Poison Promise

27

Benson eyed me, and I could almost see the wheels turning in his mind about how he could wiggle out of this. He was more than happy to strap me down to a chair and pump me full of drugs, but fighting me on equal footing was something else—something that all his calculations, observations, and experiments hadn’t prepared him for. I’d changed the rules of the game by coming here, by openly challenging him, and he didn’t like it—not one little bit.

Too damn bad.

After a few more seconds of silent contemplation, Benson threw back his head and laughed, as if my challenge was some great joke. His dark, evil chuckles rang out through the street, and mutters of unease rippled through the crowd. They knew what Benson was capable of, and they didn’t want any part of it. Couldn’t blame them for that.

But I was ready to end this—and him.

“Ah, come on, Beau,” I said, when his laughter finally died down. “I’m here, you’re here. We’ve even got a crowd to see our heavyweight title bout. Don’t tell me that you’re going to be too chicken-shit to take me up on my offer.”

Instead of waiting for him to laugh at me again, I turned to the people behind me. More of them had gathered while I’d been jawing with Benson, with others walking this way and more cars cruising in this direction.

I threw my hands out wide. “C’mon,” I called out. “Don’t y’all want to see a show?”

Whistles, claps, and screams of approval roared back to me. I faced Benson again, my grin even wider and more predatory than before.

“You wouldn’t want to rob all these folks of a little blood sport, now, would you?” I said. “It would be a shame if they and I walked all the way down here for nothing. Then again, it would prove you to be the coward that you really are.”

“I am not a coward,” he snarled. “I am a scientist.”

I clucked my tongue at him. “Could have fooled me. Here I am, offering you the biggest, baddest prize in all of Ashland. Me, the assassin, the Spider. So why are you hesitating, Beau? Unless you think that you’re not up to the task of taking me on.”

Everyone sucked in a collective breath at me so openly, so boldly, identifying myself as the Spider.

Silence.

And then the crowd roared.

It was so loud for a moment that I couldn’t hear anything, not even Finn, Owen, and the others murmuring to one another through my earpiece. But the explosion of emotion quickly died down to a series of taunting jeers and harsh, accusing shouts rising up from the crowd, egging me on. Some of Benson’s own guards started looking at him sideways, wondering why their boss wasn’t salivating at the idea of killing me. But Benson was too busy staring at the people behind me to pay attention to his own men. His eyes glowed a faint blue as he reached for his vampiric Air magic and used it to feel all the emotions surging off the crowd—the same mix of excitement, anticipation, and derision that I could hear in their catcalls, shouts, and jeers.

Benson frowned, realizing the same thing I did: that the people on the street, the ones he’d lorded over for so long, were very close to openly sneering at him. And that if he didn’t do something soon, the crowd would turn against him completely, thinking that he was weak. And so would his men.

“Come on, Beau,” I called out, mocking him one final time. “I’m here, and I’m ready to go. So why don’t you man up and face me? Winner take all.”

Benson stared at me, his face calm, but more and more of that anger sizzled in his eyes, even hotter than the blue burn of his magic. He didn’t like being so openly and directly challenged, especially not on his home turf.

“Oh, very well,” he huffed, as if I were a mere fly that was annoying him. “If you insist.”

“Oh, but I do.”

Benson snapped his fingers.

Nothing happened.

He snapped them again.

And still, nothing happened.

After a few seconds, when he realized that no one was obeying his command, probably to bring him a white lab coat, Benson turned his head and glared at his guards. They swallowed, but none of them scurried forward.

Benson gave them all another cold look, then started unbuttoning his shirtsleeves. He rolled up the fabric, revealing his pale, skinny forearms. His movements were slow, deliberate, and meant to intimidate me. Didn’t work. Never did.

I looked at Bria and rolled my eyes. She grinned back at me.

Finally, when he deemed himself appropriately ready for the fight, Benson glanced over his shoulder at his men clustered behind him. “If anyone interferes before I kill her, shoot them.”

Concerned whispers shot through the crowd at the thought of a firefight, but the large majority of people crept even closer, wanting to have the best view possible.

Benson stepped forward so that he was standing about ten feet away from me, directly on the other side of the center lines. He let out a loud, put-upon sigh and started swinging his arms back and forth, loosening up for the fight. He flexed his fingers, rolled his shoulders, and even cracked his neck a couple of times, the dry snap-snap-snaps almost as loud as gunshots in the eerie, absolute silence that had descended over the street.

