Kicking It

by Faith Hunter

  Red, of course, blocked my way. I stared straight into his eyes, gave him the gorgon glare, and put my force of will behind it, ordering, “Freeze.”

  He stiffened, and I waved a hand in front of him to be sure it had taken. When he didn’t so much as blink, I stepped around him, my inner alarm klaxons blaring so loudly I could barely hear myself think. Like I didn’t know danger lurked behind that curtain. Steeling myself to push past the adrenaline-fueled fear that wanted to flood my system, I lifted the curtain to slip into the inner sanctum . . . right into the clutches of Ariana Weaver.

  What use was an alarm, Apollo would ask me, if I didn’t heed it? A good question. One I hoped to live long enough to explore.

  I stared into Ariana’s shades, hoping I’d be able to see the eyes behind them, but as far as I could tell, they were black holes. I knew I’d have no luck getting through to her, not unless I could knock her glasses askew, but she was holding me by the upper arms, and grinning, her lips curled up strangely to reveal fangs. Fangs. I’d never been agog before in my life, but this would probably qualify.

  “Welcome to my Parlor, said the spider to the fly,” she crooned, and pincers came out of the sides of her mouth, explaining the strange curl. They clashed ominously and everything fell into place.

  The Parlor. The bustle gown, all the better to hide an extended thorax. The dark glasses . . . If I knocked them off, I suddenly knew I’d find multifaceted eyes—spider’s eyes. Ariana Weaver . . . Arachne? Here? I’d expect maybe a dark cave somewhere, but L.A.? Of course, she was looking surprisingly human these days. The gods’ power had faded so much when their worship had waned . . . Maybe the transformative magic that had made her into a monster was waning as well. It would explain so much. But not what had become of the missing men. Had she spun them up in her web? Made a meal of them? Was that why there’d been nothing left to find?

  “I’m no fly,” I told her, trying out my bravado. Inside, though, I was quaking. Of all the ways I didn’t want to die, becoming a monster’s meal was probably at the top of the list.

  “No, you aren’t, at that. I saw what you did to Red. I have eyes everywhere, my dear. Eyes in the back of my head . . . or mounted on my walls. It’s all the same. I’ve never had gorgon get. It will be a new experience for me.”

  Her tongue slipped out from between the mandibles that were distorting her speech. It was black as night, but surprisingly human in shape. It was a wonder she didn’t cut it on her teeth.

  “Do you like games?” she asked.

  Ariadne did, if I remembered my mythology right. That’s what had gotten her arachnified to begin with—or rather, given spiders their classification name, since she’d owned it first—Athena’s insult that Arachne would dare think herself exceptional enough to challenge the goddess with her weaving.

  “Um, sure, as long as it’s a fair contest and the stakes are right.”

  “What do you say to a life for a life?”

  Fear scrabbled at my heart, gripping hard, squeezing until I could barely breathe. I’d sent Apollo into her lair. If anything happened to him, it would be all my fault.

  She cocked her head at my reaction. I wished I could read her eyes. “Ah, I see, you thought I meant the Olympian. Yes, I knew who he was the second he reached out. Be assured, little gorgon, he is still playing my game. He hasn’t yet lost and so is not yet subject to my rules. However, his luck has just taken a turn for the worse. He will be mine soon enough. You see, in my Parlor, the house always wins. No, gorgon girl. I’ve had you checked out, as I do all new employees. I know who you are and that you’re here for the scientist—Athena’s own. His blood will be all the sweeter because of it, but he is hardly sporting. Now, you, my love”—she chucked me fondly under the chin, and it was all I could do not to recoil—“you, unless I’m very much mistaken, are a fighter.”

  I glared at her, feeling those sunglasses like a barrier that even my screw you look couldn’t penetrate. A deal . . . my life for Gareth’s. As if I had a real decision to make. Without me, he had no chance. Still, it was a far cry from putting myself into Apollo’s debt for some guy I didn’t even know to giving my life for him. Hell, except for my retainer, I hadn’t even been paid for the job, and here I was facing death to finish it. Because I was pretty sure that’s what she was suggesting.

