“Leave,” Darith commanded the woman. She would only be caught in the crosshairs. Her energy flickered at the edge of his mind. If it came to her life or his, Darith wouldn’t hesitate to drain her and leave her empty shell discarded. She was a kind woman and deserved better than to be used for fuel. To someone, she was probably as real and important as Annabelle and Marim were to him. Power coupled with selfishness could do more damage than pure evil.
The nanny got no more than three steps before the door burst open, and two men thrust themselves inside. They wore black suits and had slicked-back hair. One was chubby and fair-skinned and the other was built like a giant rock with dark skin.
“Ah, Darith Cortanis and little Annabelle,” the chubby one said.
“I’m at a disadvantage. Who are you?”
“Mr. N and Mr. Q. Agents of Mr. Ymel,” the dark-skinned one said, pointing first to his companion, then himself.
“You have our property, Mr. Cortanis. Annabelle is Halis’ and as such, she belongs to us,” Mr. N said, his pasty white finger pointed at the baby.
“And Marim?” Darith asked.
“All will be explained if you come with us,” Mr. N said. His arm lifted, and in his hand, he held a gun. He leveled the weapon at Darith’s head.
Darith laughed. Annabelle’s darkness pulsed in his arms. Her rage rushed through him, merging with his own. He stood, the air drawing in around him. At the base of his spine, the darkness lifted and settled into his fingers.
His muscles, mildly atrophied, shivered at holding his weight, but his magic focused outward. His arm lifted, and the gun melted. The dark-skinned man screamed in agony until Darith tightened his fist, closing off the man’s airway.
“The mistake you made was thinking you had me outmatched,” Darith said. “Now that is cleared up: Where is Marim?”
The chubby man was white-faced, and he stuttered a moment before forming words. “Halis and Silvia contaminated her. Even if you kill me, they’ll keep coming. You’re contaminated, too, boy.”
His fist still clenched as Mr. N writhed, struggling for air, Darith walked forward. His brain was clouded with the clot of rotted power Silvia had left in his spine. He snapped his wrist to the side and Mr. N flew to the side, his neck at a crooked angle.
“One less agent.” Darith grinned. He stepped down and barely managed to keep to his feet. He was empty. He stumbled. His arm tightened around Annabelle. The rage remained, hers mingled with his, but he was dry inside, his power spent along with the spider’s residue.
The wide-eyed agent lifted his gun.
The air was dry, no currents to feed from. The nanny huddled in a corner, her energy a smooth silk song to his senses. She bore his mark in his service. That alone allowed him access to that great deep pool of strength. Mine. Her force is mine.
The gun leveled at his head.
I won’t be that. He clung to the memory of Marim’s eyes as she ran across the room, filled with sunlight. It was the only strength he had against the dark, bitter cloud. If Annabelle is to be better than Silvia, than Halis, I must be better. I must be strong.
The agent smiled.
Darith closed his eyes. Annabelle.
To use her was to bind her, but he wouldn’t use anything. The empty dry core of him gripped her strength and rode out until they touched currents—millions of tiny strengths. He drank.
The gun went off.
Angrily, the bullet ripped through the air.
Darith’s eyes opened, and from them spilled all the little lives, glowing and screaming for release. The bullet crashed into this wall of light. The air smelled of burned corn and wheat. The bullet hung there, caught. Darith stretched his free arm out. Warm as honey, the freed power slipped around his fingers in a pool, and then it hurtled away from him in a raw force, screaming and free.
The agent’s skin was the first to go, peeling back from his body. Then the soft tissue melted away. The blood showered out. Bones dressed in a drenched black suit fell to the ground.
A screaming nagged at Darith. He turned to the red-faced nanny, whose nails had scoured her cheeks. Little ingrate.
Annabelle wanted her silent. Darith’s stomach knotted with her hunger. His mouth watered at thoughts of biting into the woman, the nanny’s bloody face filtering into his mind.
“Leave!” Darith thundered at her.
