With his artfully styled hair, designer suit, and glossy wing tips, Finn looked like he’d just stepped out of the pages of some high-end fashion magazine. Add his intense green eyes, chiseled features, and toned, muscled body to that, and he was as handsome as any movie star. The only thing that ruined his sleek, polished look was the blood spattered all over his white shirt and gray suit jacket—and the body lying at our feet.

“Come on,” I said. “This guy isn’t getting any lighter.”

The two of us were standing in the alley behind the Pork Pit, the barbecue restaurant that I ran in downtown Ashland. A series of old, battered metal Dumpsters crouched on either side of the restaurant’s back door, all reeking of cumin, cayenne, black pepper, and the other spices that I cooked with, along with all of the food scraps and other garbage that had spoiled out here in the July heat. A breeze whistled in between the backs of the buildings, bringing some temporary relief from the sticky humidity and making several crumpled-up white paper bags bearing the Pork Pit’s pig logo skip down the oil-slicked surface of the alley.

I ignored the low, scraping, skittering noises of the bags and concentrated on the sound of the stones around me.

People’s actions, thoughts, and feelings last longer and have more of an impact than most folks realize, since all of those actions and feelings resonate with emotional vibrations that especially sink into the stone around them. As a Stone elemental, my magic let me hear and interpret all of the whispers of the element around me, whether it was a jackhammer brutally punching through a concrete foundation, weather slowly wearing away at a tombstone, or the collective frets of harried commuters scurrying into an office building every day on their way to work, hoping that their bosses wouldn’t yell at them for being late again.

Behind me, the brick wall of the Pork Pit let out low, sluggish, contented sighs, much the way the diners inside did after finishing a hot, greasy barbecue sandwich, baked beans, and all of the other southern treats that I served up on a daily basis. A few sharp notes of violence trilled here and there in the brick, but they were as familiar to me as the sighs were, and I wasn’t concerned by them. This wasn’t the first person I’d killed inside the restaurant, and it wouldn’t be the last.

“Come on,” I repeated. “We’ve had our body-moving break. You grab his shoulders again, and I’ll get his feet. I want to get this guy into that Dumpster in the next alley over before someone sees us.”

“Dumpster? You mean the refrigerated cooler that Sophia hauled in just so you could keep bodies on ice close to the restaurant with at least a modicum of plausible deniability,” Finn corrected me.