Helixweaver (The Warren Brood Book 2)

by Bartholomew Lander

  He blinked twice, again confused, and then gave his head a shake. “I . . . please, forgive me, Spinneretta. I am truly sorry. But what I feel for you is no more than friendship.”

  Again, the change was clear to her elevated senses. A spike in circulation, an increase in saturation of oxygen in the blood. Subtle, invisible twitching of muscles. She breathed a shallow gasp that sent fire through her limbs. “Oh my God,” she said. “You’re lying. I can taste it.”

  His expression began to crumble. “What? Taste? But, how?”

  Spinneretta shuddered from head to toe. Her lungs ached, and her head swam. “Your blood.”

  “Blood?” She heard his breath stutter, felt the muscles bracing. “But . . . Spinneretta, are you . . . ?”

  She slid a bit closer to him. “I . . . it’s the same. As the night of the fight. And prom night. At some point I guess I realized. It’s not just anger that triggers it.” She felt naked. But there was nothing else to hide. They were alone in the dead of night. Alone with one another, naked, exposed, but unafraid. She slid a little closer again. He did not recede. He sat there, eyes wide, minute trembles in his muscles.

  Control yourself, she thought. Don’t do anything stupid. But it was long past that point. A little closer. Her hand fell upon his leg. “Mark,” she breathed. “If you really meant what you said. That you don’t feel anything for me. Then say it one more time.”

  Mark mouthed silent words. His eyes were fixed upon her. She felt the hornets embedding their needles in the walls of her stomach. The butterflies were dead, and now those stingers were filling her with a growing recklessness. Her skin smoldered with a hyper-sensitive edge; the cool air of the living room became a polar chill. She leaned in closer to him, and her other hand found his shoulder. It was too late to go back. The Instinct’s control of the situation had reached critical mass. Leaning yet closer, she lifted her chin and placed a gentle kiss on his lips.

  A moment later she pulled back, her folded spider legs quivering. His pale brown eyes were indecipherable, but the faint shaking in his arms did not escape her notice. Her plated legs shifted, tasting the air. When she tasted no resistance, she leaned in closer to him again. This time his arms closed around her waist, bringing her tight against him as he returned the kiss. A thrill went through her, and the chemical bath in her veins turned it into a euphoric shock that raced to the extremes of her nervous system. Her spider legs sought purchase anywhere they could, taking up position along his arms and shoulders.

  Their lips broke again for only a moment before he slid forward and took another kiss from her. The heat of his hand upon her lower back burned, spreading a poisonous longing. Her spider legs wrapped around him. All at once he shifted forward, toppling her onto her back. It was only a moment before he fell atop her and his lips found hers again. Her hands were upon his chest and his hands upon hers. Electric shivers, amplified by the adrenaline toxin in her veins. This was it. A moment of mental ecstasy; she would take what was hers and give back what was owed in return. The taste of his lips, his tongue, was finality, victory. She dug her fingernails into his chest when she felt his lips brush her neck. Against all attempts at self-control, she let out a moan into the still air.

  And as she did, she felt a tremor of hesitation manifest in Mark’s shoulders. And that tremor then grew. Abruptly he pulled back off of her. “No,” he said, his voice panicked. “I . . . I cannot do this. Forgive me.” And just as suddenly as it had begun, he was on his feet, heading toward the front door.

  For a few moments, Spinneretta just lay there, stunned. “Wh-what?” When she heard the front door slam, she bolted upright, the molten blood coursing through her begging for release. And yet only stillness and solitude remained. What the fuck just happened? It took her a few seconds to process the fact that she was, once more, alone. Had it all been a delusion? A dream? No. The hair still stood up on the back of her neck. The heat from his lips was still raw, unrelenting. And that unfulfilling conclusion began to morph into indignation.

  Shaking, she rose to her feet. The Instinct still saturated every milliliter of her blood, but in that moment its aspect went from amorous to raw, uncompromising fury. Whatever attempt her higher brain made to calm herself was ineffective. The Instinct hit the ignition point. “Fuck you!” she shouted into the empty room. She raised her right leg and then sent her foot crashing into the surface of the glass coffee table. Her leg was stronger. Shards of glass twinkled across the floor in answer of the outburst.

