by SM Reine
“That’s what they told me, too,” she said. “I think they lied. I don’t think the Union’s just some department. I think it’s bigger than the OPA, or maybe bigger than our whole damn government.” Suzy stopped walking, staring blankly at the boards holding up the sagging wall. “It was enormous. The detention center, I mean. What they had underground—it was bigger than the OPA campus. There are hundreds of demons under there. Thousands.” She touched my sleeve, gave me an urgent look. “I think we made a mistake signing up for this.”
I didn’t get a chance to ask if she meant Fritz’s special team or the OPA in general.
A distant shuffling sound echoed up the tunnel.
Suzy’s gun was out again in an instant, aimed into the darkness ahead of us. I kept my gun toward the floor. Watched our backs. It was hard to tell where the noise had come from—ahead or behind—because of the way everything echoed against the rocks.
My partner saw it first.
“Dammit,” she said.
I think she said something else, but it was drowned out by the sound of her gun firing.
CHAPTER EIGHT
AFTER SUZY FIRED HER gun, I spent a moment recalling the cute little harvestman spider in the Soup Express building. I remembered how delicate its legs were and how harmless it had looked skittering across the broad surface of my hand.
I remembered thinking about how spiders were good to have in the house, and how Pops had once told me that they were bad luck to kill. I’d laughed at him over that part. Stupid superstitious Pops. Spiders weren’t lucky; they were just bugs.
Pops had smacked me upside the head when I shared that sentiment with him. They weren’t merely bugs, he’d said. They were the apex predators of the bug world. And, he’d grudgingly admitted, it would make our ant infestation problem worse if we killed the bugs that ate them, which would definitely be unlucky.
I remembered all of that in the span of a heartbeat.
Then that heartbeat passed, and I realized that Suzy and I were the infestation problem that the apex predators were out to fix that day.
The demon came hurtling out of the darkness at the end of the tunnel.
Seeing Connie’s ghost hadn’t prepared me for the sight of an arachnid the size of an eight-legged pony. It was brown, leathery, wrinkled, covered in hair. Reddish stripes marked its legs and back. It looked kind of like a wolf spider. A huge fucking wolf spider.
And it moved like lightning.
It hit Suzy. She fell under it with a scream that rattled inside the tight mineshaft. Her Maglite went flying, lighting up the roof in a brief flash before it hit the ground.
The light went out.
It was on top of her, and apparently, it was stronger than its size suggested. Suzy kicked and shoved and couldn’t get it off of her.
I slammed my shoe into the daimarachnid’s head—did spiders even have heads?—and smashed it against the wall. One of its flailing legs knocked me off balance.
Yeah, it was strong. Really fucking strong. Like getting kneecapped by a baseball bat.
Suzy fired again. Bang! Black blood sprayed up the wall.
It didn’t deter the spider.
I dropped my Maglite as I hurried to my feet. From the floor, the flashlight magnified all of the shadows a dozen times, casting the scurrying spider in a dark silhouette that consumed most of the tunnel.
I could only make out Suzy’s struggle in brief flashes between the moments of light and darkness as the flashlight spun.
She kicked the demon in the pincers.
Got her shoe caught in its mouth.
Fangs glistened, dripped poison.
A dainty-boned fist slammed into one of the gleaming red eyes. The eyeball erupted. Fluid gushed down the side of its face.
She shot again. Bang!
Another spray of blood.
I leveled my Desert Eagle but couldn’t get a clear shot, not with Suzy still fighting underneath it.
“Shoot the fucker in the fucking face!” she roared. She swung another punch. The demon released her foot and bit down on her sleeve.
I wanted to shoot it. I did. I’d finally found the circumstances under which my inner pacifist was subdued by my much more hidden inner warrior, and I’d never wanted to shoot anything as much as I wanted to shoot that spider.
But my aim sucked, and there was no clear shot.
“I can’t—I might hit you!”
Suzy screamed as she emptied her magazine into its belly with her free hand. The exoskeleton cracked. Stinging blood sprayed over me.
