(Elemental Assassin 01) Spider's Bite Read Free Page A

whether a murder had taken place on the premises.
    But the stone wall underneath my hand only babbled its usual insanity. There were no sharp notes of alarm. No clashing and clanging vibrations of hurried activity. No sudden disturbances rippling through the rock. The bodies hadn’t been discovered yet, and my fellow crazies were probably still drooling on each other. Excellent.
    I climbed up on a metal shelf set against the wall, pushed aside a loose ceiling tile, and grabbed the plastic-wrapped bundle of clothes I’d hidden there. I stripped off my blood-spattered, white inmate pajamas and shimmied into the new garments. One of the first things I’d done when I’d been committed had been to break into the patients’ repository and liberate the clothes I was wearing when the cops had brought me here. In addition to my blue jeans, long-sleeved navy T-shirt, boots, and navy hooded fleece jacket, I’d also had a couple of pocketknives on me, along with a silver watch that had a long spool of garrote wire coiled inside the back. Small, flimsy weapons, but I’d learned long ago to make do with what I had.
    In addition to the repository, I’d also paid a visit to the records room, grabbed my fake Jane Doe files, and destroyed those, as well as erased any mention of my stay here from the computer system. Now, there was no trace I’d ever been in the asylum at all. Besides Evelyn Edwards’s cooling body, of course.
    I snapped the watch around my wrist. A bit of moonlight streaming in the window hit my hand, highlighting a scar embedded deep in my palm. A small circle with eight thin lines radiating out of it. A matching scar decorated my other palm. Spider runes—the symbol for patience.
    I uncurled my hands and stared at the lines. At the tender age of thirteen, I’d been beaten, blindfolded, and tortured—forced to hold onto a piece of silverstone metal, a medallion shaped like the spider rune. My hands had been duct-taped around the rune, which had then been superheated by a Fire elemental. The magical metal had melted and burned into my palms, hence the scars. Back then, seventeen years ago, the marks had been fresh, ugly, red—like my screams and the laughter of the bitch who’d tortured me. The scars had faded with time. Now, they were just silvery lines crisscrossing the swirls of my pale skin. I wished my memories of that night were as dull.
    Moonlight highlighted the silverstone metal still in my flesh and made the marks more visible than they were during the day. Or maybe that was because I did most of my work at night, when the dark things, the dark emotions, came out to play. Sometimes I almost forgot the runes were there until moments like these, when they showed themselves.
    And reminded me of the night my family had been murdered.
    I ignored the painful tug of memories and continued with my work. The job was only half-done, and I had no intention of getting caught because I’d become misty-eyed and maudlin over things best forgotten. Emotions were for those too weak to turn them off.
    And I hadn’t been weak in a very long time.
    I stuffed the bloody pajamas and the empty plastic wrap into the bottom of one of the buckets the janitors used to mop the floors. Then I grabbed a can of bleach off the metal shelf, opened it, and dumped the liquid into the bucket. Using my jacket sleeve to hold one of the mop handles, I gave the whole thing a good stir. There’d be no DNA to be had from these clothes. Assuming the police even bothered to check for any. Murders, especially stabbings, weren’t exactly uncommon in the asylum, which is why I’d decided to take out the shrink here instead of at her home.
    When that was done, I reached into my coat pocket and pulled out a pair of silver glasses with oval frames. The bluish lenses went on my face, obscuring my gray eyes. The other pocket held a baseball hat, to hide my dyed blond hair and cast my features in shadow. Simple tools really did work best, especially