Finally, he let me yank my arm back and turned to face me. I inspected my arm for a moment, feeling my entire body shake with the pain of it. When I looked back up to snarl in his face, I noticed vanity had gotten hold of him and he’d grown in his hair. He looked like Mel again, though his eyelashes didn’t look quite as impressive as he seemed to prefer them. His face was sad and it made me bite back the insult I’d been about to hurl at him out of anger.
“I didn’t—I thought you were right behind me,” he explained.
“Yeah,” I mumbled, swallowing my anger. It wasn’t his fault he’d bitten me, and the wrapping really was for my own good.
“Me too,” I said finally, cradling my arm to my stomach. I was probably going to have some pretty wicked scars, if I got to keep the arm at all. God, just the thought of it made me want to vomit again. I pushed back at the desire to curl up in a ball and sob. “So, what happened?”
Mel sighed, relief opening up his face. He stepped forward enough to wrap an arm around my shoulder and then turned us to walk down the tunnel.
“I stopped to sniff something and when I turned around you were just standing there, staring down the tunnel. I asked what was wrong and you said that you thought you could feel something, that we should head down this way. I think this tunnel rounds back to where we stopped before and the creature wanted us to meet in the middle to attack each other.”
“I don’t know about this ‘each other’ business. I think it just wanted you to attack me.”
Mel made a noncommittal sound that could have meant he disagreed or that he was unhappy to agree. Free hand pointing at some scuff marks in the dirt, Mel moved his hand from my shoulder to my waist, supporting me a bit better. I let him, partially because I really didn’t want to be moving around in that moment. Mostly, it was just comforting to not be alone.
“When I saw you it wasn’t you. I mean, the actual you was the spider, and the fake you told me to attack the actual you.”
“Well, I swear I’m the real me. If it comes to it, kill the other one, the one that’s not me.”
“Good god, we’re a rooftop and a gun away from a bad 80s movie.”
“Is there any other kind of 80s movie?”
“You shut your mouth,” Mel said, looking down to force a glare. I could tell he as trying to lighten the mood, so I let him, giving back an equally forced grin.
“What happened to you?” Mel asked after a moment.
“You just disappeared. I was feeling dizzy but I thought it was just nerves,” I admitted, looking around. The dirt walls were still unremarkable and unrecognizable. “Then, I heard babies crying and I went after them. It was just one at first, so I picked him up. Then there was a second, and a third, and then a whole bunch of them. I could hear so many babies wailing and I panicked. I almost started crying myself, just because I knew I wouldn’t be able to rescue them.”
“You just heard them? You didn’t feel any emotions? Or did the trickster figure what you can do and fool you that way, too?”
“I—” Cutting myself off, I swore. Mel let me work through my extensive cuss word collection as we approached the split in the tunnels again. “I didn’t even try to sense how they were feeling. I saw crying babies and I flipped out. Maternal instinct kicked in.”
“You have maternal instinct?” Mel asked wryly.
“I… Is there an aunt’s version of maternal instinct? Aunt-ernal instincts? I probably have that.”
“Either way, it fooled you.”
“Yeah. I didn’t even think of trying to feel for anything.”
“I’ll give you something to feel,” Mel said, invitingly. When I looked up at him, he winked, stepped away. Turning to face me, he rudely grabbed his crotch, gave me a wag of his brows. I snorted, shaking my head. He was trying to distract me from the pain in my arm, I was sure of it. Short of full-on knocking me out, I knew he was capable of such a feat, but I let him play.
“I don’t see much to feel at all, sorry.”
Sighing as if it was some inconvenience to be rebuffed as such a dangerous time, he dropped his hand away.
“It’s your loss, Arthur,” he insisted. As I snorted, he crouched down to grab his clothes.
“Well, we’ve been down three of these and we know they don’t help.” Draping his shirt over his shoulder, he bent slightly to pull his pants back on.
“You getting prudish on me, Somerset?” I asked. Mel caught my eye and winked.
“I need you on top of things. I can’t have you getting distracted lusting after me at a time like this.” Instead of pulling the shirt on, he held out a hand. “Shall we?”
