An hour later, I finished the book and went to bed. Despite the hot chocolate and plethora of marshmallows I’d consumed, my sugar rush quickly faded away, and I drifted off to sleep, thinking how much better the detective story would have been if Hugh Tucker had been reading it to me…
Crack!
The sharp, loud, unexpected noise made me sit bolt upright in bed. My gaze darted around my room, and my heart leaped up into my throat. What was that?
I listened, but no other sounds disturbed the dark quiet. Still, something had woken me, and I wasn’t going to be able to sleep until I figured out what it was. So I got out of bed, grabbed my phone, threw on a thick plush robe, and shoved my feet into some fleece-lined boots. Then I went over to the small freezer in the corner of my bedroom, opened it, and drew out a gun made entirely of elemental Ice.
Gin Blanco was one of the most powerful elementals in Ashland, able to shower people with clouds of Ice daggers or blast bricks out of a wall with her Stone magic and pelt people with the resulting shrapnel. Just like Gin, I was also gifted in two areas, but my Ice and metal magic were both much weaker than her raw power, so I needed to be far more creative if I wanted to hurt someone with my magic. Hence the Ice gun.
My mother had been an Ice elemental, and when I was a kid, Lily Rose had shown me how to make all kinds of things with my power, from bouquets of Ice flowers to brighten my room to intricate crowns to top my dolls’ heads to glittering ornaments to hang on our Christmas tree. Using my magic in such a precise way had helped give me a sense of control I had desperately needed back then, especially since my father and my brother and their tempers had been so out of control.
As an adult, I’d further honed and refined my skills, making Ice guns, knives, and other weapons, which I stored in various freezers throughout my mansion, as well as in my warehouse. The chill of the gun barrel soaking into my palm immediately made me feel better, calmer, stronger—and ready to deal with whoever might be creeping around my house in the middle of the night.
With my Ice gun in hand, I left my bedroom and tiptoed down the hallway, careful to avoid the creaky floorboards in the middle of the corridor. I glanced out the windows, but the security lights burning at the corners of the mansion didn’t reveal anyone outside, so I kept going and eased down the stairs to the ground floor. Gin Blanco wasn’t the only one with enemies, and plenty of folks would love to see me dead for deals gone wrong over the years.
I reached the first floor and continued my circuit through the mansion, stopping to peer out all the windows. I still didn’t see anything suspicious, so I reached out with my magic—my metal magic.
Most people didn’t realize it, but metal was all around us, and most folks had a piece or two of it on them at all times. Why, you could hardly find a pair of jeans without a metal zipper or a pair of boots without metal eyelets to hold the laces in place. Not to mention the iron and other metals flowing through a person’s blood.
I could sense, reach out, and manipulate all that metal, just like my father and my brother could, although I’d never been as strong in my power as they had been in theirs. But you didn’t have to be strong to kill someone with magic—just skillful—and I was definitely that, thanks to my mother’s lessons and my own adult experiments.
I didn’t sense any metal in the mansion that shouldn’t be here, which meant that if someone was lurking around, then they were outside. So I plodded downstairs to the basement and stepped into a concrete tunnel. This space used to be an old root cellar, although several years ago, I’d had it expanded, lengthened, and transformed into a tunnel that ended in a set of stairs about two hundred feet away from the back of the mansion. I crept up the stairs and reached out with my magic again, but I still didn’t sense any unusual metal nearby, so I opened the locked trapdoor and slipped outside.
Nothing but night greeted me, and I softly shut the trapdoor and headed into the woods that ringed the mansion. Thick drifts of snow still dotted the ground from the recent storm, crusting the trees and branches in a beautiful crystalline sheen. I stepped forward, grimacing as my bootscrunch-crunchedthrough a patch of ice. If anyone was out here, they had probably heard that, but I tightened my grip on my gun and moved forward.
I moved from one tree to another, doing a wide circle around the mansion. The night remained cold and quiet, and no birds or animals flew or scurried around to disturb the peace, but I still felt like someone was watching me. So I kept going, determined to find them before they did something horrible to me.
I had just reached the edge of the backyard patio when I spotted a telltale stain that didn’t match the rest of the pristine landscape.
The stain was dark and ugly, like old, dirty oil from a junker car that had leaked all over the clean white snow. I frowned. What was that? And what could have possibly made it?
I still didn’t see or hear anything else out of the ordinary, so I crept onto the patio and crouched down behind some chairs. Everything remained as quiet as before, so I eased around the chairs, leaned forward, and dipped my hand into the dark spot. A familiar, warmish wetness coated my fingers, and I lifted them up into the beam of a nearby security light.
Blood glistened a sinister red on my skin.
I froze and glanced around again. Everything remained as calm and quiet as before, so I studied the stain again. It was only a small pool, and I couldn’t tell if the blood had been left behind by a wounded animal—or a person.
In addition to the blood, some of the snow had been disturbed, and one of the patio flagstones was cracked, as though something had slammed into it with exceptional force—like a person’s head.
A cold trickle of unease slid down my spine, but I wiped my fingers off in the snow, then grabbed my phone out of my robe pocket and turned on the flashlight app. I shone the light back and forth, and back and forth, until I found what I was looking for.
More blood.
With my phone in one hand and my elemental Ice gun in the other one, I followed the drops of blood across the patio and into the backyard. The blood trail led straight into the woods, along with a path of scuffed snow, and I cautiously crept from one tree to the next.
If someone was lurking out here with a gun, then I was basically painting a giant bull’s-eye on my chest, especially since I was still using my phone as a flashlight. Then again, if someone was lurking out here, they probably would have shot me by now. Either way, I wanted to know exactly who—or what—had been so close to my house, so I kept moving forward—
I rounded another tree and almost tripped over someone.
A blond man with pale skin was sitting on the ground, with his legs tucked underneath him and his back resting up against a fallen log, almost like he was taking a nap, as ridiculous as that would have been on this cold, snowy night. The man’s head was turned in my direction, and I froze, thinking he was staring straight at me.
It took me three long, excruciating seconds to realize he was dead.
The man might be looking in this direction, but he wasn’t seeing me—or anything else. His brown eyes were fixed and still, his mouth was gaping wide, and his body was contorted at an awkward angle. I crept closer and focused my phone flashlight on him. From this angle, he looked normal, if dead. But as I circled around, I noticed that the other side of his head was a bloody mess, probably from where he had hit the patio flagstone.
But there was one thing I didn’t see: his accomplice.
This guy might have slipped, fallen, and hit the patio all on his own, but you didn’t just get up and walk away with that sort of gruesome head wound. No, someoneelsemust have dragged the guy into the woods, either to try to help him escape or in a poor attempt to hide his body.