  She watched avidly as all of this flitted across my face and stopped me with a raised hand just as I would have given her my answer. “But wait. I have just realized that I hold all of the cards. The scientist, the gorgon, and, soon, the god. I have no reason to give any of you up.”

  “I’m not yours to hold. None of us are.”

  “My dear, possession is nine-tenths of the law.” She gave me a shake, hard enough to make my teeth rattle. “And right now, I am in possession. So, we will make it double or nothing. Triple, even. If you survive, you all go free. If not . . .”

  The alarm klaxons weren’t just screaming. They were about to shake apart. The house always wins. I strongly suspected that Ariadne liked to stack the deck. If she thought even for a moment that I would survive, she would never have made the offer.

  “I can’t speak for Apollo,” I said, feeling him from a room away or more. He was aware of my distress. How could he miss it? And his own worry was creating a feedback loop I could barely stand. But we couldn’t read each other’s minds, and I couldn’t warn him or tell him to shut it, no matter how much I might want to.

  “I don’t see that you have a choice,” she said with a truly scary smile.

  She whipped off the glasses with a flourish and I flinched from her compound eyes and the million visions of my doom.

  Red tore through the curtain just then, ready to hit something. He stopped cold when he saw me locked in Ariadne’s grasp, and a sick smile spread across his face.

  “The Pit?” he asked, completely unsurprised by the sight of Ariadne exposed.

  Ariadne continued to stare me down. “What will it be, my dear? Will you champion your companions or shall I arrange the scientist’s sudden death?”

  As if there was a choice.

  Red grabbed me and began to pull me away as Ariadne called to a minion unseen, perhaps on one of the many cameras she’d mentioned, “Rally the troops and tell them to place their bets. Challenge in ten!”

  Ten minutes? Who were the troops? Her minions? Those betting on the outcome of the battle? How frequent an occurrence was this that she could pull it all together so quickly? Even though I was facing my own doom, the questions wouldn’t stop. Or the urge to investigate.

  Red swept me into a freight elevator, and thick metal doors closed ominously behind us. He patted me down, stealing my only weapons—the pepper spray, lock picks, and even my hidden dagger. Once he’d secured them all on his own person, he took a key from his pants pocket and inserted it into a slot on the elevator panel, which opened up to reveal a second set of buttons. He pressed the button for the basement, I assumed—and my heart sank as we started to descend. My precog had gone past high alert and onto overload. My head rang like the inside of a bell, and the reverb shot all-points bulletins to my extremities and everywhere in between.

  “Enough!” I yelled. I must have said it out loud, because the word bounced around the elevator and seemed to strike Red right between the eyes, if the look he shot me was any indication.

  The alarm klaxons quieted suddenly, leaving me with a resounding silence in which to think. If only I was equipped.

  Hard to plan when you didn’t know what you faced and were armed only with a reflective bikini and stiletto heels. Hey, if they put me in a giant microwave, I’d show them. I’d blow that sucker right out.

  Somehow I didn’t think it would be that simple.

  When the elevator doors opened, we faced a concrete bunkerlike basement, the kind where you might wait out a nuclear holocaust—the kind where no one could hear you scream. He dragged
me by the arm down a bare hallway. I desperately wanted to freeze him again, then grab his key and get the hell out, hopefully with Gareth and Apollo in tow. But my alarms started to blare again, and I knew I’d never get out that way. Ariadne had the whole place wired. Probably she could even shut down the elevator remotely. I suspected the only way out was to play her game.

  Red opened a door along the hallway, hurled me inside, and slammed the door shut behind me. It closed like a vault door, and I immediately felt like I didn’t have enough air, though I knew it was all in my head. The room was dark but for a single bare bulb too high to reach. To call it a room was actually giving it too much credit. It was more like a closet of poured concrete. There was a crack running down one wall, but it wasn’t even big enough to fit a pinky nail into, and it had been sealed over by spackle as white as bone. Even the single bump in the wall, a ledgelike projection probably meant to be a bench, was concrete, all smooth edges. It wasn’t nearly high enough to stand on to get at the bulb—not that I thought a few pieces of jagged glass would mean the difference between life and death, but you never knew.