I eyed his hand suspiciously and wiggled his fingers like he was calling me closer.
“The buddy system, come on. If we’re touching, it will be harder for the unktomi to separate us.”
“You sure?”
Mel blanked his face, lifted his chin slightly.
“Come with me if you want to live.”
“That would be a first,” I said without thinking.
“Hunh?” he asked. I bit my tongue and lifted my arm, as if the injury could explain what I’d said. Mel nodded gravely and I sighed, glad I hadn’t been forced to elaborate.
Chapter Eighteen
The next tunnel seemed to hold no answers but, luckily for my sanity, it also held no screaming babies. Mel’s hand was a warm comfort in mine as we went but holding it made me feel useless. I was betting either of the corpses we’d found would have been of more help in that moment should something decide to attacks us. With my wounded arm cradled against my belly and my working hand in Mel’s, I could do nothing more than watch him as he walked.
Not a bad way to pass the time, mind you, but considering the way the trickster fae had gotten into our heads before, it wasn’t preferable.
“So, the plan continues to be to walk around until we find the thing—or it finds us—and then kill it?”
“Pretty much.”
“Somehow I am not confident in your plan-making abilities.”
“Well, I’m not confident in your fashion sense, but I still let you dress yourself.”
I scowled his way as he crouched to take a whiff of another section of wall. Two of the looped, bracelet-style glow sticks had gotten trapped at the back of his neck sometime during his transformation and I’d been fighting the urge to shove them back toward the front. I hooked my fingers into them and slid them back around to hang across his chest. Mel looked up at me from his place on the ground, lifted a brow, and gave me an expression like he knew something I didn’t.
“You’ll use any excuse to touch me,” he said suggestively. I rolled my eyes, felt the sentiment stick in my craw, and make me slightly nauseated.
This time, though, my brain caught up to the situation almost immediately: it wasn’t actually Mel making me sick. The unktomi was back and I felt myself start to tremble. Eyes wide, I gave Mel's hand a hard, panicked squeeze. His expression went dead serious in a split second and he pushed to his feet, twisting to push me between his back and the wall. I kept my eyes peeled but I knew I wasn’t going to see anything he couldn’t.
After a brainless moment, I took a deep breath, closing my eyes.
I’d learned pretty young how useful my empathy could be. It wasn’t just about knowing what others were feeling and reacting accordingly. I could sense emotions, see them in the air like a diagram of where the people around me were standing. One of my favorite uses for this power as a youngster had been to make sure that my parents weren’t around to catch me as I raided their change jars (or wallets, as I got older) for cash.
Aware that I could track the spider fae in the same way, I searched for any and all emotions within my range, made a mental map of them.
It didn’t take much searching: the only thing there was the unktomi. Mel’s feelings were still hidden from me and, despite feeling the heat of his body and the softness of his hand, he was absent from my map. The trickster, though, practically shouted it
s position at me. Now that I could look for it specifically, now that I knew what to pinpoint, it wasn’t so hard to locate.
It felt massive and it felt hungry, a gargantuan ball of confusion. I’d been truly fall-down drunk precious few times in my life but I could recognize that reading the unktomi felt like one of those times. It felt like being drunk and trying to focus on a quickly spinning top.
Worse than all that, though, it felt close.
“To the right!” I screeched, throwing my body away from the ravenous monster. Mel’s hand left mine and the absence it startled me into opening my eyes. I slammed myself against the wall, the pain in my arm almost forgotten against my fear.
I caught sight of Mel’s pants in a pile where he’d been standing before I heard an angry growl and the thud of bodies hitting dirt. I heard scrambling, shuffling, and jolted as a spike of pain swamped over me. Outrage followed and then silence fell. Something moved off to my left, another emotion flashing on shock, and I looked toward it. Almost immediately, it got lost in the sounds of fighting and the surprise I felt from the unktomi.
The course of the fight changed in an instant once again. Pain slammed into me, forcing me against the wall, making me groan. It exploded behind my eyeballs, as if my brain had been the one under attack. Combined with the general nausea, it made me lose track of my own body. For roughly a minute, my consciousness was floating in a soupy mess of queasiness.
