Spider-Touched

Fourteen

TIR slowed as he neared the Victorian. It was the only house on the street where people weren’t gathering at windows, watching the daylight fade from the false safety of clubs with names like Sinners, Greed, and Envy.

The collective emotions of the elegantly clad humans in those clubs reached out, clawing at Tir’s mental shields, the patrons like a single vicious creature hungry for pain and suffering instead of food.

The knowledge that they hid their true natures within beautiful bodies and cunning minds reinforced centuries of his hatred and disdain for them. They were less than the most simple of beasts. They were unworthy of his attention—except what might be required to rid the earth of them.

He turned his thoughts to the club in front of him. Temptation.

The sign identifying it was elegant, an engraved invitation to sin that contained both warning and promise. Curtains instead of people fluttered at the still-open windows, the sound beckoning like an insidious whisper, one whose breath held sighs of pleasure and the sweet scent of opium.

Like the other clubs, bouncers stood on either side of the door. But unlike the others, these were dressed in expensive suits, as was fitting for ushers to a party, or a funeral.

Tir climbed the steps and stopped in front of them. “I’m here to see Rimmon.”

“You’ve got Lord Rimmon’s marker?” the bouncer to the left said. “Or someone else’s?”

“No.”

Interest flared in cold eyes. “Then the only way you’ll get in is if you’re willing to risk a cage fight and pay your way by entertaining Lord Rimmon’s guests.”

Tir shrugged. “As long as the fight doesn’t delay me unnecessarily. I have other business to attend to tonight.”

The second bouncer’s smile was as cold as his companion’s eyes. He opened the door to reveal a woman standing there. “Take him to Lord Rimmon. No detours.”

The woman nodded and turned, exposing a dress cut away to reveal her back, its skirt slit so each step afforded a shadowy glimpse of her woman’s folds. Temptation, Tir thought, but his cock didn’t stir at the sight of her cunt.

Other women waited along a curved staircase, their dresses equally revealing, their bodies adorned with jewelry. One of them stepped forward to take the hostess’s place as he was led away from the foyer.

Period pieces graced the rooms they passed. Men and women sprawled on couches and chairs, some of them engaging in sexual acts while others watched or conversed with fluted glasses in their hands.

The woman turned toward Tir, her white gloves extending to her elbows, her dress plunging to reveal deep cleavage and the coy hint of pale pink nipples.

She reached for him, as though she intended to loop her arm through his and press her breasts against him, but faltered at his expression. “I’m happy to attend you,” she murmured. “But if another escort would better please you, it can be arranged, assuming of course that Lord Rimmon allows you to remain as his guest.”

Tir didn’t respond, other than to force his mind to remain on the task at hand rather than straying to thoughts of Araña and what they’d done together before he left. Her body was the only one his craved, her human life the only one he cared about.

The sweet smell of opium slunk into the hallway, mixing with that of hashish. Wallpapered rooms gave way to hazy, dim ones where gaunt men and women hovered over specialized pipes, smoking substances that had claimed human souls for centuries.

Conversation gave way to mumbling and then, as Tir moved deeper into the club, to shouts as dice were thrown and a roulette wheel spun. Smoke-filled rooms became dark paneled ones. Tapestries yielded to exotic silk and then to red velvet and the smell of cigars.

Men gathered around gaming tables, calling out numbers and calling for cards, praying to Lady Luck and cursing her, ice clinking in their glasses, the noise they made blending into that of the next room, a hybrid mix of gentleman’s club from the long ago past and sports bar from the days before The Last War.

Flesh pounded against flesh, the sound of violence instead of lovemaking. Large-screen television sets were positioned so those at the bar and in front of it could watch as two boxers fought in another part of the country.

An empty cage dominated another section of the room, a circular arena meant for fighting. Tir took it in at a glance before he found Rimmon.

The vice lord sat on a raised dais in a shadowy corner, the rest of the room fanning out in front of him as though he were a king sitting on a throne. His face was made nightmarish by the flicker of candles set in sconces on the wall on either side of him.

Rimmon spoke to the woman sitting on a cushion at his feet, her arms wrapped around his elegantly trousered legs, her head cushioned on his lap where his hand stroked over honey gold hair as if she were a pet. She was dressed similarly to the hostess Tir followed.

When Tir reached the edge of the dais, she rose to her feet and walked away with the female who’d accompanied him. The vice lord’s attention remained on them, his single emerald-colored eye alight with appreciation. “They’re magnificent creations, aren’t they?”

