By a Thread

by Nyna Queen

  Darkness swallowed her like the mouth of a beast. Tiny pale dots danced on the ceiling above her where slivers of the first morning light pinched the jalousie. Alex ignored them and closed her eyes.

  Yet although she was bone weary tired, sleep wouldn’t come easily.

  The images from the news kept popping up in her mind: torn, mutilated body pieces strewn upon a bright green lawn. A child's hand poking out between grass blades, fingers outstretched, as if reaching for help …

  Alex pressed her head into the pillow, trying to dispel the gut-wrenching images, but they seemed stamped into the back of her eyelids. The rain had increased again and pounded against the window in a scornful, cackling cacophony.

  For an hour or so, she tossed and turned from one side to the other, yet the more she tried to catch sleep, the more it eluded her, like a chased horse that shied back whenever you were about to touch it.

  When she finally fell asleep it was haunted by nightmares of pale puppet limbs scattered around a tree-sheltered summer meadow that turned into severed children's arms and legs whenever she picked them up.

  The small corpses stared at her from broken, mournful eyes, their sibilant voices whispering: “Murderer.”

  “No,” she wanted to tell them, “it wasn’t me. I didn’t do this.” But when she looked down at her hands, they were slick and wet with red, dripping blood.

  The mangled bodies rose to their feet, stiff, like gruesome marionettes led by a clumsy puppet master, and stumbled toward her, hands outstretched. “Monsssster!”

  Panicking, Alex tried to run, but it felt like wading through sticky honey and the child-corpses were gaining on her, impossibly fast, reaching for her with their bloodless fingers.

  In front of her, a path opened toward a cliff that jutted out over a churning sea. In the light of the setting sun, it gleamed dark red like an ocean of boiling blood. A man in a dark cloak stood at the edge with his back to her, watching the horizon, where lightning flashed in front of black clouds. Alex called out to him and waved her arms, but he didn’t respond.

  Something cold grazed her back and she squeezed every last drop of speed she had out of her too-heavy legs. When she had almost reached the man, he turned. The trueborn man from the bar glared at her from that handsome stone-carved face, but where his eyes should be, there were just two burning holes—as if she was staring straight into the pits of hell.

  The Jester’s lips curved into a smile. Alex recoiled, but it was too late; her own momentum carried her forward, and with a scream, she fell right into his eyes and was consumed by the flames.

  “THERE are people waiting to be served at table six.”

  Alex snapped out of her trance with a jerk and found herself eye to eye with Mr. Mahoney, owner of the Jester’s Inn and, by virtue of that, her boss. Who didn’t look pleased. Not pleased at all.

  Of course, he was the kind of person who always had a sour look on his pinched face, but this actually went beyond the usual degree of dissatisfaction. Which made her wonder how long she’d been standing there, simply staring into space.

  When the alarm clock woke her up this morning, she had felt even more exhausted than when she’d gone to sleep last night and the half ounce of coffee she’d knocked back during the last hours hadn’t done her much good either, except for a buzzing between the ears and the beginning of a spectacular headache. And while Mitja was the lucky one on bar duty today, she and Romanova were responsible for waiting the tables. Which meant running, running, and even more running.

  She realized Mahoney was still watching her from his small foxy eyes, impatiently tapping his foot, each tap sending a painful reverberation through her skull. Alex squeezed her eyes shut, trying to clear her head.

  “What—are—you—waiting—for?”

  Pain shot through her left arm as her boss painfully dug his fingers into her shoulder. The spider growled fiercely, and Alex had a hard time keeping herself from snarling at him. Or worse.

  Deep breath! The last thing she needed right now was trouble with her boss.

  With an immense effort, she pushed the spider back, swallowing whatever prickly reply lay on her tongue—like if he didn’t mind screwing himself since nobody else would—and nodded with all the contriteness she could muster.

  “On my way, Sir.”

  A nasty smile stretched his thin lips. “And look smart about it!”

  He released her with enough of a shove to make her stumble. She might have fallen, too, if not for her shaper balance.

