Rise of the Poison Moon (22 page)

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Authors: MaryJanice Davidson

Tags: #Magic, #Fantasy fiction, #Dragons, #General, #Fiction, #Fantasy, #Spiders, #Shapeshifting, #Epic, #Good and evil

BOOK: Rise of the Poison Moon
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She had no better plan and nowhere else to go. “Okay, love. Whatever you say.”
“That’s my girl.”
CHAPTER 32
Andi
“Outrageous!” shrieked the baboon spider.
“Impossible!” thundered the brown recluse.
“Ridiculous!” added the slender harvester.
“Dangerous!” intoned the twin sun spiders.
“Just like your father,” hissed the last, a yellowed scorpion, whose stinger hung heavy over its bulbous back. “All anger, all ego. His poor planning sacrificed rigor for showmanship. Lack of rigor leads to inefficient traps. Inefficient traps lead to wasted poison. Poison is life. You have no respect for any of this.”
Skip’s jaw twitched.
Andi bit her lip and slid an arm under her sleeve to massage the tracks from her most recent cuts. “I don’t think it’s about anger or ego or respect,” she said. “I think Tavia wanted Skip to have your guidance. Let’s be more constructive. What help can you offer?”
“None.”
“Skip, maybe—”
“No, Andi. The answer is none.”
“Please, Skip. Tavia wanted—”
“Aunt Tavia is dead for a reason. I didn’t ask her for help, I didn’t ask her rotten and cowardly brothers and sisters for their advice, and this meeting is over. Almost.”
Through the muttering and mandible-grinding of the creatures assembled closely around them in the abandoned convenience store, Andi wondered aloud, “What do you mean, ‘almost’?”
Skip suddenly relaxed, as though he had reached a decision. “I mean, that even though I didn’t ask for her help, I’m glad she tried. In fact, it’s for the best.”
The brown recluse twitched. “How so?”
“I haven’t been completely honest with all of you. I mean, I do plan to ascend and become our kind’s greatest. And I do plan to poison the moon, to make that happen. I shouldn’t have made you think this would be a proposal review or decision council.”
“What is it, then?” snapped the scorpion.
“More like a breakfast meeting.”
They had no time to take in what he meant. Even as he rose tall on two extended legs, his other six were fully formed and twice the length of any of them, each tipped with a spear-like tarsus. By the time the adults gasped at his sheer size—
no one can possibly morph that large!
—the six jagged limbs came down and made the linoleum floor shudder. Each was a skewer, with a kabob gasping and wriggling at the end.
“SKIP!”
“Quiet, Andi. This is the most important part.” The enormous arachnid—Andi couldn’t say for certain if it was a true species or something out of Skip’s own imagination—minced on its hindmost legs quickly, holding high the dying relatives on its way to the back room. “Could you grab the door to the refrigeration corridor?”
“What’s in the—ah, geez, you’re going to stuff them all in there? That’s gross. And weird. Skip, these are your uncles! Your aunts! Not TV dinners!” Andi nearly threw up as she took in the sight of them all, abdomens spasming and eyes bulging, hanging off their nephew’s limbs. “You’ve killed them!”
“Not quite yet. I need their blood fresh, and I can’t weave fast enough to keep them alive with this much blood loss. Also, I want to soak up what’s on the floor. Every drop will help. You’ll thank me later.”
At his impatient hiss, she opened up the walk-in door. “At least keep them away from the milk. Skip, how is this going to help you poison the moon?”
“I had insight, during my research.”
“You mean your bird-flaying.”
“These idiots only know one way to get it done. It generally involves eighty years of the sorcerer traveling through sixteen different dimensions and damning himself at the end. Boring and worse . . . not exactly enjoyable. But I found a faster, better way.” He flicked the bleeding creatures off each tarsus, letting them collapse over each other in the middle of the slick floor. Vapor seethed from his mandibles as he turned from them and faced Andi. “Quick. Easy. Brilliant. Good thing Aunt Tavia thought I was an ignorant ass who needed help.”
“Yeah, that’ll learn her.” She managed not to shudder. “Skip, I don’t understand.”
“I can reach the moon with the blood of enough arachnids. Finding our own kind is tough enough nowadays— Tavia seemed to think we might even be the last—but being the helpful person she is, she tracked down these recluses and brought them here. Well, one recluse, anyway.” He snickered, waving a back leg at the brown spider. “Get it, Andi.
Recluse?
”
Which is more horrifying—the insanity, or the puns?
She gulped. “Yeah, nifty gag. So you need their blood—to do what, exactly?”
“To weave into the soil. What arises will poison the moon in my favor. It won’t matter if we’re the last arachnids on earth—what will rain down from the sky will be all the replenishment our kind needs.”
“Huh. So. How many do you need?”
“I’ve got seven already.”
“There’s only six there.”
“I have Mr. Slider wrapped up in a chest freezer in the basement of one of the nearby houses. The night he died, I told Tavia I’d bury him. I didn’t say where.”
“Ugh, Skip! He’s been dead for nearly a year! How fresh can his blood be?”
“I’ll average it out. I figure the blood of a living arachnid, mixed with his, should work fine.”
“So you have seven. One of them’s dead. You say you need to mix living blood, and you’re out of arachnids . . . unless you’ve resurrected Aunt Tavia and have her stuffed back there somewhere as well.”
“No. It would have been ideal to use her, too. But with her gone, I really only have one option to get the number I need.”
The air near the freezer suddenly seemed frostier to Andi. She took a step back. “Skip. How many arachnids do you need for this ritual?”
His head lowered, his front legs began to pull him out of the freezer . . . and all eight inscrutable eyes fixed on her.
CHAPTER 33
Andi
Andi sucked in air again, a violent and painful act.
Plink, plunk. Plink, plunk. Plinkplunk, plinkplunk. Plink, plunk.
It was dark and chill, wherever she was. She was leaning up against a cement wall. She couldn’t move her spread and slightly bent limbs, and the rattling of chains suggested she should not bother to try. A wet rag was taped into her mouth.
Her arms felt heavy, something was tickling them, and they hurt.
Plinkplunk, plink, plunk.
She let out a low hum, then another. She built one note upon the other, and the music made her throat glow faintly. What she glimpsed made her choke, shutting off the light.
Swarms of round black ticks clung to each arm. A few of them moved, but most were feeding from her flesh—from her smooth underarms, her bony elbows, her wriggling fingertips, and most of all from the forearm welts she had inflicted upon herself.
Those that had swollen to full size were dropping off into large buckets lined up by her feet. The buckets were about a third full with a thick, crimson, boiling mixture. New ticks crawling up the wall quickly replaced them.
It felt like all her innards were roiling and clenching at once. Her skin crawled—literally! It felt like a greasy fist was clenching her throat; she had never been so frightened, or repelled.
She swooned in her chains and tried not to retch into her gag.
This is what you get for sticking with him. This is what you deserve, for turning Jennifer down.
Plink, plink, plunk, plinkplunk.
For a few minutes, she let herself hang from her wrists, bile rising from her gut, swaying back and forth.
Let it be done. What else can I hope for? You win, Skip. You win.
The answer came from an unseen source. It was a voice from her past, from a life she barely lived, in a moment even before her birth—her mother, strong and vibrant, holding her in her womb, standing up for herself:
You won nothing! You don’t test me! You don’t control me! You don’t tell me what I can and cannot do! Screw you!
SCREW YOU!
Her skin began to tingle all over—not from the sensation of tiny arachnids crawling, but from something within. Something was unwinding. Was it her intestines, her lungs, her arteries? It felt like it was everywhere. It . . . it wasn’t a scary feeling, exactly.
I’ve felt this before,
she realized.
On the bridge. With Mother, before I killed her.
You’ve failed,
came her father’s voice.
Screw you,
her mother replied.
I’m not just a sorceress born in the dark, raised in the dark, and left to die in the dark. I’m the daughter of the most powerful beaststalker to ever walk the earth. She wouldn’t just hang here. She wouldn’t let a slob like Skip bleed her slowly. She would control her own destiny.
Her torso unfolded, and four new arms appeared, unrestrained, each holding a dagger.
And it would start with a weapon or four.
 
