Spider’s Revenge

  Behind the counter, Sophia Deveraux grunted her agreement with Finn’s pointed, acidic tone. Today, the Goth dwarf wore a black T-shirt covered with curved, white vampire fangs dripping blood. The crimson color of the blood matched the silverstone-spiked leather collar around her neck, as well as the cuffs on both of her wrists. Her lipstick was a red slash in her pale face, although bits of silver glitter glinted in her black hair.

  I sighed. “Look, I’m sorry that I went off the reservation without you, all of you. But we all know that my getting that close to Mab was strictly a solo job. I didn’t want either of you to get hurt if I missed.”

  Sophia grunted again and shrugged her shoulders, while Finn’s face softened just a bit. Then he sniffed, and I knew that there would be no sweet-talking him out of his snit. Finn had built up a good bit of righteous indignation, and he was determined to make me suffer through it.

  “While we appreciate your concern for our safety, we’re a team, Gin,” Finn lectured me. “We always have been. You need to remember that because it’s the only way that you’re going to kill Mab—by all of us working together. Not by your taking off by yourself with no one to watch your back.”

  I gave my foster brother a noncommittal shrug. “Not much chance of that happening, since I missed her last night. I imagine that she’s upped her security considerably since then.”

  “Mmm.”

  This time, Finn was the one who was noncommittal. He reached down and took a sip from the mug of chicory coffee sitting on the counter in front of him. The warm, fragrant aroma of the caffeine brew filled my nose, making me think of Finn’s father, Fletcher. The old man had drunk the same coffee in the same copious amounts before his murder as his son did. Even now, almost six months later, I still missed Fletcher. Missed seeing the old man leaning behind the counter at the Pork Pit, reading his latest book and telling me about the newest job he’d booked for me as the Spider.

  There at the end, right before he was tortured to death by an Air elemental, Fletcher had wanted me to retire, to live in the daylight a little, as he had so eloquently called it. After I’d avenged the old man’s death, I’d taken his advice and retired from being the Spider. At least, I’d tried to. I wasn’t having much success so far. I might not kill people for money anymore, but I’d still managed to get myself into a whole lot of trouble in the meantime. Mostly by trying to help other people, good, innocent folks, deal with certain problems that had only one solution in a city like Ashland—one that involved my silverstone knives and someone losing a whole lot of blood. Permanently.

  Finn took another sip of his coffee and stared at me, knowledge glinting in his sly green gaze. I rolled my eyes, walked behind the counter, and pulled a blue work apron on over my jeans and long-sleeved T-shirt.

  “Oh, just go ahead and spill it,” I said. “You know you want to tell me every little thing that you know about what’s going on with Mab since I didn’t manage to kill her last night.”

  A pleased, smirking grin spread over Finn’s face. “Why, I thought you’d never ask.”

  He took another sip of his chicory coffee before he launched into his story.

  “So I’ve had my feelers out all day,” he said. “According to my sources, Mab’s plenty pissed and some say even scared. Apparently no one’s ever gotten that close to putting her lights out for good.”

  “Fletcher did train me to be the best,” I said in a not-so-humble voice.

  Finn saluted me with his mug. “That he did, and that you are. Which is why Mab was so understandably shaken up. Well, that and the fact that you blew that giant’s brains out all over her face. Apparently Mab was quite the mess.”

  A cold, hard smile curved my lips. Poor little Mab, covered in blood. I only hoped that next time it would actually be her own.

  “Anyway,” Finn continued, “rumor has it that she’s holed up in her mansion. But the weird thing is that she hasn’t brought in any more reinforcements. At least, none that I’ve heard of.”

  “What about the people who were there last night? The ones who were having dinner with Mab? Who were they?”

  I told my foster brother about everything that had happened, including going up against Ruth Gentry, Sydney, and the other strange characters Mab had invited into her inner sanctum.

  “Weird,” Finn said. “None of my sources said anything about who the guests were. I’ll keep digging and see what I can come up with.”

  I nodded. If anyone could find out about those people, it was Finn. My foster brother had more spies in more places at his disposal than the CIA.

