Tangled Threads

28

When I was sure that Elektra LaFleur was dead, I let go of my Ice magic.

Pain immediately flooded my body, cutting through the cold numbness, but I didn’t care right now. I flopped over onto my back, scooting as far away from her as I could, given the handcuffs that still bound us together. The metal had weakened from the heat of LaFleur’s magic, but the cuffs hadn’t completely melted. Something soft brushed against my fingers, and I turned my head to the right.

Elektra LaFleur’s orchid, the one she’d planned on dropping on my body, lay on the ground next to me. Somehow the flower had survived being crushed during our fight. A breeze whistled through the train yard, ruffling the delicate white petals. I shuddered and turned away from it.

I lay there on the loose gravel, riding the waves of pain, and watching the green-gray smoke puff up from my body and drift away like ribbons unfurling into the night sky.

But I couldn’t rest yet. Not until I’d checked on Bria. Not until I knew whether my baby sister was still alive.

I didn’t have long to wonder. Just as I started to force myself to sit up against the pain, footsteps crunched on the gravel behind me, and a second later, Bria’s face came into view above mine. Dirt smeared her features, along with a few scrapes and bruises from where she’d thrown herself onto the gravel, and her shaggy blond hair was a static-charged mess. One of her blue eyes twitched, and similar spasms zipped down her throat and into the rest of her body, making her arms and legs jump ever so slightly. But other than that, she was fine. She’d just been jolted by Elektra’s magic, not killed outright.

I let out a quiet sigh of relief. My sister was fine for one more night. Which made everything I’d just been through worthwhile, including the pain that kept flooding my body like a river relentlessly rising inch by inch. I gritted my teeth and pushed it away as best I could.

“Are you all right?” Bria asked in a soft voice.

Her gaze locked onto the macabre smoke drifting up from my body. I could smell it, of course. But for once, the acrid stench didn’t bother me and didn’t trigger any old, unwanted memories. Maybe that’s because I was still alive and LaFleur wasn’t.

“I’m still breathing,” I rasped. “That’s good enough for now. Help me up, please.”

Bria gave me her hand and pulled me up into a sitting position. Despite my attempts to ignore the pain from my injuries, it took me a moment to get my breath back. My wrist was also still cuffed to LaFleur’s, and her arm flopped against my own. Dead weight, in every sense of the word. Elektra’s green eyes stared sightlessly up into the night sky. Blood still oozed from the stab wounds on her chest and stomach, and the warm, coppery scent of it filled my nose.

I didn’t have any magic left, not even enough to make another Ice pick so that I could unshackle myself from her dead body. I just sat there and stared dully at the handcuffs.

“Let me help you with those.”

Bria must have sensed what I was thinking, because she held out her hand and reached for her own Ice magic. A blue light flickered in her palm, and the familiar caress of her elemental power flowed over me like a cool, refreshing breeze, washing away the static remains of LaFleur’s electricity. Somehow, Bria’s magic made my injuries, my pain inside and out, just a little easier to bear. It felt so good, so right that it made me want to weep.

A second later, Bria had two Ice picks in her hand that looked identical to the ones that I’d made earlier tonight. She crouched down beside me and went to work on the handcuffs. It took her a couple of minutes and a few soft curses, but eventually the silverstone clinked open, and LaFleur’s dead arm fell back to the ground to join the rest of her.

Bria sat back on her heels, crouching there in the cold beside me. She stared at me, then at the dead assassin beside me. I couldn’t read the emotions flashing in her eyes — or maybe I just didn’t care to tonight. Maybe I was just afraid of what I would see.

“What are you going to do now?” I asked.

She knew what I was asking — if she was going to arrest me and turn me in for being the Spider. For killing Mab’s men and all the others I’d murdered over the years.

Bria sighed and ran her hand through her hair. Green static crackled around her fingers. She shuddered and dropped her hand. “I’m going to call in and report that I was abducted tonight by someone claiming to be an assassin. That she was going to torture and kill me before the Spider intervened. Mainly, that the assassin is dead and that I was locked in a railcar the whole time and didn’t see a thing.”

“You’re not turning me in?” I whispered.

Bria looked at me. Without a word, she shook her head. I didn’t ask her why. I didn’t think she even knew the reason herself. But that wasn’t the only issue between us.

“And what about us? We’re sisters, Bria.”

“You’re … It’s just … I can’t …” She sighed. “I don’t know, Gene — Gin. I just don’t know. I need some time to think about things. You’re not exactly what I expected to find when I came back to Ashland. None of this has turned out the way I thought it would.”

