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I panted in terror, fully waking and remembering my current situation—that I was cuddled up to my dead boyfriend.
Who was currently making horrible noises.
“Oh no.”
I had a good imagination—it was one of the reasons I didn’t like being sober too much. Because what if Nia’n’an’s leftover acids inside of him had eaten away at his internal acid-making organs and had burst out and were now onhisinsides, disintegrating him? I’d seen what they’d done to that man’s face, he hadn’t shoved the body away fast enough—but then the web we were in shook.
“Oh no, oh no!” I hissed.
I’d been a fool to think that nothing would notice the now-somewhat-smelly bodies the fight had left all around. Iknewwhat lived in the caves, I’d seen all of Nia’n’an’s scars?—
Then the web jerked sideways, and there was a horrible tearing sound.
I screamed, and tried to get away from Nia’n’an, back the way I’d come into his webbing. The tugging of the web and all its many anchors had reactivated all the surrounding cavern’s bioluminescent glow, which was great; I couldn’twaitto get to see just what was going to kill me.
And just when I thought things couldn’t get any worse—Nia’n’an ripped in two.
I screamed. And screamed. I wouldn’t stop screaming. My throat was already broken from singing, but that didn’t matter, because I was screaming from my chest now, and also I thought I might throw up, until?—
“My love?”
I both heard his familiar croon, and the translation device provided him with a voice.
He moved, shifting, sending waves across the web like we were in a bounce house, and I watched him begin to pull off sheets of skin.
“Nia’n’an . . . is it you?” I asked him.
Because I had seen a lot of zombie movies. And we’d been around a lot of fungus.
He peeled off a piece of his face, inspected it, and then replaced his translation device where it belonged, on the new him. “It had better be.”
I gawked, as he kept trying to free himself of his old skin.
“Oh my god, that’s so disgusting!” I squealed—but then, because I was one ofthosegirls, I rocked back forward. “Let me help!”
We worked in a strange silence, until Nia’n’an two-point-oh was revealed. I’d had to tug off some of his old leg shells for him, like he’d put on a pair of too-tight thigh-high boots, and then I’d gotten a lot of pleasure peeling all the extra bits of him off of his back, and then we were together, in a very messy web, with one spider-dude alive, and the pieces of some other spider-dude crudding up the ground.
Nia’n’an braced himself out as we finished, and looked around, in just as much wonderment as I was. “I am alive, again.”
“You are,” I whispered, and then I counted. “And—you have eight legs now!”
A ripple moved through him as he tried all of his legs in quick succession, without looking back. “I do,” he agreed, mystified.
“I thought you were dead!” I shouted, before flinging myself as best I could onto him. He caught me and pressed me to his chest where, I noted, all of his old gouges had gone away with his old skin.
This version of Nia’n’an had never been hurt by me.
“I did too, my love,” he said, holding me tightly. “I am so sorry I worried you.”
“It was a dick move!” I shouted into his chest, shoving him without moving him in the least.
Thirty-Nine
NIA’N’AN
Arachnaea did not havethe same “heaven” as humans thought of; we only had the Great Web, where our spirits were meant to live on, and clearly I had reached it, because Sloane was still here by my side.
Whatever I had accomplished in my prior life, I must have been very, very good, to have earned such a favor.
