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CHAPTER ONE

T here you are, little butterfly.

No one mourns the insect trapped in silken strands.

Unnoticed. Overlooked.

Struggle as it might, it would only tire itself in time.

Nature simply running its course.

Serrik reached out and draped a single golden thread between two points, carefully arranging it to be just so.

His spell would need to be meticulous, for he sought to reach outside the walls of his twice-deep prison. A cage within a cage, locked three times over. The temptation was to rush. For he had not been prepared, and this little butterfly was flitting in the breeze, her wings so colorful and delicate.

But he could not. One misstep, and it would all go awry. It would take an effort that would leave him tapped and exhausted. It would leave his prey vulnerable to the jaws of all the other fiends and predators who had come to call his prison theirs as well.

Yet it had been so long since his last attempt. He could not let this one go. Another strand of gold thread, stretched between the ornately carved wooden frame before him.

He could see her in his minds’ eye. Walking in the rain, weeping. Destitute. Distraught. Destroyed. Her long dark hair was soaked, hanging in strands around her face, fighting to maintain their curls despite it all. Her tears were mixing with the deluge of the storm. She had a backpack over her shoulder, and her clothing would have perhaps been more dry if she had been tossed into the surf.

Human contraptions that Serrik did not recognize—things of transportation, by his guess—whipped past her at alarming speed, their occupants blissfully unaware or callously choosing to ignore her agony.

Even in the darkness of the storm, he could see her eyes were a beautiful shade of gray-green.

A butterfly with gossamer wings the world would never miss.

A third strand, and a pattern was emerging—a web that spoke of both potential, disaster, and pain.

How long had it been since his last attempt? How long since Gregor had learned the lesson of what it meant to disappoint him? Decades? Centuries? It did not matter. Time blurred in this place.

But it had not blurred his skill.

A vision danced over Serrik’s mind. One of her standing up on a great bridge rock. She gazed out into the black, starless night, before leaping into the nothingness.

Oh, yes. You will do nicely.

The last of the threads, and his work was done. With a whisper of words, his spell flared to life. The walls of his prison pressed back—as was their purpose. But he had long since studied its hairline cracks. Their slightest faults.

He knew them by heart.

For he had designed them, after all.

The barriers bent—just enough. Just enough. Like pressing his ear to a door to eavesdrop on a conversation, he could but barely eke out enough influence to rustle the leaves upon a tree.

She was so close he could almost taste her sorrow. Her rage at being abandoned. Rejected. The agony of having nowhere that she belonged. Her desperation to matter and the hopelessness that came with knowing that she simply…did not.

Each was a thread upon which he could pull. Each was a strand that he could press his will upon.

Here, you shall matter.

Here, you can have purpose.

Here, you will have a home.

Her steps slowed. She stopped. Her gaze tracked toward the woods beside her. She furrowed her brow, as though she saw something in the woods that she did not understand.

Come to me.

Come to me.

Come to me.

And lo, though it were madness to do so, the dark-haired, green-eyed young woman took a step from the street and into the darkness of the rainy woods.

All his power, and he could do nothing but summon a breeze to rustle the leaves upon the trees.

But sometimes, that was all it took to send a butterfly’s path into the Web that waited for her.

Ava was having the worst day of her life.

Which was the culmination of the worst two years of her life. Everything had slowly been building up to this moment—this one, horrible fucking day.

She tried to remember a worse one, and couldn’t. Literally went through every day she could recall as she walked through the outskirts of North Adams in the pouring Massachusetts rain…and nope. This one was the worst. She had no coat, but at least it was summer. Small favors.

The deluge had quickly soaked through her simple black t-shirt. It was one of her favorites. It’d made her laugh the moment she’d seen it—with its cartoon Medusa head and big bold text that read The Female Gaze over it. When she had to pack up whatever she could carry out with her, it’d been her top choice.

Ava was having the worst day of her life, but not because it was raining.

But because, as of an hour ago?

She was homeless.

Honestly, she should’ve seen it coming. She should have. Her father was a complete asshole, and this had been coming from the moment he’d walked out.

She’d screamed at him the day he’d walked out on her and her mother two years ago. Telling him he couldn’t just do that—as if shouting that in his stupid face would make him change his mind. Yeah. It hadn’t worked. He’d left. He’d picked up his bag, shut the door, and left their little house in North Adams that he’d shared with her mother— his wife —for twenty-five years.

A wife who had been dying of fucking cancer for four years.

Whose treatment and daily care was “taking a serious and unfair toll on him.”

Never mind that Ava had given up her senior year of college in Boston to be there by Mom’s side as she died. Never mind that she’d given up all her friends, her job prospect with an architectural firm in the summer after she’d graduated, everything—to be with her family.

A family that was gone the moment her mom’s funeral was over.

She figured her dad would move back in the moment Mom was gone.

Oh, he had.

With a new woman.

And their three kids.

And had promptly told Ava to get the fuck out.

