For a while, Grimes was able to block her blows, and all they did was exchange punch after punch after punch.

But Sophia slowly wore him down. He missed a block, and she socked him square in the jaw. He missed the next block, and she slammed her hand into his sternum, cracking a rib, judging by the way he suddenly started gasping for air.

Grimes went on the attack, swinging, swinging, swinging, but Sophia swatted away his blows one after another after another. He overextended himself, and she slammed her boot into one of his knees. He howled with pain, but before he could stumble out of range, she clamped her hands on his arms and rammed her boot into his other knee. The cracking of his bones rattled through the entire yard.

Sophia let go, and Grimes dropped to the ground like a cement block. That's when we all knew that it was over.

Sophia positioned herself on top of Grimes and started hitting him, over and over again, as though she were working a heavy bag at the gym.

Thwack-thwack-thwack-thwack.

She pounded away at his chest, focusing on his ribs and driving all of the air out of his lungs, so that he couldn't even scream at what was being done to him - just like she hadn't been able to scream after he'd destroyed her vocal cords by making her breathe in elemental Fire.

Jo-Jo. cooper. Finn. Bria. Phillip. They all stood there and watched Sophia beat Grimes to death, while I huddled on the ground next to Owen. Nobody said a word, although Bria winced at the brutality that Sophia unleashed. But she hadn't been up at the camp. She hadn't seen the pit, so she didn't fully understand his depravity.

But I did. More important, I understood Sophia's response to it and why she had to do this herself.

I'd wanted to spare her and Jo-Jo from facing Grimes again, but they'd come anyway because they needed clo -  sure. They needed to help defeat him. And most of all, they needed to know that the nightmare was truly, finally over.

Thwack-thwack-thwack-thwack.

And Sophia was making sure that happened with every single blow she landed.

Eventually, cooper helped Jo-Jo over to Owen. The two dwarves settled themselves on the scorched earth, took Owen's hands in theirs, and reached for their Air magic, healing the horrible burns on his body. Then they used their power to heal me as well. Finn, Phillip, and Bria moved silently through the yard, their guns still drawn, checking on Grimes's men to make sure that they were all dead.

I got to my feet and went to stand close to Sophia.

And I stayed right there, watching her, supporting her, through the whole thing.

I couldn't tell exactly when Harley Grimes died. One moment, he was still rasping for breath. The next, I realized that his eyes were focused on Sophia but that he wasn't seeing her anymore.

Sophia kept beating Grimes long after he was dead, but I didn't say anything, and I didn't try to stop her. She deserved all the time that she needed, for everything that he'd done to her and Jo-Jo.

Finally, though, her blows slowed, sputtered, then stopped altogether. Sophia sat back on her heels, breathing hard, covered in more blood than even I'd ever had on me. Her arms were completely coated with it, and it dripped off the ends of her fingertips like scarlet tear -  drops.

I looked down at Grimes - at least, what was left of him. It wasn't pretty. Sophia had used her dwarven strength to its fullest. His face was a bloody, pulpy, bony mess; his chest had caved in; and his knees were sprawled out at awkward, impossible angles where Sophia had broken them. If I hadn't known that it was the body of a man, I would have thought him no more than a pile of roadkill, bloated, bloody, and rotting on the side of some country road.

I stepped in front of Sophia where she could see me, then held out my hand, which was still covered with Hazel's blood. After a moment, she took it and let me pull her to her feet. She started to let go, but I tightened my grip on her hand.

"Not alive," I said. "Not anymore."

Sophia looked at me with a somber expression. But after a moment, she grinned, her smile wider, happier, and brighter than I'd ever remembered it being.

"No," she rasped. "Dead - finally."

Chapter Thirty

We spent the rest of the night cleaning up the mess.

Or, rather, Sophia did.

One by one, she packed the bodies of Grimes, Hazel, and their men into the trunk of her classic convertible.

