I snorted. The one time that my reputation as the Spider might have made somebody think twice about messing with me, my enemy didn’t even really believe that I was the Spider to start with. Ah, the irony. Thumbing its nose at me once again.
“And what about the person I spotted at Grimes’s house? The one buying all the guns?”
Finn shrugged. “I couldn’t find out anything about who that was.”
“Me either,” Phillip chimed in. “Whoever they are, or whoever they’re working for, they are keeping themselves off the radar, along with whatever they or their employer needs with all those weapons.”
“The guns and who wants them doesn’t matter anyway,” I said. “killing Grimes is what’s important.”
“How many men do you think he has left?” Owen asked.
I thought back to all the ones I’d killed on the ridge and in the forest, along with the first few men at the salon and the last ones who’d been beating Owen. “If he has a dozen men left, I would say that’s a generous estimate.
After the carnage I wreaked on his camp, it wouldn’t surprise me if there were a few more deserters, just like Finn says there are already. But it’s Grimes and Hazel and their Fire magic that I’m worried about. They’re the ones who are really dangerous.”
“How strong are they?” Phillip asked.
“Strong enough,” I replied. “I actually think that Hazel might be a little more powerful than Grimes, but they both have more than enough Fire magic to be worrisome, even to me.”
I didn’t add that it was the sick, sadistic joy that they took in using their magic that made them truly dangerous, ruthless enemies.
Then again, so was I.
“So what do you want to do?” Finn asked. “Get some guns, go back up to their camp, and have it out with them?”
I shook my head. “No, Fletcher did that, and he almost died up there on the mountain. And so did I. No, I think that it’s time for Grimes to play on our turf—and on our terms.”
Finn eyed me. After a moment, he sighed. “I know that look. What are you planning to do, Gin? And just how much is it going to wreck my wardrobe?”
I grinned.
Owen, Finn, Phillip, and I hashed out a strategy. Once we had everything nailed down, I called Bria and looped her in. Finn, Phillip, and Owen all went home for the night, but I decided to stay at cooper’s. I didn’t think that there was any way that Grimes could find Jo-Jo and Sophia there, but I wasn’t going to take the chance.
cooper offered me his bed, but I refused and bunked down on the couch in the den instead. I’d managed to keep going for far longer than I should have, and as soon as I lay down, my exhaustion took hold of me once more.
This time, I didn’t try to fight it and fell into a dark, dreamless sleep.
I woke late that night. At first, I wasn’t sure what had roused me, since I usually slept for several hours straight after being healed, as my mind tried to play catch-up and realized that my body was in one piece again. But after a moment, a series of soft, rumbling snores filled my ears. I looked down. Rosco had sprawled out on the floor beside the couch, his fat, stubby legs twitching in his sleep.
I snuggled back down into the groove on the well-worn couch, but try as I might, I couldn’t go back to sleep.
After I punched my pillow and failed to get comfortable for the fifth time, I got up, opened the patio door, and stepped outside.
It was a clear, cloudless night, the stars seeming almost close enough to touch, like glittering tiny apples hanging low on the black velvet tree of the sky. The full moon gave everything a pale silver tint, from the blades of grass in the yard to the tools hanging in cooper’s forge to the leaves in the woods beyond. The river rocks of the patio under my feet were still warm from the heat of the day, and the stones grumbled sleepily of the blazing sun that had baked them for hours and would do the exact same thing again tomorrow.
Apparently, I wasn’t the only one who couldn’t sleep, because another figure stood farther out in the yard: Sophia.
She still had on her black jeans and T-shirt, which only made her skin seem that much paler. Her face glimmered like a ghost’s in the moonlight—pale, ethereal, eternal.
Her feet were bare, just like Jo-Jo’s always were.
I stepped off the patio and deliberately scuffed my own bare feet through the grass, letting her know that I was coming up behind her. Sophia looked over her shoulder and grunted.
“couldn’t sleep?” I asked, moving over to stand beside her.
She shook her head.
“Me neither.”
We stared out into the silvery woods. Somewhere hidden in the trees, an owl let out a series of haunting
A breeze gusted through the yard, bringing with it the sharp, tangy scent of the wild onions that had sprung up among the grass.
Sophia bent down and plucked a daisy, one of several that had sprouted in the yard. She slowly, carefully, quietly started pulling the petals off the flower, then the leaves, until she’d stripped the whole thing bare. She tossed the stem aside and grabbed another one.
We stayed like that for a while, with Sophia plucking and stripping down one daisy after another, until she’d gone through a whole patch of them. I didn’t ask her what she was thinking about. It was easy to tell that she was remembering everything that had happened in the last few days—and all the horrors that Grimes had visited upon her and Jo-Jo once again.
When Sophia finished with her final daisy, she threw the stem away, although she remained hunkered down in the grass.
“Thank you,” she finally rasped, her voice seeming more broken than ever before. “For saving Jo-Jo. For coming after me.”
“No thanks needed,” I said. “My only regret is that I didn’t finish off Grimes while I was there. Hazel too.”
Sophia didn’t respond. I started to ask her if she wanted to talk about it, but I held my tongue. Despite all those old, wise sayings, talking didn’t always help. Not really.
All it did was drag all of your dark, messy, turbulent emotions out into the light for someone else to see. Besides, raspy voice or not, Sophia had never been much for chatting. So I stood there beside her, still and quiet, letting her know that I was there for her and that I would stay out here with her as long as she wanted me to.
To my surprise, after a few minutes, she began to speak.
“The first time he took me, I was so scared,” Sophia said. “Grimes had been making threats for weeks, trying to get Jo-Jo to let him court me, but we could both tell that there was something wrong with him. They say that animals can sniff out evil. Well, I could sense it in him.
But in the end, it didn’t matter, because he took me and dragged me up to that damn mountain of his anyway.
You can imagine what happened next.”
Torture, beatings, rape. Jo-Jo had told me some of it, like how Grimes had forced Sophia to breathe in elemental Fire, ruining her voice. No doubt, that had happened in the pit when he and Hazel had been torturing her. So I didn’t need her to fill in the gruesome details. It had been horrible, more than any person should ever have to endure, but Sophia had.
“It was ironic, Grimes taking me out to the pit again,”
Sophia continued. “Because that’s the only place that I ever got a moment’s peace from him and Hazel. They would drag me out there and make me dig at the sides, making it larger and larger so they could dump more bodies in on top of the ones that were already there. But I didn’t mind it. Because after they had their fun with me, they would go and do other things. All I had to do was keep digging, and the guards left me alone. All those bodies shifting and rolling and squishing under my feet, they reminded me that I was still alive, and they helped me to keep going, even when all I wanted to do was just give up, lie down, and die. But I’d seen what happened to the
