Venom

by Jennifer Estep

  How… convenient.

  “You might as well get comfortable,” I said, staring at the lone light. “Because we’re going to be here a while longer.”

  Finn just groaned.

  We didn’t have long to wait. Less than fifteen minutes later, the dwarf finished loading the last of his boxes into the van. Once I started watching him—really watching him—I realized that he’d been taking his sweet time about things; moving slower than a normal person would have, especially considering the bitter cold that frosted Ashland tonight. But then again, this was far from the innocent scene that it appeared to be.

  Now the dwarf stood beside the van, smoking a cigarette and staring into the darkness with watchful eyes.

  “What’s he doing?” Finn asked, taking another sip of coffee. “If the man had any sense, he’d crank up the heater in that van and get out of here.”

  “Just wait,” I murmured. “Just wait.”

  Finn sighed and drank some more of his chicory brew.

  Five more minutes passed before a flash of movement along the dock caught my eye.

  “There,” I said, and leaned forward. “Right fucking there.”

  A figure stepped out from behind a small, squat shack at the far end of the dock that jutted out into the river.

  Finn jerked upright and almost spilled his coffee on the leather seats. “Where the hell did he come from?”

  “Not he,” I murmured. “She.”

  The woman strolled down the dock toward the dwarf. Despite the darkness, the single streetlight still burning let me get a good look at her. She was petite and slender, about my age, thirty or so. She had a short bob of glossy black hair, held back with some sort of headband, and her features had an Asian flavor to them—porcelain skin, expressive eyes, delicate cheekbones. She also wore black from head to toe, just like the rest of us.

  I frowned. No woman in her right mind would walk through this neighborhood alone at night. Hell, not many would dare to do it during the day—much less wait more than an hour in some run-down shack on a December night when the temperature hovered in the low twenties.

  Unless she had a very, very good reason for being there.

  And I was beginning to think that I knew exactly what that reason was—me.

  The woman reached the dwarf, who crushed out his cigarette. She said something to the man, who just shrugged his shoulders. The woman turned and scanned the street, much the same way that I’d been doing for the last hour. But I knew she couldn’t see us, given where we were parked. The Dumpster sitting at the end of the narrow alley in front of Finn’s car screened us from her line of sight.

  After another thirty seconds of looking, the woman turned back to the dwarf and advanced on him. For a moment, he looked confused. Then startled. Then his eyes widened, and he turned and started running away from her.

  He got maybe five steps before the woman lifted her right hand—and green lightning shot out of her fingertips.

  Finn jerked, almost spilling his coffee again. Even I blinked at the sudden, powerful flash of light.

  The dwarf arched his back and screamed, his harsh cry echoing down the deserted street, as the lightning slammed into his body. The woman advanced on him, the magical light in her hand intensifying as she stepped closer toward him.

  And she was so fucking strong. She stood at least a hundred feet away from me, but I could still sense the sharp, static crackle of her power even here in the car. The feel of her elemental magic made the spider rune scars on my palms itch and burn the way they always did whenever I was exposed to so much power, to so much raw magic. And she had plenty to spare.

  A second later, the dwarf caught fire. He wobbled back and forth before pitching to the cracked pavement, but the woman didn’t stop her magical assault. She stood over his body, sending wave after wave of lightning into his figure, even as the green elemental flames of her power consumed his skin, hair, clothes.

  When she was done, the woman curled her hand into a tight fist. The bright lightning flickered, then sparked away into nothingness, like a flare that had been snuffed out. Greenish gray smoke wafted up from her fingertips, and she blew it away into the frosty night air, like an Old West gunfighter cooling down his Colt after some sort of shootout. How dramatic.

  “Did you see that?” Finn whispered, his coffee now forgotten, his green eyes wide and round in his face. “She electrocuted him.”

  “Yeah. I saw.”

  I didn’t add that she’d used elemental magic to do it. Finn had seen that for himself as well as I had.

