Elemental Assassin 05 - Spider's Revenge

standing, even though everything else around them had collapsed and crumbled long ago. I didn’t remember our having been particularly rich, but we must have been because the house stretched out and out and out. Or perhaps that was just because it had all been reduced to rubble.
    My childhood home looked untouched by human hands, as if no one had been near the place since it had been destroyed. Maybe they hadn’t, since Fletcher had bought the land so soon after my family’s murder. Besides, not many people wanted to linger in a place where such atrocities had been committed. Even people without magic could sense those sorts of crimes, in the primal way that animals can sniff out fear, danger, and evil in others.
    The mansion—or what was left of it—huddled in the middle of a dense section of the forest right in between Fletcher’s house and Jo-Jo’s beauty salon. Ridges covered with pine trees surrounded the mansion on three sides before rising up and rolling away into the rest of the mountainous landscape. Snow-covered rubble stretched out as far as the eye could see, rocks piled on top of more rocks. But the years had taken their toll, and the surrounding forest had made inroads into reclaiming the area. A few small pine trees had sprung up in what I remembered to be the downstairs living room, while weeds and winter wildflowers wound like ribbons through the black, jagged cracks in the stone foundation.
    As I stood there, what little was left of the sun disappeared, replaced by heavy gray storm clouds. In less than a minute, twilight cloaked the land, and snowflakes started drifting down from the sky. They covered the messin front of me in a fresh, white coat of snow, hiding what I could see of the ruins.
    But even now, all these years later, I could still hear the stones.
    They growled with dark, ugly, angry mutters, the remnants of my primal scream of elemental rage, pain, and fear. That one scream, that one burst of magic, had brought down the whole house. Even now, the stones still reverberated with the sound, so much so that it almost seemed to me like they were still vibrating, still ripping themselves apart one molecule at a time.
    For some reason, the mutters comforted me.
    Because the stones were still angry at what had been done to them, at what had been done to me, the elemental who felt such kinship with them, who had so much power and control over them. I closed my eyes and concentrated on the stones, listening to them, embracing their rage, letting it fill me up, and making it my own once more. It took only a moment for the stones’ mutters to grow sharper, blacker, harsher. Stones never forgot when something traumatic happened on top of or most especially to them. Emotions, actions, and feelings might fade over time, but they never truly vanished. The stones sensed that I was near—the woman who had lashed out at them before—and that I was back now for a specific purpose. I reveled in the memory of their anger—because it was my anger as well, at everything that Mab had done to my family. And I knew that I would need it now even more than I had that awful night so long ago.
    I walked forward, my boots crunching in the snow and scraping against the cold rocks underneath. I treadedslowly, carefully, making no sudden movements, not doing anything that would jeopardize Bria in any way.
    Or give the bounty hunters who were watching me an excuse to put a bullet in my head.
    I could see them, crouched here and there among the rubble. Men and women with rifles, crossbows, and other weapons, every one of them trained on me, ready to pull the trigger if I did anything stupid. Fools. They were the ones who were being stupid, because they all should have unloaded on me with everything they had the second that I was in range.
    But Mab wanted to kill me herself and most especially wanted to gloat in my face while she did it. Her first mistake—and the one that might just finally lead to her own death.
    It took me several minutes to pick my way through the rubble to the back side of the mansion. Along the way, I spotted more than a few broken bits of my childhood hidden in the snow and rocks. A half-melted doll’s head. A charred teddy bear. Shards of glass and small figurines from my mother’s snow globe collection. The ruination only hardened my resolve to do what needed to be done here tonight.
    Finally, though, I stepped into the courtyard itself. It looked just the way I remembered it—the