Текст книги "The Spider Ring"

Автор книги: Andrew Harwell

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Текущая страница: 7 (всего у книги 8 страниц)

It was strange how so many things could finally make sense at the exact same moment that suddenly nothing made sense. It was like Maria had spent hours putting a puzzle together based on the picture on the box, only to get to the end and realize that the box didn’t match the puzzle at all.

She continued to question Arturo. “Mom always said that Grandpa Lopez passed away before Dad was even born. I’m starting to think there was no Grandpa Lopez. Is that right?”

“You’re a smart girl, Maria. Just like your grandmother.”

“She knew Luellen was after her. She told me a week ago, ‘The other spiders are back.’ I thought she meant real spiders, the kind she collected. I had no idea she meant other people with rings.”

“I came to her as soon as I knew Luellen was on her trail. I tried to get her to leave with me, to run. But she wouldn’t.”

“You tried to get Grandma Esme to leave us?” Maria asked, horrified.

“If she had come with me, she’d still be alive.”

“Maybe, but that doesn’t sound like much of a life to me. You can’t just keep leaving your family behind whenever things get scary. That’s not how it works.”

As soon as she said it, she felt a stab of guilt. It was one thing to say this, and another to believe it. Her shoes were still caked with mud from her own late-night escape.

“Oh my gosh,” she said, connecting the last of the puzzle pieces. “Luellen knows about the rest of my family, too. She even met them at the funeral.”

Maria thought of how cruel she’d been to Rafi earlier, not to mention the way she’d yelled at her mom. They’d only been looking out for her, when here she was, putting both of their lives in danger.

“Why hasn’t the Black Widow tried to kill me yet?” Maria asked.

“I’m sure she is hoping to catch us both at once. I’ve eluded her for over seventy years, and she’s growing impatient. If we are lucky, her impatience will make her careless.”

“What do you mean, ‘if we’re lucky’? What do you plan for us to do?”

“Run away, of course! Haven’t you heard a word I’ve said? The Black Widow is here, and you are fortunate to be alive. Especially after your extravagant choice of mourning clothes and your little temper tantrum at the birthday party. Honestly, Maria, I’ll grant you your grandmother didn’t fully explain the nature of the rings, but the way you’ve been broadcasting your powers this week —”

“Has been no worse than what you and Grandma Esme did back in the day,” Maria said, cutting him off. She stood to her full height and brushed off her dress. She crossed her arms so that the Brown Recluse ring glittered against her skin. “Now, thank you for all your help, but I am not running away. My best friend says that if something makes you nervous, it just means that you’re thinking about it too much. And he is one of many people whose lives are in danger if we don’t stay and fight the Black Widow.”

“You mean Derek? I hate to tell you this, Maria, but I fear Derek has already become one of his aunt’s followers.”

Maria couldn’t help laughing. “A follower? Derek? If there’s one thing about Derek I can absolutely guarantee, it’s that he does his own thing.”

“This isn’t a joke,” Arturo bellowed. “I don’t mean followers in the grammar-school playground sense of the word. More powerful men than Derek have been drawn into the Black Widow’s web. And with six rings now in her possession, the Black Widow will surely have powers even beyond my imagining.”

“Well,” Maria said, her voice staying strong even as her eyes misted over, “that’s all the more reason why he needs my help.”

“Don’t be foolish, Maria. I won’t let you throw your life away like your grandmother did.”

“Grandma Esme didn’t throw her life away!” Maria roared. “She made a wonderful life here, and she fought to protect it. You ran away, but she stayed with what was important to her. She warned me that I’d face the same decision. To do what is easy and run away, or do what is right and stay. You can make your choice however you want to, but my mind is made up.”

“I won’t allow it. I’m sorry, Maria, but this is for your own good.”

Arturo moved like smoke, twisting his body in a fluid arc that shouldn’t have been possible at his age. In a blink, he had taken off his suit coat and thrown it at her, as if it was a net he could catch her in. Maria darted away without thinking, fleeing the cave with Arturo’s footsteps thundering behind her.

Her spiders were screaming, Hurry, hurry, but it was nearly impossible for her to run – the mirror spiders were everywhere, their round silver bodies glittering in the dull light of the cave.

Maria darted and dodged, narrowly avoiding them with every step. She knew it too well – a spider never forgets. She could hear Arturo locked in the same struggle behind her, cursing the brown recluse spiders that had come to her defense.

