Page 28 of Beware of Hodags

Cursing, I wheel around and run. Everything in me hates to do it. It makes me feel like prey. Thing is, I am prey. And super unfortunately, just as dismal as my chance at fighting them off are the odds that I’ll outrun an overgrown wolf spider: almost nil.

An excited squeal erupts behind me, making me shudder and haul ass even faster. If I’m not mistaken, that’s the sound a spider makes when it sees a free burger running through the forest .

This free burger makes for his truck, plunging back into the darkness-shrouded woods. Behind me, footfalls start slapping the thickly fallen leaves. An octet of footfalls.

They speed up until it’s six footfalls at high velocity, the spider topping out its alternating tetrapod gait—and gaining on my bipedal speed.

I have to say that there’s nothing that will make you run faster than a twelve-foot-long spider booking it after you. My lungs are working like bellows, my arms and legs are pumping, and I’m flying over logs and branches and dead leaves at warp speed.

But it isn’t fast enough. I have a spider bigger than a Texas Longhorn barreling down on me. I could run faster if I change, but problem is, if I change now, the split second it will take will be all the spider needs to be on top of me.

In the next breath I don’t have a choice anymore. The ground drops out from under me.

I’ve broken through someone’s webbed ceiling.

My stomach somersaults as I freefall into a burrow. Luckily, it’s empty. Why? I don’t know. Guess they closed their trap door when they left. Unfortunately, a giant spider lands on top of me.

Summing it up in five words: worst nightmare come to life.

Before I consciously make the decision to do it, I’m instantly, defensively bursting into a bucking, fighting hodag.

I become a Pbr bull. A furry green hodag one.

I have four massive paws equipped with equally massive unsheathed claws, a mouth full of slightly serrated teeth including a set of scimitar-shaped upper tusks, plus two horns capping my head.

My spike armor, including the row of styrax bones down my tail, have fully erupted too.

Some of my spikes have managed to gouge the spider—I felt a couple stick into its abdomen.

But because the spider is still grappling me, I know my body defenses haven’t sunk deep enough.

I swing my head and feel my right horn sink into the spider’s underside.

The sensation is a little bit like poking your finger into a loaf of freshly baked bread.

Stabbing into an exoskeleton has that same crunch as you puncture the outer crust, the same spongy squish as you spear their insides.

Now that was good damage.

The spider shrieks and snaps his forelegs around me.

Somewhere above us, the Charlotte screams too. It’s too bad I’m presently buried under an arachnid. I’d have loved to watch her malevolent smile get wiped off her face.

I’m not quite sure where on her mate’s underside that I managed to hit but hot liquid rolls over my temple and ear.

It’s hemolymph. Basically spider blood. His abdomen could be ruptured.

Good. If he doesn’t shift into his human form to force healing, he won’t live long, and that’d be real fine by me.

I try to throw my head so his blood isn’t pooling in my eye.

Mistake. My defensive armor shifts out of the way for a fraction of a second.

Fangs slam into the gap my stretched neck made between my styrax bones.

I roar in pain.

Hodags, like razorback boars, have a shield of tissue on their shoulders. Mine is probably a good five or six inches of extra tough, extra thick skin that can take slashes from claws and tusks, perfect for wrestling fellow hodags or fighting other supernaturals.

But spider fangs? They sink through my shield like butter. Ouch. My neck goes numb.

He’s injected me with a paralytic.

My stomach pitches as my body is jerked and turned.

Movements swift, the spider is flipping me like I’m a furry burrito. Fangs slam into my side, the tips so sharp they plunge through my fur, pierce my skin with a pop, and poke between my ribs .

I snarl in white hot pain. I expect my lungs to seize, the paralytic stopping my ability to breathe. Instead, pain flares. No, not mere pain. It feels like fire was poured inside me.

How fun. This would be his necrotoxin. The digestive barf that will turn me into his personal hodag-flavored Capri Sun.

The spider shifts me in his grip so that he’s got me imprisoned by his second and third pairs of legs. This frees his first pair of legs to fold at the joints as he places his clawed feet together, like humans would hold their hands palm to palm.

Then the spider speaks, his voice as clear as if he had a human mouth and lips. If I could twitch in surprise, I would. “Thank you, Lord, for this meal,” he starts.

What the…

“I appreciate You bringing me and Saenathra together,” he goes on. “Please bless my food that I’m about to eat.” He gives me a squeeze with his feet.

He’s… praying. Over me—his fucking meal.

Inwardly, I snarl, Aww, this is so messed up!

“In the name of Jesus, amen,” the spider finishes.

Surreal. This is so surreal.

