Spider-Touched (42 page)

“Okay, okay,” Salim mumbled.

“Split up,” Jurgen said as they reached the street parallel to the one their prey had turned on.

FEAR spread through Tir like an inky black stain. His jaw ached from unconsciously clenching it as he worked his way through pages of long-dead languages, translating one symbol into another and then another and another, until he came upon a word he could speak and whose meaning he knew.

Prayers. Invocations. Incantations.

All of them using his blood to heal. Most of them turning it into something separate and living, something that could be offered like wine in a cup without his presence being necessary.

His emotions swirled like a building storm. For centuries he’d kept his sanity by imagining himself in possession of the translations. And now—

The tattoos on his right arm were translated and none of them unlocked the collar or made it disappear.

Terror grabbed and twisted his guts—that he’d have the same results when he finished transcribing the glyphs on his left arm.

He stood abruptly, his chair scraping over the floor, a harsh, abrasive sound that jerked the bookseller from his own tasks.

The promise of violence gathered around Tir, and he caught himself looking upward. Stopped himself from raising his arms as if he could call out to the heavens and bring bolt after bolt of lightning down until nothing remained of mankind but smoldering ash.

Araña had bargained with the vampire’s servant. She’d made an agreement that might well cost her life, all because he’d been convinced these texts would free him and allow him to protect her.

Tir suppressed a scream of rage and frustration and fear. The muscles on his neck stood out, pressing against the collar as if by sheer force of will alone he could rid himself of it.

His hands balled into fists as he wrestled his emotions under control. Whether the remaining texts held the key or not, he needed to finish the translations and go to Araña.

He should never have let her out of sight to begin with. Caught up in the promise the book represented, he’d forgotten his thoughts when he returned to the healer’s house and knew Araña was back. A blink and she could be gone from his life forever.

HEAVY boots crunched rough gravel behind Araña, making no effort at stealth. Eyes bored into her back, almost inviting her to start running.

The footsteps sped up as she did, gaining slightly but still in no hurry to catch her. Not surprising.

There were people around. Vendors closing up their shops and stalls. Messenger boys on their bikes or on foot, hurrying to turn their coin into shelter for the night and food.

Her enemy wanted her alive.

She was counting on it.

A risk. But an acceptable one.

She walked in shadow, her hands caressing the hilts of the blades. The sweet promise of vengeance was a siren song she couldn’t ignore, the desire to kill Jurgen a black lust coating her heart and spreading through her veins. Maybe she was demon after all.

She glanced back. Instead of finding Jurgen or the black-haired stranger she thought was the werewolf Raoul, it was the guardsman whose soul thread was red mottled with black. Salim, who she’d seen in the vision of Levi’s death.

Herding her.

Premonition or instinct, it didn’t matter.

When the roles of predator and prey were interchangeable, traps could work both ways.

Erik and Matthew had taught her the value of a backup plan.

Araña started running.

A shout went up behind her.

She didn’t look back again, even when her ears told her a second man had joined the first. But she smiled, and ran faster, angling to the north and east, to the place where she’d emerged from the maze on the night she escaped it.

She gambled that her pursuers didn’t want to draw attention to their hunt by firing their guns. And the gamble paid off.

The opening that had been guarded by the spider was bricked off, but in the grove of trees in front of it, the slick knots resembling cancerous growths remained, spaced out along the path, one to a bough—just as they had been the night Gallo watched another prisoner stumble into the trap thinking he’d reached freedom when he escaped the maze.

Araña hesitated only long enough to glance back at her pursuers. Jurgen was steps ahead of his companion.

A fitting end,
she thought, not needing to feel the slide of her knife between his ribs to have her thirst for revenge satisfied.

She darted forward, into the grove.

Above her, leaves trembled slightly, but she was left alone, as she had been the night
she
escaped the maze and took this path to freedom.

A scream marked the moment her pursuer followed her into the deadly trap. Araña stepped from the path, turning to crouch behind elephant-eared plants.

Softball-sized spiders slid downward on silky strands of thread, leaving the tree limbs smooth, free of their unnatural blemishes. There could have been twenty of them, or forty, hurrying to aid the one that had jumped to immobilize their prey when he passed underneath.

Not Jurgen. Perhaps he’d sensed a trap and yielded the lead to his companion. Or maybe his companion’s misfortune came from surging ahead before reaching the trees.

Either way, the guardsman named Salim lay screaming for help, unable to thrash or move his limbs because of the subduing poison the spider on his neck was injecting into his bloodstream.

Jurgen pulled his taser gun and fired it into the body of the spider. If it felt the jolt, either of the barb or the charge that followed, it didn’t show any sign of it.

The first of the other spiders reached the paralyzed man and began using the trailing length of silk it had descended on to bind his ankles together.

“Hurry, oh god, get it off me, Jurgen.”

Araña left her vantage point, merging into shadow with the intention of circling around and killing Jurgen while he was occupied with the spiders.

Instead of firing on even the first of them, Jurgen kept his pistol aimed for an attack. “There are too many of them. I don’t have enough bullets to take them all out.”