 
Once she had cut off the gag and scraped the ticks off each arm, it was a matter of finding the right melody to unlock the chains . . . and then a quick stumble up the cellar stairs. It was a house, she recognized, between the convenience store and the restaurant. One of the first they had occupied.
Probably the same one he stored Mr. Slider in.
She wasn’t sure if she wanted Skip to be here for a fatal confrontation, or to escape unseen. In any case, he was nowhere to be found, and she did not wait for him. She was sick and weak, having left most of her blood in pails.
In the pails he set out for her blood.
Oh, you bastard,
she thought, crashing and reeling through the room, intent on flight.
Get to Libby,
her mother’s voice told her.
Libby can save you.
She burst out the back door of the restaurant and into the woods, toward the blue dome in the distance.
I’ll help them now. Jennifer, her mother, all of them. They’ll heal me and make me strong again. Then we’ll stop Skip together.
If anyone can.
CHAPTER 34
Jennifer
Jennifer ground her teeth.
This isn’t supposed to be hard anymore!
“Better focus,” advised one tiny dragon with watery scales.
“Eyes closed,” suggested another.
“But not too tightly,” added another. “You need the tears.”
“Don’t try to disappear,” a fourth reminded her. “Try to
dissipate
.”
“Breathe quickly.”
“Crouch down a little.”
“Become moist.”
“All right, all right, all right!”
Become moist?
Their recent help against Skip notwithstanding, Jennifer felt like punting these runts into the dome wall and seeing if they’d bounce back.
This was the basic lurker skill. Basic! Lurkers were dragons. She was the Ancient Furnace. Whatever any dragon could do . . .
“Can you do it yet?” came Catherine’s voice. She was coming out of the hospital into the parking lot, holding a packet of Perk-E Turk-E Jerk-E.
Jennifer growled. “Don’t you have a watch shift to start up on the roof?”
“You kidding? Who needs a watch when you’ve got three thousand misty dragon-midgets here in the parking lot? Ember would be nuts to attack here now.”
“First, in case you haven’t caught up with current events, Ember
is
nuts. Second, we’re going to try another attack soon. Sonakshi and I agree—they can’t stay hidden forever.” She motioned up to the mist creature who hovered like a cumulonimbus above the hospital. “So they’ll be leaving again within the hour.”
“Why not have them stay out there—didn’t they say they’d almost gotten to Skip and Andi?”
Jennifer felt a thrill of irritation. “Because
I
should be leading them. They’re my responsibility. This whole situation is my responsibility.”
“That seems a bit much.”
“If you don’t understand, I can’t explain it.”
“You’re surly because you’re getting shown up by the Tuna Brigade.” Catherine held her hands up defensively as a murmur of discontent washed through the sea of lurkers. “Hey, joking, guys! I’m a big fan. You smell great.”
“Why don’t you go on a supply run? Or practice your whomping? Or drown yourself in the Mississippi?”
Catherine gave an easy grin as she looked east, toward the river. “You kidding? It’s way too cold—what the—Jennifer!”
Staring where her trampler friend was pointing, Jennifer still took several seconds to process what she was seeing. Out of the forested cliffs across the river to the northeast, a shape was rising. At first, she thought it was the cliff itself heaving—but when several appendages appeared and rubbed away the clinging vegetation, she realized it was something else.

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