Spider's Bite

2

Now came the trickier part — getting out of the asylum. Because while all it had taken to get thrown in here was a faked psychotic episode and a few greased palms, several obstacles lay between me and the outside world, namely two dozen orderlies, a couple of security guards, a variety of locks, and twelve-foot-high walls topped with razor wire.

I crept to the end of the hall and peered down the next passageway. Deserted. It was after seven, and most of the patients had already been put back into their padded cells to scream away the night. With any luck, Evelyn and the orderly wouldn’t be discovered until morning. But I was going to be long gone before then. Never count on luck to get you through anything. A lesson I’d learned the hard way long ago.

Using the route I’d memorized and keeping in mind the orderlies’ timed circular sweeps, it was easy enough to make my way through the dim corridors to the right wing of the asylum. Thanks to the piece of tape I’d put over the lock, the door to one of the supply closets was already open. I slipped inside. Industrial supplies were crammed into the dark area. Mops. Brooms. Toilet paper. Cleaning solvents.

I walked to the back corner, where the builders had been too cheap to cover the granite wall with paint, and pressed my hand to the rough stone. Listening. As a Stone elemental, I had the power, the magic, the ability, to listen to the element wherever it was, in whatever form it took. Whether it was gravel under my feet, a rocky mountain outcropping soaring above my head, or just a simple wall, like the one I had my hand on now, I could hear the stone’s vibrations. Since people’s emotions and actions sink into their surroundings, especially stone, over time, tuning into those vibrations could tell me a number of things, from the temperament of a person living in a house to whether a murder had taken place on the premises.

But the stone wall underneath my hand only babbled its usual insanity. There were no sharp notes of alarm. No clashing and clanging vibrations of hurried activity. No sudden disturbances rippling through the rock. The bodies hadn’t been discovered yet, and my fellow crazies were probably still drooling on each other. Excellent.

I climbed up on a metal shelf set against the wall, pushed aside a loose ceiling tile, and grabbed the plastic-wrapped bundle of clothes I’d hidden there. I stripped off my blood-spattered, white inmate pajamas and shimmied into the new garments. One of the first things I’d done when I’d been committed had been to break into the patients’ repository and liberate the clothes I was wearing when the cops had brought me here. In addition to my blue jeans, long-sleeved navy T-shirt, boots, and navy hooded fleece jacket, I’d also had a couple of pocketknives on me, along with a silver watch that had a long spool of garrote wire coiled inside the back. Small, flimsy weapons, but I’d learned long ago to make do with what I had.

In addition to the repository, I’d also paid a visit to the records room, grabbed my fake Jane Doe files, and destroyed those, as well as erased any mention of my stay here from the computer system. Now, there was no trace I’d ever been in the asylum at all. Besides Evelyn Edwards’s cooling body, of course.

I snapped the watch around my wrist. A bit of moonlight streaming in the window hit my hand, highlighting a scar embedded deep in my palm. A small circle with eight thin lines radiating out of it. A matching scar decorated my other palm. Spider runes — the symbol for patience.

I uncurled my hands and stared at the lines. At the tender age of thirteen, I’d been beaten, blindfolded, and tortured — forced to hold onto a piece of silverstone metal, a medallion shaped like the spider rune. My hands had been duct-taped around the rune, which had then been superheated by a Fire elemental. The magical metal had melted and burned into my palms, hence the scars. Back then, seventeen years ago, the marks had been fresh, ugly, red — like my screams and the laughter of the bitch who’d tortured me. The scars had faded with time. Now, they were just silvery lines crisscrossing the swirls of my pale skin. I wished my memories of that night were as dull.

Moonlight highlighted the silverstone metal still in my flesh and made the marks more visible than they were during the day. Or maybe that was because I did most of my work at night, when the dark things, the dark emotions, came out to play. Sometimes I almost forgot the runes were there until moments like these, when they showed themselves.

And reminded me of the night my family had been murdered.

I ignored the painful tug of memories and continued with my work. The job was only half-done, and I had no intention of getting caught because I’d become misty-eyed and maudlin over things best forgotten. Emotions were for those too weak to turn them off.

And I hadn’t been weak in a very long time.

