Chapter Six

As much as I wanted to surge to my feet, run around, and scream Owen’s name, I forced myself to calmly, slowly, carefully examine the ground where I’d found his hat.

The grass had been flattened in patches and churned up in others, along with the dirt underneath, indicating a struggle. Owen had come here for some reason, or had been lured here, and then he’d been attacked. In addition to being a metal elemental, Owen was also a good, strong fighter. Even if he’d been taken by surprise, he still would have put up a fierce struggle, and all the flattened grass and disturbed earth told me that he’d been attacked by at least a couple of guys. Probably more of the black-leather-clad giants.

With a heavy heart, I also forced myself to search the ground for more blood, but thankfully, the smears on Owen’s cap were all I found.

I stood up, thinking about what I knew. Owen had definitely been attacked here and then taken somewhere else. Despite the crowds, a snatch-and-grab would have been easy enough to pull off. A couple of the costumed giants could have bashed Owen over the head and carted him off in plain sight simply by making the whole thing seem like an act and part of the ren-faire fun instead of the kidnapping it truly was.

And it was a kidnapping. If someone had just wanted to kill Owen, they could have shoved a knife in his back and left his body here. But there was no body, which told me that Owen was still alive.

For now.

But why kidnap him? Was this some ploy by Hugh Tucker to get leverage over me? To force me to kill another one of the vampire’s Circle enemies? And why grab Owen at the faire with so many potential witnesses around? Why not snatch him when he was coming out of his office late one night? Or from his house, where there was far less chance of someone realizing what was going on?

My hand fisted tight around the bloody leather cap. I didn’t know the answers to my questions, but I was damn sure going to find them out.

And when I found the people who had taken Owen, they were the ones who were going to fucking bleed.

* * *

Still clutching Owen’s hat, I skirted around the blacksmith forge, threaded my way through the crowd, and hurried back over to the Pork Pit truck. Sophia had fed the latest wave of customers, and she leaned out the window again, a concerned look on her face.

“What’s wrong?” she rasped.

I quickly told her about the giants following me into the woods and then handed her Owen’s bloody hat.

Sophia studied the hat a moment, then set it aside. Her face darkened, and her black eyes glittered with anger. “What do you want me to do?”

“Call Finn and Bria—” I stopped and let out a vicious curse.

Calling them wouldn’t do any good, since they’d turned their phones off earlier, just like Owen and I had.

“Close up the truck, then go find Finn and Bria and tell them what’s going on,” I said. “Spread out and start looking for Owen. Ask around, and see if anyone remembers some giants in black leather carrying another guy. Whoever took him couldn’t have gotten too far away yet.”

“What are you going to do?” she rasped.

“I’m going to find another giant dressed like the ones who attacked me and squeeze him for answers. I don’t know that all those giants are working together, but it’s a place to start.”

Sophia nodded and started closing up the truck. I left her there and hurried over to the wrought-iron fence that cordoned off the park from the gravel lot beyond. I looked out over the rows of cars, trucks, and vans, but I didn’t see anything suspicious, and there were no empty spaces to indicate that a vehicle had recently left.

The kidnappers could have taken Owen out of the park, put him in a car, and driven away, but it would have been much more conspicuous, and they would have had to walk right by the Pork Pit truck to do it. Whoever had planned this had been very careful and smart so far, and I doubted they would have wanted to risk Sophia seeing and stopping them. No, my gut was telling me that Owen was still nearby.

That was my hope, anyway. I wasn’t going to think about all the awful things that might have already happened, all the ways that he could have been horribly hurt and brutally tortured. My stomach roiled with fear, but I pushed it away and instead focused on the cold determination surging through me. I didn’t know what this was about yet, but I was going to find Owen, and the people who took him were going to pay for what they’d done.

With that dark and deadly promise beating in my heart, I moved away from the fence, walked back through the concessions area, and started doing a sweep of the front part of the park, searching for the black-leather-clad giants.

But I couldn’t find them—not a single one.

Earlier today, the giants had been everywhere, but now there was nary a one in sight. That only confirmed my suspicion that they were working together. After all, why stick around the scene of your crime when you’d already abducted your victim?

