The Neon Graveyard (18 page)

My own eyes darted back and forth from his globular shell to the other as the vibrations from my touch faded, and I finally realized where I was. Not a planetarium any longer. Not standing at the edge of the Universe. Rather, at the corner of giant, and once-again invisible web.

So, I thought, biting my lip. Where was the spider?

T
he hairless being began to screech, the sound a mixture of something from
Jurassic Park
and a teen girl’s sighting of Robert Pattinson. If disturbing the web hadn’t gained me unwanted attention, the upset creature’s ongoing cry surely had. I glanced back at Hunter, trapped, as the noise continued.

Fast, then. But a hand wrapped firmly around my ankle as I reached for the web. It was a good thing I looked before I struck out because it was Carlos’s imploring gaze I nearly kicked in. His other hand found my pant leg. “No, Joanna. He can’t be reached.”

I didn’t know what he meant. That I couldn’t reach Hunter or that even if I did he was still lost to me, but I did know it wouldn’t be for lack of trying. “Let go, Carlos, and do it quick. Unless you want your hands to go the way of your eye.”

His face fell, disappointment and sadness etched in lines that hadn’t been there only days earlier, but he released his hold, knowing I meant it. I couldn’t have made it this far if I’d had more regard for anyone’s life—including my own—than I did for Hunter’s.

Yet when I craned my neck again, he was shaking his head too, pounding at the cottony sac, every strike causing it to splinter with light. It looked like a lightning storm inside, but I didn’t have time to admire it, or to mind his objection. The motion was vibrating the attached threads. The web now glittered with movement. The upside was, it’d be easy to make my way up to him. The downside? I’d be as easy to see as a spotlit starlet.

The threading was strong yet flimsy, and every movement—repositioning my hand, my feet, even reaching for another strand—threatened to flip me into the blackened abyss. I hoped my power of creation extended to a trampoline if I fell.

The vibrational shock was a Richter seven by now, worsened by the continuous cries of the sac creature now propelling itself back and forth in a consoling rock. I was also messing up the web. Approximately every third movement saw me grabbing a strand in the wrong spot and pulling it loose . . . and I was only halfway to Hunter. How the hell would I get back down?

Then I became stuck. Residue, I realized, looking at my palm. A filmy layer from the silks I’d already touched, the heat from my palm warming and softening it into a gluey compound meant, I knew, to halt me altogether.

I cursed under my breath, and tried to move faster, but a new vibration whipped me against the web, which saved me, but also caught me in its dangerous fibers. The monstrous creature ceased crying. Carlos cried out. Hunter pounded on his prison shell.

And she dropped down in front of me, so close my eyes nearly crossed.

She was naked, not that it mattered, because she was also gristled from head to toe. Body blackened like bacon left frying in a pan, her former beauty was impossible to imagine, even for someone who’d seen it. I’d known the smoke I’d blown in her face would attack her body. I’d been warned not to inhale from the quirley once it was lit, lest the poisonous tendrils reach into my lungs and do the same to me.

But I’d never dreamed a weapon could so thoroughly and continually attack a person from the inside. It looked like Solange had been flash-fired and kiln-baked at the same time. Forget third-degree burns—this had rendered her skin tissue nonexistent, and my guess was the fat had been burned from her as well, because what bubbled on the surface of her face was smoke-dried strips of muscle tethered to bone. Parts of her body—her skull, left clavicle, and elbow, her entire right side from hip to knee—were blown-out chunks of bone, as if tiny explosions had erupted inside her marrow, fusing her into a new, unrecognizable shape. I found her ears only by sighting the earrings dangling from oddly angled cartilage. One was located near her charred forehead, the other down by her chin.

Kundans, I realized with a jolt. She had armed herself with the same defensive weapons as those adorning my body, and I could have hit myself for not realizing it before. She’d never been fond of ornamentation like Diana, or affectation like Nicola, so I’d once thought beauty was her greatest weapon. But she’d worn this pair of earrings every time I’d seen her, and if this was what the quirley had done to her
with
the kundans’ protective powers, I didn’t want to know what would have become of her without them.