  Son of a bitch! Gritting her teeth, Alex hurried away before she slipped the leash and did something incredibly rash—and stupid—like going for his throat. Like it or not, killing your boss usually resulted in a job dismissal. And she needed this job. Even if it was crap.

  “Just ignore him,” Romanova muttered with a disgusted expression while collecting glasses from an empty table nearby. “Some people are born assholes.”

  In response, Alex made a rude noise that caused her elder colleague to dissolve into tiny giggles. Several customers turned their heads to look for the source of the sounds. Despite herself, Alex felt a small smile tug at her own lips, before it turned into a big yawn that made her jaws crack. Jester’s grace, she was tired.

  Grabbing the pad and pencil from the counter, she stuffed them into the pocket of her black apron and headed over to table six.

  It wasn’t peak time, but the Jester was still well-filled. People around here didn’t need a specific time of day to drown their sorrows in alcohol—and noise. The blaring bass song from the jukebox punched her eardrums and added to the throbbing in her skull. Alex rubbed her forehead and cursed herself for the umpteenth time for ever being so stupid to take Darcy’s bloody shift. Next time she’d say no. Oh yes, she would.

  “Yeah, sure you will,” she muttered under her breath. “Like hell, you will.”

  Not if it meant an extra pay with a chance of a full belly for a few days. She might be able to fool others, but herself? Not so much.

  Table six was cramped with a group of beatnik kids lolling around in ripped pants and multicolored hair, who seemed barely old enough to be allowed in a bar at all. Not that anybody cared, why, not here in the Bin. A paying customer was a paying customer. It was what she and the other staff members called the Mahoney-principle.

  Alex pulled out a smile from her secret pocket of stored friendliness and raised her pad. “Hello folks, what can I get you?”

  The closest girl, with spiky black hair and dark lipstick, opened her mouth—but Alex heard nothing. The world slowed around her, all sounds fading out like a radio turned down, until she was floating in the center of a pool of silence.

  A tingle went over her skin. Magic! Its presage charged the air with crackling energy, an electric tension that ran through the ground and through her body, making every hair stand on end. The wild in her bristled, a jolted cat puffing its fur in warning anticipation.

  The world caught up and slammed into her with the speed of a train. Noise drowned her. Alex blinked her eyes, dizzily. A slightly metallic taste filled her mouth.

  “Hey! Deaf nut!” The spiky girl slapped her palm on the tabletop, arching an angry black eyebrow at her, which made her look more ridiculous than threatening. “Are you actually listening to me? I said I wanted—”

  Alex never got to know what little Miss Snotty wanted to order. Her words were swallowed by the magic impulse that hit the bar like a furious explosion.

  Space constricted like a stretched elastic band and then expanded outward in a bursting bubble. The impact shook the ground and pushed chairs and tables to the sides, knocking them over, occupied and unoccupied alike, like an angry child throwing a tantrum in a dollhouse. Glass shattered. People screamed.

  Alex staggered, fighting hard to keep on her feet despite her shaper balance, while around her people fell like freshly mowed grass in front of a lawn-mower. She felt as if someone had pushed a bell between her teeth and struck it: her ears rang, her eyes wat
ered, the world zoomed in and out of focus. A burned scent stung her nose.

  When her view finally cleared, two kids had appeared in the center of the bar, a tiny band of smoke rising from the scorched circle in the floorboards around their feet. Alex blinked several times just to make sure she wasn’t hallucinating, but no, the kids were still there. And, my, what kind of kids!

  They looked so ridiculously out of place in their fine clothes and meticulously groomed hair, “trueborn” may as well have been stitched onto their foreheads.

  The girl was a delicate little beauty in her early teens, just showing the first signs of maturing. She had that distinct porcelain skin you only got when someone constantly chased you with a parasol. Nobility for sure. Her glossy chocolate brown hair was done in complicated braids around her oval face and her fine white woolen coat over opaque black tights screamed money at everyone who cared to listen.

