Venom

by Jennifer Estep

  Finn nudged me with his hand. “Go talk to her,” he whispered. “You have to start somewhere with her, Gin. Or else everything we’ve gone through, everything we’re going to do is for nothing.”

  I stared across the restaurant at my sister. So close, yet so far away. But Finn was right. I had to start somewhere with Bria. There’d been enough antagonism and lies between us already. I wanted to establish some sort of friendly relationship between us, wanted a fresh slate to at least try to get to know my sister. Might as well try to start wiping away the grime today.

  I looked at Finn with his bright green eyes. “Have I ever told you how much I hate it when you’re right?”

  Finn just smirked into his coffee cup.

  I rolled my eyes at him, then got to my feet and walked back to her booth.

  “Hello, detective,” I said in a pleasant voice.

  Bria looked up at me and nodded her head. “Ms. Blanco.”

  “Please, call me Gin,” I replied. “Everyone does.”

  She stared at me a moment longer, then nodded. “All right. Gin. Like the liquor, right?”

  I blinked. That was usually my line when I was telling people my name. “Yeah. Where did you hear that?”

  She shrugged. “Xavier told me you spell it like that. Seemed like an easy way to remember it.”

  “Sure.” I pulled my pen and pad out of my back pocket. “So what can I get you?”

  Bria bit her lip and looked at me. “Actually, I’m here to eat a bit of crow. That’s why I tagged along with Xavier today. I was hard on you the last time we talked, and I just wanted to apologize. Roslyn told me that you were just trying to help her, that you really had no idea where she was or what was happening to her. I’m sorry if I upset you.”

  I waved my hand. “Bygones, detective. Elliot Slater got what he deserved, and Roslyn is safe now, as you can see.”

  Bria’s blue eyes flicked to Roslyn and Xavier, who had their heads close together and were talking softly to each other.

  “Any clues as to this person who killed him?” I asked. Finn had his ways of getting information, and I had mine. “What are they calling him again?”

  “Her,” Bria corrected in an absent tone. “It’s a her. The press is calling her the Spider, because of the rune that she left at the crime scene. The one carved into the wood and stone on Elliot Slater’s mountain mansion.”

  For a moment, Bria stared out the window, watching the flow of pedestrians and traffic on the cold street. Then she reached down and slowly turned one of the rings on her left index finger around. The top ring. The one stamped with the spider rune. My ring. I wondered what my baby sister was thinking about, what she was remembering, what she was hoping for.

  “Well,” I replied, cutting into her thoughts. “I hope you catch her.”

  A grim smile stretched across Bria’s face, tightening her beautiful features. “Oh, I’m going to find her, Gin. Make no mistake about that. What I do with her then, well, I don’t know just yet.” She murmured the last sentence under her breath.

  I smiled at her. “Well, I’m sure you’ll have better luck on a full stomach. So what can I get you, detective? Everything’s on the house today, in honor of Roslyn’s recovery.”

  Bria ordered a cheeseburger with all the fixings and fries. I helped Sophia cook up her order and also grabbed a piece of blackberry cobbler—today’s special dessert. Several minutes later, I carried everything back over to the table and put it down.

  Bria eyed the pie. “That looks wonderful. Blackberry’s my favorite.”

  I knew that, even if I couldn’t tell her so. “I hope you enjoy it.”

  I started to turn away from her, to go back and hide behind the cash register like usual, but Finn gave me a small wave of his hand, urging me onward. So I turned back to the table and smiled once more.

  “Care if I sit?” I said. “It’s a bit slow yet, and since it looks like Xavier’s going to be one of my regular customers, I’d like to get to know you a little better, detective.”

  Bria seemed taken aback by my strange request, but she waved her hand at the opposite side of the booth. “Sure. I hate to eat alone anyway.”

  So I slid into the booth and watched Bria take a bite of her blackberry pie. Her eyes rolled back in her head.

  “Heaven,” she replied. “Simply heaven.”

