Page 29 of Beware of Hodags

RACHEL

“You’re going to keep me with you… like at work?” I ask hopefully, lightheaded. Don’t pass out, don’t pass out!

Mirk’s fangs—or, really, his arm-wrestler appendages—lift in a grimace. “Not just work. I hate to do this, but I need to keep you here until we figure out if we’re mates.”

“We aren't!” I vow. “So you don’t have to keep me prisoner!”

His spider face is very serious. “I’m afraid I do. Because that hodag wants you. I need you to trust me enough to see that.”

“Keeping me hostage won’t make me trust you. It’s doing the opposite.”

He exhales a huff of air. I stare at his fangs, and when they rise, I see a round, gaping hole lined with teeth is situated behind them.

Mirk’s mouth. “Hodags might not have the olfactory capability to figure you out, but I do. I know what you are, Rachel. I’m trying to keep you safe.

Don’t you see? Even if we aren’t mates, he’s a hodag! ”

I feel a twinge of worry. I stamp it out. “I don’t need to be saved—Shepard won’t hurt me,” I tell Mirk, but also remind myself.

As if Mirk feels sorry for me for being na?ve enough to believe this, he makes a throat-clearing noise —

How is he doing that? And how can he talk without lips?

But before he can utter a word, a roar splits the night air somewhere outside the barn. It sounds like it’s coming from the direction of the farm’s Forbidden Forest.

My heart stops. “What was that?”

Mirk makes a chirring sound. A sigh, I think. He turns his body and his front legs cross, the tarsus pads pressing into each other like a balled fist presses into a hand. “That was a hodag’s bellow. Your hodag, I’m sure. He must have fallen into one of the burrows.”

I stumble back, right into another strand of spider silk. This one must be fresher or something because it doesn’t release my foot when I try to tug my leg away. “The what?”

“An empty burrow, most likely. But it’s possible he got lured to one.

In our spider form, we make a sort of tunnel in the ground.

We have this extra row of teeth that are specially adapted for digging,” he adds almost proudly—until he sees the look on my face.

His foreabdomen drops a fraction, his legs folding to accommodate the movement, and I get the impression this is akin to the way a person drops their head.

“We make a sort of net across the top of our burrows, like a trap door, and we hang out inside them. Some of us choose to live in them. Then in the fall season, our males typically wander for females.” His chelicerae flick and one of his front legs taps on the barn floor, once, twice—and he’s watching me so intently while he does it, it cements my suspicion that this is almost certainly a come-hither motion.

I try to lift my foot to step back, but the sticky web line is strong enough that my foot slaps back to the floor. I suck in a breath.

Mirk’s eyes are reflective, treating me to the look of terror my face is wearing. He continues patiently, “This time of year, all the burrows in the woods should be empty. They’re pretty deep. That’s why I told you to be careful walking around. I didn’t want you to fall into any of them.”

My mind is supplying snapshots, like crime scene photos, of Shepard trapped in some creepy gaping hole in the ground that bears a disturbing resemblance to the basement scenes in The Silence of the Lambs, but with more spiderwebs.

The mental picture overrides my fear of Mirk.

With a burst of adrenaline I pull free of the silk line and shove past his legs—and snarl as their bristly spikes brush me and poke into the fabric of my shirts and jeans.

But I don’t let myself freak out much. I can’t.

I don’t go for the big barnside doors because I’m not sure I’m strong enough to open them.

Instead, I race for a regular-sized side door on the far side of the barn.

Mirk gallops after me.

If you’ve never heard a spider gallop, it’s as ghastly as it sounds. Abhorrence gives me an extra burst of speed. I’m almost to the door—

Mirk’s legs snap around me, making me scream.

A roar sounds from the woods again. But this time it’s so much angrier. My heart leaps—because it means Shepard is alive.

I begin fighting Mirk in earnest to get to him.

“HOLY SHIT!” a man shouts, freezing us both.

Seeing a spider freeze and very recognizably listen is unsettling.

I shake off an onset of revulsed shivers and look past Mirk’s legs at the man standing in the side door where I was headed. He looks appalled and horrified and thrilled. It’s Dylan, the cryptid hunter. He must have been the one who revved up a minute ago.

And apparently the delay between his arrival to the farm and his entrance into the barn was him getting loaded for bear.

