Page 18 of Silk Skullduggery (Haven Hollow #40)

We ended up moving things to the backyard.

For one thing, it was much easier to set up the circle out there. For another, the grounds were warded, but not to the same extent that the house was. Protecting Poppy was the main goal, but I still needed the Tsuchigumo to be able to reach us, or the whole plan was a wash.

Staying in the house meant one of two options; either the spider demon couldn’t reach us at all, and the plan failed. Or it could reach us, but only by doing significant damage to the house, protections, or both, and I didn’t want to have to clean any of that up.

Okay, third option, it got inside with absolutely no issue, but I wasn’t sure I was mentally prepared for that kind of situation.

We did the whole shebang. Normally, this kind of effort was kept for Yule, or Samhain. Regular coven meetings, we didn’t tend to go for the full formal circle, but I wasn’t taking any chances. Not with Poppy’s life on the line.

There was a terrible tension twisting in my belly, and fear nipped at my heels. It was taking too much time, time we didn’t have, and I found myself kneeling down to check on Poppy’s breathing and pulse more than once while we were preparing.

Olga brought me some potions for protection and healing, with which to anoint Poppy. What I wouldn’t have given for one of her zest potions, or, as Finn called them, turbo coffee. A drop applied beneath her nose, and Poppy might have been up and running marathons.

Lorcan went out into the trees and dragged back a bunch of pine boughs that everyone laid out around the edge of the circle, and everyone added their own piece. A bit of essential oil, a lock of hair, icicles that didn’t melt, no matter how warm the fire was. An owl feather, a bit of thread, and from me, three drops of my own blood.

That wasn’t normal. I’d never done it before. But for better or for worse, I was a Blood Witch, and this circle was mine. And there was nothing more powerful about me than my blood.

The few remaining scraps of silk were passed out between everyone. I was banking on the lingering protection magic to help keep the coven safe. It wouldn’t do any good to save Poppy, only to have the Tsuchigumo curse or make off with someone else. Once a trap is sprung, critters get wary of stepping into another. And I wasn’t letting this thing run loose in Haven Hollow for even one second longer than I had to.

The familiars were hidden in the trees or under the back porch of the house. They could help boost their witch partners, but no one wanted to risk any of them getting injured, not even the still weirdly silent Hellcat.

He’d hissed at me when I told him to stay out of the way, his tail lashing angrily as he slunk away into the shadows under the porch, deliberately tilting his chin away so he wasn’t looking at Lorcan.

That was… strange. They’d never had a particularly good relationship, but that had seemed like a weirdly pointed snub.

That was tomorrow’s problem. I’d add it to the growing list.

Between Maverick, Lorcan, Taliyah and me, we managed to carry Poppy on a blanket out the door and into the center of the circle. I wanted her close enough to the fire that the warmth might help her, but not so close that I had to constantly worry that her hair might go up.

She was very still, and very pale lying there. Her eyes were closed, the skin of her eyelids looking so thin and fragile that I could see a hint of blue behind them. Panic sank its claws into my chest, and I took the two long strides needed to get to her side and dropped down to one knee.

“Is everyone ready?” My voice came out harsh, the tension in my body carrying over into my tone.

No one seemed to care, and I got a chorus of determined agreement. Everyone knew their part; everyone knew what to do. Now it was down to kicking the hornet’s nest and seeing how long the plan held together.

The curse threads looked dry and papery where they clung to Poppy’s skin, like old and rotted cobwebs. They were almost the same color as her skin where she lay, way too still and too pale, on the ground. The fire did what it could to bring some color to her face, but it was like its light and warmth couldn’t quite reach her.

I’d been very carefully avoiding touching the gross little threads, but now I reached for them deliberately. They were sticky and unpleasant, grasping like mouths, always in search of a new meal. I fought not to gag as I slipped one manicured fingernail underneath one strand and plucked it like I was strumming a guitar.

I wasn’t any kind of biologist, but even I knew that spiders hunted through vibration.

The strands started trying to detach, reaching for the warm meal my presence presented. I kept out of reach, pulling back, and then ducking back in to pluck another strand. I was hoping the odd behavior would trigger a response, and if the way the curse spell was reacting was any indication, more than half of the threads waving in the air like the arms of a furious sea creature, then the Tsuchigumo wouldn’t be able to ignore me for long.

The first indication I had that it was working was just a faint rustling of leaves.

Isis cried out a soft warning from her hiding spot, and the shadows beneath the trees grew darker. They went from ink to pitch. The shade cast onto the ground from the occasional branch or trunk, stretched out further, growing long and thin, until they looked like the edge of a spider web.

Maverick gave a short whistle, and I caught a flash of Isis’s pale cream and gold body as she winged out of the woods and up onto the roof of the coven house, tucking herself up close behind the chimney.

My breathing sped up, and the hair at the back of my neck prickled in warning.

