by Jen Ponce
Neutria came forward. Pushed. Aggressive, strong. I cried out when the pain hit and the transformation started. Bones cracked, skin peeled. I didn’t know how much was reality and how much was imagination on my part. As she came forward, I fled to the back of her mind, a tiny blip in the multifaceted awareness that was Neutria.
She heard gasps and a scream. Turning on fleet, quick feet she raised her front legs high in the air, spreading her mandibles to show off her fangs.
‘Neutria, stop. We need to find the white stag, remember?’
Yes. Free. Hunt. Mate.
The slyness in her voice made me mentally drop my head in my hands. Oh god.
And then we were off. I only caught a glimpse of Kroshtuka’s speckled pelt before we were past him, plunging into the forest in search of our prey.
-EIGHTEEN-
Kroshtuka streaked through the trees, his agile body zipping fast between the tangles and brambles. I worried about Neutria for about two seconds, until she climbed a tree and ran along the tops, her nimble legs able to find purchase on the smallest branches. When in doubt, she used web to bridge gaps and we soon outpaced our competitor. ‘Fast isn’t necessarily better,’ I thought at Neutria, hoping she hadn’t forgotten our goal.
Be quiet. Let me hunt.
Being the passenger wasn’t fun. I didn’t like having my suggestions dismissed out of hand or being told to shut up as if I were a two-year-old.
I am hunter. You are distraction.
Right.
She didn’t feel excitement the way I did―all dials lighting up―but when she spotted a flash of white I knew it. It was a zing of satisfaction and superiority that felt like joy to me, even framed in such an alien way. We descended in stealth, Neutria’s feet clinging easily to the bark, her spinnerets easing her body through the branches.
The stag stood with ears cocked. A feather dropping would startle him. Neutria could have been made of stone. Her multifaceted eyes allowed her greater detail of the stag’s surroundings. Trees bounded him on three sides but to his left a vast grassy plain stretched as far as Neutria’s eyes could see. That was a lot of space for him to run.
He won’t get the chance.
She waited with the eerie patience of an experienced hunter until the stag decided he must have been hearing things and lowered his head to the green clump of grass at his feet. Neutria eased down a few more inches, freezing again when the deer’s ears flicked.
A noise brought the deer’s head up again. His reddish brown eyes swiveled as he tried to figure out where the threat was coming from. Neutria scanned the area again and we both saw the hyena sliding through a thick bunch of berry bushes. Had he made the noise? No. A squirrel took that moment to drop to a branch and chitter at Neutria. The stag bolted and before I could even shout, Neutria launched herself to the ground.
Kroshtuka streaked by us, his muscular body eating up the distance between him and the fleeing animal. I urged Neutria to go faster, concentrating on the heart inside us, concentrated on opening up its power so that she could draw from it. We gained but the stag and hyena still outpaced us.
‘Can’t you shoot him with your web? Trip him up?’
She ignored me, which was fine and dandy except it wasn’t her body on the line if we lost. Kroshtuka leapt just as the stag made a desperate sudden zag to the left. The hyena missed the deer by inches and the mistake gave Neutria a chance. She cut the stag off and pounced. The stag trumpeted in fear, scrabbling, his hooves sliding in the leaf litter. He slid and Neutria caged him with her legs. I could hear the stag’s frantically pumping heart and smell his rich, warm blood. Neutria crouched to bite the stag when something hit her from the side and sent us tumbling.
A yelp from behind us. Shouts. A curse. Neutria fought with the netting that wrapped and tangled her legs. Her fangs slashed at the material, cutting a few of the strands. Her legs slid out through the hole and her body followed, then she whirled on the humans who dared try capture her. She lifted her front legs high and clacked her fangs.
“It’s free!”
“Net it again.”
She skittered away from the next net thrown at her but someone came at her from behind and had the webbed ropes on her before she got fully turned around. She began slashing again but was tumbled to her back. The men made quick work of securing her legs together, dodging her fangs as they tied her down.
‘Don’t panic,’ I told her. ‘As soon as they’re distracted we can change and I’ll slip the ropes.’
