Jory Strong: Spider-Touched

Levi didn’t respond until they’d halved the distance to the shamaness’s house. “I had the same thought as I passed from the red zone into this area. Vampires aren’t known for wasting their resources. Draven Tassone least of all. He would have provided her with information to increase the odds of success. I’ll listen to her plan, and if it’s a sound one, I’ll go with them. You can wait—”

“No. Both the Weres and the animals will need me or they’ll end up dying in the traps outside the maze or slaughtered in it when the magistrate’s guards and the police arrive and find them loose.”

The stranger opened the gate and proceeded to the shamaness’s front door. As they neared the house, Rebekka could hear music coming through the open window, an exotic mix of instruments making her think of shimmering desert and primal heat.

Their escort knocked and the door was opened by a man. Rebekka’s steps faltered. He had the same otherworldly beauty as their escort, the same hint of ready death.

“Was that the door I—” The shamaness’s question was cut off by her laugh, and it remained thick in her voice when she said, “Didn’t you warn your father against making you his pawn again, Zurael?”

The teasing question earned her a growled “Aisling” and had their escort’s teeth flashing white in the rapidly approaching darkness. He extended a hand toward Rebekka and Levi. “I’ve brought guests in need of safekeeping.”

The shamaness nudged her mate aside and stood in the doorway. He curled a protective arm around her waist, but she smiled and Rebekka felt welcome. “Come in,” Aisling said. “We’re just about to sit down for dinner.”

ARAÑA brushed her fingertips over a taut masculine nipple and smiled at the sound of Tir’s heartbeat speeding up beneath her ear. Just a little bit longer, she told herself, savoring the closeness as his words of love continued to sing through her like a musical refrain.

She closed her eyes in contentment and sighed as his fingers combed through her hair, gliding sensuously over her vertebrae, his palms caressing her buttocks at the end of each downstroke. She wanted this forever, but even as she thought it, the knowledge that he’d once killed and enslaved the Djinn pushed her peace aside.

Against her back, Tir’s hand stopped moving. “What are you thinking about?”

She longed to tell him, to ask for reassurance. But how could he give it when he had no memory of his past? When he’d already refused to give up his claim of vengeance?

Araña snuggled closer and wedged her leg more firmly between his. None of it would matter if she didn’t succeed in the task she’d agreed to. “I spoke to Levi after I left L’Antiquaire.”

“At the brothel?” There was no mistaking the purr of menace in Tir’s voice.

“Yes.”

His fingertips found one of the scars on her back and traced it, sending a pulse of erotic fear through her. “I should punish you. You knew I expected you to go directly to the Constellation .”

“I told him what we’d seen and heard at Rebekka’s house,” she said, neither making excuses nor refuting Tir’s charge, but unable to hide her reaction to his threat of punishment, not with her clit and bare mound pressed to his thigh. “I also told him I’d made a deal with Draven Tassone. Levi will be here shortly after sunrise.”

“He intends to go with us?”

“I don’t know. At the least he’ll share what information he has. He once hunted in the maze.”

She lifted away from Tir so she could see his face. “Normally there are only three people in the maze compound, beside the—beside Abijah.” When there was no flicker of recognition, she continued, “By noon tomorrow, the traveling magistrate will arrive in Oakland. Some of his prisoners will be taken to the maze.”

“Meaning additional guards,” Tir said, also remembering Thane’s comment about apartments being available for those required to be on the premises at certain times. “And meaning we need to act before noon tomorrow.”

“Yes. Thane was right in his assessment of the best way to get into Anton’s house. There are cameras throughout the maze, and cages of wild animals forming a gauntlet at the back of it. The day I was taken there, the guardsmen stopped at the gate and were buzzed in from the front office by Farold after they identified themselves. There are probably others who receive the same treatment, but there’s also Farold himself and a helper named Gulzar.” Araña smoothed her palm over Tir’s chest. “I’m going to use my gift to see if I can find a way to get into the office.”

Tir frowned, but didn’t protest.

She forced herself to roll away from him and sit up.

He sat as well, pulling her onto his lap, his chest to her back and his arms secured around her. A kiss followed, in the hollow of her neck where the spider stretched across her skin.

Araña glanced at the lantern Tir had lit earlier when they’d left the bed long enough to drop anchor a short distance away from the pier.

Remembered pain and fear pressed in on her as she thought about the night she’d climbed aboard the Constellation and seen Erik’s death. She swallowed down the emotion and found a smile when Tir said, “I won’t allow this if it’s going to hurt you.”

“I’ll be fine,” she said, focusing on the flame. Willingly accepting its call.

Almost immediately soul strands settled, forming a carpet spreading before her, as if she could walk its path into eternity. Around her colors and threads shifted subtly. She sensed then what she knew had to be true, though she’d never noticed it before. She wasn’t alone here.

She had no form, only the spider-shaped illusion she now understood was the manifestation of her soul. The others weren’t visible either, and yet the echo of the changes they made to the pattern vibrated through her.

Panic threatened to seize her. For an instant she didn’t know where to begin, how to find the threads she was looking for. Then, like a beacon, her own life blazed near her feet, only to disappear. Where it slid beneath the pattern, it was entwined in the blue black of Tir’s.

She turned away from the present and the future and looked to the past, followed the bright flare of her own thread until she found the place where it intersected with Levi’s at the brothel. There was no subtle movement around her, and in texture the carpet appeared more solid, more vivid, as if now that it couldn’t be changed, the full truth and all its nuances could be revealed.

Levi’s was the only thread she was certain would lead to Gulzar, and maybe Farold—though she held little hope his soul could be touched here given what Malahel had said about Anton.

Araña traveled further into the past, being careful not to violate Levi’s privacy until it became necessary—when it ran concurrent with a pus-colored strand she had only to concentrate on to hear the name she’d been hoping to find. Gulzar.

He had Levi strapped naked to a table slick with blood, instruments of torture and rape scattered haphazardly around him.

Charmed silver wrapped around various segments of Levi’s limbs, creating a monster that was neither lion nor man.

Nausea and hate swelled inside Araña. She reached for Gulzar’s thread, meaning to grasp it so she wouldn’t lose it, but she hesitated at the last moment. She had no desire to see the entirety of his sins, to walk the path of his evil.

She concentrated instead on retracing her imagined steps along the patterned carpet, from past into present. And her desire to kill him grew when she found him in a house in the red zone, a young girl strapped to his table, terror coming off her in waves.