“I can feel eggs growing inside me when I’m near you.” She advanced, moving gracefully on eight legs.
I screamed.
“Hush. I’m not going to hurt you.” She brushed a leg against my arm, securing me in place.
“Stop! I don’t want to do any mating.” I tried to wrench myself free. I waved my arms in the air. One arm stuck to a sticky string above my head. It was hard to see anything in the dim lighting, but I thought I glimpsed filaments of string attached from one wall to the other.
No, not string. A spiderweb. A giant spiderweb, with me in it as the prey.
I struggled against the webbing, but it was stuck to my clothes and skin. “Help me out here.”
She slid a finger over my cheekbone and down my jaw. “Yes, I believe I will.” She ran a hand behind my back and detached me from the web. “I need to keep you safe.”
My momentary relief ended when she clutched me between two claws and lifted me higher into the web. I now dangled above the floor, my head almost reaching the ceiling. My face was level with hers.
I screamed again. The more I fought the web, the more tangled I became.
“You’ll only make this worse,” she said.
I thought I heard footsteps from outside our room and pounding on the door, but the sound was muffled. There were so many spiderwebs I couldn’t see the walls.
I tried to reach one of the stones of the amulet to call Elric to save me, but I couldn’t reach it.
Josie leaned in closer.
“No, don’t eat me!” I turned my head away. “I don’t want to hurt you, but I will if I need to.” I squeezed my eyes closed, trying to spark electricity inside me.
She pressed her lips to mine. Her kiss was surprisingly soft for a creature that resembled a monster. Her thorax pressed against me. There was no way I found this sexy. The idea of being kissed by a spider was exactly opposite of sexy. My affinity recoiled.
She stroked my hair and nibbled her way down my neck. Red light inside me swelled. My body started to feel languid and relaxed, even though I knew this wasn’t what I wanted. I wasn’t sure if it was my affinity or the venom in her saliva. I stopped struggling. Magic thrummed inside me, but I didn’t have the will to shoot lightning out of myself.
Deftly, she removed my pajama bottoms, reattaching me to her web with more strings. Her smile was wicked, making Vega look like an amateur on the evil scale.
A small part of my brain still held enough sanity to protest. “Josie, it doesn’t have to be like this. We’re friends. I can help get you a cure from Pinky. Or Thatch.”
“I don’t want a cure. I want you.”
She grabbed my ponytail and yanked my head back. She pressed her mouth to mine hungrily. She bit my lip, not hard, and I suspected not with her fangs since I didn’t feel pain, but hard enough to make me gasp. She slid her tongue into my mouth, probing me, tasting me.
I had to admit, she was a pretty good kisser. She cupped my behind in her hands—claws? A claw slipped under the waistband of my underwear and snapped the elastic against my waist.
“Mmm. Granny panties today? I bet you would have worn something a little fancier if you had known it would be a special day.”
“Uh-huh,” I said in a daze. My mouth tasted strange, like I’d just had a swig of alcohol. My knees were just as wobbly as they would be after drinking a shot of whiskey. “I mean, no. Josie, this isn’t a special day. This isn’t you. It’s your affinity talking.”
She yanked my underwear down my legs. I squeezed my knees together in an attempt to stop her.
“Don’t resist. You’ll enjoy this.”
“Do you know how creepy you sound right now?” I had enough control over one foot to press it against her abdomen and push against her, though weakly. “You’re like a Fae. Like Julian Thistledown. I won’t let you use me like this.”
Anger flared in her eyes. “I’m not like the Fae.” She bound my leg to her web. Her threads yanked my hands farther apart and secured them so I couldn’t move. She nimbly worked here and there to secure me.
I wanted to scream, but I was so tired. “Help,” I said too quietly for anyone to hear besides Josie.
Pounding came at the door. No one could get in apparently.
I wanted to shoot lightning at her, but I didn’t want to hurt her. I tried to reach inside myself, but my magic didn’t want to cooperate. It wanted rainbows and sunshine, not anything bad.
