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Reaching behind me, I caught hold of the bit of shirt that had torn and yanked as hard as I could, pulling down a strip. The small sliver of iron was wedged into the end of the board and lashed as tight as my bleeding hands would allow.

“Alright, creepy. Let’s dance.”

The ghost lights followed me as I advanced on the spider, who twitched between the looming, rippling form of Goose, and the tiny dirty human who was brandishing a very sad excuse for a caveman’s spear.

Smarter than any spider had a right to be, it came for the weaker target. All eight legs scuttled across the hall, barreling toward me.

Goose wasn’t going to let that happen, with the soft target of its enormous black abdomen facing him, he latched on, teeth solidifying out of the smoke as it bit down.

I was not a trained fighter. I fought by Detroit rules: Survive at all costs. Any target is a target when it’s life or death, and a twenty-foot-tall rose spider was absolutely life or death.

I aimed for the easiest target. The bright red rose eyes.

As it grew closer, I shuddered with revulsion as I watched thousands of tiny human-like eyes with red irises blink at me from the petals of the roses.

The stench reached me before the first of its legs swiped at me. It smelled of the same sort of rot as the iron bite The Raven had doctored, mixed with a sickly, cloying perfume of crushed, sunbaked roses. It smelled like the world’s worst funeral parlor, and my gagging didn’t help.

Had Goose not yanked the spider back a foot with a snarl, that leg would have caught me easily. I stabbed blindly, catching and dragging my makeshift spear across one of the huge legs. I hadn’t expected it to be able to do much damage. I had expected it to distract the spider from attacking Goose and allowing him to do the greatest amount of damage. But the moment the iron pierced the hard exoskeleton, the entire leg began to rot from the inside out. Sick veins of black ichor reflected the eerie blue ghost lights dancing in and out of my hair like a ghastly halo.

A hissing scream of pain and anger shook the chamber, and the spider turned back to me, lunging for me. This time, it connected, piercing my shoulder straight through, knocking me to the ground and impaling me on the end of the leg.

Misery ripped through me as tiny glass-like hairs worked themselves into the wound, and with every pound of my rabbit of a heartbeat, they pumped new waves of bitter pain into me. A guttural, deep groaning scream poured from my throat and shredded it as surely as my shoulder was shredded.

Weakness tore the spear from my grip and scattered it a few feet away from me, spinning in the low light.

I whimpered, frustration and agony pumping through me.

The spider whirled around as Goose lashed out again. The scent of fresh bloodied flesh mixed with the stench of rot and decay and made me sicker as the spider whipped me around with it. I was in the worst place, between Goose and the spider, dangling from the hard rod of its leg as it reared back and threatened Goose.

Goose hesitated, a sense of his gaze falling on me as if he was unsure of how to attack his enemy, save me and himself, and not harm me all at the same time. The spider sensed this hesitation and lunged after Goose, pushing him over the edge of the chasm it had come from.

“GOOSE!” I screamed as I watched the last of the tendrils of smoke and shadow slip over into the silent depths.

He was gone.

Just like that, my shadow was gone.

Just like that, the one creature that had been with me through all of this was gone.

My heart went with him into the still darkness. If it had shattered, there would have been pieces left in the empty blackness that consumed my heart. I didn’t even know I loved that stupid thing, but with him gone, I realized I had loved him more than I should have. He had become my Cricket snake. The stable thread that bound me from one nightmare to another and held me through it all even when I didn’t want him to.

“You disgusting piece of fucking shit,” I hissed, turning my eyes to the spider. It chittered, flailing me in the air as if celebrating its victory.

That leg had to come down eventually, and this bug was about to meet Detroit when it did.

It happened slowly. The leg I was impaled on began lowering, and I straightened my body, engaging every single one of my muscles as it came down. I angled myself to catch my feet on the stone floor.

The moment my foot touched the ground, I let my thighs gather strength. As the leg came down, folding me in half, I bellowed and pushed up, working against the strength of the spider trying to slam me into the stonework.

The snap of the spider’s leg shivered through my body and shredded my mind, chasing spots of black and purple into my eyes.

My head hit the floor at the same time as my shoulder did as I rolled away from the shrieking, snapping beast. Every roll and tumble wedged the shard of exoskeleton farther into my shoulder, and pale golden blood covered the floor in a stuttering streak following my rolling body.

This was it. This was how I was going to die. The spider was turning on me, clear venom pooling and dripping from its fangs.

Rage washed through me. Rage at the injustice of it all. Rage that had been stuffed down deep and turned into bitter poison from my childhood. Rage at all the pain and suffering I had lived through boiled into my body and coalesced in a spark behind my eyes. If I was going to die, I was not going to be a satisfying meal for this asshole. He would choke on it, and if there was a god anywhere, I would give this shithead indigestion.

I was no longer fighting to survive. I was no longer fighting to save my friend. I was fighting for the sole petty purpose of inflicting the maximum amount of suffering and punishment. When an enemy stops struggling for survival and, instead, begins to fight for the pleasure of your pain, that was where true nightmares are born.