick green vines providing vivid splashes of summer color.

  If it hadn’t been for the plain, grim, depressing look of the rest of the camp, I would have thought the house was a beautiful mountain hideaway. But the more I stared at the structure, the more something about it bothered me, like I’d seen it somewhere before.

  Three stories, plantation style, white paint, front porch. My stomach turned over at the wrongness of it . . .

  “Is it just me, or does that house in the middle look like Jo-Jo’s place?” Owen whispered.

  “It’s not just you,” I replied in a low voice. “I wonder when Grimes built that.”

  According to Fletcher’s maps, there had been a house in that spot the last time he’d been up here, but he’d sketched it as a much smaller structure, and he hadn’t made any mention of it resembling Jo-Jo’s. That wasn’t the sort of thing that he would have overlooked.

  “It certainly wasn’t here the last time Fletcher and I were,” Warren chimed in. “But that was some fifty years ago. It’s definitely new—in fact, it doesn’t look to me like it’s more than a few months old. See how fresh the paint still looks? And how thin the yard is in places?”

  “Do you think . . . do you think that he built it for Sophia?” Owen asked.

  That was exactly what I thought, that Grimes’s sick obsession with her had led him to do that very thing. I wondered how long he’d been planning to kidnap Sophia again and when he’d started construction on the house.

  If Warren was right, and the structure had only been finished for a few months, then Grimes must have started building it as soon as he heard that Fletcher had died back in the fall.

  I kept scanning the clearing, fixing the locations of all the buildings in my mind and watching the men go about their chores. No one glanced up at the ridge, and no one realized that we were watching them. No doubt, they felt perfectly safe and secure in their mountain camp. Well, that was going to change—and soon.

  I was about to tell the others to draw back down away from the edge of the ridge, when the front door of the plantation house opened. I put the maps away, then rustled around in my backpack, grabbed my pair of binoculars, and held them up to my eyes so I could get a better look at things.

  Harley Grimes stepped out onto the front porch, then ambled down the steps and out into the yard. He’d traded in his gra
y suit for a fresh one in an off-white. A white fedora with a black feather stuck in the brim topped his head, and I could see the shine of his black wing tips from all the way up here. Once again, he was dressed like some gangster straight out of the Prohibition era. According to Fletcher’s file, that’s when Grimes had grown up. Apparently, he enjoyed clinging to his youth. That, or he just liked his look to match his occupation.

  The door opened again, and a woman stepped outside.

  She hesitated, then followed Grimes down the porch and out into the yard. I recognized her, but this person was the exact opposite of what I knew her to be.

  She wore a short-sleeved white sundress patterned with tiny pink roses—instead of her usual black jeans and T-shirt.

  A black ribbon was cinched around her waist, and black patent-leather heels gave her a few more inches of height—instead of her old, battered black boots.

  Her black hair was pulled back into a high ponytail tied with a long white ribbon—instead of the colored streaks and glitter that usually highlighted her hair.

  Pale pink lipstick covered her lips—instead of the darker, bolder colors that she normally wore.

  Grimes held out his arm. The woman hesitated again, then stepped forward and took it.

  Sophia.

  Chapter Fifteen

  I blinked and then blinked again, wondering if I was really seeing what I thought I was. But the picture didn’t change, no matter how I much adjusted the focus on the binoculars or how hard I squinted through the lenses.

  Sophia standing with Grimes, wearing a dress, dolled up like a gangster’s moll from some old-fashioned mob movie. It was bizarre seeing her like this, looking so different and not at all like her usual dark, fierce, Goth self.

  It was wrong. Just . . . wrong .

  After a few seconds, I lowered the binoculars and passed them over to Owen.

  “Is that . . . Sophia?” he asked, peering through the lenses. “What’s she doing? Why is she wearing a dress?

  And why isn’t she trying to get away from him?”

  “Look past them,” Warren said, using the binoculars he’d pulled out of his own satchel. “There on the porch.”

  I’d been so shocked by Sophia’s appearance that I hadn’t noticed that three men had also stepped out of the house behind her—and that they all had guns in their

  hands.

  “No doubt, Grimes will have them shoot her, but not

  kill her, if she steps out of line,” I said. “She’s still injured, though. See how she’s limping?”

  Sophia favored her right leg with every step that she

  took, dragging her left one along behind her in an awkward shuffle. Her left arm also hung limply by her side, and one of her cheeks was red from where Grimes had slapped and burned her in the salon. I didn’t see any blood on her, though, so Grimes must have at least bandaged her wounds. Well, that was something, although he was still going to suffer for everything that he’d done to her and Jo-Jo.

  Owen handed me back the binoculars, and I focused in on Sophia again. Grimes squired her around the yard, dragging her over to the picket fence and pointing out the roses to her. Sophia hobbled along beside him as best she could. But through the binoculars, I could see exactly how cold, hard, and flat her expression was and the way her black eyes kept darting around, desperately looking for an escape.

  But there was nowhere for her to go.

  Even if she could have gotten away from Grimes, there was nothing but clear space all around her, which would make it all too easy for one of the men on the porch to step forward, take aim, and put a bullet in her back.

  Still, she tried.

  Sophia waited until Grimes turned his head, and then she brought up her good arm and punched him in the face, making his spiffy white hat fly off his head. She kept hold of him, spun him around, and hooked her arm around his throat, using Grimes as a shield between her and the guys with guns on the porch. She also plucked Grimes’s revolver out of the holster on his belt, thumbed back the trigger, and held the weapon up to his head.

