Nick had already pulled on her jacket. “Then that’s where we start the hunt.”
Knowing his sygkenis was more comfortable on two wheels than four, Gabriel had arranged to have a motorcycle delivered to the inn. As he expected, she grinned as soon as she saw it.
“A brand-new Rocket Three Triumph? Oh, honey.” She walked around it. “You really shouldn’t have.”
It took so little to please her. “I know you hate to be parted from your Tiger.”
“I don’t miss it that much.” She crouched down to peer at the engine. “I was reading about this one. They upped the torque fifteen percent with the new exhaust system. Supposed to be real quiet, too.” She straddled the bike and started it. “Whoa, man. Listen to that purr.” She gave him a mischievous look. “Speed limit in town is twenty-five. How about we go smash it all to hell?”
“No police chases,” Gabriel warned as he climbed on and rested his hands on her slim hips. “And no making of donuts on people’s lawns.”
“You’re no fun.” She kicked the stand, shifted up, and took off.
A few minutes and several hair-raising turns later, Nicola cruised up the narrow drive to a small cottage-style house and continued around the back, parking the bike in the shadows and shutting off the engine. She looked around at the abandoned houses and empty lots surrounding the property.
“Looks like she had no neighbors.” She took out a pocket flashlight and moved the beam over the back of the house. “Anyone home now?”
Gabriel sent out a tendril of his talent, gathering a thousand tiny bits of information at once from the resident insect population. “The house is empty.”
Nicola accompanied him to the back door, the frame of which bore recent tool marks around the lock. “Crowbar. These guys were in a hurry.” She opened the door.
The air inside the small kitchen smelled of herbs and overripe bananas, the latter emanating from a brown-skinned bunch sitting in an uncovered basket. Gabriel noted the general tidiness as well as the woman’s purse sitting on the counter by the coffeemaker.
“One cup, one plate, one set of utensils,” Nicola said as she inspected the dish-drying rack. “She lived alone.” She checked the calendar hanging next to the fridge. “No appointments, no notes. Probably kept to herself.”
They walked out into the sparsely furnished front room, where Nicola immediately went to inspect a dark-screened laptop. When she turned it on, it showed only a password-prompt screen. She frowned. “Not Windows. Hmmm.” She tapped a few keys, swore, and then quickly shut off the power.
“Nicola?”
“She’s got this thing suicide-encrypted.” She blew out a breath. “If I try to force a log-on, it’ll fry the hard drive.” She reached down and unplugged the laptop, rolling up the cords. “I’ll have to spend some quality time with this later.”
He glanced through an adjoining door. “Her bedroom is in there.”
Nick followed him in, and then stopped to shine the light around the four walls of the room. The light revealed that the two windows had been bricked in, and the inside of the bedroom door had three sturdy locks on it.
“Okay.” Nick closed the door and switched on a lamp. “What the hell is all this?”
Gabriel went to one of the windows. “This brickwork is not new. It’s been in place for some time.”
“Same with the locks. So who makes their bedroom into a fortress?” Nick wondered out loud.
“Someone who was very frightened,” he said, trailing his fingers along a line of mortar. He turned and looked at the cup sitting on the bedside table. He went over and picked it up, and saw several dead ants floating on the contents. He sniffed the rim of the cup and detected a powerful chemical. “This is tainted with something.”
Nicola joined him and sniffed it. “Diazepam. It’s a sedative.” She sniffed again, more deeply. “Whoa. There’s enough in here to knock out a small elephant.”
He arched a brow. “You know this how?”
“Back in the day I knew better than to take on a posse of holy freaks by myself,” she said mildly. “So when there were more than two, I drugged them.” She heaved a sigh and glanced around. “But why was this chick sedating herself? You think she was a major insomniac?”
“I don’t know.” He sent out more of his talent, summoning the smallest inhabitants of the house. “But I will ask.”
His lover’s eyes flashed up as a pebble-size gray spider on a nearly invisible thread of silk descended between them. Others climbed down the thread to cluster with the first. “Spiders. Why does it always have to be spiders?”
He smiled a little. “Because the two roaches nesting in the closet infested the house only last night.”
She shuddered. “Okay, spiders are fine.”
Gabriel placed a hand under the spinners, who abandoned the web line and landed on his palm. In his mind he both saw them and saw his face through their eyes as his talent expanded.
