Spider-Touched

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.

They split up, Rebekka going to a place of safety while Levi sought a perch where the crossbow could be used effectively. None of them knew what they’d be facing, whether there would only be a driver, or whether the truck would have a mounted machine gun and guards.

Araña slid into the forest and waited, one of the metal balls tucked into the slingshot’s leather pocket. She felt the vibration of the truck through her feet long moments before it roared into sight and accelerated when it hit the clearing, as if the driver was afraid of being caught out in the open.

The windows were tinted, hiding the cab’s occupants, but the lack of a mounted machine gun made Araña smile in anticipated victory. She heard the truck drive over the spike strips and saw the tires gape when it struck the wrought iron fence, the impact making the vehicle sway dangerously.

The driver kept going, his speed increasing, spinning the rubber off the rims even before he reached the end of the clearing and was swallowed by forest. Caution held Araña in place long enough for the shadow of a helicopter to sweep across the clearing, the sound of its blades no longer masked by the truck.

It made another pass, the nose dipping, pointing at the bent weeds marking the truck’s path, before lifting and spinning away. She moved then.

A sense of urgency gripped her. Where there was a helicopter, there would soon be guardsmen in trucks.

She didn’t see Levi and could only guess he was on the opposite side of the road, moving forward, as she was. A child’s screams poured ice into her veins, making her steps quicken though her training held, keeping her in shadow.

A hyena streaked by, followed by three others. Fear tightened her grip on the slingshot. Her thoughts flashed to the dragon lizards. If the hyenas were free…

Gunshots sounded, cutting across the engine noise like a sharp knife. A spray of automatic fire that didn’t match Levi’s weapon.

Araña pushed forward, the slingshot leading. The rear of the truck came into view, a twisted mess next to a tree broken and held upright by branches entwined with those belonging to its neighbors.

In a glance she took in the empty cages that had contained the dragon lizards and hyenas when she’d seen them in her vision. The werewolf desperately flung himself against the bars of his.

A bearish, rough-looking man crept around the side of the truck, a gun in his hand. Blood poured over his face from a gash in his forehead.

Hyde, she thought, remembering the name Anton had spoken, as she inched forward, looking for a clear shot.

“End of the road for you,” the trapper said, wiping blood off his face with his arm, then taking aim at the werewolf. “You’d be useful but I can’t trust you. It was the same way with your mother. When I was done with the bitch, I took care of her just like this.”

The werewolf growled savagely in response, hurled itself more ferociously against the front of the cage. Araña moved again, found the shot she was looking for, and released the slingshot’s leather pocket even as the man fired.

The bullet struck metal and ricocheted. The bearing projectile didn’t. It plowed through eye and brain and bone, dropping the trapper instantly.

Levi emerged from the woods with Rebekka behind him. “There was someone else in the truck besides the trapper,” he said, explaining his delay. “A man. He got away but I don’t think he intends to double back.”

Araña nodded as she left her position, securing the slingshot to her belt as she walked. It would have been foolish to ignore a potential sniper.

Levi and Rebekka reached the truck first. Rebekka leaned into the cab and turned the engine off. The child’s crying stopped, and in the abrupt silence, they all heard the unwelcome sound of the helicopter above the canvas of the trees and the distant rumble marking the approach of guardsmen in jeeps.

“Leave the child where he is until we’re finished in back,” Levi told Rebekka.

“The dragon lizards are loose,” Araña said as she knelt next to the dead trapper and rifled through his pants until she found the keys she’d guessed would be there.

Levi picked up the gun and checked it for ammunition before tossing it aside as worthless. “Only one of the lizards is free,” he said. “The trapper used all but his last bullet on it.”

Araña shivered and wondered if the freed dragon would put distance between it and the truck, or if the death of its companion and the smell of the trapper’s blood would keep it close.

She stood and climbed into the truck, pushing her way through torn canvas. Levi did the same.

Part of her noticed the crumpled form of the werecougar, but it was the man at the far end who held all her attention, trapping her in dark pools of blue and making her heart race as he’d done in her vision. She moved toward him without being aware of doing it. Felt again the shimmering touch of soul against soul and saw recognition in his face where there shouldn’t have been any.

Questions pressed in on her, but there was no time to ask them. She selected a key from the ring and fit it to the lock of the cage.

“Wait,” Levi said, lifting his hand to stop her but halting as the spider appeared near her wrist in the place his fingers would settle. “He’s not Were. He smells completely human. Look at his arms. They’re covered in tattoos. Look how afraid those of your kind are of him. He’s a prisoner being shipped to the maze to run. We don’t know what his crimes are or whether we can trust him. Leave him for last. We’ll free him from the cage and the chair then give him the keys so he can remove the shackles and go his own way.”

Ice slid through Araña as the man’s gaze flicked to Levi and she read the promise of death there. She tried a second key, then a third before the lock to his cage clicked and she opened the door.

