“What about Vinnie’s Ice magic?” I asked. “Will that be a problem?”
“He has enough to keep the bar in one piece,” Roslyn said. “But I think that’s about it. I’ve never seen him do anything else with it. He’s certainly not as strong as you are.”
I shifted in the booth. Everybody always said how strong my magic was, like it was something to be proud of. But I knew that I wasn’t that powerful. Alexis James. Tobias Dawson. Elliot Slater. Each one of them had come far too close to killing me in the last few months for me to believe that I was invincible. Death came to us all in the end, no matter how tough we thought we were.
Still, every time someone commented on my magic, I couldn’t stop this uncomfortable shiver that swept through my body. It was like they were all setting me up for the fall that I knew was coming up fast on the day that I went toe-to-toe with Mab with my magic.
And lost.
“So can we get on with this?” Finn asked, his green eyes locked onto a redhead gyrating on the edge of the dance floor. “Because if we hurry, we can still learn everything that Vinnie knows before closing. Which would leave me plenty of time to find someone to keep me warm for the rest of the night. You wouldn’t want me to be lonely, now, would you?”
I rolled my eyes. Finn’s propensity to think with his dick first was going to get him into deep trouble one day. Especially since he didn’t mind seducing women who were already taken. He saw a wedding ring as a challenge more than anything else. I always found it amazing that some angry husband hadn’t hired me to kill Finn long ago.
But my foster brother was right. It was time to get on with things. The sooner we squeezed Vinnie for info, the sooner I could start planning how to find and take out LaFleur — before she found me first.
I’d just started to slide out of the booth when a peculiar ripple in the crowd caught my eye. A wave of people parted for someone in their midst. A moment later, a woman stepped up to the Ice bar in the exact spot where Vinnie was serving drinks.
A petite, slender woman with a short bob of glossy black hair. A wide headband of flat emeralds held her hair back off her face, so that everyone could get a good look at her delicate features. The gems winked at me underneath the black lights of the club.
Unlike me, she was dressed for a night out on the town. A tight, black, sleeveless top showed off her creamy, muscled arms, while a lime green miniskirt hugged her bony ass. Black leather boots with stiletto heels crawled up to her knees. She didn’t appear to be carrying any weapons, unless she had a couple of knives tucked into her boots. But given what I’d seen her do with her electrical magic last night, she didn’t really need any.
She leaned against the Ice bar and said something to Vinnie, whose head snapped up from the martinis he was making. His jaw dropped open at the sight of her and, for a moment, the blue-white glow of his Ice magic completely vanished from his eyes before sparking and sputtering back to life. The bartender’s shocked reaction was understandable.
After all, he was talking to LaFleur.
5
“Fuck.” I let out a soft curse.
“What are you—” Finn’s eyes narrowed. “Wait a minute. Is that who I think it is?”
I nodded. “That would be her. LaFleur.”
Finn let out his own curse.
Roslyn looked back and forth between the two of us. “LaFleur? As in the assassin that you guys think Mab hired to come to Ashland and kill Gin?”
“The one and the same,” Finn murmured, his green gaze on the other woman. “And she’s talking to Vinnie.”
The three of us stared at them. LaFleur crooked her finger at Vinnie, who swallowed before moving forward. LaFleur leaned across the Ice bar a little more and whispered something into his ear. Whatever she said, it wasn’t good, because Vinnie’s blue-white Ice magic leaked out of his eyes once more. LaFleur was breaking his concentration with her words.
I tensed, my thumb tracing over the hilt of the silverstone knife that I’d palmed under the booth table. I wondered if the other assassin was going to kill Vinnie right here, right now, in the middle of the nightclub since no one had shown up for her staged meeting last night. Because the Spider hadn’t made an appearance like LaFleur had wanted me to. She could easily kill Vinnie. One blast of the assassin’s electrical elemental magic would be enough to cut through any Icy defense that the bartender might be able to muster.
That’s how elementals fought — by flinging their raw power, their raw magic, at each other. By measuring their strength against each other. Dueling each other, until one person weakened, and the other’s magic washed over the loser and killed her. Suffocated by Air, burned by Fire, frozen by Ice, encased in Stone. The end result for the weaker elemental was never a good one, and death by elemental magic was never pretty, easy, or painless.
But instead of forming a ball of green lightning in her hand and shoving it into Vinnie’s face, LaFleur did a most curious thing. She patted the Ice elemental on the cheek, gave him a sly wink and a sexy smirk, then turned and disappeared into the crowd.
Leaving him alone and unharmed.
Vinnie blinked, then sagged against the bar as though his body were made out of water and he were melting all over the place. He stayed like that for about thirty seconds, before a waitress stepped up in the spot where LaFleur had been and slid her empty tray over to him. The waitress said something, probably telling him about her latest order. Vinnie shook his head, then picked up his martini shaker once more. But the blue-white magic flickering in his eyes was weak, dim, and faint. Whatever LaFleur had said to him, it had utterly demoralized the Ice elemental.
Since Vinnie wasn’t going anywhere, I tracked LaFleur’s movements through the crowd. To my surprise, the assassin headed toward the front door. Leaving. She was actually leaving. It was too good an opportunity to pass up. I wanted to see where she was off to in such a hurry.
“Watch Vinnie,” I told Finn, slipping out of the booth. “Call me on my cell phone if he makes a move to leave. I want to see if LaFleur’s here with anyone.”
“Gin?” Finn said.
I looked at him.
“Be careful.” Concern filled his face, and I knew he was thinking about LaFleur’s magic. What we’d seen her do with it last night and what she might do to me tonight.
I flashed him a grin. “Don’t worry about me. I always come back, Finn.”
I just hoped this time it wouldn’t be in a pine box.
I didn’t immediately charge through the crowd after LaFleur. Because if I were her, I would have a couple of guys stationed in the nightclub keeping an eye on Vinnie, seeing who might wander over to talk to him, and most especially who might be interested in following the assassin outside. So my first move was to make a detour by the Ice bar.
I walked down the length of it, weaving in and out of the clusters of people. Everyone was laughing, talking, drinking, and necking, so it was easy enough for me to grab a martini that a dwarf was blindly reaching for before his stubby fingers closed over it. I also swiped a pack of cigarettes and a lighter off the bar that belonged to a giant who had his back turned to them. Props in hand, I headed for the front door and stepped outside.
The night had grown even colder while I’d been in the club, and now bits of hard snow gusted along, pushed on by a breeze that slapped my cheeks and cut straight through my jeans, T-shirt, and fleece jacket. But the cold hadn’t driven anyone away. The line to get inside had doubled since I’d arrived.