Elemental Assassin [9] Heart of Venom (15 page)

Runes were more than fancy familial symbols or flashy business logos. Elementals could also imbue runes with their magic and get them to perform specific functions.

Lots of folks used the sunburst symbol for magical trip wires and booby traps.

Warren got down on his hands and knees, laid his rifle and satchel aside, and carefully crawled forward. “What do we have here?”

He hooked his finger under something and gently pulled it up so Owen and I could see the thin, translucent fishing line that had been strung ankle-high between the poplar and another tree on the opposite side of the track.

The left end of the line was wrapped around a wooden peg that had been driven into the ground, while the right end was merely taped to the tree, right on top of the sunburst rune. As soon as you walked through the fishing line, the tape would rip off the rune, and the sunburst would flare to life and explode with elemental Fire. Simple but effective.

Warren pulled out a pocket knife and carefully cut through the part of the line that was attached to the peg, disabling the trap.

“From what I remember, we’ll run across more than a few of these. Best to clear a path now,” he said. “While we’re not being chased.” 

“Agreed,” I said. “But let’s also leave a few of them intact. We don’t want Grimes’s men realizing that all of the traps have been disarmed and that strangers are near the

camp. They probably know where the traps are, but if

we’re lucky, they might forget about them in their haste to get to us. And wouldn’t it just be a shame if they tripped them and got a face full of elemental Fire instead of us?”

“Sneaky.” Warren’s face creased into a devilish grin.

“Fletcher would have done the exact same thing.”

I grinned back at him. “I know.”

Warren was right. We found several more traps after that. Most were set dozens, if not hundreds, of feet apart, but some were clustered together so tightly that if you tripped one, you’d set off three more in rapid succession. You wouldn’t even realize what was happening until the multiple jets of elemental Fire hit you from all sides and scorched you to ashes on the spot. I had to admire

Grimes’s slyness, if nothing else.

But not all of the traps were magical. In fact, many were crude, simple devices. More fishing line strung ankle-high between two trees that would send a spiked club swinging in someone’s direction. Snares hidden under piles of dry leaves that would haul you up into the air when you stepped into them. Even a six-foot-deep pit lined with sharp, pointed wooden stakes, complete with a body lying at the bottom of it.

At one time, the body had been a young woman, judging from her slender form and the pale purple dress she wore. She’d run right into the pit, which was hidden behind a bush, and had fallen stomach-first onto the stakes, one of which had driven all the way through her body and punched out her back. Like she was a piece of meat skewered on a kebab. Really, that’s all she was now.

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 gray 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. 

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.