My knee kept throbbing, but I left my office, locked all the doors behind me, and stepped out into the chilly night air.
Instead of heading back to my car, I plunged deeper into the shipping yard, striding past the forklifts and other equipment and moving along the rows of containers that were stacked up like oversize building blocks two and three stories above my head. During the day, the metal containers would show their true colors of rusty red, burnt orange, and mustard yellow, although tonight the moonlight painted them all a dull, gloomy gray.
Numbered placards topped metal stakes that were driven into the ground at the end of each row of containers. I pulled up the list of the latest arrivals on my phone and stalked down a few of the aisles, making sure everything was where it was supposed to be. But just like inside the warehouse, all the containers were in their proper places.
I could have gone back to my car, but I was still feeling restless, so I kept walking until I reached the back of the shipping yard, where a lone container stood underneath a towering maple tree. This container was dented in several places, as though it had been dropped on its sides one too many times and was no longer in service, but it had gotten plenty of use lately.
The container was unlocked, so I swung the door open, stepped inside, and turned on the string of bare bulbs hanging on one of the walls. A table and some chairs, a cot with a pile of folded blankets, a TV, a radio, an old milk crate full of books. Everything looked the same as the last time I’d been in here, but an aura of stillness permeated the space, something that saddened me more than I’d thought possible.
Because Hugh Tucker was gone.
Given how loudly Tucker had complained while he’d been recuperating in here, he probably never wanted to see this place again, and rightly so. Even I’d gotten sick of the shipping container, and I hadn’t spent nearly as much time in here as he had.
But as my gaze drifted over to the cot, memories of Tucker filled my mind. How thin and deathly pale he’d looked in the beginning. How his shoulders had slumped with exhaustion after the smallest movement. How he’d struggled to do every little thing for himself instead of asking me for help. How his black gaze had found mine time and time again. How the heat shimmering in his eyes had made all sorts of emotions crackle like live wires deep inside my own body.
I had spent hours in here, ostensibly keeping an eye on Tucker in case he needed anything—or tried to escape. The vampire’s body might have been weak, but his mind and especially his tongue had been as sharp as ever. Sometimes we would snark at each other, playing our weird little flirting game. Other times I would type away on my laptop, working on invoices and the like, while he would sit on the cot and read one of the books I’d brought from my personal library to help him pass the time while he healed.
Often, when he came to a particularly good passage, Tucker would read it aloud, although I’d never known if he was reading to himself, or to me, or to both of us. Either way, he had one of the sexiest voices I’d ever heard, with just a hint of a Southern drawl softening his crisp, polished tone, and he took the time to make all the characters and situations come to life. His low, silky voice had echoed through the container, becoming more and more appealing with each line he read, and more than once I’d stopped typing, completely absorbed in the hypnotic cadence of his words…
I shook myself out of my unwanted thoughts. That version of Hugh Tucker was long gone, if it had ever even truly existed, and he was never coming back here—unless he tried to kill me, something that was a distinct possibility.
You didn’t hire someone like Tucker to do your accounting. No, the vampire was sly, clever, strong, and ruthless, and he would no doubt excel in any role he chose to take in the Ashland underworld moving forward. I had no idea why he was meeting with someone as petty, cruel, and obnoxious as Clyde O’Neal, though. Tucker should be starting his own crew, not playing second fiddle to someone else like he had to Mason Mitchell and the other Circle members for so long.
I huffed. Instead of procuring mint-condition comic books and other expensive items, maybe I should hire myself out as a life coach. “Life Lessons with Lorelei” or some such nonsense. It was always easier to tell someone else what to do, rather than doing such things yourself.
Life lessons aside, this container was just a metal box now. Tucker was the one who had given it life, warmth, and interest, and without him, there was nothing noteworthy about it at all—except for the fact that I was standing in here mooning about the mercurial man who used to occupy it.
I sighed, although the cold metal walls quickly soaked up the soft, lonely sound. Oh, yes. The container was simply another empty space, just like Mallory’s bedroom at our mansion.
Mallory and Mosley. Gin. Even Tucker. Everyone else was moving on with their lives, having all these fresh starts, but I was still the same old Lorelei Parker, as deeply entrenched in my routines as this container was stuck in the mud.
Anger erupted in my chest, burning through the weary resignation and icy numbness that had gripped me. I might be stuck in place, but I didn’t have to be stuck in this place. Not anymore. And I most definitely didn’t have to keep mooning over Hugh Tucker.
Disgusted with myself for thinking about him yet again, I slapped off the lights, slammed the door shut behind me, and stalked away from the shipping container.