I arched an eyebrow, more than a little bored by his show, but I kept my gaze on him the whole time. Because I wouldn’t put it past him to try to lull me to sleep with his exaggerated stretching routine.

As if he could hear my thoughts, Benson smiled, an evil light flaring in his eyes, then stepped forward and launched himself through the air at me.

I’d been expecting some sort of sneak attack, and I immediately reached for my Stone magic and used it to harden my body.

Still, for a split second, everything slowed down but was somehow magnified at the same time, almost as if I had the enhanced senses that so many vampires did.

The pearl-white gleam of Benson’s fangs in his mouth. The smell of car exhaust mixed with that metallic tang of autumn and the vamp’s own lemony scent. The rush of air flowing over my face as he leaped toward me. His looming shadow blotting out the sun and sky overhead.

It was that last small sensation, that cold touch of darkness on my face, that snapped me back to the here and now. I spun around, whirling out of the way of Benson’s first attack.

I didn’t know how many other folks’ blood and emotions Benson had been snacking on besides Silvio’s, but they gave him enough strength to leap the ten feet that separated us like he was stepping over a crack in the sidewalk. And it made him fast too, so fast that he was able to pivot back in my direction and slam his open palm into the center of my chest like he was some sort of kung-fu master.

The force of the blow knocked me back ten feet and sent me careening down the street like a ball of tumbleweed. I rolled to a stop facedown on the pavement, trying to shake off the jarring impact. Benson wasn’t playing around, and he would have caved in my rib cage with that one crushing blow if I hadn’t been using my Stone magic to protect myself. My power also saved me from splitting my skull wide open on the asphalt, but I still felt the hard smack of the landing, and it took me a few seconds to stop my eyes from spinning around in their sockets.

“Dude, is she down already?”

“Stay back!”

“Watch out!”

The crowd’s excited chatter was all the warning I had, and I heaved my body to the side just in time to avoid his feet landing where my head had been a moment ago. I shook off the rest of my daze and got back into the fight.

Before Benson could leap at me a third time, I scrambled up onto my hands and knees and lashed out with my foot, kicking him in the side of his left knee. Benson staggered forward, and to my surprise, some enthusiastic cheers rose up from the crowd.

“That’s it!”

“Get that bastard!”

“Kill him!”

Apparently, home-court advantage wasn’t all it was cracked up to be, and Benson wasn’t nearly as beloved in his little kingdom as he thought he was. I grinned. I was starting to like these people cheering me on.

I palmed a knife and threw myself at Benson, hoping to slam the weapon into his back and end him, but he used his enhanced speed to snap back up onto his feet and slide out of range of my weapon. I was too committed to the blow to stop, so I staggered past him, although I managed to right myself and regain my balance. Knife in hand, I whipped around. Benson did the same, and we faced each other in the middle of the street.

His hands clenched into fists, and he cracked his knuckles a few times in anticipation of hitting me again. I twirled my knife around in my hand, in hopes of doing the same to him. I would do the same to him.

Or I’d die trying.

The people pressed forward, forming a loose ring around us, hooting, hollering, and cheering at the tops of their lungs. Bria, Xavier, and Owen held their position by the sedan, alternating between keeping an eye on Benson’s guards and shooting worried looks at me. Through my earpiece, I could hear Owen murmuring. I didn’t focus on his words, but the sound of his voice was more than enough encouragement for me.

Meanwhile, Benson’s guards had formed a line on the sidewalk in front of his mansion, their guns out but down by their sides—for now. They still thought that their boss was going to kill me, so they weren’t going to interfere. They couldn’t, not if Benson was going to continue to be the king that he’d portrayed himself as for so long.

Benson might be a villain, but I was one too, and I was eager to show him that I could be more ruthless than he ever dreamed of being.

“You should give up now, Gin,” Benson called out as we circled each other. “Who knows? Instead of killing you, I might take you back down to my lab for a while. Test some of my new drugs on you. I’d love to see your reactions to them. I know that you’d grow to love it too. Quicker than you think. Everyone does.”

