Spider-Touched (27 page)

What could the witch do to her? Her soul was already damned to the fires of Hell.

A shudder went through her as the image of the demon Abijah rose in her mind, only to slide away with memories of Rebekka ushering her into the tiny room at the brothel, offering the use of her bed and her clothing.

That night the demon gift had shown her Tir. Ultimately it had led her to the ecstasy of knowing another’s touch.

She glanced once more toward the window and the quickly approaching night. And then, before her courage deserted her, she mentally called the flames licking at candle wax. Directed them to consume the wood in front of her.

The fire caught with a
whoosh
, filling the silence of the room with the crackling of burning lumber. Araña’s hands tightened on the hilts of the knives, drawing strength and comfort from their having belonged to Matthew and Erik.

With a thought, she found the spider positioned over her rapidly beating heart.
I am not a coward,
she told herself, holding Rebekka’s image in her mind as she looked into the fire and sought its dark heart.

It welcomed her instantly and held her for long moments in the black of a void filled with utter silence. Phantom flames buffeted her, tracing limbs that didn’t exist, as if trying to force her to face the full truth of her nature by licking over the same spidery shape she’d traced with her fingertip.

In the unseen distance, where demon place and physical world met, she thought she could feel the wild pounding of her mortal heart trying to summon her spirit back to her body. But the silence and the darkness held and she willed herself not to fight it.

If she had any hope of undoing the harm she’d already caused Rebekka, then she had to keep her mind clear. She had to act quickly, before the pain rose and she grabbed wildly at the threads in order to make it stop.

Silence finally yielded to the rushing blend of a thousand whispered voices. Black nothingness became an endless choice of color.

Doubt filled her. Panic threatened to follow.

Araña struggled to remember the exact color of the thread that was Rebekka’s life.

Too late she realized she should have faced the painful memories arising from her previous visions. She should have examined each of them and tried to understand better the array of colors, why
these
souls were the ones she could easily touch.

Now that she’d willingly entered this spidery place of power, she sensed there was an order to it, as if the kaleidoscopic swirl of color was already loosely woven into a pattern. One she was a part of.

A thread caught her attention. Various shades of brown with a swirl of gray. Elation gripped her and she mentally reached for it, thinking it was Rebekka’s. But as soon as she’d made it her choice, the brown and gray fell away to reveal tawny gold underneath, as if the healer’s touch had masked the truth of the underlying soul.

Mixed in with the gold were thick strands of dark brown and black, a lion’s mane. And Araña knew instinctively it was Levi’s life she would forever alter.

A wave of panic rose and with it the first hint of pain. She fought to
accept
demon place and dark gift rather than fight against them as she always had.

The pain subsided. She expected to slide deeper into the vision, to become a ghost to Levi’s soul and experience the world as it was for him. Instead she remained in the heart of the flame, surrounded by choice, by the whispered voices of a thousand souls.

A black-and-gray thread emerged from a tangle of color, drawing her to it because it ran parallel to Levi’s. She hesitated and the strand disappeared. In its wake, pain rose beyond the threshold where it was easily ignored.

The black-and-gray thread reappeared, once again close to Le vi’s, as if their lives traveled a similar path. She reached mentally for the thread, blocking her mind to the suffering and death her touch had brought in the past.

As soon as the choice was made, the frenetic sense of movement, the wild swirl of color ceased, and a pattern emerged. A thousand connections already in existence, places where lives touched and crossed—altering destiny.

Soul threads changed color subtly or not at all. Merged and split, giving birth to new lives. Ended.

The sight of it awed Araña, mesmerized her. The power pulsing through a carpet of woven color enthralled her. And even as she watched, there were subtle changes to it, choices made or turned away from.

For an instant she felt peace, pleasure in the gift she’d always considered a curse, a demon taint marking her soul as belonging to Hell. Then the pattern disappeared, the colors melting, fading into a blackness that took her into the future she’d wrought when she touched Levi’s life to another.

A dark-haired stranger stood face-to-face with Levi. In confrontation? In meeting? The ruin of corroded trucking containers and twisted steel gave no context.

There was movement behind Levi and the stranger, or perhaps sound. They turned, and Araña silently screamed.

Jurgen and another guardsman were there, tasers in their hands. The barbs hit Levi and the stranger before they had any chance of defense or escape.

Both fell to the ground and began convulsing. Araña had only a glimpse of the stranger’s body starting to change shape before he faded from her awareness as though his future no longer touched Levi’s.

A heartbeat later, she understood why. Levi’s back arched violently, as if the lion trapped in human flesh was making one final attempt to escape, shredding through muscle and internal organs, so desperate for freedom it would destroy itself in an attempt to gain it. And then Levi went completely still, his eyes unseeing, glazing over as Araña’s cry pulled her from the vision.

Fifteen

THE door locks clicked into place as Tir reached the sidewalk in front of Temptation. Windows slid shut and a low hum warned that additional protections were in place.

Along the street he heard other doors being closed and barred against the night. In the shadows he heard the stirring of predators and felt their anticipation as if it were his own.

Let them attack,
he thought, removing his shirt and baring not only the tattoos on his arms, but the machete in its sheath along his back. He rolled his shoulders, glad to be free of the confining material. In the short span of a day he’d learned to hate the feel of it against his skin.

His impulse was to discard the shirt. But the image of Araña emerging from the store coupled with the knowledge she’d used money she could ill afford in order to purchase it stayed his hand.

