Elemental Assassin 04 - Tangled Threads

narrowed, but a grin spread across his face, softening his chiseled features. “When did you get so smart?”
    Eva grinned back at him. “Big brother, I’ve always been smart. You just failed to recognize my brilliance until now.”
    Owen grumbled something else under his breath and threw another wad of icicles at Eva. She laughed, dug into her box, and retaliated with her own handful. And the fight was on. The two of them slung gobs of icicles at each other, until the air sparked and flashed with the thin, silver ribbons.
    I leaned against the doorway and watched them shriek, laugh, and duck around furniture as they staged their mock battle. Eva and Owen loved each other the way two siblings should. The way I loved Finn. They had the kind of easy relationship I wanted to have with my own sister. With Bria.
    Too bad Bria was a detective with the Ashland Police Department. One who wanted to track down the Spider and bring her to justice for killing Elliot Slater and the rest of Mab Monroe’s minions that I’d dispatched in the last few weeks.
    But I wasn’t here to dwell on that complicated relationship, my war with Mab, or the fact that LaFleur was in town and gunning for me. All that mattered was tonight, and this brief happy moment with the Graysons. I hadn’t had many of those in my life, and I knew enough to appreciate them. To grab and hold on to and enjoy these precious moments as long as I could.
    So I drew in a breath and stepped into the living room, letting the two of them see me. Eva spotted me first.
    “Gin!” Eva shouted, ducking another wad of icicles. “You made it!”
    Owen’s head turned in my direction, giving Eva the opening that she needed to leap up onto the sofa and dump the rest of her box of icicles on top of her big brother’s head.
    “Ha!” she shouted in triumph. “I win!”
    Owen glowered at his sister, before turning and giving me a sheepish grin. With the icicles streaming down his body, he looked like a tinfoil yeti.
    I raised an eyebrow. “Sexy. Dead sexy.”
    Owen grinned at me through the sparkling silver strings. “I do try.”
    For the next hour, I helped Owen and Eva pick up wayward icicles and put them on the tree. When we finished,Eva announced that she was giving us some private time and headed off to bed.
    “Sorry about the mess,” Owen said, bending down to pick a stray icicle off the rug. “I didn’t mean for you to have to clean up after us.”
    “It’s okay,” I replied. “I had fun helping you guys.”
    Surprisingly, I wasn’t lying. It had been fun doing something so simple, so normal. Something that Fletcher Lane would have considered to be
living in the daylight
, his words for having a regular life. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d had a Christmas tree, much less decorated one. The old man hadn’t much cared for the holiday, and Finn had always been more interested in the presents underneath the tree than what it looked like. In addition to helping me with certain things, my foster brother was also an investment banker. Finn was all about money and the shiny things you could buy with it.
    While Owen salvaged a few more icicles, I wandered through the living room, staring at the decorations, enjoying the mix of red and green, gold and silver. The gleam of glass on a table caught my eye, and I picked up a large snow globe. A charming Christmas scene of a family gathered around a fireplace lay underneath the smooth, curved surface. I shook the globe. White flakes drifted up before sinking to the bottom once more. Such a small, simple thing, but it made my heart twist all the same.
    My mother, Eira Snow, had collected snow globes. She had dozens of them, and I remembered running from one end of the fireplace mantel to the other, trying to make the snow swirl in the last one before the flakes in the firstone settled back down. A game that I’d played with Bria when we were kids.
    Bria seemed to have the same fascination with the globes as our mother. I’d seen boxes full of them the night that I’d broken into Bria’s house and kept Elliot Slater and the rest of his giant goons from killing her. A few weeks ago, when Bria had first come back to Ashland, Mab Monroe had sent her giant enforcer to murder my sister. Mab had thought that Bria was a threat to her. That Bria was the Snow sister who had both Ice and Stone magic.
    Mab had thought that Bria was the one who was going to kill her.
    Once upon a time, an Air elemental who could