Chapter 34
Rosabel La Rouge
Present day
Water below us. Something dripped on it and the sound was the first indicator. There was no ground here, and we weren’t stuck in endless levels of branches like in the Tree of Abundance. No—here, there was only dark water that reflected the blue lights slightly as something continued to drip on the surface.
A couple of inches above it began the network of webs. Thick, white, sticky threads straight out of an eight-legged spider with blue eyes.
Part of me was sure that I’d manifested this whole scene because I was scared shitless of Aragog for years. The nightmares I’d had starring that spider—and Hagrid in the background telling me not to be afraid, of course. Now here we were. An actual gigantic spider, and we were on its web.
Taland was slowly moving toward me, having gotten his body under control, and I could see other shapes moving about in the distance as well. Other players.
The spider kept on spinning around, watching, blue eyes wide and glossy, very real and very unlike Aragog—but I had no idea if that was a good thing or bad.
What I knew was that I needed to stay as far away from it as I could, so I began to move, too, toward the nearest tree with the lights, hoping to have a moment to talk to Taland.
It took a while—those threads were sticky as hell, and they liked the leather of my pants and jacket very much—but I made it to the tree, held onto the branch that could have been dipped into gasoline that strangely smelled like lemon. Not throwing up took effort, and I got myself onto its thicker roots where there was enough space to fit both me and Taland.
He was right behind me.
“Scared yet, sweetness?”
It sounded like he was already back to his usual, playful self.
“You remember how I never wanted to watch the second Harry Potter movie, right? Like, never .” I was shaking a little bit, my eyes going back to the spider.
“Mhm. I also remember how you made me promise to kill every spider in the house no matter how small, until I die.”
I nodded. “Yes, yes, and you said, I don’t have to kill them; I can just take them outside.”
He grinned. “And you said, but what about the army of baby spiders they could build out there and come back for revenge when we’re asleep?! No, no, no—it has to die! ”
I groaned. “And I meant the small spiders, Taland. House spiders. I meant normal, usual, tiny spiders. What. The. Fuck, am I supposed to do against that?! ”
Both my fingers were pointed at the spider as I looked at him, whispering, shaking still, and the asshole laughed.
Iris, I needed to scream my guts out so badly right now.
“We’ll see in a minute, won’t we?” he said, and sat down on the root with me. “Some clues would be nice right about now.”
The moment he said that word— clue— the floating head of the guy made of white light popped into existence barely two feet to my side.
“Greetings, players!” the hologram said, and I almost told him to tone it the fuck down.
Can’t you see what’s behind you?!
He couldn’t, though, and the spider didn’t react to the sound of his voice at all.
“Congratulations! You have made it to Madame Weaver’s nest. She—and Bluefire coven—welcome you!”
She, it’s a she, it’s a she, it’s a she…
But wait, because even though I thought that was the tragedy, it got worse quickly.
“You’ve asked for your clue for this challenge, and I am happy to deliver it to you,” the hologram continued. “The way to complete this challenge and find your key is to find your way through chaos and to the heart of these elegant weavings of our dearest Madame, who has been raised for this purpose alone and is perfectly immune to your magics. Scary? Yes, indeed! But only when we face our fears have we truly won.”
Please let this be a dream, please let this be a dream, please, please, please…
“Find the nest and find your key—the brightest colors in the world await the worthy victor,” the man said. “We wish you the best of luck, players. Iris is with you.”
And he was gone .
I was going to be sick.
“Breathe, Rosabel,” Taland said, and I tried.
I was trying, and I could feel the air going down my throat. I could feel my lungs expanding, and somehow my nervous system was still convinced that I couldn’t breathe. That I was drowning, that I was going to die any second—and I’d been here a lot of times before, so I recognized the panic attack just fine. On a normal day, I could manage it because I’d taught myself the best, fastest ways to get over it—but right now?
There was nothing normal about any of this. About my life. About this stupid fucking challenge.
