“Who was calling?” demanded Sam. Apparently, my brief time in the safe harbor of his good graces was coming to an end, and we were once again sailing the choppy seas of him being a total asshole all the goddamn time. That was almost comforting. I’d only been with the carnival for a little while, but I had a lot more experience with Sam being a dick than I did with him being nice to me.
“Insurance,” I said. “I’m the sole survivor of the family carnival, which doesn’t come with all that much in the way of money, but does come with a lot of ‘hey, we want to make sure you’re not secretly a serial killer.’”
“Are you?”
“No.”
“Good to know.” Sam looked at the closed RV door. The weird cottony stuff still covered the windows. In the daylight, it was much easier to tell that it was webbing, piled thick and tight against the glass. “How did we miss this?”
“You knew her. Them. They were friends of yours. I mean, I don’t know about you, but I don’t spend a lot of time waiting for my friends to turn into killers.”
“You said ‘killers.’” He turned to look at me. “Don’t you mean ‘monsters’?”
Ah. So this was what had taken us back to Assholeville, where Sam was mayor and I was a threat to his way of life. “No,” I said. “I meant ‘killers.’ Umeko wasn’t a monster. If she’s been with you for years and seemed human all that time . . . maybe she didn’t know how to be a Jorōgumo without hurting people. I’d probably freak out pretty hard if I woke up one morning with four extra limbs and no hands. There was no one here to tell her it was normal and teach her what to do.”
Sam stared at me. “You’re serious.”
“I am. I mean, I’m sorry Pablo died, I don’t know if he was like your BFF or something, although I guess probably not if it’s been this long without you noticing. But it wasn’t Umeko’s fault that she didn’t have a guidebook for being what she was. She was killing people. That’s a choice she made, and I’m not sorry she paid for it. I am sorry she wound up in that situation in the first place.” I shook my head. “If I were an actual spider-centaur, I’d go to Comic-Con as the Stalk from Saga and get my picture taken with every famous person I could find.”
Sam was still staring at me, looking increasingly dubious. “Were those actual words, or did you get nervous and vomit up a bunch of random syllables?”
“It’s good to know that even when you’re uncomfortable, you can still be a dick,” I said. “I get why you’re uncomfortable. I’d be uncomfortable, too, if our positions were reversed. And I sort of get why your grandmother is letting me look into this with you.”
“Why?”
“Because I don’t think you like humans much, and that’s sort of dangerous, given how outnumbered you are.” I left Sam gaping at me as I walked up the steps to Umeko’s RV. The door wasn’t locked. It probably should have been. I took one last breath of fresh air, pushed the door open, and stepped inside.
Being a two-person unit, this RV was substantially larger than mine, although it followed most of the same structural notes: there’s only so much that can be done with a house on wheels. The door was connected to the main living space, the front room and kitchen, while a short hall at the back led to the bedroom and chemical toilet. At least, I assumed that was where it went: it was sort of hard to tell, on account of all the webbing.
It wasn’t just the windows Umeko had covered in thick, cottony strands. It was the walls, and the ceiling, and the furniture, creating a silken tunnel leading where the hall had been. It looked like a tarantula’s burrow. It looked like the sort of thing that would make a Jorōgumo feel safe when everything was falling apart around her.
The floor was relatively free of webbing. I picked my way carefully across the room to what looked like a bookshelf, based on the shape it made through the thread, pulling a knife from inside my shirt and beginning to slice my way inside. The webs here had been exposed to the air long enough that they’d lost most of their stickiness; this wasn’t a hunting burrow. It was home.
Cutting through the silk was unsurprisingly difficult. The stuff was thick and sturdy, intended to form a permanent barrier. I kept working until I reached the bookshelf, peeling sheets of webbing aside as I looked at the titles. There were several books on Japan, and a bestiary I recognized from our library at home. I worked it free, flipping through until I found the entry on the Jorōgumo. Umeko had scribbled notes in the margins all around the description of the yōkai, culminating in an inky scrawl.
