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One by one, the others all nodded their heads again, as if we were talking about having a spring picnic instead of going up against the deadliest woman in Ashland and all of her men. Didn't they know that all of us taking on Mab was much more dangerous than just me facing the firing squad by myself? If one of them went down in the fight, the others would rush to help that fallen friend. Mab's men would take advantage of their distraction, and then they'd all be lost.
I didn't want to accept their help. It was just too risky. One slip, one mistake, one tiny, minuscule miscalculation, and my friends could all wind up dead. Or worse,
Mab could get her hands on them and torture them first before she killed them, just as she was probably doing to Bria right now. I didn't want that. I'd never wanted that. I couldn't fucking bear that.
But no one ducked from my searching gaze. No one's eyes slid away from mine. No one wavered or showed any kind of doubt.
I sighed. "I'm not going to change your minds, am I?"
They all shook their heads.
No, I didn't want to accept my friends' help, didn't want to put them in any more danger than they were already in. But I also knew that having them with me was the only way that Bria might survive this thing. I needed someone there to make sure she made it to safety while I took on Mab. It made me sick, weighing my sister's life against everyone else's, using my friends this way, dragging them all down into the muck with me. But the truth was that I needed all the help I could get right now-and so did Bria.
"All right," I said in a quiet voice. "All right. Since I can't hog-tie all of you-at least not all of you at once-tell me what you're thinking. "
A grin creased Finn's handsome face. "I thought you'd never ask. "
Finn put his coffee mug down long enough to go upstairs. He came back a minute later with what looked like five reams of paper clutched to his chest. Finn dumped everything onto the kitchen table. Sheets of papers swirled up into the air like snowflakes before settling back onto the table. Photos, maps, old blueprints.
"What is all this?" I asked. "And how many trees did you kill printing it all out?"
"This," Finn said, sweeping his hand out over the mess on the table, "is every scrap of information that I was able to get my hands on concerning your childhood home. Or, at least what's left of it, anyway. Maps, police and aerial photographs, deeds, everything. "
With his massive network of spies and other shady sources, as well as his own computer skills, Finn had the uncanny ability to dig up dirt on the saintliest soul. So I imagined that compiling all the info on my old childhood home hadn't been too much of a stretch for him. Still, the effort touched me because I knew that he was trying to give me the tools I needed to survive my confrontation with Mab. It was something his father, Fletcher, would have done, if the old man had still been alive.
"Actually," Finn said, "it wasn't too hard to get the info, since, well, I sort of own the land now. "
My head snapped up. "What? What do you mean you own the land now?"
Finn winced. "Well, Dad left you quite a bit of money, his house, and the Pork Pit in his last will and testament. "
"And. . . "
"And he left me everything else, including all his other real estate holdings. Rental properties, safe houses, and the land where your childhood home was. According to the tax records I found, he bought the land six months after your family was murdered. "
I arched an eyebrow. "And you're just now finding out about it?"
Finn shrugged. "You know how paranoid the old man was about paper trails. He knew more about how to fake documents, confuse creditors, and hide assets than even I do. It's been months now, and I'm still trying to sort out which identity he used to purchase what property. "
Everything that Finn said made sense. Fletcher had had dozens of identities and aliases, all with the appropriate driver's licenses, bank accounts, and passports to match. Still, I wondered why Fletcher had bought the property in the first place. Had he planned on telling me he knew who I really was? Maybe he'd thought that I'd want the land for sentimental reasons. Or had he known I'd battle Mab there one day? Once again, Fletcher had managed to surprise me from beyond the grave-and leave me wondering at his motives.
"Anyway, we can talk about transferring the ownership later, for a reasonable price, of course. And you can thank me later for digging up the rest of the files, Gin," Finn suggested in a not-so-humble voice.
I rolled my eyes, picked up the closest photograph, and got to work.
For the next half hour, we went through the information page by page, pulling out everything that might be useful. I didn't know much about Finn's methods, especially how he'd gotten his hands on so much data so quickly, but the maps and photographs were better than finding a pirate's buried treasure. Because I began to see that maybe things weren't as completely hopeless as they seemed. At least, not when it came to rescuing Bria.
"This is almost certainly where Mab will be," Finn said, pointing to a small cleared area on one of the photographs and then comparing it side-by-side to a more recent shot of the same spot. "It almost looks like some kind of patio. "
I recognized the first, older photograph as being one that the police had taken during their investigation of my family's murder. There was a copy of it in the fat file of information Fletcher had left me on the same gruesome subject. All the photo really showed was a bleak landscape filled with piles of smoldering rubble. I'd looked at the photo a hundred times before, but my stomach still turned over at Finn's words. I recognized the spot-it was the place where I'd hidden Bria, the place where I'd thought she'd died all those long years ago.
The place where she could still die tonight.
My eyes dropped to my right index finger and the small silverstone band there. My spider rune ring. The one that Bria had given me for Christmas. Somehow, I'd forgotten about it during the long, long night. I could feel my sister's Ice magic in the thin band, like a cold string tied around my finger. Forget me not. I reached down and twisted the ring around, just like Bria always did to the ones that she wore. My heart lurched with the movement. If Bria died, this would be all that I'd have left of her-
"Gin?" Owen asked, seeing me stare at the ring.
"It was a courtyard with a garden and a fountain," I said in a soft voice, focusing on the photo once more. "Bria and I used to play out there and in a secret chamber that was hidden in a nearby staircase. I destroyed it all the night that Mab came to call on us when I used my Ice and Stone magic without thinking and collapsed our whole house. Part of the house toppled over into the courtyard, crushing the fountain, the staircase, and everything else that was there. "
