“Get in there,” Darlington said, crouching down. He sounded calm, but it took all of Alex’s will to stay still as the spiders flowed over the ground like a spreading stain. Darlington placed his palm on the paving stone and let them course over his fingers. “Let them bite you.”
Turner cast his eyes skyward and muttered something under his breath.
He dropped into a crouch and dipped his hand in, Dawes followed, and Alex forced herself to do the same.
She wanted to scream at the feel of all those slender legs whispering over her skin. The bites didn’t hurt, but she could see her skin swelling in places.
Thankfully the spiders moved on quickly, pouring up the trunks of the trees, casting silk strands into the air, letting them catch on the wind.
The previous night they’d all taken turns weaving with the spindle, the skein of spider silk falling in a lumpen mass. It wasn’t beautiful, but it was the act of the weave that mattered, pouring their focus into it, a single phrase again and again: Make a trap. Make a trap of sorrow. In the past, the spindle had been used to create charisma and love spells to bind groups together, to make them loyal, to steal their will. This was a different kind of bond.
High above them, the spiders had begun to weave, seemingly in rhythm with the metronome. It was like watching mist form, a soft, soundless blur spreading from the gutters and corners atop the roof, until they stood beneath a wide canopy of spider silk, the web like spangled frost, turning the night sky into a kind of mosaic. Alex could feel sadness radiating from it, as if the strands were weighted with it, making the web bow at the center. A sense of hopelessness filled her.
“Just ride it out,” said Turner. But he had his hands pressed to the sides of his head, as if he could squeeze the misery out of it.
Somewhere in the library, Alex heard glass breaking. Mercy drew her salt sword.
“They’re coming,” said Dawes. “They wouldn’t—” She
was interrupted by the sound of breaking glass.
“No!” Dawes cried.
“The stained glass—” said Darlington.
But the demons didn’t care. They’d been drawn by a beacon of utter hopelessness, and their only thought was to feed.
“Hands on the basin!” Alex yelled. “On three!”
Alex saw the demons racing toward them. There would be no time for last words or fond goodbyes. She counted down fast.
As one, they seized the edges of the fountain.
43
Alex had tried to prepare herself for the fall—the fingers clawing at her, choking her, dragging her down—but this time, she splashed backward into water. The sea was warm around her, and when the reaching hands never came, she made herself open her eyes. She saw bubbles rushing past, and saw the others—Darlington’s dark coat behind him, Turner with his arms tight to his body, Dawes’s red hair like a banner of war.
She glimpsed light ahead and tried to kick toward it, felt herself rising.
Her head broke the surface and she gasped for air. The sky above was flat and bright, that murky shade of nothing. Ahead, she saw a swath of what might have been a beach. Behind her, a wall of dark clouds blanketed the horizon.
Where were the others? The sea was almost unpleasantly hot, and the water smelled wrong, metallic. She was afraid to put her head back under.
She didn’t want to see something with scales and snapping jaws undulating toward her.
She swam for shore, her limbs moving gracelessly. She’d never been a strong swimmer, but the current was nudging her toward land. It was only when her feet touched bottom, when she was able to stand, that she really looked at the water. It had left her skin stained red. She’d been swimming in a sea of blood.
Alex’s stomach seized. She bent double and retched. How much of it had she swallowed?
But when she looked down, the blood was gone and her clothes were dry.
She turned back to look at the horizon and the sea was gone too. She was standing on the sidewalk outside of her old apartment building. Ground Zero.
She had plastic grocery bags in her hands.
Alex felt that horrible sense of vertigo, real life sliding away, coming apart like a dream—Darlington, Dawes, all of it. Just a daydream. Her mind had been wandering, spinning out stories, but already the details were fading.
This was real life. The pebbled texture of the stairs. The thump of bass coming from someone’s apartment, the crash and gunfire of Halo from their own place.
Alex didn’t want to go home. She never wanted to go home. She liked to linger at the supermarket, sailing down the clean aisles on one of the big carts, even though she never filled it, listening to whatever awful music they were playing, skin pimpling in the air-conditioning. But inevitably, she had to go back out into the parking lot, heat steaming up off the asphalt, and wriggle into the cramped little Civic if she was lucky—if Len wanted to be an asshole about it that day, she’d have to go wait for the bus.
