A Debut Unpaid (San Amaro Investigations)

Chapter 5

CHAPTER FIVE

I put my hand on the doorknob to the kitchen and took a long breath.

After a few moments, King murmured, “Getting cold feet?”

“When you’re about to open the door to a nightmare, you’re welcome to do it as fast as you want,” I snarked.

I twisted the handle and pulled the door open as quietly as I could.

The hallway was almost unrecognizable. Before it had that clean, modern look that spoke of extreme wealth. Why keep things when you could always replace them if you needed to use them again?

Now, there were thick webs crisscrossing the hallway, leading somewhere. I reached out to touch one, trying to get a sense of what we were working with, but King grabbed my hand, his grip tight. He shook his head when I glanced at him.

“Spiders use their webbing to sense their prey.” He gestured to the trap laid out in front of us.

“So now we’re stuck in the kitchen?” I asked. “Great.”

King was examining the gossamer threads. When I’d first seen them, they’d looked white, but as I shifted my angle, they disappeared. It reminded me of some glamours I had seen in the Far Realm.

After a long moment, King pointed. “I think I see a way through.”

“Does it involve both of us getting stuck together in spiderweb?” I made a show of looking him up and down, letting him know I wouldn’t have minded getting stuck with him.

Ignoring my innuendo, King crept out into the hallway, avoiding the webbing with a twist of his back like one of those cat burglars in a heist movie. How was he so flexible? I pulled my back if I reached for a jar of pickles on the lowest shelf of my refrigerator.

The air in the hallway made goosebumps rise on my arms after the warmth of the kitchen. I kept close to King, because he seemed to know what he was doing and I was at a bit of a loss.

If I was dealing with werewolves, I was in my comfort zone. Witches, yes. Even poltergeists were something I could handle.

Spiders? No. Why did McCallum even have a giant spider?

I asked that aloud, and King shot me a look. “It’s certainly cheaper than a guard dog. And he can leave it here as long as he needs.”

“Because it can go back to eating flies, or even an occasional rat,” I said, realization striking me. “And, what, we’re just… extra-large rats?”

I twisted, following King’s movements as we avoided another string of spider silk. They were getting denser as we approached the entryway, and I saw flashes of green in the distance.

“Is that your magic?” I jerked my chin towards the strobe lighting, unwilling to make any move that might jostle the web.

King’s back had gone straight, as though he was about to be inspected by a drill sergeant. Standing next to him was like standing next to a movie star; he was so attractive that even being in his proximity made me feel awkward. After our kiss, my lips still tingled when I looked at him.

“Yeah,” he said. “If the circle is going off like that, the spider is trying to break in and get to Smith.”

I wasn’t sure what time it was, but it was definitely late. We were well past midnight and approaching the time of night that always felt endless, the stretch of hours when your body knew you should be asleep, but your brain was very much awake.

I probably looked as half dead as I felt and hated that King looked just as attractive as I remembered.

King wore his suit with confidence, as though he was used to them. The last time I had seen him, he had been in a beat cop’s uniform. He’d looked great in that as well, but I could already tell him in this suit was going to be featuring in some fantasies of mine.

If we survived this whole experience. I wasn’t putting our odds very high, because ninety percent of the time when I saw a spider in my apartment, I screamed as loud as I could until the thing scuttled under some furniture.

Spider – one

Parker – zero

In fact, if we were playing a game, I would have to start with a pretty high handicap. Because up until now, the only spider I had managed to squash had been out of surprise when I had been attempting to flee.

In the massive entryway, the spider had spun its web.

If I was the kind of guy who watched nature documentaries, I probably could have determined what kind of web it was, and thus what kind of enormous spider we were dealing with. Instead, my brain had shorted out and all I could think was I had to act like the rodeo clown with this thing while King got the easy job of bringing down a massive chandelier. I mean, if an Andrew Lloyd Webber hero could do it, surely it couldn’t be that hard.

King was right, the spider was attempting to eat his partner, but luckily was impeded by the magic that King had left behind. The spider circled Smith, walking along its webbing. Smith was still hovering in the middle of the room, where King had lowered him from the ceiling. The hovering body confused the spider, who kept shooting webbing at Smith to reattach him to the ceiling, where, I assumed, the spider was going to take its meal.

“So I get it down, and you kill it,” I said. “If this works, how do you feel about becoming my live-in spider killer?”

“Well, I’ve heard worse propositions,” King said. “At least you’re being honest about your needs.”

I let my eyes trail down his suit, where the fabric clung to his ass. “If I’m being honest, there might be other requirements for the job.”

King shot me an amused look. “We need to clear this webbing.”

Agreeing, I reached in my bag and took out a handful of flour. Closing my eyes, I began murmuring the spell.

My mind raced; I’d never done a spell like this before. I could practically hear my foster mom’s voice in my head reminding me that it was jazz. If I thought it sounded good, it was probably fine. The basics of kitchen witchcraft were baked into my bones. I could do this.

The ache of missing her distracted me for a half moment, but then I was back to the spell.

Unlike fae magic, witchcraft has different ways to achieve the same goal. The seeming randomness, the fact that there wasn’t one way to do anything meant I often found myself stymied in any attempt to do even the most basic magic.

If my sister Laurel had been at the house, she could have made quick work of the spider on her own. Her murdered rats still haunted me. As I didn’t have her brutal improvisation skills, I was going to need every bit of help that King could give me.