  The wait almost killed me all by itself. There were few things to do in that tiny concrete room but braid my wild hair as tightly as I could to keep it from getting in my way, panic, and kiss my ass good-bye. Only my ass and I didn’t have that kind of relationship.

  The door didn’t open again. Instead, an entire wall slid back, directly across from the door through which Red had thrown me. I wasn’t ready for it when it happened. Or for the roar that rushed in along with the air. I blinked into the lights that blinded me and kept me from seeing what awaited me, but whatever it was, we had an enthusiastic audience. Spectators . . . hungry for blood. Mine ran cold.

  I stepped forward, out of my little box, into a narrow corridor with high walls on either side—concrete, of course—that funneled me into a . . . I blinked, my eyes adjusting, but my brain slower to accept . . . a coliseum. Old-school. I stepped out onto a round concrete floor surrounded on all sides by stadium seating. It wasn’t huge—more theater-in-the-round than high school auditorium. The seats were more than half filled, but when I looked around, up toward the lights, I saw cameras as well and wondered if this was being live-streamed to a larger, private audience. I wondered again what I’d be facing and who would be the odds-on favorite. At a guess, it wouldn’t be me. Was there bidding on how long I’d take to die? How many I’d take with me? The manner of my death? I fought not to think like that.

  Ariadne was up on a dais with a microphone. In the days of lapel mics and others so small that you could barely see them with the naked eye, this seemed like an affectation, but people in concrete houses didn’t have any stones to throw. I’d barely blinked it all into view when she began.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, I have a very special treat for you! Today, our gladiator is something truly unique. The blood of the ancients runs through her. I have seen her in action—or rather, inaction—for here is a woman who can, quite literally, stop men in their tracks.”

  The crowd hooted and cheered. One shout of “You go, girl!” was even in a feminine voice. I tried not to let it go to my head. An easy thing when it was spinning with so many thoughts at once. Ariadne had just outed me. Oh sure, most of her crowd probably thought it was showmanship rather than anything serious. And likely there was some kind of code of silence when it came to fights to the death, as in talk and you’re next. But still, a whole host of bloodthirsty and potentially dangerous people now knew my secret. If I ever went up against any of them, it would be without the element of surprise. I couldn’t even prove Ariadne wrong by keeping my power to myself. It was truly all I had.

  “Now, my pets today are terribly hungry.” She raised a hand dramatically in the air and let it fall. A door slid back across the arena from me, and my knees almost gave out. There was skittering, and so many legs and bodies that I couldn’t tell one from another. All segmented, all arachnid. But they weren’t getting any closer . . . for the moment. A clear glass barrier was the only thing that held them back. Of all the ways to die, spider swarm had never even been on my radar, but now that it was, I realized there had to be at least half a million ways I’d prefer to go. And only one solution: I had to win.

  “I had a meal prepared for them, but our gladiator has valiantly decided to stand in for him. If she wins, he goes free.” She gestured dramatically and yet another door slid open, revealing a man wrapped in a web like a cocoon. I wondered if he could even breathe with all the spider silk over his face. I had to look hard to see his chest still rising and falling. I couldn’t tell if it was Gareth, but whoever the poor bastard was, I was getting him out. Somehow. “If she loses”—the crowd cheered in anticipation—“not only are their lives forfeited, but I collect this sweet specimen of manhood to sweeten the deal.”

  Red brought a hooded figure forward, but I could tell from the breadth of the shoulders and the narrowness of the waist who it was even before the hood was ripped away. Apollo, looking stunned. His gaze didn’t immediately drop down to me. He looked odd. Loopy. As if he’d been drugged. Or mesmerized. I couldn’t look for any help from that direction. Dammit, spider-woman would pay.

  “Let the games . . . BEGIN!” she shouted, throwing her arm up and snapping above her head like a matador.

