Authors: Jory Strong
She was hurt. Dying.
Whatever bound them together, so often turning her emotions into his, was stretching, thinning, dissolving.
Regret swamped him. Hers morphing into his.
It was acute. Excruciating. Destroying.
The sense of loss drove him to his knees, the bookseller and shop fading away as if they no longer existed on the same physical plane he inhabited.
No!
Tir screamed silently. Willing Araña healed as he’d willed the boy attacked by the chupacabra healed. Willing her whole, safely returned to him.
His scream of pain became one note among a thousand of them—jarring, discordant sounds creating an agony unlike any he’d known.
It lasted a lifetime and an instant.
Ended abruptly. Completely. As if the choice whether she lived or died was no longer in his power to change.
He rose to his feet. Shaky, swaying, empty of all emotion and thought, all awareness, until the bookseller’s movement brought him back to the present.
“Return the book to the safe. I have no further use of it,” Tir said as he hurried toward the door, toward the boat where Araña had said she’d wait for him.
“WAS revenge as sweet as you thought it would be, daughter? Was it worth the price you paid to gain it?”
The demon’s voice pulled Araña from blackness and into the same long corridor with its ever-changing tapestry where they’d met before. But unlike before, the threads were a vision seen through the shimmer of flames. They were like a reflection on water, there but not there, just as she was there but not there.
She was truly formless, her body an illusion created by her mind as it clung desperately to the memory of who she’d been.
Soon all vestiges of it would be burned away. She knew it as surely as she knew the demon behind her shouldn’t have been able to stop her descent into the fire.
It wasn’t the Hell she’d been threatened with and beat because of, or the place of eternal damnation and torment she’d been taught to fear, but the molten womb of the birthplace she’d dreamed about. And it held no terror for her, only the promise of rebirth.
Her soul had no place among the living, the proof of it was in front of her—in the fiery thread that extinguished in a flare of blue, as if in the instant of her death, when she’d called Tir’s name, he’d been aware of her passing and called her name as well.
Araña’s gaze lingered for only an instant before searching for the blue-black thread that was his. There was joy in not seeing it—in knowing the texts had contained the incantation to free him from the collar. But there was pain, too, intense regret at not having had a chance to say good-bye, to feel his body joined to hers one last time as they shared a final kiss, shared breath and spirit before being parted.
“Look further into the future if you want to see his life enter the weave again,” the demon said, and Araña obeyed, feeling the phantom tightening of her throat when she saw the thread enter the pattern. Disappearing and reappearing only when it was alongside another, this one jagged ice where hers had been flame.
“Is he free of the collar?” she asked, afraid she already knew the answer by how closely the twining of the two threads mimicked the way hers had done with Tir’s.
“No. Perhaps his future companion will discover a way to free him. Perhaps not.”
Araña felt the sharp stab of jealousy, but still she asked, “How long until he has another chance at freedom?”
“Do you care so much? He’s the enemy of our kind. In all likelihood he would have killed you if he’d gained his freedom from the collar.”
Memories swelled up, swamping Araña in moments of tenderness and passion, companionship and possession, filling her with bitter-sweet emotion that she’d never experience any of it again with him. “He wouldn’t have.”
“You sound so sure, daughter. But once you would have sworn vengeance against him in the same way you did to honor the two human men you loved.”
“Never.”
Tir’s name was so thoroughly woven into her soul she knew she was incapable of killing him.
Her confidence was met with laughter. “Once you would have looked at the collar around his neck and viewed it as a victory by the House of the Scorpion. You would have celebrated Abijah en Rumjal’s accomplishment along with the rest of us.”
Shock sliced through Araña, as well as the faded remnants of terror. “The demon the maze owner commands?”
“He may well be demon by now,” came the cryptic reply. “He’s been bound to human will for thousands of years. He remembers all the deeds he’s been forced to perform along with what came before. If the collar is removed, our enemy will also remember our shared history.”
