A Debut Unpaid (San Amaro Investigations)

Chapter 6

CHAPTER SIX

Unlike the glob of webbing that had hit King earlier, this wasn’t a warning shot. It pinned my arm to my body, and I struggled to get free before the spider could pounce, or attack, or whatever it was spiders did with the bugs that got caught in their webs.

The spider had given up on its dead leg and realized that the problem was the two of us. Reaching out with its two front legs, before King or I could even realize the terrible situation we were in, the spider pressed us together and quickly spun its silk.

We were being wrapped up, like a child tying two companions together in a game of pirates.

Normally, I wouldn’t have minded being this close to King, but I could feel the panic rising in my throat. King might not be able to see it, but with each shaky breath I could feel my magic exploding out of me, waking the whole room around me.

If I didn’t get control of this soon, we would end up in the same situation we had when I had taken down the poltergeist. And that would be a little bit harder to explain to a Paranormal Crimes captain than it was to a beat cop.

“Ferro,” King said. “You good?”

“This wasn’t how I pictured getting close to you.” I managed a smirk.

Before my emotions could get the best of me, King wiggled a hand free and slapped one of his spells to the silk the spider was spinning us in.

I felt a wash of warmth surrounded me, as though I had stepped into a hot tub after a long day. It actually relaxed me.

Blinking open my eyes, the silk had disappeared, burned up by whatever carefully constructed spell King had just activated. Alchemists really were too neurotic about their work, if they had spells for burning up spiderwebs . A remaining ember of fire was tracing up the silk that the spider was still throwing at us, actually burning the tip of her body where she spun webs. The spider reared back, its dead leg weighing it down.

It turned, grabbing hold of the leg and ripping it off of its body.

Viscera leaked out onto the floor as it threw the leg at us. We ducked, getting behind a low couch as the spider began moving in uneven circles, still leaking the green goo that it was made of.

“Thanks for the save,” I said.

“You really don’t like spiders,” King quipped.

My heart was still racing, but my senses were coming to me again. In my panic, my magic had woken so many different spirits in the room, and I could feel them all curious, all waiting for interaction. I could use that.

“Does anyone?” I echoed his earlier sentiment. “But, honestly, I think I’m more afraid of spiders than I am of vampires.”

“Really?” King asked.

“I’ve seen my sister take out a vamp. No problem.” I mimed a head falling off of the body. “But spiders… wait. Spiders lay eggs.”

Both of us frowned at that, and I realized that if fate was an actual entity, I had just invited it in for tea.

“You don’t think —” King started.

We both glanced up and, there, on the ceiling, was a heavy egg sack.

“The babies wouldn’t be as big, right?” I asked.

“No.” But King’s voice was hesitant.

I shook my head. “Okay. One thing at a time. Let’s take the spider out, and then deal with the eggs.”

The spider had retreated to a corner of the room, still nursing its missing leg. If it had been so accurate shooting us both with webbing, its eyes must had cleared from the flour.

King waited for me to go first, which I supposed made sense, as I was playing the role of rodeo clown and while he actually rode the bull.

Metaphorically, I hoped. I was pretty sure that any attraction I felt for him would disappear the instant I saw him on the back of an enormous spider.

I could still feel the whisper of our skin pressed together, his firm body, long legs. Even his breath smelled good.

I wanted that body. But, in order to have it, we needed to crush the spider with the chandelier.

“Hey!” I waved my arms over my head, and the spider turned to me, still with too many legs. It crept forward, more cautious. When it was about half the room away, I saw it raise its thorax again and try to shoot its webbing at me. Whatever burn resulted from King’s spell proved effective, as the webbing came out in the thick clump that weighed down the back of its body, rather than the thin strands that had caught us in the first place.

We were running out of time before the spider’s attack got serious. I didn’t have time to play at witchcraft anymore.

“Hey, ugly!” I grinned at the spider. “Looks like you’re going to have to do this the old-fashioned way.”

