Spider-Touched (9 page)

But in the end, she’d lost. She’d chosen a second strand, a deep, rich earth brown, not knowing until she touched it that it belonged to Matthew—the stranger whose boat was carrying her away from the mob hunting her. And in that instant when she touched the thread of Matthew’s life, she’d seen Erik’s death without understanding the full truth of it or what crossing the witch’s path would mean.

The first shimmer of pain pulled Araña from her memories. A nameless urgency made her push formlessly through twisting, multicolored strands—forward into some future moment—until a blue-black thread caught her attention and drew her to it.

She couldn’t tell from looking at it what made this soul and life different from all the others, but she knew it was, knew the being it represented was like nothing she’d ever encountered before.

The pain intensified, isolating her until the only choice was to reach out and grasp the thread in a spidery demon touch.

There was a wrenching disorientation as darkness and nothingness gave way to midday sun and the Oakland skyline. She saw it through tattered canvas, the ripped side of a rapidly moving transport truck.

They were several miles away from the red zone. She recognized the tallest building and knew it was near the maze. Beyond it was one of the buildings she’d seen when they sailed toward the docks.

The truck was in an old graveyard. She noticed tombstones fallen among the weeds, a destroyed mausoleum with the words “Our Lady of Peace” above a doorway framing sky and forest.

Movement to the right turned her attention to what was inside the truck, and even without a physical presence, the sight of the dragon lizards with their tails swinging back and forth in agitation sent terror whipping through her. They were contained, as were the hyenas trapped in a small cage above them.

Next to the hyenas a wolf had bloodied its mouth gnawing frantically at the bars of its cage. The warded silver around its neck made her think it was a Were. Her suspicion deepened when she turned farther and saw the werecougar trapped between forms, his body vibrating with despair.

The sense of the future,
tomorrow
, reverberated through her. Given the proximity to Oakland and the presence of the dragon lizards, she knew she must be in the truck belonging to the trapper the maze owner had spoken of.

There was one last occupant in the truck, the one whose life she’d followed to this place and moment in time. But when she would have turned farther to look, searing agony prevented it, ripping her backward to the present.

She expected an explosion of color, a thousand threads to choose from. Instead there was only the single, blue-black strand in an infinity of darkness.

The pain stopped. Completely. In a way it had never done before while she was still held in the spider vision.

Pure blackness gave way to night. A man lay on a bed of straw, bathed in moonlight.

His wrists and ankles were shackled to a band of metal around his waist. An eerie sigil-inscribed collar encircled his neck, glowing icy blue.

There was no sound in her vision walk save for the sibilant whispers, now joined by discordant notes of music, a fractured rhapsody she instinctively knew belonged to him.

He had a face like the angels she’d seen in Erik’s art history books, too beautiful to look at and yet so enthralling she couldn’t look away. Black hair as long as her own rippled over his chest and back in erotic waves, making her want to reach out and tangle her fingers in it, making her crave what she’d never known and couldn’t have—the touch of a lover.

Despite the length of his hair and the shackles imprisoning him, he was masculine perfection, the epitome of unfathomable power. And though Araña had no true awareness of her body, she had a phantom sensation of her breath catching and her cunt weeping with a need that would never be safely satisfied with anything but her own touch.

The man’s eyes opened, his gaze meeting hers deep in the vision, trapping her in dark pools of blue. And in that instant she felt the shimmering touch of soul against soul and she understood even as the lantern flame released her to tumble into exhausted sleep, this time it was her life that was to become part of the weave.

Five

THERE was nothing for Tir to do other than wait—and endure—as the truck rumbled deeper into the day and closer to its destination. But unlike the centuries he’d spent doing the same, escaping the monotony of captivity by dreaming of freedom and vengeance, this time his thoughts were consumed by the woman.

Not the pathetic creature who had spent the night huddled near the door of his cage, knees pressed to her chest, arms wrapped around her legs, weary terror filling her eyes as she waited for her husband to enter the building at dawn. No, not that woman, but the one who’d invaded his dreams like a vision and filled his body with heat, doing what no woman had done in all the centuries he held in his memory—hardening his cock and filling his testicles with seed, leaving him with the burning need to find her and lie with her.

Tir’s arm muscles bunched, straining against the tethers holding him to the chair as he remembered his actions the previous night. His lips pulled back in savage fury thinking about how he’d turned his back on the trapper’s cowering wife as lust unlike anything he’d ever known burned through his veins.

Never in all his remembered existence had the need for release driven him to take himself in hand as it had after the dream, forcing him to seek relief as he fantasized about a female whose eyes were as black as night and whose imagined touch was a fire strong enough to melt his icy control.

His body hardened with the mere thought of her and stayed that way despite the jolts traveling up his spine with each pothole and bump the truck hit. Lava-hot lust poured into his bloodstream, making him close his eyes and begin fighting against the effect the fantasy woman had on him.

Thinking about the trapper helped. It banked the flames and filled him with cold hatred.

In his mind’s eye he replayed the scene before daybreak—the trapper arriving and entering the cell, sneering with coarse satisfaction and greed when he noticed the erection pressing against the front of Tir’s pants and caught the whiff of semen on the straw bedding.

“Hope you enjoyed her enough to leave a little something behind. It’s about time I had another cash cow here,” Hyde said before ordering Tir to pick up the heavy chair, the shackles on his wrists and ankles making the task difficult.

At taser point he carried the chair outside, then up the truck ramp and into a cage just barely big enough to stand in. Tir seethed when he was bound to the chair, and the cage door closed afterward, immobilizing and securing him for the duration of the agonizing trip.

