by Jory Strong
Jurgen jettisoned the taser cartridge and holstered the weapon in favor of drawing a knife. “Looks like that’s mine already. Besides, this will keep them busy.”
The rest of the spiders massed like a living carpet and slowly began covering Salim. Jurgen’s attention shifted, eyes searching for Araña in the rapidly darkening forest.
He ignored Salim’s terror-filled words and cries until Salim began shrieking, “Kill me. Oh god, Jurgen, kill me. Don’t leave me like this.”
“Sorry, Salim, I don’t know if they like dead prey.”
Jurgen probed the shadows, directing his next words at Araña. “Just you and me now, bitch. Time to come out and play.”
Araña answered the call, darting out and slashing at his back—finding body armor but drawing first blood on his upper arm.
The pistol fired as he reflexively squeezed the trigger. It fired again, an angry shot as he cursed.
She was already gone. Waiting for another opportunity.
Jurgen was no stranger to hunting in the forest. He used the evening darkness and soft loam to his advantage. Avoided the bones littering the path and hid the sounds of his movement in Salim’s sobs and mewling cries.
Retreat wasn’t an option even if Araña had been willing to consider it.
The open space and rubble-strewn ground between the grove and the reclaimed area of the red zone made that route an unwise choice.
Jurgen would use the gun now. If not to kill, then to incapacitate.
She could go deeper into the woods, taking a long detour and circling back to where Tir had told her the Constellation was moored. But doing it risked getting caught out in the night.
It left Jurgen alive to hunt her again.
This would end here. Tonight.
Araña picked up a human skull with strands of silk still clinging to it. She tossed it into a cluster of dried vine, distracting him long enough for her to move in, this time going for his legs, slicing across the back of his knee. Disabling him.
Jurgen screamed and fired, grazing her. It was a shallow wound, but it put the scent of her blood in the air and forced her to retreat.
Gasps of pain blended with his curses. He’d have to pause long enough to stop the bleeding, to fashion a crutch.
To decide.
Stay or leave.
It was already late enough for the feral dogs to be hunting.
If he was lucky he might make it to safety.
She moved in, not willing to allow him the choice.
He was silent now.
Hiding.
The creatures who called the forest home were silent, too. Waiting.
Only the sobbed prayers of the fallen guardsman drifted through the dusk. Eerie and surreal. Araña crept forward, slow and cautious. Adrenaline coursed through her, and heightened senses caught the flash of movement. She was already slashing before her mind identified her attacker. Werewolf. The one freed in the ambush.
Raoul.
Blood sprayed hot across her chest. Hers she thought at first, until the wolf’s body fell away, her knife going with it.
She’d severed the Were’s jugular, the move accomplishing it one she’d practiced so many times with Matthew that it needed no thought.
Sudden weakness drove her downward, onto her knees next to the furred corpse. Blood poured over her hand.
She stared, uncomprehending at first.
Hers, she realized. Heart rate spiking, pumping more of it through the place where the Were’s fangs must have punctured her artery.
She had minutes before she’d bleed out.
She dropped her second knife.
Increasing weakness and loss of focus made it a struggle to free her belt and get it around her arm. Ropes and knots were second nature because of the Constellation. All she needed to do was—
Pain slammed into her, a thunderous blow to her head knocking her off her knees and to the ground.
The belt fell away from her arm.
Blood pulsed, escaped in a rush again.
Jurgen crouched over her, rage and victory in his eyes as he held his gun to her forehead, the bare skin of his wrist only inches away. “Tell me where your companion is and I’ll let you tie the artery off. Otherwise, bitch, you bleed out.”
Too late.
She was cold. So very cold. She could barely feel her arms and legs. With a thought she found the spider. It hovered over her heart and seemed to grow larger, as if it stretched to meet the blackness forming at the edges of her consciousness, as if it were anxious to escape the tether of a mortal body.
No! she screamed silently, impressions flooding her mind.
Tir finding her in front of the mirror after her visit to the witches and showing her with pleasure just how thoroughly bound together her soul and flesh were.
The spider repeatedly seeking his touch.
The sense of unity she felt with it when she entered the vision place.
At the edge of death, all denial slid away. There was no separation of soul and mark. They were mirror images of each other.
Her acceptance of it brought the fusion of name and body, mind and spirit. And using the mark was as easy as drawing her knife.
It came to her hand, to her fingertips—a manifestation of who she was, what she was. And with the last of her strength she touched the bare skin of Jurgen’s wrist.
He jerked away from her, the bullet from his gun hitting the dirt next to her head. And then he was screaming, writhing. But there was no room for satisfaction. Only regret.
Tir, she wept, her last thoughts of him as darkness engulfed her, bringing with it heat and the roar of the fire calling her home.
Twenty-three
ARAÑA. Her name whipped across Tir’s soul. Suddenly. Intensely. Making him rise from the chair so violently it crashed to the floor.
The force of his need to go to her refocused his fury, his terror at having translated the last of the glyphs and found no hint of how to free himself from the collar.
She was hurt. Dying.
