by Lola StVil
Her eyes stray to Nix as she says it, but as usual, he doesn’t notice. Fish does, but she doesn’t say anything, she just does her customary eye roll.
“I can’t think who RJ would have seen,” Lucas comments.
“Me? I didn’t see anyone,” RJ says, blushing slightly.
“You’re lying,” I say, teasing him.
“I don’t want to talk about it, okay?” he says.
I hold my hands up in mock surrender.
Ryder turns to glare at him.
“It wasn’t Sabrina, I told you already I’m over that,” RJ says, keeping the peace.
Ryder looks like he wants to say more but he doesn’t get the chance. RJ laughs.
“Enjoy my sloppy seconds, bro.”
Ryder’s eyes widen and I dread what’s coming next. He shocks me by throwing his head back and laughing.
“Let’s go kill some spiders,” Ryder says, still laughing.
Nix slips the bell back in his pocket now the Sirbisses are all dead. We start to walk towards the ship.
I find myself walking beside Lucas. The rest of the team are slightly ahead of us. He looks at me, his eyes seeming to be searching me for something.
“It must have been hard for you seeing one of those things as Nikki,” I say.
I cringe. What did I say that for? I don’t know, but I had to say something. The way he was looking me over so intensely was making me nervous.
“It wasn’t Nikki I saw,” he says guiltily.
He quickens his pace and joins the others before I can respond. His words leave my head spinning and something inside me dancing with joy.
As we walk, the air around us darkens slightly. I look up, confused. Surely it can’t be going to rain. Not here. A large flock of birds fly overhead.
“Parker, quick, throw a shield up,” Lucas shouts.
Parker raises her hands, but she’s too late. The birds swoop lower, and liquid pours from them. It rains down on us. It burns where it touches.
“What the?” I say.
“Mivens. They pee acid,” Milo yells.
I don’t know if I’m more disgusted at the thought of being doused in bird pee or more in pain from the acid.
As one we fire up into the swarm. Half of the birds drop dead from the sky. The silence around us is punctuated by gasps as we are burned.
At first, it’s like a sharp tickling pain, but it’s not long until the pain intensifies as the acid burrows deeper into our flesh.
“The river—we have to rinse this stuff off before it reaches our bones,” Nix shouts.
The Mivens have passed us, and we all dive for the river. The cool water instantly eases the pain. For a second, I wonder what will happen next. Will we be grabbed by man-eating fish, soul-sucking sharks, or how about a squid that drains your blood?
For once, luck is on our side and we make it safely back out of the river.
The Mivens have turned around and are coming back for another shot at us.
“Why didn’t Emmy warn us about these things?” I ask no one in particular.
Dylann shrugs. “She probably didn’t expect them to be here. They’re not native to this part of the world.”
The Mivens swoop down, showering us in their vile acid again. Again, we fire into them, downing more of them.
An earth-shattering scream pierces my ears.
“My eye. Oh my God, my eye,” Parker screams.
Her hands cover the eye but I can see blood and some yellow liquid I don’t even want to think about, let alone see seeping through her fingers.
Fish runs at Parker, tackling her like it’s a football game. Parker screams and tries to fight her off.
“Stop fighting me,” Fish shouts, but Parker doesn’t listen.
Fish manages to grab a fistful of Parker’s hair. She unceremoniously drags her to the river and jumps in, dragging the screaming Parker behind her.
“What just happened?” RJ asks.
Fish and Parker break the surface of the river. The screaming has stopped now. Parker no longer fights against Fish as she scoops up sprays of water, throwing them in Parker’s face.
After a few minutes, Fish pulls Parker back out of the river as the rest of us continue our battle with the Mivens.
The Mivens are decreasing in number on each attack, and I’m confident the team can handle the last few. I cross over to where Fish stands over Parker.
“What was that?” I ask.
“I’ve seen it before. If the acid got to her brain, she’d have been dead. I had about thirty seconds to get her into the water and I could see she wasn’t going to listen to reason.”
