Elemental Assassin 02 - Web of Lies (6 page)

Fletcher Lane had lived in this house seventy-seven years. He’d been born here, and he probably would have died here, if he hadn’t been murdered by an Air elemental.

The old man had collected a lot of stuff in his time on this earth. Furniture, plates, tools, odd bits of metal, wood, glass. I hadn’t had the heart to clean any of it out yet. The air stilled smelled faintly of him—like sugar, spice, and vinegar swirled together.

But the kitchen, the kitchen was mine. Always had been, from the moment I’d moved in as a homeless teenager to when I’d taken up residence again several weeks ago after Fletcher’s funeral. I stepped inside and flipped on the light.

The kitchen was one of the largest rooms in the house, and a long, skinny island divided it from a small den that contained a television, stacks of books, a sofa, and a couple of recliners. Copper pots and pans hung from a metal rack over the island. A brand new, high-end stove, refrigerator, and freezer flanked half of the back wall, while a series of picture windows took up the other side. Several butcher blocks full of silverstone knives also populated the kitchen. On the island. On the counter. In the spice rack. Behind the microwave. You could never have too many knives lying around if you loved to cook like I did—or were a former assassin.

I poured myself a glass of lemonade, then wrapped my hand around the container and concentrated, reaching for the cool power deep inside myself. In addition to being a Stone elemental, I also had the rare talent of being able to manipulate another element—Ice. My Ice magic was far weaker, though. All I could really do with it was make small shapes, like cubes or chips. The occasional lock pick. A knife, when the need arose. But often it was the little things that saved you. A lesson I’d learned when battling Alexis James a few weeks ago. The Air elemental would have killed me, would have flayed me alive with her magic, if I hadn’t formed a jagged icicle with my power and cut her throat with it.

I reached for my cool Ice magic, and a moment later, small, snowflake-shaped Ice crystals spread out from my palm and fingertips. They frosted up the side of the glass, arced over the lip, and ran down into the lemonade. Then I held my hand palm up and reached for my magic again.

A cold, silver light flickered there, centered in the spider rune scar embedded in my palm. After a moment, the light coalesced into a couple of Ice cubes, which I dropped into the tart beverage.

I took my lemonade into the den, plopped down in one of the recliners, and put my socked feet up on the scarred coffee table. As always, my eyes flicked to a series of framed drawings propped up on the mantel over the fireplace. Three pencil drawings I’d done for one of my community college classes and another, more recent, one.

The first three drawings depicted a series of runes—the symbols of my dead family. A snowflake, the rune for the Snow family, and my mother, Eira’s, symbol, representing icy calm. A curling ivy vine for my older sister, Annabella, representing elegance. A delicate, intricate primrose for my younger sister, Bria, symbolizing beauty.

The fourth rune was shaped like a pig holding a platter of food. An exact rendering of the multicolored neon sign that hung over the entrance to the Pork Pit. Not a rune, not really, but I’d drawn it in honor of Fletcher Lane. The Pork Pit had been my home for the past seventeen years, since the murder of my mother and older sister. It and Fletcher were one and the same to me.

I held my lemonade up in a silent toast to the runes, to the family I’d lost long ago, and to Fletcher, whose death was still a raw, aching wound in my chest.

But the drawings on the mantel weren’t the only runes to be found in the house. I had a rune as well. Two of them, actually—embedded in my flesh.

I put down my lemonade, uncurled my palms, and looked at the silverstone scars that decorated my skin. A small circle surrounded by eight thin rays, one on either hand. My rune, representing a spider, the symbol for patience.

The rune had once been a medallion, an innocent charm strung on a silverstone chain—until the Fire elemental who’d murdered my family had tortured me by duct-taping the rune in between my hands and making me hold on to the metal while she superheated it. The silverstone had eventually melted into my hands, forever marking me with the rune. Forever branding me as the Spider in more ways than one.

And I wasn’t the only one who couldn’t forget the past.

I leaned forward, picked up a thick folder from the coffee table, and plucked a picture out of the file. A woman stared up at me. A beautiful creature, with blond hair, cornflower blue eyes, and rosy skin. But her eyes were cold and hard, her mouth a tight slash in her face that detracted from her delicate features. A rune hung off a chain around her neck. A primrose. The symbol for beauty.

