The Spider Children (The Warren Brood Book 1)

by Bartholomew Lander

  Time bent into a twisted shape, enveloping her. Her mind screamed at her legs to stop and go back the way she’d come, but it was too late. The coward in her was in full control. A coward dies a thousand times before their death, she thought, her mind just as many miles from her body. The trees opened ahead of her, and her steps hastened as if to outrun herself. As the ground beneath her turned from mulch to paved gravel, a stray root snagged her ankle and she fell flat upon her face. Her forearms flew to protect her head, and she soon felt the sting of the small cobblestones biting and grinding away at the top layer of skin.

  She didn’t try to get up. There was no strength left. No will left. She just pulled her eight legs around herself and, for the first time in a long while, allowed herself to weep.

  A short time later, Spinneretta awoke. Assailed by recollection, she jerked upright and threw her gaze around her. The sun had finished setting, and the evening sky had been swallowed by dark gray clouds. The faint glow of the sole street light standing sentinel over the road revealed that she’d returned to the bridge over Widow’s Creek. She cringed, her eyes burning once again. There was no question about how much time had passed; the possibility of it being less than fifteen minutes was unthinkable. If Mark had made it away and gone to find her at the park, he would have had to pass over the bridge to get there, meaning he would have seen her. Right? And that clearly hadn’t happened. She choked. Tears of grief and self-hatred began to well in her eyes, and her mind screamed its fury at her. Coward, it said, you fucking worthless coward.

  She pushed herself up from the ground and looked around, blind to everything. It was no longer her own cowardice that occupied the central pit of her mind, but Mark’s safety. You ran, and left him to deal with a bunch of armed men and a monster, and now you have the audacity to act like the victim? Think about how he must feel. Oh wait, he can’t feel anything anymore, because he’s dead.

  That’s impossible, another part of her answered. He made a man vanish into thin air, so surely he must have at least stood a chance against some guys with guns. He can use magic, for God’s sake!

  So why didn’t he come back, then?

  That question sat there, fermenting. Her tears ran, for she could not find an answer that left room for his survival. But he could have won, she thought, and he could have just been hurt, or . . .

  If you think that, then why not go check it out for yourself?

  He told me that if he doesn’t come back I’m supposed to go to a friend’s house, the coward in her thought. He didn’t say to go try to help. If I go back and they’re waiting for me . . .

  He could still be alive.

  The thoughts blurred, as did the line between the coward and the real her. There was a singularity, wherein decisions were made irrespective of whether they were intelligent or self-preserving. It was within that singularity that her emotions flowed and a voice boomed forth.

  Fuck that! He asked if I trusted him. He said he would come back for me, and he hasn’t. He broke the conditions of his own order, so I don’t have to do anything he told me to.

  But what if—

  Just shut up, she thought, silencing the coward. A new conviction steeled itself in her mind. She turned back in the direction from which she’d fled. Even if he’s not there, I have to be sure. Even if it’s a trap, I don’t care. I won’t run from Mark like I did from Will. I won’t do that to him. Nor myself. I can’t keep running.

  The coward tried to interject, but she’d already made up her mind. She once again began to run, clinging to a desperate hope.

  But when Spinneretta emerged from the thicket again, Mark was not there. As she came upon the spot where she’d left him, her spirits fell even further. She saw the line he’d drawn in the dirt that created that shimmering screen. The line had been trampled by identical footprints. There was nothing else, aside from the almost unnoticeable scent of blood. His blood, of that she was Instinctually certain. Aside from that, there was nothing. Nothing at all.

  She fell to her knees, despair collapsing her stomach into a single point of supermassive shame. He wasn’t there. Whatever had happened, he had bled, and that meant he must have been losing. Whatever had happened to him, she had let it happen by running. She cursed herself with every colorful word she knew. She may as well have killed him herself, or so the pain ripping its way through her heart said. She clutched her legs around her as tears began to flow once more.

  Wait.

  Something occurred to her. Something that should have obvious.

  There’s nothing.

