Page 103 of Storm Echo

Here, she would feed. Feed until nothing was left.

And when she emerged, she’d be a power unlike any the world had ever seen.

Chapter 49

Spider, spider, my beautiful spider.

With your web so bright, and your silk so strong.

Spider, spider, I see you.

—Norah Mercant (b. unknown, d. 2059)

IVAN MADE SURE to stay on the verge of the Scarab Queen’s field of death. From what he’d experienced the last time around, he had to get close to stir her out of her stupor—and he needed her to remain inert, half-asleep.

She was too powerful for him to take her on one-to-one. With the amount of energy she’d stolen from her victims and hoarded, she’d break his mind with a single action, then swallow him whole.

One strike.

That was all he’d have. A single attempt to cut the threads of her control. He knew from his own experience that a sudden severing of a thread of his web equaled a wound. Grandmother had been aghast when she’d accidentally injured him the time he’d webbed himself to other children—he’d come to her, dropped all his shields so she could see the nightmare web.

It had still been invisible to her. Today’s experience with the Scarab Queen told him that only another spider could naturally see a fellow spider’s web. With his grandmother, it had taken a visceral link, core-mind-to-core-mind. He’d then asked her to cut the threads. After checking to see what the repercussions might be and finding no obvious issues, she’d carefully severed a single one.

It had made Ivan seize, his body racked with pain.

When he was conscious and stable again, he’d asked her to do the rest. She’d refused. “I willnothurt you. We’ll find another way.”

That other way had been for Ivan to learn to do it himself. Ifhesevered the thread, it didn’t cause him any harm. That made sense. The spider wouldn’t want to be attached to anyone it considered dead weight, its primary and only goal to feed. The dead were no use to it.

His theory was that if he severed a large number of the Scarab Queen’s threads, it would send her into convulsions on the physical plane. The best-case scenario would be that she’d drop out of this network and it would collapse by default—since she seemed to be the center, the core holding it together.

Worst-case would be if she was wounded and in pain but still able to cling to the ChaosNet. In which case, Ivan would have to find a way to kill her. The simplest answer was also the deadliest—he’d attach her tohisweb, suck her dry. The amount of power she was holding, however, would overload his mind and kill him.

Kill Soleil.

Rage burned through him in a cold fire, but the cat inside him stood unbowed, his mate’s courage endless. They would do this, because to do nothing would be to sentence all the people in this web to death. And the spider wouldn’t be satisfied with that. It would feed and feed and feed until it had absorbed the entire PsyNet.

Inside his mind, Ivan’s own spider stretched, avaricious and hungry. It wanted all those minds, wanted all that power. And for the first time in his adult life, Ivan was going to set it free and hope he could contain it once it was over.

A jagged inhale, a quiet exhale.

It was time.

He’d thought of how best to achieve his aims, had settled on spreading his web over and around the Scarab Queen. He’d always visualized his web as hard and cutting, so it took him very little effort to envisage each thread as razor-sharp.

Holding his breath in the physical world, aware of Soleil’s hand locked tight with his, he spread his web over the dead zone.

Softly, softly, Ivan.

He pushed the edges of the web outward to the point that he began to sense minds, then halted, because his aim wasn’t to damage any of those minds, not even those that belonged to Scarabs. They might be out of control, but cut off from their Queen, they might not be evil.

Then, his mate beside him, inside him, he dropped his razored web directly over the Scarab Queen’s web.

Her psychic scream was so piercing that it made his ears bleed.

Gritting his teeth through the agony, he did a rapid check to ensure he’d cut as many lines as possible … and saw that he’d severed every single one. The Queen was marooned in the dead zone, bleeding out from countless wounds, all her threads hanging limply around her.

They began to curl up and die even as he watched under the light of his silvery web … and she was gone. Disengaging completely from the web to save herself. Ivan could only hope that she was dead, but he couldn’t follow her—in fleeing the murderous tangle of her web and his, she’d detached herself from the island she’d created, had probably already linked up with another part of the PsyNet.

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