The Spider(Elemental Assassin series)

4





Two nights later, I found myself in a rustic dining room.

A long rectangular table made out of polished wood took up a large portion of the area, so big that it required three separate chandeliers to light the various sections. But instead of the usual brass or crystal, these chandeliers were made out of deer, elk, and other antlers that had been strung together. Giant wagon wheels covered the walls, along with what I could only describe as cowboy duds—shiny silver spurs, coiled lassos, and even a pair of old-timey revolvers crisscrossed over each other. A stuffed bison head that was almost as big as I was hung over the fireplace in the back wall. The bison’s dark eyes were fixed in a perpetual angry squint, as if the creature wanted to leap down and gore everyone in sight with the short, curved horns that it still had left on its head.

The dining room and all of its western furnishings were the property of Tobias Dawson, and the dwarf had apparently dressed to match the decor, sporting a droopy handlebar mustache, a turquoise lariat tie, and black snakeskin boots, along with a black business suit. A black ten-gallon hat perched on top of his head, although it couldn’t contain his sandy mane of hair, which fell to his shoulders. Dawson threw back his head and laughed at something a gorgeous vampire was murmuring to him.

Dawson was some big coal mine owner, with operations located throughout the Appalachian Mountains. Speculation among the other diners was that Dawson was thinking about expanding into the Rockies or even up into Canada. I’d have to tell Fletcher what I’d overheard. The old man lived for juicy bits of gossip like that.

Somehow Fletcher had gotten wind that Dawson had invited thirty of his closest friends and business associates to his home for a dinner party. Now here I was, smack dab in the middle of a crowd of women wearing expensive evening gowns and men sporting designer suits that cost just as much, although all of their finery seemed a bit at odds with the country cowboy collection adorning the walls—

“Hey, sweetheart, you going to stand there and gawk, or you going to offer me something to drink?” a low voice growled.

A large shadow fell over me, blotting out the light from the antler chandelier overhead and snapping me out of my snide observations. Because I wasn’t here as one of Dawson’s well-to-do guests. Instead of a satin gown and cascades of diamonds, I wore a black button-up shirt, a white tuxedo vest, and a matching white bow tie over a pair of black pants and boots. Cinderella, I was not.

No, tonight I was the help.

Actually, I was the help most nights. Fletcher often hired himself out for events like this, since it was a great way to surreptitiously scope out potential targets. See how many guards a businessman employed, whom he talked to, whom he snubbed, whom he was sleeping with. You never knew what information could be useful and help you get close enough to put your target down for good. I’d been coming along with the old man on catering jobs like these for years now, mostly working as a waiter, although I also helped him in the kitchen every now and then.

“Well, sweetheart?” the voice growled again, the tone a little sharper and more demanding than before. “What’s it going to be?”

I glanced up . . . and up . . . and up, until my gaze landed on the face of the giant in front of me. Everything about him was pale, from his skin to his hazel eyes to his wispy thatch of blond hair. His features were so light—almost albino, really—that he might have faded into the background if not for the sheer, solid size of him, seven towering feet of thick muscles anchored by a rock-solid chest. No, Elliot Slater was not someone you overlooked, not if you wanted to live through whatever encounter you had with him.

“Champagne, sir?” I asked, careful to keep my voice soft and neutral but still respectful.

I might be an assassin, but Fletcher had taught me that discretion was the better part of valor, and Elliot Slater could snap my neck with one hand if he wanted to. And he just might, since I was masquerading as an anonymous waiter. No doubt, Dawson and his guests would howl with laughter at such a casual, brutal display of the giant’s strength. They’d have to, because Slater could easily turn his wrath on them.

Slater grabbed a glass of champagne off the silver tray that I was now carefully, politely holding out to him. “That’s more like it,” he snapped.

