by Jory Strong
Safe enough, Tir thought, glancing one last time at the glyphs stirring his memory before entering the building.
The musty, dry-parchment and old-book smell was magnified inside the crowded shop. The air was thick with it, yellowed by the diffuse light coming from lanterns holding spell flame instead of true fire.
There was little room for anything other than shelves. They reached from floor to ceiling, creating tiny aisleways that would slow down a man of his size and keep anyone larger from exploring the stacks altogether.
A heavy, battered wooden desk was the only furniture visible. It was pushed into a corner to the left of the doorway but seemed to serve only as a place for books waiting to be shelved. If there was a method governing how the books were organized, it wasn’t immediately obvious to Tir.
He expected the shopkeeper to emerge from the stacks, but when one didn’t, Tir chose the middle aisle and moved deeper into the bookstore. His shirt grew dusty as he brushed against the tomes on either side of him.
Unlike those in the occult shop, the books here were mundane and not magical. History and literature. Science and politics. Texts that might have been in any library or home in the days before The Last War.
He reached the end of the row of shelves to find the aisleway he’d been traveling along blocked by the beginning of another row. A narrow gap allowed him to step to the side and proceed forward, giving the shop the feel of a maze-like warren.
Tir frowned, as puzzled by the shop’s layout as he had been by its location. It seemed to invite theft—or worse.
He kept going and finally emerged from the tight confines of book-laden shelves, only to find even more books, though these were scattered on tables in an area set aside for restoration. An old man glanced up, his gray-green eyes faded with advanced age.
“What can I help you with?” he asked, the hand holding needle and thread pausing over the book he tended.
Tir moved to the table where the old man worked. Up close he seemed even more frail and defenseless. “I’ve come for a book that’s in your possession.”
“Do you need me to find it for you?”
It took effort for Tir to tamp down the wild surge of emotion. For centuries he’d dreamed of this moment. “If you could.”
The bookseller placed the needle and thread on the table and came around to stand next to Tir. “Describe it as best you can.”
“Easy enough. It bears the stamp of the Knights Templar on its cover.”
The bookseller startled, then shook his head. “I don’t know how you learned I was in possession of that particular tome, but I’m afraid it’s already been sold.”
Tir’s hands curled into fists. How could the book be gone when Saril had seen it only a short time ago and assured him before he left that she saw only the present with her gift?
“Who is the buyer?”
“Virgilio Cortez.”
“He’s here in Oakland?”
His question was met with a puzzled expression. “Virgilio rarely leaves Los Angeles.”
Sudden insight made Tir ask, “Has he taken possession of the book?”
“Not yet.”
Satisfaction purred through Tir, though he continued to be puzzled by the shopkeeper’s lack of concern for his own safety. “Then I will see the book.”
The old man shook his head. “That’s not possible. Virgilio is quite strict in his requirements. Items purchased for his private collection are taken out of circulation immediately. The only way I can allow you access is if he or his designated servant grants me permission to do it.”
Tir’s hand dropped to the knife strapped to his thigh, Araña’s words sliding through his mind. I don’t draw a weapon unless I’m prepared to use it.
“You will show me the book.”
He let the old man hear the promise of death in his voice. But some unexpected, foreign impulse made him add, “And I will protect you from the consequences of it.”
There was the briefest flickering of fear in the bookseller, as though his advanced age made the prospect of death’s embrace frightening only at the gateway of its claiming. Stooped shoulders straightened, a signal he intended to meet his fate bravely. “I can’t allow you to see it without Virgilio’s blessing.”
Tir pulled the knife from its sheath. Centuries of captivity darkened his mind, renewing the hatred in his soul and reminding him of his pledge to seek vengeance. He would do what was necessary in order to gain his freedom. Pain could make even the most devout of humans break.
The catacombs had once rung with their screams and tortured admissions of manufactured guilt. And he had offered this man a choice when he himself had never been offered one.
“Last chance,” he said, voice guttural, harsh.
The old man started to speak. Whatever he might have said was lost in the opening of the steel door, in his sudden, deep fear as a pregnant woman entered the back room, her greeting of “Thierry” cut off, strangled.
Here is a weapon I can use against him, Tir thought. But before the intention could take root, a black-haired, brown-skinned girl-child slipped inside, stopping Tir’s heart with her likeness to Araña.
A blink and the child’s features became her own. But it was too late. The image of Araña growing heavy with his child, bearing a daughter that looked as she did, had shocked him to his core and scattered the hate festering in his soul.
Tir sheathed the knife, knowing Araña would turn away from him and accept death rather than welcome him in her arms if he harmed this woman and child whose only crime was being loved by the bookseller.
He would gain the book by another means, he decided, and thought instantly of Araña’s picking the locks, freeing him of his shackles.
He was reminded of his own pronouncement at the stream. I believe I’ll find what I seek in Oakland. Otherwise you wouldn’t have found your way into my dreams.
The bookseller said, “Talk to Draven. Perhaps there’s some service you can perform for him in exchange for his intercession with Virgilio. Only Virgilio and his High Servant have the combination to the safe the book is in.”