  Deep, voluminous breaths attacked her lungs. Why can’t you just let me be happy for five minutes? she thought as the coffee table’s fairy song died. Why do you have to jerk me around like this? She ground her teeth together and stared at the door Mark had disappeared through. Her spider legs folded and unfolded about her, pulsating with the remnants of a euphoric hunger. A short while later her overloaded nervous system began to cool, leaving her restless and lost. And with the Instinct vanishing, she became aware of the wet pain that covered her entire right leg. With her brain once again regaining control, she realized her mistake.

  Oh, shit. Cringing, she lifted her lacerated leg out from the frame of the ruined coffee table. Blood dripped from any number of slashes, where bits of extruded glass sat. The pain went from numbness to peripheral awareness to agony. Biting back a scream of anger, pain, and horror, she started limping toward the stairs, her lower spider legs clawing at the floor to support her weight. Fuck me, she thought. And fuck everything else while we’re at it.

  Mark stomped across the hill, heading for where the ground dropped toward the shore. His face was burning, and sweat clung to his forehead and the back of his neck. His hands were still shaking, and they, too, were scoured by a dangerous heat. What’s the matter with me? he thought. What am I thinking? Each salty breath did little more than stoke the fire. Somewhere in his stomach, a weight had begun to form. He felt poisoned.

  You’re lying, she’d said. But he hadn’t been lying. Had he? As far as he knew, he’d been telling the truth, and yet . . . Now that he thought on it, it was impossible to see it as anything other than self-deception. What are you doing? This is not what the Chosen of Y’rokkrem should be. This was basic, animal, secular, primitive. He was supposed to be higher than such things, and his ascetic life up until now had conformed to that notion. Until he found Lily, his life was for that purpose alone.

  Is that why you stuck around here so long? Is that why you’ve kept so close to her since you arrived in Grantwood? The question stung, and he found himself fumbling to rationalize his decision. The spider cult was dangerous. If not controlled, catastrophe would unfurl. But was that the whole truth? His blood ran cold as he realized he no longer knew the answer. But he couldn’t have loved her. Anything he felt was friendship, and if it was more than that it was easily explainable, was it not? Spinneretta was around the age Ellie had been when she died. There was no major resemblance, save that both their eyes had been Golgotha-brown. Yeah. That was it. It was just fraternal affection. No more, no less.

  But that was no less absurd than denying what that incessant heat represented. She was no surrogate for Ellie; if she were, he’d never have kissed her back. The thought sent a shiver racing along his arms and down his spine. Moreover, she couldn’t be a surrogate, because he had never let go in the first place. His hand crept into his pocket and found the cold chain within. Just touching it pried open the nest of vipers in his chest. As always, they’d swim about his body, burying their fangs and injecting him with a numbing venom. Guilt was a sedative, he realized. And in some ways, it was an addiction.

  Despite the morbid turn in his thoughts, and the abstractions of life and death that he now considered, part of him was stuck reliving the moments leading up to their kiss. His heart still hammered at his ribs. Her choice of words, her body language, his own physiological response to them. What am I supposed to do now?

  Down below the cliff, the crashing surf foamed as it struck the rocks. The waves broke, seeth
ed, but did not answer him.

  Chapter 24

  Line of Fathom

  “Are you ready?” Kara asked.

  Spinneretta closed her eyes and tried to focus on the comforter she was sinking into, and not her bloody foot hanging off the bed. “Go for it,” she said, and then held her breath.

  “Okay, here I go.”

  There came a sharp pinching in her foot, followed by a dull slicing. All the muscles in her leg clenched from the pain. She strained, but a desperate groan slipped out. The first shard of glass came loose, and the groan turned to a choked gasp. She then heard the hard clink of the shard falling into the small bowl. One down, she thought, only a million more to go.

  “How did this even happen?” Kara asked before moving on to the second piece.

