Besides, I could always kill him later, should the need arise.

"Put him in the car," I said. "Let's get Vinnie to Jo-Jo's before he dies."

While Xavier and the others loaded the unconscious Vinnie into the back of the SUV, I retrieved my dropped knife, then crouched down in the middle of the sandbox. I hadn't planned on killing anyone but the bartender tonight, but I wasn't going to miss this chance to let Mab know exactly who had taken out her men-again. It was easy enough for me to use my silverstone knife to draw my spider rune in a patch of blood-soaked sand. A couple of passes with my blade and it was done.

My eyes studied the symbol that I'd carved. A small circle surrounded by eight thin rays. It wasn't a flashy rune by any stretch of the imagination, certainly not like Mab's gold and ruby sunburst necklace. But the spider rune was the symbol for patience-something that I hoped the Fire elemental was running short on these days. Because impatience made you sloppy, and sloppy got you dead. The second she made a mistake was the second I'd make my move.

"We're ready, Gin!" Finn called out from the window of Xavier's SUV. "Let's go!"

I got back to my feet, wincing at the pain in my hip, and limped over to the waiting vehicle.

It took Xavier about twenty minutes to drive from the Northtown park out into the surrounding suburbs. The giant steered his black SUV with its now-crumpled front fender into a subdivision bearing the name Tara Heights before turning onto a street marked Magnolia Lane. I didn't have to give him directions. Xavier knew the way. We all did.

A minute later, Xavier drove up a long driveway before stopping in front of a three-story, plantation-style house perched on top of a grassy hill. The rows of white columns on the front of the house gleamed despite the late hour, and the cobblestones that made up the driveway seemed as pale as bleach in the darkness.

The four of us got out of the car. Xavier reached into the back and slung Vinnie over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes, before we all walked up the three steps leading to a wide, wraparound porch. Green, glossy kudzu vines curled around a trellis that partially obscured the porch. So did a thick cluster of rose bushes, although their branches were bare for the winter, except for the long, curved, black thorns that glittered like polished jet.

I opened the screen door. A knocker shaped like a fat, puffy cloud rested on the heavier, interior wooden door. The cloud was Jo-Jo's personal rune, denoting her as an Air elemental.

I'd just reached for the knocker when footsteps scuffled inside, the door opened, and Jo-Jo Deveraux stuck her head outside.

"I thought I heard someone out here," the dwarf said in her voice that was as light and sweet as syrup.

Despite the late hour, Jolene "Jo-Jo" Deveraux looked like she'd just finished getting ready to go out courting on Saturday night. A string of pearls hung around her throat, the same size as the pink polka dots on her fuchsia dress. Her bleached blond white hair curled around her head just so, and the perfect amount of understated makeup softened the lines of her middle-aged face. The smell of her Chantilly perfume filled the night air. I breathed in, enjoying the sweet, soft scent.

At exactly five feet, Jo-Jo was tall for a dwarf, with a figure that was still stocky and muscular despite her two hundred and fifty-seven years. Even though it couldn't have been more than ten degrees outside, Jo-Jo's feet were bare, showing off the raspberry pedicure that she'd given herself. The dwarf hated to wear socks, no matter how cold the weather got. One of the many quirks that I loved about her.

Jo-Jo stared at the five of us on her porch. The dwarf's eyes were clear and almost colorless, except for the pinprick of black at the center of her irises. She raised a tweezed eyebrow. "Quite the crowd tonight, Gin. Usually, it's just you and Finn."

I shrugged. "What can I say? I seem to attract minions wherever I go these days. Kind of like the Pied Piper."

Behind me, Finn huffed out his displeasure. "Minion? I am most certainly not a mere minion. Head minion, perhaps. At the very least."

Jo-Jo let out a soft chuckle and stepped back. "Minion or not, why don't y'all come on in and let me have a look at that fellow there with you-preferably before he bleeds all over my front porch. I just had it painted last week, you know."

I entered the house first, trailed by Finn, Roslyn, and finally Xavier, still carrying Vinnie over his shoulder. Following Jo-Jo, we walked down a long hallway opening up into a room that took up the back half of the house.