I stuffed the bloody pajamas and the empty plastic wrap into the bottom of one of the buckets the janitors used to mop the floors. Then I grabbed a can of bleach off the metal shelf, opened it, and dumped the liquid into the bucket. Using my jacket sleeve to hold one of the mop handles, I gave the whole thing a good stir. There’d be no DNA to be had from these clothes. Assuming the police even bothered to check for any. Murders, especially stabbings, weren’t exactly uncommon in the asylum, which is why I’d decided to take out the shrink here instead of at her home.

When that was done, I reached into my coat pocket and pulled out a pair of silver glasses with oval frames. The bluish lenses went on my face, obscuring my gray eyes. The other pocket held a baseball hat, to hide my dyed blond hair and cast my features in shadow. Simple tools really did work best, especially when it came to changing your appearance. A bit of glass here, some baggy clothes there, and most people couldn’t tell what color your skin was, much less what you actually looked like.

My disguise complete, I palmed one of the pocketknives, opened the door, and stepped out into the hallway.

Wearing my regular clothes and a big ole, friendly, southern smile, I left. Nobody gave me a second look, not even the so-called security guards who were paid for their stellar vigilance and exceptional attention to detail. Five minutes later, I scrawled a fake name across the visitors’ sign-out sheet at the front desk. Another orderly, female this time, scowled at me from behind the glass partition.

“Visiting hours were over thirty minutes ago,” she sniped, her face drawn tight with disapproval. I’d interrupted her nightly appointment with her romance novel and chocolate bar.

“Oh, I know, sugar,” I cooed in my best Scarlett O’Hara voice. “But I had a delivery to make to one of the kitchen folks, and Big Bertha told me to take my sweet time.”

Lies, of course. But I put a concerned look on my face to keep up the act.

“I hope that was all right with y’all? Big Bertha said it was fine.”

The orderly blanched. Big Bertha was the wizened woman who ran the kitchen — and just about everything else in the asylum — with an iron fist. Nobody wanted to mess with Big Bertha and risk getting whacked with the cast-iron skillet she always carried. Especially not for twelve bucks an hour.

“Whatever,” the orderly snapped. “Just don’t let it happen again.”

It wouldn’t happen again because I had no intention of ever coming back to this horrid place. I turned up the wattage on my fake smile. “Don’t worry, sugar, I sure won’t.”

The orderly buzzed open the door, and I stepped outside. After the asylum’s overpowering stench of drool, urine, and bleach, the night air smelled as clean, crisp, and fresh as line-dried sheets. If I hadn’t just killed two people, I might have dawdled, enjoying the sound of the frogs croaking in the trees and the soft, answering hoots of the owls in the distance.

Instead, I walked toward the front gate with sure, purposeful steps. The metal rattled back at my approach, and I gave the guard in his bulletproof booth a cheerful wave. He nodded sleepily and went back to the sports section of the newspaper.

I stepped back into the real world. My feet crunched on the gravel scattered outside the gate, and the stone whispered in my ears. Low and steady, like the cars that rumbled over it day in and day out. A far happier sound than the constant, insane shriek of the granite of the asylum.

A large parking lot flanked by a row of dense pine trees greeted me. The far end of the smooth pavement led out to a four-lane road. No headlights could be seen coming or going in either direction. Not surprising.

Ashland Asylum was situated on the edge of Ashland, the southern metropolis that bordered Tennessee, North Carolina, and Virginia. The metropolitan city wasn’t as big as Atlanta, but it was close, and one of the jewels of the South. Ashland sprawled over the Appalachian Mountains like a dog splayed out on a cool cement floor in the summertime. The surrounding forests, rolling hills, and lazy rivers gave the city the illusion of being a peaceful, tranquil, pristine place—

A siren blared out, cutting through the still night, overpowering everything else. Illusion shattered once again.

“Lockdown! Lockdown!” someone squawked over the intercom.

So the bodies had been discovered. I picked up my pace, slipped past several cars, and checked my watch. Twenty minutes. Quicker than I’d expected. Luck hadn’t smiled on me tonight. Capricious bitch.

“Hey, you there! Stop!”

