Elemental Assassin 04 - Tangled Threads

Gin Blanco. The assassin known as the Spider. I killed people, something that I was very, very good at.
    Tonight I had my sights set on my most dangerous target ever—Mab Monroe, the Fire elemental who’d murdered my family when I was thirteen.
    I’d been plotting the hit for weeks. Where to do it, how to get past security, what weapons to use, how to get away after the fact. Now, on this frigid night, I’d decided to finally carry out my deadly plan.
    I’d been on the prowl for hours. Three hours, to be exact. Each one spent out in the bitter February frost, after having climbed my way up the side of a fifteen-story mansion, one icy foot at a time. Hard bits of snowpelted my body, as I tried to keep the shrieking wind from tearing me off the side of the house. It wasn’t the most comfortable that I’d ever been during one of my hits, but it was necessary.
    Too bad Mab knew I was coming for her.
    Oh, I hadn’t expected it to be
easy,
but slipping past the massive net of security, first in the snowy woods around Mab’s mansion, and then closer to the house itself, was a bit more problematic than I’d anticipated. The whole area was teeming with giants the Fire elemental employed as her personal bodyguards, not to mention nasty land-mines and other traps strung through the trees like invisible spiderwebs. Of course, I could have dropped the giants, killing them one by one as I went along, but that would have resulted in the alarm being raised, and the security net tightening that much more.
    So instead I’d opted for a silent, nonlethal approach—at least for now. It had taken me an hour to work my way through the woods, then another one to get close enough to the mansion to slither up the stairs to a second-floor balcony and then heave myself up onto part of the roof that sloped down there. After that, things had gotten easier, since there were no sensors, alarms, or giants posted on the roofs that covered the various parts of the massive structure. Not many people bothered with such things above the second floor, since most folks weren’t brave or crazy enough to climb any higher, especially on a snowy night like this one.
    I wasn’t particularly brave or crazy, but I was determined to kill Mab.
    A strong gust of wind slapped and then backhandedthe mansion, screaming in my ears and hurling more frozen snow off the eaves and onto me. The chunks pounded my body before disappearing over the side of the roof and dropping down into the eerie silver dark of the night.
    I grunted at the hard, stinging impacts. As an elemental, I could have used my Stone magic to protect myself, could have tapped into my power and made my skin hard as marble so that the rocklike wads of snow would bounce off my body like bullets off Superman’s chest. But elementals can sense when others of their ilk are using their powers, and I didn’t want to give Mab any hint I was here.
    At least, not before I’d killed her.
    By this point, I’d worked my way up to the sixth floor, where the mansion’s blueprints had indicated there was a particularly large dining room. According to some chatter that my foster brother Finnegan Lane had picked up from his various spies, Mab was hosting a fancy dinner party this evening. Finn hadn’t been able to determine what the party was for or even who had been invited, but that didn’t much matter. Mab was getting dead tonight—I didn’t care who was in the room with her.
    I’d been in position for more than an hour now, outside the dining room window, laying flat on a part of the roof that plateaued before sloping down at a severe angle and dropping away to the ground far below. But really, the worst part of the night wasn’t the guards, the cold, the snow, or even the icy, treacherous climb—it was having to listen to the stones around me.
    People’s emotions, actions, and feelings sink into theirenvironment over time, especially into the stones around them. As a Stone elemental, I could hear those emotional vibrations in whatever form the element took around me, from loose gravel in a driveway to the brick of a building to a marble sculpture. The sounds, the murmurs, the whispers that reverberated through the stones let me know what had happened in a particular spot, what sort of people had been there, and all the dark, ugly, twisted things that they’d done in the meantime—or who might be lurking around in the here and now, trying to get the drop on me.
    Fire, heat, death,