The rest of the coven was turned out to face any oncoming threat, with Lorcan and Taliyah standing ready, just in case a more physical deterrent was necessary.

Tension hummed in the air as the shadows moved across the ground. It wasn’t the wind; the air had gone eerily still around us. Even the fire was burning straight up with no guttering, though after a moment, the flames shrank down until they were barely more than glowing coals.

Not the best sign.

The night grew closer, and I struggled to see. My body curved forward, shielding Poppy as much as I could as my eyes scanned the area, looking for any sign of movement, or a glimpse of something that might be a horrible monster from three hundred years ago and half a world away. There was nothing, though. Just the stillness in the air, the silence of the forest, and the slow drift of the shadows around us.

I glanced down just in time to see another long, slender shadow on the ground slide towards the circle, and my heart shot up into my throat. Because that wasn’t a shadow, not really. Shadows had something that cast them, a source that blocked the light.

The things picking their careful way across the dirt towards the circle, they weren’t just shadows.

They were legs.

Eight thin, stretched out legs made of darkness and night air, rose up over me, and I had to crane my neck back to see the misty impression of a head and abdomen, and the dull gleam of eight shining hellfire ember eyes peering down at me.

I hadn’t felt it. Not a tingle, not a ripple in the backyard’s wards. I should have had some sign, a magical heads up, but nothing. The Tsuchigumo was barely tethered to our world at all, slipping through the protections like early morning mist. But it was present enough that it had killed two people and made a really excellent attempt at at least four more.

I didn’t know what I’d been expecting. I knew it was a spider demon. Somehow, having to look up into the ghostly mandibles of an arachnid that was bigger than a grizzly bear had never crossed my mind.

“Wanda.”

Taliyah’s voice was strained, her face pale. She had her service weapon in her hand, but pointed down at the ground. It must have been as obvious to her as it was to me that physical weapons would be less than useless against an enemy that wasn’t even halfway into the world. She would have had more of a chance of hitting one of us when the bullet passed straight through it.

I didn’t answer her. I wasn’t sure I could have forced any words out without choking. Instead, I looked up into the spider demon’s eyes, reached out, and deliberately plucked one of the curse strands.

Was it stupid? No, of course not. Wanda Depraysie was not stupid. She was a brilliant, driven witch who had founded her own coven, and who occasionally made calculated risks when it came to defending her friends and family from serious threats.

She also apparently thought about herself in the third person, from time to time.

But that little act of bold defiance seemed to have done the trick, because one of those massive, spindly legs lifted silently off the ground, and stepped over the line of tree boughs that made up the edge of the circle.

I held my breath. It was going to be closer than I’d planned. I hadn’t expected the thing to be so stupidly huge. Some of those websites I’d visited needed a serious rewrite.

It was watching me. There wasn’t a demon that existed that wouldn’t take a witch as a credible threat. But I wasn’t the focus of its attention, oh no. Most of those hideous, glowing eyes were directed firmly towards Poppy. She was feeding the demon well, and it was enthralled.

Protective fury flared up in my chest, burning away my fear. This thing had come to my town, had hunted and killed, and now it thought it could take my best friend? Clearly, it hadn’t learned its lesson with the last witch it tangled with.

I kept my hands on Poppy. It was going to be tighter than I’d like, and I was going to have to be ready to move if I needed. No way was that thing getting one shadowy finger on her.

Another step forward, and the embers of the fire seemed to give the Tsuchigumo more definition, made the edges of its body sharper. It also glinted off what I seriously hoped was not saliva dripping off its mandibles.

Poppy made a small sound, too weak to even be called a whimper, and the Tsuchigumo moved forward again. Its last leg moved past the line of pine boughs that made up the edge of the circle.

I slammed my hand down on the dirt and sent my magic snaking through the circle. It lit up with scarlet light, looking like fire as it blazed. Carefully hidden between the evergreen branches, the last remnants of the Tsuchigumo’s silk prison, gleamed silver. They looked like threads of phosphorus, burning with an intense radiance, and the spider demon reeled back, sensing the trap too late.

It lashed out at me with one nasty, barbed leg, but Lorcan was there in an instant, his fangs barred as he batted the limb to the side. I couldn’t hold in my nasty little grin anymore. The circle was a trap for the Tsuchigumo only. The rest of us could move in and out all we wanted.

I hooked my arms into Poppy’s armpits and dragged her further away from the monster that was trying to drain her of everything that made her Poppy, and the Tsuchigumo tried to chase after, but Lorcan was always in the way, keeping it back.

The spider demon stretched up to its full height, which, spell, was actually very large. It tried to just walk over Lorcan to get past him, since circles didn’t tend to have a roof on them, but a blast of furious cold slapped it across its face, and it recoiled with a shrill sound. It skittered back, blind, trying to knock the ice away from its eyes, and Taliyah readied another clumsy burst.

