Demon's Cradle (Devany Miller Book 3) (33 page)

He shook his head no, then yes so fast, I didn’t think he knew he’d done it.

“I’m here to take him away. To make sure he doesn’t bother you anymore.” The bubble groaned, sending sparks of magic sparkling down like embers of a runaway forest fire. A line of delicate cracks formed and spread. We didn’t have much longer. Crap.

“You’re one of them,” he said, pointing a shaking finger my way. “You stole my doll.”

“No,” I said, my voice slipping into the low, long tones of a person soothing a wild animal. “We met by Tempest Peaks and you gave me a doll for the goddess. I gave it to her. She loved it.”

He did that weird yes/no shake again. “She loved it?”

“Yes she did.”

“Good. Good! I make them because she lost her son. She lost her son to the one like you.” That sent him into paroxysms of horror. Paroxysms I didn’t have time for, damn it. A large emerald crack was slowly snaking its way across the dome of my bubble, the smaller cracks spreading in the bigger one’s wake.

“Wanderer,” Krosh said in his leader’s voice.

Margolis’ head snapped up. “Yes?”

“We are here to rid you of your scourge. Where can we find him?” His tone didn’t brook any argument, nor was it angry or mean sounding. It just invited, encouraged, insisted on compliance. I eyed him. He’d better never use that particular magic on me. Then I remembered he had when we first met, but Neutria had freed me.

“He is in the south Basin, where the broken magic is worst.” Margolis pointed behind me and to the right. “Dancing where the magic sings jagged lines of glory,” he said earnestly.

“Thank you.” I put the stone back into my mouth at the same time Krosh did. Seconds later, the bubble fell with a screech of burnt sound and a flurry of sparks. It had been a close one.

We backed out of the cabin and I wished I’d remembered to say sorry for the door. I hoped he was resourceful enough to scavenge for a new one. How could he survive, living in this hellish place?

The path led in a zig-zaggy line toward Margolis’ vaguely pointed-out directions, so we stayed on it, linking hands again as we went.

What was Ellison doing in the Basin? What had driven him here? I had to assume he had some sort of advantage being here. I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what it was, then decided maybe I needed to figure out why the Rider thought it was advantageous to be here. Was there something about the broken magic that kept it going? That appealed to it? Fed it? Perhaps the broken magic made it easier for it to worm its way into people’s heads.

Something occurred to me, something that should have dawned on me long before now. Margolis had said that Leon had asked him about the Rider. I’d assumed that Leon had gone to Ketwer Island for some crazy reason to deliberately infect himself with the parasite. But he hadn’t been Patient Zero. Had Ellison gotten there first? Why the sudden interest in the parasite? Who had spurred it? I came up blank and tried another tack.

Broken magic, I mused. Made people go mad. Changed things for the worse, from the look of the Basin, its cancerous walls, the mephitic air, and the soft hush of sound from the drift of ash. So what did that mean for the Rider? Damn it, I just didn’t know and it was driving me crazy.

A rumble under my feet almost knocked me sideways. The Basin floor rippled and shook, tossing us around like bugs in a box. And then the walls started tumbling down.

***

Krosh curled around me, shielding my head with his arms. ‘No!’ I wanted to shout. Instead, I attempted a bubble, but it cracked and popped, shattering at the touch of the jagged, black rocks that fell around us.

One hit me in the leg, another cracked down hard over my arm gripping Krosh’s back. ‘We have to roll! Get up! Move! Or we’ll be buried alive,” I screamed through our mind link. ‘Can you do anything, Neutria?’

She jerked me around and shot webbing from my hands like fricking Spiderman. Awesome. Dumb that I could appreciate that in such dire times, but there it was. The webbing pulverized the biggest rocks, sifting dust down onto us. The smaller rocks still managed to hit us, one walloping me a good one on the side of the mouth.

‘It’s a trick. A mind trick,’ Kroshtuka said to me. ‘Calm yourself. See? Your fear feeds it.’