  I grinned. “If you think that’s good, you should try my chocolate-chip pound cake.”

  Bria gave me a small smile. “I’ll be sure and do that next time I’m in.”

  I nodded, and we didn’t speak for a few moments.

  “You know, I finally figured it out, Gin,” Bria said. “Why you seem so familiar to me.”

  I had to work very hard to do nothing but keep blinking steadily at her. “Oh?”

  “Yeah,” she said, taking another bite of her pie. “You look a lot like my college roommate. Same dark hair, same pale coloring. Her family had a restaurant too. Even your blue apron is the same as hers. I loved that place. I spent as much time there as I could.”

  She gave me another smile, and I forced out a soft chuckle.

  “Imagine that. So tell me, detective. Where are you from?”

  I asked the question to change the conversation, of course. To keep Bria from thinking about who else I might look like or remind her of. But I also really wanted to know the answer. I still hadn’t looked at the folder of information that Finn had compiled on Bria. For the past few days, I’d been more concerned with how Roslyn was coping and what Mab Monroe was doing to try to find me. And now, with Bria sitting here across from me, I realized that I didn’t really want to look at the information. I wanted Bria to tell me herself, the way a friend would.

  The way a sister would.

  “Please,” she said. “Call me Bria. Everyone does.”

  I nodded again and smiled. “So tell me, Bria. Where are you from?”

  As Bria began to talk about her time in Savannah, Georgia, I relaxed against the booth. A small smile pulled up my lips, and my gray eyes flicked to the wall where a bloodstained copy of Where the Red Fern Grows was mounted, along with a picture of two young men about to go fishing. Jo-Jo Deveraux was right. Wherever Fletcher Lane was—heaven, hell, or someplace in between—I think he would have been happy with things right now.

  With Roslyn’s help, I’d struck a major blow against Mab Monroe and her organization. It would take her a while to find someone to replace Elliot Slater, and the other sharks were already sniffing around, sensing weakness in the Fire elemental for the first time ever.

  And here I was, Gin Blanco, Genevieve Snow, whatever I was calling myself these days. Sitting here in my favorite place in the world with the baby sister that I’d thought was dead. It was something of a miracle.

  Oh, things weren’t perfect. Mab Monroe was moving heaven and earth, at least what passed for it in Ashland, to try to find me. And if she did, well, there would be hell to pay. The Fire elemental and I were going to dance one day very soon, and I was going to be ready. I was finally going to kill the bitch who’d taken so much from me with just a wave of her hand.

  I had no doubt that Bria had figured out that the Spider was really her long-lost big sister, Genevieve Snow. That Bria was going to do whatever she could to find me. What she did when she discovered the truth, whether baby sister turned me in to the cops or did something else, well, I just didn’t know. But Bria was here, safe and warm in my restaurant, eating my food, and telling me about herself in a real, personal way that I wouldn’t get from Finnegan Lane’s file on her.

  It wasn’t the relationship that I had in mind with my sister. Wasn’t what I had dreamed of ever since I’d learned that she was alive, but it was a place to start. That was all that I could ask for now. And it was much more than I deserved. I knew that. And I knew that I had Fletcher Lane to thank for it all. The old man was the one who’d brought Bria to Ashland. Now it was up to me to do the rest. Somehow I would.

  And finally, there was Owen Gray
son. That morning at his house in the shower and then afterward in the kitchen; Owen had accepted me—all of me—in a way that Donovan Caine never had. Were Owen and me forever? Could I care about him? Could we build some sort of life together? I didn’t know, but I was strangely eager to find out, which is why Owen would be waiting for me at his place later on tonight.

  It was enough for now.

  Turn the page for an excerpt of the

  next thrilling Elemental Assassin novel,

  Tangled Threads

  Jennifer Estep

  Coming soon from Pocket Books

  1

  “Are you going to kill this guy? Or are we just going to sit here all night?”

  “Patience, Finn,” I murmured. “We’ve only been in the car an hour.”

