Spider-Touched g-2

by Jory Strong

  “Do you recognize it?” Farold asked.

  “Yes. It’s one the fundamentalists favor. It’s not used much here, but in the San Joaquin, especially in some of the more isolated communities near Stockton, there are several groups who routinely use it to mark individuals they view as tainted by evil. The brand literally means touched by Satan, or alternatively, one of Satan’s own. A witch practicing the black arts necessary to kill by touch alone would certainly fall into that category.”

  “I’m surprised they didn’t burn her at the stake.”

  “I imagine her looks saved her from that fate, and perhaps the fact she’s learned rather than gifted. More than one pious man has been led astray by a beautiful face and form, and thought they’d be able to redeem and reclaim the soul inside it.”

  Farold’s eyebrows drew together. “But once she’s branded? How would it be possible?”

  “Where there’s a will, there’s a way. Once she’d been judged redeemed, a second brand would be laid over the first, attesting to the restored purity of her soul.” Anton chuckled. “Very primitive views considering the revelations that have come since The Last War.”

  “True.”

  “I believe I’ve seen enough here, Farold.”

  Murmurs rose in the cage next to Araña’s as soon as the two men left the room. Only now they were the sounds of men speaking in frightened turns about the demon, negotiating to work together in an attempt to survive and escape the maze.

  Araña sank to the ground where she was. Fear and adrenaline washed away to leave a deep numbness.

  Once again she pulled her knees to her chest to serve as a pillow. She wrapped her arms around them and let the curtain of hair hide her face.

  Blood from her wrist soaked into her pants. Her side throbbed with pain, as did the places she’d been kicked and hit.

  Thoughts of all she might be forced to endure in the maze overlaid the images of Matthew and Erik lying dead. The combination threatened to paralyze her, to provide an opening for despondency to envelope her in an icy haze.

  It pulled at her, nearly succeeded in sucking her under and holding her there. But pride wouldn’t let her remain in the deadly embrace.

  Matthew’s last words shamed her for allowing even a hint of hopelessness to invade her. Live for all of us, he’d said. And she would.

  She would live for them. And she would avenge their deaths by killing the two guardsmen who’d brought her to the maze.

  Slowly she became aware of her surroundings again. The words one of the prisoners was speaking sank in, and Araña turned her head slightly, just enough to peek through the black of her hair and read the tattoos on the man’s face.

  Wife abuser. But he’d frequented one of the gambling clubs where his money was welcome despite the violence he’d been found guilty of. He’d watched men and beasts run through the maze, and though he’d never seen anyone escape it, he still had answers when the other convicts asked him questions about pitfalls and design, dead ends and traps.

  Those answers chased the last of Araña’s emotional paralysis away. Hope blossomed and surged through her veins.

  There were places like the maze in other cities. She’d heard them talked about in boat towns and outlaw settlements, wherever men and women gathered to brag and swap stories over beer and moonshine and homemade wine.

  The names of the cities were often volunteered, but when a man ran a maze and survived it, he didn’t usually speak of its location or of the offenses leading to his imprisonment—and no one asked. That was unspoken custom among them because desperation could turn a former drinking buddy into a bounty hunter.

  How many times had she heard the tale of Gallo’s escape from a maze? How many times had he bought her meals and filled Erik’s and Matthew’s cups with beer while she captured his stories on paper with her pens and pencils?

  She’d run Gallo’s maze a hundred times in her imagination as she’d turned those oral stories into pictures. He’d never revealed the city, but as she listened to what the wife abuser said, familiar landmarks rose from her memory with perfect clarity.

  She saw Gallo’s run through the maze. Saw the statues he’d passed, the walls streaked with blood where desperate men tried to claw their way up concrete surfaces studded with shards of glass. She saw the traps he’d discovered, the doorway to freedom he’d found, and she knew she had a chance of escaping death. This maze was the one Gallo had survived.

