Jennifer Estep - By a Thread

“Grab her feet and we’ll heave her out as far as we can,” one of the giants said. “You know how Dekes hates it when the gators crawl up on the lawn and start chewing on their legs.”

The giant who’d been carrying me dumped me on the stone patio, making even more pain shoot through my body, and I stifled a groan. Then he grabbed my shoulders while the other man’s hands clamped around my ankles. Together, they lifted me up and shuffled forward.

“One . . . two . . . three!”

They swung me back and forth a couple of times before letting go and flinging me out into the darkness as far and high as their enormous strength would let them. I felt my body rise up in an arc and quickly plummet.

My final thought before I hit the water was that I’d done this very same thing to Dekes’s men just last night.

Ah, irony. Going to be the death of me one day.

Maybe even tonight.

The murky, brackish water closed over me, warm, slimy, and disgusting, but I didn’t try to kick my way to the surface. Dekes’s men might still be out on the balcony, watching to make sure that I sank. Instead, I focused on getting one hand, then the other, free of the garbage bag and unwinding the whole thing from around my body. It wouldn’t do to get away from the vampire only to drown in the swamp outside his mansion.

While I worked on the bag, I counted off the seconds in my head. Ten . . . twenty . . . thirty . . . forty-five . . . At the minute mark, the last of the plastic slipped off my legs, my head broke free of the water, and I blinked, trying to get my bearings in the semidarkness.

There wasn’t any current in the marsh, but my struggles with the garbage bag had carried me out of the pool of light from the balcony that had arced out onto the landscape below. I remained still and quiet, doing just enough to keep my head above the surface of the water.

“She’s gone,” the voice of one of the giants floated down to me. “The gators will find her on the bottom soon enough. Let’s go back inside.”

A few seconds later, a door slammed somewhere far above my head. The giants thought I was dead, just like their boss did. Good. Now all that was left was to make sure the marsh and blood loss didn’t finish the job that the vampire had started.

I stayed in the water, too tired and exhausted from Dekes’s attack to even think about lifting my arms and swimming to shore. Eventually, though, I spotted a ridge of land a little higher than the bog that surrounded me, and I forced myself to thrash toward it. My arms and legs felt as numb and dead as lead weights strapped to my body, not because I’d used my Ice magic on myself, but because there just wasn’t that much blood left in them. Somehow, I splashed and flailed around and finally managed to heave my chest up out of the water.

I lay there, my face in the mud, panting from the effort of doing something so small. My neck and shoulders pulsed with pain with every breath that I took, ribbons of red-hot agony winding tighter and tighter around my upper body and strangling me from the inside out. But this time, instead of pushing the hurt away, I embraced it. As long as I was in pain, I was still alive and not sliding into the cold, cold oblivion that was the alternative.

I put one hand in front of the other, weakly kicking my legs, digging my fingers into the slippery mud, and slowly pulling myself up the bank until I was back on semisolid ground again. Still panting, I rolled over onto my back and forced myself to sit up. The moon and stars were out in full force tonight, their pale light streaming in through the thick canopy of twisted trees that surrounded me. The silvery glow matched the starbursts erupting in my eyes.

I don’t know how long it took for me to crawl over to the closest tree, wrap my hands around the rough bark, and pull myself to my feet. I stood there for several minutes, resting my forehead against the trunk and trying to keep the world from spinning around and the flashing starbursts to a minimum. Then I pushed away from the tree and forced myself to start walking.

Well, I don’t know if I’d really call it walking . I stumbled from one tree trunk to the next, weaving worse than a drunken frat boy, with no idea of where I was, where I was going, and not really caring about either one at the moment. I had a much more important mission right now—stopping the rest of my blood from leaking out of my body.

Dekes had made some nasty wounds with his fangs, including one in my right shoulder that went all the way down to my collarbone. I could feel the broken edges of the bone scraping against each other and threatening to break through the tight skin that was stretched over their now awkward alignment. I could barely raise my right arm so I couldn’t set the bone, not by myself, but the bite marks needed to be covered up at the very least so that what was left of my blood would have a chance to clot. It was just dumb, blind luck that the vampire hadn’t hit my carotid artery when he’d launched into his feeding frenzy. Otherwise, I would have bled out back in the library.

I stooped down, dug my fingers into the mud at my feet, and plastered some of that on my wounds, but more of it seemed to slide off than actually stick to my skin. Ditto for the grass and moss that I tried next. So I got to my feet and trudged on. I don’t know how long I stumbled through the swamp, teetering and tottering from one slippery step to the next, but finally, I came across something that could help me—a spider’s web.

I walked right into the web, not even realizing it was there until I felt it stick to my skin. I blinked and lurched back, wondering if I’d stumbled into some sort of trap, perhaps an elemental trip wire or an elaborate snare that a hunter had made with fishing line. It took me a moment to spot the silken strands clinging to my bloody chest and realize what they were.

Despite the fact that the Spider was my assassin name and my own personal rune, I’d never really studied up on the critters themselves. I didn’t know what kind of spider had made the web, but it stretched from one tree to the next like a thick hammock that had been turned on its side. The moonlight slipped in through the cracks in the leaves above, making the individual threads glimmer like spun silver and showing off the web’s intricate pattern.

For a moment, the scene blurred, and I was back in the sunlit forests of Ashland, patiently listening as Fletcher explained another one of his folksy mountain remedies to me—the one I’d thought I’d never, ever use. But once again, the old man’s teachings were going to save me—or at least help me save myself.

“Fletcher,” I whispered.

The old man’s name seemed to echo through the trees, melting the happy illusion in my head and snapping me back to the here and now and the danger that I was in. Still, for the first time all night, a smile spread across my bloody face.

It was a shame to destroy something so delicate and beautiful as the web, but I did it anyway, just as I had so many other horrible, hurtful things over the years. I grabbed gobs and gobs of the silken strands and started packing them into the wounds on my neck and shoulders as best I could, given the fact that I could really only use my left arm. The threads stuck to my skin like glue.

When I packed the wounds with the last of the web, I managed to shrug out of my suit jacket, put it over the whole sticky mess, and loop the sleeves around my neck like a scarf, since I didn’t have the strength to try and actually tie them together. It wasn’t the best bandage I’d ever made, but hopefully it would keep me from losing any more blood.

My mission complete, I drew in a breath and headed deeper into the marsh.

I don’t know how long I walked, just plodding through the swamp. Mud, water, grass, more mud. They all merged together into a seemingly endless landscape, each one sucking at my feet and threatening to pull me down with every step I took. Half the time I would think that I’d finally found some dry land to walk on, only to find myself up to my knees in water two seconds later.