There was only one skill I possessed beyond lightning for protection. I tried to funnel that energy into my voice, to amplify my words. I called the disembodied hands from the Pit of Lost Souls. “Hands, I command you to help me. Come to my aid.”
I was so exhausted I couldn’t even think of any handy puns.
I visualized my voice projecting through walls and traveling to the deepest depths under the school. I kept calling the lost souls until Josie pressed a claw to my lips. She dipped her head down to my bra and tore at the fabric enough to reveal a strip of cleavage. Her fangs grazed my breast. It felt as though a red-hot poker pricked my skin.
Her face trailed down my belly. The sensation of her tongue on my flesh made the punctures on my breast throb even more. I tried to arch away from her, but there was nowhere to go. Her fangs grazed my hip and my leg. She nudged my legs apart and sank her teeth into the flesh of my thigh. The venom burned, radiating into me. I shivered from the unexpected pleasure of it.
It had been difficult to resist her seduction after her kiss, but now I found it impossible to think clearly. My body went limp.
I was vaguely aware of the pounding and scampering. I thought it was more spiders, but then I saw the disembodied hands I had called. One clamped its fingers around Josie’s throat. Another slapped her in the face. More tore at the web, trying to free me.
Josie laughed, the sound deep and maniacal. “I love a challenge.” The voice wasn’t my friend’s.
My brain felt foggy. I wasn’t sure where I was. White sheets of fabric curtained off sections of light around me. Spiders descended, their bodies glittering purple and black, beautiful against the sheets of white. They covered the hands, spinning them in cocoons of silk. Josie flung away one hand and bit another, shaking it like a dog attacking a chew toy.
More hands punched through the web and tore away the spider silk that held me in place.
It was only a matter of moments before the remainder of hands became caught in the webs.
Josie drew closer to me, a claw tearing away a little more of my bra. Desire rose inside me. Everywhere she touched me burned with heat. Mating with a spider sounded pretty hot, actually.
Behind Josie, a bright light glowed. I squinted, seeing a silvery figure. Elric? My vision swam.
“I reckon I arrived just in time to save Miss Lawrence from being spider food.” The accent was Texan.
A distant thought crossed my mind that this was a seriously bad moment to be caught by the principal breaking school rules.
Josie shrank back from the light. She held up her arms and retreated into a shadowy corner. The absence of her touch was torment. My limbs ached, and my temples throbbed.
The light flared brighter, searing my eyes. My head ached. Jeb incanted a spell. Josie hissed. I felt her lash out. She shrieked and thudded to the floor. The light faded. It was dim enough now that I could see he’d bound her eight legs up in her own spider silk. She thrashed on the floor. He held a lasso of spider silk in one hand.
“No, you can’t have her!” Josie said. “She’s mine.”
“No, she ain’t.” He twisted the curl of his mustache.
Josie flung herself toward him, snapping at him with her jaws. Smoothly, Jeb stepped away. He waved a hand at a swath of spiderweb hanging from the ceiling, so densely woven together it might have passed for a tapestry. The silk fabric fell over her face, binding her mouth closed. The silk knit itself together around her head.
“How about a little erotic asphyxiation for th
is one?” He chortled like it was a joke.
“Okay,” I said, my tongue thick in my mouth. It sounded like a good idea. I had never known the principal was so smart.
Jeb leaned against his staff, surveying his handiwork. “I reckon that solves that conundrum. Getting her out of the way was easier than I expected.” He swept his hand in the air, clearing a path of silk and swaddled hands between us.
I’d never noticed what an alluring voice Jeb had, deep and rumbling and full of wisdom. He was sexy in that distinguished-old-man sort of way.
My insides burned with yearning. I moaned, the sound pitiful, like a dying animal. I felt like a feral creature, passion wild inside me, consuming my every thought.
“Hush, darlin’. I’m gonna fix y’all up.” Jeb’s accent sounded strange, a mixture of Western twang and something else. British? German? It wasn’t quite either, but something similar, like Galswintha the Wise’s accent. “There’s only one cure for jorogumo venom with one this far along. That is, if one doesn’t intend to go mad from pining.”
Pining? Not pinin’? A distant part of my mind was trying to figure out the incongruity of his speech pattern.