  Sophia didn’t say a word, but she didn’t have to. Her meaning was crystal-clear. If any of the men followed her, she’d shoot Grimes in the head with his own gun. I thought she should go ahead and do that anyway.

  Apparently, Sophia had the same idea, because she pulled the trigger.

  Click.

  Click. Click.

  Click.

  I could hear exactly how empty the revolver was all the way up on the ridge.

  “Really, Sophia,” Grimes drawled, his voice drifting up to our location. “You didn’t think that I’d keep a loaded gun anywhere you could get your hands on it, now, did you?”

  Sophia growled and smashed the weapon into the side of his head. She shoved Grimes forward, then turned and ran away as fast as she could on her injured leg.

  Sophia hadn’t gone ten steps before a ball of elemental Fire streaked through the air and slammed into her back.

  One second, Sophia was hobbling across the yard as fast as she could. The next, she’d fallen to the ground, rolling around in the dirt and trying to smother the flames that scorched her skin.

  Hazel walked out from around the side of the house, where she must have been waiting for Sophia to make a break for it. She had swapped the red wrap dress that she’d had on in the salon that morning for a similar one in the same off-white as Grimes’s suit. She stopped in the yard long enough to help Grimes get to his feet and re— trieve his white hat. Then she walked over to Sophia, who was on her back on the ground. Hazel gave her an evil grin, then started kicking her.

  Thwack.

  Thwack. Thwack.

  Thwack.

  Over and over again, Hazel drove her foot into Sophia’s body. Sophia grunted with every blow, but she didn’t give Hazel the satisfaction of screaming. Still, every vicious kick that Hazel inflicted on her was like a knife slicing into my own heart.

  “Warren,” I asked between gritted teeth. “Please tell me that you can shoot that bitch from here.”

  He shook his head. “I could, but you know that will give away our position. The second I fire, Grimes will know that we’re here, and it’ll all be over.”

  “All right, then. I’ll take care of it.”

  I started to get to my feet, but Owen grabbed my arm.

  “Stop,” he said. “Stop and think for a second. Warren’s right. We need to hold on to the element of surprise as long as we can. Going down there right now is suicide.

  We all know it. Grimes’s men will cut you down before

  you get halfway across the clearing. Or worse, they’ll capture you along with Sophia.”

  “I know,” I said, choking out the words. “But I can’t stay here and do nothing. Not while they’re hurting her—”

  “Enough!” Harley Grimes’s voice rang out through the clearing as he strode forward. “That’s enough!”

  Thwack.

  Hazel gave Sophia one more hard, vicious, brutal kick, then reluctantly backed away.

  I held my breath, waiting to see how badly injured Sophia was. But after a few seconds, she rolled over onto her right side, then slowly pushed herself up. It took her a few more seconds to stagger back up onto her feet. Dirt, leaves, and grass stained the skirt of her white dress, while the back was scorched from Hazel’s elemental Fire. Her hair had come loose from its ponytail, and the white ribbon lay crumpled in the dust. Sophia shoved her black locks back off her face, leaving a bloody streak on her cheek on top of the burn that was already there, and fixed her cold gaze on Hazel.

  “Wimp,” she rasped. “That didn’t even tickle.”

  Anger mottled Hazel’s face, and she started forward, fists clenched, ready to hit Sophia some more. But Grimes held his arm out, stopping his sister.

  “I said that’s enough , Hazel.”

  She put her hands on her hips and glared down her nose at her brother. “You’re not going to let her get away with this, are you?” Hazel demanded. “I to
ld you that she would try something like this. She would have put a bullet in your head if she could have. You should just kill her. I’ve never understood your fascination with her. She’s always been more trouble than she’s worth.”

  “Sophia has always been high-spirited,” Grimes said.

  “That’s one of the qualities that I admire most about her.”

  Grimes moved forward. He held out a hand, as though he was going to caress Sophia’s cheek, but she jerked back out of his reach and curled her lips at him in disgust.

  Grimes regarded her for a moment, then slapped her across the face, just like he had in the salon. He was much stronger than Hazel, and the brutal blow sent Sophia spinning to the ground again.

  “But you’re right, sister,” Grimes said in a calm, cold voice. “Sophia does need to be punished for her insolence, and I know exactly how to do it.”

  He gestured at the men still standing on the porch.

  They hurried into the clearing. Two of them grabbed Sophia’s arms and hauled her to her feet, while the third kept his gun trained on her.

  “Bring her,” Grimes said.

  He pivoted on his heel and strode off toward the east end of camp. The men forced Sophia to follow him, while

  Hazel brought up the rear.

  I looked at Warren. “Do you know where they’re taking her?”

  He nodded, his face dark, grim, and troubled. “I have a good idea. And if I’m right, then it’s the same wretched place that Fletcher and I rescued her from before.”

  Warren crawled away from the edge of the ridge, got to his feet, swung his satchel over his shoulder, clutched his rifle in front of him, and moved out.

  The pine trees that clung to the crest screened us from any prying eyes below as Warren led Owen and me along the top of the ridge. With everyone focused on Sophia and

  her impending punishment, no one noticed us darting along the parallel path high above their heads.

  Gunshots rang out through the camp, three blasts of three, for nine shots total. They must have been some sort of signal, because more men appeared in the clearing below. They left whatever they’d been doing behind, stepped out of the various buildings, and fell into step behind Grimes, Hazel, Sophia, and her guards. Every new man who appeared made my heart sink a little more, because each of them would make it that much more difficult to save Sophia from whatever terrible thing Grimes had in mind for her.