My hand tightened around my knife, so hard that I could feel the spider rune in the hilt pressing into the larger, matching scar embedded in my palm. “I’d rather gut myself like a fish than be your damn science experiment again.”

Benson grinned, showing off his fangs, the tips of his teeth as sharp as the knife in my hand. “Well, then, I guess it’s a good thing that I don’t have a problem with that scenario either. Only I’m afraid that I’ll be the one doing the gutting, not you.”

He let out a loud roar and charged at me. I let him come.

Benson swung at me, this time using his enhanced vampire strength to put even more force behind his blows. But I still had my Stone magic, so I used it to harden my skin, head, hair, and eyes into an impenetrable shell. Oh, Benson’s punches still hurt, each one as hard and brutal as me slamming Owen’s hammer into the vamp’s car, and the blows knocked me this way and that, like I was a bit of gravel flying across the road after a semi roared by. But the brutal assaults didn’t crack my ribs and break all the bones in my face the way he wanted them to.

While Benson concentrated on pummeling me, I lashed out with my knife at him.

Punch.

Slash-slash.

Punch.

Slash.

Punch-punch-punch.

We traded blow after blow after blow, his fists pounding into my chest and face over and over again. I got in a few glancing swipes with my knife, but every time the blade would start to sink deep enough into Benson’s body to do some real damage, he would use his enhanced speed to dart back out of range of the edge of the blade. It was a small, subtle movement but extremely hard to do, and I found myself being impressed with his technique. We were playing a game of inches, and he was winning.

“You’re going to lose,” Benson taunted me when we broke apart after another furious exchange. “Face it, Gin. You’re going to run out of magic long before I run out of strength.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” I snapped back at him. “Considering that you’ve already started sucking wind, I’m willing to put my belief in my magic—in myself.”

Benson frowned as he realized how true my words were. His breath was coming in sharp gasps, sweat was sliding down his forehead, and the rims of his glasses had fogged up from his exertions.

He growled, stepped forward, and shoved me in the chest with both hands. His strength sent me flying again, this time right into the side of his smashed-up Bentley. My back slammed into the driver’s-side door, adding another dent there, while my legs slid out from under me, and my ass hit the pavement. I raised my knife, expecting Benson to do another one of his soaring leaps on top of me, but instead, he snapped his fingers. One of the guards hurried over to his boss’s side and raised his gun, pointing it at my head. I tensed, wondering if Finn could take him out before he pulled the trigger.

But Benson had something else in mind.

Even as his man turned toward me, Benson came up behind him. Then he casually reached out with one hand, jerked the other man back up against his body, and plunged his fangs into his own guard’s neck. Benson took several long pulls of blood out of the vamp, who screamed and thrashed against his boss’s body, even as his gun slipped from his fingers and clattered onto the pavement. But Benson wasn’t content to just take the man’s blood and his strength along with it.

Oh, no.

Even as the guard’s screams grew louder and his thrashes weaker, Benson clamped his hand onto the side of the man’s head, a blue glow pulsing out from between his fingers like the bright flare of a star. The bastard was sucking the fear, pain, and terror out of his own man just to make himself stronger—just so he could beat me.

It disgusted me, how casually Benson would disregard his own man’s loyalty, how he would betray it in this most ultimate, intimate way in front of everyone, but it didn’t surprise me.

Because that was exactly the kind of scum he was.

Well, not for much longer, not if I could help it.

I scrambled to my feet and started forward. But it was already too late for the guard. Benson ripped his fangs out of the other man’s neck, dropped his hand from his head, and let him go. The guard flopped to the ground, dead.

Benson let out a loud, satisfied sigh that had everyone in the crowd screaming, ducking down, and hurrying to put as much distance as they could between themselves and the vamp and still be able to see our death match.

Benson turned to face me. I’d never seen him look anything but cold, clinical, and detached, but right now, he was a fucking mess. His clothes were torn, ripped, and dirty from our fight, his black hair stuck out from his head at odd, spiky angles, and patches of sweat darkened his baby-blue shirt. Even worse, his body had swelled up, his muscles filling out and bulging with all the life, blood, and emotions he’d just sucked out of his guard.

But it was his face that was truly gruesome.

The dead guard’s blood was smeared all over Benson’s mouth, the most garish sort of lipstick imaginable, while more blood had run down his chin and spattered all over his shirt. Crimson specks even dotted the lenses of his silver glasses like dead bugs splattered all over a car windshield.

