Tangled Threads

10

Two hours later, I drove my Benz up a long, steep driveway lined on either side by thick stands of pine trees. Gravel churned under my wheels, but eventually my car crested the hill and rolled out onto the flat plateau on top of this particular ridge, one of many in the Appalachian Mountains that cut through Ashland like jagged teeth on a saw.

I stopped my car in front of the large, three-story clapboard house that perched on top of the steep hill. Gray stone, red clay, and brown brick all mishmashed together on the sprawling structure, along with a tin roof, black shutters, and blue eaves. At first glance, it looked like the house wasn’t quite finished or perhaps that someone had run out of building materials and had just decided to use whatever was handy. Still, the uneven shapes and styles pleased me, because this was my home now.

The enormous house had been in Fletcher Lane’s family for years, and the old man had left it to me in his will, along with a sizable amount of cash. Not that I’d really needed either one, as I’d put plenty of my own money away for a rainy day. The ramshackle structure was much too large for just me to live in by myself. Half a dozen people could have comfortably roomed inside and never run into each other if they didn’t want to. I probably should have boarded up the structure and moved out into a smaller apartment or town house in the city, somewhere closer to the Pork Pit. That’s where I’d been living before Fletcher had been murdered. But the house was one of the few things that I had left of the old man, and I planned on staying here as long as it — and I — were both still standing.

Despite my sentimental feelings, I still parked my car and approached the front door with my usual, wary caution. LaFleur might not have trapped me the other night down at the docks, but that didn’t mean the assassin wasn’t still looking for me. If her resources were as good as mine were, she’d find me — sooner rather than later. And then we’d dance. But I wasn’t about to give her the upper hand by doing something sloppy, like not paying attention to my surroundings. Not even here, at my sanctuary from the world.

As I walked toward the house, my eyes scanned over what I could see of the yard in the darkness. The smooth lawn stretched out for about a hundred feet before nose-diving into a series of jagged cliffs that even some mountain goats would have had a hard time climbing. Heavy clouds obscured the silver moon and twinkling stars tonight and cast the landscape in almost coal black darkness, especially up here on this high, forested ridge. The lights of Ashland gleamed in the valley below, like fireflies hovering across the surface of a quiet, murky pond.

I also cocked my head to the side and reached out with my elemental magic, listening to the stones around me — everything from the gravel under my feet in the driveway to the falling cliffs off to my right to the brick that made up part of the house itself.

The stones only whispered with their low, usual murmurs, telling me of the cold whip of the wind around the ridge, the soft scurry of animals to and fro, and the slow, crumbling passage of time. No one had been near the house all day. I would have sensed the vibration, the disturbance, in the stones otherwise, especially if it had been someone like LaFleur here to murder me in my own bed. Dark intentions like that always found their way into their stone surroundings, and the blacker your desire, the sooner it happened.

Good. I was in no mood to kill unwanted company. Not after everything that had happened tonight. Not when I knew that there was a young girl out there somewhere who might be dying at this very moment. While Jo-Jo had tucked Vinnie into bed in one of her guest rooms, Finn and Xavier had gone over to the bartender’s house to confirm whether Natasha had actually been kidnapped. The news wasn’t good. They’d found the baby-sitter tied up and stuffed in a closet. She’d told them the same story Brown had spouted at the park — that some men had stormed in, roughed her up, grabbed Natasha, and left. I had no doubt that the men had taken the little girl straight to the mysterious new nightclub that Mab was building — and all the potential horrors that awaited there.

But there was nothing that I could do to help Natasha tonight, not when I didn’t even know where to start looking for her. If she made it until morning, if Finn found out something useful from his sources, things might be different. But not tonight.

Once I was certain that everything was as it should be, I stepped up onto the porch and approached the front door. Given the many additions that had been slapped onto the house over the years, bits and pieces of stone ran throughout the entire structure, including the front door, which was composed of black granite so hard that even a giant would have a tough time punching his way through it. As added insurance against unwanted intruders, rich veins of silverstone also swirled through the stone.

The magical metal would absorb a fair amount of elemental power before it began to soften, weaken, and melt, which should give me plenty of time to be somewhere else other than a sitting duck inside waiting for whoever was huffing and puffing and blowing down my door. It would take someone with major elemental magic to get through that much silverstone. Not the kind of person that I wanted coming inside the house and catching me unawares.

My security check done, I unlocked the door and stepped into the house.

I toed off my bloody boots just inside the door, then padded in my wool socks to the kitchen in the back. So many rooms had been added to the house that it was a bit like navigating through a labyrinth, except there was no Minotaur in the middle waiting to gobble me up. Halls crisscrossed this way and that, while even more passageways curved around them and led to completely new areas — or dead ends. You could wander around in here for days and still not find every room, something that was a tactical advantage for me, should someone unsavory ever come calling after-hours.

I was too tired to even think about going into the kitchen and making myself something to snack on, even though it had been hours since I’d grabbed a quick dinner at the Pork Pit. After the night I’d had, I should have showered, gone to bed, and rested up for what was sure to be a long day of searching for Natasha tomorrow.

But instead, I found myself in the den, the way that I always seemed to late at night when I had something on my mind and trouble dogging my footsteps.

The den was a comfortable room, with a couple of recliners and a worn sofa that had been around so long that each section was perfectly grooved to fit someone’s ass. I plopped down on the sofa, letting my tired body sink into the thick, soft cushions, and propped my socked feet up on the scarred coffee table.

