Spun by Sorcery (29 page)

Funny thing, though: even though the sparkling night sky had gone dark, that same lone star still sparkled from the highest point.

Whatever.

I told myself it was all a façade, that nothing I was seeing or feeling had any basis in my reality, but my bone-deep fear of loneliness was stronger than logic. The scene looked like something from a Stephen King novel after the apocalypse. A weird hybrid of normal and bizarre that played into every dark night I ever spent wishing for a family, a home, some place where I belonged.

I was standing in front of an abandoned rest stop in the middle of a desert that stretched to infinity in every direction. No birdsong. No distant rumble of highway noise. Not even the faint whoosh of the wind moving across all of that emptiness. Just . . . nothing.

“She doesn’t like it,” one of the orbs observed.

“Look at the way she’s breathing,” another offered. “Any second and she’ll need a paper bag to keep from passing out!”

The rest of them bounced with laughter, bumping into each other in what seemed to be the glitter orb equivalent of high-fiving.

“I don’t care how powerful her magick is,” said a third, “she’s still half human and where was it written that a human could lead a clan?”

Let them talk,
I told myself. They wanted me to lose my temper and forget why I was there but it wasn’t going to happen.

It would take a lot more than some misguided high school taunts to make me forget that the future of Sugar Maple and everyone in it was hanging in the balance.

This time I was ready for whatever they threw my way.

Insults? Bring ’em on.

Bad-tempered wheels? No problem.

A tiny windowless room with no ventilation, no way out, and wall-to-wall spiders?

I might be in trouble.

Clearly they had been saving the good stuff.

I was inside the front lobby of the abandoned rest stop, feeling like the scientists in
Jurassic Park
just before T. Rex showed up on the scene. A banner reading ALL YOU CAN EAT AND MORE hung lopsided over the locked door of the once-popular buffet. The doors to the restrooms had been boarded over. Crumpled coffee cups and bent straws littered the scuffed tile floor. I could still smell the memory of french fries and sweat in the underoxygenated air.

I wanted out.

I wanted out
now.

Deep breaths,
I warned myself. Nothing was the way it seemed. For all I knew I was still on the snowy field between the woods and Sugar Maple’s old footprint and these were nothing but a string of Fae mind games meant to bring me to my knees.

Another deep breath. Square my shoulders. Have a backup plan in mind. March my butt to the exit as fast as I could.

Too bad the exit was gone. And the buffet. And the trashed-up hallway. I was in a tiny windowless room with no ventilation and no way out. Once again the only constant was the twinkling star that seemed to hang high above it all, even though the ceiling was so low it grazed the top of my head. The walls were pressing inward and I was starting to feel like a panini when something soft brushed against the back of my neck. I managed to turn around in this hideous little vertical coffin and saw the most magnificent handknitted shawl imaginable clinging to the wall. It shimmered like diamonds scattered across a field of moon-washed snow.

I instantly realized there were no purl-back resting rows involved in this design. It was pure lace technique, long row after long row of yarn overs and beadwork mixed with intricate, perfectly balanced decreases.

Maybe you had to be a knitter to understand but my whole life was about manipulating whisper-fine yarn into something beautiful. I dreamed in stitches. The love of fiber was woven through my DNA as far back as you could trace.

All of my attempts to keep my mind a total blank went up in smoke when I touched that mind-blowing shawl. It was like holding a cloud of dreams in my hands. Diamondlike crystals had been handknitted into the shawl at precisely calculated intervals. The level of workmanship was far beyond anything I had ever dreamed possible. I was good but, as far as I knew, nobody was
this
good.

That should have been my first clue but I was too in love to think straight.

Oh, the spiderweb fineness of the silk yarn! Oh, the dazzling sparkle of the crystals!

Oh, the thousands of hairy silver spiders leaping from that intricate web of beauty and onto my head, my shoulders, my arms.

I opened my mouth to scream and two of the fuzzy monsters perched on my lower lip, leaking acrid juices that dripped into my mouth and launched me into the dry heaves. The room was the size of an old-fashioned phone booth. The walls were covered with arachnids. The shawl was completely obliterated by the sheer number of them. They smelled musty and hot and the more I slapped them off my body and picked them from my hair, the faster they swarmed back to take me out.

My legs were covered from my ankles to my thighs with fat hot crawling hairy spiders. I felt the sting of their bristles as they slid under my jeans and crawled up up up. I swatted, smacked, screamed, smooshed myself against the spider-covered wall in a crazed attempt to kill as many of them as I possibly could before they did a
Star Trek
move and crawled into my ear and burrowed through my cerebral cortex.

The magick side of my brain knew these spiders were illusions courtesy of the Fae but the human side was in control. For the most part my brain entirely shut down and I was reduced to a state of shrieking mindless primitive terror. If I’d been behind the wheel of my Buick, I would have driven off a bridge to escape these hideous creatures. Anything to escape them.

They were inside my T-shirt, crawling into my bra, slithering around the curve of my left ear, moving across my cheek toward my nose, gliding over my knees and up my thighs until I was reduced to nothing but one long scream.

They were on the button of my jeans, the zipper pull, along the stitching on the pockets. One dived into my ear and a wave of fury rose up inside me and I knew I had my answer.

I battled to push fear aside and let rage take its place. And the angrier I got, the more my fingertips began to tingle, and the more they tingled—

Here’s some unsolicited advice. If you’re ever trapped in a room with seven million spiders, embrace your inner rage. Sometimes a bad temper is the only thing separating a girl from a total meltdown.