“Hey, look at me, sweetness. Can you focus on me for a second?” Taland’s hands were on my face and his eyes were right there, anchoring mine. Pinning my thoughts down. “Can we breathe together?”
Like we used to? I wanted to say, and in my mind, he replied, yes.
So, I nodded. And we breathed.
He held my face and I held his wrists, and I saw him breathing deeply, and I mirrored his every little move. The air was there. My lungs were working. It was just this fear that wanted to make a fool out of me, wanted to turn me against myself. Just the fear.
But it was okay. Because I wasn’t alone. Taland was right there with me.
“That’s better,” he said, smoothing my hair away from my face. “Remember that the absolute worst thing that could happen is that you can die.”
Oh, goddess.
I burst out laughing and I held the sound with my hands in front of my mouth only barely. He was absolutely fucking insane .
“And that’s still the worst possible thing you could choose to say in a moment like this. Like, the worst. ” Which he knew because I’d told him so before. A million times.
Taland grinned. “But it puts a smile on your face every time.”
That it did.
I wanted to say something—those awful three words again.
I wanted to say more, to thank him, to remind him who I was and what I’d done, to remind him of the fact that he didn’t need to do this for me. I was a monster as far as he was concerned. And I felt exactly like one, too.
But the moment was so heavy. The words were locked inside me and they refused to leave my shattered heart. And Taland didn’t wait—I suspected he knew exactly what was in my mind and he didn’t want to hear it.
Who could blame him? I certainly didn’t.
“Come on, let’s see what the fuss is about,” he said, standing up and turning toward the spider, who kept on spinning around in place still. Closing my eyes, I took in a deep breath, made sure my lungs were working one more time, and I stood up, too.
The key I’d gotten in Night City was still in my hand. I didn’t even give it a glance, only put it in my jacket pocket together with my other ones. All three were there, secured with the zipper.
In a flash, I was reminded by my own brain with a series of disturbing images of the last—what felt like— days in the Iris Roe, and the fact that I had been about to be incinerated by a large, fire-spitting dragon just minutes ago.
Right before falling on the webs of a house-sized spider with blue eyes. Damn .
And I thought myself weak for having a panic attack just now?
Two more keys to find, I told myself. Now we focus on the challenge.
I held onto the wet bark of the tree we were standing on and I looked around as my heartbeat steadied. I’d done this a million times before on missions. I was here now, and my thoughts could wait for later. The situation needed assessing, and I was going to assess the shit out of this spider trap they’d put me in.
“Look, they’re putting it on their bodies,” said Taland, pointing to our right, to an identical tree nearest to ours that I hadn’t even noticed before, to a Whitefire woman who was in the process of rubbing her thighs.
It took me a moment to understand what she was doing—popping the blisters emanating blue light that dotted the bark of the tree, then using the liquid inside—the same liquid that had wetted the trees and was dripping onto the water below—to cover every part of her body.
Taland moved closer to our tree and popped one of the blue blisters with his finger. Thin, colorless liquid poured out and it smelled like I was standing on lemon slices all of the sudden.
“Citrus,” Taland whispered, bringing his finger to his nose to sniff.
“Spiders hate it.” And these trees were full of those blisters that also served as light.
I turned around again as the Whitefire continued to drench herself in the liquid, and it made sense. Spiders hated anything citrusy and it was going to repel them, and it probably worked on this spider who apparently had an actual name—Madame Weaver. You’ve got to be shitting me .
“Which means we’ll need to get close and personal—to her nest to find the key,” Taland whispered, squatting down behind me as he analyzed the network of threads surrounding us. I did, too, and now that I was calmer, I could actually see the nest as the spider moved. It was shaped like a big mess of white threads, and if I had to guess from this distance, it was the size of two basketballs. The spider spun around it constantly, all eight eyes wide open, but she couldn’t see the two players coming closer to her from below. I could hardly see them myself—it was dark and the shadows of the webs made it impossible to tell what color their clothes were.
But they were approaching her, fast, as if they couldn’t see her moving right over their fucking heads.