As always, my eyes lifted up to the mantel on the fireplace across from me — and the series of framed drawings that were propped up there.

I’d done the first three drawings a while back for a class that I’d taken over at Ashland Community College. I was one of the college’s perpetual students, taking any and every course that appealed to me, especially those that dealt with cooking or literature, two of my passions. One of the projects in the art class that I’d audited had been to create a series of drawings, all different but linked together by a common theme.

I’d drawn a series of runes — the symbols of my dead family.

A snowflake, a curling ivy vine, and a primrose. The symbols for icy calm, elegance, and beauty. The snowflake had belonged to my mother, Eira, being the main rune for the Snow family, the one that had identified us to other elementals. The other two symbols had been fashioned into medallions that my sisters had worn. The ivy vine for my older sister, Annabelle, and the primrose for my younger sister, Bria.

But the fourth rune was relatively new. I’d done it only a couple of months ago, after Fletcher had been tortured to death by an Air elemental. That drawing 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 exactly, but I’d drawn it in honor of the old man. Fletcher had been the only father I’d ever really known, and I’d wanted to honor him, just the way I had the rest of my family.

I stared at the runes for another moment. Then I rubbed my hands over my face, took my feet off the coffee table, leaned forward, and picked up one of two manila folders lying there. The first file had been on the table for weeks now, since it dealt with my sister Bria, but I’d retrieved the second folder earlier today from Fletcher’s cluttered office in another part of the house. That was the one I was interested in tonight.

I flipped open the folder and stared at the pages of information — everything that Fletcher had ever been able to dig up on the assassin known as LaFleur. I’d seen her electrical elemental magic for myself the other night, of course, but information was its own kind of power, and I wanted to be as prepared as possible when the two of us finally danced.

Besides, I was willing to bet that wherever Natasha was, whatever dark hole she’d been stashed in, LaFleur wouldn’t be too far away from it. When I found the little girl, I’d find the assassin. And then, I’d kill her — or die trying.

So I leaned back against the sofa, put the file in my lap, and started reading.

I read through all the information on LaFleur, absorbing every fact, tidbit, rumor, and sheer speculation that Fletcher had been able to piece together about the other assassin. Of course, what I was really looking for was any sign of weakness, anything that I could use against the other assassin to kill her before she killed me.

But there wasn’t anything in the file to give me any hope of accomplishing that. At least, not without getting dead myself.

The file started out by listing all of LaFleur’s vital stats. Height: Five foot two. Weight: One hundred fifteen pounds. Black hair. Green eyes. Asian heritage. Rumored to have some sort of tattoo on her, probably in the shape of a rune. Cliché, yes, surprising, no. As a general rule, assassins liked symbols and catchy nicknames almost as much as magic users did.

Fletcher had also pegged her age at thirty-three and concluded that LaFleur was actually part of a family of elite assassins, all of whom sold their services to the highest bidder. Included was a sheet about a brother that LaFleur supposedly had, an assassin just like her. But since the page just referenced another one of Fletcher’s files, instead of spelling out the information for me here, I didn’t get up and go into the old man’s office to look for it. LaFleur’s brother, whoever the hell he might be, wasn’t important at this point.

The bottom line was that killing people was in LaFleur’s blood, as much a part of who and what she was as my spider rune scars were to me. Interesting to know, but not particularly helpful when it came to actually taking her down.

So I moved on to the pages that dealt with LaFleur’s accomplishments as an assassin. LaFleur had killed dozens and dozens of people over the years, everyone from common street thugs to the richest, most heavily guarded businessmen. As far as Fletcher knew, she had a one hundred percent kill rate and the exorbitant fees to match.

When success was guaranteed, you could charge whatever you wanted to for it. According to the file, LaFleur pulled down north of three million for a simple assassination. Depending on who the target was, how hard it would be to get to him, and how much someone wanted it to look like an accident, the price went up from there. Even during my heyday as the Spider, I’d only topped out at around two and a half mil myself.

“Bitch,” I muttered and kept reading.

LaFleur was skilled with all sorts of weapons and was rumored to be even better at hand-to-hand combat. Naturally. She wouldn’t have been much of an assassin if she couldn’t kill people six ways from Sunday — and then some.

However, instead of her fists or other weapons, LaFleur mainly used her electrical magic to kill. Given the number of people she’d taken out with it over the years, Fletcher had concluded that she was an extremely strong elemental — far stronger than the vast majority of those who could tap into the more common areas, like Air, Fire, Ice, and Stone. Wonderful.

But that was LaFleur’s trademark — electrocuting people and then leaving a single white orchid behind on their smoking corpses. Just like she’d done to the dwarf that she’d fried down at the docks the other night in front of me and Finn.

I wondered about the orchid, though. Lots of assassins left things behind to mark their kills. Names and runes, mostly. But even among assassins, an orchid was a strange thing to use. Mainly because they were so delicate and so expensive. Why waste all that money signing your kills when you could just draw something on the nearest wall in your victim’s blood? But I’d given up trying to figure out other assassins a long time ago. Hell, I couldn’t even figure myself out most of the time.

I read through the rest of the file, but nothing jumped out at me. LaFleur was skilled, efficient, and deadly, just like I was. Smart, ruthless, and brutal, just like I was. And she had elemental magic, just like I did. All of which meant that it was fifty-fifty which one of us would win against the other in the end. And with LaFleur having access to Mab Monroe’s men to help back her up, well, let’s just say that it didn’t do wonders for my confidence about making it to Christmas without getting dead.

Bah, humbug.