If they’d been lucky enough to leave at all.
I shut the sound of the stone’s cries out of my mind and examined it more closely. The marble was at least a foot thick, with silver flecks sparkling like diamond chips in the smooth, glossy surface. It was definitely a wall designed to keep people in, even elementals like me. Oh, I could blast through the marble, but it would take too long, make too much noise, and use up far too much of my magic. It wouldn’t do me any good to bust out of the police station only to get shot in the parking lot because I didn’t have enough energy left to run.
But it was an exterior wall and the only part of the cell not lined with silverstone bars, so I forced myself to look at it again. There had to be some way to get through it, even if there wasn’t a window, and the only things attached to it were the two toilets—
My gaze locked onto the toilets. At one time, they might have been clean white porcelain. Now they were so filthy that they were grayer than the floor and spattered with blood and other things I didn’t want to look at, much less smell. But I breathed in through my mouth to lessen the stench of vomit, urine, and blood, squatted down next to one of the toilets, and looked at how it was attached to the wall.
And I thought of something that might actually get me out of here.
It was a long shot, but it was the only chance I had. So I used the toe of my boot to flush the toilet, cocking my ear to the side and listening to the gurgle of water in the pipes. When I was satisfied, I did my lady business, flushed the toilet again, placed my hand on the cleanest spot of porcelain I could find, and reached for my magic. Elemental Ice crystals formed on my palm, then spread out, climbing up over the rim of the toilet and then down into the bowl of water below.
I kept my power at a low but steady level, feeding more and more Ice into the toilet, until I was satisfied that it would do what I wanted it to. When I finished, I waited three minutes, wondering if someone might have sensed me using my power and would storm into the room to check on me. But Dobson thought that he’d finally trapped me, and I didn’t hear the slightest sound of movement beyond the bull pen. So I felt safe enough to repeat the process on the second toilet.
Once I’d set my plan into motion, there was nothing to do but wait until Dobson or someone else came back here. Besides, I needed to rest to help replenish the magic I’d used. I might still be breathing, but this was just a temporary respite, and I’d need every scrap of power to survive what was coming.
So I curled up on one of the hard wooden benches, made myself as comfortable as possible, and drifted off to sleep.
* * *
I wasn’t really all that tired, since it was only about four in the afternoon, but the roller coaster of the day’s events and emotions had taken its toll on me, and I quickly dozed off, especially given the unnatural silence in this part of the station. But it wasn’t long before the blackness receded, and I started to dream of my past, the way that I had ever since Fletcher was murdered last year. . . .
We were in trouble.
Fletcher and I ran side by side, trying to get out of the warehouse. But no matter how hard we pumped our legs or how fast we sprinted, it didn’t seem like we had moved at all. No wonder, since the enormous shell of a building covered the better part of three acres. Bare bulbs dropped down from the ceiling, casting out more shadows than light, while old, empty wooden crates covered the concrete floor, along with odd, loose bits of metal, long snakes of stripped wires, and rusted lengths of pipe.
Crack! Crack! Crack! Crack!
But what really concerned me were all the bullets zipping through the air in our direction.
Whoosh! Whoosh!
Along with the balls of elemental Fire.
Zing! Zing! Zing!
And the razor-sharp crossbow bolts that further splintered the wooden crates as we darted past them.
Oh, yeah. The old man and I were in serious trouble.
And to think that the evening had started out so well.
As the Tin Man, his assassin code name, Fletcher had been approached about taking out Liza Malone, a crooked cop who liked to strong-arm protection money out of small-business owners over in Southtown . . . and then do absolutely nothing in return when some real danger came calling. Like, say, the three gangbangers who’d deliberately crashed their stolen car through the storefront windows of a mom-and-pop grocery and then stormed inside and shot up the place, including the owners’ thirteen-year-old son.
The kid had died in his big brother’s arms. A news photographer had captured that heartbreaking sight, and the image of the guy clutching his baby brother’s bloody, lifeless body to his chest had run on the news for days.
According to Fletcher, the Colson family had demanded that Malone find the people responsible for killing their boy. She told them that she would—for another fifty thousand dollars. Up front, of course. The Colsons didn’t have that kind of cash, but they’d scraped together what they could and given it to Malone. In return, the cop had done nothing but sit on her ass and jack up her prices for everyone else in the neighborhood who was paying her protection money.
Through his various cutouts, dead drops, and back channels, the Colsons had reached out to Fletcher to get what justice they could, and the old man had handed things off to me, since I was twenty-two now and far more spry than his aging bones. I had found and taken out the three gangbangers a week ago. The fools had been bragging all over Southtown about how tough they were, robbing a family and killing a kid. I didn’t even have to bribe anyone to find them. Easiest job Fletcher had ever sent me on. One of the most satisfying too.
But the gangbangers had told me all sorts of interesting things before they died—like the fact that they’d been paying protection money to Liza Malone too. As long as they slipped the cop a cut of their take, she was perfectly happy to look the other way as they went about their reign of robbery in the neighborhood. Now, double- or even triple-dipping was nothing new in Ashland. More like a long-standing tradition and a favorite sport. But this time, it had cost an innocent boy his life. The Colsons wanted payback, and I’d been dispatched to get it for them.