  Finn had already finished a late lunch of a barbecue pork sandwich, baked beans, and coleslaw, and was ready to move on to dessert. So I dished him up a piece of the strawberry pie that I’d made last night before closing, and topped it off with a big scoop of vanilla bean ice cream. The luscious pie had enough sugar in it to lock a person’s jaws and make him lapse into a diabetic coma, but Finn had two pieces. Sometimes I thought that all the chicory coffee in his system made Finn immune to sugar, fat, calories, and all the other things us mere mortals had to deal with.

  A few more folks trickled in throughout the afternoon, and Sophia and I whipped up their meals, but the restaurant was quiet for the most part. Not surprising, given the weather. Last night’s cold temperatures hadn’t warmed up any, which meant that there was still plenty of snow and ice outside, with more on the way. Over the past several days, including today, Catalina Vasquez and the rest of the waitstaff had called in to say that they couldn’t make it out of their driveways, much less get to the Pit to work their shifts.

  Finn’s bank had also closed early today because of the weather so he stuck around and worked his sources while he inhaled a third piece of strawberry pie.

  Finn hung up his cell phone. “Okay, now I’m interested. Because nobody I’ve talked to has any idea who those people were at Mab’s mansion.”

  “Nobody?” I frowned. “Nobody knows who those people are?”

  Finn shrugged. “Whatever Mab’s doing, she’s kept a lid on that part of it. So far at least.”

  I put down the paperback copy of Medea that I’d been reading for the latest class I was taking over at Ashland Community College. Reading during lulls in the action at the Pork Pit was another habit that I’d picked up from Fletcher. Auditing classes at the college was a hobby I’d developed on my own, but one the old man had approved of.

  My book forgotten, I leaned against the counter. I had no real reason to think there was anything particularly special about the group of people Mab had been entertaining last night—except that Gentry and her girl, Sydney, had tried to kill me.

  No, I decided, that wasn’t quite right. Gentry hadn’t wanted to kill me—she’d wanted to march me back to Mab so the Fire elemental could do it herself. Sydney, though, had been going for the kill shot, but only after she thought that I was going to stiff Gentry. Still, something about the whole thing just didn’t add up, and I couldn’t figure out what it might be. Had the people at the dinner been brought to Ashland by Mab as reinforcements for her army of giant bodyguards? As spies? Or something else? I didn’t know, but I was willing to bet that my ability to keep on breathing would depend on my finding out the answer—fast.

  Finn and I sat there and threw out a few ideas, but neither one of us came up with anything that seemed remotely plausible. I was ready to give up, and Finn was ready to leave to see what else he could dig up from his sources, when the bell over the front door chimed again and my baby sister, Bria, walked into the restaurant.

  Ashland Police Detective Bria Coolidge was a beautiful woman. Or maybe I was just a little biased, since she was my younger sister.

  Bria’s mane of blond hair, cut into a series of lush, shaggy layers, just skimmed her slim shoulders, while her blue eyes glinted in the soft curves of her face. The frosty air had painted her cheeks a pleasing pink that showed off her skin’s perfection. Given the bitter chill outside, Bria wore a long, black wool coat over
a pair of black boots, jeans, and a royal blue turtleneck sweater that further brightened her stunning eyes. Her detective’s badge glinted a cold gold on her leather belt, right next to the inky blackness of her gun.

  My gaze fell to Bria’s throat, and the rune necklace hanging there. The one that she always wore—the one I’d never seen her without. A delicate primrose. The symbol for beauty. Bria’s rune, the silverstone medallion given to her by our mother, Eira Snow, when she was a little girl. Our older sister, Annabella, had worn an ivy vine around her neck, representing elegance, while our mother’s rune had been a snowflake, the symbol for icy calm.

  Once upon a time, I’d had a necklace as well—a spider rune, of course. A small circle surrounded by eight thin rays. The symbol for patience. My assassin name. And so much a part of who and what I was.

  In a way, I still had my spider rune and, like Bria, never went anywhere without it—because the metal medallion had been melted into my palms by Mab.