He downed that glass of champagne and three more in quick succession. All the while, he stared at me, his cold gaze tracking up and down my body, from my ponytail to my breasts to my legs and back again. Apparently, he wasn’t too impressed with what he saw, because he snorted, grabbed a final glass of champagne, and shooed me away with a wave of his hand. The dismissive motion made the diamond in his pinkie ring spark and flash underneath the lights.

I gripped my tray a little tighter, but I made myself smile and politely, blandly, nod my head at him before turning away. It took more effort still to make my walk slow and controlled, as though I weren’t concerned about the fact that a vicious giant was staring at my ass, assessing it as coldly as he had the rest of me. Animals like Slater were attracted to fear more than anything else.

But he wasn’t the only one watching me—Fletcher was too.

He stood with four other chefs along the front wall of the dining room. Apparently, Dawson had thought that it would be fun to let his guests watch their food being prepared, although they were all far too busy bullshitting and boozing it up even to glance at the chefs as they whacked their way through mounds of vegetables, concocted creamy sauces, and flambéed various delicacies.

Dinner wasn’t due to start for another forty-five minutes, so the guests milled around, laughing, talking, sizing up their rivals, and plotting against everyone in sight.

Including Cesar Vaughn.

He was over in a corner, chatting with an older woman who was wearing several ropes of pearls that Jo-Jo would have admired. Vaughn was an even more imposing and impressive figure in person. Fit, trim, strong, handsome. But there was a . . . roughness to him, one that his expensive suit couldn’t quite hide. I could easily imagine him swinging a hammer, wielding a shovel, or lugging around bags of supplies, just like he had in the photos that Fletcher had shown me. And it seemed like Vaughn would have preferred to be doing any one of those things right now, judging from his many glances at his watch and the way his hand kept creeping up to his blue tie and yanking on the fabric, as though he found the knot there uncomfortably tight.

Well, that made two of us who were ill at ease, since I would have much preferred to have been killing him right now. If I thought I could have gotten away with it, I would have lured Vaughn to some dark corner and strangled him with his own tie. No muss, no fuss, no blood on my clothes. I’d even gone so far as to propose the idea to Fletcher on the ride over here, but he’d shot me down the way I knew he would. Even I would admit that it wasn’t the smartest plan, but taking Vaughn out as quickly as I could had its appeal.

Our target had been on Dawson’s guest list because he’d done some work on buildings at the dwarf’s coal mines, and also on his mansion, and he was the reason that Fletcher and I were here. Fletcher wanted to check out Vaughn’s security—or lack thereof—in person before we moved on to the next phase of the job.

Unlike some of the other movers and shakers, Vaughn hadn’t brought any bodyguards along with him. In fact, according to what Fletcher had been able to uncover, except for a few guards at his estate and a couple more who served as drivers, Vaughn didn’t employ any other giants specifically to protect him.

Then again, he didn’t need to, given his Stone magic.

Still dispensing glasses of champagne, I maneuvered through the crowd and over to Vaughn’s corner of the room until I was close enough to feel the magic emanating off him. Stone elementals were fairly rare, but Vaughn had the more common elemental trait of constantly giving off invisible waves of magic, even when he wasn’t using his power. In his case, a sense of solidness continually rippled off his body, as though his muscles and bones were encased in cement, instead of just skin, and your hand would shatter if you tried to punch him in the jaw.

Besides Vaughn’s abuse of Charlotte, his magic was the other most troubling thing about him and the one that could be the most dangerous when I finally went in for the kill. Vaughn wasn’t the strongest elemental I’d ever encountered, but it felt like he had a decent amount of power, more than enough to make anyone think twice about messing with him. I’d have to put him down quickly when we had our inevitable confrontation—

Vaughn’s phone chirped. He pulled the device out of his jacket, stared at the screen, and frowned. Then he tucked the phone away, excused himself from the woman he’d been talking to, and strode out of the room. I wondered what could be so important that would make Vaughn leave the party. Well, I was going to find out.