Maria could see the mirror spiders scrambling to build a web in the mouth of the cave. Even if she pushed through, there was no way she could avoid them on the slippery staircase.

Yelling a warning to the spiders to get out of the way, Maria threw her arms in an arc and leaped.

In less than a second, the icy-dark water came up to meet her.

Maria surfaced for air as fast as she could. The pool of deep water at the bottom of the fall was no bigger than her mom’s jeep. Five feet to the right and Maria would have landed headfirst on the sharp rocks at the bottom.

Maria kicked her legs until she reached the edge of the sinkhole. She’d always hated swimming, and swimming in a dress was even worse. The wet silk of the skirt clung to her legs as she climbed out of the water and pulled herself up the slippery rocks to even ground. As soon as she was on her feet, she ran. She didn’t look back. The image in her mind of a swooping black coat and a sea of pale light was enough to keep her running.

She reached the boardwalk, and then the short grass, and then the line of her backyard. She was almost home free. But one look through the sliding glass door and Maria could tell something was wrong.

The lights were all on, and the chairs around the kitchen table were overturned. The refrigerator door stood open. Maria crept up to her house as quickly as she dared. She didn’t hear anything from inside the house, which supported her suspicion that whoever had done this was already gone.

Not that she had any doubt who had done this.

Maria slid the glass door open. She stepped over the oranges, trash, forks, and knives that had been scattered across the floor, trying not to imagine the struggle that must have taken place while she was in the cave.

“Mom? Rafi?” she called. She wasn’t surprised when they didn’t answer.

She had sworn she wouldn’t get trapped in Arturo’s story, but that’s exactly what had happened. It didn’t matter that he probably thought he was on her side – he and the Black Widow, and now Maria, too, were all part of the same vicious web. A poisonous circle that ensnared innocent people, just like the one around her finger.

Maria dripped water all the way back to her room, only now thinking to take off her shoes. Surely her mother would forgive her the muddy footprints, under the circumstances. For now, Maria needed to change clothes, and she needed to save her family. If she thought too hard about all the steps that came in between those two things, she might faint. Unfortunately, not overthinking things had always been Derek’s strong suit, not hers.

When Maria flicked on her light switch, she had to stifle a scream. The spiderweb that had begun blooming on her bedroom ceiling days ago now stretched all the way across the room. In the center of the web was a small white rectangle.

On closer inspection, Maria recognized it as a business card for Vic’s Antiques. Derek had once used a stack of these cards to do a magic trick. He’d had Maria write her name on one of them, then he’d put the whole stack behind his back and acted like he was trying to feel for which one had pen markings on it. Finally, he’d brought his hands back around to reveal that the card with the writing was the only one left in his hands at all. The rest of the stack had simply disappeared.

The business card in the center of the spiderweb didn’t have any writing on it, but the message was clear enough. The Black Widow had sprung her trap. Rafi and Mom were the bait.

Maria drew back her arm and slung her shoes at the web. The sound of the wet smack as the shoes hit the wall gave her courage.

She felt the ring on her hand grow warm. She heard the spiders before she saw them, and for one paralyzing second, she thought that Arturo had found her – that she’d never get the chance to rescue her family.

But of course she could hear only her own spiders, and her fear turned into a sense of overwhelming relief as a brown recluse swarm surrounded her feet. Her reinforcements had arrived.

The spiders did not stop by her side, however.

Maria’s ring grew from warm to hot, until it was almost painful, as the brown recluse spiders scurried up the wall to the web. The voices in her head were so fast and frenzied, it was impossible to untangle them. What Maria saw clearly was a color: red.

Maria followed her spiders as they climbed, until finally she saw what she had missed before – a black widow spider near the top of the web. It dangled from a thread over the hole Maria’s shoe had just created. It seemed to be injured, or stuck, or afraid.

The brown recluse clutter flew at the lone black widow. In a second, they would be upon it, blind with rage.

“Wait, stop!” Maria shouted. “That’s not what I wanted!”

Her spiders stopped. They turned to face her, confused.

“If you kill that spider, we will only pay the price later. Now, I’m sorry, but at the moment, what I really need is to go save my family, and I need your help. Will you come with me? Please?”

Her spiders hesitated. It seemed to Maria that they didn’t care about the price – they wanted to eliminate their enemy. Maria hoped she wasn’t abusing their friendship by telling them no. But then, a real friend sometimes was the one who told you what you didn’t want to hear but needed to.