  She thought about that a second, her tears stopping.

  Nothing.

  That’s right, she thought, her mind beginning to once more run on logic instead of grief. There was nothing there. There was no body. There was hardly any blood; she could only even be sure it was there because of the adrenaline that heightened her senses. There were no spent shell casings, and at such a short distance, wouldn’t she have heard gunshots?

  Her mind began turning faster, connecting the dots. If they had killed him, there should have been more blood. Even if they had tried to clean it, she’d still have been able to smell the remnants. The air would have been thicker with that smell, far more than the trace she could smell. It didn’t add up, but it divided out—and she knew what the remainder was. He had to still be alive. Maybe they had taken him prisoner, or he had fled the battle. Either way, he had to still be alive.

  That left the ultimate truth obvious: she still had time.

  A drop hit the water, shattering the surface tension of her mind. With a practiced delicacy, she raised herself up on one arm and then the other, her muscles straining against themselves, holding themselves back from running wild. As she climbed to her feet, her legs twitched with a familiar titillation. Her eyes still burned, but the burn was different now; it wasn’t grief that lit the fire, but determination, want for redemption, searing hatred. There was no weakness in Spinneretta now; the last remnant of the coward she had been had melted into the ground like so many tears.

  I will not let it happen again, she thought. No matter what happens I can’t let it happen again. Memories of Will flashed before her eyes—memories of that innocent boy she had been too scared to save and too cold to face again. Perhaps it was a curse, or perhaps it was retribution for some transgression in a past life. Fate was a wheel, and the only way to prevent it from repeating itself was to stop it—and the only way to stop it was to break it. I won’t let it happen again!

  There was no cruel moon to mock her this time. It had forsaken her. In the darkness of her mind, she felt that familiar pounding—the knocking at the metaphorical door, the Instinct to hunt, to tear and maim. The Instinct to protect that which was hers and hers alone. She no longer had the strength to fight the coming of the Instinct, nor did she want to fight it. It was her rejection of her primordial strength that had damned Will to a life of suffering and herself to a life of guilt. And as the smells of the night sharpened into a pristine field of clarity, she breathed deep the newborn air. With that breath, her lungs embraced the first trace of the Instinct. The doorknob turned, and her synapses overloaded with a rush of heightened awareness.

  The borrowed senses were a taste, and little more than that. She had choked the Instinct’s flow when she fought Pat for fear of what it would make her do, just as she had every time she’d given an inch to that strange force. Now, for the first time, she allowed it to creep deeper, spreading like an infection racing toward the heart. In that moment of transcendent conviction, the coward in Spinneretta whispered its final words, a silent prayer not to any god or idol, but to the very force that was creeping over her. It was the wish of an eleven-year-old child still trapped in her own Sisyphean purgatory. They were the words of surrender, of acceptance: don’t let it happen again.

  With that, the door was torn off its hinges, and she gave in to the Instinct.

  The sound of Arthr’s door being kicked open heralded the end of any delusion o
f safety. The impact rattled through the frame of the house and slipped through the window into the night. Arthr’s heart pounded in his throat. He put his hand on Kara’s back, a gesture that meant keep quiet.

  The rain fell at a constant patter. Beneath that wet, splattering white noise there were voices. He bit his tongue. Just think we ran. Dropped down and booked it into the woods. That’s the most logical thing, so just go out there and leave us alone.

  Another smashing sound from his room below. Glass splashed into droplets and fell like rain. Then came a troubling moment of silence. Finally, something shuffled down by the window. The sound of wood grinding, moving against the side of the house. It was the worst-case scenario.

  A dark-gloved hand reached up from below and grabbed at the ledge of the roof. Arthr’s mind reeled in panic. The cold rain falling on them deepened that hand’s finality. A second hand joined the first and, slowly, almost uncertainly, the man hoisted himself up. Over the sound of the pattering on the shingles, Arthr could just make out the creaking of the wood paneling where the man supported his weight.

  When his head popped up from below, the man scanned the dark surface of the roof. “They’re up here!” he shouted over the falling rain, and thrust an arm forward to finish his ascent.

