And as they left Caramel’s Family Diner and entered the twilight, the cold sea breeze startled Spinneretta from her stupor. The chill was bracing, just as it had been when she snuck out to buy energy drinks. The wind was stronger now, and carried the smell of dead fish and seaweed with each gust. The breeze ruffled her hair and rippled through her jacket, slipping beneath the fabric and invading her spiracles. Despite her jacket’s warmth, she found her spider legs shivering.
After a few minutes of walking down the sidewalk, Mark broke their tentative silence with a chuckle. “Time sure flies, does it not? Seventeen years.” There was a hint of pride in his voice. “I remember when I was seventeen.”
“Wasn’t that like three years ago? I should hope you remember that. Otherwise, you have bigger problems than being seen in public with a spider monster.”
“Do you feel any older?”
“Significantly. Seventeen years, that’s, what, two hundred months or something?”
“Two hundred and four months. Six thousand two hundred and nine days.”
“You know that just off the top of your head?”
“I computed it earlier. For conversation purposes.”
She laughed. “God, you’re so weird.”
Mark looked away. “Congratulations in any case. And happy birthday.”
A fishy breath filled her lungs, and she released it as a sigh. Six thousand two hundred and nine days. The thought drained her of her energy. Most of that time had been spent within a hall of mirrors, ignorant of NIDUS, of the Vant’therax, of magic, of the Web. All the memories of her childhood, of the sleepovers, of her friends . . . they all took on a different aspect now. The stars twinkling overhead invited her gaze. She shivered at an errant memory of the planetary strands of Zigmhen bending through the heavens. “It’s hard to believe it,” she said. “Believe all this, I mean.”
“I’m sorry for what you have endured.”
“Even after everything, I still feel like I’m dreaming, you know. Like the weight of everything hasn’t hit me yet. I don’t know if I’d say it’s denial, but . . . I feel like all this should disturb me a lot more than it does.”
“You’ve often felt that way, haven’t you?”
She nodded. “Maybe it’s just because this is the only life I’ve ever known. And even when I thought things were normal, they weren’t. Maybe the Instinct is reminding me of that subconsciously.”
“One cannot rule out the possibility.”
“Or maybe,” she said, “it’s genetic memory.” After all, why else would so many vagueries have stricken her with such déjà vu? She’d felt it before, but never so often or so profoundly before Mark’s arrival. Why had her mind resonated upon hearing him speak the first time of Raxxinoth and the Yellow King? Why had smelling the burned air of the Web and staring into the cosmic tapestry in the heavens felt like going home? Moreover, what in Raxxinoth’s name was the sigil from her dreams? And why did it impress upon her an afterimage of some unspoken, eldritch truth? Another shudder. Genetic memory. As if such a thing could actually exist.
Mark said nothing in response to her speculation, and instead kept his attention on the distant outline of Kyle’s hill.
The rest of the walk was pleasant, if a bit blustery. Once they made it halfway back, the commercial district of Main Street transitioned into a number of cookie-cutter neighborhoods. Spinneretta glimpsed a number of families sitting down to dinners of their own, as well as homes devoid of any light or life whatsoever. They passed one house that had an overgrown lawn and a number of old, rusted cars lying dormant among the weeds, and the home’s solitude was contagious.
When they’d made it through the largest suburban section and found the foot of the hill upon which Kyle’s inherited estate was built, Mark’s pace slowed. Spinneretta turned to him, at once concerned. “Are you alright? Is your leg bothering you?”
But his posture did not suggest pain. He was standing straight, face to the stars, one hand snug in his pocket. He looked down and met her gaze. A paralyzing depth hid within his irises. He nodded up the road, toward the trunk of a fallen eucalyptus tree. “Sit with me for a little bit.”
When they reached the fallen tree, Mark sat. Spinneretta took a nervous seat beside him, willing the lump in her throat to dissipate. Mark again craned his head skyward and sighed. “Did you enjoy your birthday dinner?”
She clicked her tongue and put her chin in her hand. “Better than the last time you took me out, I’ll give you that. Food, coffee . . . The waiter was annoying, but at least the service was okay.”
“In many ways, it feels like it’s all the same. Soon the rain shall begin, and we’ll take cover under that big tree over there. Then we’ll share stories from our past.”
“Somehow I think you and I are through with that phase of our lives,” she said, carving a part of herself up with the words. There was no use pretending.
“You still think about that Will boy, do you not?”
The mention of his name struck her. For a moment she was unable to breathe. She made a reluctant, affirmative hum in the back of her throat.
“You own it,” Mark said.
“Huh?”
“You own it. All the pain you’ve been through from that night. The guilt, the doubt, the . . . all of it. You’ve paid the debt from it. You needn’t feel guilty about it any longer. Carrying that sort of burden is a waste of life. At every turn, it holds you back. Sometimes the best thing to do is to let go of things you can no longer change.”
“Well, forgive me,” she said, emphasizing his own antiquated phrase, “but I don’t really want to spend my already shit birthday getting lectured about guilt, alright?”