As she speaks, Fish’s hand disappears into one of her many hiding places and it comes back with a small tube. She kneels down and pulls Parker’s hand away from her eye.
I retch at the sight of what lies beneath her hand. Angry flesh oozes yellow pus down her cheek, and where her eye should be, there is a gaping black hole.
Fish seems unconcerned. She opens the small tube and squeezes out a clear liquid. She gently rubs the liquid around Parker’s empty eye socket.
I turn away. I can’t watch.
I hear Parker moan in pain and I turn back. My mouth drops open at what I see now. Where there was a gaping hole now sits a new eyeball. The outside of it looks red and angry, and the white of the new eyeball is bloodshot, but other than that, it’s as good as new.
Fish reaches out and covers Parker’s good eye with her hand. She holds up four fingers.
“How many fingers am I holding up?” she asks.
“Four,” Parker says, pushing away the hand that covers her good eye.
“Where did you get that salve? Only the top healers have access to that.”
Fish pushes herself back up into a standing position.
“If you have a problem with it, I can always gouge your eye back out. Maybe you’ll survive long enough for one of your precious healers to figure it out. Maybe you won’t.”
“That won’t be necessary,” Parker says coldly, getting to her feet.
“You’re welcome,” Fish says sarcastically as she walks away.
“She did just save your life,” I point out to Parker.
She just nods and she too walks away. I throw up my hands in exasperation.
With the Mivens taken down, we all go back into the river to get the last of their acid off us.
“Let’s do this,” I say, nodding towards the ship as we climb back out.
“Before anything else happens,” Milo says, standing protectively by my side.
We troop towards the ship. Nix finds a rusty ladder. He climbs up it.
“Looks clear,” he says as he reaches the top.
He clambers over the side and onto the deck and we all follow.
The ship’s deck is eerily calm.
“What now?” I ask.
“Let’s see if we can find the piece of the pendant before Arianna makes an appearance,” I say.
“Might be a little late for that,” RJ says, his voice unusually quiet.
I spin around to see what he’s seen.
At the opposite end of the deck, a huge section of floor is missing. Over the edge of it, two huge spider legs emerge and scramble, pulling the massive spider out of the hole.
I swallow hard.
I glance at Milo. He is completely grey and looks like he might be about to throw up. He catches my eye.
“It’s okay,” I mouth, although it’s anything but okay.
“Don’t worry, Milo, we won’t let the spidey get you,” Ryder teases.
RJ moves subtly to stand in front of Milo and I want to hug him, but now isn’t the time.
Arianna stands before us in all of her macabre glory. Her spider part is hideous. The legs and body are covered in long coarse hairs and the eight blind eyes sit milky white atop the legs. Her fangs drip venom, which forms a pool in front of her.
It’s the human part I can’t take my eyes off. Arianna has long blonde curls that ca
scade down her back, and her face is so beautiful I find it mesmerizing.
“I don’t remember ordering lunch,” she says.
Her voice is soft and firm. Not the obscene gargling sound I expected.
Suddenly feeling brave, I step forward. Maybe I can reason with her.
“We don’t want any trouble. My name is Summit Case and this is my team, my family. We don’t want to harm you.”
Arianna laughs.
“As if you could harm me. Okay, I’ll play along. What do you want?”
I quickly explain to her that the second piece of the pendant is somewhere on this ship and why we need it.
She seems to consider my words.
“I want to help you. Really, I do. But I can’t. My legs are tied so to speak.”
She laughs at her own pun.
“You see, if I allow you to complete your mission, people will think that the great Arianna is weak. And I can’t have people thinking that, now can I?”
“We wouldn’t tell anyone,” I say.
She laughs again, a musical sound that would be infectious if it wasn’t coming from a half human half spider hybrid that wants to eat me.
