Elemental Assassin 04 - Tangled Threads

something to be proud of. But I knew that I wasn’t that powerful. Alexis James. Tobias Dawson. Elliot Slater. Each one of them had come far too close to killing me in the last few months for me to believe that I was invincible. Death came to us all in the end, no matter how tough we thought we were.
    Still, every time someone commented on my magic, I couldn’t stop this uncomfortable shiver that swept through my body. It was like they were all setting me up for the fall that I knew was coming up fast on the day that I went toe-to-toe with Mab with my magic.
    And lost.
    “So can we get on with this?” Finn asked, his green eyes locked onto a redhead gyrating on the edge of the dance floor. “Because if we hurry, we can still learn everything that Vinnie knows before closing. Which would leave me plenty of time to find someone to keep me warm for the rest of the night. You wouldn’t want me to be lonely, now, would you?”
    I rolled my eyes. Finn’s propensity to think with his dick first was going to get him into deep trouble one day. Especially since he didn’t mind seducing women who were already taken. He saw a wedding ring as a challenge more than anything else. I always found it amazing that some angry husband hadn’t hired me to kill Finn long ago.
    But my foster brother was right. It was time to get on with things. The sooner we squeezed Vinnie for info, the sooner I could start planning how to find and take out LaFleur—before she found me first.
    I’d just started to slide out of the booth when a peculiar ripple in the crowd caught my eye. A wave of people parted for someone in their midst. A moment later, a woman stepped up to the Ice bar in the exact spot where Vinnie was serving drinks.
    A petite, slender woman with a short bob of glossy black hair. A wide headband of flat emeralds held her hair back off her face, so that everyone could get a good look at her delicate features. The gems winked at me underneath the black lights of the club.
    Unlike me, she was dressed for a night out on the town. A tight, black, sleeveless top showed off her creamy, muscled arms, while a lime green miniskirt hugged her bonyass. Black leather boots with stiletto heels crawled up to her knees. She didn’t appear to be carrying any weapons, unless she had a couple of knives tucked into her boots. But given what I’d seen her do with her electrical magic last night, she didn’t really need any.
    She leaned against the Ice bar and said something to Vinnie, whose head snapped up from the martinis he was making. His jaw dropped open at the sight of her and, for a moment, the blue-white glow of his Ice magic completely vanished from his eyes before sparking and sputtering back to life. The bartender’s shocked reaction was understandable.
    After all, he was talking to LaFleur.

5
     
    “Fuck.” I let out a soft curse.
    “What are you—” Finn’s eyes narrowed. “Wait a minute. Is that who I think it is?”
    I nodded. “That would be her. LaFleur.”
    Finn let out his own curse.
    Roslyn looked back and forth between the two of us. “LaFleur? As in the assassin that you guys think Mab hired to come to Ashland and kill Gin?”
    “The one and the same,” Finn murmured, his green gaze on the other woman. “And she’s talking to Vinnie.”
    The three of us stared at them. LaFleur crooked her finger at Vinnie, who swallowed before moving forward. LaFleur leaned across the Ice bar a little more and whispered something into his ear. Whatever she said, it wasn’t good, because Vinnie’s blue-white Ice magic leaked out of his eyes once more. LaFleur was breaking his concentration with her words.
    I tensed, my thumb tracing over the hilt of the silverstone knife that I’d palmed under the booth table. I wondered if the other assassin was going to kill Vinnie right here, right now, in the middle of the nightclub since no one had shown up for her staged meeting last night. Because the Spider hadn’t made an appearance like LaFleur had wanted me to. She could easily kill Vinnie. One blast of the assassin’s electrical elemental magic would be enough to cut through any Icy defense that the bartender might be able to muster.
    That’s how elementals fought—by flinging their raw power, their raw magic, at each other. By measuring their strength against each other. Dueling each other, until one person weakened, and the other’s magic washed over the loser and killed her. Suffocated by Air, burned by Fire, frozen