So I’d started following Malone on the sly, tracking her movements, analyzing her habits, and learning every single thing I could about her. When I had a plan of attack I thought would work, I took the final step and talked things out with Fletcher, the way I always did now, even though I’d moved out into my own apartment and was doing most of the jobs solo. The old man had agreed with my assessment and plan, and he’d even tagged along with me on this one, since taking out a cop—even a crooked one—could be tricky.
I’d learned that Malone liked to host an after-hours poker game for cops, lawyers, and whoever else had enough coin to buy in at her ten-thousand-dollar, cash-only minimum. Fletcher and I had decided to do the hit here at the abandoned warehouse where the game was played every couple of weeks, since plenty of bad folks would be around who would be sure to blame each other for killing Malone. Besides, the warehouse was out in the sticks, miles away from anything, so there would be no one around to hear any gunfire, should things come down to that. So we’d locked and loaded up our supplies, driven out to the warehouse two hours before the game was supposed to start, and gotten into position, waiting for our target to arrive.
The hit itself had been easy enough.
I’d been waiting in one of the stalls in the grungy space that passed for a bathroom when Liza Malone finally got up from the poker table to take a potty break. She was washing her hands in the cracked, stained sink when I slithered up behind her, clamped my hand over her mouth, and slit her throat. She was dead before I lowered her body to the dirty concrete floor.
But what Fletcher and I hadn’t counted on was not being the only ones interested in Malone.
Apparently, some other folks had found out about Malone’s game and all the cash lying on the table and had decided to take it all for themselves. I’d just finished wiping my knife off when the steady crack-crack-c
rack of gunfire sounded. I opened the bathroom door to see two men and two women shooting the five other cops sitting at the poker table.
So I held my position, waiting for the right moment. When they finally stopped firing and moved toward the splintered table to see how much blood-spattered money was there, I slipped out of the bathroom and started tiptoeing across the warehouse. Fletcher had come inside with me, to provide backup should I need it, and the old man was hunkered down behind a battered crate, right where I’d left him more than two hours ago when I’d gone into the bathroom, waiting for the game to start.
“Gin?” Fletcher whispered. “You okay? Did you get Malone?”
“Yeah, right before those folks decided to jack the poker game. Come on. I think we can get out of here before they see us—”
I should have known better than to even think such a thing, much less say it out loud. My bad luck would never let me get away that easy, and this time was no exception.
Because, of course, one of the women chose that exact moment to look in my direction. I’m not sure exactly what caught her eye, perhaps the gleam of my knife or the hand that I held out to help Fletcher up, but her eyes locked onto me, even though I was half-hidden behind the crate, and she started shouting to her friends.
“Hey! There’s somebody else in here!”
That’s when the bullets started flying. Naturally.
Still, I didn’t think that we were in serious danger until one of the men started hurling balls of elemental Fire at us. I didn’t know who he was, but he had some serious juice, and I could feel the power pulsing in the flaming balls that streaked past Fletcher and me. If one of those hit us in the back, we were done for, despite the silverstone vests we both wore.
And, of course, we were at the wrong end of the warehouse from where Fletcher had left his white van, since he hadn’t wanted to risk anyone’s coming to the game, seeing the vehicle, and wondering whom it belonged to.
But there were more of them than there were of us, so all we could do was run and hope that we could get away.
We might actually have made it—if the doors hadn’t been barred.
I skidded to a stop, really, really hoping that my eyes were playing tricks on me, given the dim lights. But, of course, they weren’t.
The double doors that Fletcher and I had snuck in through earlier now featured two large, heavy metal bars across them. I cursed. One of the giant cops who’d come to play poker must have put them there, trying to make sure that no one would enter the warehouse and interrupt their game.
“Cover me!” I yelled at Fletcher.
He nodded and took aim with his gun, firing at our pursuers and making them scatter and duck down behind the wooden crates.
Crack! Crack! Crack!
While Fletcher and the thieves exchanged shots, I surged forward, put my shoulder under one of the bars, and tried to lift it. But it was made out of solid iron, and I couldn’t so much as budge it.
“It’s no use!” I yelled. “I can’t move it!”
We were trapped, so I whipped back around to face our attackers and tightened my grip on my bloody knife, determined to protect Fletcher and take down as many of them as I could before they killed us—
“Over here!” Fletcher hissed.
He waved me over. He’d spotted a door that led into another room about thirty feet away and had already taken up a position there. I ran in that direction while Fletcher let loose with another round of bullets, covering me. I hurried past him into the open space. He fired the remaining bullets in his gun, then darted inside the room, slammed the door shut behind us, and threw home a series of locks that had been set into the metal. The door wouldn’t hold for long, not against the elemental’s Fire, and I turned around to start running again—
And realized that we’d come to a dead end.
No doors, no windows, not even a skylight. Just bare concrete walls all around. Trapped—we were trapped with no way out and nothing but danger and death coming up fast behind us.