Sure enough, when he pointed it out, the rocks began disintegrating before they touched us. Then they vanished altogether. The walls were still intact, still coated in that awful black soot. The ground wasn’t shaking. I put a hand up to my lip and saw that it wasn’t bleeding, though a moment ago I’d been thoroughly convinced I’d gotten a lip piercing via a rock. ‘Shit.’

We helped each other up, then lent hands to the others. One of our crew, a ebon-haired woman with multiple braids, was sobbing, her face in her hands. I hoped she still had her rock and when I asked, she sniffled, nodded, and showed me, tongue stuck out.

‘These rocks don’t seem to protect us at all,’ I said, tempted to spit mine out.

‘It isn’t from the mischief of the magic they protect us, or at least this is how I understand them. They keep us from absorbing the broken magic, making it part of us. Had we not had the Spider Stones, we could have been lost in our fears for a long time. And that would be a terrible place to dwell.”

No doubt.

We doubled back three times as we made our way toward the spot where Ellison supposedly hid. The Basin had turned into a labyrinth. Another broken magic trick, I supposed. When would it give up? Would it? Maybe we’d be trapped down here forever, wandering, and we would die without knowing we were dead and our bodies would stagger on, forever searching.

Then I heard the sound. Faint, but it was there. ‘Slip song,’ I said. Jasper was singing out to Ellison. ‘We’re getting closer.’ And I followed the music that the Rider either hadn’t known about or had no way to block. The way cleared, too, the traps, the illusions, failing as they came in contact with the music of Ellison’s soul inside me.

The screaming started, a wild, hot sound that made my heart hammer hard in my chest. It was awful, the screams of a man being burnt alive. The screams of a man being flayed alive. Jasper lurched inside me. I put my hand on my stomach and asked, ‘Are you all right?’

He is in so much pain.

I ran, urged on by Jasper’s need. It wormed its way inside me in a way that Jasper’s kindness or consciousness had not. Need and worry.

I almost fell into a pit, Krosh catching me as my foot went over the side, spilling small rocks and dirt into the trap below. It was lined with spikes, ugly grey things that were crusted with what I could only imagine were the gory leftovers of those whose bones laid at the bottom. Ellison was impaled on a spike, clutching at it with his hands. Horror froze me. Krosh drew me back to safety as I stared. How long had he been here, like this?

‘There’s something not right,’ Krosh said.

Jasper strained inside me, yearning to go to his other half. I couldn’t let him, not right now, not knowing if Ellison was truly in pain and danger or faking it to lure me in. I clamped down on the soul and apologized at the same time, hoping he’d understand, deciding it didn’t matter if he understood or not. I was keeping him safe. ‘A trick? A trap?’

‘I cannot say. I can smell the stew of his guts from here. But he is kicking his legs. Would he be able to do that with a spike through his spine?’

‘Well, he’s Skriven.’ I paused. ‘Neutria? You see anything off kilter?’

She pushed forward, shoving Jasper out of the way, or so it felt as I lurched sideways from her movements. Krosh caught me again and I thanked him, wrapping my arm tight around his middle to keep myself upright.
Something else is down there,
she said finally.

‘What?’

Moves in the shadows.

I squinted down, picking at the dark slivers on the floor, slivers that covered piles of bones like grasping fingers. Drifts of bones. Jagged bones. ‘Has something been eating people?’ I asked, my lip curling at the idea.

Yes,
she said, satisfaction warming her word.

Ugh. I turned to tell Krosh when I caught movement out of the corner of my eye. I snapped my head back—nothing. Turned again and there it was, a sneaky little critter, scampering over the bones to snap at Ellison’s heels. I flung my hand toward him. ‘Neutria! Web?’

She complied, giving me the way to shoot her sticky energy at Ellison. It wrapped around him and the shadowy little fucker got caught up in it. I still couldn’t see it but I could see its wriggles in the buzzing lines of the web.

‘Are there more?’

Yes. Hundreds. Spiders,
she hissed in satisfaction.