Ah, the usual cry of dismay after the fox had already raided the henhouse. Or in this case, killed the rabid dog that lurked inside. The gate hadn’t slid shut yet, and I heard it creak to a stop. Footsteps scuffled on the gravel behind me.

I might have been concerned, if I hadn’t already melted into the surrounding forest.

Although I would have liked to have gone straight home and washed the stench of insanity out of my hair, I had a dinner date to keep. And Fletcher hated to be kept waiting, especially when there was money to collect and wire transfers to check on.

I jogged about a mile, keeping inside the row of pines that lined the highway, before stepping out onto the main road. A half mile farther down, I reached a small café called the End of the Line, the sort of dingy, stagnate place that stays open all night and serves three-day-old pie and coffee. After the asylum’s moldy peas and pureed carrots, the stale, crumbly strawberry shortcake tasted like heaven. I wolfed down a piece while I waited for a cab to come pick me up.

The driver dropped me off in one of Ashland’s seedier downtown neighborhoods, ten blocks from my actual destination. Storefronts advertising cheap liquor and cheaper peep shows lined the cracked sidewalk. Groups of young black, white, and Hispanic men wearing baggy clothes eyed each other from opposite sides and ends of the block, forming a triangle of potential trouble.

An Air elemental begged on the corner and promised to make it rain for whoever would give him enough money to buy a bottle of whiskey. Another sad example of the fact that elementals weren’t immune to social problems like homelessness, alcoholism, and addiction. We all had our weaknesses and caught bad breaks in life, even the magic users. It was what folks did afterward that determined whether or not they ended up on the street like this poor bum. I gave him a twenty and walked on by.

Hookers also ambled down the street like worn-out soldiers forced into another tour of duty by their general pimps. Most of the prostitutes were vampires, and their yellow teeth gleamed like dull bits of topaz underneath the flickering streetlights. Sex was just as stimulating to some vamps as drinking blood. It gave them a great high and let them fuel their bodies just as well as a nice, cold glass of A-positive, which is why so many of them were hookers. Besides, it was the world’s oldest profession. Barring your normal traumatic, life-threatening injuries, vamps could live a long time — several hundred years. It was always good to have a skill that would never go out of style.

A few of the vampire whores called out to me, but one look at the hard set of my mouth sent them scurrying on in search of easier, more profitable prospects.

I walked two blocks before ditching the glasses in a Dumpster next to a Chinese restaurant. The metal container reeked of soy sauce and week-old fried rice. The baseball hat and fleece jacket got left on top of a homeless woman’s shopping cart. From the threadbare condition of her own green army jacket, she could use it. If she came out of her rambling, drunken binge long enough to notice they were even there.

The neighborhood got a little better the more blocks I walked, going from drug-using, gang-banging, white trash to blue-collar redneck and working poor. Tattoo parlors and check-cashing joints replaced the liquor stores and peep shows. The few prostitutes who trolled these streets looked cleaner and better fed than their tired, gaunt brothers and sisters to the south. More of them were human, too.

With the pieces of my disguise disposed of, I slowed my pace and strolled the rest of the way, enjoying the crisp fall air. I couldn’t get enough of it, even if it was tinged with burned tobacco. Several good ole boys chain-smoked and knocked back beers on their front stoops, while inside, their wives hurried to put dinner on the table in time to avoid getting a fresh shiner.

Thirty minutes later I reached my destination — the Pork Pit.

The Pit, as locals called it, was nothing more than a hole-in-the-wall, but it had the best barbecue in Ashland. Hell, the whole South. The outline of a multicolored, neon pig holding a full platter of food burned over the faded blue awning. I trailed my fingers over the battered brick that outlined the front door. The stone vibrated with muted, clogged contentment, like the stomachs and arteries of so many after eating here.

The sign in the front window read Closed, but I pushed the door open and stepped inside. Old-fashioned, pink and blue vinyl booths crouched in front of the windows. A counter with matching stools ran along the back wall, where patrons could sit and watch cooks on the far side dish up plates of barbecue beef and pork. Even though the grill had been closed for at least an hour, the smell of charred meat, smoke, and spices hung heavy in the air, a cloud of aroma almost thick enough to eat. Pink and blue pig tracks done in peeling paint covered the floor, leading, respectively, to the women’s and men’s restrooms.

