Page 16 of Tomb of Ancients
“How?” I begged her. “How?”
“You will know me,” she said. “You will know me by my name when you wake.Mab.”
That one word was like a hammer that broke the nightmare into pieces. I was enveloped in darkness, dreamless and still, that one name echoing on and on, carrying me to morning.
Chapter Eight
When I awoke, it was to eight tiny, curious eyes and a little hooked paw, raised as if to shake me out of sleep. A spider. My spider. My spider touching my face. Her leg brushed my nose, and I screamed, backing away on the bed frantically until I smashed into Khent. He shouted as he woke, throwing his hands in every direction at an imagined threat.
The curses that flew out of his mouth were creative even for him.
“I’m sorry! Oh! I’m sorry!” Mary shot forward, seemingly from nowhere. It was chaos. As my pulse evened, I realized that she had been out in the hall, and, from the pot of tea cradled carefully in her hands, that she had been finding us breakfast.
The spider watched me, unmoving, its furry leg still raised.
“I thought she must be so cooped up in there,” Mary tumbled on, covering her mouth with both hands. “Perhaps it was foolish to open the cage...”
The unhealed bite on my hand began to itch, and I placed my other hand over it. “No, you were right to give her that freedom. She isn’t a spider at all.”
Mary stared at me, minding the teapot, then I saw her eyes travel slowly over my shoulder to Khent.
Pushing myself off the bed, I knelt in front of the cot, bringing my face level with the spider. It made no more attempt to touch me, but I could sense the intelligence hiding there.
“It was like having a word stuck on my tongue for months and months, but I know it now,” I told them, ignoring their strained glances. “Her name is not Mab, but Mother. The soul of an ancient god cannot be killed, yes? But it can be concealed. Father trapped her in this form once he had the Dark Fae book. I saw her when I died, and I saw her just now in my dreams.”
Mary came to kneel next to me, studying the creature as closely as I did, and Khent did the same from the bunk. How strange it must have been for Mother to have the three of us pressing our noses right up to her. She seemed to take it in stride, darting forward to touch her strangely soft, paw-like foot to my hand where it had been bitten.
“Aye, you bit me,” I said, remembering how the spider had leapt from my father’s shoulder to take a nibble when he was still trying to masquerade as a human at Coldthistle House. “You were trying to warn me, weren’t you?”
The spider danced back and forth, still touching my hand.
“How extraordinary,” Mary breathed. “And how wretched to be trapped like that for so long.”
Khent chimed in, too, but his thoughts on Father and his methods were sharp enough to pierce steel; I was grateful that Mary could not understand him.
“But how to undo this?” I mused aloud.
“It must be buried in your mind somewhere, mm? If Father put her into this creature’s body, then the memory of it simply needs to be found,” Mary said. She leaned back on her heels and pursed her lips. “Ach, I’m sure that’s easier said than done.”
I stood and rummaged through the trunk Khent had recovered from our house, desperate to find ink and parchment. Vague remembrances of the dream lingered in my brain, and I needed to scratch them down before they disappeared. I came across a folded bit of paper and an old drawing charcoal. They would have to suffice.
“She said something about the curse in that nightmare,” I told them as I scribbled. “He bound her with spell and sage, blood and ink, wine and water. I can only hope the same kind of ritual would undo all of this.”
“Brilliant,” Mary murmured. “What does it mean?”
“Perhaps Dalton or Fathom might know,” I ventured, feeling hopeless. It seemed unlikely that Father would willingly part with the means to reverse his spell. Whenever I learned something he disliked, his anger emerged, and trying to help Mother would no doubt put him into a rage. My hands trembled at that. He was thirsty for more violence, and I feared the instrument of his will would again be my hands.
“I might know what?”
Dalton watched us from the open doorway, or perhaps watched was the wrong word, in light of the strip of fabriccovering his damaged eyes. But his attention was fixed in our direction, and he sipped casually from a chipped teacup, dressed in a patchy white morning suit.
“It will probably sound a bit mad...”
“Then I am definitely interested,” he said with a grin.
“This creature of ours was recovered from Father. She has the soul of an ancient Fae goddess trapped inside. The Mother, actually. Father’s counterpart. It all came to me in a dream, but I only have a few clues.”
“Which are?”
