Elemental Assassin 05 - Spider's Revenge

she’d made to me over the phone, Mab wasn’t letting Bria go or me walk out of the courtyard alive. Not unless I made her—not unless Finn, Owen, and the others made her. My part in this was to keep talking and taunting her. Every second I did that was another second that Finn and the others had to slip out of their hiding places in the woods, quietly take out the bounty hunters stationed on the perimeter, and get into position at the edge of the courtyard.
    Buying my friends that precious time meant putting on a show for all those in attendance. So instead of staring at Mab, I turned around in a slow circle, looking at each one of the giants and bounty hunters gathered around me. My gaze drifted from one face to another. Most of them stared back at me head-on. After all, it wasn’t like I was dealing with choirboys and schoolgirls here. These were professionals who were just as hard and ruthless as I was. But a few shied away from my eyes, while othersdropped their heads entirely. Their reluctance to even look at me gave me some hope that my friends would be able to break their ranks and morale long enough to rescue Bria.
    “I’m giving everyone here a chance,” I said. “Walk away right now, and you can live. I won’t come after you afterward. I know what Mab’s like. How she’s forced some of you to be here against your will. How she’s threatened your wives, kids, whatever. I won’t hold that against you, not if you leave right now and never look back.”
    My harsh words echoed through the courtyard, out into the remains of the ruined house, and even into the forest beyond. The stones under my feet muttered at my voice, recognizing it and the hidden elemental power in my words. The stones didn’t want to negotiate, they didn’t want to let anyone go. No, the stones wanted to lash out, to crush whoever came close and grind their bones into dust, just like I’d done to them once upon a time. Just the way I wanted to do to Mab right now. But some small part of me insisted that I give the others a chance first—which was more than they or the Fire elemental would ever do for me.
    There were no takers, of course. Everyone remained where they were, weapons at the ready. Couldn’t blame them for that. After all, I was the one seemingly twisting out here in the snow and wind all by my lonesome. Not for long, though. Not for long.
    Mab let out a little peal of laughter when no one took me up on my offer. “Oh, please. You don’t actually expect to walk out of here alive, do you, Genevieve?”
    The sound of her saying my name again, my
real
name, made that little primal voice in the back of my head start muttering the way that it always did whenever I was around the Fire elemental.
Enemy, enemy, enemy…
    I shrugged. “It seems to me like you’re the one not expecting to walk out of here alive, considering all the men that you brought along with you. Admit it, Mab. You’re scared of me. You always have been. Deep down, there’s a part of you that realizes that I might be just that much better than you, that much stronger than you. That’s why you killed my mother and older sister. That’s why you tried to kill me and Bria. Because you’ve always been scared of us and what we could do to you. At the end of the day, you’re nothing but a bully and a fucking coward.”
    Rage flickered in Mab’s eyes, more rage than I had ever seen her show before. I’d hit a little too close to home with my words, but the Fire elemental would never admit it. Not even now, at the end.
    “I killed your mother because I wanted to,” Mab snarled. “Because she was an arrogant, pompous bitch who took everything that I ever wanted, including your father, Tristan.”
    I’d once heard Elliot Slater say that Mab had pursued my father because she’d wanted to pass his Stone magic on to any kids that they might have had together, even though that wouldn’t have been a certainty. But my father had loved my mother and chosen her instead. Tristan had died when I was a child, supposedly in a car accident, and I barely remembered him.
    “Our families have hated each other for years, Genevieve. We’ve been at war for decades,” Mab continued.
    “And why is that?” I asked, genuinely curious.
    Mab smiled. “My family has always had certain… ideas about how things in Ashland should be run. And your family has always opposed us, being the goody-goodies that they inherently are. Ice elementals. Always so weak. But I