“They left right after your ‘Arachnid Tactics 101’ remark. I don’t think they like you very much.”
“Probably why we never had Thanksgiving dinner all these years. Fuck it—we don’t need ’em. Get outside, learn what you can, and have a song ready. I’ll be there with the swarms in sixty seconds.”
He headed for the basement. Soothed by his confidence, she went back through the flung-open doors and faced the massive front.
It was approaching the highway, and the trees on the other side sparkled with moisture. There was a sound she could hear now—a pattern of hisses not unlike rain smacking a sidewalk in summer. She closed her eyes—then opened them nervously, then forced them closed again—and listened for the music.
There it was—rhythmic, ancient, deep. Familiar and exotic at the same time, she found she could almost hum along . . . but not quite.
What the hell is this?
It was making a new melody now, something dissonant. A piece was breaking off, a rogue line of tiny notes . . . now another, in harmony with the first . . . and another . . . and another dozen . . . the volume was reaching painful levels.
Her eyes opened, and she gasped.
“Skip, hurry!”
He was beside her in an instant, and she could feel the swarms following. “Go, go, go!” He hollered over the rising wind.
Voice cracking at first, she sang. Only the thousands of two-dimensional creatures passing under her feet could hear or understand the words. As each particle of swarm touched her, it began to glow with new power. Her song became stronger, and the creatures more agitated. More raced by to touch her and share in the power she offered.
“Take them out!” Skip ordered, and the smoldering multitude flowed from her and spread across the damp grass.
What faced them on the highway was now an army of miniature dragons. Andi would have thought them almost cute, if it weren’t for two things: (a) she had heard their song, and (b) they were gathered in the shadow of what was left of the mist—an enormous dragonlike thing, with wings more vast than buildings.
The insect swarms rushed at them, their glow intensifying. Andi knew they would explode quickly and violently—perhaps we should get inside, she thought, judging the distance. She tugged at Skip’s sleeve.
The moment the first creatures touched the pavement, the dragon army lifted as one, clearing the nearby treetops and letting the colors of the sunset briefly through. Being as close as they could get and still trapped in two dimensions, the insectoids mindlessly triggered, blasting each other apart. The explosion was indeed impressive, and Andi felt the heat of it as the shock wave reached them. Small chunks of pavement sailed by their heads and cracked the glass of the dining-room windows. They staggered backward, into the restaurant.
Then the entire mass of dragon flesh and misty weather lowered itself, unharmed, onto the broken highway and extinguished the sunset again.
She was terrified and thrilled. We can’t stop them!
“Shit.” Skip grabbed her hand. “Got any other tunes to try?”
She clasped his hand in both of hers and began a new melody. Her songs were not usually this strident, but she knew she needed something rapid and strong. Skip jumped at the electricity coming through her grasp, then he understood.
The poison she created in him was potent enough to mottle his skin green. He smiled at her and began to change.
He chose a plated scorpion form, fifteen feet from pincers to stinger. Viscous goo dripped from his armaments, and his mandibles sizzled.
“Go get ’em, tiger.”
He charged them, scuttling faster than a cheetah could race. A new song came from Andi now—not of poison like the last one, but of speed and power.
The throng scattered above his head at first, adopting the same tactic it had with the explosive swarms. This did not work for long, as Skip began spitting a hail of projectiles from his deformed mandibles. A dozen of them fell screaming, their faces and eyes smoking with corrosive fluid.
A voice, deep and mysterious, dropped upon them like unhappy rain.
Unnatural child, your ways are out of balance.
We must cleanse you now, with the fire of the seas.
Andi had only known dragons who could breathe fire. What happened next therefore astonished her—and certainly surprised Skip.
The cloud of dragons lowered again, and a thousand jets of steam blasted his exoskeleton. Skip screamed and scuttled back. The boiling gloom followed him, and Andi suddenly realized that she was in everyone’s path.
“Get inside, get inside, get down, get down, get down!”
