I grabbed a couple of plastic cups out of the duffel bag and handed them to Phillip, who held them steady while I poured. The rich, heady aroma of the hot chocolate filled the van, cutting through the icy chill that had crept inside the vehicle. I breathed in the fumes as I capped the thermos and put it away. Phillip passed me my cup, and I drew in a couple more steamy breaths before taking a sip. The dark chocolate coated my tongue with its bittersweet flavor, softened by the vanilla extract and raspberry puree I had added to the mixture.
Phillip cradled his hot chocolate like a bum huddled over a trash can fire. He took a long slurp and sighed again, this time with happiness. “Now, that’s more like it.”
We both settled back in our seats, watching the mansion and sipping our hot chocolate.
The folks who’d been hosting the dinner party must have decided to go to bed, since the recorded carols abruptly cut off, and the holiday lights winked out one door, window, and plastic snowman at a time, further blackening the landscape. The drizzle picked up as well, turning into more of a steady rain, each drop tinking against the windshield. It truly was a night fit for neither man nor beast, but this had been my favorite kind of environment as an assassin. The cold, the rain, the darkness always made it that much easier to get close to your target and then get away after you’d put him down. If I wanted someone dead, I would have waited for a night just like this one to strike.
And I was willing to bet that someone might have the same idea about the man in the mansion.
Phillip tipped his cup at the shadow still pacing back and forth behind the patio doors. “You really think that he knows something about the Circle?”
I shrugged. “He’s the best lead I have right now—and the only person still alive who might know anything about them.”
Two weeks ago, I’d been kidnapped and held hostage by Hugh Tucker, a vampire who claimed he was part of “the Circle,” a secret group that supposedly pulled the strings on the underworld and everything else in Ashland. That had certainly come as news to me, since I was supposedly the head of the underworld these days. But Tucker had claimed that the Circle was a group of criminals so high and mighty that no one could touch them, especially not a lowly assassin like me. The vamp had also said that the Circle monitored everything from behind the scenes—and that they could kill me and my friends anytime they wanted to.
But the most shocking thing he’d told me was that my mother, Eira Snow, had supposedly been one of them.
My mother was murdered when I was thirteen, and it was a deep loss that I still felt to this day. But I’d viewed my mother like any other kid. She was my mom—nothing more, nothing less. I’d never really thought about who she was, much less about what kind of person. The good things she did, the bad things, how she felt about all of them. I didn’t know any of that. But Tucker had turned my world upside down with his accusations, and I wanted to know how true they were: I had to know if my mother had been the good person I’d always assumed she was, or just as rotten, dirty, and depraved as the rest of this shadowy Circle.
“You know, we could just go knock on his door and ask him about all of this,” Phillip said.
I snorted. “He wouldn’t tell me anything. Nothing I could trust anyway. He hates me too much for that.”
Phillip shifted in his seat again. “Well, at least we could get this over with and go home for the night. That would certainly keep my balls from turning into ice cubes—”
A pair of headlights popped up in the rearview mirror. I gestured at Phillip, and we both slouched back down in our seats.
A black SUV cruised down the street, passing us. The vehicle went down to the end of the block and made a right, disappearing from sight. Phillip started to sit back up, but I held out my hand, stopping him.
“Wait,” I said. “Let’s see if they come back.”
He rolled his eyes but stayed still. “Why would they come back? It’s probably just somebody who lives in the neighborhood—”
Headlights popped up in the rearview mirror again and that same SUV cruised by our position. This time the vehicle turned left at the end of the block.
“Maybe they’re lost,” he said. “All these cookie-cutter Northtown streets and mansions look alike, especially in the dark.”
I shook my head. “They’re not lost. They’re seeing how quiet and deserted the area is for whatever they have in mind. They’ll be back. You’ll see.”
We sat still in the van, watching our mirrors. Sure enough, a minute later, that same SUV cruised by us again. Only this time, the vehicle didn’t have its headlights on, or even its parking lights. It whipped a U-turn in the middle of the street, pulled over to the curb, and stopped—right in front of the mansion we were watching.
“Hello,” I murmured. “What do we have here?”
The doors opened, and two people got out of the front of the SUV, both wearing long black trench coats akin to Phillip’s. They were giants, each one roughly seven feet tall with thick shoulders and broad chests. Most likely they were the muscle and bodyguards for whoever was in the back of the vehicle.
Sure enough, one of the giants opened a rear door, and a shorter, thinner figure emerged, also sporting a black trench coat. This person also wore a black fedora and had a matching scarf wrapped around their neck. I peered through my binoculars, but the person’s back was to me, so I couldn’t see their face, although from the size and gait, I did get the impression that it was a woman.
“Some late-night visitors here for a hush-hush meeting with our old friend?” Phillip drawled.
“Maybe.”
One of the giants squatted down. At first, I wondered what he was doing, but then the woman in the fedora and scarf ran over to the giant, who hoisted her up into the air. Ms. Fedora grabbed hold of the top of the iron gate and swung her legs up and over it with all the grace of an Olympic gymnast. Landing deftly on her feet in the yard on the other side, she straightened up and started striding toward the mansion with graceful purpose.
I cursed, realizing that I was about to lose my one and only lead on the Circle. I’d considered the possibility that someone might come here looking for him, but part of me hadn’t thought that it would actually happen, since everything else I’d tried to track down the members of the Circle had been a dead end.
“Not a meeting,” I growled. “They’re here to kill him.”
Since Fedora was already past the gate, I didn’t have time to ease out of the van, sneak through the shadows, and stab the giants in the back the way I normally would have.
Thus I kicked my door open, barreled out of the vehicle, and started running down the street toward the SUV.
“Gin! Wait!” Phillip shouted, scrambling to get out and follow me.
