Elemental Assassin 05 - Spider's Revenge

whom? Bria? Or Jenkins? Somebody could want him dead for deciding to spill his guts to her.”
    “Doesn’t much matter,” I said. “Because if they so much as touch Bria, then they’re all going to get dead. You stay here and cover Bria. If one of them makes a move toward her, you put a bullet in his brain. I’m going around behind them. Maybe they’ll talk a little about what they want and who they’re working for before we end them.”
    Finn nodded and moved into a shooting stance. I tightened my grip on my silverstone knife and stepped into the shadows.
    The doors of the SUVs opened, and five dwarves spilled out—two from one car and three from the other. Bria stepped away from the men, putting her back to the Dumpsters, and yanked the gun from her pocket. Jenkins stayed where he was, the smirk on his face even wider than before. Yeah, the thief was definitely in on whatever was happening.
    The men spread out and formed a semicircle around my sister. Each one carried a gun, but they were too focused on Bria to do the really smart thing—like check and see if she had any backup. Or perhaps Jenkins had already ruled out that possibility for them by making sure Xavier was by the front door of the nightclub, instead of back here with Bria. With the giant out of the picture, the men probably thought that Bria would be easy pickings. Fools. They didn’t realize how tough she really was—or that her big sister, Genevieve, was here and would do anything to protect her.
Anything
.
    Either way, it was easy enough for me to hopscotch my way from shadow to shadow, circle around the parking lot, and slip up through the trees until I was right behindone of the SUVs. I stopped there, hidden behind the massive vehicle, a silverstone knife in my hand, with another up my sleeve, two more tucked into my boots, and a fifth hidden against the small of my back. Five knives for five guys. No problem.
    “Why don’t you put the gun down and come along quietly, detective?” one of the dwarves rumbled. A nasal,
New Yawk
accent colored his words, telling me that he was definitely not from around here. “Because I’d really hate to have to shoot you in that pretty face of yours.”
    Bria stiffened at his tone, her face tight with anger. “Who the hell are you and what do you want? You called me
detective
, so you obviously know that I’m a cop. You really want to do something as stupid as threaten me?”
    The man let out a low, evil laugh and looked at his friends, who all snickered in response. For some reason, they thought this was a laugh riot.
    I used their laughter and distraction to slide into the shadows next to the second SUV—the one that was closest to Bria. I peered around the edge of the vehicle, studying the men who surrounded my sister.
    They reminded me of a set of Russian matryoshka dolls in that they were all more or less carbon copies of each other, with the short, stocky, muscular frames that dwarves always had. None of them was taller than five feet, but their size definitely wasn’t relative to their impressive strength. They all had similar features—oily black hair that was slicked back over their foreheads, swarthy skin, and black eyes. Brothers, maybe, or cousins. And they were all dressed alike, in nylon Windbreakers in a variety of bright, neon colors, matching sneakers, andgold chains around their necks. They looked like pint-size extras from some old
Sopranos
episode, as though the dwarven mob had migrated south for the winter. The only thing that would have been worse was if there had been seven of them. Heigh-ho, heigh-ho.
    My eyes dropped to the guns in their hands, the ones they had pointed at Bria. Glocks for the most part. The lead guy, the one who’d spoken to Bria, had a snub-nosed revolver. I didn’t know who the men were, had never laid eyes on them before, but they still seemed familiar to me. They radiated the same kind of hard, predatory air as the guests did I’d seen at Mab’s interrupted dinner party. Which made me all the more curious as to why they’d decided to ambush my sister—and made them all the more likely to die when I found out the answer.
    The lead guy, the dwarven don of the group, as it were, gave Bria a grin that was as greasy as his unwashed hair. “Honey, everybody in Ashland knows that you’re a cop. That’s why we’re all so interested in you.”
    Bria frowned at his words. “What are you talking about? What’s the meaning of this?”
    The five