I said good night to Dario, drove home, and finally did what I’d told Mallory I was going to do all along: take a long, relaxing bath, make some hot chocolate, and curl up with a book in front of the library fireplace.
Tonight’s read was a noir private detective story that Bria Coolidge had chosen for the book club I was in with her, Gin, Roslyn Phillips, and some of our other friends. Bria was a police detective herself, and she always picked the sort of book where femmes fatales did bad, bad things, everyone had an ulterior motive, and you could almost see the dense fog cloaking the landscape and hear the moody soundtrack wailing in the background. As if we all didn’t already get enough of those things in Ashland on a daily basis. Still, the story was entertaining enough, although I had guessed who the killer was and most of what was going to happen about one hundred pages in.
An hour later, I finished the book and went to bed. Despite the hot chocolate and plethora of marshmallows I’d consumed, my sugar rush quickly faded away, and I drifted off to sleep, thinking how much better the detective story would have been if Hugh Tucker had been reading it to me…
Crack!
The sharp, loud, unexpected noise made me sit bolt upright in bed. My gaze darted around my room, and my heart leaped up into my throat. What was that?
I listened, but no other sounds disturbed the dark quiet. Still, something had woken me, and I wasn’t going to be able to sleep until I figured out what it was. So I got out of bed, grabbed my phone, threw on a thick plush robe, and shoved my feet into some fleece-lined boots. Then I went over to the small freezer in the corner of my bedroom, opened it, and drew out a gun made entirely of elemental Ice.
Gin Blanco was one of the most powerful elementals in Ashland, able to shower people with clouds of Ice daggers or blast bricks out of a wall with her Stone magic and pelt people with the resulting shrapnel. Just like Gin, I was also gifted in two areas, but my Ice and metal magic were both much weaker than her raw power, so I needed to be far more creative if I wanted to hurt someone with my magic. Hence the Ice gun.
My mother had been an Ice elemental, and when I was a kid, Lily Rose had shown me how to make all kinds of things with my power, from bouquets of Ice flowers to brighten my room to intricate crowns to top my dolls’ heads to glittering ornaments to hang on our Christmas tree. Using my magic in such a precise way had helped give me a sense of control I had desperately needed back then, especially since my father and my brother and their tempers had been so out of control.
As an adult, I’d further honed and refined my skills, making Ice guns, knives, and other weapons, which I stored in various freezers throughout my mansion, as well as in my warehouse. The chill of the gun barrel soaking into my palm immediately made me feel better, calmer, stronger—and ready to deal with whoever might be creeping around my house in the middle of the night.
With my Ice gun in hand, I left my bedroom and tiptoed down the hallway, careful to avoid the creaky floorboards in the middle of the corridor. I glanced out the windows, but the security lights burning at the corners of the mansion didn’t reveal anyone outside, so I kept going and eased down the stairs to the ground floor. Gin Blanco wasn’t the only one with enemies, and plenty of folks would love to see me dead for deals gone wrong over the years.
I reached the first floor and continued my circuit through the mansion, stopping to peer out all the windows. I still didn’t see anything suspicious, so I reached out with my magic—my metal magic.
Most people didn’t realize it, but metal was all around us, and most folks had a piece or two of it on them at all times. Why, you could hardly find a pair of jeans without a metal zipper or a pair of boots without metal eyelets to hold the laces in place. Not to mention the iron and other metals flowing through a person’s blood.
I could sense, reach out, and manipulate all that metal, just like my father and my brother could, although I’d never been as strong in my power as they had been in theirs. But you didn’t have to be strong to kill someone with magic—just skillful—and I was definitely that, thanks to my mother’s lessons and my own adult experiments.
I didn’t sense any metal in the mansion that shouldn’t be here, which meant that if someone was lurking around, then they were outside. So I plodded downstairs to the basement and stepped into a concrete tunnel. This space used to be an old root cellar, although several years ago, I’d had it expanded, lengthened, and transformed into a tunnel that ended in a set of stairs about two hundred feet away from the back of the mansion. I crept up the stairs and reached out with my magic again, but I still didn’t sense any unusual metal nearby, so I opened the locked trapdoor and slipped outside.
Nothing but night greeted me, and I softly shut the trapdoor and headed into the woods that ringed the mansion. Thick drifts of snow still dotted the ground from the recent storm, crusting the trees and branches in a beautiful crystalline sheen. I stepped forward, grimacing as my boots crunch-crunched through a patch of ice. If anyone was out here, they had probably heard that, but I tightened my grip on my gun and moved forward.
I moved from one tree to another, doing a wide circle around the mansion. The night remained cold and quiet, and no birds or animals flew or scurried around to disturb the peace, but I still felt like someone was watching me. So I kept going, determined to find them before they did something horrible to me.