She did what he said, diving into the restaurant and scrambling across the dining- room floor on all fours. He skittered in behind her, and the ferocious hiss followed.
The large windows burst, making Andi scream. She dragged Skip through the kitchen doors. The wooden furniture in the dining room was warping, and dozens of the tiny dragons were fluttering in, unharmed by their own breath. Their flashing silver eyes tracked her like a formation of sharks locking in on prey.
They hunt like this, she realized. Deep in the ocean. They heat the surrounding water, cook whatever they find—schools of fish, sea monsters, whatever—and serve it up right there.
Skip was back in human form, gasping. Ovals of boiled skin were sloughing off his arms and face. She could heal him—but only if they survived.
We need to leave.
She rushed him through the kitchen and into the back pantry. Three or four of the dragons were right behind them, knocking into pots with their wings and slapping utensils off the counter in their frenzy.
“Andi, there are no windows in this room! We’re trapped.”
“Hush. Hold that shut.” Kicking the door closed behind them, she breathed deeply, pressed her hands against a bare spot of wall, and hummed.
Skip dragged down plastic shelves of canned goods and piled bags of flour on top of that. The knob turned, and he grunted with the effort to twist it back and lock it. The hollow metal door shuddered with the weight of several slams. Steam leaked under the door onto Skip’s ankles, and he screamed.
Hang on, baby. She hummed, pressing her fingers into the cement. The solid wall gave way, and a portal opened. It was nothing much—a tiny bit of folded space that still belonged to this universe. It would not last forever since she had borrowed it from elsewhere, and elsewhere would need it back before long. But right now, it would have to do.
The steam stopped, and a cooler, sparkling formation of vapor was slipping through the door.
“Skip, now!”
She squeezed his fingers and drew him into the New Space. It snapped shut behind them, leaving them safe in darkness.
They stayed there as long as Andi felt they could, perhaps an hour and a half. She had let the space float—no sense in trying to enter the same room they had left, since the dragons (if they had any brains at all) would be waiting there for them. By the time they exited, they were an hour’s or so walk deeper into the woods behind the restaurant.
They climbed the nearest tree together, until they were high enough to see the restaurant and surrounding buildings, about five miles away.
The weather had brightened slightly, though the sun had lowered itself farther since their escape. Specks of dragon hovered loosely around the massive mist dragon as it lumbered through the woods immediately surrounding the restaurant. They were still searching.
“It won’t take long,” she whispered to Skip. “Even if Dianna’s not helping them, it won’t be difficult for them to find us again.”
“Mom’s not with them,” Skip grumbled back. “Why would she risk herself?”
“Still. I can’t keep making voids for us to slip into. That sorcery took a lot out of me.” She could still feel her heart pumping hard. “We should get moving.” Anything to put as much distance between themselves and theirselves as possible.
“I can’t believe it.” He was gritting his teeth as he looked at them. “T
hese things may actually bitch things up for me.”
She stroked his hand. “They won’t have the element of surprise next time. C’mon. We’ve—”
“I’ve got to counterattack.”
?!?
“What I saw in the birds convinced me I could succeed,” he continued. “I thought I might have a few weeks to prepare everything. I don’t. I don’t have a few days. Maybe a few hours.”
“Skip—”
“Don’t try to argue with me, Andi. Did you see that gigantic flock of aqua worms? I need all the power I can get! I need everything I can yank from anybody who’s not me, and I need it right now.”
“But the ritual—”
“Is my only chance. It’ll tie me to the moon.” He looked to the skies; the new moon was invisible, but he knew where it would be hanging. “And once I have the moon . . .”
“But we don’t even know if it will work!”
“It’ll work. As long as I can find my uncles and aunts . . . it’ll work.”
“What, you want their help now?”
“Andi, my love. I can’t do it without them. Can you communicate with them, get a message to them, wherever they ran off to?”
Her eyelids softly closed. “Each of them still has a song. They’ve scattered. I can get them together again. Where do you want to meet?”
