Elemental Assassin 04 - Tangled Threads

having them a lot lately. For a couple of months now. Only they’re not really dreams, so much as memories of that night. Last night, I dreamed about when I went to find you, after I used my magic to collapse our house. I remember picking through the rubble, trying to find you in that secret playroom under the stairs, but realizing that the stairs had collapsed along with the rest of the house, and finding only blood instead. So much blood.”
    My voice dropped to a whisper, and I had to swallow once before I was able to go on. “I woke up screaming then, because I thought you were dead, that I’d killed you with my magic. It’s a dream I’ve had a lot over the years.”
    Something flashed in Bria’s blue eyes. It might have been guilt, but I ignored it. If I didn’t get the words out now, I didn’t know if they would ever come to me again.
    So I sat there and told Bria everything.
    How I thought that she’d been dead for the last seventeen years until Fletcher Lane had left me a folder of information about my family’s murder with Bria’s picture inside. How I’d searched for her with no success, and then had been startled to discover that she’d come back to Ashland on her own—as a detective with the police department, no less. How I struggled with how to tell her who I really was and all the things I’d done in the meantime to protect her from Mab. All the people I’d killed to keep her safe.
    And then I told her the real reason our mother and older sister had died that night—because Mab thought a member of the Snow family, a girl with both Ice and Stone magic, was destined to kill her someday.
    “She thought that I was you, didn’t she?” Bria asked. “That I had both Ice and Stone magic?”
    I nodded. “From what I’ve been able to piece together, yes.”
    “And that’s why she wants me dead now.” Her voice was cold and flat. “Because she thinks I’ll kill her one day with my magic.”
    I nodded again.
    To my surprise, Bria threw her head back and let out a short, bitter laugh. “Well, I suppose that serves me right for being such a coward in the first place.”
    “What does?”
    “Because I ran away that night,” Bria said in a low tone. “Like the coward that I was.”
    I frowned. “What do you mean?”
    Bria drew in a deep breath. “That night, when you hid me in the playroom under the staircase, I got scared sitting there in the dark all by myself. So I went back inside the house to try to find you, even though you told me not to. And I saw—I saw Mab torturing you. I didn’t know who she was at the time, but I saw her and Elliot Slater duct-tape your spider rune medallion between your hands, and I heard her ask you all those questions about me.”
    This time Bria was the one who had to stop for a moment.
    “And I—and I heard you scream when she heated the rune and it melted into your hands. I didn’t know what to do. I wanted to help you, I wanted to use my Ice magic, but I was just so scared, so terrified that I couldn’t get it to work. So I—I just ran. I ran away. Out of the houseand back toward the secret playroom. I thought that what was happening to you was my fault for leaving and that if I went back there, everything would be okay. Stupid, I know.”
    Guilt and self-loathing gave her lilting voice a harsh, ugly tone. It looked as though I wasn’t the only one who had carried around the emotional baggage of that night for all these years. I didn’t blame Bria for what she’d done. There was only one person at fault in all of this—Mab Monroe. And she was going to pay for what she’d done to us, more than she’d ever imagined.
    Bria wouldn’t look at me, so I slowly reached over and took her hand in mine. Her fingers felt as cold as ice against my own.
    “You were eight years old, Bria. Just a kid. There was nothing you could have done to help me, nothing you could have done to stop Mab.”
    She stared at the tabletop. “You were just a kid too, Gene—Gin. And look what you did. You sat there, and you didn’t say a word about me. Not one word. And I know how much Mab hurt you. I heard your screams all the way outside the house, even after I went back out into the courtyard. I had to put my fingers in my ears to block the sound.”
    We didn’t say anything for a few minutes. Instead, we just sat there, staring at our hands stacked one on top of the other.
    “What happened then?” I finally asked. “After you—left?”
    Bria shrugged. “I