Elemental Assassin 05 - Spider's Revenge

was a red slash in her pale face, although bits of silver glitter glinted in her black hair.
    I sighed. “Look, I’m sorry that I went off the reservation without you, all of you. But we all know that my getting that close to Mab was strictly a solo job. I didn’t want either of you to get hurt if I missed.”
    Sophia grunted again and shrugged her shoulders, while Finn’s face softened just a bit. Then he sniffed, and I knew that there would be no sweet-talking him out of his snit. Finn had built up a good bit of righteous indignation, and he was determined to make me suffer through it.
    “While we appreciate your concern for our safety, we’re a team, Gin,” Finn lectured me. “We always have been. You need to remember that because it’s the only way that you’re going to kill Mab—by all of us working together. Not by your taking off by yourself with no one to watch your back.”
    I gave my foster brother a noncommittal shrug. “Not much chance of that happening, since I missed her last night. I imagine that she’s upped her security considerably since then.”
    “Mmm.”
    This time, Finn was the one who was noncommittal. He reached down and took a sip from the mug of chicory coffee sitting on the counter in front of him. The warm, fragrant aroma of the caffeine brew filled my nose, making me think of Finn’s father, Fletcher. The old man had drunk the same coffee in the same copious amounts before his murder as his son did. Even now, almost six months later, I still missed Fletcher. Missed seeing the old man leaning behind the counter at the Pork Pit, reading his latest book and telling me about the newest job he’d booked for me as the Spider.
    There at the end, right before he was tortured to death by an Air elemental, Fletcher had wanted me to retire, to
live in the daylight a little
, as he had so eloquently called it. After I’d avenged the old man’s death, I’d taken his advice and retired from being the Spider. At least, I’d tried to. I wasn’t having much success so far. I might not kill people for money anymore, but I’d still managed to get myself into a whole lot of trouble in the meantime. Mostly by trying to help other people, good, innocent folks, dealwith certain problems that had only one solution in a city like Ashland—one that involved my silverstone knives and someone losing a whole lot of blood. Permanently.
    Finn took another sip of his coffee and stared at me, knowledge glinting in his sly green gaze. I rolled my eyes, walked behind the counter, and pulled a blue work apron on over my jeans and long-sleeved T-shirt.
    “Oh, just go ahead and spill it,” I said. “You know you want to tell me every little thing that you know about what’s going on with Mab since I didn’t manage to kill her last night.”
    A pleased, smirking grin spread over Finn’s face. “Why, I thought you’d never ask.”
    He took another sip of his chicory coffee before he launched into his story.
    “So I’ve had my feelers out all day,” he said. “According to my sources, Mab’s plenty pissed and some say even scared. Apparently no one’s ever gotten that close to putting her lights out for good.”
    “Fletcher did train me to be the best,” I said in a not-so-humble voice.
    Finn saluted me with his mug. “That he did, and that you are. Which is why Mab was so understandably shaken up. Well, that and the fact that you blew that giant’s brains out all over her face. Apparently Mab was quite the mess.”
    A cold, hard smile curved my lips. Poor little Mab, covered in blood. I only hoped that next time it would actually be her own.
    “Anyway,” Finn continued, “rumor has it that she’s holed up in her mansion. But the weird thing is that shehasn’t brought in any more reinforcements. At least, none that I’ve heard of.”
    “What about the people who were there last night? The ones who were having dinner with Mab? Who were they?”
    I told my foster brother about everything that had happened, including going up against Ruth Gentry, Sydney, and the other strange characters Mab had invited into her inner sanctum.
    “Weird,” Finn said. “None of my sources said anything about who the guests were. I’ll keep digging and see what I can come up with.”
    I nodded. If anyone could find out about those people, it was Finn. My foster brother had more spies in more places at his disposal than the CIA.
    Finn had already finished a late lunch of a barbecue pork sandwich, baked