“You have to understand,” he’d said. “You just…remind me too much of her. And you’re an adult.”

No. She didn’t understand. But he owned the house. So, out she went. With just the bag on her back and that was it. Nowhere to go. And no friends who hadn’t gone off to college.

At least in the rain, she could hide the fact that she’d been crying for about an hour. Where was she supposed to go? What was she supposed to do?

Her cellphone service was already dead. Her father had canceled everything that was in her mother’s name without even thinking about it. So she had no way to search for any local shelters.

The idea of walking into a random coffee shop and asking someone for help made her skin crawl. Would they think she was on drugs? Opioids were a huge problem in this area. Would they think she was just another useless early twenty-something living on the street?

Well, that’s what I am, now.

Go to a church? Ugh. No. Fuck, no. That’s all she needed. To be told she needed to accept Jesus in exchange for a place to sleep and a pat on the head.

Rage filled her, suddenly. An unexpected anger. No one was around, save for the random cars that drove past, so nobody cared when she let out a choked, furious scream that ended in a sob.

This wasn’t fair.

But life wasn’t fair.

And it was getting late, and she was exhausted, and she was soaked. She needed a dry, safe place to sleep before she could try to come up with a game plan the next day.

She’d debated wedging herself under a bridge or in a doorjamb somewhere, but that didn’t seem very safe. There were always stories on the news about how homeless women in particular were common victims of assault—sexual and otherwise.

There was no path ahead of her. Nothing for her in her future.

The worst kind of thought entered her mind.

One that she didn’t know how to handle. It wasn’t something she’d ever contemplated before. But there it was.

What’s the point in going on?

A rock lodged itself in her throat and she released another broken sob. She didn’t want to die. She didn’t. She wanted to fucking live. But what was her life going to become, now? What hope did she have? None. None!

No. No, she couldn’t give up that easily. She couldn’t. She just couldn’t. This was all too fresh in her mind, too raw. She had to take a second, get some sleep, and think about things rationally in the morning.

That meant she had to get some sleep. Somewhere dry. And somewhere safe.

But where?

Then…it hit Ava.

Her steps slowed to a stop. And she looked off into the woods. North Adams was bordered on one side by one of the thickest woods in New England—and some of the only woods that were never cut down when the European settlers showed up.

School trips in Berkshire County were super fucking boring so they went into the woods a lot. Every year was a thing about the Mohawk Trail. Or a trip to the modern art museum. Or both.

But that meant she remembered all the weird abandoned structures that were out there—old abandoned places back from when people in the fifties actually went camping and grilling. And before people got sued into oblivion when others fell through crumbling cement structures.

Including one tower in the middle of nowhere that had been abandoned long ago because someone had jumped off it, or…died there, or something—the urban legends were all tangled up. Either way, it was somewhere dry, and hopefully she’d be…the only homeless person trying to take shelter there.

If she remembered correctly, it wasn’t too far from where she was. Maybe a mile into the woods. Or two.

But what other choice did she have?

With a wavering breath, she took a right and struck off into the darkness. It was funny how things looked obvious in retrospect. But in the moment, things were so easily missed.

She should have wondered how she could have seen where she was going. How the path into the woods was strangely lighter than the darkness around her.

How there seemed to be flickering, glimmering orbs ahead of her, showing her the way to go.

But the deeper she went into the trees, the less those things bothered her. The less those thoughts even sunk in. She had them— something is wrong. This doesn’t feel right. What’s happening? Am I high? But they skipped across her mind like a stone across the surface of a pond but never sank any deeper.

It was like she was dreaming. Voices whispered to her, calling her deeper. Singing to her. Telling her to follow. And she was helpless to listen. She walked through the woods, the orbs shining around her, leading her through, as she listened to the rain and felt…a strange sense of peace wash over her.

This was where she was supposed to be. The direction she was supposed to go. This felt right. Slowly, her tears stopped flowing. She sniffled, wiping her face. She was still soaked. It was still shit-pouring rain. But she wasn’t shivering anymore.

The path in front of her was beautiful. Lined in flowers and ivy. Even in the darkness of the rain, it was filled with colors, like a dream.

It wasn’t until Ava found herself in a clearing, looking up at a large, seemingly abandoned building—no, an ancient estate, that she had a snap of clarity.

Jolting in surprise, she whirled to look behind her. “How did—” The path behind her was gone. There was only a wall of thickets too dense to pass through. And whatever light she had been following was gone now—it was too dark to even try to find a way through, she’d shred herself to bits.

Shivering in the sudden cold that settled over her, she took a step away from the briars, shaking her head in disbelief. What had just happened to her? How did she get here? One minute she’d been on the street, then she’d been walking through the woods, and…why’d she go into the woods? For shelter, but that was idiocy, when she had no flashlight or?—

Whispers, crawling over her like spiders, made her gasp and turn sharply back to face the abandoned building behind her. The moment she did, the sound was gone. She’d never seen the place before. And she’d grown up in North Adams—if anything like this existed in town, her and her teenage friends would’ve been all over it.

