Jennifer Estep - Spider's Revenge

Instead of pulling the trigger, I heaved the rifle as far as I could into the trees. The gun hit one of the snow-splattered trunks and clattered off into the night. Gentry just looked at me, mouth agape, as if she couldn’t believe that I hadn’t gone for the kill shot when I’d had the chance. Part of me couldn’t believe it either, but that was the way things were.

Even as an assassin, even as the Spider, I didn’t kill innocents — ever. Sure, the girl had shot me, but she couldn’t be more than fifteen, sixteen, tops. Still a kid in so many ways.

Gentry crawled across the snow to the girl and held her close, shielding her from me, like she wasn’t sure what I was going to do next. Damned if I knew either.

“Next time, sweetheart,” I murmured to the girl as I bent down to pick up the knife that I’d dropped. “Keep shooting until you run out of bullets and not a second before.”

Gentry and Sydney both stared at me, their eyes identical pools of wariness, shock, and fear.

I skirted around them and disappeared into the snowy trees.

Stumbling and bleeding, as well as listening for sounds of pursuit from Gentry, the girl, or whoever else might be following me, I somehow made it to the old, anonymous car I’d stashed in a thicket of trees two miles from the edge of Mab’s property. I sank into the driver’s seat, cranked the engine, and turned the ancient heater up as high and hot as it would go.

White starbursts exploded in my eyes, and I struggled to blink them away. The girl, Sydney, had been a better shot than I’d given her credit for. The two bullets in my shoulder throbbed and burned with pain, and she’d gotten close to my femoral artery with that last shot to my left thigh. Good for her, bad for me. I’d left a blood trail through the snow that a child could follow. If I hadn’t had the car here, I would have been done for, still out floundering in the trees, trying to stay ahead of Mab, her giants, and her dinner guests, two of whom had already taken an unhealthy interest in me. And I was still in the proverbial woods, if I didn’t get the leg taken care of soon.

I ripped off my sweat-soaked ski mask, tore the fabric into strips with my silverstone knife, and used the pieces to make a tourniquet for my leg. I tied it off as tight as I could so I wouldn’t bleed out before I got to Jo-Jo. At this point, I just hoped that I had enough juice left to drive over to the dwarf’s house. But there was no time to think about things or procrastinate, so I threw the car into gear and put my foot on the gas.

As I steered through the trees and pulled back onto the icy road, I reached for my magic again. But not my Stone power. No, this time I grabbed hold of my other magic — my elemental Ice power — and let it fill the lower part of my body, particularly my left thigh. The cold magic flooded my veins, and the wounded area immediately went numb — so numb I couldn’t even feel that part of my body anymore. Or, more important, the pain pulsing through my thigh, and the blood pumping out of it with every beat of my heart. I sighed with relief.

For years, my Ice magic had been the weaker of my two abilities, until I’d overcome a block associated with it. Now it was just as strong as my Stone power. Numbing my own limbs so I wouldn’t feel pain was one of the recent tricks that I’d learned how to do with my Ice magic — the one that had helped me kill Elektra LaFleur when she’d tried to shock me to death with her electrical power.

LaFleur’s magic had been a bit of a fluke, as it wasn’t one of the four main areas — Air, Fire, Ice, and Stone — that most elementals were gifted in, that you had to be able to tap into to be considered a true elemental. But magic could take many forms, could manifest in all sorts of strange ways, and many folks were gifted in other areas, offshoots of the four main elements. Like water was an offshoot of Ice, and electricity was one of Air. The mechanics behind it all had never really concerned me. I was just glad I was still alive — and that LaFleur was rotting in whatever shallow, pauper’s grave Mab had dumped her in.

I’d only beaten LaFleur because I was the rarest of elementals — someone who could control not only one but two elements. Ice and Stone, in my case. Connected powers, but each with their own unique quirks.

My Stone magic had always been incredibly strong and let me do anything that I wanted to with the element, like hear the whispered vibrations in the rocks around me, make bricks fly out of a solid wall, or even turn my own skin into the equivalent of human marble.

My Ice power was different, in that it actually let me create elemental Ice with my bare hands — Ice that I could turn into all sorts of shapes, like cubes, crystals, and the occasional knife. My Ice magic also let me numb my body so that I would feel no pain, something that I was doing right now just to stay upright. Hell, maybe it would slow the blood loss too. I wasn’t familiar with all the ins and outs of this particular trick just yet. Maybe Jo-Jo could tell me more when I got to her.

If I got to her before I bled to death.

It was after midnight now, and the Ashland streets were deserted. Not surprising, given the icy conditions. Ashland was the southern metropolis that sprawled over the rugged corner of the world where the Appalachian Mountains cut through Tennessee, North Carolina, and Virginia. From a distance, Ashland looked like a jewel-toned paradise, surrounded by emerald forests and sapphire rivers with a silver diamond of a city set into the middle of all the sparkling grandeur. But anyone who’d ever spent any time in Ashland knew exactly what kind of violent, gritty place it really was. The horrible, despicable things that only happened on the darkest, dingiest streets in other cities occurred on Ashland’s main thoroughfares — often in broad daylight.

The city was divided into two sections — Northtown and Southtown — held together by the rough circle of the downtown area and flanked on either side by suburbs full of soccer moms, spoiled kids, and other middle-class folks. Northtown was the rich part of Ashland, where the city’s social, magical, and monetary elite lived, died, and generally tried to screw each other over every which way they could. All sorts of evil lurked inside the sultan-size mansions in Northtown, made even more sinister by the immaculate facades and perfectly groomed lawns. Mab Monroe, of course, lived in the heart of Northtown in the biggest mansion in the city, given the fact that she was the queen bee of the Ashland underworld.

The folks were poorer in Southtown — much, much poorer — but that didn’t make them any less dangerous. Vampire hookers, pimps, gangbangers, elemental junkies strung out on their own magic who’d just as soon light you up with their Fire power as spit on you. Those were the people who called Southtown home. Still, I’d always had a begrudging fondness for the area. At least in Southtown you knew exactly what dangers to expect, whereas in Northtown you might go over to someone’s house for a friendly cookout and end up with your ribs being the ones basted in the barbecue sauce.

It had been snowing in Ashland for several days straight. The February cold had been so bitter, biting, and unrelenting that what snow fell didn’t even begin to melt before the next arctic front blew in and dropped six more inches on top of it. By this point, the snowbanks on either side of the slick roads were taller than most dwarves — topping out at about five feet.

It was hard for me to drive in it, especially considering the absolute shit box of a car that I was in. Twice, the old, worn tires started sliding on the black ice, and it was only by the grace of whatever god was laughing at me that the car didn’t slam into one of the trees that lined the road. It also didn’t help matters that I could feel myself weakening and my attention wandering as more and more blood pumped out of my thigh. But I forced my hands to grip the steering wheel, the cracked leather digging into the spider rune scars on my palms, and drive on.