The Darkest Gate (17 page)

Their stomping steps picked up pace as they approached. She ducked into the closet.

Before she shut the door, a trap door in the ceiling caught her eye. An idea struck her. The crawl space between floors wasn’t big, but it let out in the other room. She could get behind them.

Elise climbed on a box of records to push it open. There was a crawl space just tall enough for her to belly-crawl through on the other side.

She threw her falchion into the crawl space.

Something rubbed against the other side of the closet door. It sounded like a claw-footed bathtub come to life.

A demon struck the door and shoved it open. She came face to face with six glistening black eyes. Its mouthparts clacked.

She grabbed the sides of the trap door and hauled herself up just as the demon barreled into the box, knocking it over with a thunderous crash. Elise struggled to pull herself through the trapdoor.

It reached for her with its boxing-glove mouth. She pulled her legs inside. It knocked into the ceiling instead, and its thick, hairy forelegs scraped against the crawl space.

Elise pulled her elbows underneath her and wriggled forward as quickly as she could. Dust tickled her nose as she squeezed under the beams. Her falchion’s blade was only two feet long, but it got in the way and made her crawl much too slowly.

Spider-demons scrabbled on the floor below. Spotting her had thrown them into a frenzy. But even if they were twice as smart as the spiders she fought in the desert, they would still be half too dumb to realize where she was going. She moved faster, dragging herself along with her free hand as wood scraped at her bare back and stomach. Elise was certain she had splinters in her arms. She could barely breathe.

Her hand slipped into an indentation.

Another trap door.

Elise shoved it open and maneuvered to exit feet-first. Her arm and back muscles flexed as she sank into a controlled drop, waiting in a chin-up position to gauge the distance to the floor.

The spiders had coated the room in webbing.

She froze, fingers trembling as she studied the mess they had left behind. It was stuck to the mirrors, the curtains over the garage door, and formed a net over the parquet flooring. The only bare spot was on the floor by the exit—a good ten feet to her right.

Okay. Maybe they weren’t so stupid.

Elise aimed carefully and swung her legs in a wide arc. And then she let go.

She landed by the door, but her foot sank into a mass of web. The sticky strands held fast, refusing to relinquish her leg. It burned against her bare flesh. Vibrations spread through the web as she fought to pull free.

Hacking at the web with the falchion helped her rip away from the greater mass, but it stuck to her skin, forming a sticky gray stocking from foot to hip. It made her muscles prick and spasm.

Thudding in the dance hall.

They were coming.

Elise clambered over the webbing, her left leg immobilized at the knee, and carefully climbed under a thick strand that stretched from one side of the doorframe to the other.

A shadow rushed at her.

She dived and rolled, coming up with the sword above her head to bury the blade in the spider-demon’s body.

Its legs thrashed. A meaty limb connected with her midsection. It was like getting struck by a baseball bat, and all the air rushed from her lungs as she fell to her knees.

Elise wrenched the sword free and drove it under the daimarachnid’s mouth.

The point of the blade burst out of a liquid red eye. She stabbed again and again. The exoskeleton cracked. Fluid gushed from its body as the eight long legs curled inward.

With a final twitch, the spider died.

Elise took a moment to examine what remained of the spider in the moonlight: the red marks on its belly, the fine hairs on its legs, and the brands down its sides. Every mark had been scored to render them unreadable. “Damn,” she whispered.

She heard motion in the lobby. There were still two others.

Need to move
.

Elise climbed awkwardly out the open window, dragging her stiff leg behind her, and dropped to the grass. She couldn’t get both feet under her. She sank to her knees in the yellow grass, and her useless leg barely bent. The web was hardening. “Shit,” she muttered. Two more spiders. She couldn’t be immobilized.

Crawling to the corner, she peeked around the wall. One spider dragged its spinneret along the lawn as it moved for the stairs on the side of the building. Gossamer stretched between its posterior and the wall, shiny and moist on the end closest to its body.

She slipped under the stairs and waited until it anchored the silken strand to the bottom step before moving. Elise stepped over the trip line it had created at the bottom and followed it silently up the stairs on her toes.

When it reached the landing, she struck.

