Soul Taken (Mercy Thompson 13)

I did take a good look at the creature’s underside in hopes of finding some weak point, but it was, as far as I could tell, made of the same stuff as the rest of it.

Adam took a third strike at the joint between leg and body. The creature could put its body anywhere from flat on the ground to about six feet in the air, and at that point the joint was level with Adam’s shoulder. It didn’t make that clanging sound, but I couldn’t see that it did any damage at all—visually, anyway. The spider-thing jerked back with a hissing noise of about the same volume as dropping water into hot grease. So he must have done something.

He’d struck the leg with a steel blade, and it had flinched. But it hadn’t reacted like most fae would have when hit with cold iron. The steel hadn’t left scorch marks or burned it. If the iron in the blade gave Adam any kind of advantage against this fae, it wasn’t much. There were fae who could tolerate iron and its more civilized child, steel—Zee was one of those.

I was in the middle of puzzling out the fae-thing’s weaknesses when I realized that I couldn’t smell the spider-thing at all—it wasn’t the source of the fae magic I could still scent.

The creature had so little scent, in fact, that I wondered if it was using magic to disguise that. I’d never heard of any of the fae doing that before, but it didn’t mean that they couldn’t. This six-legged spider-thingy just might be a case in point. With no scent to go by, there was no reason for me to be so certain that this creature was fae. But I was sure.

If it wasn’t the fae I’d scented, somewhere in the house was another fae creature working magic. I put that thought in the back of my mind because I wasn’t going to leave Adam fighting alone, even if I hadn’t been much help to this point.

As I watched Adam’s graceful, deadly dance, I had time to consider larger implications. It was fae. It attacked us, unprovoked, in the house of our ally.

If we’d encountered it in, say, a barn, as a not-random example, I wouldn’t have been that worried about it. Any single fae might attack us—but the fae community would take care of it if we weren’t able to. However, this was in Stefan’s house. Stefan, who was the bridge between the vampires and the werewolves. Could this creature’s presence in Stefan’s house be part of whatever Marsilia had tried to warn us about?

Was one of the Gray Lords holding our vampires prisoner? It might account for Marsilia’s oddly dramatic method of giving us a quest as well as her indirect communications.

One of the spider’s legs sliced down through the muscle of Adam’s calf, and I hissed in a breath as blood poured out. Adam didn’t react to it other than to pull power from the pack bonds to increase the speed of his healing. I decided to worry about whether or not we could kill Shelob (with apologies to Tolkien) before looking at the possibilities of even bigger disasters.

Adam grimaced briefly, and I smelled scorched flesh. His grip must have touched the knuckle bow. He backed farther into the living room, giving himself more space. Of course, that gave the spider-thing more room, too.

Instead of closing with Adam, the spider-creature rocked its body back even farther, like a rearing horse—except the bottom end of its body stayed on the ground. The sharp ends of the creature’s legs were leaving gouges on Stefan’s floor. It placed a leg on either side and raised the other four, twisting its odd head around until it could see Adam. The long hairs on the legs lifted away from the shafts of its legs, sparkling a little with warm golden light as they reflected the illumination from the amber glass of Stefan’s Tiffany lamp.

I flattened myself against the wall and moved very slowly around the edge of the room. If I could get behind it while Adam kept it busy, maybe I could do something.

I didn’t know what, as my fangs were apparently utterly useless against it, but something. I thought about the thin cracks the breaking strings of the piano had left in its back. Unfortunately, I couldn’t lift a piano and throw it.

I felt Adam’s awareness of me even though he didn’t look my way. He stepped forward to attack. I wasn’t sure if it was because it was the right thing to do or because he didn’t want that spider-thing noticing me when the wall I was skirting got too close to the creature.

The fight looked like a demonic fencing match, with the speed of both participants and the added weird grace of the thing’s long legs. The oddest element was that the body of the creature was largely stationary. Raised up as it was, I could see the underbelly more easily. I still could not see any spot that looked soft. The only difference was that it was even more heavily furred with the nasty slivery hairs. The precise strikes of its legs made me think that it had fought someone armed with a sword before.

As it had with me, it flung spit at Adam.

In the short period of time that I’d been examining the thing’s underbelly, Adam had acquired a long red strip along his cheek. I couldn’t tell if he’d been smacked by a leg or splattered with some of the spittle. His leg had quit bleeding, but he was favoring it ever so slightly.

Adam shifted his grip on the cutlass and punched with the knuckle guard instead of using the blade. He targeted one of the exoskeleton breaks from the creature’s impact with the piano, and his blow left a starburst pattern of hairline cracks about eight inches across. But I smelled burning flesh again.

He jumped away and I could see that the knuckle guard had buckled around his hand. He pried at the metal to free himself as the silver burned his skin wherever it touched. As soon as he’d pulled the knuckle guard away from his sword hand, he dodged under a flashing leg and hit the creature in the same spot, this time with the point of the blade.

There was a great cracking sound, like glass shattering. For an instant I thought he’d broken the thing’s shell, but then I realized the sound had come from the wrong direction.

Beside the damaged piano, on top of the broken plate-glass window he’d evidently jumped through, the king of the goblins stood. Why he chose to jump through the window instead of kicking open the damaged door, I couldn’t say.

He wore no shoes but was apparently unconcerned by the glittering shards of glass under his feet. He wore only a black loincloth; his body, like Adam’s, was refined to only muscle and sinew, though on him it looked stringy, almost as if his muscles worked differently than ours. His extra-jointed four-fingered hands flexed on the pair of short swords he carried as he stepped off the broken window, shaking his shoulders to shed stray bits of glass. If I’d done something like that wearing nothing but a loincloth, I’d have been dripping blood. His skin was tougher than mine.

He spared a yellow-green glance for me, his lips quirking upward. I don’t know if I amused him somehow or if it was just the anticipation of violence. Larry the goblin king was fond of violence.

Adam had kept the fae creature too busy to pay much heed to the sound of the window bursting—and the goblin made no more noise than Adam had as Larry’s first cautious steps turned into a sprint. He leapt atop the spider much as I had, though more to one side, deliberately unbalancing it. The creature fell forward and had to use one of the legs it was attacking Adam with to catch itself.

The tip of the leg had dug into the wood, putting the leg under tension. When the goblin knocked it down, the leg twisted further. Adam’s cutlass, sweeping upward to hit in a previously damaged joint, snapped the leg in half.

The shorn bit of leg flew at me, and I dodged right into the open doorway of the basement stairwell as the sound of the creature crashing into various furnishings echoed throughout the house.

My paws skidded on the smooth wood of the step, and my speed pushed me right over the edge. But my four-footed form is more agile than my human one, and I caught myself on the third step before I rolled all the way down. I hoped Stefan wouldn’t get too upset by the deep scratch I’d put in the beautiful figured wood of the step.

The spider-thing’s leg had followed me through the doorway and rolled over the edge of the top step behind me. As I gained my footing, it rolled through the empty space between the steps of the open stairway and fell to crash on some hard surface below. I couldn’t see the floor, because the basement was dark.

I dug my claws into the wood of the step again, with the intention of flinging myself back up into the fray wherever I might do some good. Then I realized what I was smelling and stopped.