“What did you think would happen?”

A humorless smile lifted her lips. “I thought I’d charge Mab Monroe with the murder of my mother and older sister and see her dragged away in chains, for starters. But that’s not going to happen now. Neither is the picture-perfect reunion I’d imagined having with my big sister, Genevieve.”

There was no real judgment in her voice, no condemnation in her tone, just weariness, the same weariness I felt right now. But her words still hurt. I knew that my being the Spider was the thing that stood between us. My deadly skills might have saved us tonight, but they were also tearing us apart now. Maybe forever.

All I wanted to do right now was put my arms around Bria and make sure she was really okay. Tell her — no, promise her — that everything was going to be okay, just as I had when we were both little girls and she skinned her knee or lost her favorite doll.

But we were both too old for such childish things now, and there was just too much between us. Too much history, too much emotion, too many things left unsaid and undone.

Bria’s eyes met and held mine. With all our feelings shining there inside for the other to see. Her shock. My hope. And no resolution to either one in sight.

Then my baby sister got to her feet and stalked off into the darkness to make her call.

I sat there huddled on the cold, loose gravel, slowly moving my body and cataloguing my injuries while I waited for Bria to come back. Elektra LaFleur hadn’t beaten me as badly as Elliot Slater had, but the other assassin hadn’t pulled her punches either. My face had already started to bruise and swell from where she’d hit me, and not all of the blood on me was hers. A slow, steady trickle of it slid down my face from a cut that she’d opened on my left cheekbone. Ugly, nasty, electrical burns also covered most of my exposed skin, especially on my hands and arms.

But I could still move, still walk, talk, and breathe, so I wasn’t too concerned. Jo-Jo Deveraux could heal anything short of death. I might hurt like hell, but I’d live until I got to the dwarven Air elemental healer.

A few minutes later, Bria returned. She clutched a small silver cell phone in her hand that she passed down to me.

“Here,” she said in a quiet voice. “That’s LaFleur’s phone. I got it out of the back of the limo where she left it. I didn’t want to go digging through the giants’ pockets to find theirs.”

I didn’t have to ask her why — because I’d slashed into the men with my silverstone knives, filleting them like fish, until there was probably more blood on the ground around them than was still left in their bodies. Even now, I could hear the gravel of the train yard muttering all around me, the stones whispering of all the dark, ugly, bloody things that had been done here tonight.

“I thought that you might want to call your friend Finnegan Lane first,” Bria said. “Before I do my thing.”

“Thank you,” I said and dialed Finn’s number.

It rang only once before he picked it up.

“Where the hell are you!?” Finn screamed in my ear. “We’ve been looking everywhere for you!”

I winced at his voice blaring out at me. “I’m fine. I’m back at the train yard. LaFleur jumped me behind the Pork Pit and decided to take me for a little drive tonight.”

“Well, I hope that you had the good sense to kill her for interrupting your evening,” Finn sniffed. “And for making us worry.”

“I did. But I wasn’t the only one that she nabbed. Bria’s here with me.”

Silence. I could hear Finn thinking through the phone. He knew that in order to kill LaFleur I’d had to show Bria who I really was — and exactly what I was capable of.

“And how is she taking the news?” Finn finally asked.

I looked over at my sister, who was crouched down and examining LaFleur’s body, along with my silverstone knife, which was still stuck in the assassin’s chest. “Well, she hasn’t screamed and run away yet. I suppose that’s something.”

“Sit tight,” Finn said. “We’ll be there in ten minutes.”

“Don’t worry,” I said in a wry tone. “I’m not going anywhere.”

I hung up the phone and held it back out to Bria. “He’ll be here in ten minutes. It’ll take the po-po at least twenty to get here. So go ahead and make your call, if you want.”

She nodded. Bria started to take the phone from me, but before she could touch it, the cell started ringing. My eyes narrowed. I hadn’t given Finn the number, and there was only one person I knew of who would have a reason to call LaFleur right now.

So I snapped the phone open and answered it. “Hello, Mab.”

Silence.

I waited a few seconds. After it became apparent that she wasn’t going to answer me, I decided to initiate the conversation.

“Your girl LaFleur’s dead,” I said in the cheeriest tone that I could manage, considering the fact that I’d almost been electrocuted tonight. I stared at the other assassin’s body. “And growing colder by the second.”

“You.” Mab’s voice was dark, cold, and ugly in my ear.

“Me,” I replied, a bucket of sunshine in comparison. “You’ve been busy since the last time we talked. When was that? Oh, yeah. The night that I killed Elliot Slater at his quaint little mountain retreat.”