I looked away from the earrings, lest she discern my thoughts, gaze darting over her destroyed skull like I was having trouble taking it all in. Not exactly hard to fake. This was what someone would look like walking out of a microwave set to high, left to run, and starting to smoke.

Yet the top of her skull was the most extraordinary sight of all. The hair on her head was pristine; a shiny, healthy, deep auburn—with highlights or lowlights or both—and such a great contrast with the physical wreckage beneath it that its presence was a mockery. I looked her over from head to toe, and she let me, her sooty gaze fastened on me in unflinching defiance. I had done this to her, and she wanted me to see it.

And then she’d want me to pay.

“Satisfied?” she asked in a voice as charred as the rest of her. I wasn’t, but refrained from shaking my head because, were our positions reversed, she would be.

“I thought you murdered everyone downstairs so you could fix yourself.”

“Impossible. The quirley was
of
me. I fashioned it here with the intent to cause harm, and as you know, intention is everything. In any world.”

And I’d used her own magic against her in a place where magic was everything too.

“It doesn’t matter. I’ve no need for vanity anymore. I’ve got what I want.”

My gaze flicked, unbidden, up to Hunter still suspended above us. He was thrashing on his silky prison, but as strong as he was, his actions made no sound and had even less effect. The sac undulated, the web shimmered, and Solange laughed.

“Oh darling. He’s all yours. Or he would be if I had any intention of letting either of you live.”

I ignored that last statement and shook my head. “No. You didn’t do . . .
that
to him just to lure me here. That’s . . .”

I couldn’t say it. But looking at Hunter, it was clear.
That
was personal. If her intention had merely been to kill us both, she’d have shrunken his head long ago. But he was alive. Trapped, stored above her, but still alive.

“Oh sure.” Solange shrugged, not denying it. “I thought for a short time that my husband and I might rekindle our old romance, maybe team up. I am Shadow, he is Light. We once created a child, the Kairos, between us. No reason we couldn’t do it again, right?”

There’s me
, I refrained from saying.

“But he’s useless. Impotent, if you didn’t already know. Couldn’t rise with the sun in the east, if you know what I mean.”

I felt Carlos’s one good eye roll my way in warning, and I held impossibly still, very conscious of not moving my hand to my belly, and the life Hunter had birthed inside me. Instinct told me that death was preferable over Solange discovering that.

“Oh, don’t worry,” Solange said, tone ashy and wry. “I’ll still put him to good use. See, I’m going to fossilize him in amber. He will ever be as he is now. A pleasure to look at. My pet rock, if you will.”

I looked back up. Hunter had stopped pounding, and his hands hung at his sides, sticky and useless, his shoulders hunched as he resigned himself, I think, to being unable to do anything but watch me die.

“Now, let’s see,” Solange said, looming so close I smelled the ash on her shriveled organs, the smoke on her breath. I jerked back in revulsion, and the web at my back tightened its hold. Her face twisted at my reaction, causing a muscle strip to snap over her cheek. She slapped me, then loomed even closer. “What gem, my dear, do you think will best capture the hue and form of your last soul sliver?”

Her finger, grotesque and talonlike, trailed over my breastbone. I stiffened, waiting for its inevitable plunge into my chest.

She snarled. “I screwed up the first two times. I thought your soul power was strong enough for a mineral, and tried a diamond since you’re supposed to be so fucking special. Then a garnet, representative of your lifeblood. But now I realize your particular power is organic. Maybe a coral or ivory. Maybe jet.”

I looked into her gaze, her own eyes lit by nothing but madness, and thought,
Shit
. The quirley had flash-fried her brain. There was probably a coiled up strip of jerky rattling around where her gray matter used to be. She wasn’t just everyday homicidal. She was certifiable.