Tir gave a curt nod, his eyes quickly scanning the room and finding a line of safes set into a wall. He didn’t know who Draven was. It didn’t matter.
Araña had lived among thieves. She was one. If she couldn’t open the safe, then she could help him locate someone who could.
Tir left the shop through the steel door set in the back wall. He hurried toward the healer’s house, telling himself his rush was dictated by what he’d found at L’Antiquaire. But the stirring in his cock and the worry in his heart called him a liar.
ENTERING the witches’ house again was harder, so much harder than stepping into it the first time. The paintings and antiques had no power to distract Araña, and though she forced her hands to hang loosely at her sides—away from the knives—she doubted she was successful in appearing relaxed.
She expected Annalise to lead her to the parlor again. Instead the witch took her deeper into the house, only stopping when they arrived at a sigil-painted door with a bloodred pentacle in its center. Magic hung thick and heavy in the air, as if centuries of conjuring had soaked into the wood before spilling out into the space in front of the door.
When Annalise opened it, revealing a narrow, dark stairway leading downward into utter darkness, Araña took an involuntary step backward. Despite her time with Matthew and Erik, the fear beaten and prayed into her during her formative years returned as if she’d never been free of it.
Hell and damnation waited at the bottom of the stairs. It waited for anyone who took up with witches and played in their dark magic.
Araña could almost see Hell’s flames shadow-dancing on the walls, black and hungry for her soul. The prospect of taking the first step downward made her skin crawl and grow clammy, threatening her resolve to gain control of the demon gift.
“Levanna waits below,” Annalise said, voice empty of inflection.
Araña’s
stomach knotted, forcing the acid-hot taste of fear into her mouth, and without her meaning them to her hands curled around the knife hilts.
The witch said, “Only agreements entered into long ago spared your life earlier today. They won’t protect you a second time. A single human life span passes without notice to beings whose existence spans eternity. Failed tools and plans are easily set aside and replaced by new ones.”
Araña’s fingers tightened on the smooth leather of the hilts before she made them uncurl and ordered her hands away from the false security of the knives. She closed her mind to fear and blocked out the voices from the past, the sermons shouted from the pulpit and delivered with the lash of a cane.
Her reasons for seeking out the witch hadn’t changed. Levi would die because of her unless she gained some control over her gift. Her next victim could easily be Tir.
She took the first step downward. Then a second. And a third. Fully expecting Annalise to close the door and trap her in darkness.
But if the witch was tempted, she didn’t act on it before Araña reached the bottom of the stairs and found a hallway instead of a room.
A single candle beckoned at the end of it, bloodred, the flame whispering, Come to me.
It was like a vision summons, only Araña’s body answered instead of her soul, moving steadily forward, unwilling to turn back or deny the fire’s command.
Her heart thundered, not the phantom beat she imagined in the dark center of the flame, but the real squeeze and release of muscle.
The Wainwright matriarch waited in a room of flickering candles set at each star-point of the pentacle drawn on the floor. She was draped in black, moon-faced and milky-eyed, like a spider waiting in a web. “So you returned. Perhaps you’re not a foolish child after all.”
“Will you help me gain control of my gift?” Araña asked, her throat so dry it took effort to push the words into the air between them.
“You have to enter the place where the Spiders weave if you want to learn.”
Araña’s eyes glanced at the candles, positioned one at each apex of the pentagram. If she’d allowed herself to think about it at all, she would have guessed she’d have to go to the very place she’d spent a lifetime trying to avoid.
She had no way of knowing if the matriarch would lie or tell the truth, but she couldn’t stop herself from asking, “Will I be able to undo something that hasn’t come to pass?”
“Perhaps. Perhaps not. That is not for me to say. Where you go is not a place I can enter now. Another waits to teach you the things you need to know.”
A chill swept through Araña as she imagined herself coming face-to-face with the demon responsible for the spider mark. “Who?”
Goose bumps rose on her arms with the witch’s laugh. “Nothing you can offer is worth what it would cost me to speak that particular name out loud. If you want answers and knowledge, then enter the place where the Spiders weave.” A gnarled hand emerged from the black folds of her garment. In it was a vial full of liquid. “I am here to assist you in finding the true gateway and to ensure the shell of flesh so painstakingly created to house your spirit will not host another’s.”
Araña felt as though a wall of ice encased her heart. A silent scream of no came from the depths of her soul.
Levanna lifted the vial higher and the candlelight bounced off it, turning dark liquid into a thousand strands of color. “The choice is yours. My obligation extends no further than offering you a way to enter the place of Spiders and keeping your physical body safe until your return.”
Araña’s gaze flicked to a candle flame and back to the vial. “I can enter on my own, through the fire.”
“That’s your gift, to be able to enter a realm no human can. And your curse. To have the gift limited because you’re bound to mortal flesh and can’t enter it fully.”
The witch indicated the pentacle drawn on the floor, serving as an altar much in the way the shamaness’s fetish-surrounded dirt floor had. Wax pooled at the bases of the candles and spread like bloodstains, reminding Araña of the blood she’d willingly shed in order to enter the ghostlands.
She thought of Matthew’s use of their code to tell her he and Erik were truly okay, and Erik’s parting words. Don’t let your courage fail you.