It looked Baroque. She knew her architecture. That was her major, after all. She had hoped someday to become a world-renowned historical architect, until her mother had gotten sick.

An abandoned building like this had no business being here. None.

“What the fuck is going on … ?” She took a step toward the building, shaking her head in disbelief. Of all the strange things that had happened to her that night, seeing an abandoned French estate in the middle of the deep New England woods was the thing that had her now totally convinced that something was deeply wrong.

The exterior of the building had once been beautiful and pristine limestone. But now, it was streaked and stained with rain and neglect. Nature was trying to reclaim the structure that man had built. If man had put it here.

She now had her doubts.

Vines were climbing the exterior, sticking to the cracks and crevices of the stones, following the lines of the porous mortar in a zig-zagging pattern up the winding surface toward the second floor, or sneaking inside through the cracked and broken windows.

The raked slate roof was missing many of its tiles. Much of the wrought iron detailing was long since rusted away. Now that she got closer to it, something else stuck out to her. Something that had her tilting her head to the side in confusion.

Something about it…was very wrong. She’d mistaken it for the more elaborate French style of Baroque architecture from farther away, but now that she got up closer to it? That wasn’t it at all.

This didn’t look like anything she’d ever seen before in her life. The detailing looked more like something out of a twisted illustration from some sort of nightmarish dream, the wrought iron works featuring sharply-pointed and vicious barbs instead of acanthus leaves. Instead of the typical floral patterns—jagged, pointed weaponry took their place.

This was wrong. She kept repeating it in her head. This was wrong. This was wrong.

So she had no business walking toward it, but there she was, helpless to stop herself. It was like someone was standing behind her, pushing her. She was unable to stop her footsteps as she climbed the stairs toward the front door that looked as though it hadn’t moved in two hundred years.

She felt like she was having an out-of-body experience. The whispers came again, guiding her, urging her forward.

Those old, rotted wooden doors swung open. Pulling in a gasp of surprise, Ava found herself staring at a gorgeous and perfectly maintained 17 th century interior, in all its flawless splendor. It was too much detail to absorb, with its inlaid floors, elaborate columns, and painted archways depicting fantastical creatures—some she recognized but most she didn’t—in scenes that were both magical and violent.

Candles burned in sconces on the walls and in the crystal chandeliers that hung from the ceiling over the grand staircase that led upstairs. Warmth flooded from within, a far cry from the cold, dreary rain she was standing in.

In awe, she stepped inside. But something instinctual kicked in.

Grabbing hold of the doorknob with one hand, she gripped it tight.

Something inside was calling to her. Something inside wanted her to have it. Come and see. I am your purpose. I am your new meaning.

No. No, no, no! She knew that if she followed that voice, it was all over. Somehow, someway, that voice inside of her was screaming to turn and run. Run as fast as she could, and never come back. She could feel the rusted edges of the abandoned doorknob cutting into her palm, so hard that she might be bleeding.

A hand settled on her shoulder.

It should have terrified her. Instead, Ava felt her eyes drift shut. The feeling of whoever was standing at her back washed over her like a warm blanket being wrapped around her. She could smell something like a mix of citrus, of herbs, and of ink.

A voice like rolling thunder on the horizon rumbled at her back. “It is too late. You know this.”

She did. She was trapped. But she didn’t want to accept it. She didn’t want to accept a lot of things that’d happened to her today.

“Let go. All that which you desire may be found within this place…and I will help you.”

Ava was a fucking idiot sometimes. She knew that.

Her hand on the doorknob relaxed.

And the warmth of the room fled.

So did the presence at her back. Opening her eyes, the illusion was gone.

Ava took a staggered step back toward the barricaded door that she knew hadn’t, and wouldn’t ever, open for her. Flaking bits of plaster crunched underneath her feet.

“Wh—” Ava was shivering. She was so cold. And now the panic was coming back in full force. Where the room had once been warm and lush and inviting, it was now cold, and barren, and overgrown with trees and vines. The structure of the building was decayed and rotted, the ceiling caving in and the friezes on the walls long since cracked and falling away in portions.

“No. No , this can’t be real, this can’t—” Ava stared down at her bloodied palm. It certainly felt real.

A voice whispered to her, the same as before. Both corporeal and not, but she knew she wasn’t making it up.

“Welcome to the Web, little butterfly…now, if you do not wish to be eaten, I suggest you start running.”

“What?”

But that was when she heard it.

The skittering. Turning toward the noise, her eyes went wide. She didn’t know what they were.

She didn’t want to know what they were.

Somewhere between a rat and a millipede. Too many legs, too much fur, and too many teeth. And too many of them overall—a swarm of them, cascading over the floor and along the walls and ceiling like a great mottled brownish-black wave coming after her, all chittering and snapping and shuffling.

Suddenly, the advice seemed wonderfully sound.

Screaming, she ran.

Ava really was having the worst day of her life.