Elemental Assassin 05 - Spider's Revenge

moment, Owen nodded.
    “As for you,” I said, stabbing my finger at Finn. “You will go to Fletcher’s house and stay with Bria tonight. Just in case any of our bounty hunters decide to show up there for whatever reason.”
    Owen going with me to the party would be bad enough. I didn’t want Finn in the line of fire too. I couldn’t bear it if anything happened to either one of them, but I’d already failed to save Fletcher from being brutally tortured and murdered in this very restaurant. I didn’t want Finn to meet the same bad fate that his father had.
    Finn grinned at me. “It will be my pleasure to keep tabs on sweet, sweet Bria.”
    His lecherous tone made me sigh once more. “I dohope that the two of you can keep your hands off each other, at least until after I kill Mab.”
    “It will be tough,” Finn admitted. “Given how crazy your sister is about me.”
    I snorted. “You mean given how much she’d like to slap that smug smile off your face.”
    “Every woman I meet wants to do that at one point or another, but most of them get over it pretty quick,” Finn said, dismissing my concern with an airy, arrogant wave of his hand.
    I shook my head. Owen laughed, but there was a hollow note in his chuckle, just the way there was in mine. All three of us knew that we were about to undertake the Spider’s most dangerous mission yet—to kill Mab Monroe in a room full of people and get away with it. I didn’t know if I could do it, if I could kill Mab, but I was sure as hell going to try.
    And probably die later on tonight for my trouble.

Finn and Owen finished their food and left to start getting things ready, but I stayed at the Pork Pit with Sophia. I kept right on working—cooking, dishing up food, waiting tables, wiping them down after customers left. But my mind was already focused on tonight and the things that I would need to do to get close enough to Mab to kill her—and then get away clean afterward. Assuming, of course, that the Fire elemental didn’t just blast me straight to hell with her magic. But at this point, I was determined to at least try to think positive.
    I recognized what I was doing, of course. The mindset that I was getting into. It was something Fletcher had taught me—how to leave myself, Gin Blanco, completely behind and morph into the cold, hard entity known as the Spider, whose only desire was getting to her target and whose aim was always deadly and true. Tonight, I knew that I’d need that separation, that mental toughness,more than I ever had before. Especially if I wanted to live to see the dawn.
    Around six o’clock, though, I got the first of what would turn out to be many nasty little surprises during the night—when Ruth Gentry and Sydney strolled into the Pork Pit.
    The door opened, making the bell chime, and I looked up from my paperback copy of
Medea
. The two of them stepped inside, and Sydney pulled the door shut behind them, cutting off the cold air that blasted into the restaurant. How polite of her.
    While the girl fiddled with the door, Gentry’s pale blue eyes scanned the Pit, taking in everything from the clean, worn booths to the blue and pink pig tracks that covered the shiny floor. There was nothing overtly threatening in Gentry’s gaze, but I got the sense that she was making a mental checklist. Doors, windows, number of people inside, who might make trouble, who might make a good meat shield. It was probably the same little ritual that she did whenever she went somewhere new. Just like I did.
    Gentry was the only one of the bounty hunters who’d seen me and lived to tell the tale, but I wasn’t worried about being recognized or Gentry identifying my voice. I’d been wearing a ski mask the last time we’d met in the dark, snowy woods that ringed Mab’s mansion, and we’d spent more time fighting than talking. Hell, if Gentry could somehow connect that person to Gin Blanco as I was now in my jeans, long-sleeved T-shirt, and blue work apron, then the bounty hunter deserved to nab me. Still, I wasn’t going to be so foolish as to not keep an eye on her.
    “Code red,” I murmured to Sophia, walking past her to get some menus. “Bounty hunters at two o’clock. The ones who winged me the other night.”
    Sophia grunted, and her black eyes cut in their direction, but the dwarf didn’t stop ladling up bowls full of baked beans for the current crop of customers. Still, I knew that Sophia had my back. If Gentry had come here looking