Arachnids were unique among the millions of other creatures Gabriel thought of as the Many; the carnivorous hunters had evolved to become in a sense the Darkyn of the insect world. They also did not sustain a hive mind as most insects did, but instead tasted the experience-memories of other spiders through minute traces of chemicals they exuded onto their webs. A spider had only to check the web to remember, and any who encountered another’s web would be able to read from it the experiences of the former occupant.
The seven spiders on Gabriel’s hand were siblings, and had inhabited the woman’s home since hatching that summer. Their mother had left behind many memories in her web: the arrival of the human female, her occupancy of the house, and some of the strange things she had done alone at night during the first month.
“She brought the bricks and locks with her, and installed them the first week she was here.” Gabriel sifted through the spiders’ collective memories, seeing the same one repeating over and over. “She would bring her laptop in here before she locked herself in.”
“A homemade safe room,” he heard Nicola murmur. “She probably didn’t have enough money for an alarm system. Had to be a way out, though.” She paced around the room, then bent and lifted the bed skirt. “Now, why would someone put a rug under their bed? Watch out, baby.”
Once Gabriel had stepped aside, Nicola pushed the bed to one side, exposing a dusty rag rug. She pulled it up, revealing a rectangular section that had been cut out of the hardwood floor and then fitted with hinges and a latch and replaced. She popped the latch, opened it, and used the flashlight to inspect the interior of the space below it.
“Opens down into the crawl space under the house.” She sat back on her heels. “This had to be her escape hatch. Why put it under the bed, though?”
Engrossed in chemical memories, Gabriel hardly heard her. He learned that the woman had been aware of the spiders, had never disturbed them. He found one vivid memory trace, of her standing on a chair to inspect one web. Her lips formed words the spider didn’t understand, but he did.
You can catch all the mosquitoes you want, little sister.
True to their nature, the spiders remained ever wary of the new tenant, but in time they began cautiously moving in and out of the room when the woman left the door open during the day. That was why they had witnessed other odd incidents: men watching the woman and taking photographs of her through her windows, one picking the lock on the back door and searching the house while she was gone, while in the kitchen a second mixed a packet of white powder in the canister of hot-chocolate mix the woman kept there.
The siblings had also witnessed the men returning later that night, entering her unlocked bedroom, and taking her limp body from her bed.
“She was drugged by her abductors, and fell unconscious before she could secure herself in here,” Gabriel said as he released the spiders and watched them climb up the strand of silk. “These men, they watched her long enough to learn her habits and see her vulnerabilities.”
“She was right to be afraid.” Nicola eyed the bricks. “I know we can’t mess with anything in here, but I really wish I could tear down those damn things.”
After years of torture, Gabriel had been crucified alive and left to die in a sealed room. It had been Nicola who had found him, who had used a sledgehammer to break through the bricks of his eternal prison in order to free him. Gabriel’s cool detachment, brought on by communing with the spiders, disappeared under the fierce rush of love for his woman.
Forced to become Darkyn against her will, Nicola had had every reason in the world to despise their kind, and yet she had risked everything—even her life—to save him.
He came to stand behind her, his arms encircling her narrow waist. “When was the last time I told you how precious you are to me?”
“It’s been a good three, four hours.” She rested her hands over his. “I didn’t mean to remind you about when we met.”
“I have some very fond memories of that night.” He brought one hand up to cup her breast, caressing it as he used the other to release the button of her jeans. “One is how soft and giving you were in my arms.” He slipped his hand into her panties and parted her with one long finger. “How heavenly you felt when I touched you.”
“I was?” She caught her breath as his fingertip pressed in. “Oh, yeah. That’s pretty heavenly.”
“You didn’t know what I wanted to do to you.” Gabriel eased her jeans down over her hips, exposing the sweet, tight curves of her pale bottom. “Did you?”
“I was too preoccupied at the time.” The scent of juniper rose from her skin with delicious warmth, blending with the fragrance of evergreen radiating from his. She reached behind and opened the front of his trousers, her fingers curling around his stiff shaft. “Stuff like this kept distracting me.”
“You felt like wet satin under my hand, just as you do now,” he whispered against her ear. “I wanted to be inside you so much.”