When that was full, she stuffed the other ones into Roslyn's car, which I was still driving, since it was already such a lost cause. But instead of using her Air magic to sandblast away and dissolve all the blood into nothingness the way she normally would, Sophia left the stains where they were in the yard. The weather would take care of them soon enough. Besides, this wasn't the first blood that had been spilled in front of Fletcher's house, and it certainly wouldn't be the last.

Still, as I watched her work, I thought about what she'd told me at cooper's house, about how being with the bodies in the pit had been the only peace that she'd ever gotten while she'd been Grimes's prisoner. I wondered what she was thinking now that his was one of the bodies that she was disposing of, but I didn't ask. We all had our own demons, and Harley Grimes was one of Sophia's, to deal with in her own way and time. Besides, for once, I rather enjoyed the irony of the situation.

Still, I went over to Sophia, who had a tape measure out, trying to determine how many more bodies she could stuff into the trunk of Roslyn's car. I put my hand on her arm. She stopped measuring and looked up at me.

"Are you sure you want to do this?" I asked in a quiet voice. "I can get rid of the bodies. You shouldn't have to do this anymore. Not for me. I don't want you to do it anymore."

Sophia stared at me, her black eyes thoughtful.

"It's who I am," she rasped. "It's what I do. For Fletcher - and for you too."

"But you shouldn't have to clean up my messes," I protested. "Not when I know what it reminds you of. Not when I know how much it hurts you."

Sophia stabbed her finger at her heart. "My choice. Not yours."

"But - "

She reached up and cupped my cheek with her bloody hand. "No buts. I love you, Gin. And this is how I show it."Then she smiled, and I got a glimpse of the girl she had once been, before Grimes, before the pit, before everything.

"Not soft," Sophia rasped. "Neither one of us. Not anymore. Never again."

I blinked, surprised that she remembered the conversation we'd had in the Pork Pit so long ago after we'd battled those two giants. But she was right. We were definitely not that. Broken, maybe. But not soft.

"Okay?' she rasped, her black eyes searching mine.

"Okay."

I didn't like it, and I would always feel guilty about it, but it was her choice, just as it had always been. Sophia patted my cheek. Then she picked up the last man's body, stuffed it into the trunk of Roslyn's car, and slammed the lid.And that was that.

"Gin!" Finn called out. "come here and look at this!"

Before Sophia had started packing the bodies into the cars, Finn had quickly rifled through all of the dead men's pockets, including Hazel's and Grimes's. When he realized that they didn't have anything terribly interesting on them, Finn had gathered up their car keys and had started going through their vehicles one by one.

Now, he had reached the last car, that of Grimes and Hazel. He stood next to the open trunk, along with Bria.

They both wore grim expressions.

"I thought that you'd want to see this for yourself."

Finn gestured at the open trunk, then stepped to one side.

A couple of foam-lined cases sat inside the space, all with their lids hinged open to reveal the guns grouped inside. Rifles, shotguns, revolvers, even some semiauto -  matic weapons. It was quite an assortment. Another case held boxes and boxes of bullets.

"There are more guns and more ammo in the trunks of the other two cars," Finn said, his voice more serious than I'd heard it in a long time.

"So Grimes was going to deliver some guns to someone," I said. "So what? We knew that already. Remember, I told you about the person who was at his house. This is probably that order."

Finn and Bria glanced at each other, and then Bria leaned into the trunk and slowly closed the lid on one of the cases. A small yellow note was stuck to the top of the plastic. A name was scrawled on the paper:

M. M. Monroe.

My mouth dropped open, but no words came out. I blinked and blinked, but the name on the paper didn't change. If anything, it seemed to loom even larger, as though the black letters were some sort of rune that was smoking with elemental Fire and about to explode in my face."We didn't think much of the guns either, until we found that ," Bria said in a flat voice.

"The same note is on all of the cases in all of the cars," Finn added.

Once again, I wondered about the person I'd seen at Grimes's house. I still didn't know if it had been a man or a woman, but now I had a much more pressing concern. Had that been the mysterious M. M. Monroe? Or a hired hand whom M. M. Monroe had sent to deal with Grimes? It could easily be one or the other or some third option that I hadn't even considered yet. I had no way of knowing which one, only that it meant trouble.

