Tangled Threads

18

Still keeping to the shadows as much as I could, I ran back the way I’d just come. By this point, more and more of the construction workers clustered around the open railcar, staring at and chattering about the two dead bodies inside.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the door on the next car open — and Mab Monroe and Elektra LaFleur stick their heads outside, wondering what had caused all the sudden noise. Fuck. Things had just gone from bad to worse.

The two women stepped down out of their car and hurried over to the other one to see what all the fuss was about. Even as they approached, more and more hoarse shouts filled the air.

“It’s her! It’s the Spider! She’s struck again!”

A grim smile tightened my face. I hadn’t had time to draw my rune in the giants’ blood, but it looked as though I didn’t need to. They already knew my name. If nothing else, this little incident tonight might make some of Mab’s men think twice about working for her.

Provided, of course, that I got out of the train yard alive.

My eyes scanned over everything as I sprinted forward, searching for something that I could use as a distraction to give Finn enough time to get Natasha to safety. Something that I could make noise or a fire or perhaps even an explosion with. Finally, next to the old depot, I saw something useful — an old-fashioned kerosene lantern that someone had brought along tonight for light, warmth, or both. Even better, not too far away from the lantern was a large red plastic container that I was willing to bet was filled with something flammable.

Before I could snatch up the lantern and the container, a dwarf rounded the side of the depot and moved in between me and the objects. He rubbed his stubby fingers together, then held them over the lantern, trying to get what little warmth he could from the meager fire flickering inside the glass.

I didn’t have time to be suave and kill him, so I barreled into his back like a NFL linebacker and drove my boot into the back of his knee. The dwarf screamed and did a header onto the gravel, slamming face-first into the rocks. A few heads turned in our direction at the sound, but I’d already grabbed the lantern and container and moved on. Liquid sloshed back and forth in the red plastic with every step that I took.

I leaped up onto the sagging porch of the old depot, ran across to the far side, and dropped to one knee. Lights blazed all around me now, but I was partially hidden by the dilapidated porch railing in front of me. Besides, by this point, almost everyone was still gathered around the railcar, staring inside at the two dead giants instead of looking in my direction.

With one eye on the crowd, I unscrewed the black cap on the plastic container. The acrid smell of gasoline wafted up to me. I smiled. I’d seen some generators in among the building supplies. Of course, they’d need gas to run. Maybe luck wasn’t going to completely abandon me tonight.

I didn’t have time to be sneaky or particularly creative, so I kicked over the plastic container. The gasoline slopped all over the porch and dribbled off the side like butter dripping off a hot biscuit. Then I raised the lantern over my head and dashed it down onto the gas-soaked, wooden porch.

WHOOSH!

The gas ignited at once, the bright heat of it flashing in front of my eyes and sucking the moisture out of them. I wasn’t the only one who noticed my sabotage. Elektra LaFleur’s head snapped around in my direction, her gaze drawn by the rapid spread of the fire.

“There!” the other assassin screamed, green lightning flashing in her hand. “There she is! Get her!”

Fuck. I’d hoped to slither back into the shadows while everyone else was distracted by the pretty flames. Not going to happen now. At least everyone was looking in this direction, instead of at Finn and Natasha sneaking out of the opposite side of the train yard. Still blinking orange spots out of my vision, I vaulted over the porch railing and ran out into the waiting darkness, moving away from Finn and the girl.

A few shots rang out, but none of them came close to hitting me. I didn’t even feel them kick up any gravel around my feet. Not surprising. Most people couldn’t shoot their way out of a paper bag, much less hit a moving target in the dark. Even if someone had gotten lucky and put a round in my back, I was still wearing my silverstone vest, which would catch any bullet that came into contact with it.

Still, not wanting to chance it, I forced myself to run faster. Off to my right, several giants started to give chase. No worries there. Giants might be strong, but they weren’t the quickest creatures around. I had no doubt that I could easily outdistance all of them with my current pace.

But there was one person that I couldn’t outrun — Elektra LaFleur.

I glanced over my shoulder long enough to see the other assassin sprinting after me, running just as fast as I was. She was quick, I’d give her that. Green lightning flashed in both of her hands now, illuminating her way and letting her keep me in sight. I could feel the raw, elemental power in the eerie lightning, the shocking, deadly electrical charge of it, even though I was a hundred feet ahead of her. She was so fucking strong, even stronger than I’d realized before. That little jolt she’d given me at the Pork Pit earlier today was nothing compared to the pure, pulsing energy she held in her hands right now.

But most importantly, Elektra had one advantage that I didn’t — we were running through a yard full of metal rails, and metal would easily conduct her lightning.

Elektra knew as well as I that lightning can move a hell of a lot faster than humans. That’s why she dropped to her knees and slammed her green, glowing hands down onto one of the metal rails, unleashing her lightning, and sending it sparking toward me. The deadly electricity zipped along the rails, jumping from one to another, until the whole train yard glowed with its shocking power.