But it was his eyes that worried me the most. They pulsed a bright blue from the terrified emotions he’d sucked out of his dying guard, burning hotter than the noon sun overhead. Benson was stronger now than ever before.

And I wasn’t.

I’d already used up a good chunk of my magic just keeping him from breaking every single bone in my body. I needed to finish this, I needed to kill him, before my own magic ran out entirely, just like he said. Or I’d be the one dying in the street today.

Benson grinned, showing off his fangs, stained red with blood. “What were you saying about my winding down? I can do this all day long, Gin. But you can’t.”

I tightened my grip on my knife. “I don’t have to do it all day long. It shouldn’t take me more than another minute, two tops, to finish off the likes of you.”

Benson growled and launched himself at me again. But I was expecting the move, so I was able to sidestep at the last possible second, and he slammed into his own car instead of me, putting a bigger dent in the metal with the force of his own body than I had with Owen’s hammer.

But it didn’t slow him down for an instant. Benson let out a loud, guttural growl, reached down, hooked his hands on the bottom of his car, and flipped it over onto its side, causing the people gathered on the sidewalks to scream in surprise and terror. Benson grinned, whirled around, and took a menacing step forward, as though he were going to plunge into the crowd and do to them what he had done to his own guard. He would too, the second he felt like he needed another hit of power.

In his own way, Benson was just as much of an addict as all the people he’d gotten hooked on his drugs over the years.

He chuckled at the crowd’s fear, his eyes burning brighter than ever before. He might not be able to feed on their emotions without touching them, but he could sense their fear, and it was adding to his own twisted high. I had to distract Benson from the crowd before he attacked someone else and became too strong for me to kill, so I darted over, grabbed Owen’s hammer from where it had landed, and hurled it in his direction.

But Benson was truly hopped up on adrenaline, emotion, and blood now, and he whirled around almost too fast for me to follow. One second, he was doing his best bogeyman impression with the crowd. The next, he’d snatched Owen’s hammer out of midair. He let out an amused chuckle, then turned and hurled the weapon as hard as he could. It sailed away as free and easy as a kite, as if Benson had the strength of some Olympic god, and it didn’t stop until it clattered against the side of his mansion, knocking a chunk of stone off the side before falling to the ground.

Benson grinned at me again, his fangs seeming even bloodier than before. “And now, Gin, I think it’s time for you to die.”

Before I could move, before I could react, before I could even think about ducking, Benson was on me. I lashed out with my knife, but he let out a mocking laugh and slapped the weapon out of my hand. I palmed another knife, but Benson slapped that one away too, sending it flying through the air. It came to a stop right beside my first knife. I started to reach for the third knife against the small of my back, but Benson stepped forward, grabbed my shoulders, and slammed his head into mine.

With all of that fresh blood and emotion pumping through his veins, this blow was harder and sharper than all the others he’d landed so far. I felt like my skull had gotten run over by a Mack truck, and I lost my grip on my Stone magic.

Benson used the opening to head-butt me again.

I managed to bring enough of my magic back to bear to keep the blow from killing me outright, but my brain rattled around in my skull like a coin tumbling through a slot machine. White, gray, and black stars winked on and off in my vision, and I was flat on my back on the pavement before I realized what was happening.

I lay there, trying to blink-blink-blink the dangerous spots away and come up with some sort of plan that would let me kill Benson without getting dead myself. In my earpiece, I could hear Bria, Xavier, Owen, Finn, and Phillip all screaming at me to getup-getup-getup!, but scrambled brains aren’t great for comprehension or action.

I blinked again, and Benson was kneeling on the pavement beside me, his hand wrapped around my throat. He easily hoisted me off the ground and lifted me up into the air, so that my feet were kicking in the breeze and my gaze was level with his.

Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Bria, Owen, and Xavier start forward, only to draw up short as Benson’s men moved in front of them, cutting them off from me.

“I don’t have the angle,” Finn yelled in my ear. “I don’t have a shot!”

“Neither do I!” Phillip yelled back.

Things had not gone my way, and my friends were still trying to save me. But they were going to be too late.

So I’d just have to save myself.

