Spider’s Revenge (34 page)

I shrugged. “It always struck me that Oedipus’s parents went about things the wrong way. Instead of sending their son off to die, they should have kept him at home and loved him. That way, he would at least have known what his own father looked like. Then maybe he wouldn’t have killed dear old dad when he met him on the road years later. But Oedipus thought that his father was just another stranger and not anyone important.”

Mab frowned, not seeing my point.

“That’s the thing that’s always bugged me about the Greeks and prophecies in general. The more you try to prevent them, the more you hasten them along. Happens all the time in classic mythology,” I said. “So I ask again. Did you ever think that if you hadn’t come to my house that night, if you hadn’t murdered my mother and older sister, if you hadn’t tortured me, maybe we wouldn’t be here today?”

Mab stared at me, the black fire burning even darker in her eyes now, sucking in even more of the twilight that streaked the wintry landscape in brooding purples and impartial grays. The snow fell silently around us, a steady torrent of fat, fluffy flakes that seemed at odds with the tension in the air. Despite the cold, I could still feel the intense heat radiating off Mab’s body. Her Fire magic pricked against my skin like thousands of needles stabbing
me one after another—a relentless wave of red-hot agony.

But I didn’t reach for my Stone magic to block hers. Not yet. I’d need every ounce of power that I possessed if I had any hopes of defeating Mab, and I wasn’t going to waste any of it now while we were still just taunting each other. No, I’d summon up my magic when she threw her elemental Fire at me—that’s when I’d need it most. So I swallowed down the primal snarl that clogged my throat at the feel of the invisible, fiery needles against my skin and continued with my musings.

I figured that I could be forgiven my odd quirk of sentiment just this once. It wasn’t like I’d ever get the chance to confront Mab again—as one of us would kill the other in another minute, two tops.

“Because let’s face it. Me living on the streets, getting taken in by an assassin, becoming an assassin myself, becoming the Spider. That all goes back to one thing—you killing my family,” I said. “If you hadn’t done that, well, who knows what would have happened? I might have grown up to help people. Become a doctor or something. Learned how to save lives instead of being so very good at taking them.”

“None of that matters,” Mab scoffed.

“Of course it does—it’s
all
that matters. Especially here in this place. Especially now.”

Mab’s eyes narrowed to slits, but the elemental Fire still burned in the smoldering depths of her gaze. “And why is that?”

“All the people that I’ve killed over the years? Yeah, I did most of them for the money, because being an assassin
was a job and one that I was good at. But the biggies, all the folks that I’ve taken on in recent months, Alexis James, Tobias Dawson, Elliot Slater, Elektra LaFleur. You see, I’ve gradually come to realize something about them—and how they’ve each been different from everyone else that I’ve battled over the years.”

“And what would that grand revelation be?” Mab asked.

This time, I tilted my head at her and smiled. “That they’ve all just been practice for you, bitch.”

We stared at each other, the Ice and Stone magic in my gray gaze a perfect, natural enemy for the elemental Fire flickering in Mab’s black eyes.

“Well, then,” she said in her silky voice. “Let’s see just how much you’ve learned, little Genevieve.”

Mab brought up her hand and curled it into a fist. Fire spilled out from between her clenched fingers and dripped down them like water before falling away to the ground.
Plop-plop-plop
. The stones underneath our feet shuddered, snarled, and screamed as her Fire burned into them. The rocks’ angry mutters blended in perfectly with the steady, evil hiss of the melting snow. Ribbons of steam twisted up into the frigid air between us, delicate ropes binding us together.

I never took my eyes from Mab’s black gaze, watching her the way one gunfighter would another, waiting for that small twitch that would tell me that she was ready to draw down on me. I drew in a breath and got ready to reach for my own power.

Mab smiled at me a final time, confident in her magic, her strength, her unmatched, raw elemental power. Then
she drew back her fist and hurled everything that she had at me.

