“I think you’ve found your answer,” Lace concluded. “Neither the Widow nor the Faun will accept anything she offers them.” But Darien couldn’t shake his feeling of unease. “You need to let her do this on her own, Dare. She’ll come back.”
He set off down the street. “I’ve got a walking trash bag to beat to a pulp and two hundred thousand gold mynet to rake in. Call me if anything else comes up.”
He’d wanted to talk to Loren about what Arthur had told him—about Erasmus Sophronia, the genius and creator of the Arcanum Well himself, who supposedly died nearly a thousand years ago, being her father. But with everything going on, no time felt like the right time.
Lace said, “Will do.”
He hung up, and he tried not to think about Loren facing the Fawn or the Widow. Tried not to think of how frightened she would be when she spoke to them—nor how disappointed when they told her no.
—
Darien made it home before Loren, despite that he’d taken his sweet time with his target.
He was sitting at the island in the kitchen with Travis and Max when he heard bicycle wheels crunching through gravel, his sharp hearing picking up on the sound even through Mortifer’s audio-blocking spells. A moment later, the front door swung open.
Loren didn’t look at any of them as she breezed into the entrance hall and kicked off her low-top sneakers.
“Everything okay?” Darien called.
“Fine,” she bit out. She still wouldn’t look at him, and when that second sneaker sprang free of her foot, she sprinted up the stairs, ponytail bobbing with every step. Beneath the hem of her denim shorts, her bare legs were pink from the sun, her white long-sleeved shirt spotted with dust.
A minute later, the door to her suite slammed shut.
Darien had spent a good, long while thinking about the Crossroads; how Loren had likely had her heart broken even further from the Fawn or the Widow declining whatever bargain she’d tried to strike with them. She had done nothing to deserve this. Nothing to deserve any of it.
He pushed out from the counter and stalked into the foyer.
“Darien,” Travis called softly. He thought better of whatever he was about to say and didn’t say it.
Beneath the initial whiff of her peaches-and-honeysuckle scent, and that faint hint of cedar smoke, Darien found decay and soil and rocks. He took another breath and picked up on the briny smell of the sea, along with the musty and slightly fishy hint of the Angelthene River.
The Fountain, then.
The Widow.
Darien pulled on his boots and stomped up to the bowl in the entrance hall. He picked out two pieces of silver and shoved them into the pocket of his gray hoodie.
Max came up behind him, his footfall echoing softly. “Dare,” he said. His voice was gruff. “Don’t do something you’ll regret.”
Darien was already pulling open the door. Cool air rushed into the entrance hall, rustling his hair and clothes. “I won’t,” he said. And then he left, closing the door behind him.
What he’d really meant was that he would do it—but he wouldn’t regret it.
—
It went without saying that humans were the weakest race in the world. They could barely tread water in the unjust society they were born into, and nothing they could possibly offer to creatures like the Widow would get them anywhere.
The only powers a human could possess had to be given to them by someone else; someone whose place was above theirs in the hierarchy. It was because of this that Darien knew the Widow had refused to strike a bargain with Loren. The eight-legged demon might’ve entertained the idea purely out of curiosity, but Loren had nothing to sate the Widow’s greed, so she’d left the spider’s den emptyhanded. And although he knew better than to think the Widow had taken anything from Loren during her visit, in a way she had, even without knowing it.
The Widow had taken from Loren the last of her hope. And in taking this, the remaining pieces of her shattered heart had likely been ground down to a fine dust.
Darien barely felt the bite of the blade in his palm as he leapt to a crouch upon the edge of the fountain at Ebonfield. The salt of his blood filled his nostrils as he let it dribble into the bucket. He tossed in two pieces of silver and then punched the bucket into the fountain.
That field disappeared swiftly, and mist and shadows swept in as he was carried off to some faraway place of liminality that was neither here nor there; betwixt and between.
The Widow’s habitat was dark and windowless. It consisted of nothing but curved walls and a cement floor that was covered by an inch of murky water that smelled of oil and sewage.
The thing watched in silence from the shadows across from the fountain he was crouched upon. No matter how sharp his vision, he could barely see the silhouettes of those eight long and slender legs.
