Authors: A.J. Aalto
It was suddenly quiet enough to hear my skin crawl. My brain skipped ahead, unable to say the Z-word aloud.
Oh, Dark Lady.
There weren't any spider babies, because—I whipped around just in time to see a football-sized zombie spider drop into the gleaming auburn tresses of Agent Heather Golden.
C
HAPTER
27
“DOWN!” I SHOUTED,
shoving Batten away hard with my left hand. He rebounded quickly but I was faster.
I brandished the Taser, and for a second, Golden's eyes flew wide like she thought I was going to zap her. I swung the baton of the Taser like a baseball bat, knocking the spider off her head with a squishy
thwack!
Golden dropped in slow motion, her head pulling down into the sanctuary of her shoulders with instant understanding; she rolled, clutching her gun in both hands.
I didn't give her a chance to screw up. Heaving one foot back, I punted the fat brown spider away from us. It made a sloppy splat against the toe of my Ked and rolled, leg-over-leg, whirling in the sand, before scuttling to a stop. With alarming speed, it righted itself and hissed at me in a series of short, snaky noises. I ran forward to meet it, aiming the Taser's electrodes.
The spider, shockingly fast, came skittering right for the brilliant, sparking probes, its putrid forward pair of legs open and waving. Probably it was just attracted to the light. That's what I'll tell myself when I get queasy about it for the rest of my life.
Behind me, Batten shouted something I didn't hear. I hit the butane lighter's switch as the probes flew, and heard the spray catch with a crack. The spider was quicker than I expected but it didn't matter. The jolt knocked it down; for good measure, I speared the rotten fucker like I was holding a cattle prod.
With a flash, the spider ignited. The stench of burning hair and rotten meat filled the air. The spider's hiss dissolved into the spitting of a nasty grease fire while its hairy undead legs flailed and crisped and curled in the air.
I willed myself not to puke all over the front of my coveralls or on the burning carcass. Using that modicum of self-control as a handhold, I got my shit together to do my job. I was Marnie Baranuik, Scourge of the Zombie Spiders, and that's why the PCU needed me.
“Declan, get everyone away from the fucking shed and lock that shit down,” I commanded. “No one goes near it until I've cleared it. Batten?”
I turned to find him glaring at me. If he was angry about something I'd done or said, it would have to wait. “Clear the scene, get these people back. De Cabrera, I need one of the big biohazard bins from the van.”
The Cuban nodded and went to get one.
“Golden looks clear,” Declan said, his voice thick. His eyes were wide with excitement as he examined her scalp, fingering through her hair. “Antibiotics and antivirals don't work, not on
Yersinia repens
. They don't work.”
“You know what doesn't work even more? Panic and hysteria,” I said firmly. “Calm your tits and check her again.”
“No bites, no scratches,” he confirmed.
“That we can see. Someone call an ambulance all the same, we have to be a hundred percent sure.”
When Chapel was aside making his call for an ambulance, I flicked my gaze sidelong at her. She looked like she was having trouble putting the pieces together so I helped her along the only way I knew how. “I seriously hope that actually happened, just now. I killed a zombie spider off your fucking melon. Do you know how badass that was?”
She blinked rapidly at me. “You beat Batten to it.”
I hadn't thought of that yet, though I'm sure it would have occurred to me later that night, causing me to smirk up at my bedroom ceiling in the dark. “Saved your ass. Now you owe me, so this is what you're going to do for me, okay?”
She nodded.
“You're gonna go with De Cabrera and let him put you in an ambulance and let the doctors check you out.”
She stared at me woozily. Her cheeks were flushed with irritation, but it looked like there wasn't enough focus in her head to form a response. That was not good. I snapped my fingers in front of her face.
“Agent Golden? We have to be absolutely sure. Do you understand?”
She nodded again. The hospital would have to shave her head to check every inch of her scalp for the tiniest mark, and hold her in quarantine for forty-eight hours to check for signs of infection. She probably didn't grasp all that just yet, and I didn't want to be the one to tell her. Instead, I put down the Taser and took her by the wrist.
“Gonna be ok?” I asked, lifting her arm. She allowed it. I peeked into both armholes of her t-shirt at her armpits to check for swelling; they were pale pink and smelled faintly of baby powder-covered sweat. “How ya feeling?”