  The memories of that night swam up in my head and, for a moment, I was back there. Tied down to a chair. Sweat streaming down my face. Choking on the stench of my own charred flesh. The silverstone melting, burning, searing its way into my palms—

  My hands tightened into fists, and I felt another piece of metal dig into my skin—a small silverstone ring on my right index finger. The slight sensation was enough to derail my memories, and I dropped my gaze to the ring, latching on to the distraction.

  Truth be told, it wasn’t much to look at. The ring was completely plain and featureless, except for the tiny spider rune stamped into the middle of the thin band. But to me it was more precious than any diamond because it had been a gift from Bria.

  My sister had given me the ring for Christmas. She’d worn it for years as a reminder of me, her big sister, Genevieve Snow. Even now, two more silverstone bands glinted on her left index finger—with runes carved into both surfaces. Snowflakes for our mother, and ivy vines for our older sister. Bria wore the rings every day, along with her primrose rune, as a tribute to them, our lost family.

  I pulled my gaze up from the jewelry and looked at Bria. For seventeen years, I’d thought that she was dead, that I’d accidentally killed her. After Mab had tortured me that night, I’d heard Bria scream and thought that the Fire elemental had found the place where I’d hidden her. So I’d lashed out with my Ice and Stone magic to try to escape from the ropes that had held me down, to try to get to Bria before Mab killed her. But I’d used too much magic far too wildly. As a result, I’d collapsed our whole house—and I’d thought that Bria had been crushed to death by the falling stones. A secret guilt that I’d carried with me until just a few months ago when Bria had come back to Ashland.

  My sister had been drawn here by a picture of the spider rune scar on my palm that Fletcher had sent her. Just as I’d started looking for her when the old man had arranged to leave me a photo of her from beyond the grave. Fletcher had wanted us to find each other, and we had. But our reunion hadn’t exactly been a rosy one. As a detective, Bria had dedicated her whole adult life to being a cop, to helping people, to doing the right thing and making sure that bad guys like me got exactly what they deserved. As the assassin the Spider, all I’d done was kill people for money and contribute to my retirement fund. The two worldviews didn’t exactly mesh.

  But Bria and I were working through our differences—or at least trying to find some common ground. It had started at Christmas, when I’d saved Bria from getting dead at the hands of LaFleur and had told my sister who I really was. Bria had been shocked and horrified that her big sister, Genevieve, had grown up to be the Spider, but she was trying to accept me, which is more than I’d dared to hope for.

  Now, almost two months later, we weren’t exactly best friends, but we weren’t enemies either. We had coffee sometimes and tried to talk. But even when we just sat there staring at each other, searching for something to say, I was grateful that my sister was back in my life. I thought that Bria felt the same way. At least, I hoped she did.

  Bria wasn’t alone. Xavier, the roughly seven-foot-tall giant who was her partner on the force, stepped inside the Pork Pit and shut the door behind him. I knew Xavier well and counted him among my few friends. The giant had helped me out of some tough situations a time or two, and I’d returned the favor a while back by going after Elliot Slater, the sick, twisted bastard who’d been stalking and terrorizing Roslyn Phillips, Xavier’s main squeeze. Roslyn had eventually killed Slater, but as the Spider, I’d claimed responsibility for his death to take the heat off her.

  The two of them headed over to the counter. I leaned down on my elbows and waited for them. Sophia stood off to my left, peeling potatoes in case anyone else came in this afternoon who had a hankering for the thick, steak-cut French fries that the Pit was famous for, among other things.

  “Hey there, baby sister,” I said to Bria. “Xavier.”

  They nodded at me.

  “Here for a late lunch?” I asked.

  Xavier grinned at me, his teeth flashing like opals against his onyx-colored skin. “Something like that. Think the owner will give us a break on the price?”

  “Oh,” I drawled. “She might make an exception for two of Ashland’s finest.”

  They both took off their coats and settled themselves at the counter. Xavier sat down first, forcing Bria to move in between him and Finn or risk being left out of the conversation that was sure to follow. My sister sighed but slid onto the stool.