A second later, the elemental Fire hit me, and the scorching flames engulfed my body, just like they had my mother and older sister before me.

And I screamed.

Mab’s magic slammed into me with the force of a thousand infernos, each one blazing brighter than the sun, each one burning out of control, with the sole purpose of frying me alive.

She almost succeeded.

Despite everything I knew about Mab, despite all the long hours that I’d studied her, despite what I’d seen her do to my mother and older sister, despite the damage she’d inflicted on me at the country club last night, none of that prepared me for the raw elemental force of her Fire. The heat, the intensity, the sheer, unrelenting
strength
of it took my breath away like no one else’s magic had ever done before. Not that of Alexis James, Tobias Dawson, or even Elektra LaFleur. Those other elementals had all been strong, incredibly so, when I’d battled them.

But Mab—Mab was just elemental Fire and flames
and fury herself. She was in a completely different league from all the others I’d faced before.

At the last second, I reached for my Stone magic, bringing all of it to bear, hardening my skin, head, hair, eyes, and every other part of me into an impenetrable shell, just the way I’d done so many times before.

And it saved me once again.

Mab’s raging Fire didn’t immediately kill me. But it still hurt, worse than any pain I’d ever experienced before, even the shocking jolts of LaFleur and her electrical elemental magic. Even through the shell of my Stone magic, I could feel Mab’s flames licking at my skin, eroding my magic, burning through all the many layers of my Stone power. I staggered back from the sheer force of the blast, and the silverstone in my vest immediately liquefied from the heat. Sweat streamed down my face, and it was all I could do to hold on to my own magic, to not be overwhelmed by the deadly surge of Mab’s power. She’d gone for the kill shot first, and I knew that I’d been lucky to survive it.

Mab had more raw power, more pure magic, than any elemental born in the last five hundred years, so she didn’t stop her assault on me. Not for a second. Instead, she raised her hands, elemental Fire spewing out of her fingertips in a steady, unrelenting stream, every bit of her power, every bit of her fury, directed at me in a molten ball of heat, flames, and death.

My vision went red from the Fire crashing into me, and I flashed back to that fateful night when Mab had murdered my mother. I remembered in excruciating detail how her magic had just kept getting closer and closer
to Eira, slicing through my mother’s Ice magic, until the hungry flames had washed over and consumed my mother completely. Then Annabella. Both charred to ash in an instant.

That’s how elementals fought—by flinging their raw power at each other until one elemental finally succumbed to the other’s magic—and that’s how Mab and I were fighting now. But I wasn’t just an elemental—I was an assassin too. I was the Spider, trained by the best, trained by Fletcher Lane, the Tin Man himself. If there was one thing the old man had taught me, it was that it didn’t matter how you killed your opponent, as long as she was dead and you weren’t when the bleeding was done. My Stone magic wasn’t going to save me from Mab, it wasn’t going to help me kill her in the end. Not really.

Fletcher was—just the way that he’d always intended. The old man had trained me for this one moment, for this one fight, for years. Now, I just had to figure out a way to kill Mab and live up to the faith that he’d always had in me.

“Give it up, little Genevieve,” Mab said in a mocking tone. “You’re no match for me. You never were, just like your miserable excuse for a mother. One of the happiest days in my life was when I finally killed Eira. Today is going to rank right up there with it. Because not only will I get rid of you, but I’ll burn that sweet little sister of yours to death too. Along with the dwarves, Owen Grayson, that shyster banker you call a foster brother, and anyone else who was stupid enough to come here with you. They won’t escape me, Genevieve. None of them will.
Not a single one. Your charred remains won’t even have to time cool before I send the rest of them to join you.”

I screamed. Not in pain or fear or surprise this time, but in sheer, undeniable fury, in raw elemental force, pouring my magic into that one primal sound. The bitch wasn’t killing anyone else that I loved. Not now, not ever. I didn’t care what I had to do to stop her—or what I had to sacrifice.