  A surge of adrenaline hit Arthr’s bloodstream, and he was on his feet. He rushed forward, his feet navigating the slick slope of the roof. The man looked up in shock, but it was too late. Arthr dropped, grasping at the shingles with his arms and extra legs to stop himself from sliding over the edge. Propelled by momentum, he threw his feet into the man’s face. There was a rattling crunch, and the man was thrown from the edge of the roof, his arms flailing as he plummeted to the ground. The heavy, wet thud told Arthr what his eyes could not see.

  He rolled over and climbed to his feet again, peering over the edge of the roof into the darkness below. There was a brief silence as he stood hunched over. And that only made the metallic roar that followed louder.

  Gunshots tore through the roof below. Thunder pounded against his eardrums. He recoiled from the edge and hurled himself away from the spraying metal and back toward Kara. When he looked up again, he could see the faint light from inside his room filtering up from the attic through fresh bullet holes. The shots punched their way through the shingles, tearing some free and letting others sit wounded in silence. Faint pillars of light emerged from the dust, and tracer rounds burned his eyes. In his hasty retreat, Arthr’s foot slipped on the slick surface and he fell. He ignored the scraping pain on the side of his nose and forced himself up again.

  Kara clamped her hands over her ears and Arthr followed suit, burying his head against the slight shelter the armored ridgepole of the roof would grant. The staccato pounding of the bullets as they drilled through the interior plaster and wet shingling sent waves of pressure against his skull. He clenched his teeth, biting back against the rattling in his jaw.

  The bullets kept spraying back and forth at random, but when Arthr looked up from their position again another pair of hands had found their way onto the edge. The new arrival was pulling himself up—this time with the protection of a wall of indiscriminate metal to ensure he did not meet the same fate as the first invader.

  With the shield of bullets raking a path back and forth through the fragile shingles, the new man planted his elbows and lifted himself onto the roof with a prodigious alacrity. The man was dark-skinned and couldn’t have been less than six feet tall. When he found his feet, he pulled his heavy-looking automatic weapon from a strap on his back and tapped it twice against the lip of the edge. The stream of bullets ceased at the signal.

  The vacant silence was deafening. The ghost of the machine gun’s song pounded against Arthr’s eardrums, and even the rain had become a hollow noise thousands of miles away. His muscles tensed as the man approached, but beneath the sight of the hungry weapon his muscles would do nothing more than quiver.

  “Don’t move a muscle, faggot,” the man said. Out of the corner of Arthr’s shaking eye, he found that yet another pair of hands had appeared at the edge of the roof. If there had been any chance to slip away during the fireworks display, it was gone.

  Beside Arthr, Kara’s muscles were tense, though it was not terror that clenched them. Her spider legs were splayed across the tiled roof, and she stared up at the approaching figure with the look of a leashed war-hound.

  The man’s mouth spread in a grin. Behind him, a blond-haired man finished his ascent and got to his feet. He unshouldered his own machine gun and pointed it somewhere between the siblings. His face was softer than the tall man’s; he was younger, less experienced. That much was certain from his unsure posture and the hesitant, almost innocent expression he wore.

  “Alright, now listen up, sweetie,” the tall man said in a tone that was both kind and savage. “I don’t know what it is you’re capable of. It’s not my job to know, so I don’t give a damn. But we’re not going to find out. That’s because I know exactly what Anansi here is capable of. Or what he’s not capable of, if you prefer.” The man trained the kill-end of his rifle on Arthr’s paralyzed form. “Doesn’t matter how fast he thinks he is, or how fast you know you are. You can’t outrun a bullet, sweetie. I pull this here trigger, your brother dies. That’s option one. Option two is you come with us. I won’t lie: I don’t know what will happen to you when we turn you over. It’s not my job to know, so I don’t give a damn. But I can promise you this: make it easy on us, and I won’t hurt your brother.”

  Fuck that, Arthr thought. Don’t listen to a goddamn word they say, Kara! But his vocal cords, like the rest of him, were paralyzed.