Now she climbed the steps with her bags of Doritos and lunch meat and the big boxes of cereal she had found on sale, and pushed open the front door.
It was better when Hellie came with her, but Hellie had been in a mood today, tired and cranky, giving Alex one-word answers, her head someplace else.
Someplace better. Hellie came from a different life from the rest of them.
Real parents. Real schools. A real house with a backyard and a pool. Hellie was vacationing here. She’d gotten on the wrong train, ended up on a terrible field trip, and she was making the best of it. But Alex understood that, one day, she would wake up and Hellie would be gone. She’d be done. Alex even wished it for Hellie on her more generous days. But it wasn’t easy to know that maybe Hellie thought she was too good for the flimsy balsa-wood life Alex had managed to stick together. Shelter, food, weed, friends who didn’t always feel like friends. It was the best she could do, but that wasn’t true for Hellie.
Alex bumped her hip through the door and entered the apartment, the smell of pot heavy, the air hazy with smoke. The noise from the TV was overwhelming, the ceaseless pound of Halo, Len and Betcha and Cam shouting at each other on the couch, Betcha’s pit bull, Loki, asleep at his feet.
A bag of Cheetos was open on the table beside a blue glass bong, an empty baggie, Len’s vape pen. Hellie was curled in the big papasan chair with the taped-together cushion, wearing a long T-shirt and underwear, as if she hadn’t bothered to get dressed, just rolled right out of bed. She was staring at the TV listlessly and didn’t even glance at Alex when she started unloading groceries in their tiny kitchen.
Alex was unpacking a jar of Ragú when she saw the bloody mass of fur near the sliding glass doors that led to the balcony. The jar slid from her hand and shattered on the linoleum.
“The fuck is wrong with you?” Len said over the noise from the game.
This couldn’t be right. She was seeing things. She was misunderstanding.
Alex knew she should get down the hall and check the cage, but she couldn’t quite make her legs work. There was a piece of glass lodged in the side of her foot, tomato sauce on her flip-flops. She slipped them off, brushed the glass away, made herself take one step, then another, felt the wiry spring of the carpet beneath her feet. No one’s head turned as she passed, and she had the eerie sense that she hadn’t walked into the apartment at all.
The hallway was quiet. They’d never hung art or photos on the walls, except for a Green Day poster they’d taped up after someone put a fist through the drywall during a party.
Their bedroom looked the way it always did. The battered old TV stand she’d stuffed with paperbacks, mostly sci-fi and fantasy. Anne McCaffrey, Heinlein, Asimov. The futon mattress on the floor, the old blue-and-red bedspread crumpled up. Sometimes it was her and Len in the bed, sometimes all three of them, sometimes just her and Hellie. Those were the best times.
And by the windowsill, Babbit’s cage. It was empty. The door was open.
Alex stood with her back pressed against the wall. It felt like she had cracked down the middle. She and Hellie had gotten the little flop-eared bunny at a pet adoption outside of Ralphs. They’d lied on the application, about where they lived, how much money they made, everything. Because
once Alex held that soft white body in her hands, she’d wanted it more than anything. When they’d brought him home, Len had just rolled his eyes and said, “I don’t want to smell that thing. I don’t like living in shit.”
Alex had been tempted to say she had bad news for him, but she was so grateful he hadn’t gone into some kind of tantrum, she and Hellie just scurried down the hall and shut the door. They’d spent the whole day playing with the rabbit. It didn’t do much, but there was something about being near it, about feeling its heart rate slow in her hands, knowing that this living thing trusted her, that made Alex feel better about everything.
They’d started calling him Babbit Rabbit because they didn’t have a name for him, and then it just stuck.
“That thing looks like bait,” Betcha had laughed once.
“Cheapest way to keep a bitch happy,” Len had replied. He got annoyed when they talked about Babbit Rabbit or crooned at him. “Better than getting one of them knocked up.” Bait.