I didn’t have a chance of outrunning the lightning, but I had my own magic, my own elemental power. I just hoped it would be enough to save me.

I dropped to my knees in the middle of a set of rails, careful not to touch either of them, curled into a ball, and grabbed hold of my Stone magic, pulling it up through my veins and onto my skin, head, hair, eyes, making them all as hard and solid as granite. After all, you can’t electrocute a rock—

The lightning slammed into me.

For a moment, my vision went completely green, that bright, peculiar, eerie shade of green that was the same color as LaFleur’s magic. Her cruel elemental power smashed against my body, wanting to zip through me the same way that it had all the metal rails around me. But I gritted my teeth and pushed back with my Stone magic, keeping the lightning at bay, keeping it from breaking through the hard shell of my skin. Because if it did that, I’d be dead, fried to a crisp just like that dwarf had been by Elektra the other night. Another bug zapped by her electrical power.

But that didn’t mean it still didn’t fucking hurt.

Maybe it was because I’d never been up against an elemental with electrical magic before. Maybe it was because LaFleur’s power was just as strong as my own. Hell, maybe her power just worked in its own unique way. Because despite my Stone magic, I still felt every bit of the lightning, felt every bit of the static charge of it crackling around me and trying to fry me from the outside in. The jolt of it over and over again made my heart beat so hard that I thought my whole chest would explode from the pressure. I was still getting electrocuted. All my Stone power was doing was keeping it from killing me outright.

I don’t know how long I huddled there, using my Stone magic to block the electricity humming around me, my mouth open in a terrible, silent scream that just wouldn’t come out. Sweat poured down my face, and my whole body shook from the effort. But finally, my vision cleared, and the green lightning zipped farther down the metal lines and finally sparked away into nothingness.

Still holding on to my Stone magic, I drew in a deep, shuddering breath. Green-gray smoke wafted up from my body, choking me, and the silverstone in my vest felt as hot and heavy as an anvil hung on my chest. The once-solid metal sloshed around inside the fabric like water. The silverstone had absorbed all of LaFleur’s magic that it could before dissolving into its liquid form from the sheer heat of it. It took a lot of raw elemental power to melt silverstone — a whole hell of a lot. My vest had just saved my life, had just kept me from getting fried to death outright.

But the fight wasn’t over yet. Legs shaking, I got to my feet and stumbled on. Behind me, I heard Elektra scream with fury and surprise that I was still standing, still running, still breathing.

Elektra’s magic had dazed me more than I would have liked, which is why I didn’t have any particular plan in mind, other than to just run until I got away from her. But the assassin was in much better shape than I at the moment and closing fast, given that I’d almost been fried by her electrical magic.

And then, somehow, I heard it, even above the blood pounding in my ears and the slap of my boots on the loose gravel — a train whistle. Getting louder and louder with each second.

Sweetest fucking sound I’d ever heard.

I forced my legs to move faster, to pump harder, until my feet barely touched the ground. I veered right over to the edge of the train yard. I was running across the upper level, the flat plateau where the old depot was located. But there was a lower level to the yard too, some thirty feet below me, the place that all the trains passing through Ashland used these days since the depot had been closed. The lower rail yard was a straight shot through the city, do not pass go, do not collect two hundred dollars. On the far side of the lower level, the black waters of the Aneirin River rushed by, keeping time with the trains that chugged alongside it.

The whistle sounded again, a harsh scream in the night air, and five seconds later, I saw it. A train churned this way, moving through the lower level of the yard, a line of cars snaking along behind it like the sections on a fat, metal caterpillar.

The train was moving much faster than I was, and the front engine car drew up next to me in seconds. I grabbed hold of my Stone magic again, using it to harden my skin once more. And when one of the train’s many cars passed below me, I jumped.

It felt like I hung in midair for several seconds before finally falling.

I slammed into the top of one of the railcars. It was a thirty-foot fall, and since my body was already so hard and heavy with my Stone magic, I actually made a dent in the thick metal, a perfect, Gin-shaped groove with arms and legs spread out wide like a cartoon character. Wiley E. Gin.

For a moment, I just lay there and breathed, grateful that I’d timed the jump just right and landed on top of the car, instead of slipping in between two of them and getting run over by the relentless, churning wheels. I doubted even my Ice and Stone magic would have let me survive that.

But the train wasn’t moving quite fast enough.

Ten seconds later, Elektra LaFleur popped into view, running parallel on the level above me, powerful green lightning crackling in her hands once more. LaFleur stopped and reared back, ready to throw another ball of her deadly electricity at me.

