Haints and Hobwebs Read online

  Haints and Hobwebs

  by

  Jennifer Estep

  An Elemental Assassin Story

  Haints and Hobwebs

  Copyright © 2012 and 2018 by Jennifer Estep

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual or fictional characters or actual or fictional events, locales, business establishments, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. The fictional characters, events, locales, business establishments, or persons in this story have no relation to any other fictional characters, events, locales, business establishments, or persons, except those in works by this author.

  All rights reserved by the author.

  ISBN: 978-0-9861885-9-6

  Cover Art © 2018 by Tony Mauro

  Interior Formatting by Author E.M.S.

  Published in the United States of America

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  The Elemental Assassin series

  HAINTS AND HOBWEBS

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  About the Author

  Other books by Jennifer Estep

  The Elemental Assassin series

  featuring Gin Blanco

  Books

  Spider’s Bite

  Web of Lies

  Venom

  Tangled Threads

  Spider’s Revenge

  By a Thread

  Widow’s Web

  Deadly Sting

  Heart of Venom

  The Spider

  Poison Promise

  Black Widow

  Spider’s Trap

  Bitter Bite

  Unraveled

  Snared

  Venom in the Veins

  E-novellas and stories

  Haints and Hobwebs

  Thread of Death

  Parlor Tricks

  Kiss of Venom

  Unwanted

  Nice Guys Bite

  Winter’s Web

  Haints and Hobwebs

  by

  Jennifer Estep

  An Elemental Assassin Story

  To all the fans of the Elemental Assassin series who wanted more stories—this one is for you.

  To my mom, my grandma, and Andre—for everything.

  Note: Haints and Hobwebs is an 11,000-word story that takes place after the events of Tangled Threads, book 4 in the Elemental Assassin urban fantasy series. Haints and Hobwebs first appeared in The Mammoth Book of Ghost Romance in 2012.

  Chapter One

  The first time I saw the haint was in the cemetery.

  Shocking, I know, a ghost hanging out in a graveyard, but the pale, wispy figure still caught my eye, if only because it was the first one I’d ever seen.

  You’d think I would have been visited by more haints in my time, given the fact that I was a semiretired assassin and that I’d helped a lot of people move on from this life to the next with a slice or two of my silverstone knives.

  I had come to Blue Ridge Cemetery to place some forget-me-nots on the grave of Fletcher Lane, my murdered mentor. The old man had taken me in off the streets when I was a teenager, trained me to be an assassin like him, dubbed me the Spider, and then set me loose on the greedy, corrupt citizens of the Southern metropolis of Ashland.

  Good times.

  I had been crouched over Fletcher’s grave for about ten minutes, brushing the dry, withered remains of the autumn leaves off his granite gravestone and arranging the blue forget-me-nots in an empty soda bottle I’d brought along for the purpose. The slick green glass was the same color as Fletcher’s eyes.

  It was a bitterly cold January day. The sun looked like it was submerged under dingy dishwater clouds rather than hanging in the sky, and its weak rays didn’t even come close to melting the thin patches of crusty snow that littered the ground like shreds of tissue paper.

  But I didn’t pay much attention to the cold—I was too busy talking to Fletcher. I’d been catching the old man up on everything that was happening in my life, from the reappearance of my baby sister, Bria, back in Ashland to my ongoing war against Mab Monroe, the Fire elemental who’d murdered my mother and my older sister when I was thirteen.

  Fletcher’s grave was my own private confessional, a place where all my whispered secrets and worrisome weaknesses would be whipped away by the biting winds that whizzed across this particular ridge of the Appalachian Mountains.

  Weaknesses that I had to hide as Gin Blanco—and most especially as my alter ego, the Spider.

  I had just finished telling Fletcher about my deepening feelings for my lover, Owen Grayson, when a flash of movement caught my eye. I immediately palmed one of the silverstone knives hidden up my sleeves. I might be mostly retired from being the Spider these days, but I still had plenty of enemies who wanted me dead, namely Mab, now that I was openly gunning for her.

  My fingers curled around the knife’s hilt, and a small symbol stamped into the metal pressed into a larger matching scar embedded in my palm. Both of them spider runes, a small circle surrounded by eight thin rays. The symbol for patience. The same rune, the same scar, was branded into my other palm. It was my assassin name and so much a part of who and what I was.

  Knife in hand, I turned my head, ready to face whatever danger might be lurking in the cemetery—and to put it down, if necessary, in the bloody, permanent fashion I was fond of and so very good at.

  And that’s when I first saw the haint.

  She hovered over a gravestone about twenty feet away from where Fletcher was buried. I’d never given much thought to ghosts before. They were dead, after all. It was the living you had to watch out for—the people who could still screw you over six ways from Sunday the second they got the chance.