My gray eyes focused on the cash register perched on the right side of the counter. A lone man sat next to it, reading a tattered paperback copy of Where the Red Fern Grows and sipping a cup of chicory coffee. An old man, late seventies, with a wispy thatch of white hair that covered his mottled, brown scalp. A grease-stained apron hung off his thin neck and trailed down his blue work shirt and pants.

The bell over the door chimed when I entered, but the man didn’t look up from his paperback.

“You’re late, Gin,” he said.

“Sorry. I was busy talking about my feelings and killing people.”

“You were supposed to be here an hour ago.”

“Why, Fletcher, it almost sounds like you were worried about me.”

Fletcher glanced up from his book. His rheumy eyes resembled the dull green glass of a soda pop bottle. “Me? Worry? Don’t be silly.”

“Never.”

Fletcher Lane was my go-between. The cutout who made the appointments with potential clients, took the money, and set up my assignments. The middleman who got his hands dirty — for a substantial fee. He’d taken me in off the streets seventeen years ago and had taught me everything I knew about being an assassin. The good, the bad, the ugly. He was also one of only a few people I trusted — another being his son, Finnegan, who was just as greedy as the old man was and not afraid to show it.

Fletcher set his book aside. “Hungry?”

“I’ve been pushing peas around a plastic plate for the better part of a week. What do you think?”

I settled myself at the counter, while Fletcher went to work behind it. The old man clunked down a glass of tart lemonade filled with blackberries in front of me.

I tasted it and grimaced. “It’s lukewarm.”

“All the ice is in the freezer for the night. Cool it yourself.”

In addition to being a Stone elemental, I also had the rare gift of being able to control another element — Ice, though my magic in that area was far weaker. I put my hand on the glass and concentrated, reaching for the cool power that lay deep inside me. Snowflake-shaped Ice crystals spread out from my palm and fingertips. They frosted up the side of the glass, arced over the lip, and ran down into the beverage below. I held my hand palm up over the glass and reached for my magic again. A cold, silver light flickered there, centered in the spider rune scar. I concentrated, and the light coalesced into a square Ice cube. I tipped it into the yellow liquid, then formed a few more and dropped them in as well.

I tasted the lemonade again. “Much better.”

The next thing Fletcher set on the counter was a half pound hamburger dripping with mayonnaise and piled high with smoked Swiss cheese, sweet butter-leaf lettuce, a juicy tomato slice, and a thick slab of red onion. A bowl of spicy baked beans followed, along with a saucer of carrot-laced coleslaw.

I dug into the food, relishing the play of sweet and spice, salt and vinegar, on my tongue. I swallowed a spoonful of the warm beans and focused on the sauce that coated them, trying to isolate the many flavors.

The Pork Pit was famous for its barbecue sauce, which Fletcher whipped up in secret in the back of the restaurant. People bought gallons of it at a time. Over the years, I’d tried to discover Fletcher’s secret recipe. But no matter what I attempted, no matter how many batches of the stuff I made, my sauce just never tasted the same as his. Fletcher claimed there was one secret ingredient that gave the sauce its spicy kick. But the gruff old man wouldn’t tell me what it was or how much of it he used.

“Are you ever going to tell me what’s in the barbecue sauce?” I asked.

“No,” he said. “Are you ever going to quit trying to find out?”

“No.”

“Then I guess we’re locked in a stalemate.”

“I could fix that,” I muttered.

An amused grin flashed across Fletcher’s face. “Then you’d never get the recipe.”

I shook my head and concentrated on my food. While I ate, Fletcher picked up his book and read a few more pages. He didn’t ask me about the job. Didn’t have to. He knew I wouldn’t have come back unless it was done.

I always missed the Pit’s food when I was working. Missed the smell of spices and grease tickling my nose. Missed the loud clatter of plates and the cheerful scrape of silverware. Missed cooking in the kitchen and bitching about demanding customers and lousy tips. But mostly, I missed shooting the breeze with Fletcher late at night, when the front door was locked and everything was quiet, except for the two of us. The Pork Pit was more than just a restaurant to me. It was home — or at least the closest to one I’d had the last seventeen years. The only one I was likely to ever have again. The life of an assassin wasn’t exactly conducive to puppies and picket fences.