I glanced over at Fletcher, who was whipping together a raspberry sauce to top the molten dark chocolate soufflés that he’d prepared earlier. I tipped my head at Vaughn’s retreating figure, and Fletcher gave me a tiny nod, telling me to go ahead. He knew as well as I did that any information we could gather about Vaughn might be useful in plotting his death.

I moved through the crowd, passing out glass after glass of champagne. Elliot Slater had already diminished most of my supply, so it didn’t take long. When my tray was empty, I headed toward the open double doors, as though I were going to the kitchen to replenish my stock of bubbly. I might do that . . . eventually. But right now, I was much more interested in what Vaughn was up to.

I glanced around to make sure that no one was watching me, then slipped out of the dining room and followed my target.

? ? ?

Cesar Vaughn strode through the halls of Tobias Dawson’s mansion like it was his own. His strides were long and purposeful, indicating that he knew exactly where he was going. I wondered whom he might be meeting. A business associate to negotiate a hush-hush deal? A rival he wanted to warn away from a potential project? A secret lover? It could be anyone.

Vaughn rounded a corner and disappeared from sight. I hurried after him—

“Hey! Where do you think you’re going?”

I whipped around at the sound of the voice behind me.

A woman dressed in the same tuxedo clothes that I wore strode down the hallway toward me. She clutched a clipboard in one hand, while a headset arced across her head like a plastic crown, unsuccessfully trying to flatten her frizzy black curls. Meredith Ruiz, the event planner for tonight’s dinner and many others that I’d worked. She stopped in front of me and straightened up to her full height, which was a few inches short of five feet, since she was a dwarf.

“Where do you think you’re going?” Meredith snapped.

I gave her my best, most innocent, and most clueless smile and held up my empty tray like a shield in front of me. Too bad the metal wouldn’t actually protect me from her wrath. “I was headed to the kitchen to get some more champagne. Thirsty crowd tonight.”

Her brown eyes narrowed, sizing me up, but I kept right on smiling at her, as if I were doing absolutely no wrong instead of being up to absolutely no good.

“Well, the kitchen’s the other way,” Meredith said. “Come on. I’ll take you there.”

I glanced over my shoulder, but Vaughn was long gone. I bit back a curse. Of course he was. But that was just luck for you. A capricious mistress at best, one who would give you a break every now and then but mostly just screwed you over time and time again. My bad luck was one of the most frustrating things about being an assassin. Because no matter how many times I reviewed someone’s file, no matter how much I planned, no matter how careful I was, something inevitably came up that interrupted my schemes. Like a nosy event planner appearing at exactly the wrong moment.

“Come on,” Meredith said, gesturing with her hand. “This way. Let’s go.”

“What’s the rush?” I asked, still playing dumb and innocent.

She snorted. “You had the right idea to go get more champagne. Believe me when I tell you that you do not want these folks to be thirsty—or sober.”

She clamped her hand on my arm and started dragging me down the hallway. An easy thing for her to do, given her dwarven strength. My hands tightened around my tray, and I considered bashing her over the head with it. But the flimsy metal wouldn’t put so much as a dent in her thick skull. Besides, she wasn’t my target, and collateral damage was something that Fletcher had taught me to avoid at all costs.

“Something wrong?” Meredith barked.

There was nothing I could do. Not without arousing even more of her suspicions, so I shook my head and let her march me down the hall in the opposite direction from Vaughn.

? ? ?

Meredith led me to the far side of the mansion where the kitchen was. That was bad enough, but she also watched while one of the wine stewards poured several fresh glasses of champagne and arranged them on my tray.

“You take that straight back to the dining room,” she barked when the steward had finished. “And don’t even think about stealing a glass for yourself. You’re here to work. Not booze it up.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I drawled, grabbing the tray and hurrying away from her.

The whole thing only took five minutes, but that was enough time for me to completely lose track of Vaughn. I made it back to the spot where I’d last seen him and looked up and down the hallway, which was empty. I bit back another curse. Where had he gone?