“Word would spread. And before long I’d be overrun with puny angels and demons thinking they could take me down. And I can only eat so much, you know? It would be such a shame to see all of that meat going to waste.”
She pauses for a second.
“I’m not completely unreasonable and I’m not particularly hungry. Leave now and I won’t harm you.”
“I’m sorry, we can’t do that,” I say.
As I speak, I raise my hands and fire. The team take their cue from me, and we all rain our powers down on Arianna.
Our powers bounce off her legs and body. A few chunks of flesh tear loose, but she hardly seems to notice.
She raises her two front legs to protect her human body. She raises a third leg and a spool of white flies free. It turns into an intricate web in the air and comes towards us.
“Move,” Parker shouts.
We all throws ourselves out of the path of the net. I feel it graze the back of my leg as I jump. It’s sticky and gross. I reach back and pry it loose.
I hear a shout go up behind me. RJ is tangled in the webbing. He struggles, twisting and turning. The web sticks to him, holding him tightly in place.
“Keep still. You’re making it worse,” Ryder shouts.
He leaps forward and pulls out a knife. He cuts RJ free.
RJ jumps to his feet, wiping furiously at his face, clearing the strands of sticky web.
“That’s one spider that needs stepping on,” Ryder says.
The web has done the one thing I was dreading. It’s divided us. RJ, Ryder, and Milo are in one group. Fish and Parker are in another. And Dylann and Nix stand opposite Lucas and me.
Arianna doesn’t seem in the least bit bothered by our efforts as we continue to rain fire down on her. She effortlessly bats away our shots, and the odd one that lands seems to have no effect on her other than a mild irritation.
She rears up on her two back legs and fires six shots simultaneously.
Another web fires out, but we’re ready for that and easily evade it. A large red fireball comes at us. Lucas fires into it and deflects it before it can burn him alive. Blue liquid shoots from another leg, heading straight for Ryder, who blows it off the side of the ship. I don’t even want to know what it would have done if it had made contact.
A barbed silver bullet flies in and hits Dylann. I gasp as she goes down…
I rush over to her, with Parker by my side. Dylann lies eerily still. I push a stray hair out of her face. She looks like she’s asleep. Parker gets back up.
“Wait, where are you going?” I ask, grabbing Parker’s arm.
“It’s a temporary paralysis bolt. She’ll be okay in a minute or two. Cover her.”
From the fifth leg comes a yellow beam. As it reaches the center of the deck, it goes into the air and spreads out like an umbrella, encasing us and Arianna inside its light.
“It’s a forcefield, one of her original powers, it’s how she traps her prey before webbing them. Either we die here or we kill her, but while she’s alive, there’s no getting off this ship.” Parker says.
I don’t have time to work out what comes from the sixth leg. Arianna is in full-on war mode now.
“Go, my little beauties,” she cries.
I watch, paralyzed with utter revulsion as the bottom of her abdomen pulses into life. As I watch, the writhing black mass hits the deck and I see what it is. Thousands of spiders break away from the mass. They range from so small I can only see them as black dots all the way to bigger than my head.
They rush towards us, swarming all over the deck.
Arianna comes back down to stand on six of her legs, the front two remaining before her human body. She knows that’s her weakness, I think to myself.
“Guys, we have to blast her legs off and then she’s powerless. Lucas and I will take the front right, Ryder, your group take the back right. Nix, front left, Parker, back left. Fish—you know what to do.”
I feel better as we make a concerted effort instead of firing blindly. The swarm of spiders is starting to get within touching distance. Some of them run up the yellow bubble, some swarm over the sides of the ship, but most of them just keep running towards us.
Lucas nods at one of the two legs we’re taking. I concentrate on the other. I let out a whoop of joy as the one I’m focusing on breaks in half. I fire again, aiming for the broken part, and the bottom of the leg drops away.
I focus on the part of the body that has been exposed, where the half leg now hangs uselessly in the air. I fire into it again and again. Around me, the team do the same. Legs are scattered all around Arianna and a greenish-black fluid is starting to pour out of the holes we’ve made.