“Then again, a moonstone is the most important variety of the orthoclase, and having handled your soul twice now, I think that might fit you just fine. Orthoclase, as I’m sure you know, is derived from the Greek . . .”

Great. More fucking Greeks.

“
Orthos
means ‘right’ and
kalo
means ‘cleave.’ ” She bared stubs of blackened teeth. “Appropriate, don’t you think?”

“Not so much,” I said in all seriousness. It made her laugh again, and soot billowed from the holes in her throat.

“Yes, I think a moonstone will fit you fine. Mind, some orthoclase stones are intrusive, all right angles and flinty warm tones, but a moonstone is pristine. Sacred. So there will be no cuts in this one. I’ll polish it into a pear shape. The light will filter through it in a cloudy blue haze, and it will look like it’s floating. But it’ll be clean, yes. Something to be proud of, really. Your soul is still relatively clean. What do you think?”

“I’m not really an expert,” I said, which made her nod. “But I do have a question.”

She looked at me blankly.

“Why?” I asked. “I mean, you’re no longer creating some sort of supernatural power plant with this sky of souls. You’ve taken the life energy of everyone peopling Midheaven, and while that gives you more talking heads than FOX News, the place can no longer run. Yet you’re not using that collective power to renew your body . . .” Never mind beauty. “So what’s so important that you’d need all the men’s energy to fuel it, all the women’s even . . . especially mine?”

My question either surprised or pleased her because the patchy bone and blackened muscle lifted over her forehead, and she gave me a sooty chuckle. “You’re not as smart as you think.”

She turned, and I stared at her retreating form. She really did look like a spider. As if she heard my thoughts, she flipped her gorgeous mane of hair, and looked at me from over one charred, flaky shoulder. “Don’t go anywhere.”

Of course I started struggling free of the web as soon as she scuttled away, noting she was doing a far better job of traversing the threads than I had. The vibrations from my movements alerted her, and jarred her a little, but she didn’t turn around, or otherwise acknowledge me again, as she headed directly toward her other caged pet.

Her lack of concern was very concerning. I yanked at the webbing even harder, but it just grew stickier. Body heat plus web glue equals trouble. I’d store that for future reference if I ever got out of here.

Hunter resumed his pounding, sparks bursting from his soft cage in jerky undulations. I appreciated his concern, but it did nothing to aid my escape. Carlos too was yelling again, but I couldn’t stop to listen. Every time I pulled one limb loose of the gossamer silk, another seemingly shot up to secure me in place. By the time Solange reached her pet alien’s giant sac, I was covered in sticky strands from shoulders to ankles, pinned in place.
Fuck.

“Come here, darling. Come here, baby . . .” Her croon was smoky as she slit the webbing open with the nail of her index finger, top to bottom. When the surgeonlike incision was made, she parted the thick webbing like curtains, and helped the pearlescent bald thing out. It nuzzled her cracked, hardened form, white against black, soft against gristled, then almost immediately turned to me.

“You look hungry, sweetie,” Solange told it, dropping what would have been a kiss to its bulbous head . . . if she’d still had lips. She left a scattering of charred ash there, but both were too focused on me to notice. “Well, go ahead. Dinner is served.”

Outside of its cage, the creature looked even more alienlike, though it possessed the same surefootedness as a spider, strangely graceful as four limbs—or more accurately, twenty talons—skittered unencumbered across the web. It was almost beautiful, possessing the same certainty of movement exhibited by a harpist picking across strings, except the web’s shimmer represented one note closer to death for me. I fought harder, and the thing’s teeth began to chatter.

Solange howled with wild, smoky laughter.

Time slowed in the strange way it does when you’re panicked and you know it.
Thirty seconds
, some voice said inside me.
That’s how long you have to live.

Then something else began to shake the web. The hairless, clicking, homicidal beast dropped its head, and I followed its milky gaze to find Carlos fighting to get up to me.