I reined in my anger and thought about the floor plans for Dawson’s mansion that Fletcher and I had reviewed earlier today. Vaughn had been moving down this hallway toward the west wing. If he was hooking up with a lover, there were plenty of bedrooms, sitting areas, and other secluded corners where a pair of paramours could meet and get down and dirty with each other. But Vaughn didn’t strike me as the kind of guy to wander off and engage in a quickie, especially not at a business dinner. He was too solid, too sensible for that sort of thing. So whom could he be meeting, and where would they go? It had to be something important, something serious, for him to slip out of Dawson’s soiree.

The library, I thought. That was the only other room in this part of the mansion where folks might have a quiet discussion that they wanted to go unnoticed by everyone else.

So I headed in that direction, careful to keep out of sight of the giants roaming the hallways. Like Vaughn, Tobias Dawson didn’t have all that many guards, but I didn’t want one to spot me and wonder what I was doing so far away from the dining room—or, worse, call for backup.

I made it to the library without any problems, although I was faced with one the second I got there: the double doors were closed.

I slowly, carefully, quietly tried the brass knobs, which were shaped like bison heads, but both doors were locked from the inside. Faint murmurs sounded on the other side of the heavy wood, and I was willing to bet that at least one of the folks in there was Vaughn. I wanted to see what he was up to, but I couldn’t just barge in. Even if the doors hadn’t been locked, my ditzy-waitress act wouldn’t fly here, and that would be a one-way ticket to getting dead.

Yep, my bad luck was out in full force, and she was being a real bitch tonight.

I stood there, fuming for a few seconds, before I forced myself to dampen my frustration. I thought about the mansion’s floor plans again. But I didn’t remember there being any other entrance to the library, although there were several windows set into the back of the room—

A smile curved my lips. Windows. Of course.

Still carrying my tray of champagne, I hurried away from the doors and into the hallway that ran parallel to the library. A large window was at the end of the corridor. Perfect.

I put my tray down on the floor behind a table that was shaped like an oversize barrel, hoping that no one would notice it sitting there in the shadows. Then I opened the window and stuck my head outside.

The dining room and the library were both on the third floor, but for once, I was in luck, because a ledge ran beneath the window and continued on the entire length of the mansion. I calculated the distance from this window over to the next set, the ones in the library.

It looked to be about fifty feet over to those windows and fifty feet down to the ground below. A troubling distance. If I slipped and fell, I might not have enough time to reach for my Stone magic to harden my skin before I hit the ground. If that happened, I’d break at least a few bones, if not my neck outright. And moaning and groaning from the pain would be a quick way to get noticed—and probably executed—by Dawson’s guards.

Fletcher probably would have told me to close the window, scurry back to the dining room, and blend in with the rest of the servers. That this was a risky idea at best and a fatal one at worst. But it was worth the danger to see whom Vaughn was talking to. Besides, at least this way, I’d feel like I was actually doing something to help Charlotte, instead of just standing around, twiddling my thumbs, and watching Vaughn.

So I hoisted myself up and out the window.

Holding on to the sill, I scraped my boots down the stone until my toes touched the ledge, which was about three feet below the window. I moved to my left a few inches and then to my right, carefully testing my balance. The ledge was thin, no more than two inches wide and more of a pretty decoration than anything else, but it was sturdy enough to hold my weight. So I flattened my body against the wall, let go of the sill, and started tiptoeing toward my destination.

It was hard hugging the side of the mansion, especially since my fingers had nothing to grip but pitted stone. But I decided not to use my Stone magic to help me hold on. Vaughn might sense it, even through the thick walls, and I didn’t want to give him any clue that I was watching him.

Inch by inch, foot by foot, I sidled closer to the library windows, crawling my fingers over the stone and scooting my toes along the ledge. It was after eight now. A thunderstorm was blowing in from the west, and the hot summer wind whipped and howled around me, as jagged streaks of lightning danced across the darkening sky. I had a sudden image of a white fork bolting down from the thick, blue-gray clouds and frying me on the spot, leaving nothing behind but the black, smoking outline of my body on the wall, like a cartoon character.

