The ice encasing Araña’s heart so each beat was labored spread, freezing her lungs.
“ Bòcòs use it for creating zombies.”
“Yes. But it won’t be used for that purpose this day. Choose. The spell allowing you to safely enter and return through the gateway will last only as long as the candles burn.”
Araña looked at them again, seeking their hearts. Unlike the candle in the hallway that had beckoned her forward, whispering Come to me, the ones set at each apex of the circle-inscribed star were silent, leaving the choice up to her.
She wanted to turn away and hurry from the house. She couldn’t.
The reasons for coming to the Wainwright witch hadn’t changed. Her ignorance when it came to her gift had entangled Matthew and Erik in this web. It had led to Rebekka’s capture and would lead to Levi’s death. She held out her hand for the vial.
“You will pass quickly into the world beyond,” the witch said. “I won’t catch you if you choose to remain standing.”
Araña took the vial but couldn’t bring herself to sit at the matriarch’s feet. She moved away, stopping in the center of the pentacle.
Against her fingers, she could feel tiny lines etched into the glass. Bile rose in her throat as she opened the vial. She doubted she could physically swallow its contents—until the cognac scent reached her.
The poison might have been designed for her. It made her think of home—the cabin and not the boat—of times spent in front of the fireplace, curled on a chair across from Erik, both of them reading while Matthew worked on whatever project held his interest.
Poisonous or not, she lifted the vial to her lips, drinking its contents before lying down. But as numbness came, starting with her limbs and moving into her core, it wasn’t Matthew and Erik she thought of, it was Tir.
Until she’d been forced to join the strand of her life to his, she’d never known the ecstasy and pleasure of touch. She’d thought she craved it then, but that desire was nothing compared to what she felt now.
Her heart rate sped up then abruptly slowed as the poison reached her chest. Blackness formed at the edges of her consciousness, her body trying to spare her from the panic of not being able to breathe. The darkness moved in. It reminded her of the sea surging ahead of Aziel in the ghostlands to reclaim Erik’s and Matthew’s spirits.
She thought fleetingly of the spider, and knew true fear when, for the first time in her life, she couldn’t feel it at all. And then, just as she became aware that her heart had slowed to the point where it didn’t seem to beat at all, the witch loomed above her holding an unlit candle, her words nearly drowned out by the babbling stream of sibilant whispers. “Call the fire.”
With a thought Araña did. Flame leapt from each of the five candles at the apex of the pentagram to form a sixth point above her, a fiery gateway she slid into as easily as if she were returning home.
Unbidden the dream came, the first dream, the spider’s birth dream—only it was different than before. There was no separation of soul and mark, no it and her. She and the spider were the same, a thing without form in the dark heart of hellfire.
Around her it hissed and crackled. It roared with fury and power, with the desire to destroy as well as create, and she burned with it.
Into the fire flew a raven. The black of its body absorbed the heat and its eyes became glowing pits of red.
Its presence created a storm of howling and shrieking. Flames leapt higher, as if trying to draw its attention. But it ducked and wheeled, ignoring them as it dodged grasping hands of fire and came unerringly to her.
Its beak opened, and she filled with hungry anticipation, knowing somehow that when it spoke her soul name, it would separate her from the fire and wrench her from the place where all life began.
There was no memory of a journey, no sense of a physical form, but Araña saw the world as if through the eyes of the raven. It perched on a limb outside an open window.
A deep, unnamed dread filled her as she recognized the settlement where she’d spent the first twelve years of her life. Always before, the spider’s birth dream ended just after the raven’s call gave it form, merging with the memory of pain as it burned its way outward to appear on her flesh. Now it continued.
Two men stood at the bedside of a woman who’d already been dressed for burial by the midwife who hovered near a beautifully carved cradle. One was a church elder, the other a man who’d always shunned her.
Gingham curtains fluttered peacefully, in sharp contrast to the words being spoken in the room by the younger man. “Let Satan take the child the same as he claimed the mother giving birth to it. It was conceived in sin. All I have to do is look at it to know it isn’t mine.”
“You’ll damn yourself by calling on Satan,” the elder said. “The child is innocent of the mother’s sins.”
“If it lives, I won’t claim or raise it.”
“If it lives, I’ll see that it’s raised by those who won’t spoil it by sparing the rod as happened with the mother.”
The raven hopped along the branch, its movement drawing the attention of the people in the room.
“A bad omen,” the midwife murmured. “Death waiting on an unclean soul.”
The man whose pale, silver-blond hair was almost the same shade as his dead wife’s, visibly shuddered. The church elder said, “Superstition is blasphemy against the Lord.” But he touched one hand to the man’s shoulder and extended the other to the midwife. “Join me in praying for forgiveness for any evil that’s entered our thoughts because of this birth and death, and for the child, that it will be welcomed into God’s loving arms should it not survive.”
They prayed, and filed from the room at the conclusion of it, none of them glancing backward at either the corpse awaiting burial or the infant left unattended a few feet away from its dead mother.
The raven jumped to the windowsill. It cocked its head, listening for the sound of approaching humans. Hearing none, it soared across the room to perch on the cradle.
Araña saw it then, why the man was so sure the child wasn’t his. Instead of pale skin and silver-blond hair, the infant was dark, its hair and eyes black.
Its mouth opened and closed in a cry too weak to hear. Its tiny hands were balled into fists as if it fought to live even as the raspy sound of its faint breath marked the struggle.
The raven opened its beak and emitted a harsh cry, the sound of it carrying a word buried deep inside, a name. Araña.
She felt herself taking form, emerging from the raven’s mouth as a spider, sliding downward toward the baby on a fine silken thread.
The infant stilled the moment she touched its skin. Its death the harbinger of her birth.
She felt the flutter of its soul departing as in spider form she crawled into the baby’s open mouth and took up residence in a shell of flesh that wasn’t her own.
There was the hard kick of a heartbeat returning. The gasp of lungs filling. And then a cry announcing her arrival as the human soul hadn’t had the strength to do.
No! Araña screamed silently, denial filling her, driving her out of the scene. Breaking her contact with it as though she’d been riding the thread of her own life in the same way she’d done hundreds of others.
For a shimmering instant she was without true form, as she always had been in the spider’s place, but then the physical shell she still wanted to believe was her own gathered around her, shocking her.
Instinctively she sought the mark with her thoughts, and her horror deepened when she felt her cells start to break up—as if they’d re-form into a spider in the same way the demon Abijah became the scorpion.
“No!” she shouted, and her voice joined the whispering stream around her, drawing her attention away from the whirlpool turmoil of her own emotions and to the tapestry in front of her. It extended for as far as she could see, its detail sharper, its texture richer than the carpeted pattern she’d glimpsed the first time she willingly sought this place.