Elemental Assassin 04 - Tangled Threads

a visit—tomorrow,” I said. “After we talk to Roslyn and tell her what’s going on. See what dirt you can dig up on him in the meantime. I want to knoweverything there is to know about Vinnie Volga before we go and brace him and see why he’s spreading rumors for Mab.”
    And before I decided whether Vinnie was any kind of threat to me—and whether the bartender needed to get dead for being stupid enough to try and sell out the Spider.
    Finn and I made plans to meet tomorrow and said our good nights. Then he zoomed his Escalade down the driveway to go back to his apartment in the city, leaving me alone in front of the house.
    Instead of immediately going inside the mansion, I stood in the driveway. Listening, but not to the wind as it gusted through the trees that flanked the house, making them creak and crack and shudder. Instead, I tilted my head to one side and concentrated on the whispers of the gray cobblestones under my feet and the larger rocks of the mansion above my head.
    People’s emotions and actions sink into their surroundings over time, especially stone. As a Stone elemental, I could hear, listen to, and interpret emotional vibrations in the element, no matter what form it took, from loose gravel underfoot to a brick house to a granite gravestone. I could tell if a home was a happy one, if blood had been spilled in a driveway, or if someone was lurking around the side of a building with dark intentions in her heart.
    Tonight the stones gave off nothing but their usual, low murmurs, telling me of the winter wind that had whipped around the mansion all day and the chipmunksthat had scurried from one side of the cobblestones to the other looking for shelter from the cold.
    But there was more to being a Stone elemental than just listening to rocks. My magic also let me manipulate the stone. Let me tap into the element and exert my will on it any way I wanted to, from crumbling bricks to cracking concrete. I could even make my own skin as hard as marble so that nothing could penetrate it, not even another elemental’s power—a trick that had saved me more than once. And I was strong in my magic too. So strong that I could easily lash out with it and tear Owen Grayson’s mansion apart one stone at a time. It wouldn’t have been any harder for me than breathing. I knew from past experience that my elemental power would let me bring down all those lovely gray stones and grind them to dust.
    After all, I’d done that very thing to my own home, the night that Mab had murdered my mother and older sister.
    On that horrible night, I’d reached out with my Stone magic and leveled our whole house with it to try to get to my baby sister, Bria, in time. To try and save her before Mab found, tortured, and killed her. I’d thought that Bria had died as a result of my actions, that she’d been crushed to death by the falling stones. It was a cold, ugly, secret guilt I’d carried with me for the last seventeen years, until I’d discovered that Bria was still alive and back in Ashland.
    I’d only been thirteen when I’d destroyed my own house. Now, at thirty, my magic was stronger than it had ever been before. And, according to Jo-Jo Deveraux, the dwarven Air elemental who healed me whenever I needed it, my power would only keep growing.
    The thought always made me uncomfortable. Even now I shivered at the idea. My mother, Eira, had been the strongest Ice elemental that I’d known, but her magic hadn’t been enough to save her from Mab’s Fire power. Mab’s flames had washed over her—hot, hungry, and unstoppable—consuming my mother until she was nothing more than a pile of smoldering ash. So I had more than a gut feeling that my own Ice and Stone power wasn’t going to do me much good when I finally went up against the Fire elemental.
    Sometimes, even assassins had qualms about dying.
    I pushed my melancholy memories aside and stepped up to the front door. A knocker was mounted there—a large hammer done in hard, black iron. The symbol could also be found on the enormous gate that ringed the house and grounds.
    The hammer was a rune, just like the scars on my palms. But whereas the spider runes branded into my hands symbolized patience, Owen’s hammer represented strength, power, and hard work—all things that he knew a great deal about. Owen Grayson used the hammer as his personal and business rune. A common thing in Ashland. Elementals, vampires, giants, dwarves—most of the city’s