With my eyes closed, I focused on weighing down the flour, emphasizing how heavy it was. When my arm ached, I tossed it at the webbing. Everywhere the flour hit, the webbing came down, slamming into the floor with a loud slapping sound. I hadn’t thrown enough to take down the entire thing, but half of its web disappearing definitely got the spider’s attention.

Darting into the empty space, I pulled out my chalk. I wasn’t sure what spell I’d draw yet, but I knew I had to be ready.

King, meanwhile, had activated a circle, and tossed it onto the remaining webbing where it caught on the sticky substance — a fly the spider did not want to catch. The webbing burnt up, like hair touching a birthday candle. The spider swung its gaze to him, and I got a glimpse of those infinitely black eyes again.

A shiver twisted up my spine, like I was a screw someone had over-tightened. King darted to the side, and I reached out with a finger, plucking one of the remaining threads. Taking out my lighter, I raised it to the webbing, a threat that even the spider understood.

The spider veered back to me, its massive body swinging as it began crawling towards me.

Okay, spider, we were going to play. I was wearing my big boy panties and everything. Maybe it was the scariest thing I’d ever seen, but I could handle it. After all, if I ever told anyone what I really was, I’d be featuring in their nightmares, so I was pretty sure I could take on a living nightmare of my own.

As it approached, my automatic spider scream rose in my throat, but I kept my lips closed, releasing only a softly muffled screech.

King glanced at me, but I shot him a thumbs up. I was okay. At least I could pretend to be okay until the spider was reduced to goo on the floor.

I started simply, chanting some nonsense words while I used my actual magic to summon wind. The wind curled under the spider’s two back legs, unseating it as it descended the wall. The massive thing was stable. With all eight of its legs, it would be almost impossible to unseat. However, messing with its limbs had the desired effect of distracting the spider.

“How long do you need?” I called King.

“Give me at least fifteen minutes,” he answered.

I swallowed the bile surging in my throat. The spider adjusted its approach, shifting its weight so the wind jostled it, but none of its feet came up.

How was I going to distract something that big without making myself a Parker Ferro appetizer? I could see its mouth, what looked like sharp fangs and hairy mandibles moving in a way that made my brain collapse for a second into white, hot terror. Grabbing a handful of the flour again, I cast a new spell, emphasizing the powdery nature, how blinding it would be if I hit the spider’s eight eyes with flour.

Then, I whispered to the wind for help and threw the flour straight into the spider’s face.

The thing about kitchen witchcraft is that a single substance can cause multiple different outcomes. When I chanted the weight spell, the flour had the heft of a pair of dumbbells. With the powdery focus, it was like shooting mace at the spider, right into the thing’s eyes.

The only difference was what I wanted the material to do and the spell that I chanted.

Flour is multipurpose. All-purpose flour, Laurel would joke. I could think of a couple of other uses for it, spells that would highlight distinct qualities, and I held them in my reserve in case I needed them.

The spider reared back from my homemade pepper spray, shrieking and using its front legs to claw at its face. I danced away, habit making me brush my magic against the spirits in the room around me.

No, I reminded myself, I couldn’t use my own magic. That would be too obvious, something for King to note and take back with him to his new job in Paranormal Crimes.

As soon as he mentioned my real magic to anyone who had more experience with witchcraft, the game would be up.

So, I had to stick with using witchcraft.

The spider reared back, now on only four legs as it tried to clear its eyes from the temporary blinding I’d given it. I reached in my bag again and pulled out the salt. There wasn’t a lot, but I had some left. Would it even work against something this large?

In the kitchen, the spiders had been small. The drying spell had worked as advertised, cracking open their skin and exposing their insides to air. I didn’t have nearly enough salt to desiccate this spider’s massive body.

But what if I just did one leg? Would losing a single appendage throw the spider off its game?

I wanted to get close, for accuracy, but my feet froze on the floor, my heart going rabbit-fast as I thought about gaining any proximity to the spider.

It was about the height of an oversized truck. One of those monster trucks that says more about a man’s supposed prowess than simply being a vehicle he enjoys driving.

The alchemy he was working on clearly distracted King, so I took a chance and used a gust of wind to blow half of the remaining salt onto the spider’s back legs.

The reaction was immediate.

One of the legs got the brunt of the salt and began to crack. I could see jagged openings forming in the spider’s exoskeleton, and whatever soft flesh was underneath was clearly not designed for being out in the open, because I could see it darkening and drying as soon as it was exposed to air.

Shifting focus, the spider gave up on its facial wounds, landing heavily on the pine wood floor, and shrieked again. I wasn’t sure if the sound was real, or if it was all in my head: a mix of the spider’s exhalations and the terror that was still twisting my stomach.

The spider circled itself, almost like a dog chasing its tail. It was so distracted that I took a moment to sidle closer to King.

“You good?” I asked.

“Almost done,” he said. “I had to reinforce the shields around Smith. I couldn’t risk the spider getting through.”

“Wait, this whole time I’ve been playing spider bait, you haven’t even been working?”

“I’m working now,” King said tersely. He frowned at the spider, still circling its dead leg. “What did you do?”

“If we survive, I’ll explain it. You just get?—”

My words were cut off by the shock of something sticky and whisper-light hitting my skin. Spider silk.