Finally, in a small voice, Thea spoke. “Thank you, Arachne.”
I didn’t need to be told twice, already knowing that I’d be getting more visitations from this strange spider queen and her horrific offspring. I couldn’t remember whether it was me or Thea who reached the gossamer portal first, only that we were both relieved to find ourselves back in the alleyway, clutching our knees and panting from the effort of sprinting. Thea’s forehead gleamed. She was sweating, and shuddering.
“That was her,” I panted, wiping at my upper lip. “From mythology. The woman Athena turned into a spider. She’s real.”
“They all are,” Thea said, patting at her forehead with her sleeve, her hand faintly trembling. “They live in the unseen spaces, like spiders. In the corners. Here and there, between the cardinal directions. Anywhere you aren’t looking, there they are.”
My breath returned to me in gasps. The dust in the alley choked at my lungs, and I couldn’t wait to get out, to breathe in the relatively fresher air of the city.
“Come on, Thea. We should go.”
“One minute,” she said, rubbing her knees. “Just – just give me one minute.”
In spite of the darkness, by the timbre of Thea’s voice alone, I could tell something was wrong. It was tough to see her so shaken by our encounter, her perfect surface splintered and cracked. Thea was someone I looked up to. She saved my life, once. She was a hero. It stung to see her so defeated.
Thea lifted her hand to her face again, rubbing her sleeve under one eye. I looked away, pretending that I didn’t see her tears.
Chapter 7
It was dark by the time I got home. Actually, let me clarify that statement. It was already dark by the time we’d gotten out of the alley. Thea said that being in Arachne’s domicile had done something to compress time, so that the minutes we had spent there were hours in the real world.
I’d waited long enough for her to get a ride, making sure she was fine to get along on her own. She offered to drop me off, but I didn’t want her knowing that I wasn’t heading back to my apartment, but my other home – at least what I used to call home back when I was somehow even younger and dumber.
I hugged my elbows as I watched from the safety of the shadows in the garden, or whatever passed for a garden at the house where I grew up. This had become a kind of ritual for me since I’d joined the Lorica, since the day someone tried to snuff my life out, which was part of the reason I didn’t want Thea knowing. It wasn’t healthy, she said, and damn it if she wasn’t right.
The lights were on inside the living room as they always were this time of the evening, without fail. That was when the man who lived here started actually putting things together for dinner. Once he did that for his wife and son, but both of them had gone.
I craned my neck to get a better look at what he was preparing. Time was when he would make stuff from scratch, something comforting like a chicken pot pie, or a casserole on lazier nights. I guess things were different when you were on your own, when there was no one to please, no one to tell you how good your cooking was. I watched as the man, who had the same black hair as me, the same blue eyes, pulled out a flat box from the freezer.
“Not another frozen dinner,” I muttered to myself, as if he could even hear, my words leaving my mouth in wisps of fog. “Come on, dad.”
Norman – the name I never called him for fear of getting smacked upside the head – was a cheerier person, once. Things used to be great at home. He liked to build things. When the mood took him, sometimes he’d sit down and play video games with me. Sometimes he’d even kick my ass. And mom, she liked to tinker with old toys and bikes and machines, and to bake, and some weekends we’d all head down to the beach for a picnic. I always loved the smell of the ocean, the sound of surf. They reminded me of f
amily, and home.
Things started to change when mom died. Cancer killed Diana Graves, and then it broke my father’s heart. I must have been seventeen then. I did what I could to console him, to lighten the load, help around the house, you know, just keep him company. I couldn’t say that it ever helped. Before things went south, he always used to say that I reminded him of my mother. Towards the end I think I began to remind him of her in all the wrong ways.
I wasn’t the perfect son. I never said I was. Still it got to be too much, between the push and pull of him being angry with me for the littlest things, but still wanting me around, begging me not to move out when things got too tense between us. “I’ll still visit,” I told him. “I promise.” I shuddered against the cold and smiled tightly. I always kept my promises.
Norman Graves was skinnier now, his face sallow, his eyes sunken a little further into his head than they should have been, but I knew I couldn’t just walk in there, tell him I was sorry, that I wanted us to be a family of two again. The last time I visited there was an argument. I left angry. He’d never been happy with how I couldn’t find something to do with myself, with my life, and the grandest irony was that now that I’d found something worth doing, I couldn’t even tell him about it to make him proud of me for once.
That’s why I knew that it weighed heavier on him, why he must have thought in some twisted section of his brain that it was his fault I ended up the way I did. That made it even harder to just knock on the door and announce myself. Ah, but that was the toughest part. I couldn’t even do that, not when he was there when they lowered my body into the ground.
Where to start? It was some weeks ago, the same night I had it out with my dad. I didn’t head back to my apartment right away, that shabby piece of shit I shared with those two roommates I didn’t even like, but hey, you have a shitty job, or no job at all, you put up with shitty living conditions. I didn’t know what possessed me to do so, but I took off and went to a park, just to walk around, to clear my head.
There were no joggers that night, as if everyone but me knew to steer clear of Heinsite Park. I saw a woman bent over a pond in the park, crying to herself, something about her dog. I went to help. I love dogs. And just as she was blubbering, explaining how little Sassy had fallen into the pond, something hard clubbed me across the back of the head.
When I came to I was in a dark room, strapped to a table, it felt like, what I now know must have been some kind of altar. Everything was dim, tinged with orange, like the only illumination was a whole bunch of candles.
And above me, all around me, were golden faces gleaming in the candlelight, people in bronze masks muttering, incanting. I tried to scream, but couldn’t. They must have drugged me. They strapped me down by the chest, but didn’t bother to bind my arms, like they were so confident I’d be too weak or doped up to fight back. They were almost right.
The dagger’s edge flashed in the light, a ceremonial blade that was so ornate, its hilt and guard covered in curved spines, like tendrils, its pommel gleaming with a gem that looked disturbingly like a single eye. It must have been the drugs, but I found it strange, just then, that I had time to identify the dagger’s different parts – who said video games were bad for you? – and to admire its craftsmanship. Then the hand holding the dagger brought it down.
So my life was complete garbage by then. No real job to speak of, a dad who, at the time, hated me, trash roommates, the works. But I didn’t want to die, and the pain – the fucking, searing pain of that cold dagger burying its way into the meat of my body, that reminded me of how alive I still was, and how alive I still wanted to be. But the knife hit home, biting into its sacrifice, and the screaming pain in my chest crashed across my entire body like freezing water. Everything went black. For all intents and purposes, I died.
Except that I came to again. Just as well, or you wouldn’t be here listening to this incredible tale of a near-jobless loser getting his redemption at the hands of the Lorica. I opened my eyes, and the first person I saw may as well have been an angel. That was when I met Thea for the very first time.
She had rescued me from the cultists, her and the team she’d brought from the Lorica. But the problem, she explained, was that the police had beaten them to it. The dagger hadn’t fully killed me. It was meant to, but with the ritual interrupted, it had only put me into a kind of magic-induced torpor, numbing enough of my body’s signals that I was fully a corpse by the time the cops came around.