  MOISTURE dampened Rebekka’s palms as she reached the edge of the red zone. In front of her was the section of town set aside for gifted humans, though in this part most of it was weed-filled open space or row after row of destroyed houses covered with clinging vines.

  There was no wall. No rigid boundary. But sigils marked it and wards were set in place to repel the predators that thrived in the red zone during the night.

  She paused and turned to her companion. “You don’t have to cross with me. The occult shop is only a short distance away. I’ll be okay.”

  Levi shook his head, causing the sunlight to reflect off the thick mane of his hair. He lifted his lip in a silent snarl. Tawny eyes flashed, revealing the lion trapped in a human body. “I can handle it.”

  She nodded, knowing he wouldn’t be deterred and feeling guilty for wanting his protection despite how uncomfortable it would be for him to cross the wards and remain in the territory of the gifted.

  In a rational world, gifted humans and shapeshifters would view each other as allies, but the world wasn’t any more rational now than it had been before The Last War. There was too much history between the gifted and the Were. Too much bloodshed. Too much suspicion and distrust, especially when it came to witches.

  Rebekka stepped past the boundary and continued walking, keeping her back toward Levi. She imagined he’d almost rather die than get caught flinching as he crossed the wards.

  She’d homesteaded a house in this section. But she rarely left the red zone and the brothels.

  Her fingers curled around the token in her pocket. It had been delivered hours earlier to the brothel where her room was by a young boy, one of hundreds who roamed the streets in the main part of the city looking for work, willing to do almost anything for enough money to buy food— even carry a message from a witch into the red zone.

  The token was a pentacle. Carved into its center was the Wainwright sigil, and at its outer edges, elaborate glyphs. With it came a summons only a fool would refuse to answer.

  Rebekka shivered, not just from thoughts of the Wainwrights, but at the sight of the occult shop as it came into view. All along there’d been rumors about its owner, Javier. He’d been a frequent visitor to the brothels, though, thankfully, at those she worked in he’d come only to slake his need, leaving the women he visited no worse for encountering him. But at others he’d bought out the contracts of some of the prostitutes and they had never been seen again.

  There’d been rumors of black masses and sacrificial offerings. But in the red zone there was no law, no police or guardsmen to investigate. It was only when Javier’s body was discovered that the rumors were proven to hold truth—he was a dark magic practitioner who used human sacrifices in order to summon demons.

  She shuddered. The tales might have been embellished, but she didn’t doubt for a moment the existence of demons. More than one of the men who visited the brothels had spoken of the demon who sometimes hunted in the maze.

  Rebekka cast a quick glance at Levi as they neared the occult shop. He rarely spoke of his time in captivity—what had been done to him by Gulzar to force his body into a horrifying blend of lion and man, or those he’d killed in the maze when he hunted there. But she knew not a day passed when Levi didn’t think about it, didn’t curse himself for escaping and leaving his brother behind to die or to become an insane monster—to hunt for the pleasure of humans who sat safe in their clubs and bet on the outcome.

  She stopped at the edge of an inscribed circle painted in red on the sidewalk surrounding the
shop. This time she didn’t say anything. She let Levi reach his own conclusion and voice it.

  “I’ll wait for you here,” he said and Rebekka gave a slight nod before stepping over the line.

  There was a mild touch of magic, one that had probably served to warn Javier of a visitor’s presence. She wondered if whoever now claimed Javier’s shop and house benefited from the magic Javier had laid down.

  Her heart rate accelerated as she drew closer to the shop. Weres were leery of magic, and perhaps because she spent so much time around Were outcasts, she’d absorbed some of their beliefs and uneasiness, despite having gifts of her own.

  Her nervousness increased as she reached the shop door and entered. The air was heavy with the scent of incense, cloying, enveloping—tempting and yet repugnant at the same time.

  A man glanced up from something he was working on behind the counter. A clerk, she thought, though she didn’t discount him.