Golden's face was wan. “I've got a bump on my head the size of Batten's balls, how do you think I feel?”
Not wanting to stop hating her, but frankly loving that assessment, I said what she expected to hear. “Quit whining, you joyless shitpail. You're starting to sound like him.”
Golden didn't bother clamping back a trembling smile, terror momentarily lifted by gratitude. “You take that back,” she said under her breath.
“When you give me a reason to,” I compromised with a shrug.
“We should torch the shed, Marnie,” Declan said over my shoulder, his Irish accent strong. “We have to torch it. If there were babies …”
“We should wait for confirmation from the health department before we destroy all our evidence,” I muttered, as de Cabrera handed me a biohazard bin and helped Golden to her feet. He walked her up toward the SUV to wait for the ambulance.
But, deep down, I agreed with Declan. If there was even the slightest chance that this momma spider had babies that she hadn't eaten, which had made a meal of the brain-eating beetle larvae, that had fed on Roger Kelly, who had blotches of creeping plague blooming on the inside of his skull. It was a long chain of ifs, but it led to an ugly destination. “Okay, find me even one egg sac, and we'll be proactive and torch the whole nest. Otherwise, protocol dictates we contain the spider and the body and wait for the health department.”
“The way to tell for sure instantly would be to use your psychometry and get results from the shed itself,” Declan suggested.
I heard Chapel make an affirmative noise in agreement but he didn't order it. I grabbed the yellow plastic bin with the red biohazard
symbol on it and scraped the zombie spider's remains into it; the thing was now just a blackened ball of scorched hair and oozing innards. The smoke smudged the plastic in streaky, cloudy lines. I pressed the lid down tight.
“I'm too keyed-up for psychic stuff,” I said low. “Groping won't work, I'm too hyper.”
“You know that's not entirely true.” Declan studied the side of my face but I didn't want to meet his gaze. “In an emergency, I'm okay with pulling out a bit of magic to amplify your Talents. Bagged-cat, or moth-in-chains, both would get us results. I understand you have a problem tiptoeing on the left hand path, but …”
“Says who? I'll tiptoe through your fucking tulips, Irish.”
He spread his hands. “Is it untrue?”
Both of the spells casually dropping from his lips involved using animal parts. Even if we weren't the ones who killed the animals, it was a grey area, not white magic, closer to black. I'd promised Harry I would behave myself, and worse than that, I'd sworn to Harry on Mark Batten's
life
that I wouldn't tap into the infernal through my Bond. Even if I did want to deck Batten, especially now when he was glaring at me across the slightly-scorched beach with his arms crossed, radiating the expectation of failure, I didn't want Harry to exact the price of my disobedience. And he would. Harry would fall on Batten's throat like a fly on a fresh corpse.
“It would give us answers before the health department gets here,” I reasoned, craning up at Chapel. “Any guidance, boss man?”
“If there's a danger to the public, we torch it,” Chapel said firmly. “We can't wait on the health department only to start a …” He almost said the word zombie. I saw it in his face before he skipped over it. “An epidemic. Are you sure that's what's going on here?”
“No,” I admitted. “Just going by the lab work. If the CDC did find
Yersinia repens
in addition to
Yersinia sarcophaginae
, then we've got a serious contagion here and the possibility of an outbreak. If the spider didn't eat all the larvae and all the baby spiders, then other things fed on Roger Kelly, directly or indirectly, and therefore those other things are now infected.”
“Then let's haul out moth-in-chains and find out now,” Declan urged. “I've got the moths. We're not going to just stand around and wait for the babies to wander off into the woods, right?”
“You're the head of UnBio, your call, Marnie,” Chapel said, “I trust your judgment.”
I watched my boss hustle to wave Sheriff Hood's 4X4 back as it was pulling up to the do-not-cross tape. The Timberlake lookalike was widening the perimeter, pushing back a few nosy neighbors who had come to see what the yellow tape meant. I watched sleepy people in pajamas and robes, and tried not to catch any of their curious eyes.
“I trust your judgment,” he says. Well, shit
.
C
HAPTER
28
I NODDED TO DECLAN
and led him back to the shed door to search the webs for evidence of living baby spiders. Someone had slammed it shut. I cracked it an inch while sweat rolled down between my shoulder blades, mimicking little spider creeps.