“‘My skin is not my own,’” I read aloud. “‘Things are moving inside me. How do I make this stop? Help. Help.’ Sam?”
“Yeah?” His voice came from right behind me, gruff and heavy with suspicion.
I hadn’t heard him enter: calling his name had been an educated guess. It’s always nice to know that I can still predict the movements of my enemies. “Did Umeko know?” I turned to face him. “About you?”
He raised an eyebrow. It was impressive, given how low his hairline currently was; the expression caused the eyebrow to effectively disappear, turning his entire face into a quizzical look. “I don’t think she could have missed it,” he said. “People who don’t like the fact that the boss’s kid is a monkey don’t last long around here.”
“She still thought she was totally alone.” I handed him the book, and watched as he read Umeko’s notes. His eyebrow dropped back into its original position. His whole face fell a moment later, leaving him looking despondent and ashamed. “I guess monkeys still being mammals meant she didn’t feel like she could come to you when she started to change.”
“I had a crush on her when I was a kid,” he admitted. “She was pretty, and she laughed a lot, and I thought maybe she’d be my girlfriend. She told me she was too old for me and too different from me, and one day I’d meet a nice fūri girl and settle down. So she knew the name for what I am. I don’t know why she wouldn’t ask for help.”
I did. My family is accepting of all the differences in the world. No one batted an eye when my grandparents adopted Sarah, and Johrlac are commonly accepted as the most dangerous cryptids in the world. We have two dead aunts, my cousin is half-incubus, my other cousin is half-succubus, and our walls are full of talking mice. And I still hadn’t told them when my fingers started getting hot, or when I’d accidentally set fire to my sheets in the night. Some things are a step too far. They’re terrifying and personal, and telling people about them would make them real. Worse, telling people about them might make those people look at you differently. It might make them change the way they treat you. I wanted to be Antimony Price, little sister, roller derby girl, and journeyman cryptozoologist, not Antimony Price, living fire hazard. So I’d kept my mouth shut in the beginning, and the more time that passed, the more impossible it had felt to tell.
“Maybe she was scared,” I said quietly. “Don’t you ever get scared?”
“All the time,” said Sam.
I looked at him, and he looked at me, and the silence between us stretched out into something sharp and new, something I couldn’t put a name on. Which was, naturally, when the webbing next to my left hand burst into flames.
“Shit!” I yelped, and began swatting at the fire, trying to beat it out. If the whole web went up, we were both in a lot of trouble.
The bestiary hit the floor with a thump as Sam dove out of the RV. I took a breath to start cursing at him, and stopped as he dashed back inside, now holding a bucket.
“Get out of the way!” he shouted.
I dove to the side. He doused the flame with water. The smell of char and damp spider web filled the RV. I coughed. Sam dropped the bucket.
“What the fuck, Annie?” he demanded. “Are you some sort of pyro?”
“No,” I said. “I . . . I don’t . . . I don’t know anything about Jorōgumo webbing. Maybe it’s really flammable.” There it was: the proof that sometimes, telling
the truth was too much to ask. Sam wasn’t a friend, but he was potentially an ally, and I didn’t want him looking at me like I was a freak. It says something about my idea of “normal” that I thought the man who walked like a monkey was going to judge me for setting a few fires with my mind.
“So be more careful,” he said. “I don’t feel like hauling your ass out of the fire.”
“Yes, sir,” I said. The bookshelf was soaked: if there were any more clues to be found there, they’d need to wait until it dried. Maybe the bodies—
I stopped. Keeping my voice very level and calm, I asked, “Sam? Where are the bodies?”
“We put Umeko in the bedroom. That’s where . . .” He stopped. Swallowing hard, he continued, “That’s where we found the cocoons.”
I followed his gaze to the webbed tunnel. “I always liked haunted houses,” I said, and began walking in that direction.
