Heart of Venom

I hated to leave her in the middle of a fight, but she was right. We had to save Sophia.

I nodded at Bria. "Now!" I screamed.

We both rose from behind the salon chairs. The men raised their weapons to fire at us again, but Bria reared back and threw her Ice magic at them, causing them to duck down out of the way of the chilly blast. She followed that up by raising her own gun and firing it at the men while I sprinted for the doorway.

Hazel and the other two men had already managed to drag Sophia outside. knives in hand, I sprinted through the house and ran out the open front door. I leaped down\ off the porch and hurried across the lawn, my bare feet squashing the grass.

A large white van sat in the driveway, parked at a haphazard angle behind Sophia's classic convertible and a beige sedan that I didn't recognize. Hazel had already gotten into the driver's seat of the van and had cranked the engine. Sophia was still struggling with the two men at the back of the vehicle as Grimes looked on, apparently unwilling to get his suit or his hands dirty. I didn't bother screaming at the men to let go of Sophia. They'd do that as soon as I killed them - and Grimes and Hazel too.

Grimes must have seen me racing toward him out of the corner of his eye, because he turned in my direction.

He frowned and considered me a moment as though he were surprised that I'd managed to get past his men and make it all the way outside.

Then he threw his Fire magic at me.

The flames streaked through the air, seeming to burn hotter and brighter as they zoomed across the lawn. I didn't have time to duck them, not if I wanted to save Sophia, so I used my Stone magic to harden my skin as the elemental Fire engulfed me.

The searing strength of the heat stopped me in my tracks, and it took all my concentration to keep holding on to my own power so I wouldn't be incinerated. Grimes wasn't quite as strong as Mab had been, but his magic still packed a hell of a wallop.

I didn't want to waste precious seconds dropping to the ground and rolling around to smother the flames, so being one of the rare elementals who was gifted in not one but two areas, this time, I grabbed hold of my Ice power. I sent out a blast of magic and used my cold power to douse the Fire trying to scorch my skin. The flames immediately froze into weird twisted shapes, cracked off my body, and plummeted to the ground like icicles falling off a roof. The cold Ice hissed as it came into contact with the hot embers and smoldering grass underfoot. I darted forward again.

Apparently impatient with his men's lack of progress, Grimes was now wrestling with Sophia himself. He didn't bother to look at me to see if I was still standing. He seemed confident enough in his magic to believe that one fiery burst was enough to toast me to ashes. Fool.

Grimes grabbed Sophia and rammed her head into the side of the van. She kept fighting him, so he slammed her head into the metal again, hard enough to leave a dent behind. She collapsed on the driveway, unconscious.

Grimes easily picked her up and tossed her into the back of the van.

"Stop!" I screamed, trying to distract him long enough for me to get to Sophia. "Stop!"

He glanced over his shoulder at me and frowned again, as though I were some bothersome bug he thought he'd already swatted away. He gestured at his men, and they moved from the driveway over to the edge of the lawn in front of the house. I headed toward Grimes, but his men put themselves in between the two of us, and I had no choice but to go through them to get to him.

So I tightened my grip on my knives and threw myself into the fight.

The men pulled out their weapons, but I didn't give them the chance to fire. I sliced one of my knives into the gun hand of the man on my right, then pivoted and did the same thing to the second man. They both grunted with pain and surprise, but they snapped their hands up, ready to beat me to death. I didn't care. I moved back and forth between them, whirling this way and that, cutting into the first man, then the second, until they resembled a couple of pinatas, only with blood and guts pouring out instead of candy.

I finally managed to cut down one of the men in front of me. The other followed a moment later, giving me a clear path to the van and Sophia trapped inside.

"Sophia!" I screamed, running toward the vehicle."Sophia!"

Hazel threw the van into gear and whipped it into a U-turn right in the middle of Jo-Jo's lawn. The tires threw up grass and dirt, and the van fishtailed, but Hazel managed to get it under control. She gave me an evil grin before flooring it.

I dropped my knives and chased after the van, throwing myself forward, trying to use my speed and momen -  tum to latch onto one of the rear door handles, but I just wasn't quick enough to catch the vehicle, and my fingers missed the handles by several inches.