  “If you want your brother to live, then you’ll be a good girl and come with us. No questions, no whining, no running. If you do any of those three things, we’ll kill him. Got that, honey?”

  The rain was getting heavier, and its sound nearly drowned out Arthr’s thoughts. A moment passed. Despite his fury, he was unable to open his mouth or bend a finger.

  Finally, Kara’s small voice answered. “Alright.”

  Arthr found the strength to snap his head toward her. His mouth fell open in disbelief—what the hell are you doing, Kara? he wanted to say, but he couldn’t. He knew too well that his objection was suicide. The part of him that wanted to survive vetoed the part that was willing to die for his sister.

  “Good girl,” the man said. He stretched one hand out to her, never removing the sights of his rifle from Arthr. “Richter, kill Anansi if this one tries anything.”

  “Yessir.”

  Kara said nothing and pushed herself up onto her knees. The tall man reached his free hand toward her as if to help her up, but she ignored it, throwing a quick glance at Arthr’s statue-like form. The only thing he could do was shake his head; his instinct of self-preservation wouldn’t allow any more than that.

  She got to her feet, wrapped her spider legs around her chest and stepped over the ridge of the roof. The larger of the two men smiled as she crossed over to them. He put his free hand on Kara’s shoulder and turned to lead her back toward the ledge where the blond-haired man waited.

  “Now, you lay right there,” the man said over his shoulder to Arthr. “Don’t make a move. Not even to fart. Stay right there for twenty minutes. Don’t come down before that, or we’ll fucking kill you. Just because I’m feeling nice now doesn’t mean I’ll cut you any slack if you do something retarded. You got that?”

  Arthr couldn’t have said anything if he wanted to. He could only sit still and watch as the blond man led Kara down the ledge with an air of smug satisfaction. When they had gone below, the larger man slung his military hardware onto his back and descended from the ledge. There came the cracking of some paneling, and a couple seconds later the man had disappeared, leaving Arthr alone in the cold rain of failure.

  Spinneretta’s eyes shot open and she sucked in a deep, painful breath of air. How long had she been holding her breath? Not long; she was sure of that. She had lost consciousness a
gain. This time it wasn’t from her desperate release of grief, but from the shock of allowing that strange adrenaline to hit her blood full force. It had been a sense of weightlessness, and then a flood washing through her bloodstream. She’d dreamed of fog and thought she even saw that haunting dream-sigil hovering just beyond it. But none of that mattered, for none of it was real. She had only lost seconds. She still stood at the exact place where she had left Mark. Aside from that burning in her lungs and an elevated heart rate, there was nothing different from the scene than before.

  No, that wasn’t true. Everything was different now.

  Her entire body was overheated. Her nerves were on fire, and each beat of her heart sent another flare through her muscles. The chill of the air was bracing against her skin, and her burning blood began its hunt for a new equilibrium. She was aware of things that she had no right to be aware of: the minute change in pressure as the wind swept through the trees along the path; the sound of a dog barking somewhere impossibly far away; the subtle smells of the night mixing into a discrete array of scents. If her senses had been sharp when she fought Pat with only a trickle of the Instinct’s influence, they were now razor-like. Godlike. She could hear sounds that must have come from half a mile away if not more. She could even feel the beacon of collective body heat emanating from the direction of the prom. She could taste the river. And then there was the most important smell: Mark’s blood. There was only a trace of it here. Even if the men had removed the entire layer of cobble from the road, the smell of that blood would have lingered in the air. It was confirmation. He may have been gone, but he was at least alive.

  But he wasn’t gone. Across the river and to the north, that familiar scent pulsed. The distance was vague, but the direction was clear. And she had to go after what was hers. She stretched out her appendages and a smile crossed her lips. He was alive. And, more importantly, she could save him. The Instinct would see to that. Whatever the men in the yellow coats had wanted with her didn’t matter. Whatever they wanted with him was even less important. With the Instinct running hot through her veins, she was invincible.