Soul Taken (Mercy Thompson 13)

That’s not to say that he wasn’t creepy. His eyes were on me, white and pupilless, as they had been the only time I’d seen him alive. Or as alive as vampires got, anyway. He was, as he had been then, half-starved and frail, his hair only a stubble on the pale globe of his shaved scalp. Tears dripped slowly down his emotionless face.

Daniel was not a ghost I would have been comfortable living with—but Stefan didn’t know Daniel was still in his house. Or if Stefan did, it wasn’t because I’d told him about it.

I tried to ignore Daniel because too much attention from me strengthens ghosts. He was not what we were hunting here, and Stefan would not thank me for making his dead roommate more powerful.

Adam stopped in the center of the living room. He turned very slowly, taking his time peering into the shadowed hallway that led to the bedrooms, then at the open basement door. He didn’t see Daniel, but I hadn’t expected him to.

Adam moved without a sound, but not because he needed to. The splintering of the front door had been loud enough to alert anyone in the house who hadn’t heard our car drive up of our presence. It was an involuntary reflex he reverted to whenever there was danger about. I thought that he might have learned to do that before he’d ever become a werewolf, when he’d hunted and been hunted in Southeast Asia.

I felt like we were being hunted now. My impression that this was a trap had settled into an instinctive certainty. I just couldn’t tell if Adam and I were its intended prey—or if it had been set for Stefan.

I was going to feel really stupid if I was overreacting and Stefan and his people were at the seethe, or out on a team-building exercise. I made a mental note to ask Stefan if he did team-building exercises, then thought about what kind of team-building exercises a vampire might do and decided it might be better not to ask.

I told myself that the fact that Daniel was the only ghost I could see was good news—since I could not hear anyone in this house, which should have at least eight normal humans and a couple of fledgling vampires in it at this time of night. If they had been violently killed recently, there would be more than one ghost here. I put my nose to the floor and tried to pick up any hint of the thing we were hunting.

I made a full circle of the living room, a quick-time perimeter slink, with my nose on the floor, finishing back at Adam’s side. There were no sounds or scents to direct our hunt, so I paused to see where he wanted to go next.

I didn’t much want to move on to the bedrooms, where tighter spaces would make fighting anything nasty more difficult. As for the basement... spending some time in the basement of a black witch might have left me with just a bit of basement-itis, because I didn’t want to go through that dark doorway.

Adam took two steps forward so he could get a better look at the kitchen and dining area. I would have started heading into the kitchen, but Daniel’s whitewashed eyes caught mine. He wasn’t, had not been, one of the ghosts who interacted with the real world, so it caught me by surprise when he looked from me up to the vaulted ceiling.

I followed his gaze. I yipped a warning, but it was too late. Something pale the approximate size and shape of a VW Beetle dropped from the ceiling on top of Adam, flattening him on the floor with a boom that rattled the house.

I leaped upon its broad and smooth back, hoping to find a place I could get some teeth into, something that might get it off Adam. I’d expected to land on something soft, but the surface was as hard and cold as an ice-skating rink. My nails landed with a click, and I had to scrabble to stay on top of it as it moved under me because I could find no purchase.

The creature was near white with a greenish cast in the warm light of the floor lamp. It looked as much like a spider as it did like anything else I’d ever seen. Its body was divided into two rounded segments, one—the one I’d hopped onto—much larger than the other, and it had six long legs with two joints in each. If someone who had never seen a spider tried to make one based on a kindergartner’s description, it might have looked like this creature. Especially if the kindergartner was afraid of spiders—and couldn’t count to eight.

Fine “hairs” covered the hard shell of the body in patches, and they had more in common with cactus spines than with anything as friendly as actual hair. They dug into the tough bottoms of my feet like fiberglass fibers. The connection between body and head was hard, too, covered with plates like armor, and gave me no place to worry at with my teeth.

The legs were covered in longer slivery needles that lay down against the surface. I’d learned how to kill porcupines without getting a muzzle full of quills. If I bit at just the right angle, maybe I could avoid being stuck.

I had to try something because Adam was beneath it.

It shuddered, shivering like a maraca, complete with sound effects. I felt my feet slipping, so I flung myself back off the creature in the hope that once I was on the floor, I could get traction to pull off a leg strike.

The smaller round section, which turned out to be its head, spun as it tracked my motion. It was an uncanny movement—as if it were connected to the body like a trailer ball instead of bone or sinew. It reminded me of the way an owl’s head moves, but creepier. I got a brief glimpse of its open mouth—no teeth or tongue but dangling bits that wriggled—and it spat at me, a cupful of clear liquid that it obviously thought of as a weapon.

I accepted its judgment and sprang out of range as if the spit were acid. It landed on the wood and the edge of a Persian carpet and dissipated in a fog. I decided to continue to treat the spider spit as if it was dangerous.

In the back of my head, I kept track of how long Adam had been down beneath the creature. Seconds were hours in a fight, and I had counted three already.

Fortunately, Adam on the ground was the farthest thing from Adam helpless. While I was trying for a good angle of attack for one of the legs, Adam surged to his feet under the weight of his attacker and flung it into the piano with thunderous effect. Stefan’s piano had survived when someone heaved me into it a while back.

Either Adam threw harder or I didn’t weigh as much as the Volkswagen-sized monstrosity. The piano collapsed in a shower of splinters, ringing soundboard, and broken wires that lashed the creature hard enough to leave a few small cracks in its shell.

The spider-thing righted itself with a stomach-turning flutter of spindly legs. Then it skittered—if something that large could be said to skitter—back toward Adam.

Looking only a little the worse for wear, he waited for it with a calm face and my cutlass at the ready. It leaned back and balanced on four legs, striking at Adam with the two closest to him.

Adam avoided the first limb with a subtle twist of the weapon and a slight movement of his body. He caught the leg with a glancing blow as it swept past him. He didn’t hit it hard, but the blade sang out as if the leg were metal.

My cutlass wasn’t the thick-bladed version made famous in cartoons and bad pirate movies, though it was stout enough. Its blade was slightly curved, and short enough so that it could be used in close quarters—like on a pirate ship. Zack told me they’d picked it because the length suited my arm, and also because it was a prize for winning the pirate computer game the whole pack was obsessed with.

Adam’s first strike had been to test the way the blade felt against the leg, and he’d gotten some feel. The spider-thing’s second leg was only a hair’s breadth behind, and on that one Adam tried to take out the joint. Again, he didn’t hit it full force—as he would have with something that was ordinary flesh and blood. Instead, he caught it a glancing blow, the way he would have dealt with another, equally strong blade.

He thought that whatever formed the outer layer of the leg was as strong as or stronger than steel or he’d have hit it differently. Again, the blade sang out as it rebounded a bit off the leg.

There were going to be no easy victories here—and I was afraid that I was as useless as sunscreen in Seattle. I was fast enough, I thought, to avoid its attacks. But if that cutlass in Adam’s hands wasn’t doing much damage—neither could I.