Spider-Touched (34 page)

Araña felt as though a wall of ice encased her heart. A silent scream of
no
came from the depths of her soul.

Levanna lifted the vial higher and the candlelight bounced off it, turning dark liquid into a thousand strands of color. “The choice is yours. My obligation extends no further than offering you a way to enter the place of Spiders and keeping your physical body safe until your return.”

Araña’s gaze flicked to a candle flame and back to the vial. “I can enter on my own, through the fire.”

“That’s your gift, to be able to enter a realm no human can. And your curse. To have the gift limited because you’re bound to mortal flesh and can’t enter it fully.”

The witch indicated the pentacle drawn on the floor, serving as an altar much in the way the shamaness’s fetish-surrounded dirt floor had. Wax pooled at the bases of the candles and spread like bloodstains, reminding Araña of the blood she’d willingly shed in order to enter the ghostlands.

She thought of Matthew’s use of their code to tell her he and Erik were truly okay, and Erik’s parting words.
Don’t let your courage fail you.

“What’s in the vial?”

“A rare poison. It separates the soul from the body.”

The ice encasing Araña’s heart so each beat was labored spread, freezing her lungs. “
Bòcòs
use it for creating zombies.”

“Yes. But it won’t be used for that purpose this day. Choose. The spell allowing you to safely enter and return through the gateway will last only as long as the candles burn.”

Araña looked at them again, seeking their hearts. Unlike the candle in the hallway that had beckoned her forward, whispering
Come to me,
the ones set at each apex of the circle-inscribed star were silent, leaving the choice up to her.

She wanted to turn away and hurry from the house. She couldn’t.

The reasons for coming to the Wainwright witch hadn’t changed. Her ignorance when it came to her gift had entangled Matthew and Erik in this web. It had led to Rebekka’s capture and would lead to Levi’s death. She held out her hand for the vial.

“You will pass quickly into the world beyond,” the witch said. “I won’t catch you if you choose to remain standing.”

Araña took the vial but couldn’t bring herself to sit at the matriarch’s feet. She moved away, stopping in the center of the pentacle.

Against her fingers, she could feel tiny lines etched into the glass. Bile rose in her throat as she opened the vial. She doubted she could physically swallow its contents—until the cognac scent reached her.

The poison might have been designed for her. It made her think of home—the cabin and not the boat—of times spent in front of the fireplace, curled on a chair across from Erik, both of them reading while Matthew worked on whatever project held his interest.

Poisonous or not, she lifted the vial to her lips, drinking its contents before lying down. But as numbness came, starting with her limbs and moving into her core, it wasn’t Matthew and Erik she thought of, it was Tir.

Until she’d been forced to join the strand of her life to his, she’d never known the ecstasy and pleasure of touch. She’d thought she craved it then, but that desire was nothing compared to what she felt now.

Her heart rate sped up then abruptly slowed as the poison reached her chest. Blackness formed at the edges of her consciousness, her body trying to spare her from the panic of not being able to breathe. The darkness moved in. It reminded her of the sea surging ahead of Aziel in the ghostlands to reclaim Erik’s and Matthew’s spirits.

She thought fleetingly of the spider, and knew true fear when, for the first time in her life, she couldn’t feel it at all. And then, just as she became aware that her heart had slowed to the point where it didn’t seem to beat at all, the witch loomed above her holding an unlit candle, her words nearly drowned out by the babbling stream of sibilant whispers. “Call the fire.”

With a thought Araña did. Flame leapt from each of the five candles at the apex of the pentagram to form a sixth point above her, a fiery gateway she slid into as easily as if she were returning home.

Unbidden the dream came, the first dream, the spider’s birth dream—only it was different than before. There was no separation of soul and mark, no it and her. She and the spider were the same, a thing without form in the dark heart of hellfire.

Around her it hissed and crackled. It roared with fury and power, with the desire to destroy as well as create, and she burned with it.

Into the fire flew a raven. The black of its body absorbed the heat and its eyes became glowing pits of red.

Its presence created a storm of howling and shrieking. Flames leapt higher, as if trying to draw its attention. But it ducked and wheeled, ignoring them as it dodged grasping hands of fire and came unerringly to her.

Its beak opened, and she filled with hungry anticipation, knowing somehow that when it spoke her soul name, it would separate her from the fire and wrench her from the place where all life began.

There was no memory of a journey, no sense of a physical form, but Araña saw the world as if through the eyes of the raven. It perched on a limb outside an open window.

A deep, unnamed dread filled her as she recognized the settlement where she’d spent the first twelve years of her life. Always before, the spider’s birth dream ended just after the raven’s call gave it form, merging with the memory of pain as it burned its way outward to appear on her flesh. Now it continued.

Two men stood at the bedside of a woman who’d already been dressed for burial by the midwife who hovered near a beautifully carved cradle. One was a church elder, the other a man who’d always shunned her.

Gingham curtains fluttered peacefully, in sharp contrast to the words being spoken in the room by the younger man. “Let Satan take the child the same as he claimed the mother giving birth to it. It was conceived in sin. All I have to do is look at it to know it isn’t mine.”

“You’ll damn yourself by calling on Satan,” the elder said. “The child is innocent of the mother’s sins.”

“If it lives, I won’t claim or raise it.”

“If it lives, I’ll see that it’s raised by those who won’t spoil it by sparing the rod as happened with the mother.”

The raven hopped along the branch, its movement drawing the attention of the people in the room.

“A bad omen,” the midwife murmured. “Death waiting on an unclean soul.”

