Hazel gave me an evil smile, then held out her hand.
Elemental Fire sparked to life on her fingertips, swaying back and forth like lanterns dancing in the wind. Even though she wasn’t actively roasting me with the flames,
I could still feel the intense heat blasting off them and brushing against my already burned skin, adding to my misery. The sensation made a snarl rise in the back of my throat, but I swallowed it down.
“Harley wants to see you,” she purred again. “Now, are you going to come along quietly, or do I have to . . . encourage you?”
The flames on her fingers burned a little brighter and hotter in anticipation. They matched the cruelty flickering in her dark eyes.
I sat up and immediately had to put a hand down on the floor to keep myself from toppling right back over.
After a moment, my head quit spinning, if not aching.
Whoever had punched me had done an excellent job of it, judging from the pain that radiated out from my jaw and throbbed up into my right temple. Slowly, very, very slowly, I got up onto my knees and then onto my feet.
The change in elevation made my head spin that much more, and I swayed from side to side until the white spots cleared from my vision and I found my balance. This was all not to mention how every single movement made my burned skin ache and how every shift of my singed clothes threatened to pop the blisters covering my arms, legs, and back.
So as much as I would have liked to have tackled Hazel, driven her to the floor, and strangled her to death with my bare hands, I didn’t have the energy for it right then. Besides, she and Grimes had kept me alive for a reason, and I wanted to know what it was.
“I think I’ll go with the first option,” I finally said when I could open my mouth without hissing with pain.
Hazel pouted, obviously disappointed by my cooperation, but she curled her hand into a tight fist, snuffing out the flames and causing the resulting bit of smoke to drift toward the ceiling.
“come on, then,” she snapped. “Nobody keeps Harley waiting—or me either.”
Again, I wondered why they’d bothered to let me live, but I supposed that I’d find out soon enough.
Hazel pivoted on her high heels and stormed out of sight of the doorway. The three guys with guns stepped down the hallway far enough for me to leave the bedroom and fall into step behind her, then followed us with their weapons pointed at my back. I thought about whirling around and going for one of their guns, but in the end, I decided against it. I might have been able to kill the three men, but they’d probably have managed to put a couple of bullets into me for my troubles. Not to mention the fact that Hazel would be quite delighted to roast me with her Fire magic, which I had little to defend against while my own power was still so low. So I decided to go along with them—for now.
We walked downstairs, and I was once again struck by an eerie sense of deja vu. Grimes’s house was almost an exact replica of Jo-Jo’s, inside and outside. The floor plan, build, and construction were identical, right down to the dark cherry wood that had been used for the stairs and the curlicues carved into the railing that ran alongside them. Even the walls were painted the same soft blues, pinks, and whites as in Jo-Jo’s house.
I wondered how Grimes had been able to match everything so exactly. He must have been inside Jo-Jo’s house at some point. But when? I thought back. The only time the sisters had been away recently was when they’d come down to Blue Marsh to help me out with a particularly nasty vampire a few months ago. Perhaps Grimes had been in the sisters’ house then without them realizing it; that was the only explanation that I could think of.
The only things that were different were the photos on the wall next to the stairs. Instead of shots of Jo-Jo, Sophia, Finn, Fletcher, or even me, pictures of Harley Grimes covered the wall. Most of the photos had the brown, faded, vintage look of old daguerreotypes, and almost all of them showed a grinning Grimes tipping his fedora, holding a glass jar of moonshine, or clutching a pair of revolvers crossed over his chest, as though he really was some romantic bootlegging outlaw mugging for the camera, instead of a sick psychopath who liked to kidnap and torture folks.
Other pictures showed Hazel in the same poses, along with one of her on a high ridge, looking off into the distance, queen of everything she surveyed, a set of diamond pins glinting like some sort of crown in her wavy black hair.
There were even a few family portraits of Grimes and Hazel with a couple of other men who looked like them. Probably Horace and Henry, the brothers Fletcher had killed.
But there was one photo in particular that made me stop with one foot in midair: a picture of Sophia.
It was about halfway down the wall, right in the middle of a cluster of pictures of Grimes with his guns, and it looked like it had been taken with an old Polaroid camera. At first, I wasn’t sure that it was Sophia. She looked so young in the photo, and she was wearing another white dress patterned with tiny red flowers. Her black hair was much longer and tied back into a pretty braid that trailed down over her right shoulder, but she was staring at the camera with the same flat, murderous expression I’d seen earlier at the pit.
The photo must have been taken the first time Grimes had kidnapped Sophia, which meant that he’d kept it all these years. Once I spotted the one, I noticed more photos of my friend. They lined the bottom of the wall, leading back up to the first.
All of those photos looked as though they’d been taken at a distance and featured a very young Sophia in various spots: on the lawn at Jo-Jo’s house, on the front porch of country Daze, sitting in a library, reading a book.
These pictures must have been snapped before Grimes had kidnapped her the first time. Because in all of them, she looked relaxed and happy and was sporting a variety of clothes in a rainbow of colors—white jeans, red tops, khaki shorts.
None of the photos showed Sophia in her dark Goth clothes. I wondered if she’d adopted the style after her first encounter with Grimes. I would have never wanted to see another dress, ribbon, or pair of high heels again either, if I’d been her.
Just how deep Grimes’s obsession with her ran made the whole thing worse and reminded me that I needed to find some way to kill him before I died up there on the mountain. Otherwise, Sophia and Jo-Jo would never be safe.“come on,” Hazel growled from the bottom of the staircase, realizing that I’d stopped to stare at the photos.
“keep moving.”
One of the men behind me shoved his gun into my back, encouraging me. I stared at the first photo of Sophia in the white dress for a second longer before trudg— ing the rest of the way down the stairs.
I wasn’t terribly surprised when Hazel led me into the back half of the house. I steeled myself and stepped through the doorway after her, expecting to find some sort of twisted replica of Jo-Jo’s salon, but the area was completely different. Instead of combs, curlers, and hair dryers, Grimes had set up a fancy, old-timey office and parlor in the space.
An antique desk trimmed with brass stood in the middle of the room, close to the back wall, with a variety of leather wing chairs arranged in front of it. A perfect place for Grimes to hold court and pontificate to his men. All of the seats were a dark green, except for the one behind the desk. It was the same vibrant cherry red as the salon chairs at Jo-Jo’s.
A set of double doors to the left of the desk led out to what looked like a stone patio and then a fenced-in yard beyond. Grimes stood on the patio a few feet outside the open doors. He was dressed in a fresh suit, this one in a pale baby blue, and a blue fedora with a matching feather stuck in the brim perched on his head. I wondered how many of those old-fashioned suits he had hanging in his closets and in how many different colors.
But the surprising thing was that Grimes wasn’t alone.
Someone was on the patio with him. I couldn’t see who it was, though, or even if it was a man or woman. A bit of black fabric was barely visible around the edge of one of the doors, telling me that the person was wearing some sort of dark pants, but that was all.
Grimes had his hands up and was gesturing. Bits of conversation drifted in through the open doors to me.
“. . . bit of a problem . . . nothing that I can’t handle . . . the shipment won’t be delayed . . .”
Then the other person: “The guns had better not . . . that would . . . upset me.”