I asked Declan, “You're not in the least bit …”
Don't say afraid, don't admit fear
, “reticent about using black magic?”
“Here? Or in general?” Declan asked.
“In general.”
“Why would I be?”
“You don't believe it puts your soul at risk?”
Declan's sad smile said so much: he'd paid a price, wasn't entirely okay with it, but it was too late to change things. “You know, Marnie, you can say the word ‘afraid’ to me. Everyone is afraid of something. I won't think less of you. I can amp you without causing any more harm to Harry's soul, or yours, than has already been done by him.”
In the close confines of the stinking shed, crouched not two feet from the body of a dead guy whose blood once ran fresh and strong and lively through mortal veins, Declan's words sounded like a judgment.
“Harry believes in redemption,” I said, feeling the weight of my job's responsibility through the early morning exhaustion and the stress of Golden's possible injuries. My assistant's condemnation was not something I wanted to hear right now. “He's furious with me when I do anything even a little sketchy.”
“I understand that he believes, and I see that he's convinced you.” Declan shook his head. “But he's wrong.”
“I can't accept that.”
“The sooner you do, the easier your life will be, Marnie,” he said, “because the longer you deny Asmodeus, and the gifts He has offered to all of His brood, including the humans who serve Him, the more treacherous He will be when He finally comes to claim you.”
I blinked. “What do you mean ‘claim’?”
I never got an answer to that; Batten started bellowing. “What the hell is taking so long in here?” he demanded from the threshold. “It's five hundred degrees and we're waiting on a simple yes or no.”
His tone and the ball-twisted scowl on his face rocketed me toward defensive.
“Wow. You want this done faster, do it yourself,” I snapped, “or back the fuck off.”
“Dr. Edgar, could you give us a moment?” Batten said tightly.
Declan wavered. “It's not her fault, I—”
“Beat it, Irish,” Batten said.
Declan ducked out.
“Caffeine withdrawal?” Batten asked me.
I replied, “I was going to ask you the same thing. Whose idea was it to saddle me with that nitwit assistant, anyway?”
He exhaled hard. “You need another minute to calm down or are we going to have a civilized conversation?”
“I'm sorry,” I said, “it's been a spectacularly shitty day. Not your fault, though your attitude's not helping.”
He used one elbow to close the shed door, careful not to touch anything with his unprotected hands. Giving me privacy despite his spider phobia earned him
point: Batten
.
“You think it's five hundred degrees out there?” I rubbed a trickle of sweat off my forehead with the back of my gloved hand. “Wait a second and see how hot it gets in this shed with the door closed.”
“Are you a zombie?” he asked. “Are you about to bash my skull in?”
“No to the first, yes to the second.”
“What did Irish say about Harry to get you wound up?” Batten said, rather more astutely than I expected.
“He didn't say anything about anyone,” I lied. “And if he did, he's wrong. He's always wrong.”
“About?”
“Seriously, Kill-Notch, it's hot. And I haven't had any coffee today. And I'm not feeling well. And there's a plague-ridden corpse at my feet, and I'm surrounded by webs and I just torched the mother of all spiders. And Golden has to shave all her pretty hair off.”
“And?”
I glared up at him, seeing the stress of the morning in every furrow on his forehead, not wanting to respond to his anger but feeling it hammer through my chest anyway. “Your tone is upsetting me,” I said as politely as I could manage. “How much do you think I can take before I clobber you in that pea-sized slop you call a brain?”
“You're lucky I don't have you arrested for threatening a federal agent,” he told me. “Now you're gonna tell me the truth, or we're going to broil in this fucking shed all day.”
“You're not the boss of me,” I tried, hearing the childishness and not caring. “Agent Chapel is my superior. He tells me what to do.”
And who not to do.
“Tell me anyway,” he said determinedly. “What did Irish say to you?”
I rolled my eyes grandly. “What do you want from me?”
“I want to know what he said,” he insisted. “Tell me.”
“He said I might as well use dark magic because Harry is …” I tried to sigh it away, but I needed it off my chest, even though Batten was the last person on Earth who would understand. “He said that there's no such thing as redemption. That Harry can't be forgiven. His soul is damned and that's that. But Dr. Edgar is wrong.”