There was a roar, a sudden burst of air and power, like fuel added to fire, and it carried Araña to the past.
She recognized the imagery from the art history books Eric had cherished and she’d so often studied. Only instead of dreams captured in oil, scenes rising from the imagination of devoutly religious artists, instead of it being captured myth, she understood it was reality.
Men—mortal and those cast in supernatural light—fought side by side with angels, their faces resolute as they battled demons who looked like Abijah. Demons who bore images of spiders and serpents, cardinals and ravens, as well as scorpions on their skin—and others who looked fully human save for the marks that were a manifestation of their spirit’s nature.
“He thought of himself as a holy warrior,” the demon said. “It’s written that healing was the greatest of his talents, but he turned away from it, preferring to kill instead. And when he couldn’t kill, he saw us enslaved and held by humans. He lives because of alliances we’ve made with powers beyond The Prince’s domain. And because it’s fitting he endure the torment and horror he once so readily sentenced us to.”
Araña closed her eyes, unwilling to search out and witness Tir’s deeds even though the memory of it would soon be burned away. Whatever power the Spider demon used to hold her from the flames, it was weakening. She could feel the pull to leave.
“How long until he has another chance at freedom?”
“Three hundred years. Four hundred. The weave changes and the woman has yet to be born. She won’t be if we can prevent it. She wouldn’t serve our cause or pledge herself to The Prince as you would have.”
“I’d never bow to Satan.”
The demon laughed again. “That would be a terrible sight indeed. One of our kind—and a daughter of my House—bowing to the angel who is now the god’s adversary.”
The response startled Araña. She turned from the battlefield, and it faded away as if it had never been. In front of her stood the demon, dressed as it had been before, in concealing robes with only black eyes and a small strip of skin revealed.
A raven perched on the demon’s shoulder. And beyond both of them, a magnificent city rose, shimmering like a mirage, in an endless expanse of sand.
“This is the kingdom you were born to,” the demon said. “This is our paradise and refuge. Our prison set deep in the ghostlands.
“We are the children of Earth, the Djinn, given life from its fiery womb so we can protect it. But now we wait and plot, and dream in exile of one day being able to return and reclaim what is our birthright.”
“Djinn?” Araña asked, searching her mind, her memory, finding nothing though the word resonated within her.
“We existed long before the alien god arrived and thought to enslave us and give us over to his mud creations as familiars. When we resisted, the god forced The Prince into the image Abijah showed you and named him demon.
“The Prince was the first to be called by that name, but it’s come to serve us well. In the millennia since then, the humans have followed the example of their god.
“They’ve conjured up thousands of nightmare creatures and named them demon. And along with their wars and their false prophets, knowledge of us has disappeared from human memory and history. They no longer remember how we once walked among them, able to take no form as freely as we could take any form.”
The shimmering, beautiful city began to disappear, its buildings consumed by translucent flames. And like the candles burning in the witches’ circle, Araña knew time was running out. The roar and pull of the primordial fire was growing stronger, harder to resist—or want to resist.
“I grieved the first time I witnessed your death,” the de—the Spider Djinn said. “This time, as I stood in front of the tapestry and watched the outcome of your human choice, my anguish was tempered by the knowledge a Raven would soon follow you into the fire, and you would be reborn among us.
“I didn’t know then that you’d touched your lips to those of our enemy and, in doing so, shared breath and bound a part of yourself to him. In the moment your spirit was freed, he used his greatest gift to heal and preserve the human shell you’ve been tethered to.
“Because it was a vessel created for you, the Raven can guide your spirit back to it and you will live again among those who’ve feared and hurt you.
“Or the ties binding you to our enemy will burn away in the fire and you can once again walk among your kind, in our kingdom.
“By The Prince’s will, it is your choice.”
Live for all of us.
Matthew’s words found her, holding within them the love that had sustained her and the only home her heart had known—until Tir.