Still, I kept scanning the throngs of people, desperately hoping I’d spot the giants. All I needed was one of them to talk and tell me where they’d taken Owen. Just one.

No giants magically appeared to answer my silent plea, but as I looked around, I realized that someone else was also missing from the faire.

Pirate Queen Celeste.

My head snapped back and forth, and I scanned the crowd, but I didn’t see Celeste anywhere either. She had vanished, along with the giants.

Oh, I supposed that Celeste could have been taking a break, hanging out somewhere deeper in the park, or maybe even over at the stage, preparing for the next show. But mine was a suspicious mind, and I remembered how the giants had entered the faire as part of her entourage this morning, almost as if they worked for her in real life.

Maybe they did.

Even more telling was the fact that Celeste had tried to cozy up to Owen earlier at the forge. Sure, Owen had said that Celeste had wanted some custom swords, but what if that had just been an excuse to get him alone? I didn’t know that I was right, but I wasn’t going to take a chance that I was wrong either. Not when Owen’s life was hanging in the balance.

So I quit looking for the giants and started searching for Celeste instead.

I went over to a group of people standing in front of a jewelry booth. “Excuse me, have you seen Pirate Queen Celeste?”

I didn’t think a more ridiculous sentence had ever come out of my mouth. Then again, this had started out as a ridiculous day, although it had quickly turned into a bloody one—and would probably get bloodier still, before all was said and done.

Those folks shook their heads, so I moved on. I asked the same thing over and over again of all the kids, teens, and adults who crossed my path, but they all kept shaking their heads no-no-no. Despite the throngs of people, no one remembered seeing Celeste recently or knew where she might have gone—

I spotted a flash of red out of the corner of my eye. I whirled around in that direction, and I saw Celeste disappearing behind one of the vendor booths about twenty feet away.

I glanced around, but I didn’t see Sophia, Finn, or Bria anywhere. I couldn’t wait for my friends. I had to act now or risk losing Celeste, so I headed after the pirate queen.

“Hey!”

“Watch it!”

“Rude much?”

A few people let out angry mutters as I shoved past them, but I didn’t dare slow down to apologize. The only thing that mattered was tracking Celeste back to Owen before it was too late.

I reached the booth where Celeste had disappeared, and I finally did slow down, creeping up to the corner and peering around the side. I didn’t see Celeste or any of the giants, but the booth was close to one of the hiking trails that led into the woods on the west side of the park.

I hadn’t seen any buildings or other structures during my earlier hike through the woods, but this trail was about a quarter mile away from the one that I’d used. Either way, it was the most likely place for Celeste to have gone, so I stepped around the booth, jogged over to the trail, and plunged back into the trees.

I palmed a knife and moved quickly and quietly along the path. Every once in a while, I stopped to look and listen, but I didn’t see anyone on the trail ahead of me or hunkered down in the surrounding woods, and the thick tangle of trees blocked out the clatter and commotion from the faire.

A couple of hundred feet into the woods, I came across another stone bridge that arched over the same creek that I’d seen before. I approached the bridge with caution, but Celeste wasn’t lying in wait underneath it to attack me like a troll, so I crossed it.

I was just about to step off the far side of the bridge when the phone in my pocket started buzzing.

I frowned, wondering why the device was buzzing instead of playing one of the ring tones that Silvio Sanchez, my personal assistant, had programmed into my phone. Silvio and I both loved movie music, and he’d downloaded a bunch of classic cinematic themes into my device.

Then I realized it wasn’t my phone—it was the phone I’d taken off Lancelot.

The phone buzzed a moment longer, then fell silent. I pulled the device out of my pocket and stared at the screen. It was another message from the mysterious Black Rook.

Did you take care of the assassin?

More ominous bad-guy speak, asking if the giants had killed me yet.

I hesitated. I didn’t know if Lancelot and the Black Rook were using keywords or some other code, but it would be more suspicious if there was no response, so I sent back a generic bad-guy answer.

It’s done.

I waited, holding my breath and hoping I’d made the right choice. The phone buzzed again a few seconds later with another message.

Good. Meet us at the barn to get your cut.

