“Can I get you two anything to drink?”
“No,” Amanda said. “I’m good.” Chelsea just shook her head.
Will gave them an almost disappointed nod and eased the door to his room closed. The latch clicked softly, and the sound of the TV faded into an indistinct murmur. The quiet was at once imposing, insistent. The boy lowered himself into a low Papasan chair and leaned his crutches against the wall with a careless but well-practiced toss. He then clapped his hands against his knees and gave the two of them a long, uneasy look. “So. I suppose you’re going to ask about me and Spins, then.”
Amanda nodded, her whole body tense as a gargoyle. Though the guy’s room seemed normal enough, sitting face to face with a cult member left her nerves strung tight. She pulled a shallow breath into her lungs and tried not to betray her disquiet. “That was the plan. You can start with how the two of you met.”
To her surprise, he didn’t show any resistance to the question. He instead leaned back into the cushioning and reclined his head. “Well,” he said, “I first met Spinneretta at the history museum here in Widow’s Creek. And, as I’m sure you’re thinking, that was by design.” He chuckled softly. “I still remember how nervous I was about the whole thing, you know. It was basically what I’d been waiting for my whole life. And eventually we started talking, and we became friends. Also by design.”
Amanda swallowed hard. “When you say by design . . . ”
His chin dipped. “By the designs of NIDUS. Of my father.” He crossed his legs, cringing as his muscles flexed. “They wanted me to befriend her, gain her trust. And eventually to lead her to NIDUS. To initiate her, to start her down the path of the cult’s indoctrination, in as natural a way as possible. That way, once she knew the truth, she would grow into the role that NIDUS wanted her to. And by baiting the line with trust, we could bring her to the cult of her own volition.”
Another quiet sigh filled a near-silent moment. “But once we became friends,” he continued, “it just felt wrong, you know? I mean, what I was supposed to do didn’t feel right anymore. It didn’t feel like fate, or whatever. It just felt like betrayal. So, I decided I wasn’t going to go through with it. And when they sent one of their pet soldiers to collect her, I took a stand. I tried to protect her, told her to run, and she did.” He laughed, and the sincerity of the sound struck a chord in Amanda’s chest. “You should’ve seen the guy’s face,” he said with a smile. “Gave him a few pretty good blows, but . . . Well, I paid the fucking price for it in the end. At least I don’t have to use the wheelchair anymore.”
“When did that all happen?” Amanda asked, still digesting the story.
“Oh, probably about six years ago now? I remember it was June.”
“Six years.” A knowing nod forced itself upon her. “That’s right about the time she started hiding her legs.”
“Hiding?”
“Yeah,” Chelsea said, a look of patient understanding weighing her eyelids and cheeks. “About six years ago, Spins started wearing a jacket over her legs at school, and pretty much anytime she was outside. Started acting cold to most people, really distant, wouldn’t let anyone else get close to her.” Anger flickered in her irises. “That was your fault, huh?”
Will drew a sharp breath through his teeth. “Ouch. I guess I deserve that.”
“Come on,” Amanda said. “If it wasn’t for him, we might’ve lost Spins a long time ago. If you’re going to blame someone, you should blame his dad and the rest of the damn cult for everything.”
The boy cringed. “Look. I know it’s easy to say things like that, especially from your perspective. But you have to understand something. My dad wasn’t a bad guy. He was zealous, sure, but not malicious. He never wished any harm upon anyone, least of all Spins and her family. He joined the cult before I was born, and once I came around he tried to involve me as much as he could in what he saw as a miracle of divinity. He really believed in the stories of the Yellow King, of Zigmhen, of Raxxinoth. But he never did anything to hurt anybody. He wouldn’t even let me take the Nothem. Not until I turned eighteen.”
Chelsea blinked at him. “Nothem?”
“The mind control spiders,” Amanda said.
Will nodded. “Yeah, that’s right. He said that no matter what I felt, I should decide for myself once I was able to make an informed decision. And you know what? If I’d taken them like I’d wanted to, if I’d become a full member of NIDUS, I’d have died with everybody else in the lockdown. The only reason I’m alive is because of him. So, even if it’s hard, try not to blame him, alright?”
