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“No catch, Mr. Albrecht. Consider this a peace offering. You’ll find that Arachne is as much a fan of patterns and mathematic precision as I am. But alas, that is where our similarities end.”
I let my arm drop at last, and Florian took the opportunity to trot up to the summoning sigil, marveling at it, the gold reflecting in his eyes. Rubbing the backs of my eyelids, I sighed. We both knew that he was more resilient than your average humanoid, his extensive lifespan and the thickness of his weird not-quite-bark skin giving him a natural toughness, but Florian really needed to be more damn mindful of his mortality.
“You should know that we still don’t trust you, Sadriel. Not by a long shot.”
“Understood,” she said, pressing her clipboard to her chest, her expression neutral and unruffled. “In the meantime I shall resolve to avoid antagonizing you further.” She pushed her pen up into her bottom lip, eyes gazing at the sky, then quickly scribbled into her clipboard. “No more attacks, perhaps. That would help. No more threats.” She muttered to herself as she wrote, her pen working so fast that it was a wonder the clipboard didn’t just burst into flames.
“So,” I said, reaching out to the Vestments, requesting a slender dagger. “If we’re done here?”
“Yes, yes,” Sadriel said impatiently, her hand now a blur as it took more and more of her copious notes. “Go on with your business, then.”
“Right,” I said, just as the warm metal of a dagger materialized between my fingers. “Florian, open up one of those fortune cookies, would you?”
He did as I requested, the plastic rustling as he tore the wrapper open. I didn’t need to tell him to crush the cookie into little shards, to put the mess into the center of the circle.
“And for reference,” I said, holding the point of the dagger up to my finger, “here’s the last step. The final ingredient.”
I pushed, inhaling sharply as I felt the prick of the dagger against my skin. Squeezing on the end of my finger, I let the single drop of blood fall into the circle among the broken pieces of fortune cookie. It hissed and smoked as it struck the pavement, the sign that the communion had worked.
The little octagon glyph painted onto the brick wall shuddered, then rapidly expanded into an oval of shimmering gossamer gray. Whereas the portal to Artemis’s realm was shaped and colored like a leaf, the gate to Arachne’s very much looked like a constantly spinning spider web.
And it felt like one too, I noticed, just as I stepped in. “Exactly like walking through spider webs,” I told Florian behind me, trying not to get too unsettled by the feeling of sticky, silky threads adhering, then tearing from my skin.
“Kind of gross,” Florian said, his arms held out to his sides like he was playing at being an airplane. “But kind of cool, too. I’m into it.”
I chuckled. Florian was into a lot of weird things. I hoped he was ready for whatever we were about to encounter in Arachne’s domicile, though. I hoped we were both ready.
Spoiler alert: I was not.
The last traces of Valero’s warmth died from my skin and hair as we stepped into the spider-queen’s home, a cavern lit in odd spots by flames that burned a sickly jade green. The part that bothered me the most, though, wasn’t the pale woman with the lower body and abdomen of a massive spider. It wasn’t the thousands of her arachnid children skittering across the floors and walls, either.
No, what had the sweat trickling down my back was the enormous web stretched like a lace net across the entirety of the domicile, a silvery-gray canopy over which more of Arachne’s thousand thousand young crawled and frolicked.
Even Florian’s footsteps felt more hesitant. But if there was one thing I learned from Carver, it was to show a confident face to the entities, even in times of uncertainty or fear. They could smell it on you, he taught me and the others. Weakness. And that was the very last thing you wanted an entity to know about you: that you were vulnerable, or soft, or afraid.
Arachne’s head, covered in an exquisite veil that trailed to the ground, turned slowly at the sound of our approach.
“Ah,” she breathed, her voice filling the vastness of her chamber. “Mason Albrecht, the nephilim, and his companion, the alraune, Florian.”
“Thank you for welcoming us,” I said, inflecting my voice with both strength and reverence, a tough balance to strike when you’re worried about stepping on one of your host’s eight-legged children, or equally as concerning, worried about them crawling up your pants leg.
“Why, it’s my pleasure.” Arachne tilted her head just enough to let the veils fall partway past her mouth, revealing the glint of greenish light on her wet fangs. “Come into my parlor.”
22
We’d caught the spider-queen in the middle of doing – well, I wasn’t sure what, exactly. Her legs were carrying her around the underside of the great web, her head raised as she trailed her fingers along its length. On closer inspection, I could just see filaments of silk dangling from the web, and little spiders hanging from the ends. They were glimmering, too.
“I hope we haven’t intruded,” I said, careful to be respectful. “It seems that you’re very busy just now.”
Arachne smiled again, then spun slowly in place, her face turned up to the web above us. “It is no great concern, nephilim, I am merely doing what I always do. A little maintenance, if you will. A woman’s work is never done, or something to that effect, whatever it is you humans like to say.” She paused just then, bringing her hands together, favoring me with an odd grin. “Ah, but I hope you do not take offense to me calling you a human.”
“None taken,” I said, approaching slowly, the bag of fortune cookies rustling in my hand. “I’ve been human longer than I’ve been an angel, if that makes sense. I’m still figuring out that part of myself.”
Arachne chuckled, a sound that was both wondrous and frightening. She raised her hand to the strands of dangling silk, collecting one of the sparkling spiders. “Yes, that is true. My children told me that you’d only just learned to fly. What a fascinating gift that must be.”
My legs almost locked in place, but I pressed on, not wanting to show Arachne that her awareness had caught me off guard. The Fuck-Tons weren’t kidding. The spider-queen had eyes and ears everywhere, even in that distant, unnamed meadow that Raziel had taken me to.
“I’m not sure it’s for me,” I said, laughing softly. “It might take some getting used to, assuming I ever try again.”