  Still, it surprised me how translucent she was, like a shadow cast by the moon. Everything about her was pale silver, from her sweet, old-fashioned gingham dress to the wild, wavy hair that cascaded down her back like a waterfall. Her features were sharp, though, painfully so. Big eyes, full lips, a crook of a nose. She wasn’t what I would consider pretty—her features were too angular for that—but something in her face made you take a second look at her.

  All put together, she looked like an old-timey mountain girl, someone who had once lived in one of the hundreds of forested hollers that clutched around the city of Ashland like thin, green, grasping fingers.

  Besides, haints or not, only mountain girls went around barefoot in the winter. Like Jo-Jo Deveraux, the Air elemental who healed me whenever I needed patching up. I eyed the ghost’s toes, which rested on a patch of snow. I wondered if she could even feel the cold in whatever half-life she was clinging to.

  I had told Fletcher everything that was troubling me, at least for today, so I slid my knife back up my sleeve and focused on the ghost. It took me a minute to realize that she was trying to clean off the gravestone, just like I’d done with Fletcher’s. I didn’t know if she could really brush aside the glittering cobwebs that swooped from one side of the gravestone to the other with her silvery fingers, but the tight set of her mouth told me that she was sure determined to try.

  I got to my feet and walked over to the grave. The haint didn’t stop her phantom brushing, much less look at me. I supposed that she was used to being ignored. So was I. As the Spider, I had spent a good portion of my life creeping through the shadows and being as invisible as possible—until the moment I chose to strike.

  I watched the haint work for a while. Maybe it was just my imagination, but the thick, sticky cob
webs seemed to quiver, shiver, and slowly break apart one tangled thread at a time under her relentless touch. Maybe she really could brush them away if she focused hard and long enough. And what was time to a haint?

  My gray gaze traced over the faint markings on the smooth stone.

  Thomas P. Kirkwood, beloved son, 1908–1929.

  Maybe it was because I had been thinking about Owen so much lately and trying to come to terms with my feelings for him, but I didn’t think the long-dead Thomas was the haint’s son. No, I thought, only a lover could inspire that kind of devotion, even among ghosts and, most tellingly, all these years later.

  Curiosity was one trait that Fletcher had instilled in me above all others, so I crouched down in front of the gravestone, then reached forward and ran my fingers across the weather-worn words.

  The stone radiated sorrow.

  People’s actions and feelings sink into their surroundings over time, especially into stone. As a Stone elemental, I could sense those psychic vibrations in whatever form the element took around me, from the proud whispers of a beautiful jewel to the harsh cries of a concrete floor spattered with blood.

  The gravestone’s sad murmurs filled my mind, along with soft, whistling notes that told of the crumbling passage of time and how the sun, wind, rain, and snow had slowly worn away the hard, pointed edges of the marker. Not unusual emotions in a cemetery. The same feelings would eventually sink into Fletcher’s gravestone as the years rolled on by.

  What surprised me was the rage.

  It pulsed through the stone like a cold, black, beating heart—slow, steady, and unending.

  Thump-thump-thump-thump.

  Somehow I knew it was the haint’s rage. After all, if she’d died around the same time as Thomas, then she’d probably been haunting the cemetery since the 1920s, which meant that she’d had decades for her feelings to sink into the gravestone.

  But who was the haint so angry at? Thomas? Had their love affair somehow gone wrong?

  I concentrated on the rage, listening to the harsh mutters buried deep, deep down in the stone. I got the sense that the ghost’s anger was directed at someone else, someone who’d taken Thomas away from her. Sharp, anguished shrieks of helplessness also trilled through the stone, punctuating the rage and mixing with faint whispers of guilt.

  Whatever had happened to Thomas, there was nothing the haint could do about it now, and it was eating her up inside. If she even had an inside anymore. Maybe that was why she hadn’t faded away into the afterlife yet. Maybe she couldn’t until things were set right. At least, that was what always seemed to happen in the stories I read for the various literature classes I took in my spare time at Ashland Community College.

  Guilt, rage, helplessness—I could relate to all those emotions since I’d felt every single one of them every single day since Mab Monroe had murdered my mother and my older sister. Really, they were the driving forces of my life—and would probably be the death of me when I finally went up against the Fire elemental.

  So I took pity on the ghostly mountain girl. I leaned forward and spent the next few minutes brushing off all the cobwebs that decorated the gravestone.

  No one had touched the marker in years, decades probably, and the webs were so thick and sticky that they clung to my skin like grayish glue. Hobwebs, Fletcher would have called them. When I was younger, he used to tell me stories about how little hobgoblins would start hiding in the silky strands if I didn’t clean the cobwebs out of the corners of my bedroom. I smiled at the memory and kept working.

  In addition to getting rid of the hobwebs, I also dusted off all the dried leaves and snapped twigs that the wind had carried this way.

  When I was finally done, I looked over at the haint. “There,” I said. “Better now?”

  I must have surprised her, because for a moment, she zipped around me like moonlit lightning. I blinked, and there she was, shimmering a few feet away. The mountain girl’s eyes met mine. When she realized that I was actually looking at her, that I could actually see her, her mouth rounded into a perfect O. After a moment, she crept forward and waved her hand in front of my face.

