Helixweaver (The Warren Brood Book 2)

by Bartholomew Lander

  The rabbit turned to flee, but the spider-girl’s attack was too sudden to escape. Mouth wide, Kara found the rabbit’s flank with her fangs. But though the strike landed, the rabbit still managed to wriggle out of her grip and burned off through the grass like a bolt of lightning. Kara pushed herself back up and smiled, a couple drops of blood on her lips. She turned to where Cinnamon sat watching. “See? Easy!”

  Annika crossed her arms. “Easy? Doesn’t hunting normally involve killing your prey?”

  Kara looked up at her with a blank expression. “Yeah?”

  “If you’re teaching that thing to hunt, then it might help to lead it to a kill, and not just chase your prey away.”

  Kara smiled, and with one spider leg gestured toward the tall grass where the rabbit disappeared. “Look.”

  Puzzled, Annika followed the girl’s extended leg toward the tangle of weeds, uncertain what she was looking for. Through the shadows of the grass curtains, she then saw that the bunny had stopped moving. It looked to be lying on its side, helpless. As that image became clearer, she realized that the poor animal’s muscles were twitching rapidly. Her mouth drifted open. “What the hell?”

  Kara giggled to herself, and her spider legs spread out across the ground again. “Come on, Cinnamon,” she said, starting toward the convulsing rabbit. With a small, yipping crackle, the Leng cat followed.

  But Annika just shook her head, confused. “Wait, how did . . . Did you poison it?”

  “It’s not poison,” Kara said, “it’s venom.” She parted the blades of tall grass with her legs, exposing the rabbit. “Come on, Cinnamon. You’re hungry, aren’t you?” Cinnamon stared at the furry thing, its own legs vibrating with a deliberate rhythm. It reared up and opened its mouth, revealing the forest of fangs within, and snapped at the downed creature.

  Annika approached where Kara sat, watching as Cinnamon had its way with the meal. “Kara, that venom,” she said. “What does it do, exactly?”

  The girl flopped into a cross-legged sit. “Umm, I think it just makes it so they can’t move. And their heartbeat gets really fast, I think. Why?”

  Annika tapped her fingernails against the grip of her Ruger. “That must be some really potent venom. It paralyzed that rabbit in a matter of seconds. I’ve never heard of a toxin that acts that fast.”

  Kara grinned at her, as though the potency of her venom were a matter of pride. “Yeah, it’s really quick! If I inject the acid with it, then they’ll die, too. Eventually. Cuz it like, eats them from inside, kinda. But I only do that if I’m really hungry.”

  Annika watched as the Leng cat tore into the rabbit and slurped down chunks of meat. An idea crept cautiously to the front of her mind as she thumbed her revolver’s cylinder. “Kara, I have a favor to ask.”

  On the balcony, Mark stood with his arms crossed over the railing, as had become something of a habit. The morning air tasted like salt and seaweed. That smell was beginning to wear on him after so many days. Down below, Annika was setting up another makeshift target range by the eucalyptus trees. Arthr and Kara were with her, and even that juvenile spider-legged beast was scampering hither-thither, pouncing on blades of grass like the world’s deadliest herbivore. He’d almost expected to see Spinneretta traipsing out with them, but so far she hadn’t shown. All the better. He’d have to duck out of sight were she to appear, to save face and avoid reliving that deathly embarrassment. Even after a whole night of reflection, he was no closer to an answer to what had happened or what he should do next. And worse, the more he thought about it, the more his mind gravitated back toward the heat of her body against his, the brush of her skin, the rush of their kiss . . .

  Damn it all. This is becoming ridiculous.

  Footsteps came from inside the home, and he held his breath. Not Spinny. Please, not Spinny.

  And when he heard those footsteps coming toward the balcony door, panic hit. The door creaked open. A moment of mental anti-gravity. And then relief. It was May who emerged, a glass of something brown in her hand. For a moment she just stood there, startled, as though she’d just walked in on something private. “Am I disturbing you?”

  “No,” he said quickly. “Of course not.”