“Are you planning to go hand-to-hand with the thing?” King hissed. He wasn’t even looking at me, still focused on the chandelier above us.

I could see several green flashes in the space above our heads, but I couldn’t figure out what he was doing. How hard was it just to bring the thing down?

“You just tell me when you need it in place.” I gestured to the area directly under the chandelier, and King nodded tightly.

With him distracted, I found myself reaching for the familiar. There was a blanket in the room that I had woken in my panic, and I reached for it now. It was made of bamboo. Soft and just perfect for what I needed.

Any Californian can tell you bamboo is incredibly invasive. It’s strong, takes over waterways, and once it gets in a stream, it’s impossible to get out. All I had to do was get the bamboo water. I considered my options, and then found myself staring at the wet bar in the room beyond the spider. It was, as most things were in McCallum’s house, expensive and tasteful. I had to believe that someone else had designed it for him.

In the center I could see a faucet. Normally, I would have just summoned the water out of the pipes. Unfortunately, even a distracted King would notice if the water appeared out of nowhere.

So, in order to keep my disguise going, I needed to get around the spider, turn on the water, and then my bamboo could cage in the giant arachnid exactly where we needed it.

No problem. I could do this. According to my high school counselor, I could do anything I put my mind to.

Of course, at the time, she was talking about me not failing math. But, I wasn’t going to argue with the premise.

The spider crept closer to me. I wanted to say that its gait looked strange missing its leg, but it was like one of those dogs with the missing leg who ends up on a scooter. The spider had already adapted. I was the asshole for thinking it would look strange.

King juggled three spells in the air, and was drawing a large circle on the ground. He would be no help getting me across the room.

McCallum’s entryway opened on either side: one into the massive living room with the wet bar, the other to the hallway that led to the kitchen, pool deck, and onward to what I assumed was a gaming room. I had more than enough space, it was just that passing by the spider made something twist inside me.

Big boy panties, I reminded myself. Plus, like an adult offering a toddler a Snickers bar if they stopped screaming, I had a reward for myself when I was finally done.

As soon as we killed the spider, I could figure out where exactly McCallum had gone. Then, I could track him down, and serve him the exact justice that my blood demanded.

I reached into my bag, and pulled out some of the remaining honey. Then, I looked at the spider.

I had never been one of those kids who enjoyed hurting other creatures. In elementary school, there had been one kid, clearly on the road to starring in his own Making of a Murderer miniseries, who’d enjoyed trapping insects under the plastic water glasses they gave us for lunch. He had a whole collection of them on the edge of the playground on any given day: pill bugs, spiders, and assorted flies trapped under the baking-hot plastic.

Whenever he would get distracted, I would sprint by and kick over the cups, freeing the bugs like I was starring in my own made-for-tv Free Willy sequel. Free Willy 5: The Bug Liberator .

However, this was an enormous spider, not some sad daddy longlegs trapped under a child’s cup. I didn’t have much choice.

I charged forward, so close to the spider that I could see the individual hairs on its massive body. Then I spread a thin line of honey across the floor so that if the spider moved to follow me, it would be stepping in the sticky substance. When I didn’t have any more to spread, I hefted the jar in my hand, and threw it as hard as I could at the spider’s legs.

The jar cracked open, and the spider lifted its legs, distracted by the glass shards. I darted across the room, in the gap between the spider and the wall.

You can do this, Ferro , I told myself. This is just a spider —

Then the rational part of my brain cut out, because, while theoretically an arachnid wasn’t as smart as I was, it was a giant cursed spider and I had just run within inches of it. My stomach told me that it was going to kill me. Some primal part of me that had been a caveman eons ago, knew that spiders were very bad business.

The spider turned, and, sure enough, two of its legs got stuck in the honey.

It tugged on them, but it couldn’t free them.