No, no, no, no…
I hadn’t realized it, but I’d squatted down, too. I reached behind me for Taland’s arm because my heart was about to beat right out of my chest again.
The Whitefire woman who’d drenched herself in the lemon water, and other players about the threads in the distance, all watched—and it happened so fucking fast.
Madame Weaver noticed when the man on the right approached underneath her, and she moved. With those freakishly long legs that had ends like blades, she cut through the threads and tried to get to the player, who had already started to move on the threads like they were branches or ropes on a tree, spinning and jumping from one end to the other, while the other guy on the opposite side was almost— almost at the nest, his hand reaching up for it.
Fuck, I was sweating.
Madame Weaver noticed at the last second. She turned so fast and moved like she had lightning in her veins, and she chased the other player down the network of threads for only a moment .
Then he screamed.
The sound echoed so loudly that I felt the pain that had caused that scream as if it were mine. We couldn’t see the guy because the spider’s body blocked our view of him, but the first player who’d approached her was already at the nest, and he stuck his hand right inside the ball of threads.
Right. Inside. The nest.
Bile up my throat, but the guy pulled his hand back, and I could have sworn metal shone between his fingers for just a split second.
The key. He found the key.
Then he turned around and he let go.
The player simply let go and the threads were no longer sticky for him. They didn’t stop him—he slid against them like they were suddenly made out of silk, in-between them, lower and lower, and he fell right into the water at the bottom.
He never came out on the surface again.
Done. He had completed the challenge.
Meanwhile his friend was now food for the fucking spider, wrapped up in threads from head to toe, stuck to the web, perfectly motionless. He looked like a damn mummy.
I was seriously going to throw up.
“Good strategy,” said Taland all of a sudden.
I turned to him. “He’s been mummified.” In case he had missed the guy who wasn’t moving anymore.
“Yes, well, they chose to work together knowing the risks.” His eyes looked blue because of the lights falling on the side of his face. Magical didn’t even begin to describe the sight of him—but I digress.
“Are you assuming that they knew they were going to be food for a giant spider when they decided to just go for it ? ”
Taland shrugged. “You were willing to become food for a dragon—or to be incinerated by one just to complete the last challenge, were you not?” My mouth opened and closed… “Who knows what we’ll be tempted to do if we spend a lot of time in Madame Weaver’s loop.”
Oh, goddess, I was going to be sick for real.
But no— no, I wouldn’t. Because what he said might have made perfect sense, but I would rather be incinerated or eaten by a dragon with teeth the size of my head any day over dying at the legs of a giant spider, and then being wrapped up in her fucking web until she was hungry enough to eat me.
Fuck, no.
No way in any hell.
I was getting the fuck out of here right now.
“The water,” I said, my mind racing to put together a plan. “We have to take her down to the water—it’s the same water that’s in these blisters. It should take her a little while to come out.” And that made perfect sense to me, too.
“Agreed. And how do you suppose we get her down there?”
My hands shook as I reached underneath my jacket and grabbed the biggest blades in my arsenal—my daggers. With the tip of one, I tried the thread attached the sides of the root we were on. It looked so sticky and slimy and ugh, but when my blade ran over it, it cut it clean through. With ease.
I smiled. “Like that .”
We were going to cut off all these threads if we had to because I was not going to spend another second longer than I absolutely had to in this place.
The way Taland was smiling sent shivers down my back. “We’ll need a good plan,” he told me, eyes sparkling so much he could have stolen a handful of stars from the night. And that thought made me want to look up for once, to see the darkness over us, and the never-ending network of webs that didn’t allow me to see anything else.
“We’ll need a distraction,” said Taland again, and when I lowered my head, he reached up and touched the tip of my nose with his thumb. Just a little touch, like before.
My cheeks flushed.
“You have magic,” I said, my words a bit slurred together. “You can do a spell to attack her.”
“Except our dearest Madame here was raised to be immune to our magics, remember?”
I flinched. “Right.” I’d forgotten about that part.