I fell flat on my face instead.

My Stone magic softened the landing, but I still felt the jarring, bruising impact through my whole body.

Still, I pushed the pain away, rolled forward, and surged back up onto my feet. I wasn't giving up yet -  But I was too late.

The van zoomed down the driveway, screeched through a hard right turn, and raced out of sight - taking my friend along with it.

Chapter Five

I sucked down a breath and started running again.

Maybe I could catch them before they got out of the subdivision - "Gin!"

I pulled up short and whirled around. Bria stood on the front porch, covered with blood.

"It's Jo-Jo!" she screamed again. "Get in here! Quick!"

I looked over my shoulder. By this point, the van was gone. I couldn't catch Grimes and Hazel, and I couldn't save Sophia.

I couldn't save her.

"Gin!" Bria yelled again.

My heart burned with rage and guilt and shame, but there was nothing I could do about that right now. So I sucked in another breath, grabbed my knives from where they had fallen on the driveway, and ran back toward the house.

Once Bria realized that I was headed in her direction, she darted back inside. Dread tied my stomach into tight, aching knots, and I forced myself to move even faster. I\ leaped up onto the porch, raced down the hallway, and burst into the salon. Bria was already crouched down by

Jo-Jo's side. Rosco was there too, his furry head resting in the dwarf's lap. He must have come back inside while I'd been chasing after Sophia. He let out a low, plaintive whine when he saw me, begging me to help the mistress he loved so much.

Jo-Jo was in the same spot as before, slumped against the wall, her head lolling to one side, her clear eyes open, blood all over her chest.

Fear, guilt, and grief roared to life inside my chest, bubbling up like lava about to erupt from a volcano. My knives slipped from my numb fingers and clattered to the floor. I bent over double from the cruel, searing pain, from the thought that Jo-Jo was gone, dead, murdered -  that I'd failed her just like I had failed Fletcher when I hadn't been able to save him from being tortured to death inside the Pork Pit.

Then Jo-Jo slowly turned her head in my direction and looked up at me, her eyes bright and cloudy with pain, confusion, and fear - for her sister.

"Sophia . . ." Jo-Jo whispered, her voice faint and weak.

"Grimes . . ."

Relief surged through me, so sharp, cold, and bittersweet that it took my breath away. My knees buckled, and I stumbled down onto the floor beside her.

"Don't you worry about that right now," I finally said in a rough, ragged tone. "Just try to relax."

I peered at Jo-Jo's wounds, and my relief vanished, replaced once more by that hot, churning wad of fear, guilt, and grief. Grimes had shot her twice, and he'd made both bullets count. Two ugly holes marred her flesh, close to her heart. Each one a kill shot. The only reason Jo-Jo was still alive was that she was a dwarf, and her dense muscles had kept the bullets from tearing into her heart. But she was losing blood with every shallow breath that she drew in, and it wouldn't be long until she ran out of it entirely.

Bria picked up a towel she'd grabbed from somewhere and pressed it against Jo-Jo's wounds, trying to stem the blood loss. I got back up onto my feet, stepped over the dead men, and started rummaging through all of the pink plastic tubs on the counter, knocking bottles of shampoo, tubes of lipstick, and bags of pink sponge curlers off the surface in my hurried, desperate frenzy to find something that would help Jo-Jo. Finally, my fingers closed over a small metal tin, with a puffy cloud rune painted on the top in white and outlined in a deep, vibrant blue.

I popped the lid off the tin and dropped down beside Jo-Jo again. "Here," I told Bria. "This will help."

She pulled the towel away from the wounds, picked up Rosco, and moved him out of the way. I grabbed one of my knives from the floor and used it to cut open Jo-Jo's dress so I could have better access to her injuries. Then I dipped my bloody fingers into the tin, which was full of a clear ointment that had a soft, soothing vanilla scent.

I leaned forward and carefully smeared the substance all over Jo-Jo's chest, trying not to cause her any more pain than was absolutely necessary, but she still winced with every brush of my fingers against her skin.

Not only could Air elementals heal folks with their magic, but they could also imbue things like lotions, liquids, and creams with their power, as Jo-Jo had done to this tin of ointment. Now I was hoping that she'd put enough of her healing magic into the clear salve to help save her.