The demon jerked with every impact, but didn’t get off of her. Didn’t let go of her arm.
My left ear, unprotected by the noise-canceling Bluetooth earpiece, was ringing sharply. The handguns were too loud in an enclosed space and I could barely hear the scuffle now. Could have been more daimarachnids coming at us and I never would have known.
A jerking leg smacked my flashlight, spun it in the opposite direction. Now I couldn’t see Suzy and the spider at all.
Her muffled voice penetrated my ringing skull. “Shoot, Cèsar!” Even half-deaf, I could feel her panic right through my guts.
I launched myself at the spider, wrapping my arms around its massive body. Kind of like hugging an angry mastiff. Fangs pressed against my shoulder, but didn’t puncture the leather jacket. I hauled it off of Suzy with every drop of magically reinforced strength that flowed through my muscles.
We flipped, and I ended up on its back, straddling the spider like the ugliest motorcycle I’d ever seen in my life. It thrashed underneath me.
I’d ridden mechanical broncos a few times in my day. It’s a fun bar activity for teetotalers.
Not so fun with a demon.
It just about tossed me into the wall, but I managed to cling to it, wrapping one fist in its wiry hair. My head bounced off a wooden beam.
Dazed, I pushed my Desert Eagle against the carapace behind its eyes.
And I fired.
Blam!
The Desert Eagle was a fucking hand-cannon in comparison to Suzy’s new Beretta 9mm. She might as well have been shooting BBs at it. My hollow-point bullet, however, punched through its head segment and ripped out the other side.
It collapsed under me.
The spider had finally been squished.
My legs were shaking as I stood. Hands were shaking, too. I tried to turn on the safety but couldn’t seem to find it.
Fuck. This was not me.
I should have been writing up magical usage reports. Should have been sneaking Dilbert cartoons onto Fritz’s door while he was in the seventieth phone meeting of the week. Should have been bribing the administrative assistants with donuts to get a fresh supply of essential oils delivered faster.
I should not have been shooting demons in abandoned mines.
When I kept fumbling with Desert Eagle, Suzy gently removed it from my grasp and flipped on the safety for me.
“Thanks,” I said. I couldn’t even hear my own voice.
I think she mouthed, “No problem.”
She shucked her jacket, then pointed at me. I looked down. The daimarachnid had drizzled blood and venom all over me.
The mines were much too stuffy to wear jackets anyway. I dropped it.
When I spoke again, my hearing was a little bit better. I could actually tell that I was trying to talk, anyway. “Next time, let’s requisition shotguns,” I said.
Suzy leaned heavily on me, wiping her sleeve over her forehead. “Shotguns? How about a nuclear bomb?”
Better and better.
CHAPTER NINE
WE FOUND WHERE THE daimarachnid had come from at the end of the tunnel.
Unfortunately.
A few yards down, the ancient wood had given up and allowed the walls to collapse into rubble. The rocks were covered in a stringy white substance that stretched from ceiling to floor. Reminded me of Halloween decorations. Except that this wasn’t fluffy cotton.
It was webbing. Huge goddamn spi
der webs shit out of a demon’s goddamn ass.
“That’s something I didn’t want to see, ever,” I said. Not that I’d ever given a lot of thought to the possibility. But if I had, “demon shit-webs” would have been really high on the list.
Suzy grimaced and lifted her flashlight higher. The glass covering the bulb had shattered when she dropped it, but it still worked. “There’s something inside of that stuff.”
I looked closer. She was right—there were two large masses submerged in the webbing, each almost as big as I was. They looked like cocoons. “If those are eggs, I’m fucking done,” I said. “I will quit my job and walk out of here. I will move to fucking Costa Rica. I will spend the rest of my life as a bartender serving fruity umbrella drinks to fat tourists. I swear it, honest to God, right this moment.”
Suzy grinned. “I’ll take that bet. You gonna cut one of those open, or should I?”