Kill. How dare they interfere with hunt. Kill them all.
“It’s a fucking Archaeon! I’ve never seen ‘em out of the swamps,” an excited male shouted. “This thing’s gunna make us rich.”
“We’ll see. If it don’t kill us all first.” The voice of reason. “What about the hyena? How badly is he hurt?”
The heart I didn’t have skipped a beat. Oh god. What had they done to him? Neutria wriggled and earned a sharp kick in her side that made her hiss. No matter how hard I looked, I couldn’t see Kroshtuka. Spiders didn’t have necks and the way they’d downed us, we couldn’t see more than the knee high grass, a bit of sky, and a pair of legs.
“It’s the leader of the duallies, ain’t it? That big hyena what’s been harrying the wagon trains through the Anwar. He has a bounty on his head.”
My worry for Kroshtuka grew. To Neutria I said, ‘We have to do something.’
We will wait. Strike when they are asleep.
‘We might not have that much time.’ I thought about forcing a change but didn’t want to reveal myself too soon. They might think I was just an assassin spider and not take all the precautions they would if they knew the spider could become human.
“Take her to the Wing. She can fix him up for market. He’ll fetch a pretty penny if he lives.”
“Hell, even dead he’ll bring coin, if for nothing more than a coat for a rich witch-folk.”
The men laughed, then we were being dragged, bumping across the uneven ground to a wagon. They tossed the ropes around a cross bar that jutted out over the wagon bed and hoisted us onto the back. Kroshtuka’s limp body was tossed up beside us.
Blood sprayed from a wound in his side and soon soaked into the boards beneath him.
I should have slept with him, I thought, hysteria creeping into my thoughts. We wouldn’t have gone on this stupid hunt and he wouldn’t be laying beside me, dying.
Stop. Stupid human. Be still. Be ready. Wait. We will get a chance to kill them all.
Be still. Wait. I wanted to scream. Wanted to explode out of this body and fry them all with power from the heart. As if it recognized itself in my thoughts, the heart pulsed. It swelled in my mind as I concentrated on it until I had sunk deep inside it. Underneath us, the wagon jounced but I barely felt it. When I’d first seen the heart it was an eponymously shaped crystal, warm in my hand. Inside the thing as I was now, I could see that it wasn’t a crystal at all but a vast control room with lights and buttons, levers and cords. Excitement crashed through me. I could learn to use the heart, I just had to figure out how to work it.
Ahead of me I saw a slick controller, its hand grips well used. In front of it was a screen and a map of the worlds. Seeing it, I recognized what it was. These were the controls I used to make hooks. Well used and intuitive. Arsinua was right. I’d burned the right pathways for hooks and here I could see my mind’s idea of what that efficiency and knowledge looked like.
Excited, I spun around, hunting for the place where I’d opened up the heart’s full power and fried a bad guy. It took me a second but I found the blackened plastic and warped metal that burst from the central column running through the middle of the heart. Oh. The sight of the destruction scared me. I’d been killing myself using the power that way. I’d have to figure out something else, something less self-destructive.
Still, it was exciting. I knew where to start now and just needed to learn the controls. Of course, there were a million different buttons. Would I fuck myself u
p if I just started flipping and pushing?
The hyena whimpered and my awareness expanded away from the heart. The wagon was stopped. We hadn’t gone that far, had we? ‘Neutria?’
You left.
‘What?’ But she didn’t answer because there were people surrounding the wagon, talking loudly, some prodding our body and exclaiming over our size.
A blonde with wispy hair and a vacant look in her eyes stumbled into the side of the wagon from a rough push between her shoulder blades. She sang in a high, unfocused voice. Her skin was a map of bruises and scars. I looked at her with my Magic Eye and saw broken strands of pale grey energy waving around her. Cyres?
Oh god. She’d been damaged, so much worse than Jasper.
‘We have to do something, Neutria.’
She didn’t answer me. Cyres extended her hands to Kroshtuka, covering the hole in his side with her delicate fingers. A soft glow emanated under her hands. The hyena whimpered again and she shushed him. “It’s all right. I can make you better.”