It must have been hard for Umeko to move around the RV when transformed. The tunnel was narrower than her body had been, and while she could squeeze, the positioning of her legs meant she’d probably preferred to walk with them spread out at her sides, giving her greater control. I didn’t know how long she’d been able to assume her full spider form, but it looked like she’d never been able to let herself live openly as what she really was. Maybe it was wrong of me to feel bad for someone who’d been responsible for so many deaths. I couldn’t help myself. Umeko had been a victim of circumstance, just like the people she’d killed.
The bedroom door, like the floor, was unwebbed. I opened it, and there was Umeko, still in spider form, sprawled across the bed with her limbs all akimbo and her mouth hanging open, mandibles limp between human lips. Her abdomen was a deflated sack, leaking unspeakable fluids onto the duvet. The smell of decay was in the air, faint enough that it seemed to be coming entirely from Umeko herself.
And then there were the cocoons.
As Emery had said, there were five of them, large enough and with a distinctive enough shape that there was no question they were human. The one nearest the bed was oddly incomplete; a man’s head protruded from the top, skin drawn tight across the skull, a rose tattoo on the side of his neck. I frowned before climbing up onto the bed, careful to avoid the fluids leaking from Umeko, and beginning to slice the cocoon open.
“Uh, you didn’t say anything about playing with the corpses,” said Sam. “I am not here for corpse-bothering. Honestly, I’d rather not be here at all.”
“I’m not corpse-bothering,” I said. “I’m checking something.” I continued to slice at the webs covering the hapless Pablo until I exposed his neck and shoulders. There it was, as I’d more than half-expected: a vicious puncture wound in the flesh above his collarbone. It looked like the sort of thing that would have been left behind if Umeko had bitten someone. If there was any mercy to the placement of the thing, it was that he’d probably bled out before her venom could kill him.
And she had loved him. She’d left her own space to share his—no small thing, in a world where privacy was so precious and so hard to come by. There were no signs of predation on his flesh; I didn’t want to completely unwrap him, but every part of him I could see was still intact, if withered and wasted away.
“I don’t think she meant to do it,” I said, looking at the wound. “I think she moved in with Pablo because she was scared and thought she could control it, and then he walked in on her, or she shifted in her sleep, and when he screamed, she bit him. Instinct took over. She loved him, and she killed him, and after that, there was no way she could tell anyone what was happening to her. They would have looked at her like she was a monster.” I hadn’t known her, but I could absolutely understand why she hadn’t wanted that to happen.
And then she’d become a monster, because that was how she’d been thinking of herself. Sometimes we change in terrible ways without even realizing it.
Sam’s tail nervously twisted around his waist, twining and knotting in a way that seemed to soothe him, at least a little. “We should have realized something was wrong. I should have noticed when I stopped seeing Pablo around.”
“Can’t change the past. Can just try to do better in the future.” I climbed off the bed, leaving the ill-fated Pablo webbed to the wall. I hoped he’d been happy with Umeko, before the changes she was undergoing had killed him. I hoped he’d known she didn’t mean to do it.
“What are you doing now?”
“Just looking.” The other four cocoons were the victims that had attracted the attention of the Covenant in the first place. Somehow, their intelligence teams had missed one. I wasn’t going to report that part. Anything that encouraged the Covenant to improve their surveillance wasn’t a good thing as far as I was concerned. “Has Umeko been eating normally? I mean, have you seen her in the mess tent with the rest of the show?”
“Yeah,” he said. “She’s mostly been drinking protein shakes and stuff, but she’s been eating. Why?”
“Because some spiders will web up prey for later. For lean times. They eat what they can and save what they can’t.” Please, let me have this, I thought, bringing the knife toward the first of the cocoons. Please, give me one good thing, to make up for Umeko, and the instincts she didn’t get to choose. Please.
“I don’t understand.”
“Just cross your fingers, okay?” Corpses would be difficult to dispose of without endangering the carnival. Living victims would be even harder. Somehow, I thought everyone involved would be cool with the complication.
Gingerly, I cut the webbing away, peeling it back from the pale face of the boy Umeko had stolen. He was young, maybe seventeen, with a strong jaw and those annoyingly long eyelashes that always seem to go to the boys. I pressed the first two fingers of my left hand against his neck, counting slowly as I waited.
