Elemental Assassin 05 - Spider's Revenge

her pink flannel housecoat and sipping a cup of lavender tea. The fragrant fumes filled the air, making it smell warm and soothing. I breathed in, drawing what comfort I could from this safe, quiet moment. Because all too soon, I knew it would be gone—and perhaps me along with it.
    “Shouldn’t you be asleep like everyone else?” I asked Jo-Jo, as I opened the kitchen cabinets to see what supplies were on hand for a late breakfast.
    “I slept plenty before I spelled Sophia from guard duty,” Jo-Jo said. “Now, I’m restless, just like you are.”
    I grunted.
Restless
wasn’t quite the word that I would use to describe my mood. More like
resigned
. I pushed the feeling aside and started pulling ingredients out of the cabinets. Flour, sugar, salt, and all the other nonperishable staples that Fletcher had packed the cabin with. If I was going to go out today, then I wanted a good breakfast to help me along.
    “I grabbed fresh milk, berries, butter, and a few other things from my fridge before coming over here last night,” Jo-Jo said. “Just in case you were inclined to feel like making breakfast this morning.”
    I arched an eyebrow. “Got a glimpse of that with your Air magic, did you? Your precognition?”
    Jo-Jo grinned.
    “Tell me,” I murmured, opening the fridge and grabbing the milk. “Did you happen to see whether I manage to kill Mab today before she kills me? Because right now, I’d take any good news I could get.”
    Instead of answering me, Jo-Jo stared down into her tea, as though she could read something in the leaves in the bottom of the mug. Hell, maybe she could, given her Air magic. After a moment, the dwarf seemed to decide something because she nodded and looked up at me with her clear eyes.
    “Did I ever tell you how I first met Fletcher?”
    I shook my head and moved over to the counter where I’d placed the rest of the ingredients.
    “It was a week after Sophia was kidnapped.”
    I jerked around in surprise, and the milk almost slippedfrom my hands. “Sophia—Sophia was
kidnapped
? When? By whom?”
    Jo-Jo’s hands tightened around her mug. “It happened almost fifty years ago. There was a sick, sadistic bastard by the name of Harley Grimes. Half giant, half dwarf, and all mean. Grimes and the rest of his clan of miscreants lived way up in the mountains, even farther up than Warren’s store, Country Daze. He saw Sophia one day, and he decided that he was going to have her. When I wouldn’t give her to him, he came into my salon and took her. Busted up the place, beat me real bad, then beat Sophia when she tried to stop him.”
    Breakfast forgotten, I slid into the seat across from Jo-Jo.
    Jo-Jo’s eyes clouded over, like she was reliving that terrible day—the day that her sister had been taken from her. I knew what she must be feeling all too well. The rage, the frustration, the helplessness. They all pulsed through me with every beat of my heart.
    “I went after Grimes, of course, but I couldn’t find my way up the mountain to his hideout, and I couldn’t get past all the booby traps that he had strung through the woods. Besides, my magic is for healing, not killing. But I’d heard stories about someone who could help, who could kill, for the right price.”
    “The Tin Man,” I whispered Fletcher’s assassin name.
    Jo-Jo nodded. “So I went through the appropriate channels, and I made contact with him. I told Fletcher that if he brought Sophia back I would be his friend for life—that anything I had would be his, including my Air magic. He agreed to my deal and took off after Sophia.”
    I could almost see the scene unfolding before my eyes. Fletcher, tall, strong, and in his prime as an assassin. Jo-Jo, desperate for her sister’s safe return. And Sophia—no, I couldn’t picture Sophia. Not as she might have been back then. Before—before her innocence was taken away from her.
    “What—what did Grimes do to Sophia?” I asked.
    Tears welled up in Jo-Jo’s eyes and trickled down her face. “Just about every awful thing that you can imagine. Rape, torture, beatings. He made her into a slave, made her work from sunup until sundown, then come in and warm his bed at night. Grimes and one of his brothers had some Fire magic in them. The two of them would spend hours torturing her with it—burning her, blistering her skin, even making her breathe it in like cigarette smoke.”
    An odd thought crossed my mind. “Is that—is that why Sophia’s voice is