“But you know what the really ironic thing is? Mab actually had me draw up that will. I guess she thought she’d be around a lot longer than I would. Elementals.” He snorted. “They all think that they’re so much better than the rest of us. So much stronger, so much more powerful. But they die just like everyone else does.”

He let out a dark laugh. “You definitely proved that to Mab.”

I shrugged.

He raised his brandy glass to me. “I should thank you for that. For killing that bitch. For finally freeing me from her. I would have been content to do just that. Live and let live, if you will—if you hadn’t killed my son.”

McAllister moved to the end of the bar, reached down, and picked up a photo from a nearby table. A younger, larger, beefier version of himself stared out from beneath the glass—his son, Jake. McAllister stared at the photo a moment before setting it back down on the table. He nudged it with his index finger, making sure it was in exactly the same spot as before.

“Admittedly, Jake was an idiot and a colossal screwup. He wasn’t worth all of the money I wasted bailing him out of one scrape after another over the years. But nobody fucks with a McAllister—not even you.”

I tipped my head, telling him that I understood his sentiment. You didn’t have anything, you weren’t worth anything, if you couldn’t protect your friends and family. But if you did fail them, the only thing left to do was get retribution. And in a place like Ashland, that was only paid out in one way: in blood.

“I have to admit that I was still a bit confused after I found the will,” I said. “I wondered who would hire Clementine to steal it. At first, I thought that maybe it was the mysterious M. M. Monroe who was mentioned in it, but then I realized that he or she had no reason to swipe the will, since Mab had left everything to him or her already. That led me back to you, Jonah. Although I wondered at the show you had Clementine put on. Why not quietly break into the vault after hours and steal the will? But then I remembered something Finn had said about the will being made public during the gala. You had to get the will before that happened, but you didn’t want anyone to know what you were really after. The heist was the perfect cover for that. I imagine part of it was also payback.”

“You’re damn right it was payback,” McAllister muttered. “Ever since Mab’s death, everyone in the underworld’s been thumbing their noses at me. Well, they weren’t laughing at the museum, were they?”

“No. Nobody was laughing.”