“How’s Finn?” I asked after I’d eaten enough to take the edge off.

Fletcher shrugged. “He’s fine. Making his deals. Taking control of other people’s money. My son, the investment banker and computer genius. He should have taken up an honest job, like thieving.”

I hid my grin behind my glass of lemonade. Finnegan Lane’s gloss of legitimate civility never failed to amuse his father. Or me.

I’d just popped the last bite of the heart-stoppingly good hamburger into my mouth when Fletcher reached below the counter. He came up with a manila folder and placed it beside my empty plate. His speckled brown hands rested on the folder a moment before sliding away.

“What’s this?” I asked. “I told you I was taking a vacation after the shrink.”

“You’ve been on vacation for days now.” Fletcher took a long slurp of his cooling coffee.

“Spending six days locked away in an insane asylum isn’t my idea of a good time.”

Fletcher didn’t respond. The folder lay between us, a silent question. I couldn’t help but wonder what secrets it contained. And who had pissed someone off enough to wind up in my line of sight. My expertise didn’t come cheap. Especially when you added Fletcher’s handling fee on top of it.

“Who’s the target?” I asked, giving in to the inevitable.

Damn curiosity. One emotion I couldn’t quite squash, no matter how hard I tried. Something I’d picked up from the old man over the years. He was even more inquisitive than me.

Fletcher grinned and flipped open the folder. “Target’s name is Gordon Giles.”

He pushed the file over to me, and I skimmed the contents. Gordon Giles. Fifty-four. The chief financial officer of Halo Industries. A glorified accountant and paper pusher, in other words. Divorced. No kids. Enjoys fly fishing. Likes to visit hookers at least twice a week. An Air elemental.

That last piece of information was unfortunate. Elementals were folks who could create, control, and manipulate the four elements — Ice, Stone, Air, and Fire. Some people also had talents for using offshoots of those, like water, metal, and electricity. But you weren’t considered a true elemental unless you could tap into one of the big four.

My Stone magic was strong and let me do just about anything I wanted to with the element, from crumbling bricks to cracking concrete to making my own skin as hard as marble. I couldn’t do as much with my weaker Ice magic, other than create cubes, icicles, the occasional knife, and other small shapes. The miniature animal Ice sculptures made me popular at parties, though.

Since Gordon Giles was an Air elemental, he could control currents, sense the wind, feel vibrations in the air the same way I could in stone. And he could manipulate them too, just like me. Depending on what sort of innate talents he had and how strong his power was, Giles could use his Air magic to try to suffocate me before I killed him. Force oxygen bubbles into my veins. Pummel me with the wind. Or a hundred other nasty things.

I studied the photo clipped on top of the information. Gordon Giles’s salt-and-pepper hair flopped over his forehead, just brushing the tops of his gold glasses. His eyes were like puddles of powder-blue ink behind the lenses. His face reminded me of a ferret’s — long and thin. Pinched lips. Pointed chin. A sharp triangle of a nose.

Gordon’s eyes held a look of nervous anticipation. The gaze of a man who knew monsters walked the streets and expected them to leap out and grab him any second. Twitchy men were far more difficult to kill than oblivious ones. I’d have to be careful with him.

“And what’s Giles done to merit my particular brand of attention?”

“Seems the chief financial officer has been cooking the books at Halo Industries,” Fletcher said. “Somebody found out and wants to address the situation.”

“Protection?” I asked.

Fletcher shrugged. “None that I know of, but the rumor is Giles is getting nervous and thinking about turning himself over to the cops, as if they would even bother to keep him safe.”

Cops. I snorted. What a joke. Most of Ashland’s finest were more crooked than the mountain roads that crisscrossed the city. If you went to the po-po for protection, you might as well hang yourself and save your cellmate the trouble of tearing up his perfectly good bed sheets.

“Halo Industries,” I murmured. “Isn’t that one of Mab Monroe’s companies?”