“What’s in the vial?”
“A rare poison. It separates the soul from the body.”
The ice encasing Araña’s heart so each beat was labored spread, freezing her lungs.
“ Bòcòs use it for creating zombies.”
“Yes. But it won’t be used for that purpose this day. Choose. The spell allowing you to safely enter and return through the gateway will last only as long as the candles burn.”
Araña looked at them again, seeking their hearts. Unlike the candle in the hallway that had beckoned her forward, whispering Come to me, the ones set at each apex of the circle-inscribed star were silent, leaving the choice up to her.
She wanted to turn away and hurry from the house. She couldn’t.
The reasons for coming to the Wainwright witch hadn’t changed. Her ignorance when it came to her gift had entangled Matthew and Erik in this web. It had led to Rebekka’s capture and would lead to Levi’s death. She held out her hand for the vial.
“You will pass quickly into the world beyond,” the witch said. “I won’t catch you if you choose to remain standing.”
Araña took the vial but couldn’t bring herself to sit at the matriarch’s feet. She moved away, stopping in the center of the pentacle.
Against her fingers, she could feel tiny lines etched into the glass. Bile rose in her throat as she opened the vial. She doubted she could physically swallow its contents—until the cognac scent reached her.
The poison might have been designed for her. It made her think of home—the cabin and not the boat—of times spent in front of the fireplace, curled on a chair across from Erik, both of them reading while Matthew worked on whatever project held his interest.
Poisonous or not, she lifted the vial to her lips, drinking its contents before lying down. But as numbness came, starting with her limbs and moving into her core, it wasn’t Matthew and Erik she thought of, it was Tir.
Until she’d been forced to join the strand of her life to his, she’d never known the ecstasy and pleasure of touch. She’d thought she craved it then, but that desire was nothing compared to what she felt now.
Her heart rate sped up then abruptly slowed as the poison reached her chest. Blackness formed at the edges of her consciousness, her body trying to spare her from the panic of not being able to breathe. The darkness moved in. It reminded her of the sea surging ahead of Aziel in the ghostlands to reclaim Erik’s and Matthew’s spirits.
She thought fleetingly of the spider, and knew true fear when, for the first time in her life, she couldn’t feel it at all. And then, just as she became aware that her heart had slowed to the point where it didn’t seem to beat at all, the witch loomed above her holding an unlit candle, her words nearly drowned out by the babbling stream of sibilant whispers. “Call the fire.”
With a thought Araña did. Flame leapt from each of the five candles at the apex of the pentagram to form a sixth point above her, a fiery gateway she slid into as easily as if she were returning home.
Unbidden the dream came, the first dream, the spider’s birth dream—only it was different than before. There was no separation of soul and mark, no it and her. She and the spider were the same, a thing without form in the dark heart of hellfire.
Around her it hissed and crackled. It roared with fury and power, with the desire to destroy as well as create, and she burned with it.
Into the fire flew a raven. The black of its body absorbed the heat and its eyes became glowing pits of red.
Its presence created a storm of howling and shrieking. Flames leapt higher, as if trying to draw its attention. But it ducked and wheeled, ignoring them as it dodged grasping hands of fire and came unerringly to her.
Its beak o
pened, and she filled with hungry anticipation, knowing somehow that when it spoke her soul name, it would separate her from the fire and wrench her from the place where all life began.
There was no memory of a journey, no sense of a physical form, but Araña saw the world as if through the eyes of the raven. It perched on a limb outside an open window.
A deep, unnamed dread filled her as she recognized the settlement where she’d spent the first twelve years of her life. Always before, the spider’s birth dream ended just after the raven’s call gave it form, merging with the memory of pain as it burned its way outward to appear on her flesh. Now it continued.
Two men stood at the bedside of a woman who’d already been dressed for burial by the midwife who hovered near a beautifully carved cradle. One was a church elder, the other a man who’d always shunned her.
Gingham curtains fluttered peacefully, in sharp contrast to the words being spoken in the room by the younger man. “Let Satan take the child the same as he claimed the mother giving birth to it. It was conceived in sin. All I have to do is look at it to know it isn’t mine.”
“You’ll damn yourself by calling on Satan,” the elder said. “The child is innocent of the mother’s sins.”
“If it lives, I won’t claim or raise it.”
“If it lives, I’ll see that it’s raised by those who won’t spoil it by sparing the rod as happened with the mother.”
The raven hopped along the branch, its movement drawing the attention of the people in the room.
“A bad omen,” the midwife murmured. “Death waiting on an unclean soul.”
The man whose pale, silver-blond hair was almost the same shade as his dead wife’s, visibly shuddered. The church elder said, “Superstition is blasphemy against the Lord.” But he touched one hand to the man’s shoulder and extended the other to the midwife. “Join me in praying for forgiveness for any evil that’s entered our thoughts because of this birth and death, and for the child, that it will be welcomed into God’s loving arms should it not survive.”
They prayed, and filed from the room at the conclusion of it, none of them glancing backward at either the corpse awaiting burial or the infant left unattended a few feet away from its dead mother.