  “Longest hour of my life,” he muttered.

  I arched an eyebrow and looked over at Finnegan Lane, my partner in crime for the night. Most nights, actually. Just after ten o’clock a few days before Christmas, and we were sitting in the darkened front seat of Finn’s black Cadillac Escalade. An hour ago, Finn had parked the car in a secluded, out-of-the-way alley that overlooked the docks fronting the Aneirin River. We’d been sitting here, and Finn had been grousing, ever since.

  Finn shifted in his seat, and my gray eyes flicked over him. The wool fabric of his thick coat outlined his broad shoulders, although a black watchman’s cap covered his walnut-colored hair. His eyes were a bright green even in the semidarkness, and the shadows did little to hide the square handsomeness of his face.

  Most women would have been glad to have been in such close quarters with Finnegan Lane. With his easy smile and natural charm, Finn would already have had the majority of them in the backseat, pants off, legs up, steam covering the windows as the car rocked back and forth.

  Good thing I wasn’t most women.

  “Come on, Gin,” Finn whined again. “Go stick a couple of your knives in that guy and leave your rune for Mab to find so we can get out of here.”

  I stared out the car window. Across the street, bathed in the golden glow of a streetlight, the guy in question continued to unload wooden crates from the small tugboat that he’d pulled up to the dock forty-five minutes ago. Even from this distance I could hear the warped, weathered boards creak under his weight as the river rushed on by beneath them.

  The man was a dwarf—short, squat, stocky, sturdy—and dressed in black clothes practically identical to the ones that Finn and I were wearing. Jeans, boots, sweater, jacket. The sort of anonymous outfit you’d wear to go skulking about late at night, especially in this rough Southtown neighborhood, and most especially when you didn’t want anyone else to see what you were up to.

  Or were planning to kill someone, like I was tonight. Most nights, actually.

  I rubbed my thumb over the hilt of the silverstone knife that I held in my lap. The metal glinted dully in the darkness of the car, and the weight of the weapon felt cold and comforting, the way it always did to me. The knife rested lightly on the spider rune scar embedded in my palm.

  It would be easy enough to give in to Finn’s whining; to slip out of the car, cross the street, creep up behind the dwarf, cut his throat, and shove his body off the dock and into the cold river below. I probably wouldn’t even get that much blood on my clothes, if I got the angles just right.

  Because that’s what assassins did. That’s what I did. Me. Gin Blanco. The assassin known as the Spider, one of the best around.

  But I didn’t get out of the car and get on with things like Finn wanted me to. Instead, I sighed. “He hardly seems worth the trouble. He’s a flunkie, just like all the others I’ve killed these past two weeks. Mab will hire someone else to take his place before they even dredge his body out of the river.”

  “Hey, you were the one who decided to declare war on Mab Monroe,” Finn pointed out. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe that you were rather eager to kill your way up to the top of the food chain until you got to her. You said it would be fun.”

  “That was six hits ago. Now I’d just like to kill Mab and give everyone in Ashland an early Christmas present, myself included.” My turn to grouse.

  But Finn was right. A few weeks ago, a series of events had led me to officially declare war on Mab, and now I was dealing with the fallout—and the tedious boredom of it all.

  Mab Monroe was the Fire elemental who ran the southern metropolis of Ashland as if it were her own personal kingdom. To most folks, Mab was a paragon of virtue, a Fire elemental who used her magic, business connections, and money to fund worthwhile charity projects throughout the city. But those of us who strolled through the shady side of life knew Mab for what she really was—the head of a Mob-like empire that included everything from gambling and drugs to prostitution and kidnappings. Murder, extortion, torture, blackmail, beatings. Mab ordered all those and more, practically on a daily basis. But the Fire elemental was so wealthy, so powerful, so strong in her magic that no one dared to stand up to her.

  Until me.

