Elemental Assassin 04 - Tangled Threads

SUV with its now-crumpled front fender into a subdivision bearing the name Tara Heights before turning onto a street marked Magnolia Lane. I didn’t have to give him directions. Xavier knew the way. We all did.
    A minute later, Xavier drove up a long driveway before stopping in front of a three-story, plantation-style house perched on top of a grassy hill. The rows of white columns on the front of the house gleamed despite the late hour, and the cobblestones that made up the driveway seemed as pale as bleach in the darkness.
    The four of us got out of the car. Xavier reached into the back and slung Vinnie over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes, before we all walked up the three steps leading to a wide, wraparound porch. Green, glossy kudzu vines curled around a trellis that partially obscured the porch. So did a thick cluster of rose bushes, although their branches were bare for the winter, except for the long, curved, black thorns that glittered like polished jet.
    I opened the screen door. A knocker shaped like a fat, puffy cloud rested on the heavier, interior wooden door. The cloud was Jo-Jo’s personal rune, denoting her as an Air elemental.
    I’d just reached for the knocker when footsteps scuffled inside, the door opened, and Jo-Jo Deveraux stuck her head outside.
    “I thought I heard someone out here,” the dwarf said in her voice that was as light and sweet as syrup.
    Despite the late hour, Jolene “Jo-Jo” Deveraux looked like she’d just finished getting ready to go out courting on Saturday night. A string of pearls hung around her throat,the same size as the pink polka dots on her fuchsia dress. Her bleached blond white hair curled around her head just so, and the perfect amount of understated makeup softened the lines of her middle-aged face. The smell of her Chantilly perfume filled the night air. I breathed in, enjoying the sweet, soft scent.
    At exactly five feet, Jo-Jo was tall for a dwarf, with a figure that was still stocky and muscular despite her two hundred and fifty-seven years. Even though it couldn’t have been more than ten degrees outside, Jo-Jo’s feet were bare, showing off the raspberry pedicure that she’d given herself. The dwarf hated to wear socks, no matter how cold the weather got. One of the many quirks that I loved about her.
    Jo-Jo stared at the five of us on her porch. The dwarf’s eyes were clear and almost colorless, except for the pinprick of black at the center of her irises. She raised a tweezed eyebrow. “Quite the crowd tonight, Gin. Usually, it’s just you and Finn.”
    I shrugged. “What can I say? I seem to attract minions wherever I go these days. Kind of like the Pied Piper.”
    Behind me, Finn huffed out his displeasure. “Minion? I am most certainly not a mere
minion
. Head minion, perhaps. At the very
least.”
    Jo-Jo let out a soft chuckle and stepped back. “Minion or not, why don’t y’all come on in and let me have a look at that fellow there with you—preferably before he bleeds all over my front porch. I just had it painted last week, you know.”
    I entered the house first, trailed by Finn, Roslyn, and finally Xavier, still carrying Vinnie over his shoulder. FollowingJo-Jo, we walked down a long hallway opening up into a room that took up the back half of the house.
    Jo-Jo Deveraux made her living by being what she called a “drama mama.” That is to say, a purveyor of all things related to beauty. The dwarf used the back half of her antebellum house as a salon, offering every purifying, exfoliating, tweezing, plucking, dyeing, curling, cutting, perming, and waxing ritual known to Southern women. And even a few that the Yankees had invented. Jo-Jo also used her Air elemental magic to augment many of the treatments, which is what made her salon so popular. Oxygen facials and other Air beauty regimens were great for smoothing out unwanted crow’s feet and erasing stretch marks.
    Beauty magazines, scissors, combs, curlers, hair dryers, and more filled the wide room, fighting for space on the tables and counters, along with more tubs of makeup and bottles of pink nail polish than you could find at Mab Monroe’s best-stocked Sell-Everything superstore.
    At the sound of our footsteps, a dog sprawled in a wicker basket by the door raised up his head. Rosco, Jo-Jo’s fat, lazy basset hound. The brown and black beast gazed at us with dark, hopeful eyes. But when he realized that no one had any food that they planned on feeding him, he