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But what caught and held my attention was the puffy bruise on her face. It was blue, black, and every shade of green in between. There was only one way that you got a bruise like that-by someone planting his fist in your face. I stared at the girl, wondering who she was and what she wanted. There was a hardness in her face, a pinched set to her features that told me she'd already seen some bad things in her time. I knew that look. It was one I'd had ever since I was thirteen-the same one I saw every time I looked in the mirror.
The girl looked around carefully, staring at the other diners, as if she was measuring what kind of threat they might be. Apparently, she thought that she could take them, because she walked over to the counter. The girl hopped up on a stool close to the cash register and looked at first Sophia, then at me.
"Can I help you, sweetheart?" I asked.
The girl just stared at me. "That depends. Are you the Spider?"
Are you the Spider?
I'd been expecting someone to ask me that question all day long, but no one had. No one had dared to-until now.
I didn't answer the girl, but I didn't tell her that I wasn't the Spider either. If Jonah McAllister or someone else had sent her in here, I wanted to see what kind of game she was playing, and how I could twist it around to my advantage. If she had come in on her own, I still wanted to know what the hell she thought she was doing.
Some of the toughness in the girl's face melted under my hard, gray stare. She dropped her eyes from mine and drew in a breath, as if to bolster her fading courage.
"I heard that there's a lady here called the Spider who helps people," the girl said. "And I want to hire her. "
Of all the things she might have said, that was one I'd never expected. I didn't help people, I killed them. The two were not necessarily one and the same. I looked at Sophia, but the Goth dwarf just shrugged. She didn't know what to make of the girl either.
"And who told you that?" I asked. "About the Spider?"
The girl reached out and fiddled with one of the silver napkin holders. "It was just something that I heard from some people. "
She drew in another breath, then rea
ched into the pocket of her jacket and came out with a wad of crumpled bills. She shoved them across the counter to me. I eyed the bills. It looked like she had maybe a hundred bucks there, total. Not exactly my going rate before I'd retired.
"There are some bad men who are hurting my mom," the girl said. "I want the Spider to make them stop. If you're not her, then do you know who she is? Do you think that she'll help me? Please?"
I should have told the kid no. Should have told her that there was no Spider here and to get lost. Maybe it was seeing the parallels between Sydney and Gentry, and me and Fletcher. Maybe it was this strange mood I'd been in ever since my ghostly talk with the old man, this strange feeling I had that I was at some kind of crossroads. Maybe it was because I thought being retired sucked. Hell, maybe it was just the damn please she tacked on at the end. But I didn't tell the girl no.
The truth was that part of me felt adrift now, restless and at loose ends. Mainly because my finally killing Mab wasn't turning out to be quite as fulfilling as I'd imagined it would be.
Oh, I was glad she was dead. More than glad. Ecstatic, really. But now that she was gone, now that my rehab was finished, I didn't quite know what to do with myself. Sure, I had the Pork Pit to run during the day, Owen to go home to at night, and the rest of my friends and family to fill in the time between. But so much of my life these past few months had been tied up in the Fire elemental, in killing Mab. Now that she was dead, I just felt. . . empty. Adrift, without purpose. Hell, bored, even.
Killing Mab had been my goal for so long that I wasn't quite sure what to do with myself now, what to say, even what to feel.
And now here was this girl, asking for the Spider, wanting me to pull out my silverstone knives and jump into the fray once more. Her simple words and the desperate plea in them stirred something in me, something I couldn't deny, something I didn't want to deny. Not any longer. For the first time, I realized how Fletcher must have felt. How the old man had realized that maybe there was another use for his particular skill set instead of just killing people for money. One that was far more satisfying in the end.
And I knew what I had to do. Maybe it was what I'd always had to do, what I'd always been doing. The path that Fletcher had set me on all those years ago, even if I hadn't realized it at the time or along the way. Even if I hadn't thought about it until this very moment.
"Put your money away," I told the girl. "There's no need for it here. "
She stared at me, hesitating, before she scraped up the bills and stuck them back into her pocket.
"So you're her, then?" the girl asked. "You're the Spider?"
I slowly nodded.
"And you'll help me?" she asked. "And my mom?"
I nodded again. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Sophia shake her head. I turned my head and winked at her. The dwarf grumbled something under her breath, but her lips turned up into a smile.
Meanwhile, the girl sat there and stared at me, the briefest glimmer of hope swimming up in the dark depths of her eyes. "But how will you help me? What can you do?"
I palmed one of my silverstone knifes and laid it on the counter in front of her. The girl's eyes widened in surprise, and maybe a touch of fear too, but I just grinned at her.
"My name is Gin, and I kill people. "