  The boy beside her was clearly younger—maybe nine or ten—and the stiff dress pants and silk vest over a white shirt seemed overbearing on such a small kid. All in all, they could have just stepped right out of one of those oil paintings of a royal garden party or whatever it was that trueborn elite kids did to spend their leisure time, if you ignored the obvious signs of recent struggle: the girl’s coat was splattered with mud at the hem and a long rip presented the sapphire blue silk skirts underneath, while the boy’s knees and hands were caked with dirt as if he’d crawled around in the muck and telltale red dots stained his sleeves. The question was, was it his blood? Or someone else's?

  Both kids looked around the room, their eyes widening as they took in their surroundings.

  Well, well, well, little mice, Alex thought, not quite the place where you wanted to end up, huh?

  Before anybody could recover enough from their shock to do more than simply stare, a second impact rattled the bar. It didn’t come with the same force as the first, but it was still enough to make the ground buckle, and the few glasses that had survived so far cracked like eggs. Alex swayed, her skull ringing. Beside her, the spiky kid, who’d just fought her way back to her platform heels, vanished behind the table again with a startled yelp.

  Across the room, in the middle of a cluster of turned-over tables, five men materialized like snowdrops in a spring meadow after rain. The circled “A” of Arcadian Law Enforcement emblazoned the shoulders of their uniforms.

  Ugh, guardaí! Just great! This just kept getting better.

  But when she glanced from one to the other, taking in the rough faces, the hairs on the back of her neck rose. They might not look like your typical sell-swords in those fancy uniforms, but she’d dealt with enough of those to recognize hired muscle when it stared her in the face.

  It was the look in their eyes more than anything that gave them away. It was the kind of look you got when you maneuvered the realms outside the bounds of law for too long: cold, hard, merciless. A shadow that emerged, when you’d stared Death in the eye and decided no longer to give a fuck—the same look she saw when she glanced into the mirror. The look of a killer.

  The spider hissed. Those weren’t righteous law enforcers chasing some trueborn runaway kids to bring them home to their worried parents. Oh no. If they were guardaí, she was a trueborn aristo lady with a pink ribbon on top.

  They spread out immediately, moving in a quick practiced routine that strongly reeked of a military background: one front, two to the sides, two guarding the back, no communication needed.

  One of them, a blond giant with enough muscles to wrestle a boar, bellowed something she couldn’t understand over the chaos in the bar and nodded toward the children across from them, who had gripped each other, looks of pure terror etched onto their ashen faces.

  The man at the front, a bull-necked fellow with his head shorn army style, smirked—it was a cold, predatory grin that chilled Alex deep inside her bones—and reached behind his back. There was a sharp, metallic sound, a flash of silver, and then he a pointed a loaded spellgun directly at the kids.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  EVERYTHING happened at once. Magic sparked. The girl screamed.

  Alex reacted without thinking. She jumped.

  The spider snapped free from its leash in mid-air, her true teeth and claws piercing her human skin like switchblades. She covered the distance in a single leap, gliding over the heads of customers and broken furniture in a graceful arch, and slammed into the gunman the moment he pulled the trigger. A white energy blast hit the ceiling, sending dust and tiny stone fragments raining down around them. Panicked shrieks rang through the bar.

  The pseudo-guardaí stumbled backward, barely able to keep his footing, his cold eyes wide with utter surprise. It only lasted a second before it was replaced by an ugly scowl. His hand jerked. The spellgun barked again, white light flashing.

  Alex threw herself forward with shaper-speed and the energy bolt missed her by the skin of her teeth. She actually felt its heat. The hairs on her arm curled, singed by the radiation.

  Behind her, something crashed, and more people shouted, but she had no time to check if someone had been hurt. The bullneck was already raising the spellgun again. Still in the movement of going down, Alex dove forward, using her momentum to swipe his legs out from under his body. He went down with a grunt, his back crashing into the floor, knocking over two chairs on the way.

  He shook his head, visibly dazed. Alex was on him immediately and yanked the spellgun from his fingers. Clenching her teeth, she strained until the delicate, almost glassy-looking silver-blue metal of the tube buckled and finally crumpled in on itself under the pressure of her hands.

