Page 26 of Beware of Hodags

RACHEL

I keep backing away from Mirk, hurrying my steps, hoping to get his truck between us.

Easily, he cuts me off until I’m forced to let him herd me away from it—it and the doors. My route of escape.

Mirk’s eyes are bulging and spiderlike. And although the rest of his body is human, I have a very bad feeling that Mirk is about to show me what his shifter side really looks like. I hope he doesn’t. I might actually die of fright. His voice is hard. “Have you ever read Tolkien?”

What an off-the-wall question. “No.” I have to squeeze out the word. “And you’re not the first person who’s asked me.” My stomach is leaden with dread.

His brows do a surprised hop on his forehead. But his mouth is still an unhappy flat line. “There’s this forest in the stories called Mirkwood. And there’s this spider named Shelob. Her children are called the Great Spiders of Mirkwood. One of her daughters is Saenathra.”

“That’s crazy,” I croak. It’s almost like his family wasn’t afraid to warn well-read people of what they are.

I look around the scary, scary big webs strewn all over his barn.

Why did I never get into The Lord of the Rings?

Why didn’t any of my English classes have it as required reading?

In all my life experiences to date, I’ve never needed to fall back on my knowledge of Hamlet or The Merchant of Venice— but I could sure as heck have used a heads up about all the dangers facing a hobbit!

Mirk takes another step. A slow, measured step, continuing his advance on me .

My lips curl back. Stalking! He’s freaking stalking me. Panic courses through my body like greyhounds bolting after a rabbit and I curse the fact that my shifter side is about as dangerous as a turtle. Even if I change right here where I stand, I can’t really defend myself.

Mirk’s gaze drops to my bared teeth and his lips press together.

In… discomfort? Is that… guilt? He raises his gaze to mine again, and my heart sinks to see the resolve in his eyes.

Resolve to do something I’m not going to like, I can feel it.

“You know how I told you that the women in my family have a disorder? It’s more like a curse.

We call it the black widow curse. My grandmother didn’t just kill my grandfather.

She started to eat him. My dad tried to save him and she…

” He swallows and looks away. “She turned on him too.”

SHEESH.

I don’t realize I say this out loud until he nods and meets my eyes again.

“It makes it hard for the females of our kind to get close to a male. Not only emotionally, but because the males of our kind tend to avoid mating with them. We prefer to take human women. Safer for us. Like werewolves, if we bite a victim but don't kill them, they will become a spider. And turned women don’t suffer from the black widow curse.”

I have such a bad feeling. “Why are you telling me this?”

Mirk’s eyes are sad. “Rachel—”

Trying to distance myself from him, from what he’s about to say, I take yet another step backward. Something touches my ankle and I scream.

It’s sticky and cool. I know without looking down that it’s a giant line of spider silk. But it’s instinctive—I take my eyes off Mirk, already dreading the sight of it sticking to me—and there it is, holding fast to my skin. Fear curdles in my throat.

Mirk’s arms close around me.

NOW I really scream.

An engine accelerates.

We both freeze. And—yes! There’s an unmistakable roar of an approaching vehicle. Shepard.

Except… it doesn’t sound right. The growl of the engine and the crackling of the exhaust is much different than Shepard’s truck. My heart sinks.

The vehicle sounds like it curls around the side of the barn. The engine cuts off.

Tensing, Mirk drops his arms from me and steps back.

I suck in a breath to scream a warning.

Before I can let it out, Mirk shifts.

And by shifts, I mean he explodes into a spider.

Yes, I was afraid it was coming. But seeing it is so much worse than I imagined.

MIRK EXPLODES INTO A SPIDER!

I let out the scream. A really, really loud one.

Mirk swivels to face me. Body predominantly the color of dark sand, he has a set of charcoal bands on his forebody, and a single thicker charcoal stripe on his hindbody. More accurately, his cephalothorax and his abdomen, respectively.

Things I’d never know if not for my arachnid-crazy sister. Thanks, Adrian.

His two front legs are charcoal-colored. The other six have a variegated sand coloration. All of them are covered in hairs that stick out like steel spikes.

He has so many eyes—three rows of them. Four small eyes are clustered in the front. Two large orbs sit in the middle, and a set of two tiny eyes positioned to the side of his head sit in the highest row.

And his eyeglasses are perched right in front of the largest two eyes, resting on his new form, the earpieces slightly askew.

With frightfully limber articulation, Mirk’s dark foreleg rises up and plucks his glasses off his…

face—and then his other foreleg joins the first and he carefully fo lds the earpieces before reaching over and setting his glasses down on a shelf that’s got to be a good ten feet away.

Meaning his leg span has to be at least twenty feet.