Jo-Jo Deveraux made her living by being what she called a "drama mama." That is to say, a purveyor of all things related to beauty. The dwarf used the back half of her antebellum house as a salon, offering every purifying, exfoliating, tweezing, plucking, dyeing, curling, cutting, perming, and waxing ritual known to Southern women. And even a few that the Yankees had invented. Jo-Jo also used her Air elemental magic to augment many of the treatments, which is what made her salon so popular. Oxygen facials and other Air beauty regimens were great for smoothing out unwanted crow's feet and erasing stretch marks.

Beauty magazines, scissors, combs, curlers, hair dryers, and more filled the wide room, fighting for space on the tables and counters, along with more tubs of makeup and bottles of pink nail polish than you could find at Mab Monroe's best-stocked Sell-Everything superstore.

At the sound of our footsteps, a dog sprawled in a wicker basket by the door raised up his head. Rosco, Jo-Jo's fat, lazy basset hound. The brown and black beast gazed at us with dark, hopeful eyes. But when he realized that no one had any food that they planned on feeding him, he snorted once, put his head back down, and returned to his previously scheduled nap. Rosco didn't like to overexert himself-ever.

"Put the poor fellow over there, Xavier." Jo-Jo pointed to one of the cherry red, padded swivel chairs in the middle of the salon. "So I can take a look at him."

Xavier put Vinnie down where Jo-Jo had instructed. The rest of us made ourselves comfortable in the other chairs scattered around the room, except for Finn, who headed into the kitchen on a coffee run.

I sat in the chair closest to Vinnie's so I could keep an eye on the Ice elemental. Just because he'd been beaten to within an inch of death didn't mean that he couldn't rise up and do something stupid while Jo-Jo was healing him-like try to get away.

Once I was sure that Vinnie was out of it, I glanced around, half-expecting to see a dwarf dressed in all black come strolling into the salon. But Sophia, Jo-Jo's younger sister, didn't appear.

"Where's Sophia?" I asked.

Jo-Jo went over to the sink and washed her hands. "She went out to see a Clint Eastwood film festival at that old theater over on St. Charles Avenue. She won't be back until late."

I nodded. In addition to Sophia's Goth tendencies, she also happened to be a huge film buff.

Jo-Jo dried her hands, then clicked on a free-standing halogen light and angled it so that it illuminated Vinnie Volga's bloody face. She let out a low whistle. "Giants?"

I nodded. "Some of Mab's men. They were disappointed in Vinnie's job performance and decided to show him exactly how much."

Jo-Jo clucked her tongue and shook her head. Then she raised her hand up so that her palm hovered over Vinnie's face, not quite touching his bloody, bruised skin. The dwarf's eyes began to glow an opaque, buttermilk white, and the same sort of magical glow coated her palm. Jo-Jo's Air magic crackled through the room like lightning, making me shift in my chair.

Jo-Jo was an Air elemental, which meant that her magic was the polar opposite of my Ice and Stone power. Two elements always opposed each other, like Fire and Ice, just as two elements always complemented each other, like Fire and Air. I always felt uncomfortable when I sensed so much of an opposing element being used, even if I knew that Jo-Jo was healing Vinnie instead of hurting him. Her magic just felt wrong to me, as foreign and alien as eating fried green tomatoes would to a Yankee.

Not only that, but Jo-Jo's power also made the spider rune scars on my palms itch and burn, the way they always did whenever I was around so much elemental magic. The silverstone metal that had been melted into my flesh was highly prized for its ability to absorb and store all kinds of magic, and it always seemed to me that the silverstone in my hands actually hungered for power. That it was almost like a living thing, a parasite whose sole purpose was to soak up more and more magic until it just couldn't contain another molecule of power. Sort of like a greedy vampire sucking down all the blood that he could get his fangs into.

Lots of elementals had rings, bracelets, or other jewelry made out of the metal for the sole purpose of containing bits and pieces of their power in the items-power they could then draw upon at a later time. Like when they were dueling another elemental. Wear your favorite silverstone ring, have that extra bit of juice handy when you needed it to destroy your enemy. It was all just a deadly form of magical batteries more than anything else.

"So who is this guy?" Jo-Jo asked in a soft voice.