I had just reached the edge of the backyard patio when I spotted a telltale stain that didn’t match the rest of the pristine landscape.
The stain was dark and ugly, like old, dirty oil from a junker car that had leaked all over the clean white snow. I frowned. What was that? And what could have possibly made it?
I still didn’t see or hear anything else out of the ordinary, so I crept onto the patio and crouched down behind some chairs. Everything remained as quiet as before, so I eased around the chairs, leaned forward, and dipped my hand into the dark spot. A familiar, warmish wetness coated my fingers, and I lifted them up into the beam of a nearby security light.
Blood glistened a sinister red on my skin.
I froze and glanced around again. Everything remained as calm and quiet as before, so I studied the stain again. It was only a small pool, and I couldn’t tell if the blood had been left behind by a wounded animal—or a person.
In addition to the blood, some of the snow had been disturbed, and one of the patio flagstones was cracked, as though something had slammed into it with exceptional force—like a person’s head.
A cold trickle of unease slid down my spine, but I wiped my fingers off in the snow, then grabbed my phone out of my robe pocket and turned on the flashlight app. I shone the light back and forth, and back and forth, until I found what I was looking for.
More blood.
With my phone in one hand and my elemental Ice gun in the other one, I followed the drops of blood across the patio and into the backyard. The blood trail led straight into the woods, along with a path of scuffed snow, and I cautiously crept from one tree to the next.
If someone was lurking out here with a gun, then I was basically painting a giant bull’s-eye on my chest, especially since I was still using my phone as a flashlight. Then again, if someone was lurking out here, they probably would have shot me by now. Either way, I wanted to know exactly who—or what—had been so close to my house, so I kept moving forward—
I rounded another tree and almost tripped over someone.
A blond man with pale skin was sitting on the ground, with his legs tucked underneath him and his back resting up against a fallen log, almost like he was taking a nap, as ridiculous as that would have been on this cold, snowy night. The man’s head was turned in my direction, and I froze, thinking he was staring straight at me.
It took me three long, excruciating seconds to realize he was dead.
The man might be looking in this direction, but he wasn’t seeing me—or anything else. His brown eyes were fixed and still, his mouth was gaping wide, and his body was contorted at an awkward angle. I crept closer and focused my phone flashlight on him. From this angle, he looked normal, if dead. But as I circled around, I noticed that the other side of his head was a bloody mess, probably from where he had hit the patio flagstone.
But there was one thing I didn’t see: his accomplice.
This guy might have slipped, fallen, and hit the patio all on his own, but you didn’t just get up and walk away with that sort of gruesome head wound. No, someone else must have dragged the guy into the woods, either to try to help him escape or in a poor attempt to hide his body.
I glanced around again, but the path of scuffed snow ended here. I still didn’t see anyone, so I set my Ice gun down on the ground and searched the dead man. He wasn’t carrying a wallet or a phone, and he didn’t have so much as a stick of gum tucked in the pockets of his jeans.
He did have a gun, though.
The weapon was nestled in the right pocket of his black overcoat, but it was just a simple revolver. There was nothing special or noteworthy about the gun, other than its cheesy pearl grip, which would have been right at home in that noir detective book I’d finished reading earlier. But the weapon, along with the lack of identification and any personal effects, practically screamed Hello! Criminal here! I don’t want to be identified if I get captured or killed!
I used the sleeve of my robe to hold the gun out so I could take a picture of it with my phone, then slid it back into the guy’s coat pocket. I also propped him back up the way I’d found him and took several photos of his face. Maybe one of my friends would be able to tell me who this guy was and, more important, who had sent him here.
My money was on Clyde O’Neal, especially given our little run-in at Underwood’s earlier, but the dead guy could have worked for any number of underworld bosses. Or maybe he’d been an entrepreneur, a solitary burglar trolling through Northtown looking for a mansion to rob and not caring if he had to shoot the owner in the process. No way to tell for sure.
By this point, I’d been outside for the better part of an hour, and the late-winter chill had chapped my cheeks, snaked through my robe, and plunged down into my boots. I might be an elemental, but I’d had enough of the cold for one night, so I grabbed my Ice gun off the ground and got to my feet.
I thought about calling Xavier, Bria Coolidge’s partner on the police force, but it was late, and I didn’t want to interrupt his night, especially since nothing bad had actually happened, at least not to me. The dead guy certainly wasn’t going anywhere, so I decided to leave him in the woods.
Still, as I trudged through the trees and headed back toward the mansion, I couldn’t shake the feeling that someone else was out here.
Someone who was very much alive—and watching me.