Amanda swallowed hard. “Right. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean . . .”
He waved his hand. “It’s nothing.”
“So,” Chelsea said, leaning forward, halfway off the bed. “What happened after that?”
Will reached one arm over the back of the chair and grabbed an electric guitar from its stand. He pulled it into his lap and began to strum it absentmindedly. “Well, after that, my dad basically cut me out of cult life. He took it as a sign that I wasn’t committed to the cause, and still had soul-searching to do. Which was damned true at that point. But even after the police almost got involved when I showed up to school in a wheelchair with no good explanation, he was never angry with me.” His pseudorandom strumming gained a semblance of order, morphing into what Amanda thought was the main riff to Number of the Beast. “Spins never called me again. And I can’t blame her, either. After almost getting kidnapped by some maniac in a yellow coat, she should’ve stayed the fuck away. God, I wonder if she knew that I was in on it from the beginning. Wish I could apologize for the whole thing, but at this point it’d be pretty meaningless, I guess. They say all’s well that ends well. Well might be a bit of a stretch.”
It was hard not to feel a bit bad for him. Amanda and Chelsea had always wondered what had triggered Spinneretta’s change six years earlier. It just wasn’t the closure Amanda’d been hoping for. “So who are the guys in the yellow coats? Members?”
He shook his head to the rhythm. “No. They’re hired hands. A lot of them are criminals, or at least were.”
A disappointing answer. She thought almost dying at their hands made her deserving of something more substantial. “Alright. Well, what can you tell me about those yellow-robed things?”
“The Vant’therax?” His strumming quickened, conforming to an unfamiliar song. “Not much. Just that NIDUS created them, and that they’re bad news.”
Another dead end, Amanda thought. “How about the Norwegian Killer? Know anything about that?”
He shook his head. “Probably as much as you do?”
“Come on,” Chelsea whispered into her ear. Her voice was barely audible over Will’s unamplified strumming. “Enough with the questions, already. Let’s go home before his mom turns out to be a cannibal nutjob, alright?”
Amanda’s jaw tightened. “We’re not going home, Chels.” She cleared her throat and stood up, slinging her bag over her shoulder again. “Thanks for your time,” she said. “I just have one more question for you.”
“Sure.”
She filled her lungs. The smell of the room was sickly sweet, just a little dusty. “You said before that you wished you could apologize to Spins.”
Will’s eyebrows bowed upward. “Yeah? I don’t think it’s that strange of a thing to say.”
“What if I told you there was a way you could?”
The last note of a power chord went sour. For a long moment he sat there, his whole body stiff. And then, clumsily, he set his guitar back into its stand against the wall. “What do you mean?”
“The Yellow Dawn.” Through the still air, the vibrations of the living room’s entertainment growled. “The spider cult is moving again. This time if it’s not NIDUS, then it’s something just as bad. The guy who caused the lockdown is behind it. And right now, they’re looking for Spins and her family.”
His lips curled in disbelief, and then horror. “What the hell are you talking ab
out?”
“We’re going. To the cult. To Manix. We’re going to find them and stop them from destroying another community. And I have a good feeling that in doing so we’ll find out what happened to the Warrens.” A final breath to temper her courage for the request. “Come with us.”
Terror traced the edges of his eyes. “You’re . . . going against the Helixweaver?”
She nodded. “You said you always wanted to apologize to Spins. So put your money where your mouth is. Come with us. We can find her, together.”
All the blood had drained from his face, leaving an ashen complexion. “Are you insane? You’re going to . . . Why?”
“Because she’s my best friend. And because it’s obvious the cult is too dangerous to go unchecked. Surely you know how Harold Wiser’s book was received. At this rate, it’ll take a goddamn miracle for anyone to take notice of what’s about to happen there. You know the cult, Will. You were a part of them. More than me, anyway. So let’s go. We’ll stop them from killing anybody else. And then, when we find Spinneretta, you can apologize to her. What do you say?”
