Page 67 of Renegade Kingdom
The wolf subsided, still growling but obedient. I closed my eyes, which were useless in this fog anyway, and let my other senses take over. The bond pulsed at the edges of my awareness, five threads of connection stretching out into the mist. They were there. All of them. Scattered, separated, but alive.
Then I opened my eyes just in time to see the thing drop from the trees.
It landed in front of me with a sound like bones cracking, and for a moment, my mind refused to process what I was seeing. It looked like a woman, or at least, something that could once have been human until it turned into something so much worse. Human arms, human torso, a face that was twisted it into an expression of permanent, hungry malice.
From the waist down, the body of a spider. Eight massive, jointed limbs that clicked against the forest floor as it moved. Spinnerets that dripped something wet and glistening. But itwas the eyes that I couldn’t look away from. Too many eyes, clustered at the temples where human eyes should have been.
An anastid.
The fog pressed close around us, cutting off any hope of seeing my pack. I was alone with this thing, separated from everyone I loved by magic and malice. The wolf howled in my mind, desperate to find the others, but I forced him to focus on the threat in front of me.
“Silly little wolf,” the anastid purred, her voice like honey laced with poison. She began to circle me, her spider legs clicking against the now frozen leaves with a sound that set my teeth on edge. “We came all the way from where the gods ripped open the mountains to create us a home, just to taste the blood of the shifters that dared to cross our master.”
I adjusted my grip on my sword, keeping the blade between us, tracking her movements as she circled. She was fast. I could see it in the way she moved, the casual grace of a predator who had never known what it was to be prey. But she was also arrogant. Talking when she should have been fighting. Savoring the moment when she should have been going for the kill.
“Did you spin your own puppet strings, spider? Or did Arik grant you those as well?” I kept my voice steady, buying time, listening for any hint of where my pack might be. “You mean nothing to him. You’re nothing but a weapon to wield. A tool to be used and discarded.”
The anastid’s smile widened, revealing teeth that were too sharp, too numerous. Row after row of them, disappearing back into the darkness of her throat. “You make that sound like something we wouldn’t enjoy.”
She tipped her head back and laughed, and it was a horrible sound. High and chittering and wrong in ways I couldn’t articulate. The kind of laugh that would haunt my nightmares if I survived long enough to have them. The fog seemed to thickenaround us as she laughed, pressing closer, cutting off even more of my vision.
Then her head tipped to the side with a cracking sound, the angle unnatural, her many eyes focusing on something behind me.
“Arik will remake the realm,” she continued, her voice shifting into something almost reverent. Almost worshipful. “And when he brings about an age of darkness, the true creatures of Nymeria will take our rightful places. No longer hiding in the depths, no longer cowering from the light, no longer bound by the laws of a weakening goddess. We will hunt freely, feast freely, kill freely. The world will be our hunting ground, and there will be no one left to stop us.”
I wasn’t listening anymore.
Because I could hear it. The second set of legs, clicking softly against the forest floor behind me. The subtle displacement of air as something large and multi-limbed crept closer while its companion kept me distracted. They thought I was just a wolf. Just a shifter. Just prey to be toyed with before the kill.
They were wrong.
I spun.
My sword drove deep into the anastid that had been creeping up behind me, the blade punching through her torso with a wet, tearing sound. She screamed, a high-pitched shriek that seemed to vibrate through my skull, and the one I’d been facing screamed too, a mirror of her sister’s pain.
I ripped the sword free, ducking as the first anastid lunged for me. Her claws raked through the air where my head had been, close enough that I felt the wind of their passage. She crashed into her dying sister instead, her claws tearing through the already-wounded flesh in a frenzy of misdirected violence.
I rolled, coming up in a crouch, and swung my sword in a wide arc. The blade caught the uninjured anastid across herspider legs, cleaving through two of them in a single stroke. She fell, shrieking, her remaining legs scrabbling for purchase on the blood-slicked forest floor.
I backed up two steps, sword raised, eyes scanning the fog.
The screams echoing around me weren’t just coming from the two anastids I’d fought. They were coming from everywhere. The trees, the shadows, the fog itself. Dozens of voices raised in fury and hunger.
It wasn’t just the two of them. The forest was full of them.
The wolf howled inside me, eager for the fight, but I held him back. As much as I wanted to shift, as much as every instinct screamed at me to become something with claws and fangs and the raw power to tear these creatures apart, I knew it would be a mistake. We didn’t know what poison these things might carry, what venom might lurk in their claws or their bite. The sword was the safer option. The sword kept distance between me and them.
I had a moment of grim satisfaction. At least I had the anastids occupied. At least while they were focused on me, they weren’t hunting my pack. Somewhere out there in the fog, Alyssa and the others were fighting their own battles, facing their own nightmares. I could feel them through the bonds, distant but alive, and that was all that mattered.
If I could keep the anastids busy long enough, maybe the others could escape. Maybe they could make it to the Fifth Court without me. Maybe my death here, alone in this fog, would buy them the time they needed.
Even as I thought it, I laughed. A harsh, bitter sound that surprised even me.
There was no way Alyssa would leave me behind. No matter how much I wished she would. She’d come for me, and my brothers would never be able to drag her away. She’d fightthrough an army of anastids to reach me, and she’d die doing it if that’s what it took.
So I needed to not die. I needed to stay alive long enough to find my pack again. Needed to survive this fight and whatever came after. And with that determination I felt a crack deep inside me as some barrier cracked open. Something buried deep, waiting for the moment when it was needed the most.
And then I remembered.