Cut it open? What if whatever was inside was still alive? I wasn’t sure how many bullets remained in my Desert Eagle, but I was willing to bet that there weren’t enough for an egg sac filled with demon babies. In fact, I didn’t think there were enough bullets in the world to deal with all the daimarachnids I now suspected to be hiding in the Nevada desert.
Ah, hell. Why not? How much worse could this day get?
Rhetorical question. Don’t answer that.
The webbing was thick. I wrapped my sleeve around my hand and beat at it, tearing the largest supports free. It was tough, like sturdy strands of woven silk, and sticky to boot; once the web cleaved to my sleeve, I couldn’t peel it off again. If I kept trying to tear it away by hand, I was going to end up in a cocoon myself.
“Help would be fantastic,” I said.
Suzy whipped out a serrated hunting knife. It made short work of the tendons holding the cocoons to the rest of the web.
The two big masses fell to the ground. Thump, thump.
“Gimme that knife,” I said, holding my hand up.
She did.
I hacked through one pod, and then the other. I realized what they were about halfway through the first one. Tried not to think about it too much. Just kept cutting away, revealing white t-shirts, jeans, and colorless faces.
The daimarachnid had wrapped up bodies. Human bodies. One male, one female. The female was blond and mostly intact. The male looked to be of Hispanic descent, from what I could see of his remains. His face had been chewed on.
Well, at least they weren’t demon babies.
I covered my nose with my web-free sleeve as I patted them down, searching for injuries. They weren’t old enough to be rotting yet—looked like they’d just been killed a few hours earlier, in fact. But the smell of blood was strong. The coppery stench was a slap to the face and I had to swallow back bile.
Whatever the spiders had been keeping the victims for, it hadn’t been to drink their blood.
“You know, I signed up for Magical Violations so I wouldn’t have to deal with dead people,” I told Suzy without lowering my arm, voice muffled by the sleeve. “After my last case, I was really hoping that I wouldn’t have to work with this shit again for at least—oh, I don’t know, is a month too much to ask for? One month without dead people and blood?”
“If hopes were unicorns, we’d be galloping across a magical fairytale land of roses instead of shooting spiders,” she said flatly. Sensitive woman, Suzume Takeuchi. I could just bask in the sympathy. “What killed them?”
I wasn’t exactly equipped for an autopsy, but even though the male looked pretty thoroughly masticated, the only major injury I found on the female body were a pair of large punctures. I was going to bet both had fallen victim to daimarachnid venom. The scuffs and bleeding on the female weren’t significant enough to kill a person.
“Death by arachnophobia,” I intoned in my best fifties monster movie voice. “They came from the deep!”
“Uh huh. Any ideas what this means?” Suzy was actually touching the mangled male body, lifting what remained of his collar to reveal a tattoo. It was about as big around as her dainty palm and half-eaten. The half that I could still see looked like a bleeding red apple.
“It’s not any gang tattoo I recognize,” I said. “Hey! Maybe he’s a Snow White fan.”
“Guess loving Disney movies runs in the family. The other body has one, too.”
She was right about the woman being inked—probably not the Disney part, though. The dead woman had the bleeding apple tattooed on the side of her neck. It was even bigger than the man’s tattoo. Or maybe it just looked bigger because she hadn’t had her flesh chewed off by a man-eating spider.
I sat back on my heels. “The neck tattoo definitely has meaning.”
“And what would that be?” Suzy asked.
In a high-pitched, feminine voice, I said, “I’m totally unemployable.” My partner smacked me on the shoulder. “Hey!”
“Wait,” she said, suddenly focusing on the webbed wall behind me. “That’s not all rock and web in there. There’s something else.”
She had aimed the beam of the flashlight on something white and shiny. Suzy gave me an expectant look.
Guess that was my cue to dig it out.
With Suzy’s hunting knife, I sawed away more of the web. It was moister near the middle. I cringed as I peeled it back, trying to touch as little as possible, and definitely trying not to think which part of the spider it had come out of.
After a few minutes of work, I’d revealed something among the rubble that was…well, I wasn’t sure what. It looked like white marble. I hauled out one chunk that was the size of my head. It was heavier than it looked, like it was made from lead.