“Shoot them! Shoot them! Please, you can have my share of the reward.”

Jurgen jettisoned the taser cartridge and holstered the weapon in favor of drawing a knife. “Looks like that’s mine already. Besides, this will keep them busy.”

The rest of the spiders massed like a living carpet and slowly began covering Salim. Jurgen’s attention shifted, eyes searching for Araña in the rapidly darkening forest.

He ignored Salim’s terror-filled words and cries until Salim began shrieking, “Kill me. Oh god, Jurgen, kill me. Don’t leave me like this.”

“Sorry, Salim, I don’t know if they like dead prey.”

Jurgen probed the shadows, directing his next words at Araña. “Just you and me now, bitch. Time to come out and play.”

Araña answered the call, darting out and slashing at his back—finding body armor but drawing first blood on his upper arm.

The pistol fired as he reflexively squeezed the trigger. It fired again, an angry shot as he cursed.

She was already gone. Waiting for another opportunity.

Jurgen was no stranger to hunting in the forest. He used the evening darkness and soft loam to his advantage. Avoided the bones littering the path and hid the sounds of his movement in Salim’s sobs and mewling cries.

Retreat wasn’t an option even if Araña had been willing to consider it.

The open space and rubble-strewn ground between the grove and the reclaimed area of the red zone made that route an unwise choice.

Jurgen would use the gun now. If not to kill, then to incapacitate.

She could go deeper into the woods, taking a long detour and circling back to where Tir had told her the
Constellation
was moored. But doing it risked getting caught out in the night.

It left Jurgen alive to hunt her again.

This would end here. Tonight.

Araña picked up a human skull with strands of silk still clinging to it. She tossed it into a cluster of dried vine, distracting him long enough for her to move in, this time going for his legs, slicing across the back of his knee. Disabling him.

Jurgen screamed and fired, grazing her. It was a shallow wound, but it put the scent of her blood in the air and forced her to retreat.

Gasps of pain blended with his curses. He’d have to pause long enough to stop the bleeding, to fashion a crutch.

To decide.

Stay or leave.

It was already late enough for the feral dogs to be hunting.

If he was lucky he might make it to safety.

She moved in, not willing to allow him the choice.

He was silent now.

Hiding.

The creatures who called the forest home were silent, too. Waiting.

Only the sobbed prayers of the fallen guardsman drifted through the dusk. Eerie and surreal.

Araña crept forward, slow and cautious.

Adrenaline coursed through her, and heightened senses caught the flash of movement. She was already slashing before her mind identified her attacker. Werewolf. The one freed in the ambush.

Raoul.

Blood sprayed hot across her chest. Hers she thought at first, until the wolf’s body fell away, her knife going with it.

She’d severed the Were’s jugular, the move accomplishing it one she’d practiced so many times with Matthew that it needed no thought.

Sudden weakness drove her downward, onto her knees next to the furred corpse. Blood poured over her hand.

She stared, uncomprehending at first.

Hers, she realized. Heart rate spiking, pumping more of it through the place where the Were’s fangs must have punctured her artery.

She had minutes before she’d bleed out.

She dropped her second knife.

Increasing weakness and loss of focus made it a struggle to free her belt and get it around her arm. Ropes and knots were second nature because of the
Constellation
. All she needed to do was—

Pain slammed into her, a thunderous blow to her head knocking her off her knees and to the ground.

The belt fell away from her arm.

Blood pulsed, escaped in a rush again.

Jurgen crouched over her, rage and victory in his eyes as he held his gun to her forehead, the bare skin of his wrist only inches away. “Tell me where your companion is and I’ll let you tie the artery off.

Otherwise, bitch, you bleed out.”

Too late.

She was cold. So very cold.

She could barely feel her arms and legs.

With a thought she found the spider.

It hovered over her heart and seemed to grow larger, as if it stretched to meet the blackness forming at the edges of her consciousness, as if it were anxious to escape the tether of a mortal body.

No!
she screamed silently, impressions flooding her mind.

Tir finding her in front of the mirror after her visit to the witches and showing her with pleasure just how thoroughly bound together her soul and flesh were.

The spider repeatedly seeking his touch.

The sense of unity she felt with it when she entered the vision place.

At the edge of death, all denial slid away. There was no separation of soul and mark. They were mirror images of each other.

Her acceptance of it brought the fusion of name and body, mind and spirit. And using the mark was as easy as drawing her knife.

It came to her hand, to her fingertips—a manifestation of who she was, what she was. And with the last of her strength she touched the bare skin of Jurgen’s wrist.

He jerked away from her, the bullet from his gun hitting the dirt next to her head. And then he was screaming, writhing. But there was no room for satisfaction. Only regret.

Tir,
she wept, her last thoughts of him as darkness engulfed her, bringing with it heat and the roar of the fire calling her home.

Twenty-three

ARAÑA
. Her name whipped across Tir’s soul. Suddenly. Intensely. Making him rise from the chair so violently it crashed to the floor.

The force of his need to go to her refocused his fury, his terror at having translated the last of the glyphs and found no hint of how to free himself from the collar.