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to make a tourniquet for my leg. I tied it off as tight as I could so I wouldn’t bleed out before I got to Jo-Jo. At this point, I just hoped that I had enough juice left to drive over to the dwarf’s house. But there was no time to think about things or procrastinate, so I threw the car into gear and put my foot on the gas.
    As I steered through the trees and pulled back onto the icy road, I reached for my magic again. But not my Stone power. No, this time I grabbed hold of my other magic—my elemental Ice power—and let it fill the lower part of my body, particularly my left thigh. The cold magic flooded my veins, and the wounded area immediately went numb—so numb I couldn’t even feel that part of my body anymore. Or, more important, the pain pulsing through my thigh, and the blood pumping out of it with every beat of my heart. I sighed with relief.
    For years, my Ice magic had been the weaker of my two abilities, until I’d overcome a block associated with it. Now it was just as strong as my Stone power. Numbing my own limbs so I wouldn’t feel pain was one of the recent tricks that I’d learned how to do with my Ice magic—the one that had helped me kill Elektra LaFleur when she’d tried to shock me to death with her electrical power.
    LaFleur’s magic had been a bit of a fluke, as it wasn’t one of the four main areas—Air, Fire, Ice, and Stone—that most elementals were gifted in, that you had to be able to tap into to be considered a true elemental. Butmagic could take many forms, could manifest in all sorts of strange ways, and many folks were gifted in other areas, offshoots of the four main elements. Like water was an offshoot of Ice, and electricity was one of Air. The mechanics behind it all had never really concerned me. I was just glad I was still alive—and that LaFleur was rotting in whatever shallow, pauper’s grave Mab had dumped her in.
    I’d only beaten LaFleur because I was the rarest of elementals—someone who could control not only one but two elements. Ice and Stone, in my case. Connected powers, but each with their own unique quirks.
    My Stone magic had always been incredibly strong and let me do anything that I wanted to with the element, like hear the whispered vibrations in the rocks around me, make bricks fly out of a solid wall, or even turn my own skin into the equivalent of human marble.
    My Ice power was different, in that it actually let me create elemental Ice with my bare hands—Ice that I could turn into all sorts of shapes, like cubes, crystals, and the occasional knife. My Ice magic also let me numb my body so that I would feel no pain, something that I was doing right now just to stay upright. Hell, maybe it would slow the blood loss too. I wasn’t familiar with all the ins and outs of this particular trick just yet. Maybe Jo-Jo could tell me more when I got to her.
    If I got to her before I bled to death.
    It was after midnight now, and the Ashland streets were deserted. Not surprising, given the icy conditions. Ashland was the southern metropolis that sprawled over the rugged corner of the world where the Appalachian Mountainscut through Tennessee, North Carolina, and Virginia. From a distance, Ashland looked like a jewel-toned paradise, surrounded by emerald forests and sapphire rivers with a silver diamond of a city set into the middle of all the sparkling grandeur. But anyone who’d ever spent any time in Ashland knew exactly what kind of violent, gritty place it really was. The horrible, despicable things that only happened on the darkest, dingiest streets in other cities occurred on Ashland’s main thoroughfares—often in broad daylight.
    The city was divided into two sections—Northtown and Southtown—held together by the rough circle of the downtown area and flanked on either side by suburbs full of soccer moms, spoiled kids, and other middle-class folks. Northtown was the rich part of Ashland, where the city’s social, magical, and monetary elite