Elemental Assassin 05 - Spider's Revenge

kill shot when I’d had the chance. Part of me couldn’t believe it either, but that was the way things were.
    Even as an assassin, even as the Spider, I didn’t kill innocents—ever. Sure, the girl had shot me, but she couldn’t be more than fifteen, sixteen, tops. Still a kid in so many ways.
    Gentry crawled across the snow to the girl and held her close, shielding her from me, like she wasn’t sure what I was going to do next. Damned if I knew either.
    “Next time, sweetheart,” I murmured to the girl as I bent down to pick up the knife that I’d dropped. “Keep shooting until you run out of bullets and not a second before.”
    Gentry and Sydney both stared at me, their eyes identical pools of wariness, shock, and fear.
    I skirted around them and disappeared into the snowy trees.

Stumbling and bleeding, as well as listening for sounds of pursuit from Gentry, the girl, or whoever else might be following me, I somehow made it to the old, anonymous car I’d stashed in a thicket of trees two miles from the edge of Mab’s property. I sank into the driver’s seat, cranked the engine, and turned the ancient heater up as high and hot as it would go.
    White starbursts exploded in my eyes, and I struggled to blink them away. The girl, Sydney, had been a better shot than I’d given her credit for. The two bullets in my shoulder throbbed and burned with pain, and she’d gotten close to my femoral artery with that last shot to my left thigh. Good for her, bad for me. I’d left a blood trail through the snow that a child could follow. If I hadn’t had the car here, I would have been done for, still out floundering in the trees, trying to stay ahead of Mab, her giants, and her dinner guests, two of whom had alreadytaken an unhealthy interest in me. And I was still in the proverbial woods, if I didn’t get the leg taken care of soon.
    I ripped off my sweat-soaked ski mask, tore the fabric into strips with my silverstone knife, and used the pieces to make a tourniquet for my leg. I tied it off as tight as I could so I wouldn’t bleed out before I got to Jo-Jo. At this point, I just hoped that I had enough juice left to drive over to the dwarf’s house. But there was no time to think about things or procrastinate, so I threw the car into gear and put my foot on the gas.
    As I steered through the trees and pulled back onto the icy road, I reached for my magic again. But not my Stone power. No, this time I grabbed hold of my other magic—my elemental Ice power—and let it fill the lower part of my body, particularly my left thigh. The cold magic flooded my veins, and the wounded area immediately went numb—so numb I couldn’t even feel that part of my body anymore. Or, more important, the pain pulsing through my thigh, and the blood pumping out of it with every beat of my heart. I sighed with relief.
    For years, my Ice magic had been the weaker of my two abilities, until I’d overcome a block associated with it. Now it was just as strong as my Stone power. Numbing my own limbs so I wouldn’t feel pain was one of the recent tricks that I’d learned how to do with my Ice magic—the one that had helped me kill Elektra LaFleur when she’d tried to shock me to death with her electrical power.
    LaFleur’s magic had been a bit of a fluke, as it wasn’t one of the four main areas—Air, Fire, Ice, and Stone—that most elementals were gifted in, that you had to be able to tap into to be considered a true elemental. Butmagic could take many forms, could manifest in all sorts of strange ways, and many folks were gifted in other areas, offshoots of the four main elements. Like water was an offshoot of Ice, and electricity was one of Air. The mechanics behind it all had never really concerned me. I was just glad I was still alive—and that LaFleur was rotting in whatever shallow, pauper’s grave Mab had dumped her in.
    I’d only beaten LaFleur because I was the rarest of elementals—someone who could control not only one but two elements. Ice and Stone, in my case. Connected powers, but each with their own unique quirks.
    My Stone magic had always been incredibly strong and let me do anything that I wanted to with the element, like hear the whispered vibrations in the rocks around me, make bricks fly out of a solid wall, or even turn my own skin into the equivalent of human marble.
    My Ice power was different, in that it actually let me create elemental Ice with my bare hands—Ice that I could turn into all