Snared (Elemental Assassin #16)(85)

But believe it or not, he was still alive.

His eyes were still open and blinking, so I leaned over where he could see me. Slowly, his blue gaze focused on my gray one. He coughed again, more blood bubbling up out of his mouth, although the rest of his body didn’t actually move with it.

“You know what, Porter? You actually got one thing right,” I said, my words slurring a bit from the concussion.

“What’s . . . that?” he rasped.

I leaned down so that my face filled his entire vision. “Blondes really do have more fun.”

A low rasping sound rippled out of his throat. It almost sounded like a laugh of agreement. Then he coughed again, and a familiar glassy sheen covered his eyes.

I sat there and watched Bruce Porter, the Dollmaker, die.

? ? ?

Despite the fact that I was more or less in one piece, I didn’t have the strength or energy left to try to get to my feet, much less find a way out of here. So I rifled through Porter’s pockets, hoping that he had his phone on him and that it had somehow survived the fall. My fingers wrapped around a hard plastic case, and my heart rose. I pulled it out of his pants pocket and held it up where I could see it. The screen was cracked in three places, but the phone turned on.

It took me several tries, and I cut my fingers on the broken glass, but I finally managed to punch a number into the phone. And when it actually started ringing? I’ll admit it. A couple of tears slid down my face that had nothing to do with my concussion or cracked ribs.

“Gin?” Owen answered on the first ring, his voice sharp with worry. “Is that you?”

“Yeah, it’s me.”

I told him where I was—or at least where I thought I was—on the Rivera estate. After that, there was nothing to do but wait.

Owen stayed on the phone with me the whole time, talking to me, telling me that he and the others were on their way and that everything would be all right. But the phone was on its last legs, and his staticky voice cut in and out, so I gave up trying to talk back to him. Plus, my brain felt like it was stuffed full of wet cotton, and everything seemed far away.

Eventually, I was too tired to even sit upright anymore, so I lay down on my back in the cold mud and rocks with the phone wedged up against my ear, listening to the crackle-crackle of static. If nothing else, maybe the phone would stay on long enough for Finn and Silvio to track it back to me.

For the longest while, I drifted in and out of consciousness. Concussion and cracked ribs aside, it wasn’t so bad, really. Porter might be a bloody, broken mess, but his body was warm enough next to mine to keep me from freezing to death before Owen and the others found me. Plus, it was quiet here, and the only sound was the steady rush of the river a few feet away. I didn’t even mind the cold sting of the snowflakes hitting my cheeks one after another.

I didn’t know how much time passed, if I slept or just passed out, but eventually, I found myself staring up at the night sky. The storm clouds were still up there, but the snow had tapered off to light flurries.

That was the only reason I could see the man standing over me.

He was bundled up and dressed all in black, from his toboggan to the scarf wrapped around his face to his long coat and boots. A small black bag dangled from his right hand, reminding me of a doctor’s satchel. Something about how he was dressed seemed familiar, although my head was hurting too much for me to figure out what it was right now.

“Owen?” I rasped, thinking that he’d finally arrived.

But the man didn’t answer me. Cold unease trickled down my spine. Owen would have already been holding me tight, telling me that everything was going to be okay, but this man kept his silence and his distance. I didn’t know who he was or what he wanted, but if he thought that I was an easy target just because I’d jumped off a cliff, well, I’d show him just how wrong he was.

The man kept staring down at me, and I crawled my hand through the cold mud, searching for a loose rock or a broken piece of driftwood that I could use as a weapon.

The man bent down. For a second, I thought that he was going to lean down right next to me, but he maintained his distance. A familiar clank-clank sounded, like metal scraping against metal. Then he straightened up and stared down at me again.

I blinked, and suddenly, the man was gone. I rolled my head from side to side, peering into the snowy dark, but I didn’t see him anywhere. I would have thought him a figment of my imagination except for one thing: the black satchel now sitting on the ground next to me.

I still didn’t have the strength to sit up, but I wormed around in the mud until I could reach out, grab the satchel, and drag it over to my side. My fingers were so cold and stiff that it took me a couple of tries to unhook the clasp. But I finally managed it, reached down, rooted around in the bag, and came up with . . .

A knife.

I squinted at the weapon in my hand. It blurred in and out of focus, but I knew that shape, that length, that weight. More important, I could feel the symbol stamped into the hilt pressing into my palm: a small circle surrounded by eight thin rays.

Not just any knife—my knife.

I used the tip of the knife to jiggle the satchel. Sure enough, more clank-clanks rang out, telling me that more knives were in the bag, probably the other four that I’d been carrying when I was captured. I wondered what Rivera and Porter had done with my knives and especially why the man in black would bring them to me. I didn’t know, and right now, I didn’t care.