  For his part, Finn was all too happy to swivel around in Bria’s direction and give her his most charming, winning, aw-shucks smile.

  To say that Finnegan Lane was something of a womanizer was like telling someone that it was a little steamy in the South in the summertime. Old, young, fat, thin, blonde, brunette, bald, toothless, face like a steel trap, Finn didn’t care as long as it was breathing, female, and had the breasts to prove it. He wasn’t even particular about how perky they were. Finn regarded pesky little things like wedding bands, engagement rings, and jealous, hulking menfolk more as amusing challenges than immovable obstacles that could be hazardous to his health. It always amazed me that some jilted husband hadn’t hired me, the Spider, to kill my foster brother long ago. But Finn had his own sort of magic when it came to charming the ladies.

  At least, until he’d met Bria.

  Finn had laid a hell of a kiss on my sister during a Christmas party at Owen’s mansion. The kind of kiss that would make most women melt. Some men too. But Bria wasn’t most women. Oh, I could tell that my sister was attracted to Finn. She’d have to be blind not to be. But she was going to make him work for every sly innuendo, every heated look, every steamy kiss. Which, of course, only made Finn pursue her that much harder. So far, though, Bria had proved to be just as wily and elusive as Finn was clever, rebuffing every attempt he made to get close to her.

  Still, there was something in Finn’s eyes when he looked at Bria, something that made me think that all this effort might be a little more serious than he let on, something I’d never seen before—a touch of fear. Like maybe he was afraid of what he could actually feel for her—of falling for her the way that he’d made so many other women fall for him.

  Maybe I should have stepped in and told him to knock it off. Having the two of them at odds didn’t exactly make for warm, fuzzy family moments. But for once, a woman was getting the best of Finnegan Lane, and damned if I wasn’t enjoying the show.

  “Detective,” Finn crooned in his most seductive voice. “You’re looking smashing, as always.”

  Bria smiled at him, although as many teeth as she bared, it was more of a warning. “Lane. I see you’re as oily and smarmy as ever.”

  Finn pouted and put his hand over his heart. “Oh, detective, how you—”

  “Wound you.” Bria finished his sentence and snorted. “If I ever did hurt you, Lane, you’d know it.”

  Finn raised an eyebrow and turned to look at me. “I see that your sister has the same violent streak tha
t you do, Gin.”

  I gave him a toothy smile that matched Bria’s. “Must run in the family.”

  Farther down the counter, Sophia let out a soft, raspy laugh. The Goth dwarf enjoyed Finn’s discomfort just as much as I did.

  Despite Bria’s icy attitude, Finn didn’t give up. He focused all of his attention on her, as if he were a general and she was just another battle to be won no matter what casualties he might suffer along the way—including the complete and utter loss of his self-respect, pride, and dignity. Bria coolly rebuffed all of his advances, but she wasn’t completely immune to his charms. Interest sparked in her gaze whenever she looked at him out of the corner of her eye. Bria enjoyed being chased just as much as Finn liked running after her.

  “So, what’ll it be?” I asked.

  Xavier ordered a double cheeseburger with all the fixings, along with fries and baked beans. Bria opted for the Pork Pit’s most excellent grilled cheese sandwich, along with some potato salad and a piece of strawberry pie—the final slice that Finn hadn’t managed to scarf down yet.

  Sophia and I worked on the food, and the five of us talked back and forth across the counter. The dwarf and I slid the steaming food over to Xavier and Bria, and the two of them spent the next twenty minutes stuffing their faces, while Finn talked enough for everyone. Food, friends, and my sister, all in one place. It was about as good as things could get for me. Almost good enough to let me forget about how I’d botched my hit on Mab last night.

  Almost.

  Bria and Xavier polished off their food, but instead of saying their good-byes, the two of them lingered in the Pork Pit. It wasn’t like either one of them to do that, not while they were on duty, no matter how good the food was. Something was going on.

  Bria kept sneaking glances at first me, then Xavier. The giant nodded his shaved head at her, telling her to get on with it. Still, she hesitated. So I decided to make things easy for her, seeing as how the relationship between us hadn’t exactly been smooth sailing so far.