Elemental Assassin 03 - Venom

tended to release their power through their hands to make cubes, daggers, and other shapes—or just to blast someone with their cold magic.
    But I’d finally overcome the blockage during a desperate moment when I was facing off with another elemental, when my life had been on the line. Now, doing things with my Ice power was far easier than it had been before. I was getting stronger in it too. Jo-Jo claimed that my Ice magic would continue to grow until it was just as powerful as my Stone power, making me the rarest of elementals—someone who was equally strong in two elements.
    I wasn’t exactly comfortable with that idea for a variety of reasons. Mainly because I’d seen my mother, Eira’s, Ice magic let her down when she’d gone up against Mab Monroe. I wasn’t so sure I wanted to tempt fate by relying on my own Ice magic when Mab and I had our inevitable confrontation. Because it would be damned ironic if Mab killed me the exact same way she had my mother and older sister. Irony. Always out to get you.
    Roslyn eyed me some more, and I realized that I’d never done any kind of magic in front of the vamp before. That she hadn’t even known I was an elemental until now. The other customers were all still too busy with their food to notice my small magical display.
    I wasn’t worried about Roslyn telling anyone, though. She’d agreed to keep quiet after what had happened to Fletcher Lane, and she’d held up once already under Elliot Slater’s questioning. Her word was good.
    Roslyn opened her mouth to turn down the food I’d just shoved her way, but I cut her off.
    “You’re welcome,” I said. “Now, you want to tell me what’s going on? And why you decided to storm in here like Sherman marching through Atlanta? I know you’ve been around a while, but the Civil War ended a long time ago.”
    Roslyn sighed, and some of the angry fight sagged out of her slim shoulders. “Elliot called me last night, around three in the morning, demanding to know where I was, what I was doing, and if there was anyone with me.”
    I frowned. “Why would he want to know all that?”
    Finn snorted. “You mean besides the fact that the bastard’s obsessed with her? That he wants to know and control her every movement?”
    I ignored Finn’s snide comment. “What did Slater want?”
    Roslyn fiddled with the fork I’d set down in front of her. “He said he had some trouble with someone last night. That someone had come after him, and he was worried that they’d come after me in order to get to him.” Her mouth twisted. “Because everyone knew how much he
cares
about me. How fucking
precious
I am to him.”
    The vamp’s hand tightened around the fork, and her eyes darkened like she was wishing she could shove the silverware into Elliot Slater’s jugular. I admired her spirit, if not her practicality. Roslyn would have been much better off using a butter knife, if death by silverware was going to be her modus operandi.
    I filled Roslyn in on what had really happened last night. How Finn and I had been following Elliot Slaterwhen we’d seen him get the order from Mab, get his goons together, and go after Bria.
    Roslyn frowned. “Why do you care if Elliot kills some new cop in town? Why interfere?”
    I wasn’t about to confess my familial connection to Bria to the vamp, so I gave her a flip answer. “I thought I could take him out right then and there and let the cop take credit for things. It worked once before, you know.”
    Roslyn grimaced. She knew what I was referring to—the night a couple of months ago when I’d killed Alexis James in the Ashland Rock Quarry. Roslyn had been there as one of Alexis’s hostages, along with Finn. Roslyn was the one who’d backed up Donovan Caine’s claim that he’d killed the Air elemental, instead of me.
    I thought about what Roslyn had said. So Elliot Slater thought I’d been there to off him last night, not to save Bria from getting dead. Not surprising. Like Mab Monroe, Slater didn’t strike me as someone who thought about other people—except what he wanted to take from them. Still, Finn had been right. Slater would be on his guard now, which would make him that much tougher to kill.
    “Anyway, whatever you did, Slater was worried about me. It was all I could do to convince him not to come over to the club and check on me right then.” Roslyn shuddered. “Xavier was at the club with me. If Slater had come over, the mood he was in, he would have killed