Phantom fingers tightened around his heart with thoughts of her. Only the presence of the feral animals and hidden Weres kept him from reliving the moments of intimacy they’d shared or slipping into fantasies of things they’d yet to do.

The beasts lurking in the alleyways between the clubs were cautious. They clung to the darkness, assessing him from a safe distance.

Perhaps it was his lack of fear. Or perhaps they sensed he was something other than human. They held back, though Tir knew they’d eventually grow bolder.

He tied the shirt around his waist then freed the machete from its sheath. Behind the glass of bay windows, human voices merged, swelling into a tidal wave as their hungry attention fixed on him.

The last of the sun’s rays faded, leaving the night illuminated by floodlights positioned at the corners of the Victorians so the street between them became a gladiatorial arena.

The bloodthirsty didn’t have long to wait. A single word rose above the ocean sound of murmured voices.

“Out! Out! Out!”

Tir felt the hidden Weres and feral animals grow more excited as their focus shifted away from him. The voices chanting “Out” came from a club in the middle of the block, a place painted in shades of yellow. Sinners.

Like the clubs surrounding and across from it, the Victorian’s windows were unmarred by bars. Well-dressed patrons gathered, their jewelry sparkling, their hands curled around colorful drinks in expensive crystal glasses, their glossy red lips opening and closing in unison.

The shouts reached a crescendo then stopped abruptly, leaving a dark, hungry silence.

The club’s front door locks disengaged, the sound a gunshot in the street.

Inside the club a man began screaming.

The door opened. Screams turned into pleading and the sounds of a struggle that disappeared under a roar of applause as a man was ejected from the house.

He stumbled down the stairs and fell onto the sidewalk. The door closed and its locks engaged again before he could scramble to his feet.

Feral dogs slipped from the alleyway, made bold by the easy prey they’d come to expect. The human saw Tir standing just inside the floodlights’ reach, the machete held loosely at his side. And like a sinner looking for a savior, the man lurched forward.

He made it two steps before a sleek, brindle-colored mongrel launched itself into the air. Beast and human went to the ground, the man’s scream ending in a wet gurgle followed by ripping fabric, then low growls as more dogs joined the first and they fought among themselves for entrails and muscle.

Tir turned away and stepped into the darkness. He walked at first, because he didn’t want to suffer a delay by drawing the waiting Weres and still-hungry dogs away from their feeding ground. But when he no longer felt them trailing him cautiously at a safe distance, he began running. And just as he’d experienced in those moments after Araña freed him from the shackles around his wrists and ankles, he rejoiced in the movement, in the smooth play of muscle over bone.

Instead of the sweet scent of forest and the dance of sunlight in shadow, he inhaled the ocean-wet scent carried on the breeze. He basked in the coy caress of muted light as the moon slid in and out from behind clouds. And he thrilled at the faint sound of frightened heartbeats as he passed houses where humans were trapped in prisons of their own making.

Some instinct, some part of them, noted his presence. Something deeply ingrained in them understood that the barriers they built wouldn’t protect them against him should they deserve his retribution and he be free of the collar around his neck.

He felt it in the spike of their fear, their emotion and his reading of it unconscious on both his part and theirs, as though some unfathomable, inescapable connection existed between them despite how much he despised them—all of them but one.

His cock stirred, as it did anytime his thoughts turned to Araña. He allowed his mind to linger on her, to replay those moments when she knelt before him like a supplicant, her lips inches away from his hardened cock and her eyes dark pools of desire. Seductress. Sorceress.

His.

Tir quickened his pace. Worry crept in like fog off the ocean. Araña was alone, and he didn’t trust the Were not to betray her if it would mean the return of the healer.

He neared the alleyway where he and Araña had been attacked earlier in the day and slowed at the sound of shuffling, dragging.

A bone cracked. He could hear gnawing. But there was an absence of emotion. There was none of the hot animal energy that had radiated in the dark alleys between the Victorians in the red zone. He edged closer, curious to see what roamed the night along with Weres and feral dogs.

Hunched humanlike figures crouched over what remained of the men he’d killed after leaving the diner with Araña. Three or four of them to a corpse, their claws serving as knives.

They were naked, gray-skinned, and riddled with pustules. Hairless and nearly skeletal.

Jikininki.

The word escaped from the depths of inaccessible memory.

Ghouls.

They’d stripped their meals of clothing. But they took no pleasure in eating what they’d stumbled upon in the alleyway. They felt nothing—or nothing he could read from them.

As one, they became aware of Tir, and he lifted the machete in silent warning.

Something passed between the ghouls.

The first of them rose from the crouched position, a male whose penis was shriveled, his testicles wrinkled and dark like prunes. He shambled forward, tongue licking a too-small mouth.

The others followed. Males and females both.

Surprise flashed through Tir at their willingness to leave their meal and come after him. Did they think he’d turn tail and run? Did they believe they’d eventually overtake him? Or that once he was down, they could swarm over him and subdue him with their greater numbers?

He backed away from the alleyway entrance in order to give himself room to slay them. They didn’t falter, even after the first of them reached him and he decapitated it with a single swing of the machete.

Bodies piled up in front of him, forcing him to retreat further where their attack hadn’t. The machete blade glowed blue in the moonlight, its color spreading, deepening with each ghoul he struck down, until finally it was like holding a shard of dark ice.

Even as the last of those from the alleyway was dealt with, Tir could hear the shuffling sounds of more ghouls coming toward him, drawn to the battle. With a start, he realized he would spend all night battling them if he chose to make a stand.