The crowd cheered and applauded when Arthr put his right hand behind him. Face red, blood smeared around his nose, Norman fought his way to his feet and hurled himself forward again, throwing another huge punch that hit nothing but air. Arthr ducked under the attack and threw three left jabs into his gut. Norman reeled back and swept his arm. Arthr ducked the blow again and buried his elbow in Norman’s ribs. Norman’s guard dissipated, arms drawn to his battered chest. Arthr’s left fist sailed across Norman’s jaw, and the larger boy fell, slithering in pain.
Exactly five hits after his one-handed boast, Arthr had won.
“I’d say you talk the talk,” Arthr said, flashing a wide grin to the onlookers, “but you ain’t talkin’ now.” He spread his spider legs out, as though summoning the sun from the world of the dead. He began to shuffle about, laughing, throwing lightning-fast punches into the air and ducking invisible blows.
Amid the cheering, Amanda rolled her eyes at Arthr’s showboating. “Now that’s what I call shameless,” she said. “Look. He thinks he’s the center of the damn universe.”
Chelsea nodded excitedly. “Yeah, Arthr’s so cool.”
“That’s the opposite of what I meant.” Amanda paused and looked over her shoulder. “Where do you think Spins ran off to?”
Chelsea just kept nodding, eyes glued to Arthr.
Sighing, Amanda grabbed her friend’s sleeve. “Come on, let’s get out of here.”
“H-hey, what are you doing!?”
“Show’s over. Nothing to see here.” With that, Amanda dragged Chelsea away from the aftershow, leaving Arthr to gloat and pump his imaginary iron for his devoted fans.
Later that evening, Spinneretta fulfilled her promise of making cookies for Chelsea. Mark was kind enough to keep her company while she did, which was something she wasn’t sure she wanted after meeting Annika. Neither of them had much to say while she made the dough; she was moody and Mark did his best not to aggravate it. The awkward tension gathered in the air until Spinneretta asked the question that had been nagging her all day.
“So what the hell was with that woman?” It had taken that long to gather the anger into a pronounceable grievance, ambiguous though the resulting question was.
“What do you mean?” Mark asked from the other side of the kitchen counter.
Spinneretta continued to roll the fresh dough into spheres, placing them one by one on the greased cookie sheet beside her. “She tried to strip me, for one,” she said. “And aside from that she was just . . . ”
“Energetic?”
“I was going to say terrible.”
“She’s not so bad when you get to know her. Though, as I said, I am very sorry about what that turned into. Still, I think it went pretty well, all things considered.”
Spinneretta remained quiet, scooping another glob of the dough from her bowl. “How do you know her, anyway?”
“Just an old friend.”
“You already told me that. What kind of friend is she, exactly?”
“I can’t really talk about that.”
The dismissive response caused Spinneretta to stop her automatic kneading of the dough. “Why not?”
“I made a promise not to speak of it.”
She grumbled and resumed her work. “Keeping secrets, huh?” With how open he was about most things, that Mark would keep secrets about something as trivial as his relationship with that horrid woman was suspicious, unnerving. She dropped the perfect ball of unborn cookie onto the tray. Aside from her attempt at assault, something about that woman had gotten under her skin in a profoundly vexing way. She was ten times as bubbly as her mother, a thousand times as obnoxious as Chelsea—and something about that anachronistic trench coat just screamed look at me, I’m a pretentious detective! Spinneretta prayed she would never again cross paths with her.
She continued to scoop and roll the dough until the bowl was empty. She bent over to put the tray in the oven, setting the microwave’s kitchen timer with one of her outstretched spider legs as she did.
“Now that’s what I call efficiency,” Mark said in a tone that made it clear he was attempting to change the subject.
After closing the oven, Spinneretta relented and looked at him, appreciative of the effort. “It’s just a trick I picked up. It’s muscle memory at this point.”
“What other muscle memory tricks have you picked up?”
