Black Widow (16 page)

But what Fletcher and I hadn't counted on was not being the only ones interested in Malone.

Apparently, some other folks had found out about Malone's game and all the cash lying on the table and had decided to take it all for themselves. I'd just finished wiping my knife off when the steady
crack-crack-crack
of gunfire sounded. I opened the bathroom door to see two men and two women shooting the five other cops sitting at the poker table.

So I held my position, waiting for the right moment. When they finally stopped firing and moved toward the splintered table to see how much blood-spattered money was there, I slipped out of the bathroom and started tiptoeing across the warehouse. Fletcher had come inside with me, to provide backup should I need it, and the old man was hunkered down behind a battered crate, right where I'd left him more than two hours ago when I'd gone into the bathroom, waiting for the game to start.

“Gin?” Fletcher whispered. “You okay? Did you get Malone?”

“Yeah, right before those folks decided to jack the poker game. Come on. I think we can get out of here before they see us—”

I should have known better than to even
think
such a thing, much less say it out loud. My bad luck would never let me get away that easy, and this time was no exception.

Because, of course, one of the women chose that exact
moment to look in my direction. I'm not sure exactly what caught her eye, perhaps the gleam of my knife or the hand that I held out to help Fletcher up, but her eyes locked onto me, even though I was half-hidden behind the crate, and she started shouting to her friends.

“Hey! There's somebody else in here!”

That's when the bullets started flying. Naturally.

Still, I didn't think that we were in serious danger until one of the men started hurling balls of elemental Fire at us. I didn't know who he was, but he had some serious juice, and I could feel the power pulsing in the flaming balls that streaked past Fletcher and me. If one of those hit us in the back, we were done for, despite the silverstone vests we both wore.

And, of course, we were at the wrong end of the warehouse from where Fletcher had left his white van, since he hadn't wanted to risk anyone's coming to the game, seeing the vehicle, and wondering whom it belonged to.

But there were more of them than there were of us, so all we could do was run and hope that we could get away.

We might actually have made it—if the doors hadn't been barred.

I skidded to a stop, really, really hoping that my eyes were playing tricks on me, given the dim lights. But, of course, they weren't.

The double doors that Fletcher and I had snuck in through earlier now featured two large, heavy metal bars across them. I cursed. One of the giant cops who'd come to play poker must have put them there, trying to make sure that no one would enter the warehouse and interrupt their game.

“Cover me!” I yelled at Fletcher.

He nodded and took aim with his gun, firing at our pursuers
and making them scatter and duck down behind the wooden crates.

Crack! Crack! Crack!

While Fletcher and the thieves exchanged shots, I surged forward, put my shoulder under one of the bars, and tried to lift it. But it was made out of solid iron, and I couldn't so much as budge it.

“It's no use!” I yelled. “I can't move it!”

We were trapped, so I whipped back around to face our attackers and tightened my grip on my bloody knife, determined to protect Fletcher and take down as many of them as I could before they killed us—

“Over here!” Fletcher hissed.

He waved me over. He'd spotted a door that led into another room about thirty feet away and had already taken up a position there. I ran in that direction while Fletcher let loose with another round of bullets, covering me. I hurried past him into the open space. He fired the remaining bullets in his gun, then darted inside the room, slammed the door shut behind us, and threw home a series of locks that had been set into the metal. The door wouldn't hold for long, not against the elemental's Fire, and I turned around to start running again—

And realized that we'd come to a dead end.

No doors, no windows, not even a skylight. Just bare concrete walls all around. Trapped—we were trapped with no way out and nothing but danger and death coming up fast behind us.

While Fletcher reloaded his gun, I prowled around the room, looking for something, anything that might give me an idea on how to get out of here. But the only things in the room were a couple of empty, graffiti-covered metal barrels,
the kind that I always imagined Sophia used to dispose of bodies. One of them even had a crude white skull and crossbones painted on the side. The Goth dwarf would have approved of that, at least.

“Damn it,” I snarled, kicking one of the containers, although it was so heavy that it barely moved. “We're stuck here, like fish in a barrel, waiting for them to come in and finish us off.”

Fletcher shook his head and crooked his finger at me. I moved over to the door and pressed my ear up against the metal, like him. I could just make out the sounds of muffled conversation. Our pursuers had realized that they couldn't blast their way through the locks with their guns, and they were trying to figure out what to do, the same as us.

“We can't let them leave,” one of the women said. “They saw us kill all those cops.”

“Can you burn through the door with your Fire, Will?” a man asked.

The second man, Will, let out a disappointed breath. “Nah, it's too thick, and I've used up too much of my power already.”

