Page 3 of Widow

Chapter 1

Everyone thought I was insane for taking shifts on major holidays such as Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. It wasn't crazy if your only family consisted of a deadbeat mother and father who enjoyed cooking something illegal more than cooking a holiday ham for their family.

I wasn't about to deal with the headache of holiday traveling when the only thing that would greet me in West Virginia was drama. Drama and a whole lot of heartbreak.

Year after year, I celebrated alone. Well, mostly. Once upon a time, I had a husband. Sometimes I celebrated with friends.

This year, I needed to celebrate alone.

Not because I wanted to. But because there was a hunger inside of me that needed to be fed, and I couldn't risk hurting the people I cared about.

I could go a month at most before the hunger took over, and I lost myself completely. I made that mistake in my first month. I resisted. The spiders took over, and I had no choice in who they chose. They seemed to have a particular taste that I didn't completely understand.

I had hunted six times. Six times I had scrubbed my skin until it was raw. Six times I had vomited until my throat bled. Six times I couldn't say a word to anyone about what I had done. What they had done.

The first time they had killed, I had gone to the ER. Sleep deprivation, they said. I was tired and needed time off. Maybe that was partly true, but I knew what I’d done. What I’d witnessed before and after.

Luckily, I blacked out during. I didn't even want to imagine what the spiders did to the victims.

When I had been bitten, the wound had healed up beautifully. Almost too well, considering its nature and location. It should have scarred or become infected.

For a solid month afterwards, everything was fine. Or at least that's the way it seemed. None of my work colleagues even seemed to remember what had happened that night in the ER.

A month after the incident that had left me shaken to my core, I woke up and found a spider on the pillow next to me. It was black and looked similar to a black widow, but definitely wasn't. There was something... foreign about it.

It just sat there, on the white of the pillowcase, and looked at me with its creepy spider eyes. I had never paid attention to a spider's eyes before because I was more concerned about how to kill it.

It had looked at me like I was its savior.

She jumped and crawled into my skin. There one second, gone the next.

I was confident it was a she. I just had a gut feeling about it.

A few weeks later, a hunger had started developing inside of me. I couldn't explain it, but I first noticed it when I was around men at work. Particularly married men. My skin itched. My stomach churned. It was like the spider inside of me knew those men were up to no good.

After that first time, I decided I wouldn't let them have that much control of me ever again.

It was simple really: find a new bar each month, find a less than savory character. I got a feeling when my prey was within my grasp. It was like my very own spidey sense.

Except I wasn't the good guy.

I didn't want to do it. But I had to. Back when I first discovered I was different, I tried to fight it, but that increased the risk of an innocent getting killed instead. Plus, it just pissed her and her minions off.

I did not want to piss them off.

I pulled open the door to Blue Wave, a hot new restaurant in the South Bay area of Los Angeles. It was one of the few restaurants and bars open Christmas Eve night.

Thank God, because I was pushing it in terms of feeding.

I looked around the restaurant, surprised that it was so busy. I guess I wasn't the only one without family. Or one they didn't want to be around.

"Ma'am, can I get you a table? It will be about a forty-minute wait." The hostess was wearing a Santa hat, which was out of place for a mermaid-themed establishment.

The restaurant area was large and very blue. I felt like I was under the ocean with the chrome, blue, and turquoise decor and finishes. There were aquariums everywhere with tropical fish.

Maybe the spiders would leave me alone with all the water around. Spiders hated water. They reminded me every time I took a shower by tickling under the surface of my skin.

A bath was out of the question. I used to love a nice bubble bath. Now all I had was a box of unused bath bombs.

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