Page 60 of Winter Lost

I wasn’t sure I had actually heard the spider’s voice—a warm, amused feminine voice that quivered a little around the edges, as if the speaker were elderly. I could have just imagined it—though it wasn’t the type of voice I’d expect such a creature to have.

Just now it didn’t matter. Real or imagined, the “feeding” part was accurate. I could see it as soon as I looked.

“Jack?” Elyna sounded worried. “What’s wrong?”

“Mercy?” Adam asked.

“The spider,” I said absently, trying to understand what I was seeing. “It’s not really a spider—not only a spider. I think it’s feeding on Jack.”

Elyna pulled off her shoe, but when she tried to approach the spider, she ran into some sort of a barricade. When she threw the shoe instead, it hit the spider with a crack, like a baseball hitting the side of a barn, then rolled to the side. The spider appeared unharmed.

And amused. I didn’t want to know how I knew that.

I raised a hand. “Hold off. I don’t think you can do anything to her that way. I might—” I lost track of what I was saying.

Jack was a ghost—and a disturbingly strong one at that. He wasn’t a friend, or even an acquaintance. Maybe if the spider consumed him, it wouldn’t be a bad thing compared to the damage a strong ghost could cause.

But my instincts told me it was wrong, and I was in the habit of listening to my instincts.

Afterward…afterward I wondered why I knew what I had to do in order to understand what the spider was doing. And why I thought that I had to understand it before I could stop it. But that was later.

I’d spent the better part of the last two months trying to shut down the way the Soul Taker had ripped open my senses. Yes, I sensed things in a way I never had before. But that raw knowledge, that seeing into people without them or me having any say over what I saw—that intrusive, overwhelming ability had disappeared when Zee destroyed the Soul Taker.

Mostly. The quick glimpses into people—like the way I’d seen forests in Uncle Mike’s gaze—were nothing compared to the overwhelming comprehension the Soul Taker had given me before it was destroyed.

At that moment, I knew, knew that the only way to save Jack was to see the world as the Soul Taker had forced me to see it.

Opening that extraordinary, abominable sight felt like peeling bandages off and opening wounds that were raw and oozing. Festering. I exposed the changed part of my mind that the Soul Taker had made and forced it back into the light.

I was very careful not to look at Elyna, and I tried to only observe the stuff Jack was made of—energy and magic and soul. I told myself I didn’t notice the events of his life and what kind of person he had been when he was alive.

I tried not to see the bonds of spirit and soul that entwined him with the vampire. When I failed at that, I tried not to get lost in the sudden understanding of how her vampiric nature allowed him to hover so near to being alive, not a vampire but held by the necromancy that kept vampires walking when they should be corpses.

There was no time for that, and it was knowledge I should not have.

Dangerous knowledge, agreed the spider, sounding intrigued.

What I was doing was reckless, dangerous. My mind wasn’t built to hold this much, to understand this much. If it lasted too long, I didn’t know if I would die or turn into someone—something—not me.

“Mercy.” Adam’s voice was a growl, and it centered me.

I focused on the strands between Jack and the spider, but those didn’t tell me enough. I had to examine the way the spider was feeding, and my choice was to see too much of Jack—who he was and how he was made—or to see too much of the spider. Reading the spider with my mind open like this struck me as a good way to get lost.

Jack was covered in fine silver threads that encircled him and wove around him like a lovingly knit sweater. The spider silk concentrated around the ends of his arms, and the bright magic made me want to close my eyes against the power of it. Instead, I stepped closer to Jack and reached out to touch the threads.

My head ached with the amount of information pouring into me, from my eyes and my fingers and my skin. Most of the information didn’t matter; I needed to know how the spider was feeding from him so I could see how she could be made to stop.

I couldn’t prevent her snacking on him by manipulating the web, but there was a chance I could do something else. It was the only option I could find. Knowledge acquired; it was time to stop seeing.

That proved easier said than done. I fought to reseal the Soul Taker’s rips in my mind, but it was harder to close those paths than it had been to tear them open. I flailed, drowning in the river of enlightenment.

My mouth tasted of copper and salt—and then I was safe, my feet on the ground and my mind my own. I stared into my mate’s golden eyes and all that I saw was him, the taste of blood on my tongue.

I thought for a moment that I’d bitten my tongue or something and the pain had brought me back. The blood in my mouth tasted like pain. Then I saw that Adam’s mouth was bloody, too, and there was a fresh wound healing on his forearm.

He’d bitten himself and pressed his mouth to mine. Blood strengthens bonds, and he’d used his to give me the power to save myself from the Soul Taker’s cursed gift. Adam was the most loving person I’d ever met, though sometimes his love language was painful to everyone involved. I’d learned that I had to be brave to love him.

Worth it.

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