His eyes raked over my panties dangling from one foot and then up to my exposed breast. His hands worked at his belt.
Josie’s muffled scream came from the floor. Her breath puffed up against the fabric. I couldn’t tell if she could breathe. Jeb followed my gaze.
“I couldn’t have done this without her. It’s ironic, ain’t it? I couldn’t defeat you, but you trusted her enough she could get you. And I could defeat her. Like one big game of rock, paper, scissors.”
“Huh.” I stared at him dully. He was speaking, but it didn’t make a lot of sense.
His pants dropped. My affinity swelled. I needed him to touch me, to drive away the rising torment. I needed to be satisfied.
He snorted. “There was no way I could ever convince you to willingly give yourself and your powers to me. Knowing your affinity, I had a feeling jorogumo venom would be your ultimate weakness. And who would ever suspect me and my real reason for hiring you on? I’m just the bumbling principal wanting to give an innocent teacher a chance to try to overcome the stereotypes her mother set up for her.”
Josie rolled onto her other side and collapsed. She was silent and still. Her fangs poked through the spider silk, still dripping with venom. I’d never considered how much of a turn-on it would be to see someone bound and gagged. I wanted her.
Jeb reached up and roughly took my chin in his hands, his eyes cold and hard. It wasn’t so much longing I saw in his gaze but calculation. That was hot too. Maybe I didn’t want Josie. I wanted him.
I tried to make my mouth work to tell him, but my tongue felt swollen in my mouth.
“I might not have been able to get my hands on Galswintha’s magic, but I’ll have you and your magic.”
“Yes,” I managed to say. It took all my strength to speak that one word. The effort left me breathless.
I wanted him more than ever. A very distant part of me understood he was Galswintha’s murderer, and he would probably dispose of me once he had drained me and gotten what he wanted.
At the moment, my body was ruled by aphrodisiac spider venom. A dangerous man was a turn-on. That was all I cared about. Death was welcome to come knocking on my door if it satisfied my voracious needs.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Caught in a Web of Deceit
I couldn’t move. Not that I particularly wanted to. Jeb—or Ludomil Hummeln Ba’Izabul as was his true name—grasped my hips, tugging at me, but I was affixed to the web too securely. A shrill shriek came from behind him. Jeb turned, but not fast enough. Josie bowled him over. She was still bound, but her fangs poked out from the silk knit around her head.
Jeb tried to scramble away from her. A bright light blazed in his hands, but she didn’t turn away from it. Not this time. She was already blind from the fabric over her face, her fangs being the only part that poked through the silk. She used her legs, all bound together, to push up off the floor and flop onto him. Her head came down onto his, stabbing him in the face with her fangs. A gurgling sound came from Jeb’s throat.
Crimson stained the white silk. Blood dripped from her fangs as she lifted her head. She brought her head down, stabbing him again with such force I heard something crack. She plunged into him, the movement violent and savage. I was so tired I wanted to close my eyes, but I was riveted by the way she thrust herself into him. She was powerful and dominant. Even bound as she was and forced to be submissive, she insisted on being in charge.
I liked that.
I wasn’t the only one exhausted. Josie’s movement’s slowed. Each time she raised herself, it seemed to take more effort.
A shaft of light from the side illuminated the puddle of blood. A giant stood in the light, silhouetted in the doorway. Animal musk wafted into the room, making my head light and dizzy with the heady scent. I couldn’t breathe enough of him in.
“Oh, no! We’re too late!” Pinky’s high nasally voice said.
Wow. A sexy sasquatch had never looked this hot before. I wanted his big hairy hands on me.
Grandmother Bluehorse and Jackie Frost spilled in after him. Bluehorse raised her staff at Josie, but Pinky lunged in front of her. “No! Don’t. She isn’t herself. She doesn’t know what she’s doing.”
“Where’s that goddamned genie? We could use him at a time like this!” Jackie Frost shouted.
Josie collapsed onto the floor. Pinky fell to his knees at her side. Unafraid, he placed a hand on her abdomen. She wasn’t moving. I couldn’t tell if she was breathing.
