Elemental Assassin 01 - Spider's Bite

couldn’t do that. I couldn’t push Fletcher and Finn out of my mind. Couldn’t turn my back on them. Couldn’t disregard them and walk away like they would have wanted me to. Not when there might be a chance of saving one or both of them. I owed them that. They’d taken me in off the streets when I’d had nowhere else to go. I owed them everything. And they would have done the same for me. The father and son would have come for me as soon as they could, despite their own vows to the contrary. No, I wasn’t walking away from them. Not now, not ever.
    Besides, I’d never been one to take the easy path in life. Easy was for people too weak to suck it up and do what needed to be done.
    And I wasn’t weak. Not anymore.
    I approached the Pork Pit from the back, slipping into the alley that ran behind the building. My eyes caught on a black crack across from the back of the restaurant, a narrow space just big enough for a child to squeeze into.
    A hard smile curved my lips. An old hiding spot of mine, back when I’d been living on the streets. Empty and much too small for me now. Besides, I didn’t need to hide. I’d become what I was so I’d never have to run and hide again.
    But that didn’t mean I still shouldn’t be cautious. So I hunkered down beside one of the metal Dumpsters. Looking. Listening. Waiting.
    Nothing. Not even a rat digging in the container beside me. Something very, very bad must have happened to scare the rats away.
    I put my hand on the building, listening to the stone. The clogged contentment of yesterday had taken on a harsh, strident note. Something had upset the brick, intruded on its usual peace. Something sudden. Unexpected. Bloody. Violent. The low, sharp, vibrating rasp pounded in my skull like a dirge for the dead.
    Fletcher.
    My hand reached for the back door of the restaurant. I stopped. The door stood ajar just a tiny crack, hardly enough to be noticeable, but I’d spent the last seventeen years noticing everything and everyone around me. The kitchen knives slid into my hands. I backed away from the door and peered at it. A thin, black wire wrapped around the doorknob and led inside, hence the crack. Using one of the knives, I sliced the wire, careful not to jiggle it. Then I stood to one side of the door and pulled it open.
    A shotgun had been erected inside the back room, rigged to fire when the door was opened. Turn the knob, step inside, and get two barrels to the chest. A crude but effective trap.
    I waited and listened. Silence. Cold, cold silence.
    Fletcher should have been puttering about the kitchen or doing inventory in the stockroom. Should have been brewing his chicory coffee and reading his latest book. The quiet chilled me far more than the river had, soaking into my bones like an icy rain, despite the chemical hand warmers in my pockets.
    I eased into the restaurant, checking the floor and ceiling around the door for more traps. Nothing. I paused after every step. Waiting, looking, searching. Nothing moved, not even the granddaddy long-leg spiders in their cubbyholes in the corners.
    Finally, in front of the counter in the storefront, I found him.
    Fletcher Lane sprawled across a crimson pool of blood on the floor. Several jagged stab wounds and spatters of blood marred his ripped, torn, blue work apron, almost like a bottle of ketchup had exploded on him. His clothes lay in tatters around him, defensive cuts blackened his hands, and his knuckles were swollen and bruised, as though he’d hit someone repeatedly. Money spilled out of the busted cash register, sticking to the tacky, bloody floor, along with the battered copy of Where the Red Fern Grows he’d been reading. Pieces of a broken cup dotted the floor beside him, along with the dregs of his chicory coffee. Caffeine fumes lingered in the air. The faint aroma made my heart twist.
    Fletcher had also been tortured—by an Air elemental.
    Long pieces of skin were missing from his face, arms, hands. The stomach-turning stench of raw meat overpowered the pancake pools of copper-scented blood on the floor. The Air elemental had used his fingers like they were fucking sandblasters, forcing oxygen under Fletcher’s skin. Making it blister and burn and bubble up before he ripped it off, muscles, tendons, and all. A small strip here, a thumbprint-size indentation there, a fist-shaped mark right over his heart. None of the wounds immediately lethal, but all of them excruciatingly painful. The wounds were so