Elemental Assassin 03 - Venom

Mab—she’d murdered my mother and older sister when I was thirteen. And she’d been planning to do the same thing to me and my baby sister, Bria. But first, Mab had decided to capture and torture me that fateful night so long ago. Which is how I’d ended up with a pair of matching scars on my hands.
    I put my knife down long enough to rub first one scar, then the other, with my fingers. A small circle surrounded by eight thin rays was branded into each one of my palms. A spider rune. The symbol for patience. My assassin name.
    And one that Mab Monroe was now seeing everywhere she went.
    For the past two weeks I’d been stalking Mab’s men, getting a feel for her operation, seeing exactly what kindof illegal pies she had her sticky fingers in. And along the way, I’d picked off some of her minions when I caught them doing things that they shouldn’t do, hurting people that they shouldn’t hurt. A twist of my knife, a slash of my blade, and Mab Monroe had had one less soldier in her little army of terror.
    Killing her men hadn’t been hard, not for me. I’d spent the last seventeen years being an assassin, being the Spider, until I’d retired a few months ago. Certain skills you just never forgot.
    Normally, though, when I killed someone, I left nothing behind. No fingerprints, no weapon, no DNA. But with Mab’s men, I’d purposefully drawn the image of my spider rune at every scene, close to every body that I left behind. Taunting her. Letting Mab know exactly who was responsible for messing up her plans and that I was determined to pick her empire apart, one body at a time if I had to.
    Which is why Finn and I were now sitting in the dark, down by the docks, in this dangerous Southtown neighborhood. Finn had gotten a tip from one of his sources that Mab had a shipment of drugs or some other illegal paraphernalia coming into Ashland tonight. As the Spider, I’d decided to come down here and see what I could do to foul up Mab’s plans once more, thumb my nose at her, and generally piss her off.
    “Come on, Gin,” Finn said, cutting into my musings. “Make a move already. The guy’s alone. We would have seen his partner by now, if he’d had one.”
    I looked at the dwarf. He’d finished unloading theboxes from the tugboat and was now busy hauling them over to a van parked at the end of the dock.
    “I know,” I said. “But something about this just doesn’t seem right.”
    “Yeah,” Finn muttered. “The fact that I can’t feel my feet anymore and you won’t let me turn the heater on.”
    “Drink your coffee, then. It’ll make you feel better. It always does.”
    For the first time tonight, a grin spread across Finn’s face. “Why, I think that’s an excellent idea.”
    Finn reached down and grabbed a large metal thermos from the floorboard in the backseat. He cracked open the top, and the caffeine fumes of his chicory coffee filled the car. The rich smell always reminded me of his father, Fletcher Lane, my mentor, the one who’d taught me everything that I know about being an assassin. The old man had drunk the same foul brew as his son before he’d died earlier this year. I smiled at the memory and the warmth it always stirred in me.
    While Finn drank his coffee, I stared out at the scene before me once more. Everything seemed still, quiet, cold, dark. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that something was wrong. That something was just slightly off about this whole setup. Fletcher Lane had always told me that nobody ever got dead by waiting just a few more minutes. His advice had kept me alive this long, and I had no intention of disregarding it now.
    Once again my eyes scanned the area. Deserted street. A few dilapidated buildings hugging the waterfront. The black ribbon of the Aneirin River in the distance. Thepale boards of the dock. A lone light flickering over the dwarf’s head—
    My eyes narrowed, and I focused on the light; the bright, intact light burning like a beacon in the dark night. Then I looked up and down the street, my gaze flicking from one iron post to the next. Every other light on the block was busted out. Not surprising. This was Southtown, after all, the part of Ashland that was home to gangbangers, vampire prostitutes, and junkie elementals strung out on their own magic and hungry for more. People would just as soon kill you as look at you here. Not a place you wanted to linger, even during daylight hours.
    So I wasn’t surprised that the streetlights had