“Asphyxiation,” I tried to say, but the word came out a raspy hiss that sounded like “Aphhhrrrmmmm.”
Pinky looked up, trying to peer into the shadows. “Clarissa?”
I forced my mouth to work. This time I made myself say, “Asphyxiation.”
He looked at the silk. He tried to tear it, but the jorogumo weaving was stronger than sasquatch hands.
“Careful. You’ll nick yourself on her fangs,” Jackie said, peering over his shoulder.
“What kind of magic do we have that will cut through this?” he asked.
Fire burned inside me. Their voices floated in and out of my awareness. My core throbbed with wanting so strongly that it hurt. I tried to pull myself free of the spiderwebs, to draw closer to my sexy sasquatch. I needed him to fill me with his giant man sausage and make me feel complete, but I was so weak. I couldn’t will myself to talk.
No one paid any attention to me. Someone else came into the room, huddled over Josie. Eventually they dragged Josie off. All chances for being satisfied left with them. I closed my eyes, trying to ignore the pain stabbing through my body. My lips felt swollen where Josie had kissed me, and the places Josie had bitten me seared with continuous agony.
My ears rang. Male voices echoed from a distance. Even before I forced my eyes open, I knew who it was by the smell of magic lingering on their clothes. Thatch smelled of starlight and restrained dreams. Dusty books and lavender clung to him. Pro Ro smelled like cinnamon and meatballs, the perfume of moonbeams and planetary alignment wafting away from him.
Pro Ro and Thatch stood over Jeb’s body. At that moment, I would have been perfectly fine with a threesome.
I let out a breathy sigh. Thatch straightened. He stared into the shadows, searching for me but not finding me. He said something to Pro Ro and ducked under a thin veil. He held his wand out like a torch, the purple light too bright. I tried to turn away. He swiped away another curtain, halting when he saw a writhing lump in a swaddling of web that must have been one of the disembodied hands from the Pit of Lost Souls.
Perplexed, he nudged it with his wand. His gaze shifted past the twitching mass to me. Unlike Jeb, he didn’t leer at my nudity.
His eyes grew round, afraid. “Clarissa?” he asked.
I wanted to respond, but I could only blink. I le
aned my head back and closed my eyes.
He smacked my face, hard enough to make me start. “Don’t fall asleep. Do you hear me?”
I tried to nod.
“Darshan,” Thatch said calmly to Pro Ro, not a hint of fear in his voice, though I recognized it in his eyes, brief as it was. “Remove the body and leave the room. I need to work out an antidote.”
He must have arrived in a rush. He wasn’t wearing his tweed jacket or vest. His cravat was missing, and enough of his shirt was unbuttoned that I could see the white lace of tattoos just above his undershirt. As always, his hair was beautiful, waves of midnight perfectly windswept from his face.
“It’s too late for him,” Pro Ro said. He ducked under one veil but got caught. He grunted and cut at the sticky silk with his wand.
Thatch turned away, his light fading. “I must ask you to leave. I have a patient to attend to.” He dragged Pro Ro by the elbow and guided him toward the door.
Spiderwebs parted like curtains. Thatch waved a hand at the bloody mass on the floor. It slid out of the room into the hallway. Pro Ro leapt out of the way, stumbling aside before the body slammed into him. Thatch closed the door.
He strode back toward me.
Warmth flooded my face, making me feel dizzy. It was the bite, I told myself, not because I wanted him. Even as I thought it, I knew I was lying to myself. I wanted him more than ever.
Thatch stared up at me. I’d never been taller than him before. Giddiness rushed over me, and I giggled.
“Where were you bitten?” He took my chin in his hands, forcing me to look down at him.
I closed my eyes, concentrating on the words. “Thigh.”
He grunted. “Of course you were.” He tucked a hand under my knee and turned my leg to examine the bite.
The sensation of his hand on my naked skin sent a jolt of agony through my limbs. It hurt, and it felt good at the same time. I moaned. His eyes turned to pity.
I mumbled, hardly able to understand my words. “I’m dying?”
Hex Crimes Page 27