“Give me the keys,” Levi said. “I can free the wolf and the werecougar while you release him from the chair.”

Araña hesitated, not sure she could trust Levi. She glanced at the keys and tried to identify the one that would open the shackles.

“It’s not there,” the imprisoned man said, his voice rough, as though he rarely used it. “It was never in the trapper’s possession.”

Araña turned the keys over to Levi without looking at him and bent to the task of dealing with the restraints holding the prisoner to the chair. Her fingers brushed against his bare skin as she fought against cruelly tight bindings. Each touch made her breath catch and her eyes flash to the spidery demon mark, but it remained where it was on her wrist, a deadly bracelet with an agenda of its own.

Rebekka climbed into the truck and gasped at the sight of the prisoner before turning and murmuring in a soothing voice to the wolf. Levi opened the werecougar’s cage and found a pulse in the human throat. “He’s alive but unconscious. I’ll have to carry him.”

He stepped to the werewolf’s cage and pulled his gun from its holster. Aimed it at the wolf who was already rolling on its back, exposing its belly and throat in a submissive gesture.

Rebekka moved to the side, out of danger as Levi unlocked the cage. The wolf continued to lie still when the door swung open.

Levi pressed the barrel of the gun against the Were’s skull. “Don’t repay us by making us kill you,” he said as Rebekka stepped forward and removed the band of warded silver from around the animal’s neck. It turned its head slowly and lapped at Rebekka’s hand with a pink tongue.

The last restraint fell away and the tattooed stranger stood, his chains rattling as he took the first shuffling step. Even shackled like the worst of criminals, power radiated from him, stirring a deep instinctual recognition in Araña. Fear matched by and juxtaposed against desire, as if he could be either deadly enemy or eternal lover.

She shook off the strange musings as the werewolf jumped from its cage above the one that had housed the dragons. It closed its eyes, whined as if it was trying to shift into a human form but couldn’t.

Levi hefted the Were trapped in a grotesque blend of cougar and man over his shoulders. “Let’s get out of here.”

Araña left first and felt a fresh rush of adrenaline. The jeeps carrying guardsmen were closer, but it was the sound of the helicopter that made her hands go automatically to the knife hilts.

The wolf jumped from the truck and went straight to the trapper’s body. He issued a low growl before sinking his teeth into the dead man’s throat and ripping it out.

Rebekka climbed through the torn canvas side of the truck, then Levi, with the werecougar slung over his shoulder. He glanced in the direction of the clearing and voiced Araña’s fear. “We don’t have much time. The pilot is trying to set down in the cemetery. Even if he doesn’t, with the jeeps close by, he might lower guardsmen on a cable.”

Levi set his burden on the ground. Despite his early argument to leave the tattooed stranger behind, he helped the man from the truck and tossed Araña the ring of keys before pulling his gun. “I’ll stand guard.”

Araña could hear the tension in Levi’s voice. She knew without being told that if the stranger couldn’t be freed, he would be left behind, his shackles giving him no chance of escaping the guardsmen.

There should have been cutters or a saw in the truck, but there weren’t any. Araña salvaged a collection of stiff wire as she searched, claimed a short machete in a sheath as well as a knapsack packed with food, camping blanket, and matches kept safe in plastic.

Rebekka retrieved the child.

From the direction of the clearing, the helicopter rose above the trees, circled, and dropped again, the rotors thumping the air, a mechanical heartbeat sending terror out before it. Araña finished rifling through the locked tool trunk welded onto the truck body, the last of the places where anything useful might be stored, and found nothing.

She returned to the shackled stranger, who waited stoically, his gaze rarely leaving her.

“We’ve got to leave now,” Levi said.

“Go. I’ll catch up later.” The words held a confidence Araña refused to waver from, though her nerves were strung tight and her heart raced. She knelt and tried to steady her hand for the work of picking locks. She wasn’t adept at it, not like Matthew and Erik, but given enough time—

Levi hesitated a second, then stepped to the trapper’s body. He removed the knife and sheath strapped to the dead man’s thigh and dropped them on the ground next to the claimed knapsack.

“You know where to find us,” he said, hefting the still unconscious werecougar over his shoulders and leaving with Rebekka and the toddler.

The werewolf looked back before following the others into the forest. Araña’s gaze flicked upward to meet the prisoner’s and then she went to work on the locks.

In a thousand dreams of freedom, Tir had never imagined a human would risk her life for him, and yet there was no mistaking that the woman kneeling at his feet was mortal, despite the mark that had appeared at her wrist when she stood in front of his cage and refused to yield the keys.

His hands clenched and unclenched as he fought not only to remain still but to resist the urge to spear his fingers through her hair. He’d convinced himself she was a sliver of recovered memory—a woman he’d lain with when he knew who and what he was; or a fantasy conjured up to accompany the dream of freedom, but neither had done her beauty justice.