He shifted slightly beside her, seeming to take the point. Of course, no sooner had she jabbed it at him than she felt a twinge of regret for doing so. Lashing out at him wasn’t going to make either of them feel better. And besides, it’s not like that advice came without cause; he had the majority share of the guilt between them, after all.
“Spinny, I wanted to give you something.” One of his hands glided over to hers and took hold of it while the other groped about in his pocket. An electric shiver raced up her arm and toward her heart. With his other hand, he drew out a fine silver chain. He gathered and clasped the chain tightly in his fingers before placing the coiled object in her open palm.
When he released his grip on her, a quiet trembling disturbed her stomach. With a shallow breath, she opened her hand. Her lungs refused to obey. Sitting in her palm was a gleaming, heart-shaped pendant formed from a looping ribbon of silver. The center of the heart was filled with a delicately carved blooming rose. The twinge of regret she felt a moment before became a dreadful and encompassing remorse. “Mark, this is . . . ”
Looking into the distance, he nodded. “It was Ellie’s.”
She remembered his story from their last not-date. How he’d, in desperation, claimed his sister’s pendant before embarking on his quest to kill Golgotha. “You kept it? All these years?”
“I could never allow myself to forget what I had done. I could never again let myself forget the gravity of a promise.”
Her chest shook a little. “But. Why? Why are you giving this to me?”
“Because I’ve decided I don’t need it anymore.”
She stared into the pendant, tracing its slick outline with her thumb. Such a relic of a grisly death should not have filled her with the shaky hope that it did. But her mind was already looking beneath what he said, selectively deleting and singling out words and phrases that may have supported a change of heart. And then, remembering what Mark had told her was written on the back of the pendant, she turned it over to see for herself. The emotional weight of those words, the words that had stoked his rage to the edge of madness, had seen to it that she’d never forget them: Even the darkness has a silver lining. When she turned it over, however, frost raced through her bloodstream. That mantra, as she suspected, was engraved on the pendant’s reverse in
two graceful arcs of text. But in the center of the text, there was something else. A lone symbol: an angular V-shape, framing an oval whose rays pierced the V’s border. A crescent hung above the shape, and an inverted T split it down the center.
Spinneretta gasped for breath. Shaking, pulse pounding, she was unable to take her wide eyes off of the sigil—her sigil. “Mark. Wh . . . what the hell is this? Why is this . . . ” She couldn’t keep the telltale notes of panic out of her voice.
Beside her, Mark was calm. “I’m afraid I have no earthly idea. My mother gave that necklace to my sister on her fifth birthday. My mother had another necklace. It was different, but, sure enough, the back of it had that same symbol.”
Spinneretta’s eyes were drawn back to the depths of his gaze. His pale brown irises had surrendered their distance. Her heart began to race.
“Before my mother died,” he continued, “I asked her what that symbol meant. She said that it had been passed down through her bloodline for centuries. And that its meaning was not for me to know. When I first saw you scratch that symbol on your homework, and later in that painting in your room, I thought it some cruel coincidence. But when you used it to open the Web . . . ” He took a deep breath and coughed. Spinneretta could taste the nervousness rolling off him. “I . . . I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about it since then. But try as I might, I cannot find any connection that would link you to them.” He glanced down at the grass and seemed to grow more distant. “But I believe if anyone can figure out what it means, it’s probably you, Spinneretta.”
She didn’t say anything. She just stared again at the sigil. The sigil of the Web, surrounded by the mantra that destroyed the Vigil. The symbol that opened a gate to save herself and Mark, framed by the seven words that brought Mark to her in the first place. It seemed impossible that it could have been a coincidence. It felt too much like fate. “This is from your mother’s family?” she asked.
“Mmhmm.”
She shook her head in disbelief. “I . . . What does it . . . ” But she was unable to summon any question that made sense. Her fingers curled around the pendant. There was another question, though, that had hovered on the periphery for quite some time. She summoned all her courage and spat it out. “What happened to your mother?”
In reply he gave her only silence. He stared at her, dumbstruck. Spinneretta immediately regretted asking.
“Never mind,” she said with a nervous laugh. “It’s none of my business.”
Mark took a deep breath. “My mother was very sick.”
A different lump formed in her throat. Her regret deepened. “Sick?”
He nodded, gaze returning to the starlit sky. “She died when I was eight.” He swallowed hard, and his breath seemed to become labored. “When I found out that her time was limited . . . I suppose a child cannot easily come to terms with such a thing. But I was the Chosen of Y’rokkrem. That meant that I had the power to save her.” A dark, lonely chuckle. “I do not believe even the doctors knew what was wrong with her. The arrogance to think that I could help her. But of course, all I knew was that I was special. That I was born a vessel to magic.” He expelled a pained breath that sounded like it came from a corpse. “But when I tried to heal her, I just made things worse. Far worse. All I wanted was to save her. And instead, I ended up killing her.”
Her chest shook, and her tongue sat like a stone in her mouth. “Oh my God,” she said. “Mark, I’m so sorry. I had no idea.”
He closed his eyes. “It . . . it is fine. The past is the past.”