  “Oh. Good.” She eased the door shut behind her. “I hope you don’t mind if I join you for a bit. It’s just so stuffy inside.”

  “By all means.”

  She sat down in a steel-framed chair beside the door. The painted floorboards groaned as she did.

  The warm scent of alcohol stung Mark’s nostrils. That scent, too, drew his mind back toward the previous night. “Drinking already?”

  She responded by taking a big gulp of the liquid. “It helps, somehow. It’s been quite a couple weeks, eh?”

  Mark grunted an affirmation. From below, the first gunshots broke the tranquility of the morning. Pounding cracks, wet against the moisture in the air.

  “It’s hard to believe this is all really happening,” May said. “I think I must still be in denial. It seems like just yesterday Spins was on her way to prom. I was so happy when I left her to it.” A pained sigh. “Unreal how things change on you without warning.”

  Thorns of guilt jabbed the walls of his stomach. “How is Ralph?”

  “Terrible. Even when he’s lucid, he just mumbles like a lunatic before falling all comatose again. If we weren’t shut off from the rest of the world now, I’d have him right back in the hospital. It’s like it broke him. Seeing that ultrasound.” She was quiet for a moment, and then chuckled a dark little parody of her normal laugh. “Perhaps this is karma.”

  He turned to meet her gaze. “What do you mean?”

  May licked her lips and opened her mouth to speak. And then froze. She shook her head. “No. It’s nothing. Sorry. God knows you’re not the person who needs to hear me airing my laundry.”

  “I don’t really mind.” Might help take my mind off of this whole thing.

  She gave him a tired look. “Oh? Well, let’s see then.” After a deep breath, she began to speak with a methodical cadence. “I just meant that it was karma for him. The universe’s paycheck for the time he tried to leave me.” Her eyes glistened with concealed pain. “See? Not exactly the kind of thing you’d have to worry about. So just forget I said anything, yeah? It’s not your problem.” She took a sip of her drink and began to laugh. “God, I must be falling apart to even think of that in a time like this. How self-serving.”

  Mark could only stare at her. He remembered the story Ralph had told him back in the study, when vodka had broken open his chest of secrets. The story ate at his stomach. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I did not wish to open old wounds.”

  She laughed a bitter sound. “No, it’s nothing. You didn’t do anything. I’ve just had a lot of time to think about the past lately.”

  “What happened?” Mark asked, blurting out the question before he could consider its weight.

  But there was a distant serenity in May’s cheeks. She looked as though she’d been waiting for the question, and had merely been unwilling to invite it herself. “Must’ve been around twelve years ago,” she said. “He’d always acted strange around our kids, but it started getting way worse. He started acting really distant, barely talked to any of us. He started staying up all night reading, drinking, everything.” She took a sip, and the ice cubes rattled against the glass. “One day, he didn’t come home from work. Didn’t take a sleuth to notice two suitcases were gone, along with a bunch of clothes. There was even a bunch of extra money in our bank account, for about what all of his stocks should have been worth. And I knew that he was gone.”

  “But he came back,” Mark said, recalling Ralph’s own version of the same story.

  “Well, of course. When he got back, he looked like he’d had a run-in with something that had scared him straight. He told me there was an emergency business trip to Denver or Dallas or something. Funny, considering it would’ve been the first business trip he’d ever taken for that company. Well, whatever. I was
thankful enough he’d come back, so I just smiled, told him that’s okay, honey, and swallowed it.”

  A chill frosted Mark’s lungs. “You knew the whole time. Ralph . . . ” He paused, debating whether or not he really wanted to bring up what the man had told him. “He does not seem like the type of man who would cheat on you.”

  “Cheat? I was never afraid of him cheating. It was leaving I was afraid of. And he did that. Almost. Besides, it was the lie that really ate at me. Whatever made him run out on us, he didn’t even think enough of me to tell the truth about it. What am I supposed to think about that?”

  “Sometimes you must lie to protect the people you love.”

