Elemental Assassin 03 - Venom

attack from the rear. Excellent.
    I tiptoed down the hallway, a silverstone knife in each hand. Although I still wanted to charge forward, I moved slowly, calmly, carefully. Just because I thought Slater and his men were at the end of the hall didn’t mean that he hadn’t left someone behind to guard their rear. Slater had worked for Mab Monroe for a long time. He wasn’t dumb by any stretch of the imagination. So I checked every room that branched off the hallway, looking for trouble.
    Two doors up from the kitchen, I found some. A giant slouched over a sink in a small bathroom. Judging from the long, needlelike bits of elemental Ice sticking out of his face, it looked like he’d been the one who’d taken the brunt of the blast from the booby-trapped freezer. The giant held a white towel up over his eye socket. At least,the towel had been white at one point. Blood had turned the cotton fabric a dull crimson. The giant had also been shot a couple times in the chest, and a tight cluster of wounds just above his heart oozed blood. Baby sister was a good shot. She just hadn’t had time to finish him off before the other giants had rushed her.
    Good thing her big sis Gin was here to take care of that.
    I drew in a breath, then burst into the bathroom. My sudden appearance startled the giant so much that he dropped his towel, giving me a good look at the icicle that had skewered his right eye like a toothpick through an olive. The wounded giant opened his mouth to yell for his friends just as my silverstone knife slammed into his throat. The scream turned into a coughing, choking wheeze. My other knife ripped into the giant’s stomach. His warm blood splashed all over my ski mask and dark clothes.
    But the giant wasn’t down for the count just yet. The bastard lashed out at me, flailing wildly with his fists. One clipped my shoulder. The other hit my left kidney. Even weakened, the solid blows still hurt. Being an elemental, I could have reached for my Stone magic and used it to harden my skin into an impenetrable shell. Almost nothing could hurt me when I did that. But I didn’t know if Elliot Slater or one of his other men had any elemental power, and I didn’t want to tip them off to my presence just yet. Besides, I reserved my magic for the main event. This barely qualified as the warm-up bout.
    So I just stood there, slashing the giant with my knives.By the time I’d made my third pass with the silverstone weapons, the giant’s pink guts could be seen through the ripped fabric of his shirt. Not to mention the fact that his throat was open almost to his spine. He quit fighting, and his one good eye glazed over. I lowered his heavy body to the floor and tiptoed back to the door.
    “What was that?” one of the giants muttered.
    “I don’t know—” Another man started to respond when another series of
pop-pop-pop
s shattered the quiet.
    Someone else returned fire, and I used the noise and distraction to slip out of the bathroom and forward to the end of the hallway. It opened up into a large, square living room that looked like a tornado had ripped through the area. Broken lamps, overturned furniture, shattered knickknacks, cardboard packing boxes that had been split open from things falling on top of them.
    To my surprise, a giant lay dead just inside the doorway. He slumped against the wall, staring up at the ceiling. I spotted a couple of bullet wounds clustered in the middle of his chest, but that wasn’t what had killed him—it was the Ice. The giant’s face looked blue and brittle, an inch of white frost had gathered in his hair, and his eyes resembled frozen marbles. Large icicles hung off his nose and chin, and his mouth was open in a silent scream.
    The human body is mostly water. Flash-freeze that water using elemental Ice magic, and, well, you’ve got yourself a human Popsicle. Not a pretty way to die, but an effective method of dealing with an enemy who’s bigger and stronger than you. That bluish white flash I’d seen before must have been Bria laying her Ice whammy on the giant. The temperature was also at least ten degreescolder in here than in the rest of the house, due to Bria using her Ice power. My breath frosted in the air.
    But the Iced giant was the only person I saw. A short wall ran out into the middle of the room, hiding the other half from sight.
Pop-pop-pop.
Bria and the giants were still exchanging gunfire, and the stench of cordite hung in the air, along with my frosty