When my vision cleared and feeling came back to my limbs, I caught sight of Mel pinned to the ground, the gleaming pincer of a gigantic arachnid shooting toward his throat. I let out a strangled plea for the spider to stop but, just as the tip of the thing would have pierced his flesh, the illusion disappeared. I looked wildly around, trying to figure out where Mel and the unktomi had gone.
I couldn’t be sure why, but Mel had managed to rid himself of the glow sticks around the necklace. They lay in a pile further down the tunnel, leaving me blind in terms of where he'd gone. Ignoring the incredible pounding in my ears, I closed my eyes, searched for the creature, tried to listen as hard as I could to find Mel. When I found an emotional signature other than the spider, I felt myself let out a small squeak of panic.
Something else was in the cave with us and it was furious. From my left I heard a chuff of air. Immediately, anger and pain swamped over me from across the wide tunnel. It took me a second but I grasped onto it, did my best to locate it. It was hard to concentrate through the swamp of the unktomi’s emotions; I wanted to focus on whatever had joined us in the tunnel, because its outrage was awesome. The tiny, ancient part of my brain that pipes up in horrible situations was screaming, "Danger!" and fighting me on which threat was the most prevalent. The newcomer was creeping closer, slow as a lazy river
Finally, I chided my brain into being focused; I found the unktomi, figured out it was moving, too.
There I stood, knowing I wasn't alone, but unable to verify that fact with my eyes. I could barely see past the glow of my bracelets, anklets and necklaces. I couldn't feel Mel and had no idea if he was even there. Whatever had joined me in the tunnel didn't seem to be interested in attacking me, but I wasn't about to just assume the best in a bad situation. For all I knew, Mel had been taken out and the spider had brought a friend to dinner, aiming to make me the main course.
Doing my best not to hyperventilate or barf up my heart, I squeezed my eyes shut and spoke as calmly as I could muster.
“Mel, are you okay? Please be alive."
He didn’t answer. I froze, felt the unktomi shift positions, move minutely toward me. It was on the ceiling and I could feel its anger, sailing along a ribbon of some other emotion I couldn't yet place. I cracked an eye open, trying to see it in the darkness. I realized then that I was the only idiot who’d given away her position. I was lit up like Christmas morning, babbling and whimpering at every damn thing. Mel had been smart enough to ditch the glow sticks and stay silent. He hadn’t killed it yet, but maybe only because he couldn’t.
Maybe he didn’t know where to go. Maybe the unktomi had fooled him into letting it go, and was keeping its position secret. I certainly couldn't see it. The second emotion I was feeling from it snapped into focus, cracking against my ribcage like a baseball bat.
It's afraid!
“I see you,” I announced, trying something I was sure wouldn’t work, but that had to be tried anyway. Looking up in the direction I knew the spider was hiding, I pointed, doing my best to look tougher than I felt.
“Yeah, asshole. I see you," I said when I felt it move again, the fear in its psyche thumping me a little harder. "I know you think you’re smart, making yourself invisible with whatever crazy-ass powers you have, but I can still see your ugly face. That’s my power, seeing stupid unktomi faces even when they think they’re hidden. Come on, drop the tricks and fight like a man. Or…like a spider, if that’s what you’re into.” When it didn’t answer, I took a step forward, jabbed a finger toward it through empty air. My stomach rolled and I felt my body convulse starting at the tip of my finger. Forcing my gag reflex to calm itself, I tried one more time, hoping my words didn’t come as bile.
“You're not fooling anyone, you hairy son of a bitch. Not only can I see you, but I can smell your fear. It smells like shit. There’s no use hiding anymore, you coward.”
The illusion fell away, the spider appearing so close to my face that I realized the only reason I hadn’t jabbed it with the tip of my finger was that I just hadn’t reached quite far enough. Six brilliant eyeballs the size of grapefruits stared down at me as one hairy leg stretched my way. The spider’s bulbous body hung low, away from the ceiling, the hairs along its abdomen shining in the light of my glow, fat as pencils. Pincers like knives danced below its eyes, closing together, pulling apart as if it could already taste my flesh. Whimpering, I felt my very insides tremble under the force of its anger.