While Fletcher reloaded his gun, I prowled around the room, looking for something, anything that might give me an idea on how to get out of here. But the only things in the room were a couple of empty, graffiti-covered metal barrels, the kind that I always imagined Sophia used to dispose of bodies. One of them even had a crude white skull and crossbones painted on the side. The Goth dwarf would have approved of that, at least.
“Damn it,” I snarled, kicking one of the containers, although it was so heavy that it barely moved. “We’re stuck here, like fish in a barrel, waiting for them to come in and finish us off.”
Fletcher shook his head and crooked his finger at me. I moved over to the door and pressed my ear up against the metal, like him. I could just make out the sounds of muffled conversation. Our pursuers had realized that they couldn’t blast their way through the locks with their guns, and they were trying to figure out what to do, the same as us.
“We can’t let them leave,” one of the women said. “They saw us kill all those cops.”
“Can you burn through the door with your Fire, Will?” a man asked.
The second man, Will, let out a disappointed breath. “Nah, it’s too thick, and I’ve used up too much of my power already.”
“Will doesn’t have to burn through it with his Fire magic,” another woman said. “I say we bury them in here, along with all these cops. Take the cash, blow up the building, hide the bodies. Just like we planned. Two more corpses won’t matter, if they can even find them in the rubble. We’ve already got the warehouse rigged. I’ve got an extra charge in my bag. I’ll plant it here in front of the door. Then we can blow them all at the same time and get out of here.”
The others agreed that this was an excellent idea, and I heard several sets of footsteps scurrying back and forth on the other side of the door, no doubt pulling out and arming the explosives that would turn us and this whole place into pancake central.
“Now what?” I whispered.
Fletcher looked around and around the room, trying to come up with an idea, just like I had. But he was more successful because his green gaze locked onto the barrels.
“If we can’t get out, we can’t get out,” he said. “Nothing’s going to change that no matter how much we curse. So let’s give them exactly what they want—us dead and buried.”
Fletcher grabbed one of the barrels, tipped it over, and crawled inside. It was a tight fit, but he folded up his body well enough so that the metal shell completely covered him.
Good thing, since I heard a series of blasts at the other end of the warehouse, and the concrete started screaming about all the fire, heat, and explosives that were ripping through it and heading in this direction.
Boom . . . Boom . . . BOOM!
Every successive blast was louder and closer than the last, and the entire building started to shake.
“Come on, Gin!” Fletcher called out above the growing din. “Get a move on!”
I had no choice but to follow his lead, tip one of the other barrels onto its side, and crawl inside. The metal smelled dry and ashy, and I could feel soot covering every part of me, almost like it had been used to store coal to burn in a furnace.
I pulled my feet inside the container just in time to keep them from being crushed by a chunk of stone that broke free from the wall and crashed to the ground. A second later, the door blew in with a deafening, fiery roar. The shock wave sent spiderweb cracks thicker than my fingers zigzagging through the floor and up the walls, and the room collapsed in on itself. A deadly shrapnel of concrete, cinder blocks, and thick lengths of rebar flew through the air, all of which clattered against and dented in the side of my barrel, as if I were in the middle of a terrible hailstorm. In a way, I suppose that I was.
As the debris knocked more and more dents into the sides of my makeshift cocoon, I wondered if the metal would give up and cave in completely. All it would take would be one piece of rebar to skewer me to death. Fletcher too. But it was too late n
ow to do anything but huddle inside and hope that the barrel would somehow hold up against the chunks of stone that were raining down all around us—
BANG.
For a moment, I was still in the warehouse, still trapped in that soot-coated barrel, still watching the ceiling collapse and starting to bury Fletcher and me alive—
BANG.
The noise sounded again, snapping me out of the last dregs of my dream, my memory. I opened my eyes and sat up, putting my back against the bars and looking toward the cell door.
Dobson stood on the other side, a long, thick, black nightstick in his hands.
BANG.
He smacked the wood against the bars a third time, but I didn’t give him the satisfaction of flinching at the hard sound.
“Rise and shine, Blanco,” he crowed. “You’ve got visitors.”
11
Dobson stepped to one side so an officer could insert a key in the cell door and open it. Five people trooped inside the barred space, a mix of men and women, all wearing the charcoal-gray prison jumpsuits of the Ashland correctional system. The officer stepped inside as well, unlocking and removing the silverstone handcuffs that kept the prisoners’ strength and elemental magic in check before scurrying back out with the cuffs and locking the door behind him.
I looked over the prisoners for a few seconds before turning my attention to the other people streaming into the room—all the ones outside the cell.
Uniformed officers, suited detectives, even the janitors and administrative staff gathered around the three sides of the cell. They stared through the bars at me, sizing me up, just as I was them. Then fat wads of cash started going from hand to hand to hand, and the conversation started, the chorus of voices getting louder and more excited as the money moved from one person to the next.
“Give me a thousand on whoever’s fighting Blanco.”
“Make it two thousand for me.”
“Five thousand says that she doesn’t even last five minutes in there.”
So there was to be some serious gambling to go along with tonight’s blood sport.
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