When the girl was gone, Darith took a few tentative steps on legs that held him up on pride alone as the unused muscles strained. He collapsed next to the corpses. With the last of his strength, he dipped his finger into the blood and let Annabelle taste her first kill.
Chapter 9
A Walk Through the Past
Darith slept, even the whites of his eyes eaten by black. Across the void in his mind, Silvia stretched. Solid and aware of his surroundings, Darith looked back at her, his as black as her own. The surrounding web thrummed with his power. Deep inside, lodged in his spine, was the darkness Silvia planted, the ichor of her own mark. He twisted these, using them, drawing them out of him to surround himself.
“They found you. I can help,” Silvia said. The nothingness around her roiled like storm clouds ready to crack with thunder.
“I don’t need your assistance.”
“But you do. They’ve come for you, and without us, you can’t fight them.”
“I’m going to cure myself of you.”
Silvia laughed and the silver of her mirth shot like lightning from the clouds rolling around her. “And then cure Marim? Only they have her. Do you think you understand?”
“Enough. I will kill you and your wretch of a brother. I’ll save Marim, and I don’t need anything from you.”
“You have my pride, boy. Once, I deemed myself a match for The Brothel That’s pride, nothing else, and it’ll see not just you but your Marim destroyed.” Silvia reached out and touched him, and as she did, the storm encased him too, locking out the emptiness. “You’re family now. Though you have yet to accept it, you are part of Halis and me. So is Annabelle. I have information you need.”
“I was clear on my need of you,” Darith said. What could she tell him that the voice of the web could not? What could she possibly know that it did not?
“Darith,” she said. “The people who have Marim are evil and you don’t have time. You must get her out. Look.”
With the word, he plunged into a thick convoluted tangle of emotion, light, and sound. Then he looked out from her eyes. Her heart raced. Her palms were sweaty, and as her panic welled up, it nearly overtook him. She flinched back from a line of men strapped into chairs. Their wrists and heads were secured, and greedy eyes stared at her naked body as she tried to cover herself with nothing but her hands and her hair.
“I was thirteen,” Silvia’s voice informed him. “Eight days earlier, I’d witnessed Halis turn into a spider for the first time. And then, I was brought to this room, shoved inside. I always knew I was intended to be one of The Brothel girls. What other fate awaits a woman raised in those walls? But I was thirteen. I’d had my first woman’s cycle only four months prior.”
Silvia stumbled and Darith, stuck inside her mind, stumbled with her. The click of a door opening alerted her to a new presence, and she pivoted. A robust man wearing a leer and nothing else entered. At over six feet tall and sturdy muscle hidden under his girth, Silvia endured a wave of panic as it occurred to her that she was powerless.
Silvia backed away. “Please, don’t…”
The man approached. Silvia froze in the center of the room. His fingers latched around her arm, and a sharp pain shot up her, mingling with an unnamed painful clutching in her gut.
“Let me go!”
He laughed, and driven on instinct, Silvia darted forward and bit his arm. Her teeth sank in until the metallic tang of blood filled her mouth.
A hand slammed into her face, spinning her to the side. Her eyes fastened on Halis’ form behind the open door. Three men held the spider back; it strained forward. The hand caught her
jaw again, twisting her head the other way, to the wall of men. Men who’d paid to be there. Paid to see this.
She slammed into the ground. Blood trickled from her mouth—hers and his mingled. This time when she looked up into the eyes of her tormentor, she did not speak. There was no point in begging. No one would help her. Only…
“Halis, I’m scared,” she said.
“I’ll fucking gut him,” Halis replied.
A great weight pressed down on her. Silvia closed her eyes, but she could still feel the crushing weight of the man’s body on top of her. Raised in a brothel, she comprehended what was happening in a distant way. Unprepared for the forced experience, the fight drained from her limbs. To be held immobile, all choice ripped from her, elicited an illogical reaction—Silvia screamed.