Mel appeared along a whoosh of air for a fraction of a second in my field of view, jaws grasping at the leg before it could get to my face, taking it with him back into the darkness. The spider fae scrambled back as the sound of cracking carapace filled the tunnel and its blood gushed into the empty space where its limb had been.
My head nearly exploded with a cacophony of pain, shock, and fury. I clapped my hands over my ears, as if blocking out the sounds of fighting would help, and plummeted down onto my butt in the dirt. The spider’s emotions grabbed hold of my psyche, dug in, tried to pull me down with it. I pressed my face to my knees, fighting the urge to scream as the pain intensified. Somewhere past the agony in my head, I could hear growling and smell the cloud of dirt that had been kicked up in the scuffle. I lost track of how long the fight lasted. It could have been ten seconds or ten minutes. I was moaning into my knees, the pressure in my head threatening to crack a fissure in my skull.
Then, it was over.
The pain my head was gone, replaced with the oozing of concern along my skin. Silence had fallen, both inside my head and through the tunnels. After one last huff of air, I felt the warmth of someone stepping up next to me.
“Gwen?” I heard a woman’s voice ask. I twisted away, still gun shy after everything my poor mind had just been put through.
“Gwen!” Mel demanded, horrified, and I felt his hand on my chin. He tipped my head up, looked into my face. I realized I was staring at his eyes and I didn’t even remembering opening mine.
“Are you actually you?” I asked. Mel glanced up and I followed his gaze. Sarah stood next to him, stark naked and watching me; it was her worry I felt like honey on my skin. I blinked up at her, reached out to touch her knee to make sure she was actually there.
“Are you okay?”
“My head hurts,” I answered, poking my finger against her leg again. She glanced down at my touch, finding me funny but also sad. “Are you actually here?”
“Yes. Come on.” Mel grabbed me under my arms, picked me up like a pile of dirty laundry, ignoring the way my head lolled along my shoulders. Sarah rolled her eyes, ex
asperated at his lack of compassion, and stepped to the side. Jerking a thumb to her left, she spoke.
“Show her.”
Mel adjusted his hold on me, lowering me to my feet, despite the fact that my legs may as well have been overcooked noodles. After a slight adjustment to make sure I would stay upright against him, he pulled me away from the wall; the soles of my shoes skimmed the dirt. Digging a hand into my pocket, he pulled my phone out, clicked it to life, and turned it to face away from us.
There, on the ground in front of us was a massive, hairy, very dead spider. Two of its limbs had been torn off and its belly had been ripped open. The sticky white goo oozing along the dirt was only half as disgusting as the thin, greenish liquid dripping down its pincers from its ruined eyeballs. The spider looked like a giant child with an affinity for popping bubble wrap had gotten to its face.
“I’m going to be sick,” I groaned, twisting away from my werewolf bodyguard. Mel tensed, spinning fast enough that I felt myself go lightheaded.
“Is there another one?” he demanded. I shook my head, dry-heaved.
“No,” I finally croaked in answer. “That’s just disgusting.”
Sarah laughed from her place off to my right and then crouched down to retrieve Mel’s clothes. She pulled the shirt over her head, stepped forward, and handed him the pants. Gently, he unloaded me onto her and I leaned forward to dry-heave some more.
“Come on, heroes, we should get out of here,” Sarah said when my gut got itself under control.
“I’m completely turned around and I’ve got so much dirt up my nose, I don’t know if I can smell my way out. How about you?” Mel asked. Sarah nodded and I felt a mix of pity and amusement burble out of her.
“You give me too little credit,” she said, and twisted, taking me with her. As we walked, I started to smell something familiar but decidedly unpleasant. Mel let out a quick laugh and I glanced over as he slapped his palm against his forehead.
“I can’t believe I didn’t think of marking our path.”
Cold Feet (Empathy in the PPNW Book 3) Page 22