  “What?” I asked, brushing away her cool, ghostly fingers. “If you’re trying to make me cold, I don’t think it will work. I’m an Ice elemental, you see. Ice and Stone, actually. I can create Ice cubes with my bare hands that are colder than you are. And if you’re trying to scare me, well, you should know that I’ve spent a good part of my life being an assassin and killing people—bad, bad people. So I don’t scare easy.”

  The mountain girl dropped her hand. She backed up a few steps, crossed her arms over her chest, and considered me, her silvery gaze taking in every little thing about me, from my heavy fleece jacket to my chocolate-brown hair to my gray eyes that were almost as cold and pale as hers.

  I stood there and let her stare. As an assassin, I was used to being patient, used to waiting for my targets to become vulnerable, no matter how long it took—minutes, hours, days, weeks. Or in Mab’s case, years.

  But even I couldn’t compete with a haint. She had all the time in the world, and I had things to do, specifically a restaurant to run.

  “Well,” I said, “I hope you find what you’re looking for. Peace, revenge, whatever. Maybe I’ll see you the next time I come here to visit Fletcher.”

  The haint didn’t speak, of course, but I didn’t really expect her to. Still, the mountain girl stood next to Thomas’s forgotten grave and watched me disappear into the darkening twilight.

  Chapter Two

  “I think I’m being haunted,” I said the next day.

  Finnegan Lane, my foster brother and partner in murder, mayhem, and mischief, arched an eyebrow. Amusement filled his bright green eyes, which were the same color as those of Fletcher, his father. “Really? Has one of your previous dark and dirty misdeeds come back to bite you in the ass?”

  “Nothing as dramatic as that. I seem to have brought home a haint from the cemetery.”

  I jerked my head to the right. Finn stared at the spot, but he didn’t see the mountain girl spinning around and around on the stool next to him, a small, silly smile on her face. I wasn’t quite sure how she could spin like that and the stool not move, but then again, haints weren’t my specialty. Killing people was. So I just sighed and leaned my elbows down on the counter.

  It was almost closing time at the Pork Pit, the barbecue restaurant I ran in downtown Ashland, and my Gin joint was largely deserted. I’d already sent the waitstaff home for the day, and the only people inside were me, Finn, and Sophia Deveraux, the dwarf who was the head cook.

  Well, us plus the haint.

  I’d first noticed the mountain girl when I opened up the restaurant this morning. I didn’t know how she’d tracked me from the cemetery to the Pork Pit, but she had. I’d found her wandering around inside, looking at the well-worn but clean vinyl booths, the peeling blue and pink pig tracks on the floor that led to the men’s and women’s restrooms, respectively, the long counter in the back of the restaurant, even the bloody framed copy of Where the Red Fern Grows that hung on one of the walls.

  She’d perked up when I came into the restaurant, her ghostly figure pulsing a brighter silver. I’d tried to talk to her, to ask her what she was doing here and what she wanted, but all she did was stare at me with big eyes that almost glowed with hope.

  I had no idea why. I wasn’t one to inspire hope in people—more like fear, followed quickly by terror, blood, and death.

  The mountain girl had hung out in the restaurant the rest of the day, always keeping me in sight. When I went over to a booth to take someone’s order, she tagged along. When I went into the alley in the back of the restaurant to dump the day’s trash, she stayed two steps behind me. She even followed me into the bathroom, until I shooed her away and told her that I liked to do my lady business in private.

  But none of the folks who’d come into the Pork Pit noticed her hovering over their shoulders, wistfully eyeing their thick
, juicy barbecue beef and pork sandwiches, steak-cut fries, and baked beans coated with Fletcher’s secret barbecue sauce. Apparently, I was the only one who could see her.

  Well, me and Sophia.

  I supposed it made sense. Sophia was an Air elemental, which meant she could create, control, and manipulate all the natural gases in the air the same way that I could in the stone around me. No doubt, she sensed the psychic vibrations the ghost was giving off. Not that Sophia would say anything about it, since she didn’t talk much. Still, every once in a while, she would stare at the mountain girl out of the corner of her eye.

  And the mountain girl stared right back at her. That was because Sophia wasn’t just a dwarf—she also happened to be a Goth. Sophia wore black from the bottoms of her heavy boots to her jeans to her T-shirt, which featured a white, grinning pirate skull-and-crossbones. A matching silverstone skull dangled off the black leather collar that ringed her neck. Her hair and eyes were black too, although her lips were a bright, glossy pink in her pale face.

  Sophia’s clothes stood out in stark contrast to Finn’s slick gray designer Fiona Fine suit and my simple long-sleeved blue T-shirt and jeans.

  “And why do you suppose this particular haint has decided to haunt you?” Finn asked, taking a sip of the chicory coffee he favored. “You didn’t kill her, did you? Or someone she cared about?”