Winter’s Web: An Elemental Assassin Novella

by Jennifer Estep

  If an elemental was inside the barn, they might sense me using my magic and come outside to investigate. I didn’t want that. Not until Owen was safe. Then I would take on anybody here who had an ounce of magic, along with everyone who didn’t.

  As an assassin, I’d done my fair share of spidery climbing, and it didn’t take me long to reach the second level. One of the windows was right beside the drainpipe, so I grabbed hold of the wooden frame. I was only mildly surprised when it easily slid up. People thought that locking the doors and windows on the first floor was enough to keep out bad folks. And it usually was, but most folks weren’t the Spider, and I was just about the baddest of them all.

  I slid the window up as high as it would go, then grabbed the bottom of the frame with both hands, pulled myself forward, and slithered through the opening. I went headfirst, and I ended up sliding down into a loose mound of old, moldy hay. Ugh. The hay scratched my face and tickled my nose, and I had to swallow down a sneeze. I waited a moment, lying there, but no shouts or alarms sounded, so I slowly sat up.

  I was in a hayloft, surrounded by, you guessed it, hay. Several bales were stacked up along the walls, while more loose hay covered the floor, including the spot where I was sitting. The inside of the barn looked just as decrepit as the outside, and several of the wooden floorboards were cracked or missing, while others sagged underneath the weight of the bales.

  The only good thing about the loft was that it didn’t look like anyone had been up there in ages, given the thick layer of dust that coated everything. Even more dust motes swirled through the air like mosquitoes, and I had to swallow down another sneeze.

  I reached out and closed the open window behind me. Then I palmed a knife and slowly, carefully, quietly crawled out of the hay.

  The loft was shaped like a giant U, with a set of stairs in the middle leading down to the ground. I crept over to the wooden railing that cordoned off the right side of the loft and peered down at the first floor.

  I wasn’t sure what I’d been expecting. Some old, forgotten farm equipment slowly rusting away. Maybe an old junker car with flat tires that had been stripped for parts and left to rot. Maybe even some barn cats sleeping in the dusty piles of hay.

  What I didn’t expect were the thick brown leather couches arranged around low tables full of laptops, monitors, keyboards, gaming consoles, and other high-tech computer equipment. A couple of refrigerators lined one of the walls, with cases of beer piled on top of them, along with bags of potato chips, pretzels, candy bars, and other snacks. Several bales of hay were also scattered around, with swords, daggers, spears, and other sharp, pointy, medieval weapons sticking out of them, as though the bales were oversize pincushions.

  But the centerpiece of the first floor was a long, wide table covered with bright green felt that held an enormous diorama of a medieval landscape. Miniature gray stone castles, green paper mountains with painted white peaks, blue-tinted water in little rivers that snaked across the landscape, even dwarves, giants, sorcerers, and other metal figurines clutching small silver swords, shields, and magic wands. The diorama featured all that and more, and it was an impressive, museum-quality display.

  Several cushioned chairs were spaced around the diorama, along with smaller tables covered with pens, notepads, and plastic containers filled with neon-colored, multi-sided dice. Still more tables bristled with bottles of paint, brushes, colored paper, and other art supplies.

  This wasn’t a barn—it was a ren-faire, role-playing, model-making gamer’s paradise.

  Definitely not what I had expected, and the jumble of items only made me more confused. Who owned all this stuff? And why keep it in a decrepit old barn? And what did any of this have to do with kidnapping Owen?

  The low murmur of voices sounded down below, and a door creaked open somewhere in the back of the first floor, out of my line of sight. Then the distinctive slap-slap-slap-slap of boots against concrete rang out.

  A few seconds later, Pirate Queen Celeste strolled into view. She was still wearing her red leather costume, along with her two ruby-studded swords, and that silver tiara still glinted on her head.

  And she wasn’t alone.

  Four black-leather-clad giants followed her into the front part of the barn. Two of the men sat down next to each other and started typing on two separate laptops that were perched at one end of the diorama table. For a moment, I thought they were booting up some game, but rows of text and numbers filled their screens, not bright, flashy graphics. The other two giants lounged on one of the couches.