Hell, I forgot about every part when he looked at me like that, and when he touched me—so simply, so normally, like we did this on the daily still, like we used to. Like it was the most natural thing in the world to him to touch my nose like that, then carry on with whatever conversation we were having, including those about giant spiders.
“Attacking won’t work—those people would have done it if they could.” Taland nodded his head toward the center of the web.
“People?” I said. “What do you mean, pe?—”
I stopped speaking when I noticed all the other dots of white across the threads, up and down, on all levels. All bodies that Madame Weaver had already mummified with her fucking webs.
Five. Five players—and how many more had she already eaten?
The blood in my veins turned to stone.
Taland chuckled. “I’ve always liked that spaced-out look on you, sweetness. ”
He was out of his fucking mind. “We’re going to die.” Just in case he’d missed the memo.
“No, we’re not,” Taland said and turned to the spider again.
Damn him. “Why aren’t you freaking out, for fuck’s sake?!” How was he so calm? How ?
He looked at me. “Because the Iris Roe is not going to kill me. Or you.” His eyes fell on my lips. “But I seem to like it when your mouth gets dirty, too. Makes me want to cleanse it.”
Heat in the pit of my stomach, which, in combination with the cocktail of bad emotions I was currently feeling made me want to throw up five times harder than before.
“Taland,” I warned. He couldn’t seriously be this unbothered, could he?
He was, though. His conviction was to be envied.
And he slowly leaned closer to me to whisper, “We’re not going to die, sweetness—and it has nothing to do with the fact that I already pledged my life to protecting you from all spiders no matter their size, but with the fact that, while she might really be immune to attack spells, she can still be tricked.” He raised his hand between us, and small black flames sprung to life on his fingertips, just for show. “After all, isn’t that what magic is for?”
“Trick her, how?” I wondered.
“With a simple illusion,” Taland said. “You have blades—and I know you can use them.” Another grin. “I have magic that I can use, too. I bring her closer to the water, and you make sure she falls. How’s that sound?”
Um…like the last thing I want to do in my life?
I swallowed hard. “On one condition.” Which wasn’t a condition at all. “Neither of us dies.”
There he went again, chuckling, grabbing my face in his hands, coming closer until he could lick my bottom lip just slightly. Just a little taste.
And me?
I was too shocked and too panicked and too afraid to move away (which is basically code for I didn’t want to). But, hey, I was about to turn to spider food really soon, so who gave a shit?
“Sounds like a plan.”
Other players were constantly trying to get close to the spider, and another two died right in front of our eyes.
Damn it, she was fast, but we had a route in mind. We only watched for a while, and we determined where there were fewer threads to cut, and I made a plan of movement with my daggers in hand, while Taland began to chant his third-degree illusion spell. It was going to take a lot out of him, and I feared his anchor might be wasted completely, but he said he could handle it. I believed him because we didn’t really have any other choice. We were both going to have to give our best to get to bottom of this—or rather, the middle.
Too fast. It was all happening too fast.
From Ben to Taland to the hailstorm and the dragon, all that magic going through me that I hadn’t even had the chance to recover from—foreign magic.
And now a clone of Taland was basically creating itself out of magic right in front of my eyes, copying every little shape of the real Taland, every line and curve and color, until it was a ghost version of him. A see-through Taland next to the real one.
“Fuck.”
The word slipped from me—it was that good .
Taland looked a bit tired as he wiped sweat off his forehead, and the circles under his eyes were darker, and his eyes didn’t sparkle as much as before, but he’d made it. A third-degree spell, perfectly executed.
“Ready, sweetness?” he asked me.
I wasn’t. “Born ready.”
Ghost Taland moved first, controlled by the magic that coated Real Taland’s fingers as he continued to whisper under his breath. It jumped on the threads and it moved with ease from one to the other, with such precision I was really tempted to think he was a ghost. And when he was far enough that the light from the tree blisters didn’t reach him, he looked like he had an actual body. He looked perfectly real.
I was mesmerized.
And lucky for us, Madame Weaver thought so, too.