Her eyes flicked to Neutria’s and she stared. “Do you see me? I see you.”
“Shut up and heal the hyena,” a man said, slapping her in the back of the head with the flat of his hand. Her head whipped forward and almost smashed into Kroshtuka’s side. She shook it off but stayed hunched over the side of the wagon.
“Heal, doggie. Heal.” She blew at the wound and the golden glow scattered. Some flew into the air but more fell onto Krosh’s fur and melted into his skin. I held my breath—even though I knew that I didn’t have lungs to hold the air at the moment—and watched the hyena’s chest for movement. He’d been breathing so shallowly before I’d worried he was almost dead. The steady rise and fall made me thankful. He would be okay.
‘That was amazing,’ I said to Neutria.
“Thank you,” Cyres replied.
I eyed her. Had she heard me? No. She couldn’t have. I was inside a spider for heaven’s sake. I didn’t have a brain or brain waves.
She smiled but didn’t say anything else. “Doggie will be okay.”
“It ain’t a doggie, you stupid idiot. Now go on, get back to your cage.” He pushed her away and another man came up to escort her out of our sight.
I glared at that man, marking him. I remembered once upon a time I’d vowed not to kill anyone unless I absolutely had to but this asshole needed a little murder to remind him of his humanity.
They all did.
‘When?’
Shh.
‘I’m going to change. Then I can hook the hell out of here, come back around and take all these motherfuckers out.’
Blood-thirsty good. Careless bad. Wait. You will have blood.
So we waited. Time crawled by. Kroshtuka panted beside me, his body relaxed but alert. I saw the coiled potential in his body. He was waiting too, waiting for his opportunity to escape or serve these guys some justice.
“We should put them in the pit. Let them fight.”
Neutria shifted. While I’d been worrying, she’d been working her feet out of the ropes. They’d bound them two by two and she now had them all free. Because of the netting there would be no way anyone would be able to tell it unless they were looking for it.
“I say we sell them. Ain’t no money in the pits. The market money will go right into our pockets.”
A shout from out of our line of sight spread noise throughout the group. It wasn’t until I heard one of them say Nightflowers that I knew. The Carnicus had made it to Galleia. Tension thrummed through the air and the men scattered.
‘Now?’
Can you make man-beast hear you?
‘I don’t know. Why?’ As I thought it, she sent me a picture of her exploding off the wagon and sinking her fangs into the closest man’s chest. In her plan, Kroshtuka downed a second man. Other, vague details fleshed out the background. Men fighting. Chaos. ‘I can try.’
She helped me by focusing her eyes on the speckle-pelted animal next to us. I brought up the heart’s control room again, aware that it only existed in my head. Whatever it took to figure the damned thing out. ‘Talk to Kroshtuka. Send him my thoughts, Neutria’s plan.’ I pictured what I wanted in my head and then looked around, hoping a button would glow or a horn would blare to show me the way. In the end it wasn’t any of those things.
A cockroach skittered across the floor, its curly antennae wiggling. It ran past three panels full of indicators and dials before crawling up a purple pole and coming to rest on a big black button under a speaker box. The cockroach mutated into a moth and fluttered away. I walked over and pressed the button, then leaned toward the speaker, feeling silly.
“Uh. Kroshtuka?”
I let go of the button, thinking of the way walkie talkies worked. Silence. Was there an on button? I looked but didn’t see anything close enough to make sense. As I was squatting, gazing up at the underside of the panel, a voice came through the speaker. Hesitant, wondering.
“How do you touch my mind with yours?”
A big black button and a little help from a bug, I thought, my head swimming with thoughts about the control room. Focus, Devany. ‘We may have a plan.’
It is a plan.
Neutria’s voice boomed in the control room. I covered my ears―I’d constructed my body to go along with the surreality of the room―and said, ‘Stop! You’re too loud.’
She chittered.
Kroshtuka said, “Tell me.”