  Just like that, the seething mass of spiders was released as the glass fell rather than slid away and they swarmed over it. A spike of panic drove into my heart like a needle jam-packed with adrenaline, like the heart-attack scene from Pulp Fiction. I saw movement over on the dais and risked taking my focus off the arachnid army just long enough to see Apollo’s whole body jolt, as if his heart had been goosed by my very own shot of adrenaline. He looked to me, fear and disbelief in his eyes, and I couldn’t risk seeing more.

  The army was almost on me.

  “Freeze!” I yelled at the top of my lungs, raking my gaze over them, desperate to get my point across. Some obeyed, but they were only shaken off or overrun by the others, who kept on coming. Furry, sticklike, black, white, and gray, some bigger than my hand, they raced for me.

  Frantic, I hopped on one foot as I pulled off a boot and swung it like a bat, heel out, at the oncoming tide. I swept a few aside, but others immediately took their places. One clung to the heel and started a slow crawl my way. I yelped and dropped the boot, my one weapon. Probably not my brightest moment.

  “FREEZE!” I yelled again. It was all I had, but a tone sounded at almost the same time, and I could barely hear more than the first letter of the word myself, as if someone had grabbed a tuning fork and hit whatever frequency canceled me out.

  Legs reached out for my bare shin, and I kicked in a panic. Not gracefully, like I’d been taught in kickboxing. Not effectively. This had to stop. Already one spider climbed. Another leaped for me. I planted my bare foot and lashed out with the booted one, skewering the jumper, impaling it on my stiletto heel. Others were immediately airborne. I kicked, slashed, and whirled. In the groove now, but for as many as I knocked aside or impaled, others reached me, were climbing and crawling and biting. My bare foot was going numb. I didn’t know how long it would be before it was no good to me at all, before I lost my balance and fell to the floor, only to be overrun by spiders.

  Not going to happen. I still had my reflective gear. If only I could . . .

  I batted away the spiders that had crawled the highest and looked toward the stands, trying to catch Apollo’s eye.

  “Apollo!” I yelled. “The sun?”

  He looked desperately around, and I thought I saw him nod at me before something skittered across my face, and I squeezed my eyes closed in reflex, swatting desperately at the multi-legged menace. I heard something explode and forced my eyes open again. Another explosion, and glass rained down from the ceiling, from the inset lights there, and the light itself flared. I swatted and bashed and whirled, noting that my left arm wasn’t doing any more than floppin
g at that moment, but I had to expose enough of my shiny foil farce of an outfit to catch the light. I felt like a Dutch oven as I started to heat up. There were inhuman shrieks from the arachnids all around, and I whirled like a possessed disco ball, throwing off light and spiders in equal measure. I was smoking . . . literally. So hot I had no idea whether it was the lights on my shiny spots or a fever from all my spider bites. My leg gave out, and I went down hard, falling at an awkward angle, limbs not working well enough to catch me, but nothing jumped on my face, and in a moment I realized that the tone had ended and that the spectators were on their feet, roaring with elation or anger . . . I didn’t know. Didn’t care.

  But I looked up at the dais and saw through swollen eyes Apollo, still standing, looking down at me with sadness and approval.

  Arachne rounded on him, as if to take out her anger, but he clocked her right between the eyes, snapping the bridge of her glasses so that they fell to the ground along with her. Spider lady was down for the count, which I thought meant that I could finally pass out.

  No, I couldn’t. There was still Gareth to save. I had to make sure . . .

  My brain wasn’t working so well. I felt hot and slow and numb and hurt all at the same time, but I forced myself to sit and then to pull off my one remaining boot . . . clumsily. It took me three tries before Apollo was there to help me.

  “You okay?” he asked.

  It was a stupid question and I didn’t dignify it with an answer. Instead I pointed at the man cocooned in the web. He rushed to Gareth, and I saw him tear the webbing away, saw Gareth’s face start to appear and could confirm that it was the missing scientist. Then I passed out.

  —

  I woke some time later in Apollo’s arms . . . in Apollo’s bed, even, when he shook me awake with, “Here, eat this.”