  She scoffed. “Bullshit. Far better to live in a tasteless reality than get put in a decorated tank, like some kind of lizard.” Her fingers scuttled across her leg in demonstration. “I’m not a lizard. I don’t even like the damn things.” She closed her eyes and breathed out a pained sigh. “And in any case, whatever it was he wanted to keep from me, it doesn’t matter.”

  Mark rapped his fingers against the balcony’s railing, trying to time them with the gunshots coming from the eucalyptus trees. “You never forgave him?”

  “No, I did. I just could never forget what he did. And I think that’s the middle ground I’ve always needed to find. If you forget the past you’re doomed to repeat it, but that doesn’t mean I need to hold grudges over it.” Her lips paused at the edge of the glass and a cynical shrug rolled its way through her shoulders. “It looks like the universe was a bit less forgiving than I, though.”

  “Middle ground . . . ” He took a deep breath and studied her sad expression. In that moment, in what he thought might have been a recurring psychosis, he thought she resembled his own mother. You can’t bottle up thorny things, he heard her saying in his mind.

  A forlorn laugh broke his train of thought. “Sorry,” she said. “Normally I’m not so dark. But you know that. What am I thinking, dumping all that on you? Jesus.”

  “I’ve been thinking about my family a lot lately,” Mark said, again blurting it out without adequate censorship. “I’ve been thinking about all the things that happened back home.”

  May looked up from her glass. “Mmm? You’re finally ready to open up about that?”

  “No. It’s just . . . I did some terrible things back there. Things that, even if I could apologize, they would never forgive me for.” His fingernails dug into his palms as his thoughts drifted back to Ellie.

  “Never paid attention in church, did you? There’s no such thing as something unforgivable.”

  “I find that hard to swallow.”

  “Aren’t you being a bit dramatic?”

  “I may be,” he allowed. “Though with good reason.”

  A smile came over her face. “Have you ever asked them?”

  Those words slipped around his throat like a noose. “Of course not.”

  “Then how can you possibly know what you did was unforgivable?” At his silence, May hummed a contemplative note. “No matter how badly you fell out, no parent could hate their own children the way you think they can. You’ll learn that one day when you have kids of your own. I bet your mother is worried sick about you.”

  He bit his lip. “My mother died when I was very young.” The half-truth hurt to speak aloud, and he had to fight back even harder against the ever-rising tide of guilt.

  “I’m so sorry to hear that.” A silent moment, broken by a single gunshot from below. The wind had changed directions. “Do you believe in heaven, Mark?”

  “No.”

  “Well, neither do I, but if there is one then I’m sure your mother is proud of you. To put that another way: thank you.”

  “Huh?”

  “I don’t know what happened between you and your family, Mark. But I have a weird feeling that if you hadn’t shown up at our house, things would be very different right now.” Her chin dipped toward the floor. “Whatever madness our lives have become, everything would be worse if you weren’t around. So thanks for giving enough of a damn to get involved, I guess. Even if Ralph doesn’t appreciate it, I do. And I’m sure the others do as well.”

  You’ve got it precisely backwards, Mark thought. It was his choice to go after Simon Dwyre that directly led to the chaos that had enveloped Grantwood. If he hadn’t gone there in search of Lily, the Warrens would still be living in safe, blissful ignorance. Like lizards in a tank.

  “Whatever happened,” May continued, “you have to remember that people live by making compromises. If you’ve got bad blood and there’s really no hope of making amends, cut ’em loose! If you can’t save a rotting bridge, then burn it down. At least that way no kids go climbing on it and get hurt. Then go build a new bridge somewhere else. Nobody can live in the past without sacrificing their future. That’s why you have to find a middle ground. There’s a life lesson for you.” A sobering laugh. “But, then again, I’m just a drunk mother whose husband is two thumb tacks from the loony bin, so what would I know?”

  Mark turned her words over in his head. Living in the past. Sacrificing the future. “Why is it that you always seem to end up lecturing me?”

  “You don’t have a mother, sweetie. Somebody’s gotta pick up the slack.”

