Elemental Assassin 05 - Spider's Revenge

a little chat about Detective Bria Coolidge. Starting with who those men were and what they wanted with her.”
    Jenkins stared at me, his hazel eyes dark and sullen in his face. Underneath his wispy goatee, his lips turned down into an exaggerated, almost comical pout.
    “You cost me a payday,” he whined. “A big one. I was going to get ten grand for turning on that cop.”
    I didn’t tell him that cop happened to be my sister and that he’d just buried himself for the promise of that elusive ten grand. Instead, I cut him. Not deep, but there was enough of a sting in the wound to remind him of what I’d done to the dwarven mobsters in the parking lot—and that I wasn’t just some chick with a knife who looked good in black.
    “Start talking,” I said in a mild voice, digging the silverstone blade a little deeper into his neck. “Or I’ll peel the skin from your throat like it’s an apple. Now, why did you sell out Detective Coolidge tonight? What did those men want with her—”
    “Bounty!” Jenkins screamed, cutting me off. “There’s a bounty on the cop! And one on the Spider too!”
    My eyes narrowed. A bounty. Another fucking bounty. I should have known, should have guessed. After all, Mab had hired Elektra LaFleur, one of the best assassins around, to come to Ashland to kill me. No, the bounty on my head, on the Spider’s head, didn’t surprise me. But why would there be a price on Bria? Why now? Had Mab finally gotten tired of knowing that my sister was alive? Did the Fire elemental still think that Bria was the onewho was supposedly destined to kill her? The Snow sister with both Ice and Stone magic?
    “So Mab wants the Spider and a cop dead. Tell me something that I don’t know.” I used my knife to make a sawing motion against his neck, slowly drawing the blade through the blood already running down his throat, but not cutting him again just yet. “And tell me quick.”
    For a second, confusion filled Jenkins’s eyes, as if I’d said something wrong.
    “What?” I snapped. “What aren’t you telling me?”
    He started to shake his head, then thought better of it, given the knife. “No, that’s not what’s going down at all. Sure, Mab wants the Spider dead, but not the cop. She wants the cop brought to her alive.”
    There was only one reason I could think of that Mab would want Bria captured alive—leverage. To use my sister against me. To flush me out into the open so she could kill us both. So the Fire elemental had figured it out then. She knew that the Spider was really Genevieve Snow—or at least suspected it enough to want to get her hands on Bria to confirm the theory.
    Fuck. Just…
fuck
. Jenkins’s words spread through me like my own elemental Ice had coated the alley floor—cold, swift, uncaring. My heart clenched with dread and fear for my sister, but I didn’t let any of what I was feeling show in my hard face. Instead, I dug the blade even deeper into Jenkins’s neck, encouraging him to start talking—fast.
    “Tell me everything that you know,” I growled. “Before my hand slips even more than it already has.”
    “It was—it was just a job, you know?” he sputtered.“I’ve been laying low these past few days, what with all the bounty hunters in town.”
    “Bounty hunters?”
    Jenkins nodded as much as he could, given the knife at his throat. “Yeah, yeah, bounty hunters. Mab’s declared open season on the Spider. The last I heard was that Mab was offering five million to whoever brought the Spider to her dead. The number goes up to ten million if you manage to bring her in alive, but everyone would be pretty happy if she was dead. It’s not worth the extra risk, ya know? I could spend five million just as easy as I could ten.”
    I didn’t have to encourage him any more. The thief started babbling on then about how dangerous the Spider was and how bounty hunters from all over the country had come to town just to look for her. Well, I supposed that accounted for all the extra fights, murders, and violence recently. Inviting bounty hunters to a city as dark, gritty, and corrupt as Ashland was like splashing gasoline on top of an already roaring fire. Someone was bound to get burned.
    I thought about all the hard cases that I’d seen getting ready to dine with Mab last night, and the way Ruth Gentry and Sydney had more or less been trying to take me alive. So that’s who they all were then, bounty hunters come to Ashland to collect on the