Bria. My baby sister.

For seventeen years, I’d thought Bria had died that night, along with our mother and older sister. Thought that she’d been crushed to death by the falling stones of our burning house. That I’d caused her death by using my Stone magic to collapse the house in order to try to escape my torturers and save her.

But Fletcher Lane had sent me a final gift from beyond the grave—Bria’s photo. Proof that she was still alive somewhere out there in the world. The picture was the only nice thing in the folder. The rest of it dealt with my family’s murder. Police reports, autopsy photos, and all the speculation that had followed the brutal, unexpected murder of the Snow family.

“Why did you do it, Fletcher?” I murmured. “Why leave me the information about my family? About their murder? Why the picture of Bria? Where is she? How did you find her? When were you going to tell me about her?”

Silence.

Fletcher had gone where I couldn’t question him, and he was never coming back. All I had left was this folder of gruesome information and a single picture of Bria—neither of which had helped me locate my baby sister.

But Bria’s photo hadn’t been the only surprise in the folder. There had also been a slip of paper with a name on it.
Mab Monroe,
written and underlined twice in Fletcher’s tight, controlled handwriting. That was all that had been on the paper. I still didn’t know why Fletcher had written her name down and slipped it inside with the rest of the information. Was Mab Monroe the Fire elemental who’d killed my mother and older sister? If so, why? Why had she done it?

Mab Monroe might be powerful, but she’d also made a lot of enemies over the years. Back when I’d still been working as the assassin the Spider, Fletcher had gotten several requests a year from folks wanting her to be eliminated.

We’d both agreed it was an impossible job, that Mab had too many people around her, that she was just too strong in her magic to be taken down quietly by a single person. But that hadn’t stopped Fletcher from compiling all the information he could on the Fire elemental, her minions, and her organization. It had always seemed to me like Fletcher Lane had some secret interest in wanting Mab Monroe dead. A desire I’d never been able to figure out—unless it had something to do with me and my family’s murder.

It was all a great big circle of speculation. I just didn’t know the answers to anything, and I’d been driving myself crazy trying to figure them out. Frustrated and disgusted once again, I threw the folder and Bria’s picture down on the coffee table and got to my feet.

My sudden movements rattled the framed drawings on the mantel. Fletcher’s drawing—the one of the pig sign over the Pork Pit—slid down. I stared at it a moment.

Then I sighed.

The old man had compiled the information about my family’s murder for a reason. He just hadn’t told me what it was before he’d been murdered. It wasn’t his fault I wasn’t smart enough to figure it out—or find Bria. Something I wasn’t quite sure I even wanted to do. It had taken me years to put my family’s murder behind me. I didn’t know if I wanted to dig up the past again—or how Bria would react when she saw me and learned what I’d been doing all these years.

But nothing was going to be resolved tonight. Not tonight, maybe not ever. Fretting over it wouldn’t help me unravel the mysteries Fletcher Lane had left behind.

Sighing, I went over and ran my fingers over each one of the four drawings, pushing Fletcher’s crooked frame back up into its proper position. Then I turned and headed into the bathroom to wash off the day’s grease, grime, and blood.

4

“I’m going to kill this person,” I said in a cold voice.

“Slowly. Painfully. Really make it hurt. Really make him
feel
it.”

I slapped the morning edition of the
Ashland Trumpet
down onto the empty space beside the cash register.

There it was, on top of the B section. A story detailing the attempted robbery at the Pork Pit last night, along with a file shot of the outside of the restaurant. The headline read “Owner, cook thwart restaurant robbery” and ran all the way across the damn page in fifty-four-point type.

I drew in a breath, but the grease and spices that flavored the air from the morning’s cooking didn’t soothe me the way they usually did. I stared at the newspaper again, wondering how I’d been so sloppy as to get the Pork Pit plastered across the front of it.

Publicity was one thing I didn’t need. The very
last
thing I needed. I hadn’t advertised my services when I’d been a working assassin, and I certainly didn’t want to broadcast my whereabouts now that I was retired. Not that anyone had any reason to suspect that Gin Blanco, restaurant owner and part-time college student, was actually the renowned assassin the Spider. But still I worried.