The flames shot from my fingertips, crisscrossing in midair, turning spiders into charcoal briquettes at an amazing rate. Sizzle! Sputter! The stink of burning arachnid in that small airless room was stomach turning but I could live with it. The more I killed, the more disappeared of their own volition. For every one I blasted with firepower, another twenty fell from my body and disappeared.

I let out a whoop of triumph when the walls pulled and the room expanded, growing wider and deeper as more spiders met their maker.

I zapped the last one and watched it shrivel into a dried-up spider patty. A moment later the ceiling lifted up and away but the solitary star remained in position and I laughed out loud in a combination of exhaustion, glee, and amusement.

Old magick? Old technology was more like it.

The Fae had a surveillance camera watching me!

They could watch me all they wanted. It wasn’t like I was about to stage a strip show for the camera unless dead spiders had a thing for lap dances. Now there was an embarrassing way to make a buck. In fact, anything that even remotely included dancing was way out of my comfort zone. The thought of lap dancing anytime, anyplace, for anyone, brought on a wicked case of the giggles.

Great. Now the Fae could observe the rightful leader of Sugar Maple dissolve into helpless laughter like a five-year-old in church.

“Stop it!” I ordered myself. Nerves, that was all it was. A bad case of post-traumatic spider syndrome. Relief was pouring out of me in gales of laughter. Nothing wrong with that as long as I managed to keep my focus on Sugar Maple while I rode it out.

A door opened up where the beautiful shawl had been and I dashed through it before it could have second thoughts.

Instead of the desolate main lobby with the crumpled paper cups and bent straws, I found myself in a narrow whitewashed hallway punctuated every ten feet by doors right and left. The ceiling had been replaced with a dome of glass. Brilliant sunlight flooded the space, bouncing off the highly polished hospital-white tiled floor and back up to the sky.

I waved at the twinkling surveillance camera, hoping I looked casual and not at all concerned about this latest turn of events.

The camera didn’t wave back but then I didn’t really think it would.

I don’t know how you feel about closed doors but they were giving me the creeps. In fact, I would put closed doors right up there with circus clowns and hockey masks. My heartbeat accelerated painfully as I passed a pair of doors then by the time it even considered returning to a normal rate, it leaped up again in anticipation of more doors. My chest actually started to hurt and I was thinking 911 and who the heck would give me CPR.

The only thing that kept me putting one foot in front of the other was the hope that each step brought me closer to bringing Sugar Maple and the friends I loved back home where they belonged.

I kept a sharp eye out for runaway spiders but so far, so good. Every now and again a shiver ran down my spine that felt uncomfortably like phantom legs dancing across my skin. Every inch of my body screamed for a week or two under a hot shower where I could wash away the traces of sticky spider residue. A lobotomy wouldn’t be bad either if they could just remove the part of my brain that held memories of being trapped in that upright casket with wall-to-wall spiders.

Thinking about the spiders almost took the edge off all those closed doors.

Almost but not quite.

I refused to think about my best friend, who had died saving Luke.

I wasn’t going to think about Luke either. That would be like opening my heart, my dreams, my hopes to them.

No.

Absolutely not.

The hallway ended at a T intersection where I could turn right or left. A faint buzz of apprehension moved along my skin like the hum of bees. The decision took on epic proportions. Beads of sweat trickled down the back of my neck as I stood there, unable to choose. I wished I had a coin to flip, some way to avoid making the decision myself.

My inclination was to go right so I went left. At the time it made a kind of loopy sense to me.

This hallway was identical to the last. Stark white. Blindingly brilliant sunshine reflected everywhere. The surveillance camera twinkling from on high.

And those doors. I hated those doors. Blank faces staring out at me, shielding secrets I didn’t want revealed.

Terrible things hid behind closed doors. Stolen goods. Dead bodies. Murderers with cleavers the size of legs of lamb.

Think of bluebirds in spring. Think of crackling hearths on cold winter nights. Think of a truckful of Malabrigo wound into center-pull balls and ready to knit.

I made it past the first two pairs of doors without incident. This was old magick so it figured they would trot out the haunted house scenario. Why mess with success? Haunted houses had been scaring the Halloween costumes off kids for as long as anyone could remember. When it came to thrills and chills, it was a golden oldie.

And I hate to admit it but it worked. The unknown scared the crap out of me. The doors were probably props that led to nowhere but they still managed to give off a malicious vibe.

I forced my shoulders down from my ears and kept walking. If I was going to convince the talisman, wherever it might be, that I was the right one to lead Sugar Maple, I had to exhibit both courage and resolve. Not to mention the ability to kick a little ass when necessary.

This was one of those times when a girl just had to act
as if.

I strode down the hallway, head held high, a confident spring in my step. First the spinning wheels, then the spiders, and now these ominous closed doors. If they wanted to play childish parlor games, that was fine with me. I could handle whatever they chose to dish out and keep coming back for more.

At least that was what I thought until I reached the next-to-last door on the right. It swung open and a black-robed giant leaped out, grabbed me, and pressed the sharp edge of a dangerously curved sword against the soft part of my throat.

The steel was cold and I stopped breathing. The slightest movement and I’d be sliced like a Christmas ham.

I couldn’t tell if the creature was male or female. The only thing I knew for sure was that it wanted me dead.