“Women?” Tir asked, not trusting the brandy-smooth inflection in Rimmon’s voice.

Rimmon laughed and shifted his attention to Tir. “Humans. I find them simply divine. But then, I always have. They’re my downfall, the temptation I can’t seem to turn away from. After seeing the female you were with earlier…” The burning green eye found the sigil-inscribed collar. “But perhaps I’m mistaken. Perhaps your time spent among humans hasn’t been as pleasurable as I imagined.”

Tir stiffened, sensing a trap wrapped in temptation. The vice lord’s words hinted at hidden knowledge, the possibility of finding out what he’d been before his enemies trapped him in flesh and wrapped his memories in darkness—if he was willing to admit to such a weakness to the being in front of him.

Rimmon was no mortal, despite his appearance.

When Tir didn’t respond, Rimmon waved casually at the cushions scattered on the dais. “Have a seat. Since I extended no invitation for you to visit my club, I assume you’re here as a petitioner? Or better yet, as a penitent?”

“I’ll stand.”

A smile twisted Rimmon’s face into a grotesque mask. “Ah, pride. What would it take to break you of it, I wonder? And make no mistake, I’d take great pleasure in doing so, almost eternal pleasure. But of course, it would come with suffering to match. That’s always the way, isn’t it?”

Rimmon leaned forward onto the armrests of his chair, his hands settling on the lion claws carved into the old wood. “I’m not someone who believes in coincidence. There is a game being played here, of that I am certain. But are you part of it? Or a pawn?” And like light striking a different facet in the same stone, the gleam of amused speculation in Rimmon’s emerald eye hardened into ruthlessness. “What name do you go by?”

“Tir.”

“Tir. It’s a name I’ve heard whispered, but what it might stand for eludes me at the moment.

And somehow I doubt you intend to enlighten me. So rather than waste the night exploring how you came to be at the occult shop at the same time I was there, I ask, what is it you want from me?”

“I want to bring a boat into the waters you control and leave it there, knowing it will be guarded until I reclaim it.”

Rimmon blinked and leaned back in his chair, not bothering to hide his surprise. “You do prod me into curiosity. And if I choose to grant this favor? What will I gain from it?”

Rather than place his trust in the Were’s rumor about the vice lord’s daughter, Tir said, “What would you ask of me?”

Rimmon laughed. “Do you expect me to ask that I be restored to my former glory? Is that the sweet temptation you bring with you to my club? If so, then you’ve failed. There is something I want more, something that will cost you not just the boat if you manage to bring it safely into the harbor, but the woman I saw you with earlier if you’re unable to deliver on your promise.”

“And the promise you’d have me make?” Tir asked, not bothering to keep the menace from his voice in response to the vice lord’s threat against Araña.

“Heal my mortal daughter. Fail and I will keep your woman in my bed until by some miracle she gives me a child. An eye for an eye. It has a familiar ring to it, doesn’t it?”

Fury surged through Tir at the thought of Araña underneath the vice lord, her legs splayed, her channel filled with another man’s cock. It took all his control not to lunge forward—and had Rimmon been human, he wouldn’t have managed it.

Tir clamped down on his anger, though possessiveness pulsed through him with every heartbeat. There was little risk; in his centuries of captivity, he’d unwillingly cured others of the disease.

“I will heal your daughter.”

Rimmon signaled, and a server appeared with a hand-drawn map spread flat on a tray. The vice lord traced a route winding through wreckage, his finger stopping on a spot deep in the harbor. “If you’re successful in getting the boat to this point, my men will greet you. They’ll stay with you until morning. Then we’ll see if you can do what you say you can.”

ARAÑA paced endlessly, moving from one barred window to another and staring out. The house was larger than the Constellation and yet it confined her in a way the boat never did.

More than once she caught herself rubbing a hand over her heart, as if somehow it would cease beating if something happened to Tir.

It wouldn’t, she assured herself, refusing to contemplate it.

She avoided looking at the candles flickering in holders mounted on the wall, but she was less successful in deflecting Levi’s impassioned words, in steeling herself against thoughts about Rebekka and, with them, her own guilty conscience.

Araña’s stomach tightened with images of the healer huddling in the same cell she’d been in as she waited to run the maze. A cold sweat added to the chill of the house as she pictured the scorpion-marked demon, the cruelty in his eyes as he’d launched himself past her to savage one of the convicts. Without any effort at all she could remember the tortured screams of the men in the maze, the seemingly endless sounds of torment following her into freedom.