Triggered by my scream, my Stone power tore through the rubble and rocks around us, pulverizing and shattering them instantly, one after another, just as it had done the night this had all started. It was like watching a row of dominos fall down on top of each other. The giants, the bounty hunters, my friends. All the people who’d been fighting in the courtyard stumbled and staggered as the stone foundation under their feet literally disintegrated out from under them. The few walls that had been standing collapsed with a collective roar, sending more piles of rubble crashing down, and shards of rocks zipped through the air, joining the angry swirl of snowflakes.

The elemental force of my scream surprised even Mab, breaking her concentration for the briefest second. The Fire streaming out of her hands flickered and dimmed for the smallest fraction of time, but it was enough to let me draw in another breath and focus myself.

But my magic didn’t stop with the stones of my ruined house. It spread out farther and faster than it ever had before, leaping from one rock to another, until even the forest around us seemed to quake, mutter, and vibrate with it.

I’d never known that I’d had this much magic before
.

The thought skipped through my head just the way it had the last time I’d been here—the night that I’d collapsed my own mansion on top of everyone who’d been inside it. Mab, her men, Bria, even myself. Before, back then, my magic had scared me, and with my guilt over thinking that I’d killed Bria with it, I’d spent years using it in only the smallest of ways. But now I gave myself over to it completely. I could feel the power inside me, the incredible magic running through me like a vein of the finest, richest silver imaginable. Stone, Ice, Ice, Stone—there was no separation anymore. It all mixed together in me until there was just sheer power, just raw, furious force over the elements themselves. So much power, so much force, that I went cold and numb from it. Fingers, toes, torso, I couldn’t even feel them anymore. My magic was the only thing I was aware of, surging through me, building and building and building toward something spectacular—

My body burst into silver flames.

I didn’t know how I did it or why it happened or even that it was possible in the first place. But something ripped open deep inside me, and a second later, silver flames engulfed me from head to toe, dancing around my body like all the ghosts of my past come back to life to haunt me one final time. But the curious thing was that the flames weren’t hot—they were cold. Colder than Ice. And that’s when I realized what they were. My Ice magic come to life, manifesting itself just the way that Mab’s Fire magic did. A new quirk, a new extension of my elemental power in my most desperate hour. Jo-Jo had always claimed that one day my Ice magic would be the equal of my Stone power.

The dwarf had just never told me that the Ice would get
stronger
.

“Nice trick,” Mab hissed, eyeing the silver flames flashing around my body with obvious disgust. “But it’s not going to be enough to save you.”

“We’ll see about that,” I muttered back.

And then we danced.

The two of us stood there in the courtyard, our hands outstretched, magic pulsing out of our fingertips in bright, continuous waves. Mab’s magic burned red and orange and yellow and black, spitting, hissing, and crackling with ash and heat. My magic glinted like a stream of silver stars all strung together, whistling and whispering with cold and frost.

Fire and Ice.

Opposing elements in so many ways.

And now, the two of us finally engaging in this battle that had been so many years in the making.

Our magic crashed together, sending up sizzling sprays of red and silver sparks, fireworks of an impressive and most deadly sort. Steam rose in the air between us, wrapping around us like fog. Sweat poured down my face, until I could barely see what I was doing, but I didn’t wipe it away—I didn’t dare do anything to interrupt my concentration. I didn’t move, I didn’t blink, I didn’t even breathe.

I don’t know how long we stood there, the two of us just throwing our magic at each other, pushing, straining, and fighting with everything that we had.

But eventually, I realized that I was going to lose.

Despite all the magic I was holding on to, despite
all the raw power coursing through my veins, hell, despite the silver flames that coated my body, it still wasn’t enough. Not enough to drive back Mab’s Fire magic, not enough for my power to overtake hers and engulf her in Ice. All the rumors that I’d heard over the years were true. Mab did have more raw power than any elemental born in the last five hundred years—including me.