I held my breath as the ointment slowly soaked into her skin. It didn't pull the black, ragged edges of the gunshot holes back together, but it did slow and then finally stop the blood loss - for now. Jo-Jo's injuries were deep and serious, and it wouldn't be long before the Air magic in the ointment faded away and the wounds started to bleed once more, and that was if one of the bullets didn't continue its journey on into her heart in the meantime.

Once again, that hot, agonizing fear that I was going to lose her rose in me, but I ruthlessly squashed it, focusing on what we needed to do next to save her.

"We've got to get her to a healer, to another Air elemental," I said. "Right now."

"But who?" Bria asked.

Rosco eased back over to Jo-Jo's side and whined again, as if he was asking the same question.

Who indeed? Air elementals weren't all that rare, but they didn't exactly grow on trees either. Not to mention the fact that not every Air elemental used his or her power to heal. Some, like Sophia, used it to destroy, to rip apart skin and bones and sandblast molecules into nothingness.

My heart clenched again at the thought of Sophia and what she could be experiencing at Grimes's hands right now, but I pushed those sick, guilty feelings away. First, I had to save Jo-Jo. Then I could go after Sophia and rain down all of my cold, cold wrath on Harley Grimes for what he'd done to the Deveraux sisters.

Jo-Jo coughed, as though she was trying to say something. I leaned closer so I could hear what she was telling me."coop . . ." she finally whispered. ". . . er."

It took me a moment to put the syllables together. "cooper?"

Jo-Jo's head lolled to one side, which I took as a yes .

Bria frowned. "cooper? cooper Stills? Do you think that he can heal her?" cooper was Jo-Jo's gentleman friend. Well, I suspected that they were a little more than friends, but that didn't matter right now. All that did was the fact that he had Air magic. cooper was a blacksmith by trade, so I didn't know how good at healing he was. Still, I knew that he'd do his damnedest to save Jo-Jo any way he could.

At around five feet, Jo-Jo was tall for a dwarf, and she was heavy, because of her stocky physique. All of her thick, strong muscles had saved her from being immediately killed by Grimes's bullets, but they weren't doing her any favors now, because Bria and I didn't have the upper-body strength to move her as quickly as we needed to. All we could really do was carefully shuffle forward with her a few steps at a time - time that Jo-Jo didn't have.

Since Bria had Jo-Jo's shoulders and I had her ankles, I grimaced thinking about how Finn and I had moved those giants' bodies a few days before behind the Pork Pit.

And now here I was, doing the exact same thing to Jo-Jo.

It was one of the cruelest, sickest feelings of irony that I'd ever experienced.

And another thing that I was going to kill Harley Grimes for.

"We aren't getting anywhere like this," Bria finally said.

"Put her down. I have an idea."

I bit my lip, wanting to scream at the delay, and she noticed my hesitation. Rosco let out another whine, mirroring my frustration.

"Trust me," she said.

I nodded, and we slowly lowered Jo-Jo to the blood -  spattered floor. Once that was done, Bria moved in front of the dwarf, as though she were going to leave the salon and step out into the hallway, although she ended up crouching down beside Jo-Jo's bare feet. She put her hands flat on the floor, and the bluish white light of her magic leaked out from underneath her palms. A blast of power filled the salon and rolled outward through the entire house, and my own Ice magic stirred in response to the welcome, familiar feel of my sister's cold, frosty power. A second later, the light and the feel of her magic vanished.

"There," she said, getting to her feet. "Maybe this will help make it easier to move her."

I peered out into the hallway, which now resembled some sort of crystal cave. My sister had used her magic to coat the floor from the salon all the way to the front door with an inch of elemental Ice.

"We can drag her along the Ice easier and faster than we can carry her," Bria explained.

I grimaced again at the thought, but then I nodded.

"You're right. It's not pretty, but I think it will work."

We moved back over to Jo-Jo, picked up her again, and shuffled forward until she was in the hallway. Then we put her down on the sheet of Ice. The cold crystals seared the bottoms of my bare feet, but I didn't care. All that mattered was saving Jo-Jo. Bria and I leaned down, each of us grabbing one of Jo-Jo's legs.