Goose bumps rose on Araña’s flesh as minutes lengthened like long shadows and guilt slid through her, ripping away the thin scab covering a hundred memories of the lives she’d touched when the demon gift trapped her in unwanted vision.

She turned away from the window, her gaze settling unconsciously on the fireplace. A dusty bundle of wood waited only to be lit in order to ward off the cold and fear that came with nighttime and the ceding of the world to the supernaturals.

She’d never looked willingly into the flame, had never sought its heart and the place where whispered voices were a rushing stream underlying a thousand strands of color. Did that make her a coward?

Yes, her conscience whispered.

No, Erik and Matthew had counseled without fully understanding what it was she faced. To them, fighting the gift was the better way to deal with it.

Araña closed her eyes. Candlelight danced on the back of her eyelids, sinuous, like the movements of a snake.

Even without the flickering, she was aware of each place where fire drank the oxygen and fed on wax. In the close confines of the room, it had its own voice. It sang to her, telling her she had only to call and it would come to her.

A shudder went through her, the remembered screams from the maze blending seamlessly with those she’d heard the last time she called the fire to her.

She crossed her arms. Hugged herself but failed to find comfort in it.

She longed for the feel of Tir’s touch. Ached for the caress of his hands and lips.

The spider nestled in the scarred flesh of the brand, and she thought about the demon Abijah becoming the scorpion he wore. How, trapped in the vision place, her insubstantial form felt spiderlike.

More than once she’d had the fleeting sensation that without the hindrance of flesh she could live forever in the heart of the flame, endlessly weaving lives together to create the pattern the future would take. Only in that place was there a unity with the mark—and only then until the pain started, forcing her to do the very thing that burdened her with guilt.

What would it mean to willingly enter the vision place? To accept the demon gift that had caused her so much suffering? Would she gain control of it if she did?

The image of Rebekka holding the child in her arms as she walked away from the ambush wreckage rose from Araña’s conscience. Many would have left the child, or abandoned him as soon as they reached the city. Just as most would have denied her shelter the night she ran from the settlement, a mob at her heels and bearing a brand on her hand.

She regretted never asking Erik to help her find a way to gain control of the demon gift, for never telling Erik the full truth of the visions. He’d guessed there was more to them.

How many times had he let her browse through books of magic before surrendering them to the rich patrons who’d paid to have them stolen?

How many times had she fought back the urge to unburden herself, to seek absolution for the pain and suffering she’d caused?

Too many to count. And always she’d avoided talking to him by telling herself she didn’t want to burden him with the knowledge—when the truth was so much more frightening for her. She hadn’t wanted to face the inevitable question. Had she touched the strand that was his life? Or Matthew’s? She’d been terrified of losing the family of her heart, the only home that had ever offered her safety and love.

Coward, she called herself, opening her eyes and going to the fireplace, crouching on the floor in front of it. Behind her she heard the soft whisper of flame dancing on wax, begging for her to turn and look at it, to use the gift that came with the demon taint to her soul.

Araña’s hands balled into fists, and though she didn’t feel it move, the spider reappeared on her cheek. Did it choose the position to remind her of Tir pressing his lips to it, brushing his fingers over it, unafraid? Was its intent to summon her courage and urge her to face the flame freely?

She lifted her hand to her cheek and traced the outline of the spider with a fingertip. Even without a mirror, without any change in the texture of her skin, she could trace it exactly.

Her hand dropped from her cheek, going instinctively to one of the knives. By touch alone she knew it was Matthew’s.

Araña’s stomach churned at the thought of going to see Annalise Wainwright, of asking a witch for help with her gift. By Levi’s description, Annalise wasn’t one of those at the bus stop, but with little money and all of it necessary to survive, Araña knew she’d have to bargain the use of her gift for any training the witch might be able to give her.

Her other hand settled on the second knife, Erik’s, and the now-familiar pain of loss clogged her throat. If she ever encountered the witch from her long-ago vision, the old woman who’d sent them to the place where Erik and Matthew were killed, she didn’t think she’d be able to still her hand.

What could the witch do to her? Her soul was already damned to the fires of Hell.

A shudder went through her as the image of the demon Abijah rose in her mind, only to slide away with memories of Rebekka ushering her into the tiny room at the brothel, offering the use of her bed and her clothing.