  Spinneretta put her arms over her eyes in an effort to block out the pain and embarrassment of the living room. “I don’t want to talk about it.” In the other bed, Annika was curled up asleep. She was damn thankful for it, too, because the idea of explaining this to the damn detective sounded as inviting as being buried alive. She winced as the second piece of glass came out, this time with far less grace. “Oh, fuck! Be careful, will you!” The words seethed through her teeth; the last thing she wanted was the detective waking up and laughing herself to death.

  “Sorry, sorry.” There came the clinking of glass on glass again. Kara hummed softly as she moved on to the next piece. “Oh, hey, you smell like Hunting again.”

  “I smell like what?”

  “Like Hunting.” She enunciated it as though she were talking to a toddler.

  Another blade of glass danced free from Spinneretta’s skin, and she was sure she felt blood following it. Her jaw clamped tight, and shallow breaths burned her throat. Fire, up and down her entire leg. “Fuck, oww!”

  “Sorry!” Clink. It sounded heavier than the other pieces.

  Spinneretta exhaled slowly in a futile attempt at finding Zen. A similar memory crept back into her mind. “Kara, a few weeks ago you asked to sleep in my bed. It was the night Arthr and I got in that fight, I think. You had a bad dream, or something, and you wanted to sleep with me. Do you remember?”

  “Hmm.” Her chitin leg-tips gingerly began prying at the next shard. “I think so?”

  Spinneretta winced again as another jagged fragment came loose. “Do you remember what you asked me that night?”

  “Umm, not really? I don’t remember anything except the Muffin Queen.”

  Another full-leg firestorm sent Spinneretta’s legs into spasms. “Oww!”

  “I’m sorry, jeez. If you keep making me apologize we’ll never finish.”

  “Anyway, you said something about how I smelled.” She focused only on that thought, and not the feeling of slowly dying from glass-related carnage. “You said that I smelled like you did, I think. What in God’s name did you mean by that? Did you mean . . . Is that what you meant by that just now? Hunting?”

  “Oh! Oh, yeah, yeah, right. That was the night you were with Mark.”

  “That’s right,” Spinneretta said, bitter about the innocent statement.

  “Yeah, you smelled like Hunting then too. That was the first time I smelled you like that.”

  “When you say hunting, do you mean . . . You mean like the Instinct?” She didn’t know if Kara would have understood the reference. But to her surprise, her sister made a noise of excitement.

  “Yeah, that sounds about right. I call it Hunting, but your way makes sense, too.”

  “You . . . ” She peeked out from under her arms at her little sister’s radiant face. “You know about that?”

  “Duh, of course I do?”

  A sharper pain came on the underside of Spinneretta’s calf, and the pain went right up her spine. “Oww, oww, oww!”

  “Whoa, that’s a big one!” A loud clink, and again the apparent weight of the fragment set Spinneretta’s heart aflutter.

  “Kara, how long have you known about this Hunting?”

  “I don’t know, I think I’ve always known about it. Why?”

  “I . . . I don’t know. For some reason, it never occurred to me that anyone else would have the same thing. Does Arthr know about it, too?”

  “I dunno, I don’t think so. I’ve never smelled it on him before.”

  She felt a softer tugging as Kara extracted a couple smaller pieces. “But . . . Why have you always known about it? Why did it take so long for me to figure out that it was there?”

  “I dunno. Maybe it’s like Mom’s always saying: kids grow up faster and faster these days.”

  “I don’t think this is what she’s talking about,” Spinneretta said. But then again, were they not speaking tangentially of the same thing? There were only so many things an instinct cared for, after all. Not that Kara would have followed that particular train of thought. Another pain stabbed just above the knob of her ankle. “Jesus, Kara, be careful!” Her voice warbled as the piece came free, and she found herself hungry for air.

  “Quit complaining, will ya? Next time maybe you shouldn’t stomp in a coffee table if you don’t want to get glass in your leg.”

  Spinneretta’s thoughts went utterly silent. Stricken by the girl’s contradiction, she looked up at her with a growing unease. “Wait. How did you know that’s what happened?”

  “Didn’t you say something about it?”

  “No?”

