LATRODECTUS MACTANS
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Saya Claymore
Gloom emanates from Maeve’s home.
My fingernails penetrate Serun’s skin at the sight of the webbed garden. Silver light spills from fluorescent streetlamps outside the iron gate to her estate—milky white strands coating garden beds like a blanket of frost.
My ears prick at the movement of critters under the soil, and insect song stings my ears. Black spiders with red streaks creep across every web, coiling around stones, bushes, and poles.
“I see your sister likes spiders…” I say, hoping a conversation can distract me from what’s creeping around my feet.
“They keep visitors out.” Serun’s focus settles on the house ahead. It’s a two-story cottage made of dark cobblestone with a sheen of spider silk covering the windows.
I bite my lower lip as I take in the man standing at the entrance. Dressed in a skin-tight white shirt and black pants, the exposed parts of his flesh reveal silver scars against olive skin. Spiders crawl over him like friendly companions and not venomous prey.
“Evening, Death Spirit,” Serun says.
The man bows. “Lord Serun and Lady Consort. Maeve is expecting you.” He straightens, and we follow him inside.
Compared to the exterior—and Serun’s manor—the inside of Maeve’s house feels more cosy. If I ignore the spiders and webs in every corner, it reminds me of one of the fancier houses in Cherry Bloom.
The walls are mostly wood panelling, with wallpaper on one side drenching it in a warm orange floral pattern.
A thick grey carpet runs through the entrance, and an array of colourful blooming flowers and leafy plants, shimmering with spider silk, hang from hooks.
There is a fireplace across from the stairs leading up to the first floor, where the Death Spirit makes his way up the stairs.
He pays no mind to escorting us any further, seeming more interested in the thumping coming from above.
Little feet running across wood.
I’d know the sound anywhere. Cole was a stomper, too, when he was young.
“Maeve has children?”
“Two adoptive children,” Serun answers.
My focus lands on him. “And…how did she get them?”
“As I’ve said before, most children in the Undercity had no parents when Maeve found them, and others came with their parents when they became Feeders.”
“You don’t take children after they’re born?”
He stares blankly at me, unblinking. “And where would you get an idea like that?”
Because the Bleeders at Darkovish took pregnant women to settlements…
I don’t know where to begin, so I say nothing.
“Huh…” Serun grunts.
The door near the bottom of the staircase glides open.
Serun’s sister stands there, arms folded across her chest. Spiders creep along her jaw, across her red dress, and over her heeled boots.
She opens her mouth to speak, and a spider zips out and vanishes up her nose.
“Brother and Lady Consort, are you hungry?”
“I’m sated, but Saya may want something.” Serun nudges his head in my direction.
Maeve’s red eyes are shrewd but warm compared to Serun’s harsh, cut-glass, bleeding-red gaze. She assesses me, noting my hand clasped with Serun’s. “What would you like, Saya? I have human food. My children enjoy these fruit stick treats.”
Spiders crawl across the wall nearby, and with a hard swallow, suppressing the hunger that already grips me, I say, “I’m fine to wait. I came to talk to you about my vegodian powers, actually. Serun tells me you’ve been around my kind before.”
Her eyes soften further. “Straight to the point. Very vegodian of you.”
Serun chuckles when my hand crushes his.
Maeve pushes the double sliding doors fully open, revealing her kitchen. Plants hang from the wooden walls, and the scent of lavender and mint tickles my nose. Serun pulls the chair out from underneath the oak table in the centre of the room, and after I sit down, he stands behind me.
“I only know what I know. If I cannot answer, out of promises or the unknown, you will know it.” Maeve tenderly cups the purple blooms of vervain on the kitchen benchtop. “So, what do you want to ask?”
“How did you befriend someone like me? My mum raised me to…hate,” I say, wincing.
Maeve pinches the clusters of tiny flowers until they bruise. “I met a vegodian in Sahie. She had a child with her, no money, and needed someone caring enough to help her get home. I helped her.”
“Why?”
A spider crawls away from her fingertip and onto the web among the vervain. “I have a tender spot for children. They are our future, yet so very fragile.”
Our future…I shift in my seat, reminded of the nightwalkers and their rumour about Serun wanting me because I might be able to carry his children.
“And she wasn’t afraid of you?”
Maeve steps away from the vervain, her hands brushing against the granite benchtop. “When you are faced with no one to aid you, you become desperate. As we travelled, we acted as though she were my Feeder, and none cared to attack her. Not that they would be able to.”
I run my palms across my tights. “Did she teach you vegodian?”
“No. She used it while the baby slept.” Her fingers splay across the benchtop as she leans back comfortably against it. “Knelt by the slumbering child and placed protection spells on the babe.”
I keep my mask on as I say, “And how will that help me with my issue?”
“Because, Lady Consort, she placed the spell on you to keep your powers from growing.”
An ache grips my throat, as dry as sand. Thousands of questions burst from a locked box within me.
“Since the moment I laid eyes on you—red eyes, pointed ears, and skin as cold as ice—I knew you were special.”
I spin in my chair, gripping the edges, and my lip curls. “You knew, nightwalker?”
“He didn’t,” Maeve answers for him, and I turn back in my seat.