My jaw drops in surprise and fear as the leg I’ve blasted off twitches. I can’t tear my eyes away as the leg stump grows down to the floor. The noises coming from the rest of the team tell me that my leg isn’t the only one to have grown back.
“Now what?” Lucas asks me.
I shrug.
“Just keep blasting it back off and hope Fish finds her way in,” I say.
The spiders on the deck are on us now. I can feel them crawling up my legs. I reach down and swat at them, but there are so many, it has little effect. They swarm up Lucas’s legs too, but he doesn’t even look down at them.
We are the first ones the spiders reach but the ones that don’t swarm up our bodies keep heading towards the back of the ship and the rest of the team.
I can feel them biting at me. I send up a silent prayer that they aren’t poisonous and focus on Arianna’s legs again.
As each one grows back, she sends another shot towards us. We are assaulted by a mix of powers. I duck and dive, trying my best to dodge whatever comes our way. I can’t look away from her for a second, so I don’t know how the rest of the team is faring. I just have to hope they are all okay.
I hear Milo scream, a high-pitched scream that shouldn’t ever come from a man. I know immediately what’s happened. The small spiders have reached him. I hear a series of stomps as he tries to squash them. I know he’s fighting a losing battle.
Arianna takes a step forward and the ship rocks slightly under her huge weight. Spiders rain down on us as they are shaken loose from the yellow bubble.
I momentarily forget myself and stop firing at Arianna as I try to free the spiders from my hair. I can feel myself starting to panic.
A particularly large spider runs from my shaking fingers and settles on my face. I feel the scream building, but I hold it in. I’m scared that if I scream once, fear will take over me and I won’t be able to stop.
I brush the spider away and see a red flame inches from my face. It’s too late to deflect it, and I’m frozen to the spot.
I feel something hard collide with my side and I roll to the floor, a heavy weight on top of me. I reach
out, hitting blindly.
“It’s me,” Lucas says.
I force my eyes to focus. Lucas lies on top of me. My eyes meet his. The sparks flying between us are enough to burn the ship to the ground.
“You saved me,” I say quietly.
“All in a day’s work.” He grins.
He gets to his feet and pulls me up and we’re back in battle.
A stray blue flame slices across my arm. I feel an intense pain. When I look down, the top of my arm is encased in a blue jelly-like substance. It burns and I can see the skin beneath it withering up.
I ignore the pain, focusing on the task at hand.
Fish darts forward as we fire, ducking down to avoid Arianna’s powers and our own. She doesn’t make it even two steps before Arianna spots her and sends a ball of flames towards her. She jumps back in time to avoid being killed, but not quickly enough to avoid a nasty burn.
“The leg at the back,” RJ cries excitedly. “Its power is regeneration. If we can get that one off, the rest won’t grow back.”
Arianna roars in anger and I know he’s right.
Before I can even move towards the leg, Milo springs forward.
He still looks scared, but now I see something else in him. Anger. And triumph.
“Look out,” he yells as he aims for one of the large masts. He brings it down on the back part of Arianna and her regenerating leg is crushed. A spurt of black oil pours from it and Arianna screams in rage.
We all begin blasting at her as she fires at us from all sides. The small spiders seem to sense her anger and they become frenzied, dancing all over us and biting at us.
We almost have her. I can taste victory. A line of blue fire flows through the air and destroys the last leg.
I watch as the spider’s body falls into large chunks and lies steaming on the floor. Where a terrifying hybrid once stood, there now stands a woman. Arianna in her true form.
The small spiders around us all die the moment Arianna emerges from the mess of spider body chunks.
She should be afraid—she knows her death is only seconds away, but she doesn’t look in the least bit bothered. Maybe she is secretly glad to finally be free of the demon’s curse.
I look closer and see she isn’t actually free from the curse. Her legs are still covered with a coarse layer of spider hair.