  “Did anyone follow you?” Celeste asked. “Or try to stop you?”

  One of the giants on the couch shook his head. “Nope. I waited until Grayson took a break from the forge, then bashed him upside the head just like you told me to. The boys helped me carry him through the park. We told everyone that he was drunk and played it for laughs, and they all thought it was part of the show. We walked right through the crowd, and no one batted an eye.”

  Celeste nodded her approval.

  “What about Blanco?” another giant piped up.

  Celeste shrugged. “Lancelot took care of her. We’re free and clear.”

  I let out a quiet sigh of relief. Apparently, Celeste had believed my fake text claiming that Lancelot and his friends had eliminated me. Good. That at least gave me the small advantage of surprise.

  “But it’s a shame that Lancelot got to kill her instead of me. After all this work and training, I wanted to go a few rounds with the infamous Spider.” Celeste stuck out her red lips in an exaggerated pout.

  My hand tightened around my knife. She didn’t realize it yet, but she was going to get her wish to tangle with me—and she was going to bleed out all over that concrete floor.

  “All right, then,” Celeste said. “Let’s get on with it.”

  She turned to the giants on the couch and made a sharp, sweeping motion with her hand, as though she really was a queen telling her minions to scuttle away. The giants nodded, got to their feet, and disappeared into the back of the barn. A few seconds later, they reappeared, carrying a third man between them.

  Owen.

  Chapter Seven

  The two giants half dragged, half carried Owen over to a wooden chair close to the diorama and threw him down into the seat.

  An ugly bruise had bloomed like a purple pansy on the left side of Owen’s face, and blood had oozed out of a deep, nasty cut in the center of the swelling, trickled down his cheek, and dried on his skin like rusty paint. Owen blinked and blinked, but he didn’t resist as the giants tied his arms down to the chair with thick, heavy ropes. He was still clearly dazed from the hard hit he’d taken when the men attacked him behind the blacksmith forge.

  Some of the tension in my chest eased, and my breath escaped in a relieved rush that sent the dust motes spinning through the air. Yes, Owen was injured, but Jo-Jo could use her Air magic to heal his head, along with all the other damage the giants had done. I just needed to get him out of the barn first—and figure out exactly who these people were and why they had kidnapped him.

  I could understand Hugh Tucker, Mason, or some other Circle member snatching Owen to lure me into a trap, but it sounded like Lancelot had been ordered to kill me outright, while Owen was still alive. Why eliminate me and keep him alive? Unless . . .

  Unless this was all about Owen.

  This whole time, I’d thought someone had been using Owen to get to me. But these people didn’t care about me at all, other than making sure that I stayed out of their way. No, they had been after Owen this whole time. But why?

  I studied Celeste and the four giants, but I had never seen any of them before today. I was certain of it. I also didn’t remember seeing their faces in the files Fletcher had kept on Ashland’s many criminals. These were either low-level players or new folks in town. But that still didn’t answer the question of why they had kidnapped Owen.

  Celeste glanced over at the two giants in front of the laptops. “Aren’t
you ready yet?” she snapped, an impatient note in her voice. “How long does it take to type in a few passwords?”

  “A few dozen passwords,” one of the giants corrected her, still tapping keys the whole time. “And we’re almost ready. We’re just logging into all the accounts so that we can see the transactions and make sure that everything processes correctly.”

  My eyes narrowed. Accounts? Transactions?

  The giant was making it sound like this was all about . . . money.

  Kidnapping someone and cleaning out their personal and business holdings was a common enough scheme, especially in a place as corrupt and violent as Ashland, but I still wondered exactly why Celeste and the giants had chosen Owen out of all the businesspeople in the city.

