I squinted and leaned forward, wondering if I was imagining things, but the giant held the device up in the flashlight’s beam, and I got an even better look at it. A flowery blossom of colored wires and a cell phone taped and plugged into a small, foil-wrapped brick. Yep, that was a bomb all right. My eyebrows shot up in my face. What the hell were they going to do with that?

“How’s it going, Anton?” Dixon asked.

“Good,” the male giant replied. “We’re just getting ready to put everything into place.”

Anton set the bomb and the duct tape aside, picked up the crowbar, and used it to pry up one of the bridge boards. The old, weathered wood groaned in protest, but it was no match for his strength. When the board was free, Anton taped the bomb to the underside of the wood before slowly, carefully fitting the board back into its original position.

“You’re up, Hannah,” Dixon said, looking at the female giant, the one with the flashlight.

Hannah got down on her knees and held out her hand. A moment later, a bit of elemental Fire sparked to life on her index finger, and her eyes began to glow a dull orange from her power, like two matches burning in her face. Her magic pricked at my skin like tiny, invisible needles, making me grind my teeth together. Hannah didn’t have nearly as much juice as Mab had. In fact, she was quite weak in her magic, but she still had enough power to lean down and trace something into the top of the board: a rune.

In addition to using them as their personal, familial, and business symbols, elementals could also imbue runes with magic and get them to perform specific functions. No doubt Hannah was scorching some sort of Fire symbol into the wood.

Hannah finished creating the symbol and leaned back on her heels. She let go of her power, and the elemental Fire was snuffed out on her fingers, causing a bit of smoke to waft up into the night sky. The uncomfortable feel of her magic vanished a moment later.

“Good job,” Dixon said, clapping her on the shoulder. “Your rune and that explosive will be more than enough to blow the bridge.”

So that’s what they were planning, to toast the bridge. The when was easy enough to figure out: after they’d sacked up all of the art and were on the mainland once more. But why destroy the bridge at all? All of the hostages would already be dead, so it wasn’t like there would be anyone left to follow them or sound an alarm . . . unless . . . unless the giants didn’t plan to kill the hostages after all.

I tapped my fingers against the hilt of my knife as I tried to figure things out.