Tangled Threads

30

The next day was Christmas Eve. The Pork Pit wasn’t officially open for business, so I’d given all of the waitstaff the day off with pay, but Sophia and I had a few last-minute orders to see to before we closed down for the holiday. And I had some last-minute shopping to do, because I still hadn’t decided on a present for Owen, and time was running out.

In between cooking and giving people their party orders, I kept one eye on the clock on the wall, counting down the hours until my visitor arrived. Finally, three o’clock rolled around. At one minute after, the front door opened, causing the bell to chime, and she stepped into my restaurant.

Detective Bria Coolidge. My baby sister.

She looked as cool and professional as ever in her long coat, sweater, jeans, and boots. Her badge glinted a warm gold on her leather belt next to her gun. She stood in the doorway, as if she wasn’t quite sure what she was doing here. That made two of us.

Sophia and I both looked over at her. Then the dwarf turned her flat, black eyes to mine and gave me a small, encouraging nod.

“Back,” Sophia grunted in her broken voice, disappearing through the swinging doors to give us some privacy.

I wiped my hands on a dishrag, stepped around the counter, and approached my sister. “I’m glad you came.”

Bria just shrugged, as though she didn’t trust herself to speak yet.

I locked the front door behind her so we wouldn’t be interrupted. We settled ourselves at one of the booths next to the storefront windows — the same booth that Jonah McAllister and Elektra LaFleur had sat in when they’d come into the restaurant a few days ago. This time, though, the irony didn’t bother me. Because LaFleur was dead, and I wasn’t.

“Do you want anything to eat? Something to drink?” I asked.

Bria shook her head and looked at me, clearly wanting me to go ahead and say whatever was on my mind. Okay. I could do that. I hoped.

I drew in a deep breath and slowly let it out. And then, I started, telling her all the things I’d longed to for so long now.

“I called you so late last night because I had a dream about you — about the night that Mab murdered our mother and Annabella,” I said in a low voice.

Bria frowned, as though she didn’t quite believe me. “You had a dream? About me? About that night?”

I nodded. “I’ve been having them a lot lately. For a couple of months now. Only they’re not really dreams, so much as memories of that night. Last night, I dreamed about when I went to find you, after I used my magic to collapse our house. I remember picking through the rubble, trying to find you in that secret playroom under the stairs, but realizing that the stairs had collapsed along with the rest of the house, and finding only blood instead. So much blood.”

My voice dropped to a whisper, and I had to swallow once before I was able to go on. “I woke up screaming then, because I thought you were dead, that I’d killed you with my magic. It’s a dream I’ve had a lot over the years.”

Something flashed in Bria’s blue eyes. It might have been guilt, but I ignored it. If I didn’t get the words out now, I didn’t know if they would ever come to me again.

So I sat there and told Bria everything.

How I thought that she’d been dead for the last seventeen years until Fletcher Lane had left me a folder of information about my family’s murder with Bria’s picture inside. How I’d searched for her with no success, and then had been startled to discover that she’d come back to Ashland on her own — as a detective with the police department, no less. How I struggled with how to tell her who I really was and all the things I’d done in the meantime to protect her from Mab. All the people I’d killed to keep her safe.

And then I told her the real reason our mother and older sister had died that night — because Mab thought a member of the Snow family, a girl with both Ice and Stone magic, was destined to kill her someday.

“She thought that I was you, didn’t she?” Bria asked. “That I had both Ice and Stone magic?”

I nodded. “From what I’ve been able to piece together, yes.”

“And that’s why she wants me dead now.” Her voice was cold and flat. “Because she thinks I’ll kill her one day with my magic.”

I nodded again.

To my surprise, Bria threw her head back and let out a short, bitter laugh. “Well, I suppose that serves me right for being such a coward in the first place.”

“What does?”

“Because I ran away that night,” Bria said in a low tone. “Like the coward that I was.”

I frowned. “What do you mean?”

Bria drew in a deep breath. “That night, when you hid me in the playroom under the staircase, I got scared sitting there in the dark all by myself. So I went back inside the house to try to find you, even though you told me not to. And I saw — I saw Mab torturing you. I didn’t know who she was at the time, but I saw her and Elliot Slater duct-tape your spider rune medallion between your hands, and I heard her ask you all those questions about me.”

This time Bria was the one who had to stop for a moment.

“And I — and I heard you scream when she heated the rune and it melted into your hands. I didn’t know what to do. I wanted to help you, I wanted to use my Ice magic, but I was just so scared, so terrified that I couldn’t get it to work. So I–I just ran. I ran away. Out of the house and back toward the secret playroom. I thought that what was happening to you was my fault for leaving and that if I went back there, everything would be okay. Stupid, I know.”

