“But you shouldn’t have to clean up my messes,” I protested. “Not when I know what it reminds you of. Not when I know how much it hurts you.”
Sophia stabbed her finger at her heart. “My choice. Not yours.”
“But—”
She reached up and cupped my cheek with her bloody hand. “No buts. I love you, Gin. And this is how I show it.”Then she smiled, and I got a glimpse of the girl she had once been, before Grimes, before the pit, before everything.
“Not soft,” Sophia rasped. “Neither one of us. Not anymore. Never again.”
I blinked, surprised that she remembered the conversation we’d had in the Pork Pit so long ago after we’d battled those two giants. But she was right. We were definitely not that. Broken, maybe. But not soft.
“Okay?’ she rasped, her black eyes searching mine.
“Okay.”
I didn’t like it, and I would always feel guilty about it, but it was her choice, just as it had always been. Sophia patted my cheek. Then she picked up the last man’s body, stuffed it into the trunk of Roslyn’s car, and slammed the lid.And that was that.
“Gin!” Finn called out. “come here and look at this!”
Before Sophia had started packing the bodies into the cars, Finn had quickly rifled through all of the dead men’s pockets, including Hazel’s and Grimes’s. When he realized that they didn’t have anything terribly interesting on them, Finn had gathered up their car keys and had started going through their vehicles one by one.
Now, he had reached the last car, that of Grimes and Hazel. He stood next to the open trunk, along with Bria.
They both wore grim expressions.
“I thought that you’d want to see this for yourself.”
Finn gestured at the open trunk, then stepped to one side.
A couple of foam-lined cases sat inside the space, all with their lids hinged open to reveal the guns grouped inside. Rifles, shotguns, revolvers, even some semiauto— matic weapons. It was quite an assortment. Another case held boxes and boxes of bullets.
“There are more guns and more ammo in the trunks of the other two cars,” Finn said, his voice more serious than I’d heard it in a long time.
“So Grimes was going to deliver some guns to someone,” I said. “So what? We knew that already. Remember, I told you about the person who was at his house. This is probably that order.”
Finn and Bria glanced at each other, and then Bria leaned into the trunk and slowly closed the lid on one of the cases. A small yellow note was stuck to the top of the plastic. A name was scrawled on the paper: M. M. Monroe.
My mouth dropped open, but no words came out. I blinked and blinked, but the name on the paper didn’t change. If anything, it seemed to loom even larger, as though the black letters were some sort of rune that was smoking with elemental Fire and about to explode in my face.“We didn’t think much of the guns either, until we found that,” Bria said in a flat voice.
“The same note is on all of the cases in all of the cars,” Finn added.
Once again, I wondered about the person I’d seen at Grimes’s house. I still didn’t know if it had been a man or a woman, but now I had a much more pressing concern. Had that been the mysterious M. M. Monroe? Or a hired hand whom M. M. Monroe had sent to deal with Grimes? It could easily be one or the other or some third option that I hadn’t even considered yet. I had no way of knowing which one, only that it meant trouble.
I let out a long, loud, vicious curse. For the first and only time, I wished that Harley Grimes was still alive, so I could question him.
But he was dead, along with Hazel and the rest of his men, which meant that there was no one left to give me any information about M. M. Monroe, who he or she was, and what he or she wanted with so many of Grimes’s guns.
Finn and Bria watched me stalk back and forth in front of the trunk. Finally, Finn spoke up.
“Well,” he drawled. “I guess your plan to draw M.M. back to Ashland worked.”
“And I think we know that this person isn’t here for anything good,” Bria added. “There’s only one reason you buy that many guns, at least in Ashland.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Because you’re planning to start your own little criminal enterprise. Or not so little, in this case.”
“It looks like M.M. plans to follow in Mab’s footsteps after all,” Finn said.
I stopped pacing. “Please tell me that there’s some way that you can track these guns back to whoever ordered them.”
Finn shrugged. “I can try, but it won’t be easy. Grimes doesn’t strike me as the kind of guy who kept meticulous records.”
“Yeah,” Bria said. “And the weapons that I’ve looked at already all conveniently have their serial numbers filed off, so I can’t trace them in the system that way.”
I bit back another round of curses. It wasn’t their fault that we’d just killed off our best—and only—lead about M. M. Monroe.
As I looked at the guns, I couldn’t help but think that I’d just traded one enemy for another.
Soon after that, Finn and Bria took off together, promising to check in with me later, both of them eager to work their sources and see if they could find out anything about the guns and M. M. Monroe.
I waited until Sophia had packed the last body into Roslyn’s car and went inside the house with her, where we found the others in the den. Phillip was sitting in a chair in the corner, while Jo-Jo and cooper were both sitting on the coffee table in front of the sofa where Owen was lying. I perched on the arm of the couch and watched Jo-Jo instruct cooper on how best to use his magic to heal the remaining burns on Owen’s body. Jo-Jo had taken care of the worst of the damage earlier in the yard, but it had quickly exhausted her, leaving cooper to finish patching up Owen.
“Feel the Air around you,” Jo-Jo said in a soft, patient voice. “Imagine it flowing through Owen’s wounds, like a gentle breeze that takes all of his pain away with it.”
cooper gripped Owen’s hand a little tighter and leaned forward, his eyes glowing a bright copper in his lined face.
“Good,” Jo-Jo said, once he’d followed her instructions. “Now, picture the Air flowing through his wounds again, this time slowly smoothing out all of those nasty burns and pulling all of those cuts and scrapes together the smallest fraction. You need to do that again and again, until the wound is completely healed . . .”
cooper listened to Jo-Jo’s instructions, and I watched as the remaining burns on Owen’s body slowly grew soft and pink, then scarred out to white, then faded away altogether. I looked at Owen with a critical eye, but if I hadn’t seen it for myself, I wouldn’t have realized that he’d body-slammed himself into a couple of Fire elementals.
With Jo-Jo guiding him, cooper had done as good a job on Owen as she would have. He’d even fixed Owen’s hair and eyebrows. No trace remained of his fight with Grimes and Hazel.
Jo-Jo nodded. “Good job, cooper. We might make a healer out of you yet.”
He beamed at her praise. Jo-Jo smiled back at him, but she couldn’t hold back the tired yawn that escaped her lips. cooper jumped up and took her arm. He helped the dwarf out of the den. Sophia followed them, and I heard their slow, steady tread on the stairs, then one of the doors of the guest bedrooms opening and closing. Sophia and cooper would see that Jo-Jo was comfortable for the night, so I turned my attention back to Owen.
Phillip cleared his throat and got to his feet. “I need some fresh air. All this postbattle, rah-rah-we-lived senti-mentality is a bit cloying. I’ll call you tomorrow, Owen.”
“Thanks, Phillip,” Owen replied.
I arched an eyebrow at Phillip, but he grinned and left the den. A moment later, the front door of the house opened, then closed.