His shoulders shook, at first so subtly that Amanda thought it was a trick of the old bulb overhead. But then it grew more severe, and his head started thrashing side to side. “No, no, no! Are you out of your fucking mind?” He stood up, his legs nearly folding beneath him. He grabbed the top of the chair to support his weight. “You can’t do that. If you’re right, then that is the worst thing you can possibly do!”
“No. The worst thing I could do,” Amanda said, “is sit by and watch.”
The pallor in Will’s face deepened further until he looked like a corpse. “If you’re certain that it’s the same group that caused the lockdown, then please, go home. And stay the hell away from wherever they are. No good will come of you going, least of all for Spins.”
Amanda tried to hide her disappointment. She crossed her arms and stared into Will’s features. “And what makes you so sure?”
“Listen to me,” he said, his voice strained. “Last time someone went up against a Helixweaver, dozens of people died. Instantly. With no recourse. My father among them. I don’t know where Spins is now. I don’t know what the cult wants anymore. But I do know one thing. Since the foundation of the spider cult—since the very beginning—everyone who has ever challenged a Helixweaver has died.” His eyes were burnished sapphires, blazing, paralyzing. “And if you try to go up against one, then so will you.”
Chapter 14
All Roads Lead to Manix
Arthr didn’t get a chance to eat breakfast Thursday morning. When his mother wasn’t yelling about his missing sisters, she was sitting in quiet, shivering despair. It was the latter that gave him the greatest sense of dread and led him to skip school to search high and low for where they’d gone. Just like the previous day, his search turned up nothing. He checked the library, the bookstore, every restaurant and retailer, and searched every tangle of shrubbery between home and the center of town. Nothing. No Spins. No Kara. No Cinnamon.
When he returned home in the afternoon, he found his mother shaking at the kitchen table, unable to drink the tea she’d made herself. Seeing her like that made him feel sick to his stomach. When he sat down at the table, May looked him up and down out of the corner of her drooping eyes. “Anything?” she asked in a near whimper.
He shook his head. “I looked everywhere. Are you sure we shouldn’t just go to the police?”
A trembling breath squeezed itself from his mother’s lungs. Her jittery fingers crept around the spoon in her tea, and the glass chattered as she tried to stir it. “We can’t. I wish we could.”
“And still no answer on her phone?”
She shook her head. “Why did this happen?”
Arthr gulped. He hated seeing his mom like this. Her aura of weakness made it harder to swallow the dark thoughts that slithered up from the core of his doubt. Though his whole body was sweating beneath his jacket, he shuddered. “Do you think they were taken? By the . . . ”
“No. I know they weren’t.”
The certainty of her tone surprised him. “How?”
She exhaled and stared at her fingernails. “I figured out what the point was.”
“Huh?” Their eyes met, and he found the distance in her pupils chilling.
“The whole point of making spider-people. Took a while, but I could finally make sense of that damn report.”
Arthr shook his head. “Wait, then what is it?”
Her slender fingers coiled into something resembling a half-fist. “The point was to bear a child to that Yellow King the cult loves so much.”
His blood ran cold. “What?”
“That’s it. They just wanted something genetically similar enough to their King to produce viable offspring. And that’s why . . . ” Her lips pulled back around her clenched teeth. She shook her head and banged her fist on the table. “The cult is dead,” she sobbed. “And if they could get Spins and Kara, then why would they take Cinnamon, too? I can only think that they left on their own. I don’t know why, but . . . ” She buried her face in her hands and her shoulders heaved. “It’s not fair. All I wanted was to raise a family with your father. I keep thinking it has to get better. I’ll make these concessions if things just get better. Staying at Kyle’s? Fine. Moving to this humid shit-hole? Fine. But it’s not. It’s not getting better. It just keeps getting worse. It’s not fair. I can’t take this.”