“Looks valuable,” I said, hefting it. The rocks shifted where I’d removed the stone, revealing other, larger pieces of white stone behind it.
“Looks like bone,” Suzy said. She reached out to touch it. “What do you think—”
Scuffling noises echoed up the tunnel. We spun simultaneously to face the darkness.
I didn’t see anything yet, but there was no question what that sound meant.
Suzy fumbled for her pistol, then stopped. She must have remembered that she’d emptied her magazine. I handed her the knife and she took it with trembling fingers.
The shuffling noises grew louder.
Oh fuck. Oh fuck. Oh holy fucking fuck.
That sounded like a few more daimarachnids. Plural.
I shouldn’t have been in this mine. I should have been wasting sticky note pads by animating stick figure ninjas. I should have been sneaking mild laxative potions into Suzy’s coffee. I should have been calling in sick so that I could stay home and read the newest Iron Druid release. I should have been—well, just about any-fucking-where but here.
Drawing my Desert Eagle, I tried to count the bullets mentally. How many times had I shot the first spider?
“We’ll bring nukes next time,” Suzy whispered.
Next time? We’d be lucky if either of us had a next morning.
I didn’t say that out loud.
“Yeah,” I said. “Definitely nukes.”
Two daimarachnids appeared at the end of our pool of light—barely even fifty feet away. It wasn’t enough warning.
I fired without aiming. It was luck more than skill that blasted the top of the first demon’s carapace off. Red eyes splattered. Its legs buckled, sending it stumbling.
The other one climbed right over it without care.
And there was another behind it.
The second daimarachnid hit Suzy and slammed her into the collapsed wall. She grunted, hand locked against its face, just above the flailing pincers. They scraped at her shirt even though she held it, barely, at arm’s length.
She plunged the knife into its mouth.
I fired on the third one. First shot missed; second one hit in the center mass.
The other injured daimarachnid leaped up onto the wall, skittering at us from the ceiling. I lifted my gun. Fired again. Missed again.
It ju
mped on me. We hit the ground.
Venomous fangs filled my vision.
“Holy fuck!”
I jammed the Maglite into its jaw just as the pincers were about to strike, and they snapped shut on the flashlight instead of my face. It reared back a couple inches, squirmed on top of me. One of its legs banged hard into my shoulder. Felt like being hit by a car.
This close, I could hear wheezing, hear the slurp-slurp inside its mouth. Sounded like it had organs a spider shouldn’t have had. It exhaled hot air on me that smelled like rot.
I tried to bring the gun up—tried to shoot it through the head. Pulverize the brain.
But another leg slammed into my arm. The Desert Eagle snapped out of my grip. Metal clattered against stone.
The Maglite bent inside the spider’s jaw. It was biting down, making the metal groan. Five more seconds and the flashlight would be gone, leaving nothing between venomous death and me.
I’m going to die down here. The realization washed over me, cold and jagged and aching.
I wished I’d called Domingo to say goodbye.
A gunshot exploded through the tunnel, loud enough to make the collapse tremble and dust spray over the daimarachnid and me.
Sounded like Suzy had found my gun. Maybe she’d at least be able to save herself.
Another booming gunshot.
Wait—that’s not the Desert Eagle.
I’d barely had time to realize that I was hearing shotgun fire when the demon on top of me turned into mist. The flashlight shot from its mouth and smacked me in the face. Flesh and blood sprayed over me, getting in my hair and on my sparklebombed chin.
It even got in my goddamn mouth.
Not going to lie, I freaked out. I screamed and kicked away the now-limp bits of the spider.
My skin was burning. My tongue felt like I’d just tried to deep-throat a cactus.
I couldn’t feel relieved that the spider was dead. I could only think about making the pain stop. I stripped my shirt off, ripped it over my head, flung it to the floor. Slapped the patches of blood that were burning at my abs, wiping it off.
Shit, it’s on my jeans!
I started to unbuckle my belt.