Elemental Assassin 05 - Spider's Revenge

then she can use Bria to make me come to her.”
    Nobody spoke.
    I drew in a breath. “So work your contacts, Finn. The second that Mab leaves her mansion, I want to know about it. I don’t care where she’s going, one of her businesses, out to dinner, even to the fucking mall. Wherever she ends up at, I plan to be there waiting for her, knives ready.”
    Finn nodded, already pulling his cell phone out of his suit jacket to start making calls. Jo-Jo reached over and took my hand, her fingers warm against my palm.
    “It’s going to be okay, Gin,” the dwarf murmured. “You’ll see.”
    I thought about how close I’d come to losing Bria tonight. How close Mab, her giants, and her bounty hunters had come to nabbing me at her mansion. How many times in the last few months that the Fire elemental or one of her minions had just missed killing me. I didn’t say anything, but I squeezed the dwarf’s fingers with my own, trying to reassure myself as much as her.
    Finn promised to contact every single one of his sources to see what they had to say about the bounty hunters, Mab, and anything else that might be relevant or helpful.Then Bria came back into the kitchen, and I drove the two of us over to Fletcher’s house. Sophia had already gotten rid of the old clunker that I’d used to escape from Mab’s mansion last night, hauling it off to some junkyard where it belonged. Bria and I had met Finn at Jo-Jo’s earlier, and since he’d driven the three of us over to Northern Aggression, I’d left my regular car at the dwarf’s house.
    Bria and I didn’t speak on the ride over, although she grimaced and grabbed the door handle as my silver Benz churned up the driveway. Couldn’t blame her for that. The steep, twisting path still rattled my bones every time I drove up it.
    My Benz crested the top of the ridge, and Fletcher’s house came into view. A lone light burned like a firefly over the front door, dimly outlining the sprawling structure. White clapboard, brown brick, and gray stone joined together to make up the building, along with a tin roof, black shutters, and blue eaves. You couldn’t see much of the odd mishmash of styles and materials in the darkness, but I knew the lines and texture of the ramshackle house as well as I knew my own face.
    “Home, sweet home,” I murmured, stopping the car.
    Bria stared out the window, peering into the shadows that covered the yard like puddles of gray ink oozing over the snow. Despite the fact that we’d been getting reacquainted with each other, my sister had never been up to Fletcher’s house before. We always met in public places, like the Pork Pit or Northern Aggression, usually with Finn, Xavier, Roslyn, or one of the Deveraux sisters in attendance. Self-imposed chaperones to keep the long, awkward pauses to a minimum.
    There were no chaperones, no safety nets tonight, and this place was as personal as it got for me. I’d loved Fletcher like a father, and his house was a natural extension of the old man himself, as much a part of him and his legacy to me as the Pork Pit was.
    We got out of the car. It was after three now, but thanks to the snow, a sort of pearl gray twilight softened the cold edges of everything and made it seem lighter than it really was. In front of the house, snow crusted the flat lawn before the ridge fell away into a series of frozen, jagged cliffs. Snow and ice covered the gravel in the driveway as well, but I could still hear the stone’s murmurs. Low, steady, and as quiet as the icy landscape around us.
    No footprints marred the smoothness of the snow, and no sense of excitement, urgency, or dark desires rippled through the stones under my boots. No one had been near the house tonight. Good. That meant that Mab and her city full of bounty hunters hadn’t unearthed my true identity, hadn’t discovered that Gin Blanco was really the Spider—yet.
    I led Bria over to the front door, which was made out of solid black granite. Thick veins of silverstone also swirled through the hard stone here and in other strategic places around the house, while bars made out of the magical metal covered the windows.
    Bria let out a low, appreciative whistle. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen that much silverstone in a single door before. You’d have to have a hell of a lot of magic to bust through that much of it.”
    “Remember what I said about easily defendable? Well, this is it,” I said, unlocking the door and stepping inside.
    I flipped