  Pentagram jewelry, fetishes and candles, herbs, wands, cauldrons and athames—all were available and with plenty to choose from. But it was the books on magic and witchcraft that both awed and frightened her each time necessity brought her to the shop.

  She moved deeper into the store, toward the place where the Wainwright witch would be. An entire wall contained a library of handwritten spell journals, individual shadow books no living witch would have willingly parted with. They were all that remained of entire families lost to plague and war, people who’d died long ago, so quickly they hadn’t been able to burn the books in order to keep them out of the hands of strangers.

  Rebekka stopped next to a woman dressed in black. Not the Wainwright matriarch. Even with the streak of gray in her hair, this woman wasn’t old enough. But she was still powerful. Standing in the witch’s proximity made Rebekka feel as though magic crawled over her skin like a hundred tiny spiders.

  She pulled her hand from her pocket and offered the pentacle. The woman gave a small shake of her head. “Keep it. You might need it to summon help. I’m Annalise. But it’s on behalf of the matriarch that I’m here. Tonight they run in the maze.”

  Only the instinct for self-preservation finely honed from being around Weres kept Rebekka from stiffening with the mention of the maze. If Anton Barlowe or Farold had any idea she and Levi were doing what they could to interrupt the supply of captured hunters, planning for the day when they could somehow find a way inside and free those held…

  Rebekka suppressed a shiver—but only barely. “They’re running convicts tonight,” she said, somehow managing to keep her words neutral, as befitted someone who called the red zone and the brothels home.

  Annalise pulled a book from the shelf. It parted on a page showing a werelion in a partial form, the head and arms those of a beast while the body remained human.

  “A woman will run tonight as well,” Annalise said. “It is beyond our control as to whether she will escape. But should she survive, she will be as important to you and the… man… who waits outside for you, as she is to us.”

  Rebekka didn’t ask how the Wainwrights knew about the woman or Levi. It was possible they had spies who passed on information in the same way she gained it when the men and women who frequented the gaming clubs came to the brothel. But it was equally likely they’d gained the knowledge by other means, with a toss of bones or a reading of fire. There were whispers about the Wainwrights and their ancestors, tying them to black magic as well as white.

  A tremor passed through Rebekka before she could stop it. The token she still held in her hand grew heavier. She understood the significance, understood if she acted on the witch’s information, obligations would arise between them because of it.

  Her gaze flicked to the picture of the werelion. Sometimes it was hard to maintain hope that Levi’s brother could be freed or his sanity salvaged.

  The destruction of the maze itself and the release of the animals and Weres held captive there seemed like an impossible dream. And yet it was one of hers. If the witches wanted the same thing, or might be persuaded to involve themselves…

  Rebekka closed her hand around the pentacle and put it back in her pocket. Annalise returned the book to its place on the shelf and picked out another, opening it to a page with a handwritten spell and a picture of a pentacle similar to the one in Rebekka’s possession.

  “Can you read this?” Annalise asked.

  It was a short spell, requiring candle, blood, and token, easy to memorize because it served only to trigger a larger one already set in place. “Yes.”

  “Should you need to use it in order to summon help, change the last word to aziel,” Annalise said, placing the book on the shelf and leaving without another word.

  Four

  ARAÑA guessed it was nearing sunset when footsteps approached beyond the door.

  The men grew quiet.

  She rose to her feet as Farold entered with a satchel under his arm. He stopped in front of her cage, far enough back that she couldn’t touch him, and emptied the contents of the bag onto the floor.

  Two dozen knives poured out of it, many of them with dried blood on their blades. Araña’s throat tightened when she recognized one of Matthew’s, then saw Erik’s as well as her own.

  Farold glanced up at the camera mounted above the door he’d just come through. “You’ve got five minutes before the others are freed,” he said, speaking to someone else as well as her. “Anton is allowing you the choice of two knives.”

  Behind her she heard the slide of metal, the solid steel that had served as a wall opening to become a doorway. A breeze swirled in, bringing with it the smell of evening air.