  I had a special reason to hate Mab—she’d murdered my mother and older sister when I was thirteen. And she’d been planning to do the same thing to me and my baby sister, Bria. But first, Mab had decided to capture and torture me that fateful night so long ago. Which is how I’d ended up with a pair of matching scars on my hands.

  I put my knife down long enough to rub first one scar, then the other, with my fingers. A small circle surrounded by eight thin rays was branded into each one of my palms. A spider rune. The symbol for patience. My assassin name.

  And one that Mab Monroe was now seeing everywhere she went.

  For the past two weeks I’d been stalking Mab’s men, getting a feel for her operation, seeing exactly what kind of illegal pies she had her sticky fingers in. And along the way, I’d picked off some of her minions when I caught them doing things that they shouldn’t do, hurting people that they shouldn’t hurt. A twist of my knife, a slash of my blade, and Mab Monroe had had one less soldier in her little army of terror.

  Killing her men hadn’t been hard, not for me. I’d spent the last seventeen years being an assassin, being the Spider, until I’d retired a few months ago. Certain skills you just never forgot.

  Normally, though, when I killed someone, I left nothing behind. No fingerprints, no weapon, no DNA. But with Mab’s men, I’d purposefully drawn the image of my spider rune at every scene, close to every body that I left behind. Taunting her. Letting Mab know exactly who was responsible for messing up her plans and that I was determined to pick her empire apart, one body at a time if I had to.

  Which is why Finn and I were now sitting in the dark, down by the docks, in this dangerous Southtown neighborhood. Finn had gotten a tip from one of his sources that Mab had a shipment of drugs or some other illegal paraphernalia coming into Ashland tonight. As the Spider, I’d decided to come down here and see what I could do to foul up Mab’s plans once more, thumb my nose at her, and generally piss her off.

  “Come on, Gin,” Finn said, cutting into my musings. “Make a move already. The guy’s alone. We would have seen his partner by now, if he’d had one.”

  I looked at the dwarf. He’d finished unloading the boxes from the tugboat and was now busy hauling them over to a van parked at the end of the dock.

  “I know,” I said. “But something about this just doesn’t seem right.”

  “Yeah,” Finn muttered. “The fact that I can’t feel my feet anymore and you won’t let me turn the heater on.”

  “Drink your coffee, then. It’ll make you feel better. It always does.”

  For the first time tonight, a grin spread across Finn’s face. “Why, I think that’s an excellent idea.”

  Finn reached down and grabbed a large metal thermos from the floorboard in the backseat. He cracked open the top, and the caffeine fumes of his chicory coffee filled the car. The rich smell always reminded me of his father, Fletcher Lane, my mentor, the one who’d taught me everything that I know about being an
assassin. The old man had drunk the same foul brew as his son before he’d died earlier this year. I smiled at the memory and the warmth it always stirred in me.

  While Finn drank his coffee, I stared out at the scene before me once more. Everything seemed still, quiet, cold, dark. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that something was wrong. That something was just slightly off about this whole setup. Fletcher Lane had always told me that nobody ever got dead by waiting just a few more minutes. His advice had kept me alive this long, and I had no intention of disregarding it now.

  Once again my eyes scanned the area. Deserted street. A few dilapidated buildings hugging the waterfront. The black ribbon of the Aneirin River in the distance. The pale boards of the dock. A lone light flickering over the dwarf’s head—

  My eyes narrowed, and I focused on the light; the bright, intact light burning like a beacon in the dark night. Then I looked up and down the street, my gaze flicking from one iron post to the next. Every other light on the block was busted out. Not surprising. This was Southtown, after all, the part of Ashland that was home to gangbangers, vampire prostitutes, and junkie elementals strung out on their own magic and hungry for more. People would just as soon kill you as look at you here. Not a place you wanted to linger, even during daylight hours.

  So I wasn’t surprised that the streetlights had been broken, probably long ago, by the rocks, beer bottles, and other trash that littered the street. What did surprise me was that there was one still burning—the one right over the van that the dwarf was now packing his boxes into.