The man whose pale, silver-blond hair was almost the same shade as his dead wife’s, visibly shuddered. The church elder said, “Superstition is blasphemy against the Lord.” But he touched one hand to the man’s shoulder and extended the other to the midwife. “Join me in praying for forgiveness for any evil that’s entered our thoughts because of this birth and death, and for the child, that it will be welcomed into God’s loving arms should it not survive.”

They prayed, and filed from the room at the conclusion of it, none of them glancing backward at either the corpse awaiting burial or the infant left unattended a few feet away from its dead mother.

The raven jumped to the windowsill. It cocked its head, listening for the sound of approaching humans. Hearing none, it soared across the room to perch on the cradle.

Araña saw it then, why the man was so sure the child wasn’t his. Instead of pale skin and silver-blond hair, the infant was dark, its hair and eyes black.

Its mouth opened and closed in a cry too weak to hear. Its tiny hands were balled into fists as if it fought to live even as the raspy sound of its faint breath marked the struggle.

The raven opened its beak and emitted a harsh cry, the sound of it carrying a word buried deep inside, a name. Araña.

She felt herself taking form, emerging from the raven’s mouth as a spider, sliding downward toward the baby on a fine silken thread.

The infant stilled the moment she touched its skin. Its death the harbinger of her birth.

She felt the flutter of its soul departing as in spider form she crawled into the baby’s open mouth and took up residence in a shell of flesh that wasn’t her own.

There was the hard kick of a heartbeat returning. The gasp of lungs filling. And then a cry announcing her arrival as the human soul hadn’t had the strength to do.

No!
Araña screamed silently, denial filling her, driving her out of the scene. Breaking her contact with it as though she’d been riding the thread of her own life in the same way she’d done hundreds of others.

For a shimmering instant she was without true form, as she always had been in the spider’s place, but then the physical shell she still wanted to believe was her own gathered around her, shocking her.

Instinctively she sought the mark with her thoughts, and her horror deepened when she felt her cells start to break up—as if they’d re-form into a spider in the same way the demon Abijah became the scorpion.

“No!” she shouted, and her voice joined the whispering stream around her, drawing her attention away from the whirlpool turmoil of her own emotions and to the tapestry in front of her. It extended for as far as she could see, its detail sharper, its texture richer than the carpeted pattern she’d glimpsed the first time she willingly sought this place.

“Your time here is finite,” a voice behind her said. “The candles in the other world burn down rapidly.”

Araña whirled to find a woman standing there in the robes of a desert dweller, the fabric concealing all but a dark slash of face and eyes as black as Araña’s own. “Who are you?”

Nineteen

THE woman tugged at the material covering her head, pulling it away to reveal features nearly identical to Araña’s, save for the wrinkles at the corners of her eyes and the spidery threads of gray through her black hair.

“I am the one who first gave you life, only to witness your being slain by the god’s warriors, your soul cast back into the fire until a Raven could find the name forged for you, and you could be reborn—not as you once were, but to serve our kind in a different manner.”

“No,” Araña said, denying the woman’s words. She’d accepted the mark, accepted that it tainted her soul by turning her into a tool for the demon, but this—

“No.” She couldn’t be a demon.

“It doesn’t matter whether you believe or not. Your life serves us. You live bound to human flesh by the will of The Prince.”

Ice slid through Araña’s veins at the mention of the name, but also a thin, desperate sliver of hope. How often had she felt the lash of a cane against her back and heard the fervent prayers accompanying it in an effort to drive out the taint placed on her soul by the Prince of Lies, the Great Deceiver? She had no reason to trust the being standing in front of her, no reason to think the demon’s words or appearance were truth.

Araña forced her mind closed to everything but the purpose that had made her seek out the Wainwright witch and freely swallow poison so she could enter this place. “Will you teach me how to use my gift?”
My curse.

The demon pulled the folds of material back in place, leaving only the thin strip of flesh and dark eyes revealed. “I will give you the knowledge you need to possess. Come. Not much time remains.”

She turned and walked alongside the tapestry. Araña followed, realizing as she did so that she could sense the passage of time vividly now. They were moving from the past into the present, the babble of indecipherable voices growing louder with each step.

The demon stopped in front of a section of the weave. And somehow, Araña knew if she could find her own soul thread and touch it, she would see herself lying in the center of the witch’s pentacle with the Wainwright matriarch standing guard. She looked ahead, into the future, and the patterns shifted subtly, then shifted again, as if despite what might be done in this place, life could not be so easily controlled.

“Until you are freed from the shackle of human flesh and able to exist in a noncorporeal form,” the demon said, “you won’t enter this place again or see the complete weave of lives. Your gift will remain limited.”

Training and the hardships she’d endured growing up kept Araña from reacting to the comment, from revealing she’d seen this tapestry before, as a carpet sweeping out in front of her.

The demon’s hand lifted to hover just in front of it. “Do you hear the whisper of their true names?”

“I hear a rushing stream.”

“Choose a thread and focus on it, but don’t allow yourself to touch it mentally.”

Araña felt a trickle of sweat down her back. A lifetime of resistance paralyzed her. Acid burned her throat at the thought of destroying a life.

She swallowed and focused on an orange-green thread with hints of brown. It was a struggle not to merge into it. But slowly the babble of voices faded away, leaving only one, an unknown man’s name. It repeated itself over and over again, as if death would come if it ever ceased being spoken.

Araña pulled away from it mentally and turned toward the demon. “How can I find a particular soul if I can’t see the pattern?”

“Your reach is short unless you travel deeper and deeper into the heart of the flame. Physical proximity is compounded by the ties those souls have to others.”