Rosco huffed in indignation, then dropped his brown-and-black head down on top of his tubby stomach and went back to sleep. His favorite pasttime, other than eating.

Jo-Jo pulled a chair over to Violet, clicked on a light, and gently unwound my T-shirt strips from her face. The damage looked more garish underneath the white fluorescent glow. The swelling had already set in, and Violet’s face had puffed up to twice its normal size. Black and green and purple streaked out from her disjointed nose and sliced across her cheeks—what I could see of them underneath the dried blood.

“Hell’s bells,” the dwarf muttered again. “You said he only hit her twice?”

“Yeah,” Finn said, holding the broken glasses together until the glue dried. “But he made them both count.”

Jo-Jo shook her head. “Well, let’s hope the poor girl remains unconscious for the next little bit. Because putting her face back the way it’s supposed to be is going to be just as painful as what he did to her in the first place. No need to traumatize her more than she’s already been tonight.”

Jo-Jo examined Violet’s face another minute before she went to work. She drew in a deep breath and held her hand in front of the girl’s ruined features. Her palm hovered just above Violet’s skin. A second later, the dwarf ’s eyes began to glow an opaque white, as though thick clouds wisped through her bright gaze. A similar buttermilk-colored glow coated her open palm. Jo-Jo brought even more of her power to bear, until I could feel it crackling through the salon like static electricity, just itching to zap me. I scooted my stool back another foot from the dwarf.

Of the four elements, two were opposites, and two were complementary. Fire and Ice didn’t go together, but Fire and Air did, just like Stone was the natural companion to Ice. Each element also had various offshoots, like metal for Stone, water for Ice, and electricity for Air, that some folks could tap into. Jo-Jo Deveraux was an Air elemental, which meant her magic was the exact opposite of my cool Stone and Ice power. Being in the presence of someone using so much of an opposing element always made me twitchy and unsettled. Jo-Jo’s power just felt wrong to me, as would any Air or Fire elemental’s magic.

Just like my Stone and Ice power would seem foreign to them.