I pushed all the noise away. Finn and Phillip still screaming in my ear. Bria, Xavier, and Owen shouting from behind the guards. The excited whispers of the crowd. I ignored it all and focused on Benson. The sweaty warmth of his hand wrapped around my throat. The strength in his arm as he held me up. The hot blue glow of magic in his eyes. The bloody flecks painting his glasses. The lemony scent wafting up from his body.

It was that last one, his smell, that made me flash back to my time in his lab. Different day, same situation. Because right now, I was just as helpless as I’d been in his chair, when Benson shoved that Burn pill down my throat and then made me swallow it—

Malevolent understanding burned through me like acid, making me grin. Because I wasn’t helpless. Not here, not now, not ever.

And I knew how I could beat Benson: the exact same way he’d beaten me.

All around us, the crowd gasped, pressing forward in anticipation of the end. They knew that this was the moment when the vamp could snap my neck with a thought, if he so chose.

Benson knew it too, because he started laughing. He turned this way and that, lifting me up higher and higher into the air for the crowd’s and his own inspection and amusement, as if I were some sort of trophy he’d won and was hoisting skyward.

But what the bastard didn’t realize was that he hadn’t won—not yet—and that I wasn’t about to let him be the end of me.

Finally, Benson quit waving my body through the air and brought me back down so that my eyes were level with his again. He stared at me, his happy face creasing into a thoughtful frown. Once again, he did that weird, tilting thing with his head, staring at me like a bird about to gobble up a worm, as if he were surprised by something I’d said, even though he had such a tight grip on my throat that I could have barely done more than croak out a few words, even if I’d wanted to crow about how I was going to kill him.

“Fascinating,” he said. “Truly fascinating.”

Benson loosened his hold on my neck and waved his free hand in front of my face. The rough, sandpaper feel of his Air magic sloughed against my body, trying to pinpoint the emotions under the surface of my skin and tear them out of me. But I didn’t let them. Instead, I reached for my Ice magic and let the cold power center me the way it had done so many times in the past.

Benson gave me a little shake, as if trying to rattle the emotions out of me, like pennies stuck to the bottom of a glass jar. I gritted my teeth as my brain sloshed around inside my skull again, but I didn’t give him the satisfaction of hissing in pain. Instead, I focused on my magic, letting it make me as cold as ice—literally—from the inside out.

But my lack of response, my lack of emotion, my lack of fear, made him go from curious to enraged in a heartbeat.

“How can you be so damn calm?” he hissed. “Don’t you know that I’m seconds away from killing you? Where’s your fear? Your panic? I want your terror, Gin. Give it to me. Give it to me now.”

I rasped out a low chuckle. “Oh, sugar, do you really think that you’re the only nasty thing that’s ever had his hand around my throat? Please. This isn’t my first heavyweight bout, but it’s going to be your last.”

He shook me again, then brought his face even closer to mine, so close that I could smell the coppery stink of blood on his breath, mixed with his lemony scent, both as bitter and foul as any poison. “You should be scared, you stupid fool.”

“No,” I countered. “You should be scared. You like getting people hooked on your drugs because it makes it that much easier for you to feed on their emotions. You’re so proud of your power, of your formulas and experiments, and you think that they make you so smart, so superior to everyone else. But you’re just as much of an addict as all those poor people in your basement. You’ve been the undisputed king of Southtown for so long that you’ve forgotten one important thing—the only thing that matters right now. Kind of sad, since you so painfully reminded me of it yesterday down in your lab.”

“And what would that be?” he hissed again.

I smiled, my features even more predatory than his. “That no matter who you are—addict, assassin, or vampire—everybody needs air to breathe, even you.”

I shoved my hand out so that I was touching his right cheek, cupping it almost the way a lover might.

Then I unleashed my Ice magic on the bastard.

A silver light flared between us, leaking out from the spider rune scar branded in the center of my palm. For a moment, the light was so intense that I couldn’t even see Benson standing in front of me. But I didn’t need to see him, because I could feel my magic, and I directed it at him with all the force of an arctic blizzard.

In an instant, his skin was severely frostbitten and even bluer than his eyes. He drew in a breath, and the air crystallized and froze deep in his lungs, killing all of that precious tissue. And then, for the coup de resistance, I coated his entire face with three inches of elemental Ice, a trick I’d learned from Bria.

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.