That night the demon gift had shown her Tir. Ultimately it had led her to the ecstasy of knowing another’s touch.

She glanced once more toward the window and the quickly approaching night. And then, before her courage deserted her, she mentally called the flames licking at candle wax. Directed them to consume the wood in front of her.

The fire caught with a whoosh, filling the silence of the room with the crackling of burning lumber. Araña’s hands tightened on the hilts of the knives, drawing strength and comfort from their having belonged to Matthew and Erik.

With a thought, she found the spider positioned over her rapidly beating heart. I am not a coward, she told herself, holding Rebekka’s image in her mind as she looked into the fire and sought its dark heart.

It welcomed her instantly and held her for long moments in the black of a void filled with utter silence. Phantom flames buffeted her, tracing limbs that didn’t exist, as if trying to force her to face the full truth of her nature by licking over the same spidery shape she’d traced with her fingertip.

In the unseen distance, where demon place and physical world met, she thought she could feel the wild pounding of her mortal heart trying to summon her spirit back to her body. But the silence and the darkness held and she willed herself not to fight it.

If she had any hope of undoing the harm she’d already caused Rebekka, then she had to keep her mind clear. She had to act quickly, before the pain rose and she grabbed wildly at the threads in order to make it stop.

Silence finally yielded to the rushing blend of a thousand whispered voices. Black nothingness became an endless choice of color.

Doubt filled her. Panic threatened to follow.

Araña struggled to remember the exact color of the thread that was Rebekka’s life.

Too late she realized she should have faced the painful memories arising from her previous visions. She should have examined each of them and tried to understand better the array of colors, why these souls were the ones she could easily touch.

Now that she’d willingly entered this spidery place of power, she sensed there was an order to it, as if the kaleidoscopic swirl of color was already loosely woven into a pattern. One she was a part of.

A thread caught her attention. Various shades of brown with a swirl of gray. Elation gripped her and she mentally reached for it, thinking it was Rebekka’s. But as soon as she’d made it her choice, the brown and gray fell away to reveal tawny gold underneath, as if the healer’s touch had masked the truth of the underlying soul.

Mixed in with the gold were thick strands of dark brown and black, a lion’s mane. And Araña knew instinctively it was Levi’s life she would forever alter.

A wave of panic rose and with it the first hint of pain. She fought to accept demon place and dark gift rather than fight against them as she always had.

The pain subsided. She expected to slide deeper into the vision, to become a ghost to Levi’s soul and experience the world as it was for him. Instead she remained in the heart of the flame, surrounded by choice, by the whispered voices of a thousand souls.

A black-and-gray thread emerged from a tangle of color, drawing her to it because it ran parallel to Levi’s. She hesitated and the strand disappeared. In its wake, pain rose beyond the threshold where it was easily ignored.

The black-and-gray thread reappeared, once again close to Le vi’s, as if their lives traveled a similar path. She reached mentally for the thread, blocking her mind to the suffering and death her touch had brought in the past.

As soon as the choice was made, the frenetic sense of movement, the wild swirl of color ceased, and a pattern emerged. A thousand connections already in existence, places where lives touched and crossed—altering destiny.

Soul threads changed color subtly or not at all. Merged and split, giving birth to new lives. Ended.

The sight of it awed Araña, mesmerized her. The power pulsing through a carpet of woven color enthralled her. And even as she watched, there were subtle changes to it, choices made or turned away from.

For an instant she felt peace, pleasure in the gift she’d always considered a curse, a demon taint marking her soul as belonging to Hell. Then the pattern disappeared, the colors melting, fading into a blackness that took her into the future she’d wrought when she touched Levi’s life to another.

A dark-haired stranger stood face-to-face with Levi. In confrontation? In meeting? The ruin of corroded trucking containers and twisted steel gave no context.

There was movement behind Levi and the stranger, or perhaps sound. They turned, and Araña silently screamed.

Jurgen and another guardsman were there, tasers in their hands. The barbs hit Levi and the stranger before they had any chance of defense or escape.

Both fell to the ground and began convulsing. Araña had only a glimpse of the stranger’s body starting to change shape before he faded from her awareness as though his future no longer touched Levi’s.

A heartbeat later, she understood why. Levi’s back arched violently, as if the lion trapped in human flesh was making one final attempt to escape, shredding through muscle and internal organs, so desperate for freedom it would destroy itself in an attempt to gain it. And then Levi went completely still, his eyes unseeing, glazing over as Araña’s cry pulled her from the vision.