She crossed her arms and leaned against the wall beside the stove. “I don’t know, it’s not something I really think about. I use them to grab stuff I don’t have hands for, and I use them for reading sometimes.” A glance at the microwave said that eight minutes and forty-three seconds remained before her cookie obligations were fulfilled, so she sat down on the stool at the counter, across from Mark. “What are you doing?” she asked. “Shouldn’t you have your nose in some evil book or something?”
“I should, but I’m taking a break for now. Evil books can be exhausting, you know.”
“Yeah, I know all about that.” She rested her head on the countertop. The chill reminded her she still had trigonometry homework, and that she hadn’t made any further progress on that damn family history project. Right now, she had no mind to do either of those things. For a moment she just let the cool surface of the counter soothe her warm face. “Distract me from everything,” she said.
“Distract you? What did you have in mind?”
“I don’t care. Tell me a story.” She glanced over her shoulder at the countdown before returning her forehead to the cool marble of the counter.
“What sort of story would you like to hear?”
“I don’t know. Why don’t you tell me about the stupid Warren cult.”
At that he grew quiet. “I’ve already told you about them, have I not?”
“Nothing easy to understand. Tell me about this Gate thing that they all apparently worshiped.”
“Do you really want to know? Are you really that eager to know what your own blood was a part of?”
She lifted her head from the counter and saw his stern expression. There was a caution in that expression, an unwillingness to indulge her curiosity. His pale brown eyes held her gaze, as if in warning. She could tell those eyes held no intent to deceive her. Deciding to risk the revelation, she nodded. “Wouldn’t ask if I didn’t.”
At once, his expression seemed to relax. “Very well. First of all, the Warren cult, as you call it, is best known by another name: the Lunar Vigil. It is important to draw some level of distinction between the family and the Vigil, for non-Warrens also formed a part of its congregation.”
“The Lunar Vigil? So you guys were, what, moon worshipers?”
He hesitated. “In a sense. The Lunar Vigil was an eschatonic cult devoted to the worship of the Primal One that lies dormant beneath Mare Vaporum.”
“Whoa, slow down there. You’re gonna need to define some terms for me. What, exactly, is a Primal One?”
“Ahh, forgive me. The Primal Ones are beings whose existence predates any and all culture on Earth. In the early days of our universe, there were many such beings that fissioned from the original source of life. While most of them are—at least physically—gone now, their legacies have been scratched into the obscure folklore of primitive tribes and enlightened cults since the beginning of time. Those more in tune with the universe have historically been the first to fall victim to the whispers and echoes of those creatures. The Warrens of the Vigil were no exception, nor were any of the cults in whose footsteps they were seduced into following.”
She blinked at him, trying to piece together an image of what he was describing. “Okay. So these things, these Primal Ones, were what? Gods?”
“It would be dreadfully inaccurate to describe them as such, but perhaps that is the simplest explanation.”
An odd chill tickled up and down Spinneretta’s spider legs. She brought her legs in to leech the heat from her shoulders and hips. “Okay. So this Primal One thing . . . ”
“Right. The L
unar Vigil worshiped one such being known as Y’rokkrem, The Tree Which Splits the Heavens.”
“Tree. The Warrens worshiped a tree on the moon.”
“That is, in principle, correct. Y’rokkrem lies sealed deep under the lunar surface, beneath a crater in Mare Vaporum, the sea of vapors. That crater, where the barrier holding it entombed is weakest and Y’rokkrem’s thoughtforms are able to seep through, is known as the Gate. The Lunar Vigil dreamed of opening the Gate and uniting with Y’rokkrem, becoming gods over the desolate remnants of the Earth.”
Spinneretta looked at Mark’s stoic expression until his silence announced he had finished his story. “Well, that’s just about the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard,” she said with a weak smile, again checking the incomplete cookie timer over her shoulder. “Gives Heaven’s Gate a run for its lunatic money, if you ask me.” She chuckled, but the sound died when she found no trace of humor on Mark’s face. “Oh, Jesus. Don’t tell me you actually believe in that shit, too.”