A supernatural bear, that is.

He’s strapped on enough munitions to win a war—and he raises a giant gun and levels it at Mirk.

It’s so big I can read the words painted on it: Cryptid Cannon.

Mirk’s whole body stiffens.

Taking advantage of the distraction, I drop to my hands and knees and scramble out from under his legs, getting their spiky hairs all over me in the process. Some drive through my clothing, piercing my skin like black porcupine quills. I cry out in pain.

Almost immediately, my skin begins to burn like a chemical reaction .

It’s because there is a chemical reaction happening.

These aren’t simple hair shafts like a dog or cat’s hair.

Spider hair isn’t even real hair—it’s setae, which are bristles with barbs on them.

There are even reverse barbs at their tips so they’re more torture going in and absolute murder to pull out, or so my sister told me.

I believe her. They’ve only just gone into my skin and already they feel like ant bites—giant ones.

The Cryptid Cannon fires with an explosive sound, and I flatten myself to the floor. I look up in time to watch a black ball erupt out of the gun’s muzzle instead of a bullet. It blows up in front of Mirk like a giant curtain—then it slaps around him.

The gargantuan spider rears, straining against the netting. Because that’s what it is, what’s captured him. It’s a giant monster-catching net. Thank you for being a supernatural-chasing freak, Dylan.

Mirk shrieks, startling me. And he begins to leap like an arachnid bronco, making the floorboards of the barn shake. I scramble on my hands and knees and get my feet under me.

With Mirk focused on fighting his way free from Dylan, I hightail it along the wall of the barn until I safely reach the side door. I dart out of it and start running for the woods.

For Mirk’s Forbidden Forest, which is potentially filled with more spiders the size of Mirk.

Grimacing, I run faster. I keep my eyes scanning the ground, trying not to fall into any spider burrows. But the fact that it’s pitch dark under the tree canopy is inhibiting both my speed and my confidence that I’ll be able to avoid them.

I run until my lungs start to burn and my breath starts to saw in and out of my throat painfully.

On the upside, this gives me something to focus on besides the urticating bristles that are driving me mad. They’re really burning my skin now and itching something goshawful .

Occasionally there’s a break in the trees, allowing shafts of moonlight to beam down.

This gives me some decent illumination, but not enough to be helpful for removing setae.

I blindly fumble my hands over myself, searching for what feels like arrow bolts.

When I get a grip on a couple, I try to yank them out, but cross-country running isn’t exactly conducive to the process.

Even when I’m successful at removal, there isn’t a lot of relief.

My skin is really not reacting well to whatever Mirk’s hairs introduced.

Leaves crashing under my racing feet sound way too loud, like I’m filling up the forest with noise. Nervously I wonder if this is like a ringing dinner bell to the arachnid occupants here.

Scents assail my nose. Unlike a hodag, I do have a good sense of smell. No, I'm no bloodhound shifter. Or a Belgian Malinois. (I wish!) I’m not a werewolf either. But if I were, or if I were something even marginally more agile than what I am, I’d strip and shift and hunt Shepard in my animal form.

But my animal side is adorably chunky and clunky, and nimble I am not.

Thus I keep to my human form and cover ground as quickly as I safely can, eyes straining as I stare at the forest floor that could be false, ready to drop me into a tunnel dug by a spider with special dirt-chewing teeth plus a set of enormous chelicerae.

And my best hope if I fall into one of these is that the spider who owns it isn’t home because he’s off romancing an unsuspecting human lady to abduct so he can make more giant spiders.

My nose is straining too, and to my relief I’m picking up traces of Shepard’s scent, allowing me to follow his trail.

Trying to thwart me, however, is the breeze that, while slight, could be causing his scent to drift to the side.

Depending on how far it’s drifted I could be really, really far away and off the mark—or right on top of him.

“Shepard!” I call, my voice wispy, my chest tight, my hand grasping at my throat. I hope I’m close to him .

A growl rumbles up from the ground a couple of yards to my left.

And to my relief, a hodag head rises up.

A clawed paw as broad as a grizzly bear’s follows, latching onto the dirt at the mouth of what must be the burrow.

But when his other paw comes up to catch ground, the hodag makes a quiet, pained snarl—and he drops from sight, landing with a sickening thud.