By the time I dropped my hand, Benson looked like he was wearing a bubble of bluish glass over his face. His hand slipped from my throat, and he staggered back, beating and clawing at the elemental Ice on his face. I dropped to the ground, gasping for breath, but I was already pushing the pain away and coming back up onto my hands and knees. I lashed out with my foot, driving it into the side of Benson’s knee, and then I sent out a burst of Stone magic, cracking the pavement under his feet.
This time, he was the one who landed flat on his back. Using his enhanced strength, Benson finally broke through the Ice on his face and started sucking down some much-needed oxygen, his breath coming in painful rasps, given how much of his lungs I’d just destroyed. While he was busy wheezing, I flattened my hands against the asphalt and reached for my power.
I didn’t have a fancy chair to help me subdue the vampire, but I didn’t need one. Benson might be the king of Southtown, but the foundation of everything around us was made of stone—my element, the one that I was queen of.
Like the street he was lying on.
So I pressed my palms into the pavement and sent my Stone magic racing through it, causing more and more of the asphalt to crack-crack-crack-crack. And then I poured even more of my power into the pavement, causing all those broken bits of stone to rise up and come together again, until they formed five specific shapes.
Shackles.
Using my magic, I clamped a Stone shackle around each of Benson’s arms and legs and his neck, then sank them down deep into the asphalt, as though they were about to pull him down into the center of the earth along with them. For extra insurance, I coated each shackle with three inches of elemental Ice, so that even if Benson could use his strength to break through the restraints, he’d still have to expend even more energy to get through the Ice too.
He must have already used up a good portion of the dead guard’s blood and emotions, because he heaved and bucked and thrashed against my improvised restraints, but he couldn’t break free of them.
Just like I hadn’t been able to break free of the ones in his lab.
Desperate, Benson looked at me, his fingers crawling across the broken stone, trying to touch me so he could siphon off enough of my emotions to escape. Well, he was finally going to get his wish, since I was more than ready to open up about my feelings.
I went down on one knee beside the vamp, staring at him as dispassionately as he had stared at me in his lab. Then I slowly drew the knife from against the small of my back and tapped the point of it on my cheek, as if I were considering all the secrets of the universe.
“Tell me, Beau,” I drawled. “How does it feel to be completely helpless? What sort of emotions are you feeling right now? Hmm? Why, I think it would make for a fascinating scientific study, don’t you?”
He opened his mouth to scream or perhaps yell at his men to shoot me, but before he could, I raised my knife and slammed it into his heart.
“Why, I do believe that’s agonizing discomfort you’re experiencing,” I murmured. “Every nerve ending in your body probably feels like it’s on fire right now. Sort of how I felt when you pumped me full of Burn.”
Benson screamed, but I clamped my hand over his bloody mouth, cutting off the sound.
“Now, what was it you told Troy the night you murdered him? Oh, yeah. Don’t be frightened. It’ll only hurt for a minute. Well, you’re right about that. Because I’m not like you. I don’t torture people. I’ve already killed you with that one blow.”
I leaned forward so that he could see my eyes—eyes that were a lot colder than the elemental Ice that I’d encased him with. Benson’s panicked blue gaze locked with my calm gray one.
“You wanted me to share my emotions with you. Well, do you know what I’m feeling right now?” I purred. “I’m sure you can sense it with your magic. There’s only one word for it, really: satisfaction.”
I removed my hand from his mouth and ripped the knife out of his chest. The vamp arched his back, but he couldn’t break free of my Ice and Stone shackles, and he didn’t even have the energy left to scream. Instead, he sputtered and sputtered, as if he couldn’t believe that the same thing was being done to him that he’d done to me and countless others.
Slowly, his body grew still, and his breath came in ragged gasps, flecks of foamy blood spewing out of his lips and coating his glasses.
“And now your body is shutting down from the massive trauma that I just inflicted on it—and you. And that chill you’re feeling? That’s not my Ice magic. It’s my emotions—and your own death, taking hold of you breath by breath.”
Benson almost seemed to nod his head in agreement. Then his body relaxed, his head lolled to the side, and his gaze fixed on something that only he could see.
The bastard was dead.
Good riddance.
28
I watched the blood dribble off Benson’s chest and start pooling in the spiderweb cracks in the pavement. All around me, the stone of the street, sidewalks, and buildings chattered with the violence that the vampire and I had just dished out to each other. But I didn’t mind the shocked sounds. They told me that I’d made it through another battle and had killed another enemy who had threatened me and mine.
But as I got to my feet and turned around, I wondered how much more trouble I’d just caused for myself.
Because folks stood two and three deep on the sidewalks in places, and everyone was staring at me—the curious gawkers, Benson’s guards, Silvio, my friends.
The silence grew and grew, and my gaze swept from one face in the crowd to another. People whispered to one another, their low muttering sounding remarkably like that of the blood-spattered stone under my feet.
“Um, Gin?” Finn said in my ear. “This might be a good time for you to say something.”
“You think?” I murmured back.
I stepped forward. Several folks in the crowd gasped and backed away from me, probably thinking that I was going to do the same thing to them with my knife that I had done to Benson. Some of them probably deserved it. The pimps who beat their hookers just because they felt like it. The dealers who sold drugs to kids just to make a few extra bucks. The gangbangers who hurt innocent people just because they’d had the misfortune to get in the way of their turf wars. These were not nice people gathered around me.
Then again, I wasn’t particularly nice either.
Still, for the most part, I had a live-and-let-live policy. As long as you didn’t come after me, I wasn’t going to go after you. So I decided to make that clear to everyone within spitting distance.
I stabbed my bloody knife toward Benson’s body. “The so-called king of Southtown is dead.”
“Long live the queen!” someone shouted in a voice that sounded suspiciously like Finn’s.
“I’m not the damn queen of anything,” I growled.
My angry glare was enough to get the crowd to shut up again, so I continued with my impromptu speech.
“Benson terrorized everyone who came into contact with him. Not because he needed to but because he wanted to. Because he liked it.”
Several people nodded in agreement, including many of Benson’s own guards.
“But I’m not Benson. I’m the Spider.”
Once again, the crowd gasped.
“I’m the Spider,” I repeated. “And despite the rumors you might have heard, I don’t treat people like shit just because I can. I don’t hurt or torture or kill them just because it amuses me.”