I let out a long, loud, vicious curse. For the first and only time, I wished that Harley Grimes was still alive, so I could question him.

But he was dead, along with Hazel and the rest of his men, which meant that there was no one left to give me any information about M. M. Monroe, who he or she was, and what he or she wanted with so many of Grimes's guns.

Finn and Bria watched me stalk back and forth in front of the trunk. Finally, Finn spoke up.

"Well," he drawled. "I guess your plan to draw M.M. back to Ashland worked."

"And I think we know that this person isn't here for anything good," Bria added. "There's only one reason you buy that many guns, at least in Ashland."

"Yeah," I said. "Because you're planning to start your own little criminal enterprise. Or not so little, in this case."

"It looks like M.M. plans to follow in Mab's footsteps after all," Finn said.

I stopped pacing. "Please tell me that there's some way that you can track these guns back to whoever ordered them."

Finn shrugged. "I can try, but it won't be easy. Grimes doesn't strike me as the kind of guy who kept meticulous records."

"Yeah," Bria said. "And the weapons that I've looked at already all conveniently have their serial numbers filed off, so I can't trace them in the system that way."

I bit back another round of curses. It wasn't their fault that we'd just killed off our best - and only - lead about M. M. Monroe.

As I looked at the guns, I couldn't help but think that I'd just traded one enemy for another.

Soon after that, Finn and Bria took off together, promising to check in with me later, both of them eager to work their sources and see if they could find out anything about the guns and M. M. Monroe.

I waited until Sophia had packed the last body into Roslyn's car and went inside the house with her, where we found the others in the den. Phillip was sitting in a chair in the corner, while Jo-Jo and cooper were both sitting on the coffee table in front of the sofa where Owen was lying. I perched on the arm of the couch and watched Jo-Jo instruct cooper on how best to use his magic to heal the remaining burns on Owen's body. Jo-Jo had taken care of the worst of the damage earlier in the yard, but it had quickly exhausted her, leaving cooper to finish patching up Owen.

"Feel the Air around you," Jo-Jo said in a soft, patient voice. "Imagine it flowing through Owen's wounds, like a gentle breeze that takes all of his pain away with it."

cooper gripped Owen's hand a little tighter and leaned forward, his eyes glowing a bright copper in his lined face.

"Good," Jo-Jo said, once he'd followed her instructions. "Now, picture the Air flowing through his wounds again, this time slowly smoothing out all of those nasty burns and pulling all of those cuts and scrapes together the smallest fraction. You need to do that again and again, until the wound is completely healed . . ."

cooper listened to Jo-Jo's instructions, and I watched as the remaining burns on Owen's body slowly grew soft and pink, then scarred out to white, then faded away altogether. I looked at Owen with a critical eye, but if I hadn't seen it for myself, I wouldn't have realized that he'd body-slammed himself into a couple of Fire elementals.

With Jo-Jo guiding him, cooper had done as good a job on Owen as she would have. He'd even fixed Owen's hair and eyebrows. No trace remained of his fight with Grimes and Hazel.

Jo-Jo nodded. "Good job, cooper. We might make a healer out of you yet."

He beamed at her praise. Jo-Jo smiled back at him, but she couldn't hold back the tired yawn that escaped her lips. cooper jumped up and took her arm. He helped the dwarf out of the den. Sophia followed them, and I heard their slow, steady tread on the stairs, then one of the doors of the guest bedrooms opening and closing. Sophia and cooper would see that Jo-Jo was comfortable for the night, so I turned my attention back to Owen.

Phillip cleared his throat and got to his feet. "I need some fresh air. All this postbattle, rah-rah-we-lived senti-mentality is a bit cloying. I'll call you tomorrow, Owen."

"Thanks, Phillip," Owen replied.

I arched an eyebrow at Phillip, but he grinned and left the den. A moment later, the front door of the house opened, then closed.

When I was sure that we were alone, I went over and dropped down on my knees on the floor in front of Owen.

He started to sit up, but I put a hand on his shoulder.

"Just lie there and rest a minute. You've definitely earned it."