Oh, no, I thought.

I hurried forward, praying to the Morningstar that the spider wouldn’t detect me. I couldn’t let her soul in its already terrified state get stuck inside the silk, still attached to her body as the spider began to eat it.

The stink of the spider’s rotten breath and the miasma that poured off it filled my nostrils. I gagged, covered my face with my sleeve and hoped Lucifer’s sword would cut through the ectoplasmic cord that held this poor woman’s soul to her body.

I usually use magic to cut the soul since my mother’s dagger had melted in the flesh of a dragon on my front lawn a couple of months before. But I worried the spider would notice magic being performed under its nonexistent nose, and I didn’t have time to do the usual ritual and offer the woman a choice.

I crept closer to the spider busily wrapping up its prey. The soul was struggling, pulling on the cord that bound her to her body. I lifted the sword and struck a clean blow just under the spider’s jaws.

The soul broke free, screaming, the incorporeal body dissolving and re-forming in her panic and confusion. The spider immediately dropped the body and made a high-pitched chittering noise. I guess it had noticed something, after all. It didn’t seem to see me, because I stood frozen in place less than a foot away from its fangs. But it knew something was wrong, and its chitter had notified the other blood-bloated monsters dangling over my head.

They lowered quickly to their companion, and I saw stars for a moment. I hoped I wouldn’t pass out from panic. If you are a moderate arachnophobe, the last place you want to be is in an enclosed space with three spiders the size of CTA buses. Actually, after this I was pretty sure I’d be a full-on arachnophobe. Forget moderation.

The spiders began to click and hiss at one another. Since proximity was making me hyperventilate I backed away slowly, holding the sword in front of me and trying to make my footfalls as soft as possible. It seemed that I might be able to get away and get help.

Until the heel of my boot knocked into the leg of one of the wooden chairs. The person in the chair toppled sideways and, separated from the machine, began to bellow at the top of his lungs.

The first spider screamed and bounded forward in a giant leap to the place where I stood, invisible still.

I didn’t have time to run or to think. I saw the spider’s huge, hairy body above my head, coming down on me, and I jumped back and pushed the sword into the spider’s crazy multifaceted eye as it landed.

The spider jerked, screeched, thrashed its legs on the floor. I set my feet and yanked the sword free, leaving the spider to its death throes. The blade was unharmed, but some acidic goo had run out of the spider’s eyes and burned the top of my right hand and the cuff of my coat.

“This is why I can’t have anything nice,” I muttered. “Including hands.”

The other spiders, quite aware that someone was in the warehouse who was not supposed to be, reared up on their silks a few feet—the better to survey the area with, one assumed. I was torn between running to get help and trying to defeat the other two spiders. I worried that a lot of innocent bystanders would be harmed if I stayed and tried to take the spiders out.

Thinking it would be safer for the prisoners if I went out and returned with backup, I resumed my slow backward walk.

The spiders screamed and dropped toward me with frightening rapidity. I didn’t know what gave me away until I looked downward and saw my boot prints in the slippery blood pouring from the spider’s body.

“Sometimes I wonder if J.B.’s right about me Three-Stooging my way through life,” I said out loud.

There was nothing to do now except stand and fight and try to limit collateral damage. The man I knocked over was crying himself hoarse because of his separation from the cameras.

I lifted off from the ground as the spiders landed on the floor near the body of the dead one. I swooped over the head of the nearest eight-legged monster and then arrowed downward with the sword pointed in front of me. I pushed the blade up to the hilt into the spider’s body. As I did I shot electricity through the blade and into the spider. I was getting really good at that spell.

There were the smells of flesh cooking and blackened blood, and the spider went still as its insides were fried.

I yanked out the sword and turned toward the other spider, but it was gone.

10

A WHISPER OF MOVEMENT, THE FAINTEST OF CLICKS. I looked up and saw the other spider mere inches from me. I leapt backward off the electrocuted spider. Well, okay, it was a lot more like an awkward motion in which I tumbled ass-over-elbows and landed hard on my side in a big icky pool of spider gore. Lara Croft I am not.

The last spider landed on the body of its compatriot with a triumphant chitter, and then it realized I wasn’t there.

I pushed to my feet, discovered the sword had gone flying somewhere and I couldn’t see it. I tried to raise my arms to shoot nightfire at the spider and noticed something else. My right arm hurt like hell, and it was hanging at an awkward angle.

“Dislocated shoulder. Awesome,” I said through my teeth. It hurt.

The spider leapt toward the place where I’d landed in blood. I shot upward on my wings, threw nightfire at it with my good arm. The nightfire bounced harmlessly off its hairy body. All I was really doing was giving away my position as the spider threw webs and swung closer and closer to the source of the blasts.

Throwing nightfire and flying all over the place like a demented pinball wasn’t doing any good. I hung as still as I could, moving my wings only just enough to keep me aloft. The spider paused, suspended on its string, twisting in the air and looking for me. I made barely an eddy in the thick cloud of miasma that blanketed the air.