Elemental Assassin 01 - Spider's Bite

Magic flickered like lightning in Alexis’s gaze, brightening her eyes until they were almost pure white. A similar glow outlined her palms. She was focusing on her power, ready to use it on me the instant I stepped out of line. I could feel her Air elemental magic snapping around her like a dog at its master’s feet. The sensation of the opposing element made my skin crawl. Or perhaps that was just because I’d seen what Alexis liked to do with her magic. How she liked to flay people alive with it.
    “So tell me,” I said, trying to give Donovan Caine as much time as possible to come in behind them. “Of all the assassins out there, why did you pick me to double-cross?”
    “Because you were the easiest to identify.”
    “How?”
    “What’s the old saying? Loose lips sink ships? Or in your case, get your photo on the six o’clock news.” Alexis chuckled at her seeming cleverness. “You might not know it, but my old friend Gordon Giles liked to visit hookers. Seems he needed a little help getting it up and was embarrassed by more traditional relationships.”
    I’d seen exactly what kinds of relationships Gordon liked to have in his photo stash—ones that involved costumes.
    “When I realized Gordon was suspicious about where so much of the company’s money was going and was poking around, I made Stephenson follow him and pick up the women he was with to see what he’d told them, if anything,” Alexis continued. “Gordon was smart enough to keep his mouth shut to the whores, but Stephenson got some interesting information out of one of them. Information about an assassin called the Spider.”
    So that’s how they’d found us. No good deed goes unpunished. Fucking pro bono work.
    “It turned out you’d done some work for the hooker. Killed a cop for her. It took some legwork, but I managed to identify your handler and contact him. The rest was easy.” Alexis smiled.
    I flashed back to the file Fletcher had compiled on Gordon Giles. Fletcher had noted Giles’s tendency to visit hookers. Not to mention all the kinky pictures I’d found along with the flash drive. So Giles had visited the woman whose daughter had been raped. The one who’d contacted Fletcher and asked me to kill Cliff Ingles. We’d come full circle with the irony and bad luck tonight.
    Finn stared at Alexis. Hate flashed in his green eyes, making them burn even brighter than hers did. A muscle twitched in his puffy cheek, but he held himself still. Finn knew better than to make any sudden moves. He knew I’d take care of Alexis—or die trying.
    “The old man was easy enough to find at the barbecue joint,” Alexis continued. “But you, we never could spot you.”
    Of course they couldn’t. I took great pains to make sure no one ever followed me from the Pork Pit back to my apartment. Besides, I was just another lowly restaurant worker. As Evelyn Edwards, the asylum shrink had said, someone like me couldn’t possibly have been moonlighting as someone like the Spider in my spare time.
    “So that’s why you brought Brutus in,” I said. “To take me out at the opera house. Since you couldn’t find me to do it yourself after the fact.”
    “Brains too. Aren’t you the complete package?” Alexis smiled again. “But enough talk. Let’s get down to business. Do you have the flash drive?”
    I slowly reached into my jeans pocket and pulled it out. “I do.”
    “That’s it?” she said. “That’s the only drive? You haven’t made any other copies?”
    “I couldn’t copy the drive. Gordon Giles encrypted it with some kind of weird software. You look at it the wrong way, and all the data gets erased.”
    An easy lie. Just before I’d left the apartment, I’d used my laptop to send out a timed e-mail with all the information on it. At exactly six o’clock tomorrow morning, the e-mail would be sent to officials at the police department, the Ashland Trumpet newspaper, and Mab Monroe. Unless I was alive to stop it. Just a bit of added insurance. I might die tonight, but Alexis James’s days would be numbered as soon as Mab got the e-mail. I’d feel that satisfaction even in death.
    “What about Donovan Caine?” Wayne Stephenson spoke up.
    Alexis turned to him. “What about Caine?”
    The captain stared at her. “She had to be the one who saved him from those men you sent after him. They’ve got to be working together. So where is he? Why isn’t he here? You said it yourself. He’s a loose end that needs to