By this point, I was weak, dazed, and utterly drained. I wasn’t sure I could bring enough Stone magic to bear to ward off LaFleur’s power again, especially since my silverstone vest was liquefied and the metal car I was lying on would probably conduct her electricity that much more. So I did the only thing that I could.

I rolled out of the Gin-shaped groove, toppled off the side of the car, and fell another fifty feet into the Aneirin River below.

As an assassin, provided you live long enough, you’re sure to experience déjà vu from time to time. When you kill someone the same way that you have a dozen people before. When you use the same disguise to get close to a target. When you feel your latest victim’s warm, sticky blood coat your hand.

I’d done another swan dive into the Aneirin River a few months ago, when one of my hits had turned out to be a trap, so I was familiar with exactly how chilly the river actually was. But I’ll be damned if the water wasn’t that much colder tonight. My mind, hell, my whole body, immediately went numb from the shock of it. The bitter chill surprised me, making me stupid and sloppy enough to open my mouth, and water poured down my throat, the icy, bone-rattling cold of it further freezing me from the inside out. The water also cooled down the melted silverstone in my vest, turning it heavy and solid once more, while the force of the fall peeled the black ski mask off my head.

Gagging on the fishy-tasting water, I forced my legs to kick upward in a steady rhythm, and a few seconds later, I broke the surface. The swift current had already pulled me several hundred feet away from LaFleur, although I could still see the green spark of her lightning flickering, getting farther and farther away with every second.

I wondered what would happen if the assassin threw her lightning at the river itself, if the whole length of it would light up with her electrical magic. I shuddered at the thought. Maybe she was too far away or maybe, like me, she just didn’t have that much juice left. But more seconds passed, and no lightning came arcing toward the river, something I was infinitely grateful for.

I was too dazed to do much of anything but go with the flow of the water. I drifted maybe a mile downstream before I finally saw a rocky outcropping I thought I could swim to. So I drew in a breath, turned my head, and flailed that way, making my arms and legs go through the motions, even if I couldn’t exactly feel them at the moment.

I didn’t quite reach the rocks, but I managed to get into shallow enough water to wade up onto the shore. I fell onto my stomach in the frozen mud and frosted cattails, panting from the effort, entirely disconnected from my own body. I didn’t feel anything anymore — not even the cold that I knew had invaded my body and was slowly killing me.

I don’t know how long I huddled there before I managed to summon up the strength to roll over onto my back and fumble with one of the zippers on the front of my vest. At this point, my whole body shook from the cold, even though I didn’t actually feel it. My hands trembled from the force of it, but apparently the message just wasn’t reaching my brain, because it wasn’t registering as an actual physical sensation to me. I didn’t feel anything but numb. Completely numb. Or maybe dead, if this is what being dead felt like. I’d helped a lot of people get that way over the years, but I hadn’t actually been on the receiving end of things myself — yet.

But the really weird thing was that the spider rune scars on my hands were glowing.

A small circle surrounded by eight thin rays, one embedded in either palm, and they were both as bright as the lights on Owen Grayson’s Christmas tree. The runes glowed with a cold, silver light — the kind of light that flared whenever I used my Ice magic. But … I wasn’t doing that right now. At least, I didn’t think that I was. Or if I was, I didn’t know why or how.

It kind of freaked me out, since the last time that my palms had glowed like this was when I’d finally broken through the silverstone embedded in my hands. The metal had been absorbing my Ice magic until I’d forced myself to blast right through it and had brought an entire coal mine down on top of myself and the men who were trying to kill me.

But this? Now? I had no idea what was going on. I stared at my glowing palms another minute.

Fuck. This couldn’t be good.

But I put my wonky magic out of my mind. I managed to unzip the pocket on my vest and pull out my cell phone. I squinted at the glowing screen, which meant that I still had a signal. Somehow Elektra LaFleur’s magic and my swim in the river hadn’t completely fried the device. Better than a Timex and much more useful right now. It took me three very slow, concentrated tries before I managed to hit one of the numbers on the keypad and then send the call.

He picked up on the third ring. “Hello?”

But it wasn’t Finn’s voice on the line — it was Owen’s. I must have hit the wrong number on my speed dial, because I’d wanted to call Finn, not Owen.

“Ow … Ow … Owen,” I managed to get out through my chattering teeth — teeth that I couldn’t even feel at the moment.

“Gin? Where are you? Are you okay?” Concern filled his voice.

“T-tr-train yard. I–I — jumped in river. Down — downstream now. Finn — Finn has the girl.”

I knew that I wasn’t making a lot of sense, but I just couldn’t think. I couldn’t move, I couldn’t do anything. My whole body, my mind, everything was just numb. Dead and numb.

“Are you hurt? Where are you?”

The phone slipped from my deadweight fingers and plopped onto the muddy riverbank.

“Gin? Gin?”

Owen’s voice was the last thing that I remembered hearing before the world went completely cold, dead, and black.