  It wasn’t like they’d seen Owen walking down a dark street at midnight and decided to grab him on the spur of the moment. This whole setup reeked of weeks, if not months, of careful planning. But how had Celeste and her men even known that Owen was going to be at the renaissance faire? It wasn’t like he’d posted photos of his blacksmith costume on social media like his younger sister, Eva, would have. The only people who had known that Owen was going to be here were me and my friends and of course—

  A faint, ominous creak sounded. I froze, as did Celeste and the giants on the first floor.

  She yanked her two swords out of their scabbards and snapped them up. “What was that?”

  The two giants who’d dragged Owen in here drew their own swords and started looking around, while the other two men in front of the computers stopped their staccato typing, their heads swiveling left and right, searching for the source of the noise.

  A bad, bad feeling filled my stomach. I shifted my weight the tiniest bit to the right. Sure enough, another faint, ominous creak sounded.

  I was the one making the telltale noise.

  I grimaced and glanced down. For the first time, I noticed that the boards under my feet contained several deep, jagged cracks, far more cracks than the surrounding wood. My grimace deepened. I’d picked exactly the wrong spot to crouch down and spy on my enemies.

  I slid my knife back up my sleeve, then slowly stood up and scooted one of my feet to the side. I was trying to get off the weakest-looking board, but the next one I stepped onto wasn’t any better, and a third ominous creak rang out. I scooted my foot to a different board, and that creak cranked up into a low, steady whine.

  I grimaced again and glanced around, trying to find a sturdier board to stand on, but there was nowhere for me to go. All the wood up here was cracked and rotten. So I changed tactics, leaning forward and stretching my hand out toward the window. Maybe I could at least grab hold of the windowsill and take some of my weight off the weak wood—

  Too late.

  Crack! Crack! Crack!

  One after another, the boards splintered, and the entire floor gave way beneath my feet.

  Apparently, I was the straw that broke the hayloft.

  For a moment, I had the weightless sensation of falling, but then gravity set in, sucking me down, down, down. It all happened so fast that I didn’t have time to grab hold of my Stone magic and harden my skin, but I landed on one of the bales that wasn’t filled with weapons, and the hay softened my landing.

  But smacking onto a solid surface was never pleasant, and pain spiked through my back. The blow also punched the breath out of my body, and I lay there sprawled across the hay bale and broken boards for several seconds, just trying to get air back down into my lungs.

  While I sucked down breath after breath, two of the giants rushed forward and flanked me, their swords still clutched in their hands.

  When I felt steady enough, I slowly sat up and dusted the splinters of wood and bits of hay off my clothes. Then I looked at the giants.

  “Hey, fellas,” I wheezed. “What’s up?”

  Celeste stepped forward, both of her swords still in her hands. She eyed me a moment, then jerked her head at the giants. “Get her up.”

  The two men holstered their weapons, stepped forward, and hauled me to my feet. One of them held me still while the other man patted me down. He found all five of my knives, which he tossed onto the top of the hay bale. Once that man had gotten rid of my knives, the other giant let go of my arm, and they both stepped back. Fools. They should have realized that I didn’t need my blades to kill them.

  I looked over at Owen. “You okay?”

  He blinked away the rest of his daze and focused on me. “Just a little headache. You?” He nodded, and I realized that he was staring at my left arm.

  “Oh, just a little slice with a sword. Nothing to worry about. You know I’ve had worse.” I winked at him, and Owen grinned back at me.

  “Well, if I were the two of you, I would be very worried right now,” Celeste purred.

  She started twirling her swords around in her hands, just as she had done earlier during the pirate show, and her hazel eyes started glowing with a bright, golden light. And just like at the pirate show, I sensed a faint gust of magic, one that slowly grew stronger and stronger the longer and faster Celeste spun her weapons around.

  A sharp static charge filled the air, raising the hair on my arms and neck. In an instant, I felt like dozens of tiny invisible needles were stabbing into my skin over and over again, and I had to grind my teeth to keep from snarling. The uncomfortable pricking sensation reminded me of Jo-Jo’s Air magic, but it wasn’t quite the same.

  It was worse.

