There was blinding pain as her head struck a rock. Terror made her fight through it and scramble to her knees to look for her knives.
The men were on her just as she staggered to her feet. The hard smash of a rifle butt to her chest sent her tumbling backward and struggling for breath.
A heavy boot landed a blow to the middle of her stomach, making her roll to her side and vomit what little she had in her stomach.
The dark-haired man delivering the blow drew back his leg, and she braced herself for a second kick even as she tried to gather the strength to surge upward, to at least kill one of her attackers with the knife she’d managed to recover.
The man with the rifle stopped his companion from delivering the blow by saying, “Enough already. I don’t want to fuck a corpse, Nelson.”
There was a raunchy laugh from the third man. “It wouldn’t be the first time.”
“Shut the fuck up, Cabot. My cock was out of that girl before she died.”
The rifle barrel dropped to point at Araña’s hand. “Let go of the knife or I’ll fire. Putting a bullet into you won’t ruin our fun. You won’t bleed out before we’re finished.”
The demon mark was no longer on her shoulder. It was on her bare mound like an exotic tattoo, ready to kill the first man who touched his flesh to hers in an attempt to rape her.
Its presence gave her courage. Matthew’s last words gave her strength. She opened her fingers and let the knife fall away.
The blond guardsman named Cabot immediately holstered his gun and unzipped his pants. “I go first,” he said, pulling his cock out and fondling its hardened length.
The man holding the rifle kicked Araña’s knife out of reach before pressing the barrel of the gun to her forehead. “Push your pants down.”
Her heart pounded violently inside her chest, a seething mass of fear and grief and hate. Bile rose in her throat at the thought of revealing herself to these men.
She wanted to kill them. To see them writhing in agony. But only their faces and hands were exposed and the spider needed bare skin.
The waistband of her pants was wet with blood. Touching her fingers to it broke the barrier of numbness her mind had erected.
Araña fought against crying out as pain rippled through her, originating where the bullet had grazed her side. Her jaw clenched as she refused to show them anything more than their deaths.
She undid the buttons at the front of her pants. Her fingers trembled slightly despite her efforts to keep them steady and focus her mind on what she needed to do in order to survive. In the coming confusion she’d grab the dying man’s gun and—
He grew impatient and bent down, took a fistful of material and jerked, wrenching her pants and underwear to her knees. The sight of the spider sent him stumbling backward, his penis shriveling.
His two companions laughed. The one not holding the rifle unzipped his pants. “I’ll take your turn. Looks like we’ve got ourselves a lawbreaker. A tattoo like hers is illegal. I’m betting she likes it rough and bloody.”
“Give me your gun, Nelson,” the man with the rifle said, holding out his hand.
“I’m not going to fuck her with it. Not till after you have a turn with her.”
“Gun.”
A petulant expression came and went on the dark-haired guardsman’s face. He unholstered the weapon and slapped it onto his companion’s outstretched hand. “I want it back. I want to finish her with it.”
A shudder went through Araña. She found it easy to imagine any one of these men brutalizing her with a gun and then firing it inside her as his companions looked on.
Erik and Matthew had always ensured her safety, but life among fugitives and societal outcasts had stripped her of what was left of her innocence when it came to the atrocities men were capable of. The settlements and floating boat cities were full of women left disfigured by the violence done to them.
“Hurry up,” the man holding the rifle barrel to her forehead said. “We’ve still got to haul the bodies to the truck then find out if Sarge was shitting us about there being bounties on the two men.”
Araña closed her eyes against the wave of pain that crashed through her heart with his words. A tidal wave of grief threatened to drown her.
She wanted to scream out her rage and anguish. Instead she fought her way through it, for Matthew and Erik, as well as herself.
Her eyes opened when her assailant climbed on top of her with a grunt. She was barely aware of the feel of his hand and cock brushing against her skin as he tried to find her opening. And then he was rolling away, screaming and shrieking, his penis and hand swelling as black streaks of poison spread.
She grabbed the rifle barrel, deflecting it. A bullet slammed into the screaming man, putting him out of his misery and sparing him long moments of torment.
Araña hung on to the rifle, fighting to wrest it free at the same time she tried to use her grip on it to pull herself up, in the hopes the spider would be able to find skin and kill again.
The tangle of her clothes around her knees interfered. A kick to the chest sent her backward.
There was the sound of a bullet being chambered, and the end of the rifle was once again placed against her forehead. But death didn’t come, though the blond guardsman whose penis had shrunk at the sight of the spider said, “Kill her so we can get out of here.”
“I’ve got something better in mind. We’ll take her to Anton and Farold. They’ll pay good money for her, no questions asked. Then we turn around and double it by going to a betting club and watching while she runs the maze.”
“She’s a witch,” the blond said, aiming his pistol at Araña, his voice shrill. “Look at what she did to Nelson. Look at the glove on her hand! Look at it! I bet she’s been branded by the Church.”
“Don’t turn into a chickenshit just because your dick shrunk. Good thing it did or you’d be dead. If she could have killed us with a spell, she’d have done it. I’m betting we’re safe as long as we don’t touch her.”
“I don’t care! Out of seven of us, look how many of us are left. You and me, Jurgen. You and me. Everyone else is dead.”
Anger tightened the rifleman’s face. “Use your brains before you piss me off, Cabot. Think about the edge knowing what we know would give us at the club. Tonight they’re running convicts in the maze. They’ll let them loose to have some fun with her before setting the hunters free. We’ll make a killing betting on her.”
The guardsman pulled the barrel back from Araña’s forehead, trusting that she’d prefer to remain alive, to take her chances elsewhere rather than die where she lay. “Take off the glove.”
She pulled it off, revealing the brand burned into her flesh when she was twelve, when an exorcism failed to rid her of the demon mark.
“We’ll get more for her once Anton or Farold sees it,” the one called Jurgen said. “Maybe Anton will even let the demon out in the maze tonight.”
His blond companion backed away, but he nodded. “Okay, but I’ll shoot her if she tries to touch me.”
She was ordered to her feet and allowed to restore her clothing so she could walk. At their command, she emptied her pockets. They took her keys to the boat, but not Erik’s wallet. Somewhere between the first dead guardsman and the one the spider killed, it had fallen out of her pocket.
“Move,” Jurgen said, indicating the direction with the rifle barrel.
Fresh blood poured from the wound in her side. Pain stabbed through her, but it was nothing compared to the searing agony as Araña passed Erik’s body and then Matthew’s.
The need for revenge burned at her core, intensified when the blond, Cabot, said, “What about collecting the bounty? What are we going to say about Sarge and the others being dead?”
“We’ll radio it in to headquarters and say we were ambushed while trying to bring three people in for questioning. We’ll tell them we’re still chasing the third one. Let them send another unit to collect the bodies. Even if it turns out Sarge is wrong about there being bounties, after what happened here, nobody is going to care.”