  He forced a smile, and turned toward the door. “I thank you for the advice.”

  “Where are you going?”

  His hand came to rest upon the doorknob. “To think.”

  May made a disappointed noise in her throat and rattled the now-lonely ice in her glass. “You sure you don’t want to drink with me?”

  “That’s really more of an Annika thing. I’m sure she’d be more than happy to drink with you when she’s done shooting.” And with a cordial smile and nod, he excused himself back inside.

  After concluding the day’s shooting practice, Annika returned to the makeshift office she’d set up in the middle bedroom. Paperwork littered the dresser, and it was at last nearing completion. Despite their best efforts to wait out the Grantwood crisis, there was little question about what was going to happen at the end of their stay. One piece of their puzzle, however, was still missing.

  The phone rang three times against her ear. Then a cheerful voice picked up. “This is Cathy.”

  “Cathy,” Annika said, a smile forcing itself upon her. “You have one guess who this is before I burn your house down.”

  A laugh answered her. “How’ve you been, Annika? What can I help you with?”

  Annika hummed a long note as she flopped back onto the bed. She pried her left boot off with her heel, and then struggled to complete the symmetry. “You sure you don’t want some small talk first? You’re not going to be happy with me if we just get to the point.”

  “Let me be the judge of that. I’m pretty busy, you know.”

  “This line secure?”

  “Of course.”

  “Good. I’ve got a job for you. It’s a big one.”

  “Again? How big, exactly?”

  “Five people.”

  “Five. Are you out of your damn mind?”

  Annika chuckled. “Relax. I’ve already done the legwork on two of them.”

  “What do you mean?”

  She took to curling her toes. It felt like a callus was starting to form between the cracks. “I mean I’m using some recycled information.”

  “I’d think you of all people would know better than that. That’s not going to make anything easier.”

  “Yes, it will. They were married. The other three I need are their children, so it’s wango-bango, in and out before they know what hit them.”

  She heard Cathy typing on the other end. “Three? Hold on, I’ll make a note of this. What ages are we looking at?”

  “Let’s go with seventeen, fifteen, and . . . eleven? Girl, boy, girl.”

  “Uh-huh. What items in the catalog do you need for these three?”

  “Socials. Birth certificates. If you want to go above and beyond, I could probably use a Minnesota state driver�
��s license for the oldest.”

  “Not a federal document, can’t help you there.”

  “No biggie. Was worth a shot.”

  Some more typing came. In the background, she heard the sound of an old ink ribbon printer starting up. “I’ll take it I shouldn’t ask what you’ve been up to?”

  “I’d like it if you didn’t.” A knock came to the door, and Annika bolted upright. A shining smile between cascades of blond hair. Annika bounded to her feet at the sight of the girl.

  Kara mouthed something, indicating the vial of liquid in her outstretched hand. Annika gave a thumbs up and accepted it. The girl returned the gesture and, giggling, headed back out into the hall with a clattering Cinnamon at her heels.

  “Do you already have names picked out?” Cathy asked.

  “Hallström.”

  The woman on the other end paused. “Ahh. I see. You’re lucky I remember how to spell that.”

  “Luck has nothing to do with me.” She held the vial between her thumb and pointer, and gently turned it over. The fluid was mostly clear, with cloudy ribbons twisting and breaking in slow motion within. She turned it over again. The trapped air bubble climbed to the top, leaving a subtle disturbance across the surface. It seemed to be just a little viscous. Perfect. Now she just needed to find a drill and some candles. Sure wish I had my case trimmer.

  After a few moments, the typing sound ceased once more. “Okay. You have first names in mind?”

  “I’ll get back to you on that one. Just make the preparations.”

  “Uh-huh. Now, just to let you know, this isn’t going to be as easy as last time. It’s hard to fudge records with—”

  Her fingers closed around the vial in a loose fist. “Yeah, yeah, hard to do, contacts have prices, whatever. I’m digging deep for this. This is pretty much my eleventh-hour Plan Z. We’ll pay. But we need the numbers fast.”