The spider was too fast. It saw her and twisted. What she intended to be a death blow glanced off its side.

It smashed her into the railing and nearly threw them both off the side. She tangled her free hand in the hairs on its back and hung on. Unbalanced, her shoulders tipped over the rail. The world spun and flipped as she dangled. The ground was at least twelve feet down.

She hooked her ankle on the spider’s leg, holding tight. Slimy pincers snapped over her face. She slammed her elbow into one of its eyes. It squealed.

Upside-down, she saw the third spider reach the bottom of the stairs.

Hauling herself upright, Elise threw her weight into the second spider and shoved them away from the edge. It crashed into the door. She slashed. Blood splattered on her face. It keened and fell.

And then the third one was there.

It slammed into her with its glossy body and knocked her onto her back. The hairs on its belly scraped against Elise. She drew her one good leg up to shield her stomach as fangs dropped out of its mouth. They came down on her knees instead of her ribs, and she twisted to the side before they could puncture.

Pincers rushed at her face. She flung her arm up. The sword caught in its mouth.

Red eyes bored into her from inches away as it pressed into her. Her arm trembled as she struggled to force it back. The angle was poor and it was too strong—a line of venom dripped onto her neck and slid into her hair.

She pulled her fist back, and for an instant, hairy feelers scraped against her face.

Then Elise shoved the blade straight into its mouth.

It screamed as it thrashed, twisting from side to side above her. The contortions seemed to only pull the blade deeper into its body. Her slippery fingers lost grip on the hilt.

One of its feet smashed into her leg, and another into her shoulder. Elise flung her arms over her head, trying to curl into a ball to protect her vital organs from its death throes, but its weight was too much.

With a final rasping sigh, the air left its lungs. It stopped moving.

The door opened.

“What—
Elise
?”

James stared at her through the tangle of legs.

“Help?”

He lifted the daimarachnid, and Elise wiggled free of the carcass. Venom and other unidentifiable bodily fluids seeped out of its stab wounds. She looked down at herself. There was an imprint on her leg where it had almost managed to break the skin, at which point her blood would have been pumped full of all that poison.

“What happened?” he asked. His cheek was imprinted with the pattern of the couch fabric, but his eyes were alert as he took in the two bodies of the spiders.

“They were downstairs. I don’t think they wanted to attack us. Hold this.”

She picked at the web on her leg with her fingernails. It wouldn’t come off, and she couldn’t feel her skin beneath it.

“The wards,” he said. “How—?”

“They’re broken. I don’t know how.”

She shivered as she limped back into the apartment. Elise suddenly felt very, very vulnerable in her underwear and wanted nothing more than an actual pair of pants. “Impossible,” James said, staring at the doorway where he had etched tiny marks of warding. “These are the strongest wards possible. Petty daimarachnids couldn’t have broken them.”

Anthony staggered into the hallway wearing nothing but his boxers. He had found a knife somewhere. “What’s going on? Was it an angel?”

“Wake Betty up,” Elise ordered, grabbing a clean pair of James’s jeans from the laundry cubby. She pulled them over her stiff leg, threaded a belt through the loops, and pulled it tight. They were so long that they bunched over her feet. “We’re not safe here anymore. We’ve got to move.”

“I’ll take them to my—” James stuttered. “To Stephanie’s house. The wards aren’t as strong, but nobody should know where it is.”

Anger surged through Elise. Stephanie’s house? She would have preferred to take everyone to the Night Hag’s den. Biting back a nasty comment, she nodded sharply. “Fine. Let’s get going.”

M
orrighan arrived at
the studio exactly two hours later. Nobody in the coven approached James’s skill with magic, but she was unusually good at protective charms—with the added bonus that Mr. Black wouldn’t be out to kill her.

“Thanks for this,” Elise said, stifling a yawn. “How long do you think it will take?”

The witch surveyed the studio with a binder hugged to her chest. “You want the entire perimeter redone? At least three hours. I’ll have to do some measurements.”

“Thanks.”

Elise rolled her pant leg up to the knee and picked at the spider webbing stuck to her calf. Instead of sleeping, she had spent the last hour in a hot bath trying to separate the web from her flesh. She had peeled most of it off, along with half her skin, and was slowly regaining sensation above the knee. There was still a thick sock of slime over her ankle.

