The hit itself had been easy enough.

I’d been waiting in one of the stalls in the grungy space that passed for a bathroom when Liza Malone finally got up from the poker table to take a potty break. She was washing her hands in the cracked, stained sink when I slithered up behind her, clamped my hand over her mouth, and slit her throat. She was dead before I lowered her body to the dirty concrete floor.

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.”