Elemental Assassin 04 - Tangled Threads

match.
    When success was guaranteed, you could charge whatever you wanted to for it. According to the file, LaFleur pulled down north of three million for a simple assassination. Depending on who the target was, how hard it would be to get to him, and how much someone wanted it to look like an accident, the price went up from there. Even during my heyday as the Spider, I’d only topped out at around two and a half mil myself.
    “Bitch,” I muttered and kept reading.
    LaFleur was skilled with all sorts of weapons and was rumored to be even better at hand-to-hand combat. Naturally. She wouldn’t have been much of an assassin if she couldn’t kill people six ways from Sunday—and then some.
    However, instead of her fists or other weapons, LaFleur mainly used her electrical magic to kill. Given the number of people she’d taken out with it over the years, Fletcher had concluded that she was an extremely strong elemental—far stronger than the vast majority of those who could tap into the more common areas, like Air, Fire, Ice, and Stone. Wonderful.
    But that was LaFleur’s trademark—electrocuting people and then leaving a single white orchid behind on their smoking corpses. Just like she’d done to the dwarf that she’d fried down at the docks the other night in front of me and Finn.
    I wondered about the orchid, though. Lots of assassins left things behind to mark their kills. Names and runes, mostly. But even among assassins, an orchid was a strange thing to use. Mainly because they were so delicate and so expensive. Why waste all that money signing your kills when you could just draw something on the nearest wall in your victim’s blood? But I’d given up trying to figure out other assassins a long time ago. Hell, I couldn’t even figure myself out most of the time.
    I read through the rest of the file, but nothing jumped out at me. LaFleur was skilled, efficient, and deadly, just like I was. Smart, ruthless, and brutal, just like I was. And she had elemental magic, just like I did. All of which meant that it was fifty-fifty which one ofus would win against the other in the end. And with LaFleur having access to Mab Monroe’s men to help back her up, well, let’s just say that it didn’t do wonders for my confidence about making it to Christmas without getting dead.
    Bah, humbug.

11
     
    It had been a long night, so I put the file aside, took a hot shower to wash the giants’ blood off me, and then crawled into bed.
    Maybe Finn would have a bright idea tomorrow about how I could find Natasha and kill LaFleur. Before we’d left Jo-Jo’s, he’d promised to dig up everything that he could find on the assassin, her new job as Mab’s number one enforcer, and where Mab’s new nightclub might be located.
    I was so tired that for once it was easy for me to put those thoughts out of my mind. I fell asleep almost immediately, but sometime during the night, the dreams took over, the way that they always seemed to these days …
    I’d never known that I’d had this much magic before. Never dreamed that I was this strong. Never even imagined, hoped, or wished for it.
    But I was. And then some.
    Those were the odd thoughts that flashed through my mind in the split-second before my Ice and Stone power lashed out, reverberating through my whole house like a giant frozen jackhammer, pounding into everything that it touched.
    And crumbling it all to dust.
    There was a loud, violent, angry, collective roar as the stones in the ceiling above my head splintered. Seeing the long, deep cracks zigzag through the rocks was like watching spiders suddenly swarm out of a dark hole, hurrying out and out and out as fast as they could, dragging their silken strings behind them. That’s what it reminded me of, as weird as it might seem.
    For a moment, I sat there, stunned by what I’d just done with my magic. The terrible thing that I’d wrought with it. I’d only been trying to get free of the heavy ropes that tied me down to the chair I was sitting in. Ropes that the Fire elemental had had her giant lash around me while I’d been unconscious. Ropes that kept me from moving when she’d questioned me about Bria. Ropes that had kept me from fighting back when she’d superheated the spider rune medallion duct-taped in between my hands—her cruel, cruel way of torturing me. As if killing my mother and Annabella hadn’t been horrible enough.
    I didn’t remember much of what happened after the Fire elemental had