Guilt and self-loathing gave her lilting voice a harsh, ugly tone. It looked as though I wasn’t the only one who had carried around the emotional baggage of that night for all these years. I didn’t blame Bria for what she’d done. There was only one person at fault in all of this — Mab Monroe. And she was going to pay for what she’d done to us, more than she’d ever imagined.

Bria wouldn’t look at me, so I slowly reached over and took her hand in mine. Her fingers felt as cold as ice against my own.

“You were eight years old, Bria. Just a kid. There was nothing you could have done to help me, nothing you could have done to stop Mab.”

She stared at the tabletop. “You were just a kid too, Gene — Gin. And look what you did. You sat there, and you didn’t say a word about me. Not one word. And I know how much Mab hurt you. I heard your screams all the way outside the house, even after I went back out into the courtyard. I had to put my fingers in my ears to block the sound.”

We didn’t say anything for a few minutes. Instead, we just sat there, staring at our hands stacked one on top of the other.

“What happened then?” I finally asked. “After you — left?”

Bria shrugged. “I don’t remember a lot of it. I ran back through the house for what seemed like forever, stopping to hide every time I saw one of Mab’s men searching for me. But finally I made it all the way back to the staircase where you’d told me to wait before two of Mab’s men spotted me. One of them grabbed me, and I started screaming.”

I remembered the sound of her screams that night. The awful, awful sound. The one that always made me wake up in a cold sweat.

“Anyway, I don’t really know what happened after that. I guess it was you and your magic, because the house started to collapse right on top of us. Part of it fell on one of the giants and buried him.”

That must have been the one whose arm I’d seen near the fountain.

“I jerked away from the other giant, ran past the staircase, and managed to make it out of the courtyard. But he wasn’t as fast as I was. I saw the staircase fall and crush him to death.” She gave me a tight smile. “I know it’s horrible now, but at the time, I remember thinking that his blood squirted out of him just like juice from a tomato. I imagine that’s whose blood was on the rocks you found. His, not mine.”

It wasn’t any more horrible than all the things I’d done as the Spider, but instead of telling her that, I just nodded.

“Anyway, I just kept on running, going deeper and deeper into the forest around our house until I collapsed. After that, things get a bit blurry,” Bria said. “All I really remember is that sometime later, this man found me out there in the middle of nowhere. I don’t really remember much about him, just that he had the greenest eyes I’ve ever seen. All slick and shiny-looking, like glass or something. Anyway, he took me … somewhere. Fed me, bathed me, and made sure that I was okay. The next thing I knew, I had a new mom and dad. They were wonderful people, Gin. I think you would have liked them. But it wasn’t — the same. It wasn’t ever the same.”

I looked over at the wall beside the cash register and the photo of Fletcher Lane that was hung there. In the faded picture, a young Fletcher held up the catch from his fishing trip, beaming proudly at the camera. Somehow, I knew that the mystery man that Bria was talking about was him.

And once more, I was stunned — simply stunned. The old man had found Bria all those years ago? Had given her to her foster parents? Why? Had he been looking for me as well?

More importantly, had he known about Mab’s attack on our family? Had he been there that night? Had Fletcher been there as the assassin the Tin Man, as one of Mab’s men? That horrible thought slammed into me with the force of one of my own silverstone knives, slicing my heart in two. Had the old man in some way been responsible for the murder of my mother and older sister?

For a moment, the world tilted crazily, and I couldn’t breathe. I just couldn’t breathe—

“You’re not the only one who has dreams,” Bria said in a low voice, cutting into my troubled thoughts. “Last night in the train yard, I was doing just what you wanted me to — getting out of there. But I couldn’t stop thinking about that night and how I had acted back then. And I decided that I didn’t want to run away again.”

Somehow I pushed my speculations about Fletcher aside and concentrated on her once more.

“Is — is that why you came back for me last night? Because you felt guilty about running away all those years ago?”

Bria bit her lip and nodded. “I was a coward once before when my big sister needed me. I didn’t want to be one again. Especially over an arrogant assassin like Elektra LaFleur. So I ran back to the giant you had killed, the one with the gun, picked it up, and circled around behind her. The two of you were struggling, so I couldn’t get a clear shot. But then she started using her magic, and you collapsed at her feet. I thought she was going to kill you, and I just — lost it. That’s why I started shooting. But I didn’t think to check to see how many shots were left, which is why I ran out of bullets before I could kill her.”

“Believe me,” I said in a wry tone. “I was grateful for the shots you took. It distracted her long enough to let me do what needed to be done.”

Bria nodded and lifted her eyes to meet mine. “And that’s what you specialize in, isn’t it? Because you’re the Spider.”

I stared at her. “Does it bother you? The fact that I used to be an assassin? The fact that I’ve decided to go after Mab and make her pay for all the evil things she’s done? For what she did to our family, to us?”

