Elemental Assassin 01 - Spider's Bite

them too, just like me. Depending on what sort of innate talents he had and how strong his power was, Giles could use his Air magic to try to suffocate me before I killed him. Force oxygen bubbles into my veins. Pummel me with the wind. Or a hundred other nasty things.
    I studied the photo clipped on top of the information. Gordon Giles’s salt-and-pepper hair flopped over his forehead, just brushing the tops of his gold glasses. His eyes were like puddles of powder-blue ink behind the lenses. His face reminded me of a ferret’s—long and thin. Pinched lips. Pointed chin. A sharp triangle of a nose.
    Gordon’s eyes held a look of nervous anticipation. The gaze of a man who knew monsters walked the streets and expected them to leap out and grab him any second. Twitchy men were far more difficult to kill than oblivious ones. I’d have to be careful with him.
    “And what’s Giles done to merit my particular brand of attention?”
    “Seems the chief financial officer has been cooking the books at Halo Industries,” Fletcher said. “Somebody found out and wants to address the situation.”
    “Protection?” I asked.
    Fletcher shrugged. “None that I know of, but the rumor is Giles is getting nervous and thinking about turning himself over to the cops, as if they would even bother to keep him safe.”
    Cops. I snorted. What a joke. Most of Ashland’s finest were more crooked than the mountain roads that crisscrossed the city. If you went to the po-po for protection, you might as well hang yourself and save your cellmate the trouble of tearing up his perfectly good bed sheets.
    “Halo Industries,” I murmured. “Isn’t that one of Mab Monroe’s companies?”
    “She’s the major stockholder,” Fletcher said. “But one of her flunkies, Haley James, and James’s sister, Alexis, actually front the business. Halo Industries was started by their father, Lawrence. Him and the sisters kept it in the family for years, until Mab decided she wanted a piece of the action and muscled in on them. The father died of a heart attack two weeks after Mab took over. At least, that’s what the official word was.”
    “And unofficially?” I asked.
    Fletcher shrugged. “Rumor has it the father was making lots of problems. Wouldn’t surprise me if his heart attack was more of an unfortunate accident arranged by Mab herself.”
    “A heart attack? That’s not really her style,” I said. “Usually, she just incinerates people with her magic, burns their house to the ground, that sort of thing.”
    “True,” Fletcher agreed. “Which meant she probably passed the job on to one of her boys and asked them to make it look like natural causes. Either way, Lawrence James ended up dead.”
    Ashland might have a working police force and government, but the city was really run by one woman. Mab Monroe. Mab was a Fire elemental—strong, powerful, deadly. All that was bad enough, but she wasn’t just your run-of-the-mill elemental. Mab Monroe had more magic, more raw power, than any elemental had had in five hundred years. At least, that’s what the rumor mill churned out. Given the fact that anyone who went up against her got dead sooner rather than later, I tended to believe the hype.
    A respectable, multitiered business front hid Mab’s moblike empire. Intimidation. Bribes. Drugs. Kidnappings. Murder. None of it bothered Mab. She reveled in the blood like a hog in slop. She had her spies everywhere. Police department. City council. Mayor’s office. Cops, district attorneys, judges, and other assorted good guys didn’t last long in this city, unless they went over to the dark side—and into Mab’s hip pocket.
    Like all savvy businesswomen, Mab Monroe hid her true nature behind a veneer of cultured sophistication. Donating money to charity. Spearheading fund-raisers. Giving back to the community. All of it designed to distance her from the ugly things she ordered done on a daily basis. Mab kept her eye on the big picture, which is why she had two lieutenants, for lack of a better word, who ran the day-to-day operations. Her lawyer, Jonah McAllister, and Elliot Slater.
    McAllister handled the people who challenged Mab through legal means. The slick lawyer buried the poor folks in so much paperwork and red tape that most of them went bankrupt just trying to pay their own attorneys. Slater claimed to be a security consultant, but the giant was really nothing more than an enforcer in a nice suit. He handled Mab’s minions