Finally, her spiders backed down, and the red in the back of Maria’s mind became a much quieter blue. The black widow pulled itself up to the top part of the web, and it, too, looked at Maria, as if it was considering what to do with her.

“You can go now,” Maria said, none too warmly. “But if I find you doing anything to my mom or brother, I’m not going to stop them next time.”

The black widow fled, and the brown recluse spiders waited at attention.

“I’ll meet you by the front door,” Maria said, and as they left her alone, she took a deep breath. She was happy to have them with her, she thought. Now that she’d seen what they were capable of, she knew it was better than having them against her.

Maria changed into a pair of jeans and a T-shirt. It was after three in the morning, and she had reached that point in being tired where she was actually dizzy, as if she might fall asleep standing up. But no good could come of waiting. And the exhaustion was making her braver than she would be in the daylight.

She threw on a hoodie – one with a sewn-on sword patch that always reminded her of Agatha at Sea – and in this armor, headed out into the night.

The historic district was deserted. Maria had been here at night plenty of times before, with Derek’s family or for town festivals, but usually there were cars parked on the street, and other people around. Now the old streetlamps cast pale oranges and yellows on all the empty shops and restaurants, and the wide-open road looked like a set for a movie about the zombie apocalypse.

Maria stepped out of the shadows and hurried across the street before she could think better of it. Even the spiders trailing at her feet were nervous. Their energy crackled like a radio in her brain.

She reached the door to the shop at a jog, but the creepy doll in the display window stopped her cold. Its wooden horse mount was rocking back and forth as if it had only just been pushed. Maria could swear the doll was looking back at her.

Over the doll’s shoulder, a picture caught Maria’s eye. It was one of many old photographs on a corkboard in the display window. All of them had something to do with the history of the shop, and Maria had never paid them much attention before. But one of the photos was a family portrait from when Derek’s great-grandpa Vic was a little boy. And now Maria noticed a girl next to Vic – a girl who looked so much like Aunt Luellen that they could be twins.

But they weren’t twins, were they? This must be Luellen herself, already a teenager almost a hundred years ago. Maria had guessed that the rings had something to do with Arturo’s and Grandma Esme’s remarkable youth. But if this picture proved what Maria thought it did, the combined power of the rings had kept Luellen from aging hardly at all in a century. Perhaps with all eight rings, she’d become immortal.

Maria tried the door. As she expected, it wasn’t locked. She pushed it open quickly. The sudden, frantic warnings of her spiders came a moment too late.

She ran headlong into a heavy black coat, which enveloped her even faster than she could scream.

Maria was thrown back outside, and she heard the door slam closed behind her. When the coat was yanked off, she was face-to-face with Arturo, who in this strange light looked like an alien, and not the friendly kind, either.

“What in the world is wrong with you?” he said, clenching his coat in his fist. “Did you really think you could just barge your way in there and take down the Black Widow by yourself?”

“I’m not by myself,” Maria said defiantly. Her spiders twittered.

Arturo ran his hands through his hair and breathed an exasperated sigh.

“You’re every bit as stubborn as your grandmother. I hope you know that. But even she would have approached this problem with a bit more forethought. You can’t help your family at all by rushing in and getting yourself killed.”

“Oh, so you’re trying to help me now?”

“In my own way, yes.”

He gave off the faintest hint of a smile, not devious or deceitful but perhaps a bit playful, as if to acknowledge just how peculiar his way was. In that smile, Maria could see the young man Grandma Esme had known.

He loved her, Maria thought. He really did.

“All right, then,” she said. “So what now? I didn’t see anyone else in the shop, and this was my only lead.”

“Oh, someone’s in the shop, all right. The light was on in the basement. My mirrors should be here any” – he cracked open the shop door, and a trio of shiny mirror spiders slinked out – “moment.”

The spiders crawled up Arturo’s leg, all the way to his shoulder. He squinted his eyes as if listening to a faraway sound.

“They say the boy is down there. Derek, it sounds like. But your mother and brother, too. The two of them are … asleep. My mirrors caught no sign of Luellen herself. I expect she is still out looking for you.”

“Then what are we waiting for? Derek won’t be a problem. He won’t. I know it.”

“Maria, I don’t think you understand how dangerous a person without a mind of his own can be.”

“Sure I do,” Maria said. “This girl in my school, Claire, has turned practically the whole seventh grade into followers.”