I grimaced. Maybe this hadn’t been quite as brilliant a plan as I’d thought. But I was more than halfway there, so I edged onward.

Finally, I made it over to the library windows. Once again, I was surprised with a bit of good luck in that the windows had been cracked open, probably to let some cool air from the approaching storm blow into the room. I hooked my arms over one of the black shutters so I would have a better grip and to take some of the pressure off my legs. When I felt steady enough, I peered around the edge of the shutter and in through the windows.

The library had the same rustic feel as the rest of the mansion, with lots of barrels, bison heads, and antlers decorating everything from the tables to the chairs to the light fixtures overhead. If I hadn’t known better, I would have thought that Dawson was a cowboy instead of a miner. As expected, shelves filled with expensive-looking leather-bound books lined two of the walls, but my attention was drawn to the center of the room, where Vaughn was standing in front of an ornate wood-and-brass desk.

I hadn’t expected Vaughn to be alone, but I was mildly surprised to see his son, Sebastian, standing by his side. Sebastian’s name was on the guest list, but I hadn’t spotted him in the dining room. Perhaps he’d come straight here instead of stopping off for a drink.

Either way, the Vaughns looked like they were facing a firing squad. Both were stretched up to their full six-foot heights, their bodies stiff and tight with tension, their wary eyes fixed on someone sitting in the dark green leather chair behind the desk.

Tobias Dawson lounged on a sofa off to one side of the room, along with Elliot Slater. They must have left the dining room when I’d taken my forced detour to the kitchen. Both men looked far more relaxed than the Vaughns did.

“You can imagine my concern,” a low, smoky feminine voice drifted out the cracked windows to me.

Vaughn dry-washed his hands a few times before he realized what he was doing. His hands stilled, and he clasped his fingers together to keep himself from repeating the nervous, worried motion. Sebastian’s dark eyes flitted to his father, but that was his only reaction.

“I do understand your concern,” Vaughn said, his voice stronger than I thought it would be, given his obvious apprehension. “But as I’ve told you repeatedly, I have no idea what happened. I’ve been over everything a dozen times—the materials, the work history, even the crew that did the job—and I can’t find anything wrong. Not one single thing. I don’t know why that terrace collapsed.”

My eyes narrowed. They were talking about the accident at the restaurant, the one that had killed and injured so many people. The most likely reason that someone wanted Vaughn dead.

“Does it really matter why?” the woman asked.

Vaughn gave her a helpless look.

“Of course not,” she answered her own question. “All that does matter is that it did happen. And now we need to find someone to blame for it.”

For a moment, Vaughn’s gaze cut to his son, but no one else seemed to notice. If Vaughn was capable of abusing his own daughter, I had no doubt that he would throw Sebastian to the wolves in front of him in order to save his own skin.

So he was a coward too. Another thing that made me want to kill him.

A rustle of silk sounded, and the woman in the chair gracefully rose to her feet. She wore a deep emerald-green gown that clung to her curves in all the right places, and a bit of gold glinted around her neck.

Vaughn and Sebastian both swallowed, as if they were afraid that the woman was going to snap her fingers and kill them on the spot. I wondered whom they could be more scared of than Slater, but I got my answer a moment later. The woman turned toward the windows, and I finally got a good look at her face.

Her coppery hair was smoothed back into a sleek bun, the bright color a stark contrast to the absolute blackness of her eyes. Her skin was pale and luminous, dotted here and there with faint freckles above the generous swell of her décolletage. But my gaze locked onto the necklace that ringed her throat: several dozen wavy golden rays with a large ruby set in the middle of the design. I recognized it—and her—immediately.

A sunburst, the symbol for fire, the personal rune of Mab Monroe.