Memories of Tir made the decision easy. Thoughts of how she’d found him in the trapper’s truck, shackled and tethered to a chair, and how earlier in the day he’d healed a human child when there was nothing to be gained from it.
If she’d once lived for vengeance, she realized now its price could be too high to pay. And if she and Tir had once been enemies, she’d learned that the past might be better put aside and a different future forged.
“I want to go back to him,” she said.
The pitch black eyes of the Spider Djinn who claimed to be her mother showed no emotion. “As you will,” she said. “But know this. If you betray us by speaking of us or revealing our existence, The Prince will send assassins belonging to the Scorpion House and they won’t fail him. He will order your name struck from the books of our kind and those of the Raven’s House will be forbidden from ever returning you to us.”
“I understand.”
“Then the choice is made. Perhaps you will still come to serve us as you were meant to. Use your gifts wisely. Use
all
of them.”
“Will you continue to teach me?”
“Perhaps, daughter. Call my name when you next enter the Spider’s realm. I am Malahel.”
Araña understood, as she hadn’t before, that from the moment she’d climbed onto the
Constellation
and seen the unnamed port city in her vision, she’d been meant to come to Oakland and encounter Abijah and Tir.
“Why don’t you free Abijah?”
“The human he’s bound to is one we can’t touch, not from our prison, and not while he refuses to leave the one he created for himself with the maze.”
“And Abijah, why doesn’t he kill Anton?”
Malahel shuddered. “Doing so would make him
ifrit
. One whose name can no longer be spoken out loud and whose spirit can’t be guided back and reborn into a new life.”
“Will he be freed if I kill Anton?”
“Perhaps. Perhaps not.”
If the Spider Djinn cared at all about Abijah’s fate, it wasn’t reflected in either answer or voice.
Araña could feel how little time she had left before the choice she’d made would no longer matter against the consuming nature of fire. “Will you tell me how to free Tir?”
The raven stirred, ruffling its feathers.
Malahel turned her face toward it, and something passed between them before the Spider Djinn’s attention returned to Araña. “Abijah knows the incantation. You have his name. If the maze owner is dead, and the moment right, you can gain the information you desire.”
“I can’t speak in the language Anton uses.”
“His use of it is a conceit.”
The last of the kingdom city behind Spider and Raven went up in flames with a
whoosh
that engulfed everything—burning away moment and scene like a match put to paper—turning reality into a rush of heat and the hungry song of the fire, then nothingness until Araña opened her eyes to descending nightfall seen through a canopy of trees.
The stench of death surrounded her. Blood and feces and urine.
Goose bumps pimpled her skin, making her realize how cold she was.
Her shirt was soaked in blood, both hers and her enemies’.
But the Dji—Malahel hadn’t lied. She was whole. Healed. Strong.
Araña found her knives among scattered bones and leaves. She got to her feet, sheathing them, taking a last look at Jurgen and the Were.
The soft sound of sobbing and whispered prayers reached her. She retraced her earlier steps, going to the place where the remaining guardsman, Salim, who she knew only from the vision she’d changed with her visit to the witches’ house, cried in a cocoon of silk. There were twenty or thirty spiders around him, protecting their prey as others scurried along the branches on either side of the path, anchoring the threads that would allow them to lift their meal and suspend it where other predators couldn’t get it.
The spiders let her approach, parting to create a path through their midst, those displaced climbing onto the cocoon.
Perhaps he deserved this fate. Perhaps he didn’t. But Araña couldn’t walk away and leave him to die slowly.
She drew the knife, and the spiders converged on him, completely covering him. They lifted the front part of their bodies, telling her by their action they would protect their prize even from her.
Use your gifts wisely. Use
all
of them
.
If there’d been fire here, she could have used it as a weapon. But in doing it, she would have betrayed a gift of trust, a birthright forged for her in the womb of Earth’s fire, where her nature was chosen.
Instinctively she willed the mark to her hand, then concentrated on the spiders, asking them with pictures if they’d let her cut away the silky threads of the cocoon.