“ Now,” Taland said, stepping aside to let me jump off the branch and onto the threads. “I’ll bring her to you. Be ready.”
“I will,” I promised. I’d do my damned best because it was his life on the line, too, this time.
And strangely that thought made the whole thing easier for me. Made my hands stop shaking, my heart stop beating like it wanted to break out of me.
I wasn’t doing this for me—I was doing it for Taland. And I was perfectly okay with going against giant spiders to make sure he survived.
It all happened fast and slow at the same time, like it usually did in stressful situations like this one. I climbed a level lower than the one we’d been on and moved closer to the center of the web, trying to figure out the best way to move faster without those threads sticking to me. They slowed me down, but I couldn’t cut through too many of them because I would fall in the water myself, and that was not going to happen—unless I wanted to die.
Meanwhile Ghost Taland was already being chased by Madame Weaver when I made it to the spot I’d chosen from the distance, where there were the least number of threads to cut. Judging by the size of the spider, she would be falling through if I cut only a handful as soon as she was running over me. Right over my head.
Iris help me, I am really doing this.
My daggers were in my hands. I positioned my knees on a thicker thread. Ghost Taland ran over me, in the exact place where I needed the spider. I didn’t look at Real Taland at all, my focus unwavering, the sound of those fucking legs as the spider moved filling my ears.
Then she was over my head for real.
I began to cut through threads as fast as my body allowed.
Move, move, move! my mind urged me, and it helped that none of this felt real right now.
Madame Weaver was falling exactly as she did in my imagination. Details were lost on me, partly because I didn’t want to remember. My brain wanted to protect me from images of a falling spider that was trying to crawl and grab her threads and try to hold on before she toppled over—while I moved, faster than her, lower and lower on the threads, my blades cutting without stop. Surreal.
The water was right there. Goddess, I could taste it, and at that point I was a hundred percent sure that I was going to make it.
We were going to make it because by now Taland had gotten his key, no doubt, and all I had to do was climb back up there to get mine while Madame Weaver went for a swim .
Except it didn’t happen quite that way because one of those eight fucking legs got this close to my face while she fell and lost balance, and I panicked a little bit.
I panicked and cut the wrong threads when we were just a level above the surface of the water.
I fell in it together with the Madame.
It couldn’t be helped. I tried to hold on, but as if to spite me, the threads decided that they wanted to be slippery when I tried to hold onto them now—or maybe it was because of the handles of the daggers in my hands.
Water everywhere, ice-cold and almost weightless. Instinct moved me as my mind repeated, Taland made it, Taland made it, Taland made it, like some kind of a mantra, like it was going to save me. I pushed myself up with all my strength, and it was dark in the water, for which I was thankful. If the spider was right behind me about to slice me wide open, at least I wouldn’t see it until it was too late.
Air in my mouth and nose and lungs. I broke the surface, still alive, and I tried to stay up, tried to reach for the threads closest to me, my survival instincts still at it.
But they were too far. I couldn’t reach them unless I spontaneously grew twenty inches. That’s how close life was to me—twenty inches, yet a world away.
Then she broke the surface, too.
The Madame . The house-sized spider that was going to eat me raw right now.
Eight wide blue eyes. Eight long legs, a mouth somewhere between those fucking eyes, and it was open, lined with razor sharp teeth as big as my fist, and she was screeching. She was crying as she tried to reach for the threads, not even bothering to look at me.
Guess it was safe to say she was panicked, too.
“Rose! ”
I could have imagined it, but my name in Taland’s voice filled my head, my mind still not made up on whether I wanted to try to fight the spider, or just give up and let her get this over with quickly.
But I looked up and sure enough, Taland was there, hanging onto a thread, reaching out a hand for me.
Close. Close enough that I could touch him.
I dropped a dagger in the water, and I grabbed his hand without thinking.
Taland pulled me up with such ease you’d think I weighed nothing at all. The threads of the web strained with the weight, but not him. He wasn’t smiling, and he looked murderous, but he put me on the threads and made sure that my legs were up, too. Made sure I wouldn’t accidentally fall into the freezing water again.