She was exquisite, her skin the dusky brown of earth, her hair and eyes the color of night sky. “I am Tir,” he said, giving her the name he hadn’t heard spoken in centuries and had never willingly shared with any of his captors.

“I’m Araña.”

Araña, the Spanish word for spider. He glanced at the mark on her wrist again and wondered if she had a witch’s training, or carried a witch’s spell.

There was the barest trembling of her hands as she tried to coax the lock open. He could sense her fear. It washed over him in waves despite her outward calm.

The tiny click of the lock yielding to her coaxing sent emotion surging through him, a fevered song pouring hope and anticipation into his blood as the first shackle fell away. The second followed quickly, and then she rose to her knees, her fingers going to the band at one wrist, the heat of her and the proximity of her mouth to his cock searing him, burning a fantasy into his mind even as the wrist restraints fell away and she turned her attention to the steel belt with its dangling chains.

When the last of the restraints put on him by humans dropped to the ground, Tir reached for her as she stood. She stumbled backward, evading him, her fear spiking. “Don’t. It’s not safe to touch me.”

A small sound of anxiety followed as the tone of the chopper blades changed, indicating the pilot’s success in landing it a short distance away. She pointed to the sheathed weapons and knapsack on the ground and said, “You can have them,” before whirling away, heading in a different direction than the one taken by her companions.

Tir grabbed the items up and followed her, his muscles rejoicing in the movement. He didn’t fear recapture, not in that moment. There was no room for it in the heady reality of freedom—the sweet scent of forest and the play of sunlight in shadow, the smooth rhythm of movement denied him for centuries.

He wanted to laugh. To sing. To raise his arms toward the heavens in embrace.

Behind them he could hear shouts as the dead dragon lizard and the trapper’s corpse were discovered. A machine gun rattled, a nervous burst slicing through leaves and silenced by a shout from a superior officer.

He smiled, a savage baring of teeth. Let them come after him. Let them try to take him. They’d be the first to feel his vengeance.

From time to time he caught a glimpse of the city. They were moving away from it and he wondered if Araña had a destination in mind.

He didn’t ask. He didn’t care. If he’d ever walked freely among men, it was locked away, the memory of it blocked by the collar.

Eventually he would go to Oakland and begin his search for the texts that would help him translate the tattoos on his arms. But for the moment he savored the freedom.

He easily paced Araña, found his attention returning to her repeatedly, caressing her lines, appreciating the sleek feminine form, the confidence in her stride.

His eyebrows drew together as the scent of blood reached him. His gaze was drawn to the black material of her shirt and the darkening spot on her side.

She was injured. The knowledge of it sent emotion roaring through him—not unfamiliar in the violent resolve it contained, but unfamiliar in its cause. The thought of someone touching her, hurting her…

Tir’s fingers curled into fists, tightening on the sheathed knife and machete. He told himself the savage anger rose from the debt he felt toward her for freeing him, from the belief she would be of further use to him in navigating a human world he had no experience with.

He told himself the fierce possessiveness came from the lust she generated in him, a heat unlike any he could remember. Thoughts and images from the previous night flitted through his mind.

Suspicion flared as he remembered his revulsion when the trapper’s wife was ordered into his cage to breed with him, her face overlaid onto a hundred other faces—women who’d failed to tempt him into breaking his vow never to lie with a mortal. And now, when he should care about nothing but savoring the freedom he’d gained, he burned for a human whose life was nothing against the span of his.

He didn’t think he would be able to stop himself from taking her. He wanted to cover her body with his and know the sweet heaven of finding her opening and thrusting into her slick, heated core.

He wanted her kneeling in front of him, as she’d done when she removed the last of the shackles, and taking his cock into her mouth. The fantasy was so visceral it sent a jolt of icy-hot pain through his shaft.

Tir slowed, allowing her to pull ahead of him and move out of sight. His lips pulled back in a silent rage. Was she a witch? Was that how she’d shown herself in his dreams and sent lava-hot lust boiling through his veins?

Was this the work of some dark deity? Or some elaborate human ploy, his freedom an illusion to trick him into surrendering what he’d never surrendered before, his seed? Already he’d given her his name.

Tir slowed further, stopping at the edge of a clearing. There were no sounds of pursuit, and with the fading of Araña’s footsteps, he was left surrounded by the rustle of leaves and grass, the scolding of a jay and the chirp of a squirrel.

He became aware of the knapsack he carried and the weight of the weapons in his hands. He didn’t need them to survive, but they gave him an unanticipated advantage as he prepared to enter a world that was unfamiliar to him in so many ways.

Without meaning to, his gaze traveled to where Araña had disappeared. Instinct told him to follow her. His cock urged it.

The sheer force of his desire to go after her served as a warning of how dangerous she was to him. It made him turn away and take another path. But each step grew harder than the last the farther he got from her.

A tightness gathered in his chest, silken strands of unnatural worry weaving, encasing his heart until finally he stopped and turned back—unsure he could find her given the time that had passed.