Elemental Assassin 04 - Tangled Threads

Spider, not spending her time assassinating you.”
    I shrugged. “There’s no guarantee that she’ll come after me. But I was an assassin for a long time, and I ran intomore than a few of my comrades over the years. Some of them were like me and Fletcher. They killed for the money or because it was a job that they were good at.”
    Finn, Owen, and Jo-Jo all nodded.
    “But LaFleur’s different,” I said. “She kills for the thrill of it. Because it amuses her. That’s why she toasted the dwarf at the docks. Because it gave her a charge, at least for a few minutes. She doesn’t think that Gin Blanco, simple restaurant owner, is any kind of threat to her at all. Hell, she bragged to Mab that killing me wouldn’t take up more than half an hour of her precious time. LaFleur will want, no, she’ll
need
some kind of little victory after letting me get away from her last night. Some little something she can take back to Mab that she accomplished, that she got right. But even more than that, she’ll need a kill for herself. Something to quiet that twitchy itch in her if only for a few hours.”
    “And you think that Gin Blanco will be it,” Owen said, the worry loud and clear in his voice.
    I nodded. “I do. Jonah McAllister wants me dead in the worst way. He just doesn’t want to get his hands dirty doing it. LaFleur will be all too happy to do the job for him.”
    We sat in the kitchen in silence. In the den, Natasha’s cartoon played on, the high jinks and
yuk-yuk
laughter sounding cheerily obscene next to the grim reality facing me—kill or be killed. But like it or not, it was the story of my life. It had been ever since I was thirteen. So far, I’d been the one who’d done the killing, and it was a tradition I planned to continue.
    “Say that she does come for you, that she comes to thePork Pit to murder Gin Blanco,” Owen said. “What are you going to do?”
    I stared at him with my flat gray eyes, letting him see the cold violence that always lurked there in the depths, just below the calm surface. “My plan is simple really. Kill the bitch before she kills me.”

21
     
    We stayed in the kitchen for another ten minutes, hashing out how things might go down when LaFleur came to the Pork Pit to murder me. Not much to hash out really. I’d kill her, then Sophia would help me dispose of her body. Simple, efficient, deadly. Those were always the best kinds of plans.
    Finn and Owen offered to watch the restaurant, to be lurking in the shadows waiting to provide backup when LaFleur called, but I turned them down. I did my best work alone, when I didn’t have other people to think about, when I didn’t have other people to worry about. If I had one second of distraction, one second of hesitation with LaFleur, I’d be the one who ended up dead instead of the other assassin.
    Finn and Owen didn’t like it, but they understood my reasoning. When they realized that I wasn’t budging or changing my mind, the two of them reluctantly relentedto my decision and left the kitchen. Finn went off to call Roslyn and Xavier and tell them to lie low and watch their backs for the next few days, while Owen checked in with Eva to give her an update on how I was doing.
    I stayed behind in the kitchen with Jo-Jo. The middle-aged dwarf had remained silent during most of Finn’s debriefing, but now she turned her pale, colorless eyes in my direction.
    “What’s bothering you, darling?” Jo-Jo said.
    I sighed. In addition to her healing skills, Jo-Jo also had a bit of precognition. Most Airs did, since their magic let them listen to and interpret all the feelings and emotions that swirled along with the wind. It was just another way in which the dwarf’s power was the opposite of mine. Jo-Jo’s elemental Air magic gave her glimpses of the future, while my Stone power let me see into the past and what had happened in a particular place.
    Thanks to Jo-Jo’s precognition, I never could really hide anything from the dwarf, so this time I didn’t even bother to try.
    “Elektra LaFleur and her electrical magic,” I said. “She’s strong, Jo-Jo. So
strong
. Maybe even stronger than I am. LaFleur almost got me last night, almost broke through my Stone magic and fried me alive right there in the rail yard with her electricity. And even though she didn’t kill me, her magic—it hurt so
much
. It took every bit of strength that I had to keep going after she blasted me with it that first time.”
    “You’re