The barn? What barn?

Then I remembered the old barn I’d seen perched on the hill beyond the woods when we first arrived at the park this morning. That must be where this trail led and where the kidnappers had taken Owen.

I switched the phone to silent, shoved it back into my pocket, and hurried along. A few hundred feet later, the path started climbing, and that old barn came into view through the trees.

As soon as I spotted the structure, I stepped off the trail and started moving from one tree to the next, steadily and silently making my way up the incline. I didn’t spot Celeste or any of the giants lurking in the woods, and no trip-wires littered the ground. Sloppy, sloppy, sloppy of the kidnappers not to leave a rear guard behind or at least a few rune booby traps buried in the leaves in case someone like me came creeping up behind them.

A few minutes later, I crested the top of the hill and hunkered down behind a large boulder at the edge of the woods. The trail I’d been on before ran out of the trees and snaked through an overgrown field choked with tall grasses, winter wildflowers, and other vegetation before ending at a small mowed yard that surrounded the barn.

I studied the structure, but it looked like any other barn in the Ashland countryside—a two-story building that had probably been painted a bright, glossy red at one time but whose color had slowly faded to a dull, rusty brown. The double doors on the front were closed, and shades had been pulled down over the windows, but a faint, steady hum sounded in the distance. Probably a generator to power the lights and pump some heat into the barn.

The double doors were the only way in on the ground level that I could see, so I looked up at the second story, which featured a couple of windows, along with a large single door that probably led to a hayloft. No shades covered the glass on the second-story windows, and I didn’t see anyone moving around up there.

Fletcher had always said it was better to come at your enemies from an unexpected angle, and the old man’s words of wisdom were especially true in this case, when Owen was trapped inside the barn with who knew how many giants. So I started looking for a way to get up to the second level, and my gaze locked onto a drainpipe at one corner of the building. Perfect.

I didn’t want to waste time turning my phone on, so I pulled the dead giant’s phone out of my pocket and texted Sophia, telling her where I was and what was going on. I also sent the same message to Finn and Bria, even though I doubted they had switched their phones back on yet. Once that was done, I slid the device back into my pocket.

I looked around again, but the barn remained silent and shut up, so I surged to my feet, plowed my way through the overgrown field, crossed the mowed yard, and plastered myself up against the side of the building. I drew in quick, steady breaths through my nose, trying to listen above the roar of my heart, but no shouts sounded, and no one seemed to have spotted me.

I took hold of the drainpipe and gave it a hard, sharp tug to determine if it would hold my weight. The dull gray pipe looked as old and run-down as the rest of the barn, but it didn’t budge, squeak, or protest, so I wrapped both hands around it and started climbing.

I dug my boots into the wood on either side of the drainpipe, using my feet to help support me as I reached higher and higher and shimmied up the pipe. The metal was so cold that it burned my hands, but I didn’t dare use my Stone magic to harden my skin.

If an elemental was inside the barn, they might sense me using my magic and come outside to investigate. I didn’t want that. Not until Owen was safe. Then I would take on anybody here who had an ounce of magic, along with everyone who didn’t.

As an assassin, I’d done my fair share of spidery climbing, and it didn’t take me long to reach the second level. One of the windows was right beside the drainpipe, so I grabbed hold of the wooden frame. I was only mildly surprised when it easily slid up. People thought that locking the doors and windows on the first floor was enough to keep out bad folks. And it usually was, but most folks weren’t the Spider, and I was just about the baddest of them all.

I slid the window up as high as it would go, then grabbed the bottom of the frame with both hands, pulled myself forward, and slithered through the opening. I went headfirst, and I ended up sliding down into a loose mound of old, moldy hay. Ugh. The hay scratched my face and tickled my nose, and I had to swallow down a sneeze. I waited a moment, lying there, but no shouts or alarms sounded, so I slowly sat up.

I was in a hayloft, surrounded by, you guessed it, hay. Several bales were stacked up along the walls, while more loose hay covered the floor, including the spot where I was sitting. The inside of the barn looked just as decrepit as the outside, and several of the wooden floorboards were cracked or missing, while others sagged underneath the weight of the bales.

