Tangled Threads (Page 62)

I shrugged. "Doesn’t much matter to me since you’re not going to live to tell anyone about this little encounter."

Instead of being cowed by my threat, given the fact that I was pretty much covered in blood from head to toe and brandishing two silverstone knives, LaFleur laughed. The crackling peal in her voice made me grind my teeth together. I was going to enjoy silencing that sound-forever.

Already I could feel LaFleur pulling her electrical elemental magic around her, bringing more and more of it to bear. The hair lifted on my arms and the back of my neck at the feel of it. Once again, I was struck by just how f**king strong her magic was, just how much raw power she had, but I pushed that thought aside. Thinking about how powerful your opponent was was a sure way to get dead. Weaknesses. I needed to focus on the bitch’s weaknesses, not her strengths.

Elektra reached up and wiped a small tear from the corner of her eye. I’d made her laugh until she cried. Too bad I couldn’t make her die the same way.

"I’m glad that you find your own impending death so amusing," I said. "Although in this case, laughter will not be the best medicine. Nothing’s going to save you."

Elektra smiled at me. "You certainly are confident, Spider. Then again, so was my brother. Right before you killed him."

My eyes narrowed. "Who the hell was your brother?"

Elektra tilted her head to one side. To anyone else, she would have seemed the figure of easy confidence. But I could see the tightness in her face, the calculations taking place in her eyes. She was looking for weaknesses, just like I was. Waiting for the right moment to lash out at me with her magic. My hands tightened around the hilts of my knives.

"You probably knew him best as Viper," she said. "Or maybe Brutus. He had a lot of names."

In the file of information that he’d compiled on her, Fletcher Lane had said that LaFleur came from a family of assassins. The file had even mentioned a brother. I’d just never expected it to be him, Brutus, aka Viper, the assassin I’d killed a few months ago at the Ashland Opera House. A man’s face flashed in front of my eyes, and I remembered his tattoo-the one of a snake crawling up his neck, the one he had taken his assassin name from. One that was eerily similar in design to Elektra’s orchid, now that I knew what I was looking for.

"That f**king neck tattoo," I spat out. "I should have known. I thought I’d seen it somewhere before."

She gave a delicate shrug of her shoulders. "Family trait. We all have one. Our parents decided Brutus should have a snake, even though I was older and wanted to be called Viper. But they thought it was a more manly symbol. They were rather sexist that way."

I put the pieces together in my mind. "So what? That’s your secret motivation? You came here to Ashland, you took Mab’s contract to kill me, just to get revenge for your brother? For Brutus? The bastard double-crossed me. He tried to hit me when I was trying to hit someone else. He got exactly what he deserved."

Elektra let out another crackling laugh. "Oh, please. I couldn’t care less that you killed Brutus. He was nothing to me. But I’ll admit he was a good assassin, which made me curious as to who had murdered him and how. We were always competing with each other, you see. Who could do the most hits, who could get to the hardest targets, who could command the highest price. So when this little job in Ashland came up, I thought, why not come and test myself against Brutus’s killer? Why not take on the great Spider? And so here we are."

"And so here we are," I murmured.

We stood there staring at each other, our eyes locked, green on gray. Neither one of us looking away, neither one of us moving a muscle, neither one of us even breathing. At this moment, we were just like two gunslingers out in the middle of a dusty, deserted street, ready for a duel at high noon. Only one of us would walk away, and I was determined it was going to be me.

"Well," Elektra said in a light, happy voice. "I suppose we should get on with things. Before Detective Coolidge gets too far away, and I have to chase her down. I really hate running, especially in these shoes."

There was no way she was getting past me. No way in hell she was putting one finger on my baby sister. No matter what I had to do, no matter what I had to sacrifice to keep that from happening.

"Bring it on, bitch," I snarled.

Elektra LaFleur gave me another smile. Green lightning flashed to life in her hand once more.

And then we danced.

Chapter 27

LaFleur reared back and threw her ball of green lightning at me. The other assassin wasn’t messing around anymore. Now that she knew I was really the Spider, she was going for the kill shot first. Smart of her.

But I was expecting it. I dived forward, tucked into a ball, and rolled back up onto my feet, all in one smooth motion. The lightning sailed over my head and streaked off into the darkness. My momentum carried me within arm’s reach of the other assassin, and I slashed at her with my silverstone knives, trying to end this with two swift cuts.

But she was expecting my move as well and caught my wrists. We stood there, her hands locked onto my arms, seesawing back and forth, with me trying to plunge the knives down into her body, and her holding my hands back. LaFleur was just as strong and determined as I was. Neither of us could get any kind of real advantage, merely grappling the way we were. So Elektra decided to up the ante.

She smiled, and lightning flashed once more in her green eyes.

I was able to grab hold of my Stone magic and use it to harden my skin the split-second before she slammed her elemental magic into me, using her hands like two conduits.

This wasn’t the first time I’d been blasted by magic. A few months ago, I’d gone toe-to-toe with Alexis James, an Air elemental who liked to use her power to flay people alive, to force oxygen under people’s skin and strip it from their bones one slow inch at a time. That’s what Alexis had done to Fletcher when she’d tortured and killed him inside the Pork Pit. She’d tried to do the same to me when we’d had our inevitable confrontation at the old Ashland rock quarry. But Alexis James hadn’t been as strong as Elektra LaFleur.

I felt every bit of the other assassin’s power surge into me, crackling against my own, arcing around me like lightning attracted to a metal rod, trying to break through the protective shell of my Stone magic. Even though my Stone power was blocking her attack and keeping the electricity from killing me outright, it didn’t do anything to stop the pain of it from filling my body. And it still hurt so f**king much, the shock of it arcing and arcing through my body as though I were holding on to a power line. I’d been wrong before when I’d thought you couldn’t electrocute a rock-because that’s exactly what was happening to me right now. My muscles spasmed, my teeth clattered together, and my whole body twitched and cramped and screamed from the agony of the electricity zipping through me again and again and again.