Jory Strong: Spider-Touched

“Move,” Jurgen said, indicating the direction with the rifle barrel.

Fresh blood poured from the wound in her side. Pain stabbed through her, but it was nothing compared to the searing agony as Araña passed Erik’s body and then Matthew’s.

The need for revenge burned at her core, intensified when the blond, Cabot, said, “What about collecting the bounty? What are we going to say about Sarge and the others being dead?”

“We’ll radio it in to headquarters and say we were ambushed while trying to bring three people in for questioning. We’ll tell them we’re still chasing the third one. Let them send another unit to collect the bodies. Even if it turns out Sarge is wrong about there being bounties, after what happened here, nobody is going to care.”

HE hated humans now as fiercely as he’d hated them for centuries. If not more so.

They were dust, the walking dead. Frail and unworthy.

They were less than the most simple of beasts.

It was their cunning, their intellect that allowed them to rule. And yet their base nature always reasserted itself. Time and time again they raised civilization to unimaginable heights only to plunge it into a dark abyss of decadence and decay.

He’d witnessed it for more years than he could count, seen the cycles of humankind repeat themselves over and over again. Blissfully he could no longer remember all of the details.

He was old. Hundreds of years old. That much he knew from what memories he still held.

Perhaps his age could be measured in thousands. The heavy weight of his soul whispered it might be so, though why he should be so convinced he had a soul was beyond him.

His form was human, but it wasn’t his true form. He was positive in that regard. Just as he was equally sure the name resonating through him was his own. Tir. Though he hadn’t heard it spoken in centuries and would never willingly share it with any of his captors.

Was he the last of a supernatural race no longer walking the earth? Tir didn’t know the answer. He had never met another of his kind.

Great stretches of his remembered life had been spent in darkness, in damp underground catacombs, his ankles and wrists manacled. In the early days the priests and their acolytes cut out his tongue periodically so he couldn’t speak. Then, later, as science gave them other tools, they sewed his lips together and fed him through a needle in the arm.

He could no longer remember why his human captors feared what he might say. Apparently neither could they—though they still feared what he might do.

They were right to.

One day he would be free of the sigil-inscribed collar around his neck. When that day came and his memories poured into him along with the power he sensed at his core, he would wreak vengeance not only on the human race but on whatever beings had first enslaved him.

He would have his revenge. The promise of it had kept him sane over the centuries, given him the strength to endure torture and dismemberment, depravation, and degradation.

In the cage next to Tir the human finally succumbed to his injuries. His rattling breath was a death knell making the hyenas laugh and the lion charge.

The wereman, his body caught in a grotesque blending of cougar and human, paused in his savage assault on the bars of his cage, his lips pulling back to reveal broken teeth and a bloody mouth.

At the far end the lethal dragon lizards turned their heads, flicked their tongues out to capture the scent and taste of death. Their huge size and venomous bite, their aggressiveness, made them terrifying creatures, illegal to house or transport, though Tir had seen little evidence that humans obeyed the laws they were so fond of creating.

The sound of footsteps drew Tir’s attention away from the companions he was caged alongside. He shifted his weight, and the chains tethering his shackled wrists and ankles to a metal belt around his waist rattled.

There was enough play in them to allow for a shuffling walk, to allow him to scoop food into his hand and bend his torso to eat, but not enough to allow him to kill—though given the opportunity, he wouldn’t hesitate to attempt it.

His hands curled around the bars of his cell. The door at the far end opened, allowing pure sunlight into the building. His eyes stung, but he didn’t close them. He let the light burn itself into his soul, let it strengthen him and feed his resolve for freedom and vengeance.

A slight figure stood in the doorway, her fear palpable. Familiar. Tir’s lips curled in disgust when the woman finally stepped into the building, driven not by courage but by a terror of disobeying her husband.

She scuttled crablike past the wereman, who pleaded for help in a voice that sounded strangely human despite the distortion and indecipherable words caused by the cat’s muzzle. She moved past the dead man’s corpse and Tir, her face averted, shoulders hunching in defense, like a turtle trying to pull its head and neck into a shell.

If Tir had once been capable of feeling pity for humans, it had long ago been extinguished. Disgust burned in his belly with his rage. Those who stood by and did nothing deserved to have their fate tied to that of the guilty.

The woman stopped at a crank mounted on the wall. She grasped it with both hands, strained to turn it.

Her arms shook with the effort of trying to manipulate something set for a man’s height. Whimpers and panted sobs blended with the groan of metal against metal, the slow unfolding of a heavy tarp rolled against the ceiling.

Tir watched without compassion. He wondered idly when the trapper would come in and berate her for her inadequacy, equate her value to the dead man whose carcass already buzzed with flies.

Her plight interested Tir only in that it served to break up the monotony of his captivity. He would have been the answer to her prayers had she been willing to free him. But his promise to kill the human known as Hyde and leave her alive had fallen on deaf ears. His words had been wasted on a spineless creature who allowed herself to be terrorized by the man she’d accepted for a husband.

Tir could not remember a time when he was free, but not all his jailers had treated him poorly. Some, especially the acolytes, had shared with him the changes taking place in the world outside the catacomb prison. Others had left books in his cell, hoping to gain his favor, or perhaps reduce their own complicity should he gain his freedom in their lifetime.

He might have spared them. It was a moot point.

The acolytes matured into priests. Into deacons and bishops, and popes, grand rulers and god kings, chancellors—depending on who held the key to his cell. They aged and died, and in the end, many of them were laid to rest in the same catacombs holding his prison, their bodies becoming food for worms, then dust and brittle bones.

Tir’s attention shifted away from the woman and her pathetic struggles. It returned to the open doorway.

Through it he could catch a glimpse of blue sky and white clouds. The sublime promise of freedom.

His latest captor appeared, a brutal, unkempt man with bearish features. Hyde.

Oh yes, Tir thought, I would enjoy killing this human .

A look of distaste crossed the man’s features when he noted the tarp curtain extended only a few feet from the ceiling. “Worthless cunt,” he directed at his wife. “What’s taking you so long? You think they’ll stop to ask who owns the lizards? They’ll shoot us on the spot if they see them, and walk out of here without paying for what they came for.”

Hyde’s gaze shifted to the cell containing the corpse. He half turned in the doorway. “Raoul, get in here. Help this worthless bitch get the tarp down. Then haul Rudy’s body out of here. Put it someplace where the dogs won’t get it. We’ll deal with it later. After you’ve done that, stay out of sight until the buyers are gone.”