Shit. The thing in the net was joined by more and soon the web was ripped apart by all the squirming bodies. Spider bodies, were I to take Neutria’s word for it. ‘How do we get him out?’

Neutria ignored me, watching the spiders in fascination. Was she impressed? Or did she want to eat them? Maybe both, for all I knew.

‘Maybe we could send in flames,’ I said, feeling lame. Magic wouldn’t work here. Not right, anyway. Wasn’t sure where I’d get a raging fire without magic. I hadn’t exactly remembered to bring a lighter.

‘Perhaps we were given Spider Stones for more than protection,’ the young man who’d freaked out earlier said. I jumped a little, startled I’d heard him. I think Krosh was surprised too. Something had changed while we’d been in this hell hole. And that wasn’t necessarily a good thing at all.

I considered how we might use the stones to get rid of the spiders and came up blank. ‘Anyone have any ideas?’

‘One of us must speak to them,’ suggested the young woman—’Kaolini,’ she told me with a wan smile.

With a stone in my mouth, I’d sound silly, but maybe the spiders wouldn’t care. Then I had a better thought. ‘Neutria, could you talk to them, do you think? Using my mouth?’ I didn’t want to give her that much control over me. I’d let Arsinua do it, once, and it had been weird and awful and strange. It would only be worse with Neutria, and what if it softened the barriers so much that she would be able to do it again, whenever she wanted? Still though.

Get out of my way,
she said, and shoved me back into my own head. She didn’t change but it felt similar to the bone-crunching awfulness of the transformation between my human form and that of her spider form. “I am Neutria,” she said, her voice ringing out over the pit. Ellison moaned and tipped his head our way. “You will obey me.”

Good lord, I thought. She’d have them charging at us in seconds.

“You will show yourselves to these puny two-legs.”

‘Neutria,’ I said, warningly. She, of course, ignored me.

One by one, the spiders popped into sight. There were red, green, black, blue, orange and yellow ones. Pink, purple, silver, and gold ones. They were all similar in size and shape, rainbow nightmares on eight legs. There were colors I didn’t have names for and they covered every inch of the pit in squirming horror.

And then Neutria said, “I am your new Queen.”

And I thought, Oh shit, we’re fucked.

TWENTY-TWO

I couldn’t turn my head to look at Krosh and had no idea what he was thinking of the new voice coming out of my mouth. She certainly didn’t sound like me. Neutria’s voice was lower than mine, more forceful, and it rang with power. It was like roaring with words. She said, “I’ve come to release you from your prison!”

‘We aren’t here to liberate spiders! We are here to get Ellison and get the hell out.”

The psychedelic horror-show scrabbled around madly. Either they really liked what she was saying or her voice was stirring them up to crazy new heights of eight-legged mischief.

Yeah, that was a mild word for such a sight. I tried to sink down into my control room to see what I could do to take back my head and she slammed a black box around me so fast my ears—my imaginary ears—rang. When she’d done this to me before, she’d at least given me an explanation. This time? No. Nothing. She just shoved her will over me and trapped me like a bug in a glass. ‘Let me out you dozy spider or I will find away to pluck you from my head and smash you flat!’

There was a tug of magic deep in my belly and a bright pink and green dome flared as the energy flung my Neutria splatted against it. This energy ate its way through the barrier, pitting it like acid then dripping through, sizzling to the floor below. It scattered spiders, the screaming colors rushing this way and that to avoid the magic burning its way through.

“Come to me.”

And they did, swarming over the side of the pit, rushing over and around the feet and legs of the Wydlings, who huddled together for protection, using what weapons they had to ward off the horde.

The spiders didn’t bite, thankfully, and I felt Neutria’s fierce satisfaction as they gathered behind us.
Protecting us. Not harming us
. “You are my minions now,” she said and I could almost picture her standing like Xerxes in front of a massive Persian army.

She retreated from the forefront of my mind, letting me go, letting me know that she’d let me go. I hadn’t freed myself. She’d had all the controls.

I was sweating profusely when I came to. ‘Shit. Shit, shit, shit.’