Page 1 of The Spider & the Storm

PROLOGUE

MASSACHUSETTS, PRESENT DAY

I’d once read somewhere that a spider couldn’t get trapped inside its own web.

It had something to do with their familiarity with their own work and knowing where they’d laid the sticky shit down to trap its prey. Apparently—and contrary to popular belief—the whole web wasn’t sticky, only some of the strands, and a spider had this crazy ability to remember where they’d put it down.

I know. It had blown my mind too.

Still, even knowing that, I watched this thing—a black widow—skitter along one fine silvery line, glistening in a shred of light cast from a nearby lamppost, and I wondered how many spiders just …forgotwhere they’d laid that sticky stuff. Like, how often did they get sidetracked? How often did they have too much on their mind, walk down one of those fine threads of silk, and—fuck!—glue themselves right onto their own trap and become a feast for someone else, maybe even one of their own kind?

A cool gust of wind blew through the cemetery, rustling the remaining leaves overhead, still clinging to the branches of night-darkened trees. The black widow’s asymmetrical, tangled web—low to the ground and stretched between the legs of a memorial bench in a family plot—swayed in time with the breeze. She held tight, not allowing herself to move an inch until the interruption to her work had passed.

A solitary creature, the black widow. Feared and often misunderstood for her venom, yet her only true desire wasn’t toterrorize, but to simply be left alone to live her life and do her work.

I knew the feeling well.

I’d known it for years.

But soon, with the passing of autumn, after her mating season ended, she would find herself a place to hide indoors. Maybe even inside the cottage on the hill, the one I’d been calling home for the past several years. I’d welcome the quiet company. She’d respect my decision to keep to myself, and for her, I’d do the same. We could spend the winter together until the arrival of spring—if either of us survived for that long—and our time shared would come to an end without so much as a word spoken between us in our departure. Peaceful and perfect. My ideal roommate.

Fuck. There was that chilling wind again, and this time, it brought with it the familiar sense of being watched.

I turned without an inkling of fear from the arachnid’s art show to survey the grounds, immaculately kept, thanks to yours truly. From where I sat on the cold stone bench, I could make out the shadowed structures of a row of mausoleums in the near distance, a handful of trees and their outstretched limbs, and a group of headstones sitting alongside the dirt path, beneath the iron lamppost. Nothing was out of place, and the specters I knew well weren’t there, hiding between the gravestones.

But there was that old feeling—some would call it intuition—lifting the hairs at the back of my neck. Telling me there was something—maybe even someone—out there, watching me watch the spider when I should’ve been in my bed, asleep.

Seven a.m. would come quickly, as it always did, and my day of working among the dead would begin again.

“Well, ma’am,” I said to the black widow while continuing to fix my stare on the row of towering stone structures in the distance, “I guess I’ll be heading back home now. You have a good night.”

I grabbed my sketchbook, pen, and phone—not that anyone was likely to call, but I guessed you never did know—from the bench beside me and stood. Home was only a short walk down the path and up the hill, and most nights, I looked forward to it. But tonight, I wasn’t so sure as an uncomfortable foreboding curled inside my gut and made itself at home. The sensation was familiar but old, like remembering the feel and scent of a worn blanket you hadn’t seen since childhood, realizing you would never see it again while also knowing you’d recognize it if you ever had the chance.

The last time I had known this feeling was the last time I was in Connecticut.

Home.

God, could I even call it that anymore when I hadn’t lived there in so long? But at what point did the place you had been born and raised in stop being home?

I held tight to my things as I quickened my pace down the path, winding between the markers of marble and limestone, and toward the light shining bright from the lantern hanging beside my front door. A welcome calm wrapped around my thundering heart, and I breathed out my relief as I turned up the flagstone path to head up the hill and to my door when the wind came blowing at my back. Lifting the hair off my shoulders and ripping through the flesh of my neck to the bone beneath.

And with it came a message, one I knew all too well from years before.

A message that said something was about to happen. Something monumental and soul-shaking, maybe even tragic.

And whether I liked it or not, I would have to weather the storm.

CHAPTER ONE

CONNECTICUT, AGE EIGHT

“Charles Corbin?”

I glanced up quickly from my book to see the lady stepping into the boring waiting room, a clipboard in her hand, and then I looked at Mom. She was already starting to stand from the chair beside mine as she nodded reassuringly.

“That’s you, Charlie. Come on.”

My tummy felt worse now than it had when she picked me up early from school. She had said that it was butterflies from being nervous, but butterflies fluttered and danced through the sky like ballerinas. The feeling in my tummy didn’t remind me of dancing at all. This feeling hurt. It felt angry and reminded me of the wasps that had made a home under the porch roof last summer.

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