Whatever bound them together, so often turning her emotions into his, was stretching, thinning, dissolving.
Regret swamped him. Hers morphing into his.
It was acute. Excruciating. Destroying.
The sense of loss drove him to his knees, the bookseller and shop fading away as if they no longer existed on the same physical plane he inhabited.
No! Tir screamed silently. Willing Araña healed as he’d willed the boy attacked by the chupacabra healed. Willing her whole, safely returned to him.
His scream of pain became one note among a thousand of them—jarring, discordant sounds creating an agony unlike any he’d known.
It lasted a lifetime and an instant.
Ended abruptly. Completely. As if the choice whether she lived or died was no longer in his power to change.
He rose to his feet. Shaky, swaying, empty of all emotion and thought, all awareness, until the bookseller’s movement brought him back to the present.
“Return the book to the safe. I have no further use of it,” Tir said as he hurried toward the door, toward the boat where Araña had said she’d wait for him.
“WAS revenge as sweet as you thought it would be, daughter? Was it worth the price you paid to gain it?”
The demon’s voice pulled Araña from blackness and into the same long corridor with its ever-changing tapestry where they’d met before. But unlike before, the threads were a vision seen through the shimmer of flames. They were like a reflection on water, there but not there, just as she was there but not there.
She was truly formless, her body an illusion created by her mind as it clung desperately to the memory of who she’d been.
Soon all vestiges of it would be burned away. She knew it as surely as she knew the demon behind her shouldn’t have been able to stop her descent into the fire.
It wasn’t the Hell she’d been threatened with and beat because of, or the place of eternal damnation and torment she’d been
taught to fear, but the molten womb of the birthplace she’d dreamed about. And it held no terror for her, only the promise of rebirth.
Her soul had no place among the living, the proof of it was in front of her—in the fiery thread that extinguished in a flare of blue, as if in the instant of her death, when she’d called Tir’s name, he’d been aware of her passing and called her name as well.
Araña’s gaze lingered for only an instant before searching for the blue-black thread that was his. There was joy in not seeing it—in knowing the texts had contained the incantation to free him from the collar. But there was pain, too, intense regret at not having had a chance to say good-bye, to feel his body joined to hers one last time as they shared a final kiss, shared breath and spirit before being parted.
“Look further into the future if you want to see his life enter the weave again,” the demon said, and Araña obeyed, feeling the phantom tightening of her throat when she saw the thread enter the pattern. Disappearing and reappearing only when it was alongside another, this one jagged ice where hers had been flame.
“Is he free of the collar?” she asked, afraid she already knew the answer by how closely the twining of the two threads mimicked the way hers had done with Tir’s.
“No. Perhaps his future companion will discover a way to free him. Perhaps not.”
Araña felt the sharp stab of jealousy, but still she asked, “How long until he has another chance at freedom?”
“Do you care so much? He’s the enemy of our kind. In all likelihood he would have killed you if he’d gained his freedom from the collar.”
Memories swelled up, swamping Araña in moments of tenderness and passion, companionship and possession, filling her with bitter-sweet emotion that she’d never experience any of it again with him. “He wouldn’t have.”
“You sound so sure, daughter. But once you would have sworn vengeance against him in the same way you did to honor the two human men you loved.”
“Never.”
Tir’s name was so thoroughly woven into her soul she knew she was incapable of killing him.
Her confidence was met with laughter. “Once you would have looked at the collar around his neck and viewed it as a victory by the House of the Scorpion. You would have celebrated Abijah en Rumjal’s accomplishment along with the rest of us.”
Shock sliced through Araña, as well as the faded remnants of terror. “The demon the maze owner commands?”
“He may well be demon by now,” came the cryptic reply. “He’s been bound to human will for thousands of years. He remembers all the deeds he’s been forced to perform along with what came before. If the collar is removed, our enemy will also remember our shared history.”
There was a roar, a sudden burst of air and power, like fuel added to fire, and it carried Araña to the past.
She recognized the imagery from the art history books Eric had cherished and she’d so often studied. Only instead of dreams captured in oil, scenes rising from the imagination of devoutly religious artists, instead of it being captured myth, she understood it was reality.
Men—mortal and those cast in supernatural light—fought side by side with angels, their faces resolute as they battled demons who looked like Abijah. Demons who bore images of spiders and serpents, cardinals and ravens, as well as scorpions on their skin—and others who looked fully human save for the marks that were a manifestation of their spirit’s nature.
“He thought of himself as a holy warrior,” the demon said. “It’s written that healing was the greatest of his talents, but he turned away from it, preferring to kill instead. And when he couldn’t kill, he saw us enslaved and held by humans. He lives because of alliances we’ve made with powers beyond The Prince’s domain. And because it’s fitting he endure the torment and horror he once so readily sentenced us to.”
Araña closed her eyes, unwilling to search out and witness Tir’s deeds even though the memory of it would soon be burned away. Whatever power the Spider demon used to hold her from the flames, it was weakening. She could feel the pull to leave.
“How long until he has another chance at freedom?”