  Something caught the light. Alex leaned back on instinct and instead of stabbing her through the heart, the thug’s knife just ripped through her shirt, merely gracing her ribs. It was just a scratch, really, but it felt as if she’d been lashed with a burning whip. The spider howled.

  Poison, huh? And some heavy shit, too, from the way her body instantly went into defense mode, flooding her skin with heat as it triggered the immediate immune response. So, this is how you wanna play?

  The bullneck swiped the knife at her again, but rather halfheartedly, probably expecting her to be a goner already.

  Sloppy. Very sloppy. Killing a shaper with poison was … well, not impossible per se, but a tough challenge at best. They didn’t react to toxins like normal humans did. If the concentration was high enough, it might cause anaphylactic shock, but mostly they could burn right through it. They were poison, after all.

  Alex caught his wrist and squeezed hard until the knife dropped from his hand. Leaned forward. Her fangs slid out of their canals, replacing her human teeth, glistening wet with milky liquid. See how you like these little babies!

  Silent horror flashed in the thug’s eyes when he realized his mistake and he tried to roll to the side. Too late. She clamped him down with her legs and sank her teeth into his throat. Blood filled her mouth, hot and sweet, a vivid stream of life, and the human part of her was appalled but the spider in her … the spider was absolutely thrilled. It sang inside her, a triumphant, wild howl, as her venom pumped into his body.

  The trueborn struggled under her, his heels drumming the floor. Then he went limp. His hands convulsed at his sides, his face a terrible mask of agony.

  Hurts, sugar, doesn’t it? Oh yes, by now it must be hurting. And how it must be hurting. As if he was being flayed alive, or so she’d been told. Not that many victims lived to tell. A shaper’s wicked kiss was mostly enjoyed but once.

  Still, from the looks of him, the pain was excruciating enough for him to wanting to scream his black little heart out, yet, as luck would have it, at the same time the venom was developing its paralyzing effect, laming his nerves, disabling every muscle connection, making it impossible for him to move. Next would be the respiratory tract. His breath already came in wheezing gasps. He’d be dead in less than a minute.

  Alex raised her head. The bullneck’s fellows were recovering from their shock and closing in o
n her joint force, faces distorted with fury.

  She rose slowly. Blood was rushing in her ears. A wild, glorious song. A song of battle. A song of death.

  The spider bared her bloody teeth and the wild gaped at them from solid black eyes. She smiled.

  Let’s play.

  They charged.

  Alex exhaled and let the spider in her take control. Instinct took over and she moved, claws and teeth flashing, a lethal shadow in the half dark of the bar. The rest of the room, the people, it all faded into the background, all thoughts and emotions dimmed by the primal need to survive.

  They ambushed her from all sides and she spun like a whirlwind, claws slicing the air. Someone screamed and one of them went down, clutching the shredded mess of his arm. The scream died quickly.

  The others, sobered by his fate, kept their distance, avoiding the range of her poisonous stings. They circled her, slowly now, warily, like a pack of wolves circling a truculent deer, waiting for an opening. Prey might have been intimidated. The predator in her was just really pissed.

  One of them lost his patience and went at her from behind. Bad choice! Sensing his approach through the floor, Alex twirled around, sending a high kick at his jaw. Bone gave way and the blond giant, who’d pointed out the children, howled, raising both hands to his face. Alex quickly assessed the destruction for further reference. Jaw: broken. Teeth: at least two missing. Ego: irreparably damaged.

  Something whistled through the air. Alex jerked her head to the side just in time to avoid the throwing dagger. Its tip buried itself into the backrest of a chair, where her body had been a split second before, shaking slightly. Wow, close call!

  A second dagger cut the air. This time she was prepared. Moving on liquid joints, she snatched it from the air in mid-flight, flipped it in the same movement and sent it back to its owner with aimed force. It pierced his dark forehead bullseye, pinning him against the paneled wall. His eye broke, his body went slack, and a small red trickle of blood ran down between his eyebrows.