I had just reached ten when his heart thumped, once.
“He’s alive,” I said, and started cutting again, faster this time. “Sam, help me. We need to get them out of here.”
“What?”
“They’re alive!”
Sam rushed to help me, and together, we lowered the first survivor to the floor.
They weren’t all alive: only two, the first and the last, had survived what Umeko had done. The other two had partially liquefied inside their cocoons, and a substantial amount of what should have been there was missing. Umeko had been doing her best to stay away from human flesh, but without someone to help her balance her diet, the protein shakes hadn’t been able to cut it.
There was no egg sac.
It was odd. I was furious at the loss of life, but I still felt terrible for Umeko. What she’d been through, what she’d been forced to do by her own body. None of this was her fault. She’d done it, and she’d paid for it, but it hadn’t been her choice, and it hadn’t had to happen.
If the Covenant hadn’t wiped out so many of the Jorōgumo, maybe Umeko would have had a supportive community around her, one that could tell her how to handle the changes she was going through. If humans hadn’t reacted so badly to the idea of sharing the world with people who weren’t like us, maybe she wouldn’t have become a killer. Sometimes monsters are made, not born.
Neither of the survivors had any memory of what had happened to them, or any idea of how much time had passed. Emery let them call their parents, hovering nearby while they explained that the carnival had saved them, not stolen them. Maybe it was the fact that any memories they did have would center on a giant spider, but both boys sounded utterly sincere as they spun a tale of being knocked out cold until the heroic carnies—me and Sam, who had been conspicuously absent since the teens woke up—rescued them. Emery agreed to hold the show where it was until their parents could come and pick them up.
The teens who hadn’t made it were still in Umeko’s RV. Unless the police did a door-to-door search, the bodies wouldn’t be found—and the police weren’t going to do a door-to-d
oor search. They didn’t have any reason, and the only person they knew had died had been a carnie, not one of their own.
Emery was pressing mugs of tea on the boys. I slipped out.
Sam wasn’t in the mess tent. I hadn’t expected him to be. I hadn’t known him long. I’d still known him long enough to know that when he was stressed, he went for the trapeze.
The bone yard was buzzing and the midway was deserted: classic early morning. Our posted hours would have the show opening for business at four. I wondered whether Emery would delay that, given the circumstances, but I rather suspected the thought would never cross her mind. The show must go on, after all. I made my way to the big tent and slipped inside, pausing by the bleachers to let my eyes adjust.
Sam was on the trapeze, swinging back and forth with a ferocious, fluid grace. The odd stiffness I’d seen in his shoulders before was gone, replaced by utter relaxation and a spine that seemed to be made of wire or live ferrets or something other than rigid bone. No wonder he’d been tense before: he’d been fighting to keep looking human when he should have been letting himself go and relaxing into the moment.
I watched him for almost a minute. He was graceful in motion, spinning and flipping and leaping farther than a human acrobat could pray to achieve. He used his hands, feet, and tail almost interchangeably; he was more likely to break a fall with his foot than his tail, but I assumed that was because of the way shock was distributed through the body. Having his tail pulled couldn’t feel awesome. Yelling didn’t seem like the thing to do. He was lost in his own world, letting gravity speak for him.
Slowly, I bent and removed my shoes.
There’s something exhilarating about the long climb toward a trapeze swing. Every step means there’s farther to fall, and plenty of opportunities to consider just how bad an idea this is. My toes gripped the rope, holding me fast as I ascended. The muscles in my shoulders had already started to ache by the time I reached the platform. I’d been throwing knives and working on the trampoline, doing laps and push-ups and sit-ups and all that fun bullshit, but those all work different muscle groups. They didn’t suspend my body weight from my arms the way climbing or the flying trapeze did. I was out of practice, and I was probably going to pay for this tomorrow. That was okay. I’ve made a long habit of writing checks against my future, and so far, I’ve always been good for them.