“Stop!” Darith cried, but he remained pinned with Silvia. He smelled stale booze and sweat, tasted blood, and her panic threatened to sweep him away.
Then the man was ripped off of them, blood spraying from his mouth. And Darith, carried on Silvia’s emotions, felt a surge of love and triumph as the spider drained the man.
“By all that is good in the universe, why would you share that?” Darith yelled. He yanked free of her. The clouds surrounding them swept away at his outburst, leaving them in a vacuum of emptiness.
“Those are the people who have your Marim,” Silvia said.
Elegant and distant as always, Silvia appeared unaffected by the memory. She glanced down at the nails on the hand that had held him, inspecting each finger as if for damage to a nail. Darith trembled, ashamed to show weakness in front of her but unable shake off the weight of that man lying on top of her, on top of him.
“You don’t have time for your pride,” Silvia said. “You don’t have time to struggle through these discoveries on your own. Darith, you need me. Like it or not, we’re your family, Halis and I. Come to me, Darith.”
“Come to us,” the dark voice echoed.
Darith disengaged, pulling away from the web and falling back into the sunlit world around him. The mess in his room seemed less random. The Brothel. It wasn’t just Silvia and Halis The Brothel wanted. They wanted Darith, too, because he carried the contamination.
They’d kidnapped Marim.
Holding tightly to the arms of his chair, he dragged himself up into the seat. Only once his daughter rested in his lap did he leave the blood-splattered room and head down the hall. He took the time to ponder whether he should bother checking on his parents.
They were dead. If he hadn’t known it before, sharing in Silvia’s memory left no doubt. Those people weren’t likely to care about who they killed as long as they accomplished their goal. But he owed his parents something for raising him, so he wheeled himself back to his father’s study.
The room was in disarray, papers and books scattered everywhere. The butler, or he assumed the corpse belonged to the butler, lay on top of the desk, his face a pulp. Like a scarlet fruit half-eaten by a wild beast. Could a gunshot do that? Or was this something different?
Wheeling carefully through the wreckage, Darith came around the back of the desk.
“Hi, Father.” The back of his eyes burned. Annabelle began to cry, the sharp tuneless cry of a human infant. One of them weeping over the old man was enough. “I’ll clean you up. You wouldn’t want to be found like this.”
In the mess of the count’s torn clothing, a scar stood out on his shoulder, a small discolored circle. Staring at his father’s stripped corpse, a knot of fear in his gut unwound.
He can’t hurt me. Tears slipped from Darith’s eyes unheeded. The scar demanded his attention and, drained from killing the agents and witnessing Silvia’s pain, Darith couldn’t fight the images. Distanced from it by ten years, Darith heard the crack of the gun. Saw blood spurt from the wound as the bullet embedded itself in the wall by his bed. His father’s drunken eyes cleared, and his hand fell from his belt buckle.
“Next time, I won’t miss. I’ll live with all manner of indignities, but you won’t touch my son. Darith is the only good thing you ever did, and I’ll see us both burn before you ruin him.” His mother’s voice was flat, emotionless. But the pistol in her hands shook and tears streamed from her eyes, coating her cheeks in mascara.
Darith turned angrily from his father. He thought of Timmy in town, for the first time since the accident, he truly thought about it. Remembered the person he wanted to be, the person his mother thought he was.
As he finished cleaning his father to be found, Darith pondered how he could honor that part of his life. He couldn’t be that boy anymore. He smiled as he thought of Gretta. The girl who’d promised to help him, the one he’d parted ways with to avoid entanglement.
He only hoped their monetary arrangement didn’t put her in danger.
∆∆∆
Not possible. Berrick stared at the file as if by doing so, the words would begin to make sense. Everything besides the punctuation was blacked out. Every damn thing. What could be that classified? And why was Silvia interested in an event that the government had tried to scratch out of existence?
