Read Online Elemental Assassin 05 - Spider's Revenge by authors_sort - Free Book Online Page A

night, but I was still alive. I’d plotted more than one murder inside the Pork Pit. I’d go inside and get started on Mab’s lickety-split.
    I scanned the interior of the Pit through the storefront windows. Clean, but well-worn blue and pink vinyl booths. Matching, faded, peeling pig tracks on the floor that led to the men’s and women’s restrooms. A counter running along the back wall with an old-fashioned cash register sitting at one end. A battered, blood-covered, framed copy of
Where the Red Fern Grows
by Wilson Rawls hanging on the wall opposite the cash register, along with a faded photo of Fletcher in his younger years. Everything was as it should have been.
    The lunch rush was over, and only one person sat at the long counter. I stepped inside, making the bell over the front door chime, and he swiveled around and fixed me with a cold glare.
    “It’s about time you showed up, Gin,” Finn snapped.
    Finnegan Lane was just as handsome as Owen, but in a more polished, classical way. Finn wore one of his many power suits, since as an investment banker, he spent most of his daylight hours swindling people out of their money. Today’s color choice was royal blue with the faintest houndstooth check pattern running through the expensive cloth, topped off by a silver shirt and blue-and-silver striped tie. Finn’s thick, walnut-colored hair was styled just so, and his eyes were as slick, shiny, and green in his ruddy face as the glass of a soda pop bottle.
    Finn crossed his arms over his chest and glared at me, much the same way that Owen had done earlier. Time for round two of the Gin Blanco firing squad.
    I sighed and walked over to my foster brother. “Let me guess. You want to have a little chat about what happened with Mab last night.”
    “Why, whatever gave you that idea?” Finn drawled in a deceptively light voice. “Perhaps it was because I was awakened at an
unseemly
hour this morning only to learn that someone tried to kill Mab last night while she was entertaining guests in the main dining room of her mansion. The very part of the mansion that I distinctly remember getting you the blueprints for just last
week
.”
    Behind the counter, Sophia Deveraux grunted her agreement with Finn’s pointed, acidic tone. Today, the Goth dwarf wore a black T-shirt covered with curved, white vampire fangs dripping blood. The crimson color of the blood matched the silverstone-spiked leather collar around her neck, as well as the cuffs on both of her wrists. Her lipstick was a red slash in her pale face, although bits of silver glitter glinted in her black hair.
    I sighed. “Look, I’m sorry that I went off the reservation without you, all of you. But we all know that my getting that close to Mab was strictly a solo job. I didn’t want either of you to get hurt if I missed.”
    Sophia grunted again and shrugged her shoulders, while Finn’s face softened just a bit. Then he sniffed, and I knew that there would be no sweet-talking him out of his snit. Finn had built up a good bit of righteous indignation, and he was determined to make me suffer through it.
    “While we appreciate your concern for our safety, we’re a team, Gin,” Finn lectured me. “We always have been. You need to remember that because it’s the only way that you’re going to kill Mab—by all of us working together. Not by your taking off by yourself with no one to watch your back.”
    I gave my foster brother a noncommittal shrug. “Not much chance of that happening, since I missed her last night. I imagine that she’s upped her security considerably since then.”
    “Mmm.”
    This time, Finn was the one who was noncommittal. He reached down and took a sip from the mug of chicory coffee sitting on the counter in front of him. The warm, fragrant aroma of the caffeine brew filled my nose, making me think of Finn’s father, Fletcher. The old man had drunk the same coffee in the same copious amounts before his murder as his son did. Even now,