“She’s the major stockholder,” Fletcher said. “But one of her flunkies, Haley James, and James’s sister, Alexis, actually front the business. Halo Industries was started by their father, Lawrence. Him and the sisters kept it in the family for years, until Mab decided she wanted a piece of the action and muscled in on them. The father died of a heart attack two weeks after Mab took over. At least, that’s what the official word was.”

“And unofficially?” I asked.

Fletcher shrugged. “Rumor has it the father was making lots of problems. Wouldn’t surprise me if his heart attack was more of an unfortunate accident arranged by Mab herself.”

“A heart attack? That’s not really her style,” I said. “Usually, she just incinerates people with her magic, burns their house to the ground, that sort of thing.”

“True,” Fletcher agreed. “Which meant she probably passed the job on to one of her boys and asked them to make it look like natural causes. Either way, Lawrence James ended up dead.”

Ashland might have a working police force and government, but the city was really run by one woman. Mab Monroe. Mab was a Fire elemental — strong, powerful, deadly. All that was bad enough, but she wasn’t just your run-of-the-mill elemental. Mab Monroe had more magic, more raw power, than any elemental had had in five hundred years. At least, that’s what the rumor mill churned out. Given the fact that anyone who went up against her got dead sooner rather than later, I tended to believe the hype.

A respectable, multitiered business front hid Mab’s moblike empire. Intimidation. Bribes. Drugs. Kidnap pings. Murder. None of it bothered Mab. She reveled in the blood like a hog in slop. She had her spies everywhere. Police department. City council. Mayor’s office. Cops, district attorneys, judges, and other assorted good guys didn’t last long in this city, unless they went over to the dark side — and into Mab’s hip pocket.

Like all savvy businesswomen, Mab Monroe hid her true nature behind a veneer of cultured sophistication. Donating money to charity. Spearheading fund-raisers. Giving back to the community. All of it designed to distance her from the ugly things she ordered done on a daily basis. Mab kept her eye on the big picture, which is why she had two lieutenants, for lack of a better word, who ran the day-to-day operations. Her lawyer, Jonah McAllister, and Elliot Slater.

McAllister handled the people who challenged Mab through legal means. The slick lawyer buried the poor folks in so much paperwork and red tape that most of them went bankrupt just trying to pay their own attorneys. Slater claimed to be a security consultant, but the giant was really nothing more than an enforcer in a nice suit. He handled Mab’s minions and dealt with those who crossed the Fire elemental in a swift, brutal, permanent manner — when Mab didn’t deign to do it herself.

To most folks, Mab Monroe was a paragon of elemental virtue, a perfect marriage of money and magic. But those of us who dealt in the shady side of life knew Mab for what she really was — ruthless. The Fire elemental had a stranglehold on Ashland, her fingers in every worthwhile, lucrative, or helpful operation in the city, but it just didn’t seem to be enough for her. Mab just kept reaching for, and accumulating, more and more and more, as though money, power, and influence were the vital oxygen she needed to fuel herself. Simply put, she was a bully, albeit one with enough magic to back up any claim she made and get her anything she wanted.

I’d never liked bullies.

But Mab’s magic didn’t keep folks from quietly plotting against her. Several times a year, Fletcher got inquiries about hiring me to take out Mab Monroe. We’d done some recon on her over the years and had decided it was too close to being a suicide mission to bother with. Even if I could get through her layers of security and giant bodyguards, Mab could always kill me herself. She wasn’t afraid to use her own Fire elemental magic. That’s how she’d clawed her way to the top in the first place — by killing anyone who challenged her meteoric rise through the ranks of Ashland’s underworld.

Still, Fletcher kept an open file on the Fire elemental, tracking her security, her movements, looking for any signs of weakness. For some reason, the old man wanted Mab dead. He just hadn’t found a way to get it done yet. At least, not one that didn’t involve him going out in a blaze of glory with her.

“You’re telling me Gordon Giles was stupid enough to embezzle money from one of Mab Monroe’s companies?” I asked.

Fletcher shrugged. “It appears that way. Client didn’t give any more details, and I didn’t ask. If you’ll flip to the back page, you’ll see there’s a time limit on this one.”

