Elemental Assassin 03 - Venom

hour.”
    “Longest hour of my life,” he muttered.
    I arched an eyebrow and looked over at Finnegan Lane, my partner in crime for the night. Most nights, actually. Just after ten o’clock a few days before Christmas, and we were sitting in the darkened front seat of Finn’s black Cadillac Escalade. An hour ago, Finn had parked the car in a secluded, out-of-the-way alley that overlooked the docks fronting the Aneirin River. We’d been sitting here, and Finn had been grousing, ever since.
    Finn shifted in his seat, and my gray eyes flicked over him. The wool fabric of his thick coat outlined his broad shoulders, although a black watchman’s cap covered his walnut-colored hair. His eyes were a bright green even inthe semidarkness, and the shadows did little to hide the square handsomeness of his face.
    Most women would have been glad to have been in such close quarters with Finnegan Lane. With his easy smile and natural charm, Finn would already have had the majority of them in the backseat, pants off, legs up, steam covering the windows as the car rocked back and forth.
    Good thing I wasn’t most women.
    “Come on, Gin,” Finn whined again. “Go stick a couple of your knives in that guy and leave your rune for Mab to find so we can get out of here.”
    I stared out the car window. Across the street, bathed in the golden glow of a streetlight, the guy in question continued to unload wooden crates from the small tugboat that he’d pulled up to the dock forty-five minutes ago. Even from this distance I could hear the warped, weathered boards creak under his weight as the river rushed on by beneath them.
    The man was a dwarf—short, squat, stocky, sturdy—and dressed in black clothes practically identical to the ones that Finn and I were wearing. Jeans, boots, sweater, jacket. The sort of anonymous outfit you’d wear to go skulking about late at night, especially in this rough Southtown neighborhood, and most especially when you didn’t want anyone else to see what you were up to.
    Or were planning to kill someone, like I was tonight. Most nights, actually.
    I rubbed my thumb over the hilt of the silverstone knife that I held in my lap. The metal glinted dully in the darknessof the car, and the weight of the weapon felt cold and comforting, the way it always did to me. The knife rested lightly on the spider rune scar embedded in my palm.
    It would be easy enough to give in to Finn’s whining; to slip out of the car, cross the street, creep up behind the dwarf, cut his throat, and shove his body off the dock and into the cold river below. I probably wouldn’t even get that much blood on my clothes, if I got the angles just right.
    Because that’s what assassins did. That’s what I did. Me. Gin Blanco. The assassin known as the Spider, one of the best around.
    But I didn’t get out of the car and get on with things like Finn wanted me to. Instead, I sighed. “He hardly seems worth the trouble. He’s a flunkie, just like all the others I’ve killed these past two weeks. Mab will hire someone else to take his place before they even dredge his body out of the river.”
    “Hey, you were the one who decided to declare war on Mab Monroe,” Finn pointed out. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe that you were rather eager to kill your way up to the top of the food chain until you got to her. You said it would be
fun
.”
    “That was six hits ago. Now I’d just like to kill Mab and give everyone in Ashland an early Christmas present, myself included.” My turn to grouse.
    But Finn was right. A few weeks ago, a series of events had led me to officially declare war on Mab, and now I was dealing with the fallout—and the tedious boredom of it all.
    Mab Monroe was the Fire elemental who ran the southern metropolis of Ashland as if it were her own personal kingdom. To most folks, Mab was a paragon of virtue, a Fire elemental who used her magic, business connections, and money to fund worthwhile charity projects throughout the city. But those of us who strolled through the shady side of life knew Mab for what she really was—the head of a Mob-like empire that included everything from gambling and drugs to prostitution and kidnappings. Murder, extortion, torture, blackmail, beatings. Mab ordered all those and more, practically on a daily basis. But the Fire elemental was so wealthy, so powerful, so strong in her magic that no one dared to stand up to her.
    Until me.
    I had a special reason to hate