Mark closed his eyes and shrugged his shoulders with a visible lack of devotion to the gesture. “It’s not a matter of believing any more than observing the sun is a matter of faith.”
Spinneretta shifted on the stool, feigning another look at the timer. She’d been willing to give him the benefit of the doubt when it came to the subject of his alleged magic, but there wasn’t much she could think of to justify such a sensationally mad worldview. A tree on the freaking moon? She could, perhaps, believe it was just a consequence of his upbringing, or a remnant of scars from the mental trauma inflicted by—
“Do you want to feel it?” Mark asked, interrupting her chain of thought. Before Spinneretta could respond, he reached over the counter and placed his hand gently over hers.
“H-hey, what are you—?”
“Relax,” he said, ignoring her protest. “Clear your mind and you should be able to feel it.”
Easier said than done. She was able to stop herself from jumping backward off the stool, but her mind was spinning a mile a minute. The warmth of his hand on hers was disarming, although far less so than the unexpected pounding in her chest. Blood gathered in her warming cheeks, and her other hand began to tremble, fingernails tapping a wild but silent rhythm against the marble counter. She tried to move her eyes, but they were transfixed on the point in space where their hands met.
Oh my God, she thought, what the hell is wrong with me? Get a hold of yourself!
As the seconds passed, however, she became aware of a strange and unfamiliar pressure. A deep breath flooded her lungs, and she tried to steady herself. A couple breaths later, she forced her eyelids closed.
There was something—there was actually something. At first, it was a vague and formless sense of pressure stirring against her mind, a buzzing that came and went in irregular waves. But as she focused more on that strange feeling, she was able to follow it to its source. The pulsing came from far in the east, and the reason struck her like a hammer. Her eyes shot open. A quick glance at the calendar hanging beside the refrigerator—April twenty-second, waxing gibbous. That meant that, yes, that throbbing, singing force just above the eastern horizon—it could only have been coming from the moon. The air, the floor, the walls—all the matter around her seemed to vibrate in response to the slow beating.
After a few moments of awed silence at the whatever, Mark removed his hand from hers and the sensation faded away. Speechless, Spinneretta looked up at him. His expression was just as serious as it had been a couple minutes before.
“That’s the Barrier of the Gate,” he said. “Prison of Y’rokkrem.”
From behind Spinneretta a loud buzzing cut the air, announcing that the cookies were done.
There was an undeniable awe about what Spinneretta had felt. It was an awe that, on the most fundamental level, challenged her understanding of the world. Not only that, but it was verification. It proved, at least to some degree, that the things Mark had told her were true. That the deity the Vigil called Y’rokkrem may have actually existed was a far more disturbing revelation. The universe was a vast and majestic place. She mathematically understood such concepts as cosmic scale and time, but she could not even begin to fathom those numbers when they left the page. Beyond so many zeros, everything became infinite. It was the quantifiable scale and unknowable vastness of spacetime that made the existential possibility of those creatures so horrifying. That Mark was connected to something so enigmatic, so elder, was a fact that was only beginning to dawn on the horizon of her thoughts.
Furthermore, the revelation gave greater credence to his impossible-sounding stories of the yellow-coated spider cult. She’d swallowed the idea with a grain of salt, but it was now far harder to dismiss. Annika’s reaction. It was like being slapped in the face with a bundle of briar. The longer she thought about how unknown their family was, the more seriously she considered that old, bizarrely familiar tale. She could understand how the extra legs might look to someone indoctrinated in the fairy tale of the Yellow King. If such followers truly existed, then it was only reasonable that knowledge of the Warren brood’s existence would spark a feverish zeal to their ill-conceived beliefs. The possibility that those theories held water was alarming, though she still had only an incomplete picture.
But separate from those worldview-destroying theories, however, was another issue that had surfaced in the midst of the exchange and now demanded addressing.