He thought quickly and pointed. “The abandoned convenience store about two miles down the road.”
She had no better plan and nowhere else to go. “Okay, love. Whatever you say.”
“That’s my girl.”
CHAPTER 32
Andi
“Outrageous!” shrieked the baboon spider.
“Impossible!” thundered the brown recluse.
“Ridiculous!” added the slender harvester.
“Dangerous!” intoned the twin sun spiders.
“Just like your father,” hissed the last, a yellowed scorpion, whose stinger hung heavy over its bulbous back. “All anger, all ego. His poor planning sacrificed rigor for showmanship. Lack of rigor leads to inefficient traps. Inefficient traps lead to wasted poison. Poison is life. You have no respect for any of this.”
Skip’s jaw twitched.
Andi bit her lip and slid an arm under her sleeve to massage the tracks from her most recent cuts. “I don’t think it’s about anger or ego or respect,” she said. “I think Tavia wanted Skip to have your guidance. Let’s be more constructive. What help can you offer?”
“None.”
“Skip, maybe—”
“No, Andi. The answer is none.”
“Please, Skip. Tavia wanted—”
“Aunt Tavia is dead for a reason. I didn’t ask her for help, I didn’t ask her rotten and cowardly brothers and sisters for their advice, and this meeting is over. Almost.”
Through the muttering and mandible-grinding of the creatures assembled closely around them in the abandoned convenience store, Andi wondered aloud, “What do you mean, ‘almost’?”
Skip suddenly relaxed, as though he had reached a decision. “I mean, that even though I didn’t ask for her help, I’m glad she tried. In fact, it’s for the best.”
The brown recluse twitched. “How so?”
“I haven’t been completely honest with all of you. I mean, I do plan to ascend and become our kind’s greatest. And I do plan to poison the moon, to make that happen. I shouldn’t have made you think this would be a proposal review or decision council.”
“What is it, then?” snapped the scorpion.
“More like a breakfast meeting.”
They had no time to take in what he meant. Even as he rose tall on two extended legs, his other six were fully formed and twice the length of any of them, each tipped with a spear-like tarsus. By the time the adults gasped at his sheer size—no one can possibly morph that large!—the six jagged limbs came down and made the linoleum floor shudder. Each was a skewer, with a kabob gasping and wriggling at the end.
“SKIP!”
“Quiet, Andi. This is the most important part.” The enormous arachnid—Andi couldn’t say for certain if it was a true species or something out of Skip’s own imagination—minced on its hindmost legs quickly, holding high the dying relatives on its way to the back room. “Could you grab the door to the refrigeration corridor?”
“What’s in the—ah, geez, you’re going to stuff them all in there? That’s gross. And weird. Skip, these are your uncles! Your aunts! Not TV dinners!” Andi nearly threw up as she took in the sight of them all, abdomens spasming and eyes bulging, hanging off their nephew’s limbs. “You’ve killed them!”
“Not quite yet. I need their blood fresh, and I can’t weave fast enough to keep them alive with this much blood loss. Also, I want to soak up what’s on the floor. Every drop will help. You’ll thank me later.”
At his impatient hiss, she opened up the walk-in door. “At least keep them away from the milk. Skip, how is this going to help you poison the moon?”
“I had insight, during my research.”
“You mean your bird-flaying.”
“These idiots only know one way to get it done. It generally involves eighty years of the sorcerer traveling through sixteen different dimensions and damning himself at the end. Boring and worse . . . not exactly enjoyable. But I found a faster, better way.” He flicked the bleeding creatures off each tarsus, letting them collapse over each other in the middle of the slick floor. Vapor seethed from his mandibles as he turned from them and faced Andi. “Quick. Easy. Brilliant. Good thing Aunt Tavia thought I was an ignorant ass who needed help.”
“Yeah, that’ll learn her.” She managed not to shudder. “Skip, I don’t understand.”