Arthr stood up and walked around to where she sat. He put his arms around her shoulders and hugged her tight. Her sobs came again, and so he patted her back, his stomach churning. The whole house felt empty, but his insides felt even worse. None of this made any sense. Whenever somebody brought up the Yellow King or the cult of the spider, Arthr felt like he was being lectured to on some fantasy universe. But seeing his mother lost to despair like this made it all too real.
He remembered a time when he was proud, when he was confident. That was before he’d had his leg cracked open. Before he’d seen Spinneretta beat the shit out of the man who’d done it to him. Before the yellow-coats had taken Kara from the roof, all but blurting out that they didn’t need him. Because he was incapable of bearing children. That was it? That was the reason he was dispensable? How was that fair? The more damning question, however, was how had he missed it? He blinked back his own tears. They were selfish tears, and that made him feel even worse. His jaw was tight, and his mother’s head against his chest crushed the hope out of him.
After a long while, May sat back up and wiped at her red eyes. She stood, leaving her tea where it sat. “I’m going to the store. We’ll still need to eat.” She wandered to the front door, leaving Arthr standing there. When the front door clattered open and then shut, he thought the silence would suck his brains out.
His own thoughts bending and churning, gut hollow and foul, he made his way to the couch. He slumped onto one side and buried his head in one of the floral throw pillows, his spider legs clenching around his trunk. The morning’s exhaustion was too much, and he drifted to sleep.
A knock at the door awoke Arthr from his light nap. The impatient rapping sounded like the call of a machine gun, and it filled him with a nightmarish memory of the Vault. He sat upright and caught his breath, heart pounding an irregular rhythm. When the burst of knocks came again, he got to his feet and staggered toward the door, gravity dragging the blood from his head. Fear was for the weak, and so he threw the door wide open. On the other side was a black-haired woman in a blue blouse and jeans. His heart stopped. “A-Annika?”
“Oh good, your memory works,” the woman said. “That means only two of you are brain-dead.”
He flushed and took a step back. She was just as beautiful as he remembered. But what impression was he projecting after almost three months? His jacket was disheveled from his brief nap. The sweat that dampened his hair probably made him look completely unpresentable. He batted at his bangs with one hand, trying to smooth them in an attractive direction. “Wh-
what are you doing here?”
Annika gave him a blank stare. “I take it back. You’re just as stupid as your sister. Get out of the damn way.” She pushed past him and into the living room, slamming the door with her foot. “Where’s May?”
He tried not to stare at her, but the V-neck blouse she wore gave him an unhindered view of her cream-colored skin.
She scowled. “Have you gone fucking deaf, kid? Where’s you mother?”
Her words startled him back to alertness. “Uhh, she went to the store. To buy groceries.”
“Great. Awesome. Then where’s the old man?”
“He’s at work.”
Annika gave an exasperated sigh. “Jesus fuck. Alright, then take me to Spinneretta’s room.”
“Spinneretta?” He chuckled a little and gave her a knowing grin. “I’m afraid nobody lives here by that name. This is the Hallström residence, my name is—”
Annika grabbed him by the collar and shoved him against the wall. The impact rattled his bones, and his spider legs flew out to steady himself against the side of the couch. The whole world spun, and then the whirling panorama resolved into the sight of Annika glowering at him. Her eyes blazed as though she were contemplating snapping his neck. “Why are you fucking with me right now?” she said in a low, hideous tone, fingers grinding against his collarbone. “Do you not understand how serious this situation is? Why are you making jokes that serve only to waste my time instead of answering my question?”
He suddenly found he could not breathe. “I was, uhh . . . just trying to lighten the mood?”
Her grip against his collarbone tightened, and for a moment he believed she would throttle him to death. She pressed her teeth together and hissed before shoving him hard against the wall and releasing him. She balled her hands into fists and began to stomp toward the hall. “Vafan är det för fel på era jävla spindelungar!? Fan ta dig!”
He had no idea what the words meant, but he got the feeling she was sparing him some humiliation by singing in that foreign tongue. Embarrassed at himself, he started following her. “Spins’s is . . . second on the left here.”
Tatters of the King (The Warren Brood Book 3) Page 19