“If you don’t take this seriously, you’re going to get us both killed.”

“I’m sorry, but look: You might know more about spiders, but I know more about Derek. If you just let me talk to him, I —”

“No. I have a better plan.”

Every moment they spent talking in the street was a moment they weren’t rescuing Rafi and Mom.

“Fine. What’s your plan?”

“Well, part one is that we hide your ring.”

“What?”

“Your ring. If you take it right to her, you have nothing left to bargain with, and she’ll kill you immediately. If you hide it, you have the power to negotiate.”

Maria winced. She hadn’t thought about that. But there was one small problem.

“I’m sorry, but I don’t trust you all the way. The Black Widow kidnapped my family, but you tried to kidnap me, too, you know. Esme gave me the ring, so the ring stays with me.”

Arturo narrowed his eyes at her, visibly unhappy.

“Fine,” he seethed. “Then on to part two.”

And with that, he turned and swept back into the shop, not even bothering to make sure Maria was following him. Fine by her. She was getting the hang of this Order thing. You just had to accept that everyone was trying to trick you at all times, and the only safe bet was to trick them back.

“Are you ready?” Maria whispered to her spiders. She could almost feel their anxious twitching in response. “Me neither,” she said.

Arturo was waiting for her at the checkout counter inside. The light from the basement filtered up and speckled the main room with just enough slivers to see by. The same old trinkets that had looked so harmless and familiar earlier now looked like the possessions of ghosts.

“They say Derek is guarding your family on the far side of the room,” Arturo whispered, the trio of spiders still perched on his shoulder. “I’ll go down first and keep him occupied while you sneak around and free them. And whatever you see down in the basement, you mustn’t stop moving. Do you think you can do that?”

“How are you going to distract him?”

“Do you think you can do that?” Arturo repeated.

Maria nodded. She dreaded to think what the mirror spiders had seen that Arturo was so afraid to tell her now.

“Then do it, and don’t worry about how I’m going to distract him. Just count to ten, then follow me down the stairs.”

With that, Arturo disappeared through the door.

One, two, three, Maria counted, listening for movement from the basement but hearing nothing.

“Stay close to me,” she whispered to her spiders.

Four, five, six. Still nothing. Maria went to the door.

We will, her spiders whispered, and the ring grew warm.

Seven, eight, nine. She took a deep breath.

“Here goes nothing.”

Ten.

She raced down the stairs to the sound of shattering glass.

The scene in the basement took her totally by surprise.

It was all the same junk from before, but it had been reconfigured – organized, somehow, though into what Maria couldn’t say. Across the room, Derek appeared to be strapped into a makeshift suit of armor comprised of pots, pans, and deconstructed furniture. The clock he’d been “repairing” earlier was now on his chest plate, counting time. He was wielding a fireplace poker like a sword, and the reckless anger in his movement as he struck out at Arturo was the only thing that kept the whole image from being comical.

Maria breathed in sharply as the poker connected with Arturo’s chest, but the sound of her gasp was drowned out by more glass shattering. It hadn’t been Arturo at all, but his reflection in one of the many old mirrors. By the looks of the shattered glass on the ground behind Derek, this had happened before.

She was still standing there, agog, when Derek started to turn his eyes in her direction. She’d been given one instruction – don’t get distracted – and already she’d blown it. She was about to ruin the entire rescue.

Arturo appeared farther into the room, and he shouted, “Hey! Junk heap!” Derek whirred around in rage.

Maria ducked behind a nearby dresser, scrambling to take in the rest of her surroundings. She needed to find her mother and Rafi and get them out of here fast, before the Black Widow returned.

Then, in the corner, she saw something ghastly – something that robbed all the air from her lungs. It was the spiderweb to end all spiderwebs, strewn between the wooden beams that seemed to hold the whole foundation of the old building in place.

Mom and Rafi weren’t just strung up in the web – they were wrapped from neck to foot, so that their faces were visible and visibly distressed. As the spiders had warned, neither of them appeared to be awake, which was probably a good thing. If Rafi were awake, he’d be hysterical. He never liked small spaces or being forced to keep still.

Maria made her way from one hiding spot to the next in a low crouch, dodging left and right as Derek turned with his weapon. Arturo was clearly trying to lead him away from the web, but he was limited by the placement and number of mirrors – a number that was getting smaller as Derek demolished one after another.