When Spinneretta finished her business with the freshly baked cookies and left Mark’s company, she ascended the stairs to her room and locked the door behind her. She sat down on her bed, settling herself into the silence of solitude, and gazed into nothing. Okay, we’re going to work this out here and now, she thought to herself, and figure out what the hell is going on.
What’s going on is plainly obvious, another part of her mind answered, like a professor patiently explaining some mathematical equilibrium. Spinneretta shook her head, not even hearing out her own thoughts.
Let’s get one thing straight, she thought back, finding the emulated conversation grounding. I don’t like him like that. Period. End of story. That’s stupid and makes no goddamn sense.
And just why doesn’t it?
She hugged her legs to her chest and rolled onto her back, letting her eight appendages stretch toward the ceiling. Because I don’t need anything like that.
Need? Whatever, that’s a useless reason. Nobody needs anything, it’s what you want that’s important. Can you be honest with yourself about what you want?
Unlikely. Next point: for better or worse I’m a freak and I may just as well stay comfortable by myself. Just because he’s good at pretending he’s not bothered by my legs is a terrible reason to go gushing over someone.
You don’t really think he was pretending, do you? Though she wanted to argue the point with herself, she realized it was a dead end. She closed her eyes and felt a shudder run through her appendages. The warm memory from that cold night on the way to Chelsea’s came fluttering back to her. You might have had a case, he’d said, were you not so cute.
Okay, whatever, she thought, trying to shake away that memory. He’s still family, though. Jesus, if I’m really having to think this through so thoroughly then maybe I need some real help.
Uhh, you realize how far removed we are, right?
Vaguely, she thought. Ninth cousins with Dad’s dad, so that means we’re twice removed. That’s, what, eleven generations?
Somewhere around there. Genetics may not be our strong point, but it seems like a goddamn miracle we still have the same name after all this time. Unless that cult is really into inbreeding, I guess, which would downgrade the odds to a standard damned miracle. In any case, there’s more to relation than a surname. Blood. Consanguinity. That’s the real measure. We’re only as closely related as our blood is. Now quit sulking and help me remember that damned equation. What’s the consanguinity of a pair of cousins?
Uhh, it’s twelve point five percent, right? She hadn’
t thought about it since biology with Mr. Turner the previous year. Right, because siblings share half and children share half, and you’re going from yourself through a parent then a brother then a child, so twelve point five. She strained her brain trying to remember the process for that biology activity, and decided it would be faster to look online than risk playing with dirty exponents. Within a few minutes, she found a chart detailing degrees of separation on a genealogy website.
Ninth cousins, she thought. Counting the common ancestor, that’s four degrees of separation for first cousins, plus two more for each number past one. That’s twenty degrees, plus two more for being twice removed. She brought up the desktop calculator and input the resultant equation: 0.5 to the twenty-second power. She held her breath a moment, and the machine spat back: 0.00000023841857.
Sliding the decimal over on her mental abacus, Spinneretta found the resulting degree of relationship was just over two one-hundred-thousandths of one percent. She let her held breath out through her teeth, unsure how that should make her feel. A goddamn miracle. She was willing to accept that the laws of probability broke down when it came to her improbable siblings, but that was a vanishingly small relationship.
She turned her computer’s monitor off before collapsing onto her bed again. Okay, so we may as well be family in name only, then. Doesn’t matter though, because I’m certainly not going to lose myself over some guy, especially in the middle of whatever the hell is going on. That’s just stupid.
You say that as if you can rationalize it. Even though the thought came from her own discourse it was still unwelcome. She rolled over and grabbed at one of her pillows with her legs, digging their tips into its surface. A helpless feeling came over her. The evidence is stacked up. Take your pick.
Illogical though it was, it was hard to deny. The way the nickname Spinny always made her feel. The way her pulse raced when their hands had touched. The anonymous anger she’d felt toward that Annika woman when she’d come so close to Mark—well, that was dubious support, since that woman was awful irrespective of her involvement with him.
The Spider Children (The Warren Brood Book 1) Page 18