A car pulled up behind her. She prepared herself to turn away yet another dancer who hadn’t gotten the message that classes were canceled for the day, and then realized it was Anthony’s Jeep. And Betty was driving.

“Hey, what are you doing here?” Elise asked, offering her a hand out of the car. “You don’t drive.”

“I came to help redo the wards,” Betty said. She still sounded like she had smoked an entire pack of cigarettes in one sitting, but the bandages on her shoulders were gone, and her skin was completely unmarked by burns. “I got coffee. Check the passenger seat.”

“You should be somewhere safe. You can’t be here until Morrighan finishes.”

“There’s nowhere safer than with you. Besides, Stephanie’s house radiates bitch vibes. Didn’t I tell you to grab the coffee?”

She found a cardboard container with four huge cups of plain coffee. “There’s only three of us here.”

“Those are all for you. I already drank mine, and Morr doesn’t imbibe.”

Elise had to smile. “Thanks. What happened to your burns? Did James take care of them?”

Betty grinned. “Something like that.”

She took a sip to test the temperature. It was perfect. Elise tipping her head back and drank until nothing but dregs remained. She sighed and rolled her shoulders, enjoying the familiar warmth she had missed since losing her coffee pot. Betty’s smile grew.

“Five hours,” Morrighan announced, joining them at the Jeep. “Hi, Betty.”

“Hey there.”

“Whatever James did here originally is powerful. I’m going to have to cast three levels of charms to fix them. Do you have some touchstones so I can rebind the wards to him?”

“Sure,” Elise said.

She went inside to gather some of James’s remaining belongings. He kept a few broken things around for spell fodder—cracked coffee mugs, old bed sheets, jeans that had worn thin at the knees. Belongings James had used a lot but no longer needed. The wards would be tied to him and him alone.

Other than watching for attack, Elise could do little to help. She gave James’s belongings to Morrighan, then finished cleaning up spider-demon corpses and the web they left behind. The bodies were easy—she skinned the brands off of one, gathered as much of its venom as she could in a Tupperware for later, and then stuck their corpses in trash bags.

The webbing was much more difficult. Elise donned rubber gloves to remove it, but it was too tacky. It wouldn’t come off.

She connected a hose to the tap in front of the house and power-washed the dance hall. It broke down most of the mess and left a blurry residue on the mirrors. James wouldn’t be thrilled, but at least his workspace was clean. It was a start.

Elise paused to study herself in the wall of mirrors. She still didn’t have any money to buy clean clothes and James’s hand-me-downs were ridiculously baggy on her. She twisted around to look at her shoulder, bared by a wife beater that she had knotted at the waist. The Night Hag’s brand was angry and red.

“What is that?” Betty came inside, sweaty and pink-cheeked from the summer heat.

“Nothing,” she said, fluffing her hair over the mark to hide it. “How are you feeling?”

“I’m on so much Vicodin that I could be an amputee and I wouldn’t know it. So I’m fine. When it wears off, though…” Betty’s smile was wan. “The attempts on my life are not my favorite.”

Elise clenched her jaw. “I know.”

“You must have really pissed this guy off.”

“Yeah.”

“I’m sure he deserved it.”

She nodded again, and Betty didn’t ask any more questions. There was a reason they were such good friends.

They went outside and sat on the front step to watch Morrighan work. She was so focused on burying objects around the yard that she didn’t seem to notice how hot it was becoming.

“I wouldn’t blame you if you wanted to leave,” Elise said suddenly.

Betty blinked. “Where would I go?”

“You could visit your family in Canada for a few weeks. At least until everything settles down.”

“You’re trying to protect me, right? It’s sweet. But I’m a big girl. I understand the consequences.”

“This isn’t a game. You could die. The fact that you haven’t already is miraculous.”

“Trust me. I’m getting to be a better witch.” Betty glanced around the street, as though she expected someone to be listening, and then she pulled a notebook out of the back pocket of her jeans. “Check this out. I finally figured it out last night, when I couldn’t sleep. James didn’t heal me. I did, using copies of his spells.”