Elemental Assassin 05 - Spider's Revenge

Not many people bothered with such things above the second floor, since most folks weren’t brave or crazy enough to climb any higher, especially on a snowy night like this one.
    I wasn’t particularly brave or crazy, but I was determined to kill Mab.
    A strong gust of wind slapped and then backhandedthe mansion, screaming in my ears and hurling more frozen snow off the eaves and onto me. The chunks punched my body before disappearing over the side of the roof and dropping down into the eerie silver dark of the night.
    I grunted at the hard, stinging impacts. As an elemental, I could have used my Stone magic to protect myself, could have tapped into my power and made my skin hard as marble so that the rocklike wads of snow would bounce off my body like bullets off Superman’s chest. But elementals can sense when others of their ilk are using their powers, and I didn’t want to give Mab any hint that I was here.
    At least, not before I’d killed her.
    By this point, I’d worked my way up to the sixth floor, where the mansion’s blueprints had indicated there was a particularly large dining room. According to some chatter that my foster brother, Finnegan Lane, had picked up from his various spies, Mab was hosting a fancy dinner party this evening. Finn hadn’t been able to determine what the party was for or even who had been invited, but that didn’t much matter. Mab was getting dead tonight—I didn’t care who was in the room with her.
    I’d been in position for more than an hour now, outside the dining room window, lying flat on a part of the roof that plateaued before sloping down at a severe angle and dropping away to the ground far below. The blowing snow and murky shadows, combined with the glare of the lights inside, made me all but invisible to anyone looking out through the window.
    But really, the worst part of the night wasn’t the guards,the cold, the snow, or even the icy, treacherous climb—it was having to listen to the stones around me.
    People’s emotions, actions, and feelings sink into their environment over time, especially into the stone around them. As a Stone elemental, I could hear those emotional vibrations in whatever form the element took around me, from loose pebbles underfoot to the brick of a building to a marble sculpture. The sounds, the murmurs, the whispers that reverberated through the stones let me know what had happened in a particular spot, what sorts of people had been there, and all the dark, ugly, twisted things that they’d done in the meantime—or who might be lurking around in the here and now, trying to get the drop on me.
    Fire, heat, pain, death. That’s what the stones of Mab’s mansion murmured of, punctuated by sly, smirking, confident whispers of power and money—both things that the Fire elemental had in abundance. But the most disturbing thing, the sound that made me grind my teeth, was the cackling of maniacal madness that rippled through the gray stones. Wave after wave of it, as though the rock had somehow been tortured until it was just as broken, burned, and dead as Mab’s many victims.
    After a minute of listening to the stones’ insane, wailing cries, I’d blocked out the damned disturbing noise and had gotten on with more important matters, like checking my weapons. As always, I carried five silverstone knives—one up either sleeve, one against the small of my back, and two more tucked into my boots. The knives were my weapons of choice on most jobs because they were sharp, strong, and almost unbreakable. Just like me.
    But Mab was a Fire elemental, which meant that she could create, control, and manipulate fire the same way that I could stone. And Mab wasn’t just any
mere
Fire elemental—she was rumored to have more raw magic, more raw power, than any elemental born in the last five hundred years. She could easily fry me alive with her magic before I got close enough to even think about plunging my silverstone knives into her burning black heart.
    I’d decided to play it smart and keep a healthy distance between us, just in case things didn’t work out exactly as I’d planned tonight. So I’d brought another weapon along with me—a crossbow. It looked like your typical crossbow—heavy, substantial, deadly—made even more so by the rifle scope that I’d mounted above the trigger and the six-inch-long, barbed bolt already in firing position. Since it was made out of silverstone, a particularly tough magical metal, the bolt