More silence.

Bria just stared at me, listening to my side of the conversation with the Fire elemental. My sister’s mouth tightened into a thin line.

“I have to admit that you gave me a good fight this time,” I said. “Hiring LaFleur to come to Ashland to try to kill me was an inspired move, since it was so obvious that none of your own men were going to get the job done. Too bad you backed the wrong horse. Again. But that seems to be a bad habit of yours. One that I’m going to end very, very soon.”

“So you killed LaFleur tonight,” Mab snarled. “So what? It’s not going to save you in the end, Spider.”

“Probably not,” I murmured, staring up at Bria. “But it sure as hell was fun.”

I hung up the phone and passed it back to Bria. It started ringing again the second that she touched it, but she waited until it had stopped before turning away from me, flipping it open, and calling in her kidnapping.

While she did that, I picked up one of my wayward knives and used the hilt to draw my spider rune into the gravel right next to LaFleur’s body. Mab already knew I’d been here, of course, but I wanted to drive the point home to her, so to speak.

A few minutes later, just as Bria was finishing up her call, a pair of headlights popped into view at the far end of the train yard. By this point, I’d managed to get to my feet and retrieve all of my silverstone knives, so I palmed one of the weapons, just in case the vehicle held more of Mab’s men. Bria didn’t have a weapon; she picked a long piece of pipe up out of the junk in the train yard and held it down by her side. She came up to stand beside me, even though she didn’t look at me.

Tires crunched on the gravel, and a large silver SUV rolled over to us. The doors opened, and Finn got out of the passenger’s side. I expected Sophia Deveraux to hop out of the driver’s seat, but to my surprise, Owen slid out of the vehicle instead.

The two men jogged over to us. Owen stopped in front of me, his violet gaze sweeping over my body, but when he realized that I was in more or less one piece, some of the tight concern in his face faded away.

I held up one of the bloody knives he’d given me for Christmas. “You should give me presents more often. Because this one worked like a charm.”

Owen shook his head and just smiled at me.

Finn was a little more practical about things. Once he looked me over and made sure that I was okay for the time being, my foster brother directed his attention to Bria.

“Detective,” he said. “You’re looking well this evening, all things considered.”

“Lane,” Bria replied in a cool voice, crossing her arms over her chest. “You’re acting as smarmy as ever.”

Finn grinned, his green eyes twinkling. He loved a challenge, especially when the current object of his affection so obviously hated him. Or at least hated him knowing that she was attracted to him. Even after everything that had happened tonight, a spark of interest filled Bria’s face as she stared at Finn before she managed to hide it. Finn saw it too, which made his grin widen that much more.

“We need to leave,” I said, interrupting his leering at Bria. “Bria’s called the cops and told them about her … kidnapping this evening. And lucky intervention and rescue by the mysterious Spider.”

Finn and Owen stared at me, then at Bria. My baby sister shifted on her feet, but she met their curious gazes head-on.

“The cops will be here any minute,” she said in a cool voice. “So I suggest the three of you leave before they arrive — or I decide to change my story.”

Owen came over and gently put his arm around me to help me to the SUV. Finn stayed where he was. He looked at Bria, then back again at me, a more hopeful look on his face now. I shook my head, telling him that nothing had been resolved between the two of us.

Bria saw the exchange and frowned. Our gazes met and held again. So many emotions shimmered in her bright blue eyes. Shock. Relief. Weariness. And just a touch of fear. The last one saddened me more than I’d thought possible. I didn’t want my baby sister to be afraid of me. I wanted her to see the hope and longing that filled my heart. I wanted her to know I would never, ever hurt her. I wanted her to accept me, if only for this one brief moment.

Whatever Bria saw in my face, it wasn’t enough to break through this wall between us — a wall I’d built brick by brick, body by bloody body, as the Spider.

“Come on, Gin,” Owen said.

His arm tightened protectively around me, as if he could somehow shield me from having my heart broken by my sister. It was already too late for that, though.

“We need to get you to Jo-Jo’s,” he finished. “You’re hurt. You need to be healed.”

Bria was the only one who could really heal me right now, who could soothe this fierce ache in my heart. But apparently my sister wasn’t interested in having anything else to do with me, because she turned away from my hopeful, searching gaze.

There was nothing I could do but accept her decision — at least for tonight. So I nodded and let Owen help me over to the waiting SUV. Finn followed us.

Bria stood there next to Elektra LaFleur’s body and watched us disappear into the night.