11 Poison Promise by Jennifer Estep Read Free Book Online

sensation shot through my skin, as though the silverware were red-hot.
    I was so surprised that I dropped the utensil. It clattered to the floor with a loud, reverberating bang , almost as if someone had fired a gun inside the restaurant. Everyone turned to look at me—the other customers, Catalina, even Sophia, who had stepped out of the restroom. But I ignored their curious gazes and focused on the fork, expecting to see some sort of elemental Fire rune flare to life on the handle and wondering if I could reach for my Stone magic, use it to harden my skin, and throw myself down on top of it in time to protect everyone else from the upcoming blast of magic—
    But nothing happened.
    No runes, no Fire, no magic, no explosions, nothingthat would indicate that the fork was anything other than a fork.
    Catalina stopped her wipe-down of the next table over. “Gin?” she asked in the same cautious voice she’d been using with me all day. “Is something wrong?”
    I shook my head. “Nah. It’s nothing. Just a case of butterfingers.”
    Catalina gave me a strange look, like she didn’t believe me, but she finished wiping down the table, then moved over to the next one. The customers went back to their food and conversations, and Sophia returned to the stoves, although she raised her black eyebrows at me as she passed. I shook my head at her, then crouched down on the floor, still staring at the fork.
    Folks had left me all sorts of nasty surprises in and around the Pork Pit these past few months. Everything from saw-shaped runes frosted into the doors that would spew out razor-sharp needles of elemental Ice when someone tried to open them, to trip-wires strung across the alley floor that would trigger a double-gauge shotgun, to good old-fashioned ticking time bombs hidden in the backs of the restroom toilets. No one had tried to booby-trap the silverware yet, although I supposed it was only a matter of time before someone thought of it.
    But I wasn’t going to find out what was wrong by just staring at the fork, so I drew in a breath, reached out, and carefully picked it up again. Once more, it burned my hand, although the sensation was much fainter now. Whatever had made the metal feel like it was scorching my skin was slowly fading away, like warmth quicklyseeping from a pan that had been taken out of a hot oven, but I’d been right about what had caused the sensation.
    Magic—elemental magic.
    I wrapped my hand around the metal and concentrated, trying to identify what kind of magic it was, but it didn’t feel like the Fire power that I’d expected it to be. Otherwise, hot, invisible pins and needles would have been stabbing into my skin, and I would have experienced a similar sensation if it had been Air magic. The faint, steady burn wasn’t cold or hard, so it wasn’t Ice or Stone magic either, the two areas I was gifted in, and it didn’t feel like some offshoot power like water or electricity.
    I frowned. The auburn-haired woman was definitely an elemental, and her power—whatever it was—must have somehow soaked into the fork while she’d been eating. That was the only explanation that made sense, since some elementals constantly gave off invisible waves of magic, even when they weren’t actively using their power. But whatever her magic was, it was something I’d never felt before.
    And that worried me more than anything else.

4
    A few more customers came into the restaurant, but it looked like it was going to be a slow night, so I decided to close early.
    Besides, I wanted to go home and go through Fletcher’s files to see if there was any mention of the auburn-haired woman and her giant friend. The two of them hadn’t said a single word to me, but I couldn’t help but think that they were a dangerous threat all the same. Folks always said that animals could sniff out evil, and I’d gotten pretty good at it myself these past few months. I’d had to, in order to survive.
    Catalina was the last of