“Three hundred years. Four hundred. The weave changes and the woman has yet to be born. She won’t be if we can prevent it. She wouldn’t serve our cause or pledge herself to The Prince as you would have.”
“I’d never bow to Satan.”
The demon laughed again. “That would be a terrible sight indeed. One of our kind—and a daughter of my House—bowing to the angel who is now the god’s adversary.”
The response startled Araña. She turned from the battlefield, and it faded away as if it had never been. In front of her stood the demon, dressed as it had been before, in concealing robes with only black eyes and a small strip of skin revealed.
A raven perched on the demon’s shoulder. And beyond both of them, a magnificent city rose, shimmering like a mirage, in an endless expanse of sand.
“This is the kingdom you were born to,” the demon said. “This is our paradise and refuge. Our prison set deep in the ghostlands.
“We are the children of Earth, the Djinn, given life from its fiery womb so we can protect it. But now we wait and plot, and dream in exile of one day being able to return and reclaim what is our birthright.”
“Djinn?” Araña asked, searching her mind, her memory, finding nothing though the word resonated within her.
“We existed long before the alien god arrived and thought to enslave us and give us over to his mud creations as familiars. When we resisted, the god forced The Prince into the image Abijah showed you and named him demon.
“The Prince was the first to be called by that name, but it’s come to serve us well. In the millennia since then, the humans have followed the example of their god.
“They’ve conjured up thousands of nightmare creatures and named them demon. And along with their wars and their false prophets, knowledge of us has disappeared from human memory and history. They no longer remember how we once walked among them, able to take no form as freely as we could take any form.”
The shimmering, beautiful city began to disappear, its buildings consumed by translucent flames. And like the candles burning in the witches’ circle, Araña knew time was running out. The roar and pull of the primordial fire was growing stronger, harder to resist—or want to resist.
“I grieved the first time I witnessed your death,” the de—the Spider Djinn said. “This time, as I stood in front of the tapestry and watched the outcome of your human choice, my anguish was tempered by the knowledge a Raven would soon follow you into the fire, and you would be reborn among us.
“I didn’t know then that you’d touched your lips to those of our enemy and, in doing so, shared breath and bound a part of yourself to him. In the moment your spirit was freed, he used his greatest gift to heal and preserve the human shell you’ve been tethered to.
“Because it was a vessel created for you, the Raven can guide your spirit back to it and you will live again among those who’ve feared and hurt you.
“Or the ties binding you to our enemy will burn away in the fire and you can once again walk among your kind, in our kingdom.
“By The Prince’s will, it is your choice.”
Live for all of us.
Matthew’s words found her, holding within them the love that had sustained her and the only home her heart had known—until Tir.
Memories of Tir made the decision easy. Thoughts of how she’d found him in the trapper’s truck, shackled and tethered to a chair, and how earlier in the day he’d healed a human child when there was nothing to be gained from it.
If she’d once lived for vengeance, she realized now its price could be too high to pay. And if she and Tir had once been enemies, she’d learned that the past might be better put aside and a different future forged.
“I want to go back to him,” she said.
The pitch black eyes of the Spider Djinn who claimed to be her mother showed no emotion. “A
s you will,” she said. “But know this. If you betray us by speaking of us or revealing our existence, The Prince will send assassins belonging to the Scorpion House and they won’t fail him. He will order your name struck from the books of our kind and those of the Raven’s House will be forbidden from ever returning you to us.”
“I understand.”
“Then the choice is made. Perhaps you will still come to serve us as you were meant to. Use your gifts wisely. Use all of them.”
“Will you continue to teach me?”
“Perhaps, daughter. Call my name when you next enter the Spider’s realm. I am Malahel.”
Araña understood, as she hadn’t before, that from the moment she’d climbed onto the Constellation and seen the unnamed port city in her vision, she’d been meant to come to Oakland and encounter Abijah and Tir.
“Why don’t you free Abijah?”
“The human he’s bound to is one we can’t touch, not from our prison, and not while he refuses to leave the one he created for himself with the maze.”
“And Abijah, why doesn’t he kill Anton?”
Malahel shuddered. “Doing so would make him ifrit. One whose name can no longer be spoken out loud and whose spirit can’t be guided back and reborn into a new life.”
“Will he be freed if I kill Anton?”
“Perhaps. Perhaps not.”
If the Spider Djinn cared at all about Abijah’s fate, it wasn’t reflected in either answer or voice.
Araña could feel how little time she had left before the choice she’d made would no longer matter against the consuming nature of fire. “Will you tell me how to free Tir?”
The raven stirred, ruffling its feathers.
Malahel turned her face toward it, and something passed between them before the Spider Djinn’s attention returned to Araña. “Abijah knows the incantation. You have his name. If the maze owner is dead, and the moment right, you can gain the information you desire.”
“I can’t speak in the language Anton uses.”
“His use of it is a conceit.”
The last of the kingdom city behind Spider and Raven went up in flames with a whoosh that engulfed everything—burning away moment and scene like a match put to paper—turning reality into a rush of heat and the hungry song of the fire, then nothingness until Araña opened her eyes to descending nightfall seen through a canopy of trees.