“Kill him quickly, then change!” the Charlotte shouts down to her mate, sounding apprehensive. “Or—bring him up here, Corey,” she urges, voice going shrill with desperation. “Hurry! You can present him to me as a gift!”

I groan.

She doesn’t want me as a gift. She wants to finish me off so I can’t hurt her male any worse.

But her plan sounds reasonable to Corey, and of course it would—male spiders present female spiders with food in order to entice them to mate.

She barely gets done speaking before he grips me tight and starts to back out of the pit like he’s trying to break the Guinness World Record for the fastest mile in reverse .

My rear toes are tingling, and when I test them, I find I still have some control over my back legs and feet. With a burst of effort, I kick at Corey.

My effort is weak. My rear claws snag at him, but barely. All it results in is Corey tightening his grip on me.

Drool slides from my mouth—I’m having trouble swallowing—and I silently snarl.

I almost wish I hadn’t taken the risk. Because when food fights back it provokes a spider to nail their takeout with more paralysis juice.

And more might kill me. Then again, I do want to be dead before the spiders start sucking out my melted organs. I kick out once more.

Corey stops climbing.

His Charlotte nearly screeches, panicked for him. “It’s okay! He won’t hurt me, bring him up here!”

He doesn’t. My weak-ass fighting has triggered his protective instinct. Rather than risk handing a potentially dangerous meal to his mate, he wants to gift me to her safely and fully subdued.

He rolls me to my back in his grasp so that I’m facing him, which doesn’t seem like an improvement in my circumstances.

Inwardly, I shudder as I get another too up-close and personal view.

He raises his fat fangs up high and a droplet of venom wells on one fang tip.

His mouth behind his set of fangs is a gaping hole lined with teeth.

Even if I didn’t have excellent night vision, thanks to a shaft of moonlight shining into this hell pit, I can see perfectly.

A fucking curse at the moment.

The spider’s fangs jerk down, aiming for my heart.

…But they don’t connect with me. No fang tips plunge into my chest.

Instead, his legs begin to curl around himself.

I stare up at him, watching his venom harmlessly drip off of his fang and land somewhere below us. That’s when I see it. A gelled waterfall gathered in a clump under his body. It’s his hemolymph .

Spiders need hemolymph in order to move. It functions like hydraulic fluid—with such a loss of it, Corey can no longer extend his legs. No extension means he’s not going anywhere. Good.

Downside is his pairs of legs that have a hold of me start to curl too. Bringing me closer to his fangs.

Shit! No, no, no—

I kick my rear legs again, the only movement I can manage—and he drops me.

Unfortunately, he had us most of the way to the top of the burrow, holding me suspended.

The drop is equivalent to falling a story and I land on my frozen wrist. I hear my wrist bone snap in half just as I feel it fracture beneath me, tearing an agonized grunt from my convulsively swallowing throat.

Corey’s legs continue to curl, brushing against me as his lower joints peel up so that he’s supporting himself on his shin bones instead of his feet.

This is a wonderfully bad sign. Wonderful for me, that is—but real bad for him because he’s lost too much blood. Enough to be life-threatening. He’s in a death curl.

A bone is sticking out of my wrist and my paw is dangling by some skin and a tendon. Dogbane. Vision going dark, limbs mostly numb and unresponsive while my insides are screaming as they melt from the toxin, I try to shift to my human form.

My body jolts as the change rolls over me. Immediately my liquifying organs reform as solids. The toxin burns away. My wrist knits together. My limbs unlock, responding to me again, no more paralytic boiling through my bloodstream.

I test my legs, tensing the muscles.

They flex fluidly, fully under my control again.

Good.

But in a weird shifter twist, although my wrist is whole now that I’ve changed, it hurts like a mother. Compound fractures are problematic to begin with, and I had a lot of other damage for my body to work on. At best, I think I now have a hairline fracture.

In another change or two I should be back to normal, but I need a minute to recuperate. Changing, although rapid, takes a lot of juice.

I heave out a breath and slump to the floor of the burrow.

My lips peel back as I bare my teeth. Frustration makes my skin itch.

(To be fair, the itching could also be due to spider hairs.) I’m wicked thirsty, suddenly starving because changes and damage require food to refuel, and I’m trapped in a burrow with a twelve-foot spider on his way to becoming a corpse—and none of these things are the worst of the problems. The worst is that my mate is in danger.

Thinking of mates has me jerking my head up to look for the Charlotte. I’m surprised she hasn’t shifted and reached her excessively long legs over the side of the burrow and throttled me for killing her besotted male.

But when I scan the mouth of the burrow, my guts go cold.

Because she’s gone. I just killed the Charlotte’s mate—and my mate is very likely somewhere on this property, vulnerable and unprotected.

I need to get to Rachel.