  Elementals were people who could create, control, and manipulate one of the four elements—Air, Fire, Ice, and Stone. Those were the areas that most folks were gifted in, the ones that you had to be able to tap into to be considered a true elemental. But magic had many forms, many quirks, and there were some people who could use other areas, offshoots of one of the four elements. Like metal was an offshoot of Stone—and electricity was one of Air.

  One that Finn and I had just seen used to deadly efficiency, thanks to our mystery woman.

  I was an elemental too. In my case, I had the rare ability of being able to control two elements—Stone and Ice. But I’d never seen someone with electrical power before. And now I wasn’t so sure it was a good thing that I had.

  The woman stuck the toe of her boot into the man’s ribs. A large hunk of his body disintegrated into gray ash at her touch and puffed up like some kind of cold, macabre fog. A sliver of a smile lifted her lips at the sight. Then she reached inside her coat, drew out something white, and tossed it down on his body before heading toward the van and sliding inside.

  Thirty seconds later, the woman drove the van down the street, turned the corner, and disappeared from view. But instead of watching the vehicle, I stared at the burned-out body that she’d left behind, wondering what that bit of white was on the dwarf’s still-smoking chest.

  “You want me to follow her?” Finn asked, his hand hovering over the keys in the ignition.

  I shook my head. “No. Stay here and keep an eye out.”

  I got out of the car and made my way across the street, slithering from shadow to shadow, a silverstone knife in either hand. After about five minutes of careful creeping and lots of pauses to look and listen, I reached the edge of the building closest to the dwarf. I crouched there in the black shadows, out of sight, until I was sure that the mystery woman wasn’t going to circle back around the block and see if anyone had come to inspect her shocking handiwork. Then I drew in a breath, stood up, and walked over to the dead dwarf.

  Even now, ten minutes after the initial attack, smoke still curled up from his body, like elegant, green-gray ribbons wafting all the way up to the black sky. I breathed in through my mouth, but the stench of charred flesh still filled my nose. The familiar acrid scent triggered all sorts of emotions that were better left dead and buried deep inside me. But they bubbled to the surface, whether I wanted them to or not.

  For a moment I was thirteen again, weeping, wailing, and staring down at the ashy, flaky ruined thing that had been my mother, Eira, before Mab Monroe had used her elemental Fire to burn her to death, and at the matching husk that had been my older sister, Annabella. Trying not to vomit as I realized the cruel thing that had been done to them. That was going to be done to Bria and me before the night was through. Sweet little Bria—

  I ruthlessly shook away the memory. My hands had curled into fists so tight that I could feel the hilts of my silverstone knives digging into the spider rune scars on my palms. I forced myself to relax my grip, then bent down on my knees so I could get a better look at the white blob resting on the dwarf’s back.

  To my surprise, it was a single white orchid, exquisite, elegant, its petals soft in the dark.

  My eyes narrowed, and I regarded the blossom with a thoughtful expression. I knew what the flower meant and exactly who had left it behind to be found. It was her calling card, her name, rank, and trademark, just like my spider rune was. S
omething that she’d put here to announce her presence, mark her kill, and serve as a warning to anyone who dared to get in her way.

  She was taunting me, just as I’d been doing to Mab Monroe these last two weeks.

  “LaFleur,” I muttered, saying her name out loud.

  Because the simple fact was that an assassin had come to Ashland—one who was here to kill me.

  About the Author

  By night, JENNIFER ESTEP is an author, prowling the streets of her imagination in search of her next fantasy idea. By day, Jennifer is an award-winning features page designer for a daily newspaper.

  Spider’s Bite and Web of Lies are the first two books in her red-hot Elemental Assassin urban fantasy series for Pocket Books. She is also the author of the Bigtime paranormal romance series, including Karma Girl, Hot Mama, and Jinx.

  For more on Jennifer and her books, visit her website at www.jenniferestep.com.