Spider's Bargain - (Elemental Assassin, #0.5) Page 0,1

of bad people doing a lot of bad things. But Ingles was the lowest sort of scum for what he’d done to that girl.

And I was here tonight to make sure that he never had the chance to do it again.

Pro fucking bono.

Normally, I didn’t work for nothing. Mine was a highly specialized skill set, and I liked getting paid for it. I earned it, if only for all the blood I had to wash out of my clothes and hair after the fact.

And as the Spider, I got paid a lot to kill people. I’d been in the assassin business since I was thirteen. Now, creeping up on thirty, I had more money tucked away than I could spend in two lifetimes. Which was one of the reasons my handler, Fletcher, kept nagging me to retire. The old man wanted me to live long enough to actually spend and enjoy my ill-gotten gains.

So far, I’d only listened to Fletcher with half an ear. Killing people was all that I knew how to do. What the fuck would I do if I retired? Take up knitting? Adopt stray puppies? Get knocked up by some guy, move to the suburbs, become a soccer mom, and try to put my bloody past behind me?

None of those things particularly appealed to me. Well, maybe the puppies. I’d always been a dog person.

But the simple fact was that I liked my job. Sure, it was dark, dangerous work. But the blood and the screams didn’t bother me, and I’d long ago given up trying to save my own immortal soul from the fiery hell I knew I was destined for. Besides, every once in a while, I got to take care of somebody like Cliff Ingles. Got to make the city of Ashland just a little bit safer in my own twisted way.

It was the little things in life that made me happy.

A bit of cool magic surged through the air, interrupting my musings. I glanced over at the guy tending bar. His eyes glowed a blue-white in the semi-darkness of the nightclub, as he embraced his power once more. The Ice elemental responsible for keeping the bar in one piece for the night was feeding a bit of his magic into the cold, massive structure.

My own sluggish Ice magic responded to the familiar influx of power trickling into the bar. I was an elemental too, with the rare ability to use two of the four elements—Stone and Ice in my case, although my Ice magic was far weaker than my Stone power. Usually, though, I didn’t think too much about my magic when I was out on a job. As the Spider, I didn’t use my elemental powers to kill.

That’s what my knives were for.

Still, I uncurled my palm from around my drink and stared down at the scar embedded in my flesh. A small circle surrounded by eight thin rays. A spider rune. The symbol for patience. My namesake, in more ways than one. A matching scar decorated my other palm.

The spider rune had once been a medallion that I’d worn around my neck as a child, until a Fire elemental had superheated the metal and burned the symbol into my palms, marking me forever the night she’d murdered my family—

“Disgusting pig!”

The vampire waitress that Cliff Ingles had been propositioning spat out the words, then drew back her hand and slapped him across the face—hard. Despite the music that filled the club, I still heard the stinging crack of her blow at my end of the bar.

Wow. Whatever he’d said to her must have been pretty bad for her to react that way. Because the vampire was also a hooker, just like all the other folks on the wait staff. There weren’t many things you couldn’t do at Northern Aggression, which made me wonder exactly what sick thing Ingles had just suggested.

“Bitch!” The detective snarled, his hand drifting down to the gun on his belt, like he wanted to pull it out and cold-cock her with it.

The vampire’s dark eyes widened, and she backed up a couple of steps.

But before Ingles could pull his gun and retaliate, one of the giant bouncers cut through the crowd, taking up a defensive position in front of the waitress, shielding her from Ingles with his seven-foot frame. The giant’s shaved head glinted like onyx under the club’s black lights.

“Is there a problem here?” the giant rumbled, his deep baritone voice cutting through the pulsing beat