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    Haints and Hobwebs
    Haints and Hobwebs
    Haints and Hobwebs
    Ebook54 pages42 minutes

    Haints and Hobwebs

    By Jennifer Estep

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    About this ebook

    Even the Spider can’t escape a ghost’s web . . .

    I’m being haunted.

    As Gin Blanco, aka the assassin the Spider, I’m used to being haunted by all the bad things I’ve done over the years. I suppose it was only a matter of time before an actual ghost came back to haunt me. But for once, I’m not the bad guy, and I wasn’t the person who sent this ghost—this haint—into the afterlife.

    But this haint definitely wants something from me, and I can’t help but think that it’s revenge on the person responsible for her untimely demise.

    Good thing revenge is my specialty, whether it’s among the living or the dead . . .

    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.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherJennifer Estep
    Release dateNov 27, 2018
    ISBN9780986188596
    Haints and Hobwebs
    Author

    Jennifer Estep

    Jennifer Estep is a New York Times, USA Today, and international bestselling author who prowls the streets of her imagination in search of her next fantasy idea. Jennifer is the author of the Crown of Shards, Elemental Assassin, and other fantasy series. She has written more than 35 books, along with numerous novellas and stories. In her spare time, Jennifer enjoys hanging out with friends and family, doing yoga, and reading fantasy and romance books. She also watches way too much TV and loves all things related to superheroes.

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      Book preview

      Haints and Hobwebs - Jennifer Estep

      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

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