  “Oh. Well, I was watching from the stairs.”

  “You what!?” Her shock reconcentrated in her foot as Kara’s surgically precise legs extracted another blade. “K-Kara,” she said, panic growing. “How long . . . how much did you see?”

  “Oh, I saw everything.”

  All the heat in Spinneretta’s body flowed right to her cheeks. She covered her face with her hands and her spider legs followed them, forming a shield that was still porous to shame. “Wh . . . but, why? Why would you . . . ? Why didn’t you leave once you . . . ?”

  “Because I wanted to see what would happen.”

  “Oh, God, Kara . . . What is the matter with you?”

  “Are you embarrassed?”

  “I’m embarrassed for you. You can’t just . . . You . . . Ugh, forget it. I’m not reprimanding you until my foot is glass-free.” Spinneretta held a deep breath that lasted for two shard-removals. They had to be almost done by now. Her whole leg throbbed with each beat of her heart, and slowly but surely she began to breathe with a rhythm that was half-normal. “Kara. Never fall in love.”

  “Okay.”

  “It’s just a . . . Wait, why did you agree so quickly?”

  “I dunno. Aren’t I supposed to?”

  “No. You’re supposed to be surprised I would say something so absurd, and then listen to my well-thought-out reasoning that supports it.”

  “Oh. I’m sorry. Do you want to try again?”

  “No. The mood is ruined.” She covered her eyes with her forearms again, hoping her cool skin would absorb the heat that still lingered in her face. It was distracting enough that the next few pieces of glass came out with no more than ground molars. And then she felt something crawling across her hair. She started, and when her arms parted she found Cinnamon’s huge red eyes looking down at her. It opened its mouth and appeared to yawn. A clicking sound reverberated out of its throat, along with the suggestion of a far-off banshee-like wailing.

  A chill of horror. She remembered so clearly the gigantic eyes of the adults in the Web, and the forests of venomous teeth. A tremor of pain came to her upper arm. Her wound had mostly healed, and the swelling had long since gone down, but the soreness was still fresh. It would be so easy, she thought, to reach out her spider legs, wrap them around the juvenile, and snap its neck. Nip the danger in the bud, before it had a chance to hurt them. But there was no malice in its eyes. She saw only curiosity, innocence. Even if it was too dangerous to keep alive, there was no way she could dispose of the Leng cat herself. Especially since it was the only thing keeping Kara sane in Boredom Manor.

 
; “If you pet Cinnamon you’ll feel better,” Kara said as she worked at a buried shard of glass.

  “I think that’s the last thing that would make me feel better.”

  “It’s true! She can tell you’re feeling bad. That’s probably why she came to you.”

  “So it’s an unstoppable killing machine that also feeds off misery. Great.”

  As if sensing her rejection, the Leng cat hopped to the side and then onto her chest. It curled its spider legs beneath it and lay down. Spinneretta tried to shift herself out from beneath the thing, but a stabbing pain in her foot paralyzed her. She groaned a little as Kara extracted the shard and dropped it in the bowl. When the pain had released her nerves, she cracked her eyes open. Cinnamon still sat there, wide red eyes gleaming. With its bat-like ears laid flat against its head, and the thick fur obscuring the contours of its body, even Spinneretta had to admit it was kind of cute. For an apex predator, anyway. Tentatively, she reached out her hand toward Cinnamon’s fur and began to pet it. It was softer than she would’ve thought. Silky, almost. The creature made a guttural clicking sound in its throat, like an otherworldly version of purring.

  A few moments passed as she stroked the top layer of the Leng cat’s fur. Soon, Kara pulled the last bits of glass free from Spinneretta’s foot. “I think I got it all,” she said. Kara began wiping her leg with a wad of paper towels, soaking up the blood while humming a few notes of an old jump rope melody. “Okay, I’ll wrap you now.”

  Spinneretta watched as Kara filled her mouth with her special resin and started pulling the thick material into strands of silk. And as the wrapping began, there was a mild stinging sensation at the points where the web touched her broken skin. It had to be the web’s antiseptic agent doing its work.