  Celeste was still twirling her swords around, but the blades seemed much brighter than before, almost as if they were . . . glowing. That bad, bad feeling filled my stomach again, and I peered at her weapons more closely.

  Hot golden sparks of electricity popped, crackled, and sizzled up and down the two blades, streaking from the hilts to the points and back again in explosive waves. Most elementals were gifted in Air, Fire, Ice, or Stone, but Celeste’s power was electricity, an offshoot of Air, just like Owen’s metal magic was an offshoot of Stone. I grimaced again. Of course, she had electrical magic. Because she wasn’t nearly dangerous enough with those swords already.

  Celeste must have gotten tired of showing off, because she stopped spinning her swords around and slowly lowered the weapons to her sides, although those golden sparks kept dancing up and down the lengths of the blades.

  “I can’t believe you’re an assassin, much less the Spider, the queen of the Ashland underworld.” She sneered. “And to think that I used to be your biggest fan. I got into sword fighting because of you, and I even dressed up like you at the summer faire last year. What a fucking disappointment.”

  My fan? Training with swords? Dressing up like me? I’d expected threats of violence and promises of pain, torture, and death. Not . . . whatever this was.

  “You’re my fan? How do you even know who I am?”

  Celeste arched an eyebrow. “Are you kidding? You’re a real-life assassin who supposedly has a heart of gold and helps people who can’t help themselves. Of course I know who you are. Everyone on the ren-faire circuit knows who you are. You’re practically a fucking folk hero.”

  All four of the giants nodded, confirming her words, and a couple of them gave me sly, goofy grins. I glanced over at Owen, who looked as bewildered as I felt.

  Celeste shook her head. “But I guess this just goes to show that the old saying is true and that you should never meet your idols, because they’ll only end up disappointing you.”

  “And how have I disappointed you?”

  She let out a loud, derisive snort. “Forgive me for not admiring someone stupid enough to fall through a rickety old hayloft.”

  She had a point, although I would never admit it. Plunging through the hayloft hadn’t been one of my finest moments, but sometimes Lady Luck just screwed me over like that. What mattered was picking myself up again and getting back into the fight, and I was an expert at both of those things.

  Unlike these people, who seemed to be . . . amateurs.

  All the talk o
f being my fan and dressing up made me think that Celeste and her friends were only playing at being hardened criminals instead of being bona fide villains. I eyed the golden sparks of magic still shooting off her swords. Well, she wasn’t playing. She definitely wanted to murder me in the most painful manner possible.

  Had Owen and I really been captured by some weekend ren-faire players? I bit back a groan. Finn would never let me live this down—provided Owen and I made it out of here alive.

  “Complete and utter disappointment,” Celeste said for the third time.

  Fan or not, I’d had enough of her snide criticism. She thought she was better than me? Well, we’d see about that.

  “I bet Lancelot and his two friends were disappointed in me too—right up until I killed them.”

  My harsh words wiped the goofy grins off the giants’ faces, although they didn’t seem to faze Celeste.

  “You guys don’t know what you’ve gotten yourself into. This is real life, not some game you’re playing on that diorama,” I snarled. “You’re right. I am the Spider, I am a real assassin, and I am really, truly going to kill you all dead unless you leave right now.”

  I turned my cold, wintry gray gaze to first one giant, then another. The two standing near me shifted nervously on their feet, but they didn’t back away, while the other two in front of the laptops stayed in their seats. I’d given them a chance to save themselves, and they hadn’t taken it. What happened next was on them.

  Celeste snorted again. “Lancelot was an idiot who barely knew the sharp end of his sword from his ass. I won’t make the same mistake. Trust me on that.”

  She spun her swords around again, putting even more flashy flourish into her smooth moves, along with another wave of bright, crackling electricity. Arrogant show-off.

  Still, as much as I would have liked to charge across the barn, wrest one of those swords away from her, and bury the blade in her heart, I held my position. Celeste was close to Owen, and she could easily slice one of her swords across his throat before I could get to him.