Elemental Assassin 04 - Tangled Threads

veins and onto my skin, head, hair, eyes, making them all as hard and solid as granite. After all, you can’t electrocute a rock—
    The lightning slammed into me.
    For a moment, my vision went completely green, that bright, peculiar, eerie shade of green that was the same color as LaFleur’s magic. Her cruel elemental power smashed against my body, wanting to zip through me the same way that it had all the metal rails around me. But I gritted my teeth and pushed back with my Stone magic, keeping the lightning at bay, keeping it from breaking through the hard shell of my skin. Because if it did that, I’d be dead, fried to a crisp just like that dwarf had been by Elektra the other night. Another bug zapped by her electrical power.
    But that didn’t mean it still didn’t fucking
hurt
.
    Maybe it was because I’d never been up against an elemental with electrical magic before. Maybe it wasbecause LaFleur’s power was just as strong as my own. Hell, maybe her power just worked in its own unique way. Because despite my Stone magic, I still felt every bit of the lightning, felt every bit of the static charge of it crackling around me and trying to fry me from the outside in. The jolt of it over and over again made my heart beat so hard that I thought my whole chest would explode from the pressure. I was still getting electrocuted. All my Stone power was doing was keeping it from killing me outright.
    I don’t know how long I huddled there, using my Stone magic to block the electricity humming around me, my mouth open in a terrible, silent scream that just wouldn’t come out. Sweat poured down my face, and my whole body shook from the effort. But finally, my vision cleared, and the green lightning zipped farther down the metal lines and finally sparked away into nothingness.
    Still holding on to my Stone magic, I drew in a deep, shuddering breath. Green-gray smoke wafted up from my body, choking me, and the silverstone in my vest felt as hot and heavy as an anvil hung on my chest. The once-solid metal sloshed around inside the fabric like water. The silverstone had absorbed all of LaFleur’s magic that it could before dissolving into its liquid form from the sheer heat of it. It took a lot of raw elemental power to melt silverstone—a whole hell of a lot. My vest had just saved my life, had just kept me from getting fried to death outright.
    But the fight wasn’t over yet. Legs shaking, I got to my feet and stumbled on. Behind me, I heard Elektra screamwith fury and surprise that I was still standing, still running, still breathing.
    Elektra’s magic had dazed me more than I would have liked, which is why I didn’t have any particular plan in mind, other than to just run until I got away from her. But the assassin was in much better shape than I at the moment and closing fast, given that I’d almost been fried by her electrical magic.
    And then, somehow, I heard it, even above the blood pounding in my ears and the slap of my boots on the loose gravel—a train whistle. Getting louder and louder with each second.
    Sweetest fucking sound I’d ever heard.
    I forced my legs to move faster, to pump harder, until my feet barely touched the ground. I veered right over to the edge of the train yard. I was running across the upper level, the flat plateau where the old depot was located. But there was a lower level to the yard too, some thirty feet below me, the place that all the trains passing through Ashland used these days since the depot had been closed. The lower rail yard was a straight shot through the city, do not pass go, do not collect two hundred dollars. On the far side of the lower level, the black waters of the Aneirin River rushed by, keeping time with the trains that chugged alongside it.
    The whistle sounded again, a harsh scream in the night air, and five seconds later, I saw it. A train churned this way, moving through the lower level of the yard, a line of cars snaking along behind it like the sections on a fat, metal caterpillar.
    The train was moving much faster than I was, and thefront engine car drew up next to me in seconds. I grabbed hold of my Stone magic again, using it to harden my skin once more. And when one of the train’s many cars passed below me, I jumped.
    It felt like I hung in midair for several seconds before finally falling.
    I slammed into the top of one of the railcars. It was a thirty-foot fall, and since my body was already so hard and heavy with my Stone magic, I