There was no time to be relieved, though, because unfortunately for us, the Madame was already spitting silk out of her body, creating a link to the nearest thread, because she was too unstable in the water to reach it with her legs.
Taland grabbed my chin and our eyes locked.
“Move as fast as you can . ” And he pushed me to start climbing up the threads.
Forget freezing. Forget how heavy my wet clothes were. Forget everything because the spider was already climbing up, half her body out of the water.
Forget everything and just move!
I did.
Taland led the way, showed me which threads to grab and which space to move through, and maybe it was the fear, but it felt like we were up there again in the blink of an eye. Madame Weaver’s screeching cries were far, far too close to me for my liking, but if I turned back to see where she was or how fast she was moving, I’d freeze, so I didn’t.
I kept my eyes on Taland and on the other player who was already pulling her key out of the nest since we’d gotten rid of the spider for her. It was the Whitefire woman we’d seen before. Then Taland turned around and grabbed my arm and propelled me forward, closer to the nest, just as the Whitefire let go and fell, and the threads didn’t stick to her at all. She just fell all the way into the water.
We were next.
“Put your hand in there, now,” Taland ordered, and I did.
Without realizing that things were moving inside that big ball of silky threads, I did.
Tiny spiders with tiny legs that tried to break free—they were all in there. So many of them. Black and blue and white.
So many, and my hand was inside the nest.
I screamed.
The feel of their legs and sharp teeth biting my hand and fingers was too much. It was equally as scary as the big fucking spider at our back.
I thought I wouldn’t make it. I thought these tiny spiders in the nest were going to eat me raw by the time I thought to move my hand away, but then something cold touched my fingers. Something undeniably metal.
The key.
The tiny legs and teeth forgotten, I wrapped my fingers around it and pulled my hand out.
A fucking cylinder with engraved spider legs wrapped around it, and eight blue sapphires at the very top—just like Madame Weaver’s eyes.
“I got it! I got it! I got?— ”
Three things happened at once.
Taland began to whisper a spell as his magic sprung to life.
The spider was already behind us, and her leg sliced a clean cut across his shoulder when he couldn’t move away in time. Blood exploded right in front of my eyes.
And Taland’s Blackfire magic slammed against the spider.
It’s not going to work.
We knew she was immune to magic, and yet Taland was trying to spell her again.
It’s not going to work, you fool!
Everything went dark—well, darker than it already was, but inside my head, too. Suddenly I felt like I wasn’t me at all, or maybe I just slipped into momentary insanity. Because when Madame Weaver came for him again, I moved.
The spider acted like I wasn’t there at all, though I was half sitting on the thread next to Taland. Probably because I’d already gotten my key, but that served me. My last dagger was still in my hand, and I stabbed her leg with all my strength just before she could stab Taland in the chest.
She wailed in pain and moved back a little bit. Just a little.
It was enough time for me.
Training with the IDD meant my muscles had developed their own memory and they could function even when I wasn’t thinking straight. That was the best gift the exhaustion and the pain and the torment of all those training months had given me. Before I knew it, I’d put the key in the pocket of my pants, and I had no choice but to let go of the dagger still buried in the spider’s leg. My gun was in my hand within a second, and I was pulling the trigger furiously.
I shot her four times straight in her fucking eyes as I screamed.
Then I slipped.
Blood everywhere, and I was slipping, the threads moving to the sides to let me through, all of them silky smooth now.
“ Taland! ” I screamed at the top of my voice, gun in hand still.
Had it worked? Had the spider backed off? Had she been wounded—could bullets even hurt her? Had she given Taland the chance to grab his key?
Where the hell are you, damn it?! Why didn’t you get the key first?!
Water right below me.
A second before I fell in it, I saw a dark shape falling somewhere over me, too.
Taland. It’s Taland, it’s Taland, it’s Taland— that became my new mantra.
The water claimed me, ice-cold and unforgiving, and it didn’t let me go for a long time.