  The choice of knives was easy. Araña indicated one of Matthew’s and one of Erik’s.

  As they slid across the concrete toward her, she allowed herself the brief fantasy of using them on the guardsmen who’d brought her to the maze. But when they reached her, her thoughts turned only to survival.

  She grabbed them and fled, emerging from the cell into a chute formed of outdoor cages. Wild animals lunged as she ran past them. They hurled themselves against the bars, excited by the prospect of a hunt.

  A pack of feral dogs frenzied, spinning and salivating and finally turning to savage the weakest member. A bear rose on its back legs. A cheetah crouched in the cage next to it while hyenas laughed.

  Adrenaline surged through Araña, but its source wasn’t solely fear. This gauntlet meant to induce terror fed her hope. It was exactly as Gallo had described it.

  Beyond the caged animals she paused only long enough to determine which direction the heart of the city lay in. Then she ran away from it, toward the forest.

  Her lips pulled back in a fierce smile when she reached the next choice of turns. It was marked by pornographic statues, a beast raping a woman to the right, another doing the same to a man on the left.

  She took the left without slowing, just as Gallo had once done, and ran past walls covered in vines, ignoring glimpses of light hinting at shortcuts, and deep shadows suggesting hiding places.

  Cameras perched boldly on top of poles and concrete. Araña imagined just as many of them remained unseen, all of them turning violence and carnage into entertainment for anyone with the money to pay for it.

  There were other statues along the way, most of them sexual in nature. She used them as others would use a street sign, hoped as she was doing it that they hadn’t been repositioned since Gallo ran this maze.

  Behind her a bell sounded. The feral dogs began barking, warning her the convicts had been freed.

  Araña pushed herself to run harder, unsure how long it would be before the demon was released into the maze. Blood ran down her side from where the bullet had grazed her. She ignored it and kept going, her breathing becoming labored.

  The maze encompassed miles, and one wrong turn would mean rape, possibly death. Her lungs burned along with her thighs, making her fight for each running step.

  Relief fed her strength as she turned a corner and faced a bridge she
’d hoped to find there. In the evening air a trace of steam rose from a channel too wide to jump.

  The water disappeared through a bricked archway offering a tantalizing glimpse of freedom. She knew it was an illusion. Just as she knew the bridge was a trap.

  Anyone rushing across it would drop into the water. And though its surface was calm and unbroken, beneath it waited schools of piranhas kept hungry for human flesh. The night Gallo ran, he’d seen the man in front of him fall into the water and be eaten alive.

  Araña sheathed the knives. She wiped sweat and blood from her hands before grasping the metal railing and moving forward, keeping to the very edge of the bridge.

  Gallo hadn’t known where the trigger was, but there was one. And once it was tripped, a section of wood would swing downward.

  At mid-span a scream tore through the maze, followed by another, and then another, telling her the demon now hunted. An involuntary shiver wracked her body as she pictured Abijah. She flinched when a different voice gave an agonizing cry of torment—the sound of it wavering, hovering in the air and turning her skin icy cold as it went on and on and on.

  Footsteps drew close, more than one pair of them, pounding hard and fast. Making Araña hurry along the bridge. She nearly screamed herself as it fell away beneath her feet.

  Only her hold on the railing saved her from plunging into the piranha-infested water. The upper body strength she’d gained from a lifetime of hard physical work served her well as she climbed hand over hand to reach solid footing.

  Out of the corner of her eye she saw two convicts round a corner. She recognized them. One was the wife beater, the other a rapist.

  Araña started running again as soon as her feet touched dirt. Seeing the trap of the bridge, the men would know the danger the water posed and cross it quicker than she had.

  She followed their progress with her ears. They were catching up to her. But with freedom so close, she didn’t think they’d linger to make sport of her— if the opening Gallo had escaped from was still there.

  Araña turned the corner and saw it. Only instead of a doorway leading to sky and forest— and a nightmare trap in the copse of trees beyond it—a silvery web spread across the space.