Bria didn’t say anything, but I could see the struggle in her face. She hated Mab as much as I did, but my sister was still a cop. She still believed in things like law, order, justice. She’d spent her whole life believing in them and fighting against people like me. She couldn’t just put all that aside because she’d found out that her long-lost sister was a notorious assassin. No matter how much I might want her to.

“So you really are the Spider?” she finally asked.

I nodded.

“And how many people have you killed over the years?”

I didn’t want to push her farther away, but I wasn’t going to lie to her either. Not anymore. So I shrugged. “I quit keeping count a long time ago. You wouldn’t want to know anyway, not really.”

“No,” she said in a thoughtful tone. “I wouldn’t want to know. Not really.”

We didn’t speak for several moments.

“So what now?” I asked. “We’ve both been searching for each other for weeks, and we both want Mab to pay for what she did to our family. So where does that leave us?”

Bria hesitated. “You have to understand that I’ve spent my whole adult life being a cop, Gin. That I was raised by a cop, a good one. Rules, procedure, the law, all of those things mean something to me. I don’t think that they do to you.”

I shrugged again. No, they didn’t, because I had my own rules, my own procedure, my own law. But I didn’t think that Bria wanted to hear about the Spider’s cynical, bloody, violent worldview right now.

“I should be turning you in for everything you’ve done, including killing Elektra LaFleur and Mab Monroe’s men, even if they deserved it,” Bria said. “But I just can’t seem to bring myself to do it. I don’t know why.”

Her reluctance to rat me out wasn’t much, but it was a place to start.

“Well, I know what I want,” I said. “You’re my sister, Bria. I want what I’ve always wanted — a relationship with you. You back in my life in some way. I want to get to know you and see how much you’re like the little girl I remember, the one I used to play all those games with, and have such fun with. Don’t you want that too? After everything we’ve been through? After all these long years we’ve been apart?”

Bria let out a tense breath. “I thought I did before I found out that you were the Spider. Now, I just don’t know.”

Her words didn’t surprise me. I’d expected this conversation to more or less go the way it had. But her lack of commitment hurt me, wounded me deep down in a way I couldn’t even begin to describe. Probably the same way that my doubt and hesitation did to Owen. He’d never said anything to me about it, but I could tell that Owen wanted something from me that I just wasn’t ready or able to give him. Just as Bria wasn’t ready to give me her love and trust. Not now, maybe not ever. Irony. Out to get me once again.

“I need some time to think about things, Gin,” Bria said, running a hand through her blond hair. “I mean, it’s not just you. After I left the train yard last night, I called Xavier and told him what had happened. Xavier’s my partner, for crying out loud, and he knew more about you, about who you are and what you do, than I did. Or do. Or whatever. I feel … betrayed. By him, by you, by the whole situation. I can’t just snap my fingers and forget everything that I am just because I know who you are now.”

“I understand,” I said in a quiet voice.

And I did.

Once upon a time, I’d been a happy little girl with a mother and two sisters who had loved her. But fate or destiny or even simply circumstance had turned me into a killer. It was a choice that I’d embraced and something that I’d had to do in order to survive. I knew this. Rationally, I knew it, but it had still taken me a long time to adjust to the fact that I’d never be that carefree little girl again.

And neither would Bria. In many ways, my sister was just like me. She might believe in the law and in justice, while I put my faith in my knives and my will to use them, but deep down, we were more alike than she realized. We both did what needed to be done to protect the people we cared about. I just got more blood on me along the way. I wondered if Bria would ever realize that. I hoped she would. I hoped — for a lot of things. Too many things, really.

“Well, my invitation still stands,” I said.

Bria frowned. “What invitation?”

“The one to the Christmas party tomorrow at Owen Grayson’s house. I’d like you to come, if you would.”

Bria immediately shook her head. “I don’t think that would be a good idea, Gin. I just need some time to think about things. How much time, I don’t know.”

I nodded, accepting her request. After all, I was the Spider, the assassin whose rune was the symbol for patience. I’d wait for Bria — for however long it took.

“All right. I’ll be here, whenever you’re ready,” I said. “In whatever way that you want me to be.”

And then there was nothing left for us to talk about, not today, so Bria slid out of the booth and got to her feet. I did the same and unlocked the front door for her.

She put her hand on the knob and twisted it as if she was about to leave. But for some reason, she turned and faced me once more.

“Whatever issues there are between us, whatever bad things we’ve both done over the years, I want you to know that I’m glad you’re alive, Gin,” Bria said. “I’m glad you’re alive.”

It sounded like she was saying good-bye — forever. But before I could call out to her, before I could try to get her to stay, Bria opened the door, stepped out into the cold evening, and walked away.

Taking the last piece of my childhood, and maybe even my heart, with her.