Finally, Maria reached the web. Up close, she could see that Rafi’s lips were tinged with blue, and the color had drained from Mom’s face. They couldn’t be gone. They couldn’t. Whatever was keeping them unconscious must have sent them into a kind of shock.

“Aha!” Derek shouted, parrying once more with the poker. The glass of one more mirror crashed with the resounding cascade of a chime, and a cuckoo clock somewhere in the rubble echoed in the silence that followed. But that was the last mirror, and when Derek spun on his heel, he was standing face-to-face with the real Arturo. Over Arturo’s shoulder, Derek saw Maria, and he knew he’d been had.

“Maria, hurry!” Arturo called. She’d failed his orders again. She was just so tired, disoriented, and scared.

But she pushed on because she had to. She clawed at the web until it was thick in her fingernails. When her hands started to get stuck, she used her teeth.

“Help me,” she pleaded, and her spiders went to work immediately. But this was no ordinary spiderweb; it was thick like plastic and almost as strong. If only she’d thought to bring a knife.

Meanwhile, Arturo struggled to keep Derek away using what looked like the leg of an old table. It was stranger than any duel Maria had ever imagined, and clumsier, louder, and more dangerous, too. Maria didn’t want either of them to be hurt, but it was finally sinking in that this wasn’t her best friend – the Black Widow’s power had seen to that.

“Wake up, Rafi,” Maria said desperately. “Help me get Mom down. Please, wake up.”

But Rafi would not wake up. And even as Maria tugged and bit, and even as her own spiders struggled alongside her, she heard a scuttling sound, and she knew she was already too late. The enemy spiders were here, and they were out for blood.

In droves, they rushed over her hands and arms; they swarmed her face, knocking her glasses askew. Forced to let go of the web, Maria flailed about, trying to rid her body of the onslaught. But for every spider she shook off, two more appeared. Bulbous spiders, brown-and-red spiders – there were even bright yellow and glassy green spiders – all of them crawling on her skin with legs like little needles. And then there were black widow spiders, with their poison-red hourglasses.

In the moments when she could see her surroundings through the maelstrom of fear and color, she realized that the spiders were turning on Arturo as well. Arturo was stomping on the spiders left and right; he didn’t seem to have any of Maria’s qualms about hurting them. With each spider Arturo killed, the rest of the swarm became angrier and angrier.

When Maria finally felt the spiders moving in the same direction, and the direction was down and away from her body, she entertained the hope that they had changed their minds once more and decided to help her. But if that were the case, her own brown recluse spiders wouldn’t sound so panicked. And what’s more, she couldn’t move her arms or legs. The enemy spiders had wrapped her in a web so tight, she could hardly breathe. Arturo looked to have suffered the same fate, and he was beyond miserable. After decades of successfully evading capture, he’d finally been caught, thanks to Maria’s stupidity.

Derek was winded. He clutched his sides and gulped down air, and for a fraction of a second, he looked like the boy Maria knew. But then he stood upright and glowered at her, as if she had done something to him and not the other way around.

“Derek, help us out,” Maria pleaded. “You don’t have to do this, you know. This isn’t who you are. We can get away from her.”

“No. We can’t.” His voice was monotonous, impossible to interpret. “There’s no escaping her. The Black Widow is everywhere, in us and around us.”

And, as if fulfilling a prophecy or obeying a command, the spiders began to pool at Derek’s feet, pouring out of the walls and the ceiling and the heaps of antiques. They scrambled to climb on top of one another, a mountain of spiders that grew higher and higher.

The teeming pile became tighter and denser, until it looked almost solid, and Maria couldn’t distinguish one spider from the next. Then the pile began to take shape, squeezing in at the bottom and expanding out at the top, the very peak separating into long, thin bands like hair.

Finally, it wasn’t a pile at all. It was a woman. It was Luellen.

Only it wasn’t Luellen – there were a few key differences.

This woman had eight eyes and two terrible mandibles. The mandibles clacked together in a grotesque imitation of speech, and whether it was because words actually came out or because Maria was wearing her ring, she knew this was the Black Widow, and the Black Widow was hungry.

The Black Widow surveyed the room with those eight horrible eyes. She took her time, too, gloating in her victory.

“I have waited many years for this moment,” she said. “But I knew the rings would come to me in the end.” She turned to Arturo. “I think I will take the Brown Recluse first, so that I can savor killing you afterward. I have spent too much of my life hunting you down, oh amazing one, but it will hardly matter when I have all eight rings.”