For days, he’d pored over videos of Silvia at the library. Every appearance coincided with violent attacks. The same crimes that had led Berrick to believe they’d stopped here in the first place. At first, that troubled him. Silvia delved into her research only when Halis went on a killing binge. In the end, any discord between them could only serve to benefit him. He’d set his mind on finding what Silvia was doing that she didn’t want Halis to know about.
Figuring out her goal proved to be no challenge. He tracked her research. He had to give her credit; she managed to hack into files no civilian should have been able to access. But if she’d had his rotten luck with finding answers, that explained why on her last visit she had broken some poor sap’s arm, then proceeded to kick him repeatedly in the head and casually walk out.
So far, what had he learned? A planet had existed. The government destroyed the planet twenty-five years ago. Everything else was classified. The basic fact probably would have been classified too if there hadn’t been a burned-out hull of a planet visible to all passersby.
Berrick stood up, giving one last disgusted look at the black-lined document. There was one more place to look. A place Silvia never would have thought of. The physical files. If this colony was like most of these tech colonies, physical files stopped being kept about twenty years prior. Most of the old files were supposed to be uploaded. But that was a lot of manual entry, and no one prioritized the project.
Back in his office building on Yahal, they had a basement filled with files just like these. Occasionally, they punished a new officer who stepped over a line by making them input a box.
If this particular incident was uploaded, that would be the end of the line. The physical forms would be destroyed. But they wouldn’t be uploaded. Good old bureaucracy and its overwhelming ineffectiveness. The files would be sitting there, forgotten.
On his walk through the town, unrest filled Berrick. I should have drowned that damn baby. Should be with Marim. Instead, I’m out here tracking ghosts. When things are classified there is a reason.
He’d checked, a level six clearance would be needed to see the unedited documents. Even on Yahal, he only had a level five. Six. Only members of The Council of Five, the highest members in The Galactic council, had a level six clearance. Whatever those black lines held was deep and nasty.
This whole time, he’d been so convinced they were all playing Silvia’s game. But they weren’t. She might be the queen on the chessboard, but she wasn’t the player. So who was? If this wasn’t the spider’s game, then whose?
He let himself into the building. Like every other building, it was spotless, cleaned by machines until it stank and looked like the inside of a factory. He went directly to the door at the back. The descent was murky with dim lights that flickered on at his movement. Like plunging down into the underworld.
At the foot of the stairs, a robot jerke
d to life. “What can I help you find?”
“Files from twenty-five years ago.”
With a whir and a few blinking lights, the metal box equipped with a smaller second box with a speaker and a camera moved out of a puff of dust. The robot led him past rows and rows of boxes. It stopped at one and a little puff of dust particles lifted from it, flitting in the light. “Any particular interest, sir?”
Berrick stayed silent a moment. Telling it the truth might mean being denied the files. But lying put him at risk of treason and might mean a fruitless search.
“Intergalactic issues with a focus on the cold months.”
“Third row down, sir. Blue coded boxes.”
Berrick walked the echoing aisle between the rows, grateful that the robot didn’t trail him. He pulled out the first box and leafed through. The papers were old and yellowed, a few with water spots. It only took him thirty seconds to find something. The box fell to the floor as he gripped the neat sheet of paper. The page gleamed white as if the contents of the sheet had burned away all signs of age.
“Gods forgive us… Gods forgive me.”
Chapter 10
Allison
Halis found his human legs awkward. They didn’t bend at the correct angles and there were far too few of them. But as a disguise, it was flawless. He walked across the room to the closet, where he picked amongst the clothes Silvia had provided.
The sun glared through the window, penetrating the wooden blinds. His nose curled, and he shielded his eyes. Another thing he despised about human culture—its instance on being awake during daylight hours.
“Silvia?” he called. No answer. She was probably in the gardens.
He opened the door and took the spiral staircase down to the lower floor. The glass doors of the patio provided a perfect view of Silvia. She lay in a hammock swing made of spider silk. Beside her lay Havoc. Halis paused to admire her. Even in her human form, Silvia pleased.
Spider's Kiss: Book One of the Drambish Chronicles Page 19