Jory Strong: Spider-Touched

Rebekka stepped past the boundary and continued walking, keeping her back toward Levi. She imagined he’d almost rather die than get caught flinching as he crossed the wards.

She’d homesteaded a house in this section. But she rarely left the red zone and the brothels.

Her fingers curled around the token in her pocket. It had been delivered hours earlier to the brothel where her room was by a young boy, one of hundreds who roamed the streets in the main part of the city looking for work, willing to do almost anything for enough money to buy food— even carry a message from a witch into the red zone.

The token was a pentacle. Carved into its center was the Wainwright sigil, and at its outer edges, elaborate glyphs. With it came a summons only a fool would refuse to answer.

Rebekka shivered, not just from thoughts of the Wainwrights, but at the sight of the occult shop as it came into view. All along there’d been rumors about its owner, Javier. He’d been a frequent visitor to the brothels, though, thankfully, at those she worked in he’d come only to slake his need, leaving the women he visited no worse for encountering him. But at others he’d bought out the contracts of some of the prostitutes and they had never been seen again.

There’d been rumors of black masses and sacrificial offerings. But in the red zone there was no law, no police or guardsmen to investigate. It was only when Javier’s body was discovered that the rumors were proven to hold truth—he was a dark magic practitioner who used human sacrifices in order to summon demons.

She shuddered. The tales might have been embellished, but she didn’t doubt for a moment the existence of demons. More than one of the men who visited the brothels had spoken of the demon who sometimes hunted in the maze.

Rebekka cast a quick glance at Levi as they neared the occult shop. He rarely spoke of his time in captivity—what had been done to him by Gulzar to force his body into a horrifying blend of lion and man, or those he’d killed in the maze when he hunted there. But she knew not a day passed when Levi didn’t think about it, didn’t curse himself for escaping and leaving his brother behind to die or to become an insane monster—to hunt for the pleasure of humans who sat safe in their clubs and bet on the outcome.

She stopped at the edge of an inscribed circle painted in red on the sidewalk surrounding the shop. This time she didn’t say anything. She let Levi reach his own conclusion and voice it.

“I’ll wait for you here,” he said and Rebekka gave a slight nod before stepping over the line.

There was a mild touch of magic, one that had probably served to warn Javier of a visitor’s presence. She wondered if whoever now claimed Javier’s shop and house benefited from the magic Javier had laid down.

Her heart rate accelerated as she drew closer to the shop. Weres were leery of magic, and perhaps because she spent so much time around Were outcasts, she’d absorbed some of their beliefs and uneasiness, despite having gifts of her own.

Her nervousness increased as she reached the shop door and entered. The air was heavy with the scent of incense, cloying, enveloping—tempting and yet repugnant at the same time.

A man glanced up from something he was working on behind the counter. A clerk, she thought, though she didn’t discount him.

Pentagram jewelry, fetishes and candles, herbs, wands, cauldrons and athames—all were available and with plenty to choose from. But it was the books on magic and witchcraft that both awed and frightened her each time necessity brought her to the shop.

She moved deeper into the store, toward the place where the Wainwright witch would be. An entire wall contained a library of handwritten spell journals, individual shadow books no living witch would have willingly parted with. They were all that remained of entire families lost to plague and war, people who’d died long ago, so quickly they hadn’t been able to burn the books in order to keep them out of the hands of strangers.

Rebekka stopped next to a woman dressed in black. Not the Wainwright matriarch. Even with the streak of gray in her hair, this woman wasn’t old enough. But she was still powerful. Standing in the witch’s proximity made Rebekka feel as though magic crawled over her skin like a hundred tiny spiders.

She pulled her hand from her pocket and offered the pentacle. The woman gave a small shake of her head. “Keep it. You might need it to summon help. I’m Annalise. But it’s on behalf of the matriarch that I’m here. Tonight they run in the maze.”

Only the instinct for self-preservation finely honed from being around Weres kept Rebekka from stiffening with the mention of the maze. If Anton Barlowe or Farold had any idea she and Levi were doing what they could to interrupt the supply of captured hunters, planning for the day when they could somehow find a way inside and free those held…

Rebekka suppressed a shiver—but only barely. “They’re running convicts tonight,” she said, somehow managing to keep her words neutral, as befitted someone who called the red zone and the brothels home.

Annalise pulled a book from the shelf. It parted on a page showing a werelion in a partial form, the head and arms those of a beast while the body remained human.

“A woman will run tonight as well,” Annalise said. “It is beyond our control as to whether she will escape. But should she survive, she will be as important to you and the… man… who waits outside for you, as she is to us.”

Rebekka didn’t ask how the Wainwrights knew about the woman or Levi. It was possible they had spies who passed on information in the same way she gained it when the men and women who frequented the gaming clubs came to the brothel. But it was equally likely they’d gained the knowledge by other means, with a toss of bones or a reading of fire. There were whispers about the Wainwrights and their ancestors, tying them to black magic as well as white.

A tremor passed through Rebekka before she could stop it. The token she still held in her hand grew heavier. She understood the significance, understood if she acted on the witch’s information, obligations would arise between them because of it.

Her gaze flicked to the picture of the werelion. Sometimes it was hard to maintain hope that Levi’s brother could be freed or his sanity salvaged.

The destruction of the maze itself and the release of the animals and Weres held captive there seemed like an impossible dream. And yet it was one of hers. If the witches wanted the same thing, or might be persuaded to involve themselves…

Rebekka closed her hand around the pentacle and put it back in her pocket. Annalise returned the book to its place on the shelf and picked out another, opening it to a page with a handwritten spell and a picture of a pentacle similar to the one in Rebekka’s possession.

“Can you read this?” Annalise asked.

It was a short spell, requiring candle, blood, and token, easy to memorize because it served only to trigger a larger one already set in place. “Yes.”

“Should you need to use it in order to summon help, change the last word to aziel ,” Annalise said, placing the book on the shelf and leaving without another word.

ARAÑA guessed it was nearing sunset when footsteps approached beyond the door.

The men grew quiet.

She rose to her feet as Farold entered with a satchel under his arm. He stopped in front of her cage, far enough back that she couldn’t touch him, and emptied the contents of the bag onto the floor.

Two dozen knives poured out of it, many of them with dried blood on their blades. Araña’s throat tightened when she recognized one of Matthew’s, then saw Erik’s as well as her own.