The trap had worked, so I turned around and jumped over the wet bar. I had reached the water. Flicking the faucet on, I turned the head so that it was spilling all over the bar top, then onto the floor. Once I was sure that Derek McCallum’s expensive wooden floors would never be the same, I ran for the bamboo blanket. It was like a beacon in my mind, already awake, curious what I had planned for it.

The spider was making a horrible shrieking sound, and then I heard ripping as it pulled off the two of its legs that had gotten stuck in the witchcraft flytrap. With five legs, it somehow looked more frightening. Its eight beady black eyes didn’t have eyelids to narrow, but somehow it still looked menacing.

I had made the giant spider very angry. That primal part of my brain, the caveman that was still drawing in charcoal on the walls, took notice. He seemed to be saying, Hey, Parker Ferro. By the way, this is how everyone else I knew died. Giant spider, very few legs, very angry.

I tossed the blanket onto the floor, where it immediately soaked up the water. Crouching down, I put my hand on the fabric, pushing more of my magic into it. The bamboo wouldn’t care if my magic was red, in fact it might work out to my benefit.

“Hey,” I whispered. “You don’t look so good. You’re all bleached out, all white. You’re not supposed to be white. You’re supposed to be green and tall, so tall that you practically touch the ceiling. I’ve seen the movies. People can do martial arts in you, that’s how tall you are.”

The bamboo didn’t need to be told twice. It remembered forests so tall that they blocked out the sky. Individual threads loosened and slid through the water, like roots underground. Bamboo shoots sprouted up almost instantly.

“Don’t forget the other side of the spider,” I coaxed. “In fact, if you could just make a cage?—”

A tearing sound interrupted me, and I looked away from the fence the bamboo was growing around the spider. Glancing up, a black shadow spread across the ceiling.

No, not a shadow. Baby spiders. The giant egg sack had hatched.

At the sight of the moving darkness, the caveman in my brain banked his fire, put away his charcoal sticks and left the building. It was terrifying. It was the kind of thing that made my stomach take a very long elevator ride down to the basement.

Thousands upon thousands, maybe even millions of baby spiders were darting across the ceiling.

I had to stay focused. I would deal with the baby spiders when they became an issue, which couldn’t be now. Right now, their mother was the issue.

My original plan had to work, if it didn’t, then King and I were both about to become food for the spider’s millions of babies.

I ran more water across the floor, watching it with a careful eye. It was definitely going to ruin McCallum’s hardwood, and I didn’t regret that at all. The water hadn’t soaked in yet; instead it puddled on top, the varnish keeping the floor safe for a few more moments.

With the influx of water, the bamboo began to spread throughout the room, first only a few inches high, then a few feet, and soon enough they would exactly as tall as I remembered from Wuxia movies on late night TV.

“Ferro, is this your work?” King’s voice was calm, but I could tell that that was through training. Suddenly finding yourself in a bamboo grove would startle anyone.

“It’s me,” I confirmed. He glanced over at me, his head just barely visible over the growing forest. I could read skepticism in his arched eyebrow. He might not know what witchcraft involved, but he definitely didn’t believe that what I was doing was normal.

“How much longer?” I challenged. My best hope was to get him focused on his own work.

If I kept the bamboo contained, I might be able to claim I was doing some normal craft work and it had just gotten out of hand because of my panic.

A kitchen witch doesn’t grow plants on principle, but a naturalistic witch could. I would have to claim that I had had bamboo seeds on me, and not that I was growing the plants out of a bamboo blanket. Maybe I could even say I was a druid, from the old school of witchcraft, one that that’s barely practiced anymore. No one really knows what druids can do, or how they do it. That might pass muster with Paranormal Crimes.

The bamboo grew taller than the spider, penning her in. With three legs gone, she hesitated before trying to climb the tall, flexible shoots.

The first of the baby spiders dropped from the ceiling, and disappeared into the forest I’d grown. A shiver rose up my spine. If I had to get back to King, who was all the way across the room through my bamboo forest, it would mean crossing the path of millions of baby spiders.