Jory Strong: Spider-Touched

Laundry fluttered on lines. Children screamed in play as they chased one another and were chased in turn by dogs big enough to protect them if necessary.

She knew the instant the bus entered the area set aside for humans who were different, gifted—or damned, as some believed. The houses were marked with symbols, and the distance between them grew, affording privacy. Some of the sigils were familiar; some she’d seen only in Erik’s books.

The bus slowed to another stop, and the witches got out just as a long-bodied vehicle carrying guardsmen passed, going in the opposite direction. Araña shifted in her seat so she could look out through the back window at the truck’s occupants.

Fear soured her stomach. She thought it possible she’d seen them earlier, but she couldn’t be sure, just as she couldn’t know whether they patrolled a set route or if they were trying to get a glimpse of Matthew and Erik.

Her palms glided over the sheaths containing the knives, and she gained a measure of comfort from the feel of the blades. “We get off still?”

Matthew nodded. “We can make it to the red zone if necessary.”

“It’s a safety zone?”

Matthew snorted. “It’s where the rich go to play without any worry about breaking laws. And because of it, it’s also where the vice lords and black magic practitioners live without fear of being arrested. It’s a death trap for anyone who doesn’t know how to take care of themselves.”

Erik’s soft laugh brought a smile to Araña’s heart along with a stab of pain. “The same could be said of the places we’ve called home for the last twenty years. The biggest difference is the rich don’t come to play with us.”

“True enough,” Matthew said, rising from his seat even as the bus driver announced the last stop on the route.

They stepped off the bus onto a deserted street. The houses for as far as the eye could see were nothing but rubble, with yards full of weeds and burned-out cars.

Uneasiness filled Araña, a terrible certainty that the witch had betrayed them with her answer. Your stop is the last one. It’s close to the red zone.

“Which way?” she asked, but the drone of an engine coming toward them made the choice an easy one. Instinctively they headed toward the nearest cluster of buildings and took cover.

Matthew and Erik freed their knives. Araña did the same, her heart skipping into a too-fast race when the long-bodied guardsmen’s vehicle that had passed only moments earlier jumped the curb and stopped.

Seven men got out, six of them young. The seventh was grizzled, old enough to recognize Matthew and Erik from the days they’d pirated in the waters near Oakland.

He directed three of the men to go across the street, then pointed at the row of destroyed and ruined houses where Araña crouched next to Erik, his voice carrying across the distance. “They had to have gotten out at this bus stop. Fan out. We take the men dead or alive. Either way we can claim the bounty on them.”

“And the girl?” a pale redhead asked.

“Probably a piece of diseased boat trash. Take your chances if you want to. But don’t leave her alive when you’re done with her.”

“Give me some credit, Sarge. I’m not that sloppy.”

Araña’s hands tightened on the knife hilts. She could kill. She’d been forced to do it before.

“If you get a chance, separate from us and make a run for it,” Erik whispered, his breathing already strained from the sprint to shelter. He shifted his knives into one hand and dug out his wallet, then slid it into the pocket of Araña’s shirt. “Don’t go back to the boat. It’s not safe and by tomorrow she’ll be confiscated. Hide among the gifted.”

Icy fear squeezed her heart. A terror born in her childhood and fed with ranted sermons about Hell and damnation, beatings that came with being judged as demon-tainted.

“I won’t leave you,” she whispered, refusing to let the thought of what waited in the afterlife make her abandon the men who’d saved her life and made her a part of their family.

When she would have given the wallet back to Erik, Matthew stopped her. “Keep it for now. Only two of the guardsmen have rifles. The rest have handguns. Eliminate any one of them and get his weapon and the odds start to change in our favor. We’ll hide and wait for them to come to us. We won’t outrun them.”

Araña nodded, hearing in Matthew’s words his own declaration. He wouldn’t leave Erik regardless of what happened.

Matthew moved around the corner to hunt the hunters. She found a place among a curtain of vines, one that allowed her to see the building where Erik melted into the gloom of a room that had collapsed except for a small area.

There was no sound save for the thunderous beat of her heart. It felt as if the world around them held its breath, silencing birdsong and insect noise alike, stilling the wind so there was no rustle of leaves or whisper of grass.

A guardsman appeared, the pale redhead with his own plans for her. He walked quietly, his arm outstretched and gripping a gun. His movements held a bold confidence, as if he were stalking prey and his possession of the weapon protected him from attack.

The thin leather of her belt could serve as a garrote, a way to kill without risk of a shouted warning. But it took strength and time, and with the others patrolling, she couldn’t take the chance of using it.

Her breath caught when he glanced briefly at the building housing Erik, and released it when the guardsman shunned it in favor of aiming toward the open doorway near where she hid.

In her mind she prepared to attack. Saw herself striking without hesitation as Matthew had taught her to do.

She let the raw need for survival turn fear into strength, conscience into primal instinct as adrenaline surged, honing her focus so all reality faded save for the need to kill her enemy.

He neared, his eyes flicking over her hiding place, dismissing it. The scent of sweat and cologne trailed him as he stepped past her.

She struck. Driving and twisting with the knife in her left hand.

The gun fired as his grip tightened on it reflexively. A cry escaped before the knife in her right hand found its mark, slashing across his throat and making arterial blood spray onto the vine and concrete.

Araña pushed him away and crouched, picking up the gun. Out of the corner of her eye she saw Erik emerge from his hiding place and grab the arm of a guardsman summoned by the noise.

They struggled. Erik’s back was to her, preventing her from using the dead man’s gun.

She rushed forward. A shot fired. And then Erik crumpled to the ground.

Animal sounds of rage ripped from Araña’s throat. She leveled the gun and pulled the trigger without thought, didn’t stop moving forward as the bullet slammed into the guardsman’s forehead, the force of it taking most of his skull and driving him backward into rubble.

And then Matthew was there, a rifle in one hand, his knife in the other. He knelt by Erik, the weapons dropping to the ground as he lifted Erik off the cracked, broken cement and cradled him in his arms.

Araña crouched next to them, agony swelling in her chest, incapacitating her, the present and past colliding in an overwhelming instant of anguish.

It was the scene from her vision. The death she’d known waited with the first glimpse of Oakland.

Matthew’s face was a mask of unbearable grief as he put Erik down and snatched up both the rifle and the pistol she didn’t remember dropping. “Don’t follow me, Araña. Run. Hide. Live for all of us.”

He disappeared around the corner before she could say anything. There was the sound of a gun firing, then another.

Araña cast a quick glance at the guardsman who’d killed Erik, but she didn’t see where his weapon had landed. She grabbed Matthew’s discarded knife as well as her own dropped one. A sob escaped as she turned her back on Erik and did as Matthew ordered. She ran, dodging rubble and blackened cars in an effort to escape the guardsmen.