I turned to the appropriate sheet and read the info. “They want the job done by tomorrow night? You want me to do a job on less than twenty-four hours’ notice? That’s not like you, Fletcher.”

“Read the payment.”

My eyes skimmed farther down the paper. Five million. Question asked and answered. Fletcher might have loved me like a daughter, but he also loved getting his fifteen percent. I wasn’t adverse to my cut, either.

“It’s not a bad chunk of change,” I admitted.

“Not bad? It’s twice your going rate.” A mixture of pride and anticipation colored Fletcher’s rough voice. “The client’s already made the fifty percent deposit. Do this job, and you can retire.”

Retirement. Something that had been on Fletcher’s mind ever since I’d come back with a broken arm and a bruised spleen from a botched job six months ago in St. Augustine. The old man kept talking about me retiring in a dreamy tone, as if there were a world of options that would magically open up to me the second I put down my knives. Instead of the dull boredom of reality.

“I’m thirty, Fletcher. A highly effective, well-paid, sought-after professional in my area of expertise. I’m good at my job, the blood doesn’t bother me, and the people I kill have it coming. Why would I want to retire?”

More importantly, what would I do with myself? I had a very particular skill set, one that didn’t lend itself to a lot of options.

“Because there’s more to life than killing people and counting money, no matter how much one might enjoy them.” His green eyes locked with mine. “Because you shouldn’t have to look over your shoulder for the rest of your life. Don’t you want to live in the daylight a little, kid?”

Live in the daylight. Fletcher’s catchphrase for having a normal life. Seventeen years ago, I’d wanted nothing more. I’d prayed for the world to right itself, for time to rewind so I could go back to the safe, sheltered existence I’d once had. But I’d given up that fairy tale long ago. Nothing but wistful pain would ever come of wanting something I couldn’t have. That gilded dream, that soft hope, that sentimental part of me was dead, burned away and crumbled to ash — just like my family had been.

People like me didn’t retire. They just kept going until they got dead — which was usually sooner, rather than later. But I was going to roll the dice as long as I could. Even if it was a sucker’s bet in the end.

But I didn’t want to fight with the old man. Not tonight. Like it or not, he was one of the few people left in this world that I loved. So I distracted him by waving the folder in the air. “You really think this is a good idea? This assignment?”

“For five million dollars, I do.”

“But there’s no time to do prep work with this job,” I protested. “No time to plan, to go over exit points, nothing.”

“Come on, Gin,” Fletcher wheedled. “It’s an easy job. You can do something like this in your sleep. The client even suggested a place for you to do the hit.”

I read some more. “The opera house?”

“The opera house,” Fletcher repeated. “There’s going to be a big shindig tomorrow night. They’re dedicating a new wing to Mab Monroe.”

“Another one?” I asked. “Aren’t enough buildings in this city named after her already?”

“Apparently not. My point is there will be lots of peo ple there. Lots of press. Lots of opportunity to get lost in the crowd. It should be easy enough for you to slip in, do Giles, and slip out. You are the Spider after all, known far and wide for your skill and prowess.”

I grimaced at his grandiose tone. Sometimes Fletcher reminded me of a circus ringmaster making the sad elephants, browbeaten horses, and two-bit acts seem more thrilling than they actually were.

“The Spider was your idea, not mine. You’re the one who thought you could charge more for my services if I had a catchy name, Tin Man,” I said, referring to the old man by his assumed assassin name.

Fletcher grinned. “I was right, too. Every assassin has a name. Yours just happens to have a better ring than most, thanks to me.”

I crossed my arms over my chest and glared at him.

“C’mon, Gin. It’s easy money. Pop the accountant tomorrow night, and then you can take a vacation,” Fletcher promised. “A real vacation. Somewhere warm, with oily cabana boys and boat drinks.”

I raised an eyebrow. “And what would you know about oily cabana boys?”

“Finnegan might have pointed them out when he took me to Key West last year,” Fletcher said. “Although our attention quickly wandered to the lovely ladies sunning topless by the pool.”

Of course it had.

“Fine,” I said, closing the folder. “I’ll do it. But only because I love you, even if you are a greedy bastard who works me too hard.”

Fletcher raised his coffee mug. “I’ll drink to that.”