I did, about Leon spoiling for a fight and Neutria’s idea to use the confusion to get free. I told him I had to save my friends and the woman who’d healed him. I didn’t say that I wanted to save the whole Carnicus from the asshole but maybe he saw that in my mind anyway. ‘The only problem is you’re still bound.’
“No. The woman loosened the ropes.”
Color me impressed. Was the crazy-girl persona just an act then? She’d been sneakier than I’d ever imagined if she’d freed him without the abusive man noticing. Hell, she’d done it right under the asshole’s nose. ‘Wow.’
“It will be my pleasure to liberate the innocents and kill the rest.”
‘Me too.’ And I meant it. God. What was wrong with me?
I change you, Neutria said, sounding delighted and smug all wrapped in one big, gooey, spider sandwich.
‘As soon as they’re fighting,’ I said to Kroshtuka.
He smiled―I saw it in his thoughts. Then he sent me an image of him and I naked on his furs and I swear the speaker sizzled from the heat of it.
‘Stop that.’
His laughter sounded in my head.
Holy crap.
Another shout and a roar of challenge. Neutria turned her attention to the far side of camp but far distances weren’t her forte. I saw a colorful blur. I was squinting but of course that wouldn’t do any damn good. Spiders didn’t squint. They didn’t even blink. Then I heard Leon’s voice, raised and angry. Not nearly as scary as his quiet speech about watching the dog die on the anthill.
“Ready.”
I told Neutria. She thought it over. Soon.
‘Neutria! Come on.’
Soon.
A thud of flesh on flesh, and then it was on. Real life fights didn’t sound anything like the ones on TV. For one, it wasn’t as dramatic but definitely more horrifying. Actors didn’t get hurt on TV, or at least, that wasn’t the goal. In real-life fights, people were getting broken and bloody and working like mad to break someone else. The dull, unremarkable thumps belied the damage being done.
Swift kills. No mercy.
I passed on the message. Then—
Now.
‘Now.’
We erupted from the bed of the wagon. Neutria sank her fangs hard into the closest man’s chest, pumping venom into him. It killed him instantly. She didn’t even slow, crawling over the ground in seconds to kill the next man and the next. To our left, Kroshtuka crushed a man’s skull. I heard the crunch from across the yard.
The fight was in full swing and only those on the fringe r
ealized something was wrong behind them. By the time they figured it out, they were dead.
Leon swung hard at the jaw of the man who’d hit Cyres and knocked him onto his ass. Kroshtuka pounced on him, ripping out his throat. As he did, Leon turned and ran, his self-preservation stronger than his need for revenge.
‘Him! Don’t let him get away,’ I said, pushing at Neutria to turn and give chase. She did, to my surprise and we almost had him but he slid into the Nightflowers camp, past the barriers. Neutria fetched up against them, bright blue sparks flying when she hit it.
‘Damn it.’
She hissed, then spun at a noise behind her. Another man, this one with a gun. He shot at us and the bullet caught her in one of her right legs. A flash of pain and then it went numb. She had to drag it as she pounced on the guy, not giving him a chance to get off another shot.
Once he was dead we scanned for other threats. All I could see were dead bodies and the backs of those smart enough to run. ‘Cyres?’
Scent her. Wait. That might have been the coolest part of being inside a spider. She didn’t have a nose; instead she ‘smelled’ stuff through the hairs on her legs. It was a great shivering that ran through me as she searched for Cyres’ trail. When she found it she set off running, her wounded leg dragging uselessly behind us. I hoped that it didn’t translate to a horrible wound on my body when we switched back.
The cage where they held Tytan’s soul was disgusting. Neutria let her venom drip on the lock and the acid ate through the thick metal, weakening it so Cyres could pop it open. She stumbled out, pushing her hair back from her face as she stopped beside us. She didn’t show any fear of the giant spider next to her. Instead she said, “Thank you.”
Neutria chittered. To me, she thought, Grey man and head.
‘Yes. I’m not sure how we’re going to get to them through the barrier. I might need to change to get through.’
Yes. Change.
Color me shocked. She’d never changed that willingly before. ‘Are you sure you’re okay?’