The dwarf moved her hand back and forth across Vinnie's face, not quite touching his battered features. With every pass of her hand, the swelling on Vinnie's face went down a little more, the black bruises greened out and faded away, and the bloody cuts drew together and sewed themselves shut. Jo-Jo was using her Air elemental magic to force oxygen into Vinnie's body, using her power to put all those broken molecules and blood vessels back together and make him whole once again. That's how Air elementals healed-by using all the natural gases in the atmosphere, especially oxygen.

"He's somebody who's been spying on Roslyn for Mab," I said.

Jo-Jo looked at me. "So why am I healing him?"

"Because he might have some useful information, and he seems to be in as much trouble as the rest of us."

While Jo-Jo finished healing Vinnie, I told the others what I'd overheard in the park. Everything that the vampire had said about Vinnie spying on Roslyn, about the trap LaFleur had set for me with the fake rumor about the drug shipment, and how Mab had big plans for Vinnie's daughter, Natasha.

"They said that about Natasha?" Roslyn asked. "That Mab was going to put her in some kind of whorehouse? She's eight, maybe ten. She doesn't deserve that."

Roslyn's face tightened, and she pressed her lips together, as though she was trying to keep from being sick again. Some might have thought that it was hypocritical of Roslyn to have any kind of objection about whatever sort of prostitution that Mab was involved in. After all, she ran her own stable of hookers at Northern Aggression. Most of the guys and girls at the club were vampires, just like Roslyn. The vamps pretty much owned the sex trade in Ashland. That's because for a lot of them, having sex was just as stimulating as drinking blood. Humans needed vitamins to keep going, and vamps needed sex and blood. Get laid, get your B12 for the day. Or something like that. For the most part, it was win-win for the vamps and their clients.

But vamp or not, everyone who worked at Northern Aggression was there because they wanted to be. Roslyn didn't force them to do anything they didn't want to, and she made sure that her giant bouncers kept the club's clients from hurting anyone. Roslyn also let her hookers keep what they made, instead of taking it all for herself like so many of the vampire pimps did on the Southtown streets. If you had to be a hooker, you wanted someone like Roslyn watching out for you, and not some gangbanger pimp who'd take all your money and then beat the shit out of you just for fun.

Jo-Jo dropped her hand from Vinnie's face. "There. He's as good as new. Your turn, Gin."

I sighed. As much as I hated being injured, sometimes I thought that getting healed by Jo-Jo was worse. But I leaned back in my chair and let the Air elemental work her magic on me.

Jo-Jo placed her hand close to my hip, and her palm began to glow milky white with her Air magic once again. A hot tingle sizzled to life deep inside my body, centered in my aching hip joint. Then another, then another. It was like being pricked with thousands of tiny red-hot needles all at once. I gritted my teeth, clamped my hands around the armrests of the chair, and suffered through it. The spider rune scars on my palms reacted to Jo-Jo's magic and began to itch and burn even worse than before, as she used her power on me. Sweat beaded on my forehead, and I bit back a primal scream. Even though I knew that Jo-Jo was helping me, healing me, the deep, dark elemental part of me wanted to lash out at her with my own magic just to get her to stop. Just so I wouldn't feel the wrongness of her power one second longer.

"Dislocated hip, some minor cuts and bruises. An easy night for you," Jo-Jo murmured.

"Yeah," I muttered. "It was just a walk in the park."

A few minutes later, the glow faded from Jo-Jo's palm, the magic evaporated out of her eyes, and she dropped her hand. I let out a quiet sigh of relief and leaned back against the chair, grateful that I couldn't feel her Air magic anymore.

I let myself relax and recover for two minutes before I sat upright again and got on with things. I turned my attention to Vinnie, who was still unconscious in the next chair over.

Normally, I would have let someone who'd been so severely injured as Vinnie sleep until morning. Being magically healed always took a toll on a person, as you went from being close to death to suddenly being healthy again. It pretty much zapped all your strength until your body could switch gears and catch up with itself again. Hell, even I would have liked to crawl into bed myself and not come out until morning. But I wanted answers, and I wanted them now. So I reached over and poked Vinnie in the shoulder.

It took about a minute of prodding before the Ice elemental's eyes fluttered open, and he became aware of his surroundings. Vinnie looked at Jo-Jo and frowned with confusion.