“When my siblings and I heard about you, a rumour from Sahie, I was tasked with going there to kill you. But I couldn’t…
” She smiles, but it doesn’t reach her eyes.
Pain settles there, burrowed deep, looking as if tears will shed.
“So, I helped her instead and told my brothers I killed you. Serun only learned of you recently after tasting your blood.”
“Mind you, I did not know you were part nightwalker. Only that you were a vegodian,” Serun says, his breath closer and presence looming, but he doesn’t touch me. “The other aspects of you drew me in—a curiosity.”
My mind races with so many questions, but my mouth won’t move.
If only I had known.
If only my mum had told me.
Here I am, hearing it from a nightwalker I know nothing about and hoping that her words aren’t fables. But also, I hope they are. I hope she is spewing lies, because this truth stings. An ache in my heart that hones like a blade, carving at the meat with every heartbeat.
“Why didn’t she tell me? Why trust a nightwalker w-when a-all she did was l-look at me with h-hate,” I say, my voice a quivering mess. She hid who I was this entire time. Put a spell on me to hide my vegodian side. She acted as if I were a monster.
They treated me as weak—barely a vegodian, when all this time it was because she suppressed my magik. Hid it from me.
“Why did she do that?”
Maeve shrugs. “She did not answer when I asked. Fear? Sometimes it is easier to hide something when the one with the magik doesn’t know they have it.”
My fangs sink into my skin before I snap, “She took away my choice. Refused to train and teach me—or let me play with the other children—because she was afraid?”
“Kamai…” Serun whispers behind me, but I jolt away from him, panic turning into heat and rage over all the lies and secrets.
“Is it possible to break it?” I say.
“That is for you to know when or how. But you can—we’ve all seen it.”
“When I am angry,” I say as I rise, my breath quickening. With it, a surge of light radiates from me, dancing like flakes of dust against my skin. “When I am frustrated.”
Maeve shrinks into the shadows, her ears pulled back, eyes wide, searching for a way to escape the light that burns its way across the table.
Even here, I am feared. No matter where I go, I am—
“My kamai…” An icy hand rests on my shoulder. Shadows steal away the light, eating at it like maggots on a festering wound. “We will channel your magik now that we know what’s blocking it. Besides, you did wonderfully with your glamour yesterday. That is something to admire.”
With an exhaled breath, calming the poison running through the neuropaths in my brain, I say, “I need to go home. I need to find Cole and go home so that my mum can undo what she did.”
“Reyes is close. We can leave soon,” Serun says, his hand falling away from my shoulder and wrapping around my wrist instead. “Is that all you know, Maeve?”
“Yes. I took her and the Lady Consort to the woods on the border of Darkovish, and that was the last time I saw her,” Maeve says, her eyes flickering away for a moment before settling back on me. “But if you have any more questions, you know where I live.”
I want to know more, but the answers I need won’t come from her.
“What’s vervain for?” I ask, my focus settling on the plant next to her.
“Protection. Think of it like your glamour. It hides things in plain sight. A vegodian spell. That is all I know.”
Another thing to learn when I return home. “Then we will be on our way.”
Maeve turns to Serun. “Lucifer’s bow will be ready in a couple of days. Did you want me to claim it and take it to him?”
“Kin puhn.” Serun moves beside me. When I arch my brow, he tweaks his smile and says, “I will get the bow, and Saya and I will travel to the Sunken City.”
Maeve inclines her head. “Enjoy the rest of your night.”
We leave the kitchen as the Death Spirit descends the stairs. He holds a basket of clothes in one arm and a wooden toy in the other. After a fleeting look between us, he smiles faintly, catching me off guard. “Lord Serun. Lady Consort.”
Serun murmurs his goodbye, but my mouth fills with cotton, and I find it hard to speak. It’s not until we leave and make our way back to the tunnel that Serun explains. “The Death Spirit is like Olivia and my family. Nightwalkers who hold onto their souls.”
“And what does a nightwalker with a soul look like? You have certainly not been a reassuring example, tricking me into marriage,” I say, muttering the last part.
“Heh…I believe that is a very human thing to do.” His eyes light as he smiles. “Nightwalkers with souls have emotions. They retain thoughts of what feelings were like and express them as a human would.”
Nightwalkers clinging to their past life.
“Newborns from the cages were afraid of the Death Spirit—one even wanted me to join them to kill him,” I admit.
Serun chuckles. “I overheard. But I doubt anyone would try. Maeve’s very adamant about keeping him.”
“As a slave?”
“Lover,” he replies. “They often shared a coffin when Maeve visited topside.”
“Was she the one telling him who to kill?”
“Yes.”
Creepy. I wouldn’t want to get on their bad side.
“Will we train again tonight? I want to get better at controlling my magik until I can confront my mum.”
We step into the darkness; a thick line of black swallows us whole. Serun inches daringly closer, his knuckles brushing mine, and as much as I want to resist this feeling, I enjoy the shadows that consume him. “Did you want to train or a distraction?”
“Tonight, I’d like to train with my glamour.” I crush my hand into a fist. “I’m almost there. I can feel it.”
He grunts a laugh. “Then we will train.”