The animals, including the wereman and Raoul, were loaded next. The dragon lizards were driven into cages at the rear of the truck last and the tarp flaps pulled closed and tied down, trapping them all in the cool predawn darkness.

Hours and miles had passed since then, each one of them adding to Tir’s discomfort. The air was heavy, heated, filled with the dry, scaly scent of lizard. His skin was covered in a light sheen of sweat. Around him in the dim interior, the furred creatures panted, their body heat adding to what the close confines and sun-beaten tarp created.

The visitor left behind, Tomás, had barely spoken as they traveled, while the toddler, Eston—brought to ensure his mother would remain in the compound—fretted occasionally, but was already afraid enough in his father’s company not to give in to tears.

The heavy rumble of the truck’s engine drowned out the sounds of insects and birds. Tir closed his eyes, willing himself to ignore the torture of his confinement. He strained to hear something of nature, to escape the tether of his body and lose himself in the sweet hope of escape. Instead he heard the distant thump of rotors, the sound of a helicopter flying low and rapidly approaching from the direction they were heading.

Moments later Tomás uttered a single panic-laden word: “Guardsmen.” And the truck accelerated savagely then lurched violently as it took a turn.

Machine gun fire erupted behind them. The toddler began screaming, terror of his father giving way to an instinctive fear of death as the truck careened forward, plowing through anything blocking its path.

Jolt after jolt of pain shot up Tir’s spine as the truck bounced along, jerking and swaying dangerously each time it turned. Tree branches clawed and grabbed, stabbed and shredded the canvas, revealing the thick, dark forest hiding them from view.

Eventually the sound of the helicopter faded and the truck slowed. In the truck’s cab Eston’s screams of terror ended abruptly with the sound of a slap and Hyde’s growled “Shut up.”

“What now?” Tomás said, fear leaking through in his voice. “There’ll be ground patrols looking for the truck.”

The trapper’s only response was to brake at a turn, then accelerate.

ARAÑA moved through the woods as quietly as her companions. The last time they’d reached a spot affording a view of the bay and the Oakland skyline, she’d compared it to the one she’d seen in her vision. They were nearing their destination, the abandoned cemetery with the destroyed mausoleum.

Her eyes went to the gun Levi wore holstered at his hip and the crossbow slung across his back. She hadn’t known he was Were the night before, though it wouldn’t have made a difference to her. A Were among humans was almost always an outcast.

She’d tumbled out of deep sleep and into an urgent sense of wakefulness as soon as Rebekka and Levi stepped into the bedroom at sunrise. The first words out of her mouth were a request for paper and a pencil so she could capture the vision scene. And as she’d drawn, she’d answered their questions about what she’d seen and heard while waiting to run the maze—and quickly learned of their interest in the werelion Anton intended to pit against the dragon lizards.

Uneasiness slid through Araña. It seemed too much of a coincidence, like an elaborate pattern created by an unseen hand—Rebekka and Levi waiting beyond the maze, the vision and the blue-black thread, the nightmare glimpse of Oakland on the night she climbed into Erik and Matthew’s boat.

Her throat threatened to close thinking about them. She touched the sheaths that now held their blades, seeking comfort even as she steeled herself against the pain of their loss.

Her fingers curled around the knife hilts, and she tightened her grip until her knuckles paled and the fist squeezing her heart loosened.
Live for all of us
.

Matthew’s voice whispered through her consciousness, reminding and reinforcing what she knew to be the truth. They’d always lived in the here and now, cared only about the present.

It was enough she’d loved them while they were alive. They wouldn’t want her to grieve for them.

Araña took a deep breath and forced her fingers to loosen. The back of her hand brushed against the borrowed wrist-brace slingshot dangling from her belt. It wasn’t a weapon she favored, but she was proficient with it, Matthew had seen to that.

Shadow gave way to sunlight around her, forming a wall to block the sadness and press her toward anticipation as the cemetery came into view, a small patch of forgotten civilization not yet reclaimed by forest or covered in vine.

A narrow road ran through it, faded gray cobblestones no longer holding against the weeds. She read the sign even as Levi said, “Nothing’s passed through here recently.”

He didn’t ask if they were in the right place. Neither did Rebekka. From the road they had only to turn and look toward Oakland to see the picture she’d drawn at sunrise.

Rebekka knelt near the road and slid the knapsack off her back. She opened it and dumped its contents on the grass. Narrow strips of rubber, pierced with sharp metal and nails, lay in coils.

“If the truck has good tires on it, these might not be enough to flatten them,” she said.

Araña nodded. Most of the outlaw settlements had spike strips in place to prevent guardsmen from driving in at will in a hunt to collect bounties. Those strips were more substantial than the ones Levi had fashioned, but they couldn’t take the chance of arriving and relying only on their weapons to stop the trapper.

“I’ll look for something else,” Araña said, leaving Rebekka and Levi to position the spike strips and secure them so they’d remain in place when the truck drove over them.

She found a section of wrought iron fencing near a grave site, the ends jagged and sharp from whatever long-ago force had sheered it away from the base still buried in concrete. She liberated it and dragged it to the road.

Rebekka and Levi joined her in positioning the section of fence at an angle and fixing it there so the ground became its new base and the power of the truck would force metal through rubber.

Levi cocked his head. “Just in time,” he said, freeing the crossbow.

For a moment Araña heard only the sound of birdsong and whispering grass, but then the breeze shifted to bring the distant rumble of a truck. Her fingers brushed over the knife hilts again, but she didn’t draw the blades from their sheaths. She unclipped the slingshot and placed it on her wrist before pulling metal bearings from her pocket.