“I can reach the moon with the blood of enough arachnids. Finding our own kind is tough enough nowadays— Tavia seemed to think we might even be the last—but being the helpful person she is, she tracked down these recluses and brought them here. Well, one recluse, anyway.” He snickered, waving a back leg at the brown spider. “Get it, Andi. Recluse?”
Which is more horrifying—the insanity, or the puns? She gulped. “Yeah, nifty gag. So you need their blood—to do what, exactly?”
“To weave into the soil. What arises will poison the moon in my favor. It won’t matter if we’re the last arachnids on earth—what will rain down from the sky will be all the replenishment our kind needs.”
“Huh. So. How many do you need?”
“I’ve got seven already.”
“There’s only six there.”
“I have Mr. Slider wrapped up in a chest freezer in the basement of one of the nearby houses. The night he died, I told Tavia I’d bury him. I didn’t say where.”
“Ugh, Skip! He’s been dead for nearly a year! How fresh can his blood be?”
“I’ll average it out. I figure the blood of a living arachnid, mixed with his, should work fine.”
“So you have seven. One of them’s dead. You say you need to mix living blood, and you’re out of arachnids . . . unless you’ve resurrected Aunt Tavia and have her stuffed back there somewhere as well.”
“No. It would have been ideal to use her, too. But with her gone, I really only have one option to get the number I need.”
The air near the freezer suddenly seemed frostier to Andi. She took a step back. “Skip. How many arachnids do you need for this ritual?”
His head lowered, his front legs began to pull him out of the freezer . . . and all eight inscrutable eyes fixed on her.
CHAPTER 33
Andi
Andi sucked in air again, a violent and painful act.
Plink, plunk. Plink, plunk. Plinkplunk, plinkplunk. Plink, plunk.
It was dark and chill, wherever she was. She was leaning up against a cement wall. She couldn’t move her spread and slightly bent limbs, and the rattling of chains suggested she should not bother to try. A wet rag was taped into her mouth.
Her arms felt heavy, something was tickling them, and they hurt.
Plinkplunk, plink, plunk.
She let out a low hum, then another. She built one note upon the other, and the music made her throat glow faintly. What she glimpsed made her choke, shutting off the light.
Swarms of round black ticks clung to each arm. A few of them moved, but most were feeding from her flesh—from her smooth underarms, her bony elbows, her wriggling fingertips, and most of all from the forearm welts she had inflicted upon herself.
Those that had swollen to full size were dropping off into large buckets lined up by her feet. The buckets were about a third full with a thick, crimson, boiling mixture. New ticks crawling up the wall quickly replaced them.
It felt like all her innards were roiling and clenching at once. Her skin crawled—literally! It felt like a greasy fist was clenching her throat; she had never been so frightened, or repelled.
She swooned in her chains and tried not to retch into her gag. This is what you get for sticking with him. This is what you deserve, for turning Jennifer down.
Plink, plink, plunk, plinkplunk.
For a few minutes, she let herself hang from her wrists, bile rising from her gut, swaying back and forth.
Let it be done. What else can I hope for? You win, Skip. You win.
The answer came from an unseen source. It was a voice from her past, from a life she barely lived, in a moment even before her birth—her mother, strong and vibrant, holding her in her womb, standing up for herself:
You won nothing! You don’t test me! You don’t control me! You don’t tell me what I can and cannot do! Screw you!
SCREW YOU!
Her skin began to tingle all over—not from the sensation of tiny arachnids crawling, but from something within. Something was unwinding. Was it her intestines, her lungs, her arteries? It felt like it was everywhere. It . . . it wasn’t a scary feeling, exactly.
I’ve felt this before, she realized. On the bridge. With Mother, before I killed her.
You’ve failed, came her father’s voice.
Screw you, her mother replied.
I’m not just a sorceress born in the dark, raised in the dark, and left to die in the dark. I’m the daughter of the most powerful beaststalker to ever walk the earth. She wouldn’t just hang here. She wouldn’t let a slob like Skip bleed her slowly. She would control her own destiny.