Oh. My. NOPE. Nope, nope, NOPE!

“Aragog!” I screech.

“Who?” he asks in confusion.

HE CAN TALK?!

His voice is disturbingly normal. It sounds like Mirk. His face and body are just a giant horrendous spider.

“Is EVERYBODY a shifter in this town?!” I shout.

“Pretty much. Who’s Aragog?” he asks, his spider eyes narrowing. All of his spider eyes.

I shudder.

My body insists that I need to turn tail and run away, except there’s no way I want to run deeper into the barn. Forcing myself to remain facing Boss Level Mirk, I know that my only hope of escape is to get past him. Somehow.

Over is not an option. Even if I could do an Olympic vault to launch myself vertically, he’s so tall, his head is nearly level with the rope swing dangling from the rafters.

He’s huge—he fills half of the barn! Legs aside, he’s a spider the size of an elephant! The stuff of pure nightmares…

He flexes his chelicerae. Also known as his fangs. These are a spider's jaws, and they’re packed with muscles like a wrestler’s arms because that’s what they use them for—to grab and hold their prey.

The hollow fangs tipping the ends of each of them are for stabbing prey and injecting them with all sorts of danger juice.

When Mirk flexes his muscly chelicerae at me again, I experience the concern that he thinks I find his flexing attractive. I think I recall that female spiders might appreciate a set of strong chelicerae like women appreciate a good set of guns on a man .

My hackles rise. I’m not a lady spider. I’m never going to find any of this attractive. NOT EVER.

“Who is Aragog?” Mirk prompts.

Panting from stress, I eye him in disbelief. “Haven’t you ever read Harry Potter?!”

One of his front legs taps the floor twice, such a rapid twitch my eyes almost can’t follow it. “Yeah…”

“Read it again!” I growl. I shift sideways, avoiding more contact with the sticky floor web. “Aragog is the giant spider that Hagrid is friends with!”

“Oh. That’s right.” His legs clench, causing his knobby joints to rise high above his back, forcing his legs to tuck close to his body.

A full-body shiver attacks me.

“I always skipped over those parts,” he states. “I hate that whenever giant spiders get mentioned in books, they always turn into villains. It makes giant spiders sound bad.”

“Mirk, there’s no way to make giant spiders sound good!”

If a giant spider can wince, Mirk does it.

“Sorry,” I say.

He sighs heavily, which makes his whole body fast-twitch.

I think I pee a little. “No, like I told you the other day, I appreciate honesty. You shouldn’t feel guilty that your first instinct is to recoil from spiders.

It’s everybody’s first instinct.” He raises his second leg, bent at the…

knee? Wrist? Er, it’s bent at one of the middle segments—and he effortlessly twists it so that he can run his tarsus—those would be spider paws—over the top of his head, like he’s running a stressed hand through his sparse spidery head hairs. Urticating ones, probably.

My sister’s tarantula has hairs that give people hives.

Spiders can kick them when they’re angry, and they even drop them around their enclosure to deter predators.

They’re so small and thin that most of the time you can’t even see them.

When Adrian got an armful of tarantula hairs, she had to suffer like a human because she can’t shift.

She was stuck trying tweezers, then tape, and finally she coated her skin in Elmer’s glue in an effort to peel up all the tiny irritations that were starting to give her blisters.

Her skin’s reaction to them lasted for weeks.

Mirk’s hairs are almost as long as my arm.

Imagining the damage he could do has me sweating.

Mirk is watching me, all eight of his eyes shiny and intelligent. “It’s hard to blame people for being afraid of us.” He sighs. “That’s why my kind…”

“Your kind what?”

“Like I was telling you, we take our mates. And Rachel?”

My eyes can't get any bigger. “Don’t finish whatever you’re about to say.”

“I have to.” His front legs twitch forward. I definitely pee a little. “I have to do this. I feel protective of you.”

“So you’ve trapped me in your barn?! This is not protection, Mirk—this is a hostage situation!”

“Give this a chance, Rachel,” Mirk says.

My face screws up. “A chance to what?”

I can’t say for sure, but I think his spider face sets with reluctant determination. Mirk’s front legs, the two dark ones, begin tapping. The movement is so rapid, the vibration sounds like a weird sort of purring.

Oh no. I know what that means…

Male spiders vibrate their legs (and sometimes their abdomen or their pedipalps—the small swollen-ended leg things that hang down on either side of their fangs) to attract females.

YIKES.

All of my skin tries to crawl off my body.

Mirk is still talking. “I can’t tell if you’re like a little sister to me or… more. I want to keep you safe and I want to figure this out so… I’m going to keep you with me.”