She must have realized that the mundane weapon was too big a risk to us and the neighborhood both and she’d gone with something she was a little less comfortable with, personally. I thought it was the better choice. Spiders weren’t cold weather creatures, after all.

Once I had Poppy out of immediate trampling range, I sat back on my heels. “Now!”

The rest of the coven piled into the circle with us. They all converged on Poppy, while Lorcan and Taliyah kept the Tsuchigumo at bay. I could hear the high buzzing scream of the spider demon as Lorcan got a good hit on it, and the tinkling crack of Taliyah’s ice as it broke and reformed. My breath fogged in the air as the warmth of the night drained away, but all of my focus was on Poppy.

There wasn’t time for delicacy. Her skin, always fair, was looking gray and brittle, more like the papery husk of a wasp’s nest instead of healthy, living flesh. I kept one hand on the side of her neck, making sure that she was still breathing. Her pulse was thready and weak, but still fluttering against my fingers. I mumbled every healing charm I knew under my breath, feeding a trickle of my magic into her, now that the Tsuchigumo was, hopefully, too distracted to try and finish its meal.

Olga and Betanya knelt down on either side of me, while Imani and Maverick stayed down by Poppy’s feet. Together, they all reached forward, their hands blazing with magic, and they grabbed fistfuls of the curse strands, and started ripping them away. Poppy whimpered, her head whipping to the side. I tried to soothe her, stroking a hand over her brow, and clearing off a few strands while I did it.

It wasn’t pretty. It wasn’t elegant. It was furious, and desperate, and so full of anger that I was half surprised that the sticky bits of gray webbing didn’t go up in flames on the spot.

Poppy was ours , our own. She was a founding member of Circle Scapegrace, and anyone in the supernatural world knew, if you came for one witch, you came for the entire coven.

Hunk after hunk of curse was torn away, while in the distance, the Tsuchigumo gave a disturbing scream that was more of a high-pitched buzz. I could hear the scuffle of its legs, the ground being torn up. At one point, someone must have stepped in the remains of the fire, sending embers scattering everywhere until the circle grounds looked like a field of stars.

It was Betanya who finished first. She’d always been skilled that way. She rose to her feet, and before she turned, I could see the fire in her eyes.

With a vicious motion of her hand, Betanya launched her collection of curse strands right back at the Tsuchigumo. The gray webbing stuck fast, and the draining curse hit even harder. The spider demon staggered, one of its legs losing consistency.

One by one, the others rose. And one by one, they threw their collected webbing back at the demon. It shrilled, tried to avoid the sticky strands, but soon masses of thick gray webbing clung to its shadowy hide, and its seemingly delicate legs buckled.

Lorcan and Taliyah darted back out of the way, and they stood with the coven as the Tsuchigumo thrashed and lashed out with legs that were only in our world sometimes.

It was more difficult than I was strictly comfortable with to stand and step away from Poppy, but I did it. The others would make sure she was stable and okay, but this had to be done.

I moved until I was level with Lorcan and Taliyah. She had a lacy pattern of frost creeping up both her forearms, with her silver hair gleaming in the moonlight with its own soft radiance. The narrowed, watchful gaze had nothing to do with the Faerie princess, though. That look was all Chief of Police Taliyah.

Lorcan’s eyes were shining green in the dark, backlighting like a cat’s. His teeth were barred, full lips pulled back off his fangs, and his muscles were tensed and ready to pounce at any second. If I spent a second too long admiring the corded muscles in his forearms, well, I didn’t think anyone could blame me. It had been way, way too long.

I turned and faced the spider demon.

In one hand, I clutched a nasty, squirming pile of curse strands. They writhed between my fingers like worms. Or maybe leeches, since worms didn’t bite.

In my other hand, I clutched a tiny scrap of silk, no bigger than my own palm. It was the largest piece of the original silk that was left. It was fragile, crumbling a little around the edges, worn down by time and the corruption it had been containing. But it was enough. It would have to be.

I launched the curse first, right back into the monster’s face, but I didn’t let go. I felt the curse connect, felt it stick, nasty and greasy and clinging in a way that made me desperately want a shower.

I’d shielded myself with my magic, but I still felt the echoes of the curse as it got to work trying to drain the Tsuchigumo. The thing was probably ticked off, maybe even a little scared. Plenty for the spell to stick to and glut on.

That big, thrashing body lost its crisp edges, fading back into the shadows as its intended meal started feeding on it instead. It was eating its own tail, and finding nothing of substance at all.

A spindly, barbed leg lashed out, and I didn’t even bother to duck. There wasn’t anything left of it, and it felt like the night breeze passing by.

I held out the other hand, with that one pale piece of silk lying on my palm.

Then I wrapped my other hand in the curse strands, winding them around and around in my grip.

And I yanked.