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“Hello?” I am forced to call again, louder this time. What if he’s not here? What if he’s gone? What if none of this is actually real and I’ve had some kind of break? What…
“What are you doing here?”A cold voice rattles down my spine.
I freeze, knowing I am going to have to turn around, but putting off the horror and anticipation of that moment for as long as possible. I truly never thought I would see him again, but that voice sends me spinning back through time, giving me all the old feelings of vulnerability, fear, and excitement.
I’ve seen him before, so seeing him again should not come as a shock to me, even in the gathering dusk of winter beginning to give way to a more hopeful spring climate.
I turn, slowly, to find Order looming over me, his eight eyes uncovered, every single one of them narrowed at me. Two sets of his three sets of arms are folded over his chest. The lowest pair reaches out for me, taking me by the hips. Does he know how intimate this kind of greeting is? It feels as though he just has to hold me.
I clear my throat in the attempt to gather my wits about me.Get it together, Tessie, I lecture myself silently.He’s just a guy.
But he’s not just a guy. He is a mutant, a mostly or perhaps only partially human creature who otherwise is made of spider. The hands gripping me are capable of emitting a thick and sticky silk which is almost impossible to escape.
“I’ve come on police business,” I say, trying to sound official. Trying not to let him sense how my knees quiver and shake when all those eyes pierce my very soul. Order would be intimidating no matter what his temperament due to his appearance alone, but he is grumpy. Very grumpy. Stern. That’s it. Domineering and dominating. It’s a demeanor that makes me feel scared and somehow safe all at the same time.
He looks at me, waiting for me to elaborate on my business. I force the words out, because no matter how intense this all feels, it is not about me.
“Sally is missing. Have you seen her? Or Justice?”
Justice is Order’s brother. He is a different kind of unholy monster.
“I don’t know where they are. I don’t know what they’re doing,” he snaps irritatingly.
“I think you’re lying.” I’m surprised to hear myself say that quite so bluntly. I try to be more diplomatic these days, but there’s just something about Order that triggers me.
His upper eyes narrow at me, and the grip on my hips tightens just a fraction.
“Let me rephrase. I don’t owe you any answers,” Order growls down at me.
“You don’t owe me anything,” I say. “And I don’t owe you anything either.”
There’s an awkward, heated tension. We’re talking at cross-purposes, because we have the kind of history that can only be achieved through a one-night stand. It’s a mixture of awkwardness and mutual insecurity covered by an immediate and ever growing lust. Yes. I have been the spider’s mate, and more. I have felt him inside me. I have…
“Have you forgotten what I told you last time I saw you?”
I feel myself flash hot with excitement and fear. I haven’t forgotten a thing about the last time I saw him and the first time I met him.
2
Afew weeks ago…
There’s something wrong with my partner. Sally has always been perfectly detached and calm. She’s really the ideal cop. I admire her in many ways. She’s never made me feel less than her, even though I’m basically crippled. Nobody else wanted to work with me, but she took me as a partner, and I have every intention of being a good one.
But she’s paler than usual, which is saying something because she’s a pale redhead to begin with. She’s also distracted and fidgeting and occasionally muttering the occasional barely coherent fragment of speech to herself.
I’ve come with her halfway across Brooklyn to the sort of place people usually find bodies. That’s what I’m expecting to encounter, if I’m to be honest. I’m just not sure what’s got Sally so wound up. Bodies are unfortunately par for the course in our line of work, as golfers like to say.
“Here,” she says, pointing me toward the kind of creepy abandoned location people like to do shady deals in. I am immediately tense. With the way these containers are stacked up high all around us, anyone could take a shot from anywhere. Of course we’ve come out here in the middle of the night. Makes total sense. How can you be murdered in a sketchy location in the dark if you’re not in a sketchy location in the dark?
The hairs on the back of my neck stand up as clouds travel over the golden moon above. My head is on a swivel, looking for threats from anywhere. By the time I look back, Sally has managed to get herself caught in an incredibly oversized spider web, one big enough to capture her completely. At first she just touched it, but now she’s wound all the way up in it.
Her ridiculous predicament is enough to break the tension that has gripped me from our arrival. I cannot help but laugh at her, as the staunchest, strongest woman I know ends up upside down in a sticky web, fresh bits of her sticking even more with every hapless movement she makes.
“Stop filming me and help me the fuck out of here!” she curses at me. That only makes me want to capture this moment on my phone more than ever. I’m flipping between cinematic and standard video, because the guys and girls down at the precinct are going to love this. This is going to go a long way toward lightening the mood from all the bodies we’ve been finding lately.
“I am helping,” I tell her.
“You are not!” She yells back, sticking her other leg through an extra bit of web. As gross and weird as all this is, there is something intrinsically satisfying and amusing about big gooey things.