“You don’t need to kill the girl,” Arturo said. “Look at her – she’s hardly a threat to you.”

“She’s as cunning and ruthless as I am, as we both well know. Besides, I don’t do anything without doing it thoroughly.”

The Luellen-like creature sauntered right up to Maria, its legs quivering with each step so that Maria could almost see the hundreds of spiders in its veins. Maria’s terrified face was reflected back at her eight times.

“Don’t worry, little one. This will only hurt for a second.”

She raised her arm across her chest as if she was going to backhand Maria. Maria saw the lights glittering off all six rings, one on each finger except her middle finger, which had two. Luellen’s fingers were long and sharp, like tiny daggers. There was no telling which of the rings produced that effect.

In the split second before the blow landed, Arturo disappeared with a pop and reappeared right before Maria. Luellen’s hand came down with a sickly slice. Just like that, Arturo was dead.

“No!” Maria shouted, her voice breaking like a wave. Her anguish seemed finally to pierce Derek’s armor. His eyes opened wide and he noticed the iron poker in his hand as if for the first time.

Luellen prodded Arturo’s body with her foot, then leaned over to remove the Mirror Ring as if she were picking out a diamond from a pile of trash. She slid the ring onto her middle finger so that it now bore three. As soon as it did, Luellen’s eyes glazed over with veils of red. Her transformation was nearly complete.

Luellen stared at her hand, then blinked all eight of her horrible red eyes at once. She turned her attention back to Maria.

“Symmetry, my dear, is everything in life. Balance, order, what-goes-around and all that jazz. There’s nothing quite like a perfect circle, except perhaps a perfect story, which exists always in a loop, the infinite present. When you are gone, I will be the story. When you are gone, the Order of Anansi will begin and end with me. I am sure you can see the beauty in that.”

Maria’s spiders screamed their protest in her mind. They didn’t think the Black Widow’s vision for the future was beautiful. They were as frightened and appalled as Maria was.

“The Order won’t end with you,” Maria said. “You don’t really control the spiders. They make the circle. You’re just a cog.”

For a moment, the Black Widow looked furious, her red eyes flashing dangerously. Then she threw back her head and laughed.

She removed the mirror ring, and her eyes became black once more. She removed another ring, and another, and her mandibles became cheeks and her eight eyes melded into two. At last, it was Luellen standing before her, not the Black Widow. She held the seven rings in her hand. In place of her right ear was a nub of flesh. And at her feet, an army of spiders stood ready to strike.

“Who is that pathetic little act for, Maria? Me? The spiders? My drudge of a nephew?”

Behind her and unnoticed, Derek blanched. Whatever spell the Black Widow had held over him was gone. A plan was quickly forming in Maria’s mind. She just needed to keep Luellen talking.

“It isn’t an act,” Maria said. “It’s the truth. My grandmother taught me never to harm a spider. How many have you killed to get those rings? How many more lives will you take when you have mine, too?”

“No more than you would have taken if I’d given you the chance. Oh, yes, Maria. My spies told me all about what happened at that little girl’s birthday party. You wanted to make her suffer, and you did. You wanted to have an expensive dress like hers, so you commanded your spiders to make you one. You expect me to believe you’re an innocent victim, but you’re not, Maria. You’re a wicked girl.”

“I didn’t mean to do that!” Maria shouted. “Or at least, I was sorry after I did it. That’s the important thing.” She hoped that was true. She had to believe it was.

“Oh, I’m sure the Brown Recluses before you were all very sorry when they eliminated their enemies, too. Did your grandmother happen to mention that of all the eight rings, the Brown Recluse has had the most violent history by far? No? Of course not. But so it goes. The venom of the brown recluse spider is far deadlier than the black widow’s. It is no coincidence that the ring you wear is the only poison ring in the collection. So you’ll forgive me for not believing your warmhearted display. I’ve already seen every trick in the book.”

At that exact moment, Derek swung the fire iron.

But Luellen heard it coming, and she turned and caught the iron as if it were made of paper.

“Idiot boy,” she snarled, snatching the poker from his hands and pushing him to the ground, where he was instantly overtaken by spiders.

Maria screamed, but she had no time to rescue her friend now – Luellen was jamming the rings back onto her fingers, and if Maria didn’t think of something fast, she and her family were history.