But I needed to get to the man in the mansion before Fedora did, so I tuned him out. The giants whirled around at the sound of Phillip’s voice and spotted me racing toward them. They cursed, pulled guns out from underneath their trench coats, and snapped up the weapons.
Pfft! Pfft! Pfft!
I zigzagged, and the first round of bullets went wide. But when the giants paused to take more careful aim, I reached for my Stone magic and hardened my skin into an impenetrable shell.
Pfft! Pfft! Pfft!
The second round of bullets also went wide. The giants had come prepared, and the silencers on the ends of their weapons muffled the sounds of the shots. No lights snapped on inside the neighboring mansions. They wanted to keep this quiet—well, so did I.
Pfft! Pfft! Pfft!
Two of the bullets went wide, but the third punched into my right shoulder, spinning me around. Still, thanks to my magic, it didn’t blast through me the way it would have otherwise. I skidded on the ice coating the street, but I managed to regain my balance and charge forward again.
But instead of heading toward the giants, I ran straight at the SUV. When I was in range, I leaped up onto the hood, then scrambled up onto the roof. Before the giants realized what I was doing, I raced
forward and leaped off the vehicle’s roof, pushing off hard and trying to get as high in the air as possible. Lucky for me, they’d parked close to the curb and the narrow sidewalk. A second later, my hands hit the top of the wall that fronted the mansion, and I dug my boots into the slick stones so that I could pull myself up onto the top of the wall. Fedora wasn’t the only one who could do gymnastics.
I rolled off the top of the wall and dropped ten feet down to the other side. I paused a moment to palm one of the silverstone knives tucked up my sleeves, then darted forward across the lawn. The ice-crusted grass crunched like brittle bones under my boots.
The light spilling out from the office perfectly illuminated Fedora, who was fifty feet ahead of me and moving fast, her breath streaming out behind her in a trail of frosty vapor. She must have heard the disturbance out on the street because she picked up her pace, pulled a gun out of her trench coat, and shot through the lock on the patio doors with one smooth motion. A second later, she was inside the mansion.
“Hey!” a man’s voice shouted from inside the office. “Who are you? What do you think you’re doing?”
I didn’t hear her reply, if there even was one.
Pfft! Pfft! Pfft!
Pfft! Pfft! Pfft!
More and more shots sounded behind me, but the giants weren’t aiming at me anymore. Phillip must have gotten into the fight. He could take care of himself, so I focused all my energy on sprinting across the lawn, trying to get to the mansion, even though it was already too late.
Pfft! Pfft! Pfft!
Sure enough, gunfire flashed inside the office, as bright as the holiday lights had been earlier. Someone had just been shot.
A second later, Fedora stepped through the doors and out onto the stone patio. I squinted, but the office lights were behind her, and all I could really see in the darkness was the pale glitter of her eyes. She gave me a mocking salute with her gun before ducking back inside the mansion. Now that her mission was accomplished, no doubt she’d leave through one of the back doors and disappear into the woods. All without my even getting a look at her face.
I cursed. Even though I wanted to rush inside the mansion, I forced myself to slow down and approach the patio doors with caution, just in case she might be lying in wait to try to kill me too. I also grabbed hold of even more of my Stone power, hardening my skin as much as possible on the off chance that she decided to blast me with elemental magic and bullets. As a final touch, I reached out with my magic, listening to all the emotional vibrations that had sunk into the stone walls of the mansion.
Harsh, shocked mutters echoed back to me, from the shots the woman had just fired. Alongside that was a high, whiny chorus of worry, fear, and paranoia. But there were no sly whispers or dark murmurs of evil intent that would have signaled that she was hiding in the office, ready to put a bullet in my head the second I stepped inside. Whoever the woman was, she was long gone.
Still, I was careful as I eased my way into the office, my knife still in my hand, my other hand up and lightly glowing with Ice magic, ready to blast whoever might challenge me.
But only one person was in the office: the man I’d been watching.
Jonah McAllister, my old nemesis, lay sprawled across the floor.
About the Author
PHOTO © ANDRE TEAGUE
JENNIFER ESTEP is a New York Times and USA TODAY bestselling author prowling the streets of her imagination in search of her next fantasy idea. Spider’s Bite, Web of Lies, Venom, Tangled Threads, Spider’s Revenge, By a Thread, Widow’s Web, Deadly Sting, Heart of Venom, The Spider, Poison Promise, Black Widow, Spider’s Trap, Bitter Bite, and Unraveled, along with the e-shorts Thread of Death, Parlor Tricks, and Kiss of Venom, are the other works in her red-hot Elemental Assassin urban fantasy series. Jennifer is also the author of the Black Blade and Mythos Academy young adult urban fantasy series and the Bigtime paranormal romance series. For more on Jennifer and her books, visit her at www.JenniferEstep.com and @Jennifer_Estep.
FOR MORE ON THIS AUTHOR: Authors.SimonandSchuster.com/Jennifer-Estep
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Books in the
Elemental Assassin Series
by Jennifer Estep
Spider’s Bite
Web of Lies
Venom
Tangled Threads
Spider’s Revenge
By a Thread
Widow’s Web
Deadly Sting
Heart of Venom
The Spider
Poison Promise
Black Widow
Spider’s Trap
Bitter Bite
E-novellas
Thread of Death
Parlor Tricks
Kiss of Venom
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Pocket Books
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2016 by Jennifer Estep
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First Pocket Books paperback edition March 2016
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Cover design and photo illustration by Tony Mauro
ISBN 978-1-5011-1127-3
ISBN 978-1-5011-1128-0 (ebook)
Contents
Acknowledgments
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Unraveled Excerpt
About the Author
Bitter Bite Page 31
