Page 59 of Magic for Nothing

“Maybe she was scared,” I said quietly. “Don’t you ever get scared?”

“All the time,” said Sam.

I looked at him, and he looked at me, and the silence between us stretched out into something sharp and new, something I couldn’t put a name on. Which was, naturally, when the webbing next to my left hand burst into flames.

“Shit!” I yelped, and began swatting at the fire, trying to beat it out. If the whole web went up, we were both in a lot of trouble.

The bestiary hit the floor with a thump as Sam dove out of the RV. I took a breath to start cursing at him, and stopped as he dashed back inside, now holding a bucket.

“Get out of the way!” he shouted.

I dove to the side. He doused the flame with water. The smell of char and damp spider web filled the RV. I coughed. Sam dropped the bucket.

“What the fuck, Annie?” he demanded. “Are you some sort of pyro?”

“No,” I said. “I . . . I don’t . . . I don’t know anything about Jorōgumo webbing. Maybe it’s really flammable.” There it was: the proof that sometimes, telling the truth was too much to ask. Sam wasn’t a friend, but he was potentially an ally, and I didn’t want him looking at me like I was a freak. It says something about my idea of “normal” that I thought the man who walked like a monkey was going to judge me for setting a few fires with my mind.

“So be more careful,” he said. “I don’t feel like hauling your ass out of the fire.”

“Yes, sir,” I said. The bookshelf was soaked: if there were any more clues to be found there, they’d need to wait until it dried. Maybe the bodies—

I stopped. Keeping my voice very level and calm, I asked, “Sam? Where are the bodies?”

“We put Umeko in the bedroom. That’s where . . .” He stopped. Swallowing hard, he continued, “That’s where we found the cocoons.”

I followed his gaze to the webbed tunnel. “I always liked haunted houses,” I said, and began walking in that direction.

It must have been hard for Umeko to move around the RV when transformed. The tunnel was narrower than her body had been, and while she could squeeze, the positioning of her legs meant she’d probably preferred to walk with them spread out at her sides, giving her greater control. I didn’t know how long she’d been able to assume her full spider form, but it looked like she’d never been able to let herself live openly as what she really was. Maybe it was wrong of me to feel bad for someone who’d been responsible for so many deaths. I couldn’t help myself. Umeko had been a victim of circumstance, just like the people she’d killed.

The bedroom door, like the floor, was unwebbed. I opened it, and there was Umeko, still in spider form, sprawled across the bed with her limbs all akimbo and her mouth hanging open, mandibles limp between human lips. Her abdomen was a deflated sack, leaking unspeakable fluids onto the duvet. The smell of decay was in the air, faint enough that it seemed to be coming entirely from Umeko herself.

And then there were the cocoons.

As Emery had said, there were five of them, large enough and with a distinctive enough shape that there was no question they were human. The one nearest the bed was oddly incomplete; a man’s head protruded from the top, skin drawn tight across the skull, a rose tattoo on the side of his neck. I frowned before climbing up onto the bed, careful to avoid the fluids leaking from Umeko, and beginning to slice the cocoon open.

“Uh, you didn’t say anything about playing with the corpses,” said Sam. “I am not here for corpse-bothering. Honestly, I’d rather not be here at all.”

“I’m not corpse-bothering,” I said. “I’m checking something.” I continued to slice at the webs covering the hapless Pablo until I exposed his neck and shoulders. There it was, as I’d more than half-expected: a vicious puncture wound in the flesh above his collarbone. It looked like the sort of thing that would have been left behind if Umeko had bitten someone. If there was any mercy to the placement of the thing, it was that he’d probably bled out before her venom could kill him.

And she had loved him. She’d left her own space to share his—no small thing, in a world where privacy was so precious and so hard to come by. There were no signs of predation on his flesh; I didn’t want to completely unwrap him, but every part of him I could see was still intact, if withered and wasted away.

“I don’t think she meant to do it,” I said, looking at the wound. “I think she moved in with Pablo because she was scared and thought she could control it, and then he walked in on her, or she shifted in her sleep, and when he screamed, she bit him. Instinct took over. She loved him, and she killed him, and after that, there was no way she could tell anyone what was happening to her. They would have looked at her like she was a monster.” I hadn’t known her, but I could absolutely understand why she hadn’t wanted that to happen.

And then she’d become a monster, because that was how she’d been thinking of herself. Sometimes we change in terrible ways without even realizing it.

Sam’s tail nervously twisted around his waist, twining and knotting in a way that seemed to soothe him, at least a little. “We should have realized something was wrong. I should have noticed when I stopped seeing Pablo around.”

“Can’t change the past. Can just try to do better in the future.” I climbed off the bed, leaving the ill-fated Pablo webbed to the wall. I hoped he’d been happy with Umeko, before the changes she was undergoing had killed him. I hoped he’d known she didn’t mean to do it.

“What are you doing now?”

“Just looking.” The other four cocoons were the victims that had attracted the attention of the Covenant in the first place. Somehow, their intelligence teams had missed one. I wasn’t going to report that part. Anything that encouraged the Covenant to improve their surveillance wasn’t a good thing as far as I was concerned. “Has Umeko been eating normally? I mean, have you seen her in the mess tent with the rest of the show?”

“Yeah,” he said. “She’s mostly been drinking protein shakes and stuff, but she’s been eating. Why?”

“Because some spiders will web up prey for later. For lean times. They eat what they can and save what they can’t.” Please, let me have this, I thought, bringing the knife toward the first of the cocoons. Please, give me one good thing, to make up for Umeko, and the instincts she didn’t get to choose. Please.

“I don’t understand.”