Paranoia was good. It had kept me alive this long. No reason to abandon it now.

“Come on, Gin. It’s not that bad,” a deep, male voice cut into my brooding. “At least he made you out to be the hero instead of the villain. How often does that happen?”

I glared at Finnegan Lane, who sat on a stool across from me drinking a cup of chicory coffee. Finnegan looked every bit like the smooth-talking, money-swindling investment banker he was. A fitted gray suit draped over his solid frame, along with a matching wool coat. His starched, tailored sage shirt brightened his eyes, which were the slick green of a soda pop bottle. His walnutcolored hair curled over the collar of his coat. His thick locks had a sexy, stylish, rumpled look that had taken Finn at least ten minutes, two mirrors, and several squirts of product to obtain.

In addition to being my money man, Finnegan Lane was also the son of my mentor, Fletcher. Finn was like a brother to me and one of the few people I trusted since the old man’s murder. Finn was also my handler now, for lack of a better word. He didn’t like my decision to retire, as it robbed him of his lucrative fifteen percent handling fee, but he understood why I’d done it. That I was honoring Fletcher’s wishes. Besides, Finn had plenty of other less-than-legal schemes to keep him busy—when he wasn’t out fucking anything in a miniskirt or attending some high-society function and rubbing elbows with his clients who were even more devious, crooked, and dangerous than he was.

“Besides,” Finn continued in a matter-of-fact voice.

“You can’t kill the reporter. Nobody wants him dead, ergo, there’s no one to pay your rather substantial fee. Remember what Dad said—never work for nothing.”

Finn took another sip of his coffee. I drew in a breath, letting the rich caffeine fumes fill my lungs. Fletcher had drunk the same chicory coffee when he’d been alive, and the familiar roasted smell comforted me better than a warm hug. Finn was right. I couldn’t kill the reporter for doing his job. No matter how much trouble he’d just caused me with his story.

“All right, so I won’t kill him,” I said. “How about you ruin his credit instead? Call in his mortgage or something?”

“Mortgages,” Finn scoffed. “Dime a dozen in this city, penny ante, and not worth the trouble.”

He drained the rest of his coffee and stared at me.

“What about the kid, the would-be robber? Did you know he was Jonah McAllister’s son when you broke his wrist and threatened to slit him from groin to gills?”

“It wasn’t a threat so much as a promise.” I shrugged.

“And no. Didn’t matter to me who his daddy was then, and it doesn’t matter to me now.”

Finn swiveled around on his stool and looked at the rest of the restaurant. Just before noon on a Tuesday. Despite the gray clouds and cold, rainy weather outside, I should have had at least twenty customers by now, with more coming in every minute, all eager to get their barbecue fix on, and the phone ringing off the hook with takeout orders. Instead, a lone woman huddled in a booth in the back of the restaurant, out of sight of the storefront windows. A young girl who looked all of eighteen, nineteen, tops.

Nobody else sat at the long counter or in the booths.

Not a single person stood outside staring in through the windows, and no one had called for takeout. Not even my Tuesday regulars. Hell, nobody besides the girl had come in all morning, not even the mailman. He’d just slid the day’s bills through the mail slot and scurried on to the next stop on his route as though this were a house of lepers.

“And you wonder why you don’t have any customers,” Finn murmured. “Jonah McAllister’s put the word out that you are persona non grata. And I’m sure the story in the newspaper didn’t help matters, either. Nobody wants to eat someplace where they might not have cleaned up the blood yet.”

“What does McAllister think he’s going to do?” I asked. “He can’t keep people away forever. The food’s too good. Even if he could, I still wouldn’t starve.”

“Thanks to my years of wise monetary advice and stellar investing skills,” Finn not so humbly stated.

I rolled my eyes. “Yeah, thanks to your skills. If Jonah McAllister thinks a couple of days of lousy business are going to intimidate me into dropping the charges against his loser kid, then he needs to think some more.”

“Jonah McAllister doesn’t know who he’s dealing with,” Finn replied. “If he knew you were the assassin the Spider, he’d probably just borrow a couple of Mab Monroe’s giants to try to kill you before you could testify against his son.”