Claws ripped through Spinneretta’s intestines. Her spider legs felt like they’d turned to water. It was one thing to indirectly cause the death of his closest family members, but to be the direct cause took the suffering he must have felt to an alien level of severity. She slid closer to him and grabbed his arm. “Everyone makes mistakes,” she said, breath short. “That just means you’re human.”
His whole body tensed. “Human. I wonder sometimes.”
“The hell are you talking about? I’m the one with spider legs, here!”
A weak smile. “Be that as it may, I am the one who has killed everyone he’s ever been close to.”
She took a deep breath. “You haven’t killed me.”
To her surprise, he didn’t protest her stale words. Instead, he just put one hand on top of hers. Her heart fluttered, and the butterflies and hornets went to war in her stomach once more. And for a few moments, they just sat there, staring into the dark. Despite her best efforts, the Instinct was again creeping into her system, turning their cold log into an island of warmth in the night sea around them.
“You had good intentions,” she said. The legs beneath her jacket wanted desperately to get out and taste the cool night air, to taste the heat between them. “That counts for something, doesn’t it?”
“I think it might.”
A moment passed, and Spinneretta smiled a little despite herself. She laid her head against his shoulder. “You were right, you know. It’s not raining, but it’s still exactly like the other night, isn’t it?”
“Almost.” Mark slipped his arm free from her grasp and put it around her waist, pulling her close to him.
She gave up fighting inevitability. Temporary or not, this was their moment. Her arms wrapped around his shoulders, and she pressed her face into his neck. Her spider legs twitched beneath her jacket. She closed her eyes and breathed in the reborn night, soaking in the primal warmth radiating from their bodies. Even from beneath the jacket, her legs could smell the pulse pounding through him. The fluttering of his heart matched her own. His skin was hot against her cheek. She pulled away only slightly, making enough space to look up into his eyes. His expression was hesitant yet determined. His odd-colored eyes held hers and refused to let go; under his pale gaze, she found herself helpless to do anything other than wait.
“Spinneretta,” he breathed. “I—”
“What a touching scene,” came a voice from behind them.
Startled, Spinneretta released Mark and jerked away from him, spinning to face where the voice had come from. Mark was on his feet before she was, and his legs parted in a defensive posture, one arm in front of her. “Who’s there!?”
With the Instinct running hot, Spinneretta’s eyes dilated and opened the dark of the night to her. The ruined remains of several trees nearby held a shadow both unnatural and ominous. A soft laughter flowed like the plucking of a discordant harp. Soon, Spinneretta’s eyes decoded the intruder’s form. He was a lanky man with amber eyes and sandy hair. He wore a purple pin-stripe suit, and atop his head sat a bowler hat of a matching color. When he strutted out of the shade, the soft halo of the closest street light fell across him. Spinneretta felt Mark shift in terrified recognition. She, too, shivered. The gaudy purple attire, the haunting eyes that glowed yellow, and the evil, mischievous grin filled with pearly white blades—he reminded her of the Cheshire Cat depicted in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
The Cheshire Man smiled, and the muddy glow of the street light glinted off his teeth. That light seemed to be sucked into the depths of his chilling amber eyes, giving them an internal luminescence. “It is so great to finally meet you in person,” he said in a haunting hiss. “Our formal introductions are long overdue, Mark.”
Chapter 28
The Cheshire Man
“What the hell do you want?” Mark demanded of the purple-suited intruder. Every muscle in his body was tensed, and Spinneretta couldn’t blame him. Just a glance at the Cheshire Man’s unthinkable smile sent tremors of fear down her spine. She found herself shaking with some Instinctual hatred toward him.
The man shrugged his shoulders. “Oh, come now. No reason to be so hostile. We’re friends, after all!” The way he emphasized friends was nothing short of venomous. “Now, where would we all be right now if I hadn’t sent you that little present through your detective friend?”
“I don’t know who the hell you are,” Mark said. “And I don’t know what g
ame you’re playing. But I won’t have any of it.”
The man sighed and leaned against the deadwood tree beside him. “Game?” He drew a silver knife from one of his pockets and began to twirl it in his fingers. “And what game would this be, friend Mark?”
Mark clenched his jaw. “I know you were in contact with Dwyre. That you claimed to be his ally and an ally of the Yellow King, all while passing me information.” He narrowed his eyes. “It was you. You’re the one who killed Simon Dwyre.”
The purple man rolled his head skyward, and his smile widened. A toxic laugh. “Guilty.”
Mark snarled at him. “Why?”
“Hmm. I don’t suppose you would believe me were I to say I was just helping finish what you started.”
“Started? You’re the one who gave us those tapes. Do not insult my intelligence by pretending you had nothing to do with all this.”
The man’s eyes fell shut. “We could go on and on about who started what, but I find the topic dreadfully boring. Shall we move on to matters of more interest?”
“Not until you tell me who you are and what you want with us.”
The Cheshire Man leaned forward, and a guttural laugh rattled out from somewhere. “Who am I? Why, I am the audience, Mark!”
Helixweaver (The Warren Brood Book 2) Page 34