“Will doesn't have to burn through it with his Fire magic,” another woman said. “I say we bury them in here, along with all these cops. Take the cash, blow up the building, hide the bodies. Just like we planned. Two more corpses won't matter, if they can even find them in the rubble. We've already got the warehouse rigged. I've got an extra charge in my bag. I'll plant it here in front of the door. Then we can blow them all at the same time and get out of here.”

The others agreed that this was an excellent idea, and I heard several sets of footsteps scurrying back and forth on
the other side of the door, no doubt pulling out and arming the explosives that would turn us and this whole place into pancake central.

“Now what?” I whispered.

Fletcher looked around and around the room, trying to come up with an idea, just like I had. But he was more successful because his green gaze locked onto the barrels.

“If we can't get out, we can't get out,” he said. “Nothing's going to change that no matter how much we curse. So let's give them exactly what they want—us dead and buried.”

Fletcher grabbed one of the barrels, tipped it over, and crawled inside. It was a tight fit, but he folded up his body well enough so that the metal shell completely covered him.

Good thing, since I heard a series of blasts at the other end of the warehouse, and the concrete started screaming about all the fire, heat, and explosives that were ripping through it and heading in this direction.

Boom . . . Boom . . . BOOM!

Every successive blast was louder and closer than the last, and the entire building started to shake.

“Come on, Gin!” Fletcher called out above the growing din. “Get a move on!”

I had no choice but to follow his lead, tip one of the other barrels onto its side, and crawl inside. The metal smelled dry and ashy, and I could feel soot covering every part of me, almost like it had been used to store coal to burn in a furnace.

I pulled my feet inside the container just in time to keep them from being crushed by a chunk of stone that broke free from the wall and crashed to the ground. A second later, the door blew in with a deafening, fiery roar. The shock wave sent spiderweb cracks thicker than my fingers zigzagging through
the floor and up the walls, and the room collapsed in on itself. A deadly shrapnel of concrete, cinder blocks, and thick lengths of rebar flew through the air, all of which clattered against and dented in the side of my barrel, as if I were in the middle of a terrible hailstorm. In a way, I suppose that I was.

As the debris knocked more and more dents into the sides of my makeshift cocoon, I wondered if the metal would give up and cave in completely. All it would take would be one piece of rebar to skewer me to death. Fletcher too. But it was too late now to do anything but huddle inside and hope that the barrel would somehow hold up against the chunks of stone that were raining down all around us—

BANG.

For a moment, I was still in the warehouse, still trapped in that soot-coated barrel, still watching the ceiling collapse and starting to bury Fletcher and me alive—

BANG.

The noise sounded again, snapping me out of the last dregs of my dream, my memory. I opened my eyes and sat up, putting my back against the bars and looking toward the cell door.

Dobson stood on the other side, a long, thick, black nightstick in his hands.

BANG.

He smacked the wood against the bars a third time, but I didn't give him the satisfaction of flinching at the hard sound.

“Rise and shine, Blanco,” he crowed. “You've got visitors.”

11

Dobson stepped to one side so an officer could insert a key in the cell door and open it. Five people trooped inside the barred space, a mix of men and women, all wearing the charcoal-gray prison jumpsuits of the Ashland correctional system. The officer stepped inside as well, unlocking and removing the silverstone handcuffs that kept the prisoners' strength and elemental magic in check before scurrying back out with the cuffs and locking the door behind him.

I looked over the prisoners for a few seconds before turning my attention to the other people streaming into the room—all the ones outside the cell.

Uniformed officers, suited detectives, even the janitors and administrative staff gathered around the three sides of the cell. They stared through the bars at me, sizing me up, just as I was them. Then fat wads of cash started going from hand to hand to hand, and the conversation started,
the chorus of voices getting louder and more excited as the money moved from one person to the next.

“Give me a thousand on whoever's fighting Blanco.”

“Make it two thousand for me.”

“Five thousand says that she doesn't even last five minutes in there.”

So there was to be some serious gambling to go along with tonight's blood sport.

I expected nothing less from the bull pen.

I'd heard whispers about this place for years, and Fletcher had a file on it in his office, although I'd only skimmed the information. Still, I knew the gist of it. About this single cell hidden deep in the police station where the cops corralled particularly strong, sadistic, and troublesome prisoners, sicced them on each other late at night, and watched the resulting carnage for their own twisted amusement. From what I'd heard, the fight didn't end, and the cops didn't open the cell door, until at least one prisoner was dead.

And tonight, they wanted that prisoner to be me.

According to the rumors, most fights in the bull pen featured only two prisoners, not the five-on-one grudge match I was facing. But Dobson had obviously made some special arrangements for me, no doubt on Madeline's orders. Still, as the rolls of bills kept going from one person to another, I couldn't help but wonder how many folks were betting on me. Finn certainly would have, if he'd been here. But given the knowing smirks aimed in my direction, it didn't seem that many people were willing to take a chance on me, not when I'd been so clearly marked for death. Their loss.