The only good thing about the loft was that it didn’t look like anyone had been up there in ages, given the thick layer of dust that coated everything. Even more dust motes swirled through the air like mosquitoes, and I had to swallow down another sneeze.

I reached out and closed the open window behind me. Then I palmed a knife and slowly, carefully, quietly crawled out of the hay.

The loft was shaped like a giant U, with a set of stairs in the middle leading down to the ground. I crept over to the wooden railing that cordoned off the right side of the loft and peered down at the first floor.

I wasn’t sure what I’d been expecting. Some old, forgotten farm equipment slowly rusting away. Maybe an old junker car with flat tires that had been stripped for parts and left to rot. Maybe even some barn cats sleeping in the dusty piles of hay.

What I didn’t expect were the thick brown leather couches arranged around low tables full of laptops, monitors, keyboards, gaming consoles, and other high-tech computer equipment. A couple of refrigerators lined one of the walls, with cases of beer piled on top of them, along with bags of potato chips, pretzels, candy bars, and other snacks. Several bales of hay were also scattered around, with swords, daggers, spears, and other sharp, pointy, medieval weapons sticking out of them, as though the bales were oversize pincushions.

But the centerpiece of the first floor was a long, wide table covered with bright green felt that held an enormous diorama of a medieval landscape. Miniature gray stone castles, green paper mountains with painted white peaks, blue-tinted water in little rivers that snaked across the landscape, even dwarves, giants, sorcerers, and other metal figurines clutching small silver swords, shields, and magic wands. The diorama featured all that and more, and it was an impressive, museum-quality display.

Several cushioned chairs were spaced around the diorama, along with smaller tables covered with pens, notepads, and plastic containers filled with neon-colored, multi-sided dice. Still more tables bristled with bottles of paint, brushes, colored paper, and other art supplies.

This wasn’t a barn—it was a ren-faire, role-playing, model-making gamer’s paradise.

Definitely not what I had expected, and the jumble of items only made me more confused. Who owned all this stuff? And why keep it in a decrepit old barn? And what did any of this have to do with kidnapping Owen?

The low murmur of voices sounded down below, and a door creaked open somewhere in the back of the first floor, out of my line of sight. Then the distinctive slap-slap-slap-slap of boots against concrete rang out.

A few seconds later, Pirate Queen Celeste strolled into view. She was still wearing her red leather costume, along with her two ruby-studded swords, and that silver tiara still glinted on her head.

And she wasn’t alone.

Four black-leather-clad giants followed her into the front part of the barn. Two of the men sat down next to each other and started typing on two separate laptops that were perched at one end of the diorama table. For a moment, I thought they were booting up some game, but rows of text and numbers filled their screens, not bright, flashy graphics. The other two giants lounged on one of the couches.

“Did anyone follow you?” Celeste asked. “Or try to stop you?”

One of the giants on the couch shook his head. “Nope. I waited until Grayson took a break from the forge, then bashed him upside the head just like you told me to. The boys helped me carry him through the park. We told everyone that he was drunk and played it for laughs, and they all thought it was part of the show. We walked right through the crowd, and no one batted an eye.”

Celeste nodded her approval.

“What about Blanco?” another giant piped up.

Celeste shrugged. “Lancelot took care of her. We’re free and clear.”

I let out a quiet sigh of relief. Apparently, Celeste had believed my fake text claiming that Lancelot and his friends had eliminated me. Good. That at least gave me the small advantage of surprise.

“But it’s a shame that Lancelot got to kill her instead of me. After all this work and training, I wanted to go a few rounds with the infamous Spider.” Celeste stuck out her red lips in an exaggerated pout.

My hand tightened around my knife. She didn’t realize it yet, but she was going to get her wish to tangle with me—and she was going to bleed out all over that concrete floor.

“All right, then,” Celeste said. “Let’s get on with it.”

She turned to the giants on the couch and made a sharp, sweeping motion with her hand, as though she really was a queen telling her minions to scuttle away. The giants nodded, got to their feet, and disappeared into the back of the barn. A few seconds later, they reappeared, carrying a third man between them.

Owen.