Page 46 of The Blood Queen

It shrieks and moans, age screaming in its hinges and the dust that kicks off the floor within. Alyth only opens the door enough for us to slip inside, and we go fast, shutting the door behind us.

It’s dark. I can just make out high walls and a long, thin room, windows near the ceiling showing the constant twilight sky outside. That’s the only light, a soft stream of hued pinks and blues.

My eyes adjust slowly. Neither Alyth nor I move, our breaths held, my hand still on the small of her back.

The room is covered in drop cloths. The kind fancy-bred people use to close up their homes when they move for the season, keep the dust off their furniture. Only the furniture’s in weird places. Scattered throughout the long room, all the way up to what has to be the throne dais, lumps covered in white are haphazardly arranged, like maybe chairs got dragged out and tipped over. Did the fae just cover them up rather than risk moving them if they feared the mysterious Red Cap weapon?

Pillars line the room, and there are sheeted bits halfway up them too and clinging to the ceiling.

Alyth whispers something, and then a soft light fills one palm, her other hand held up, keeping the translucent silver barrier in place around us. The white light is small, but its brightness feels like the sun in this quiet, dim place, showing—

Showing—

My body goes cold.

Head to toe, I freeze solid, forgetting how to move, how to speak, how to breathe.

Those aren’t cloths.

They’re spiderwebs.

And those bundles—they aren’t bits of furniture. The light shows their shapes now, and they’re distinctly human shapes. Heads, torsos, legs, all knotted together in webbed cocoons.

They’re bodies.

Bodies held to the wall. The ceiling. The floor. Bodies tangled up in spiderwebs. And the webs spread across every free space, crowding up around the small area where we stand near the door, the only free bit in the whole damn room.

“It’s them,” comes a hissing voice. No—many hissing voices. An overlapping discord of thousands of beings all talking at once. It comes from above us, beside, all around, everywhere. “It’s them. They’re here. It’s them.”

And then.

The webs start to move.

The white strands swell and ripple, and thousands, thousands of tiny blue and red and black specks burst out of them, skittering and scurrying over the webs.

Toward us.

12 Alyth

Well, shit.

Everything I know about the throne room of the Faerie Queen comes secondhand at best. It was impossible for all the legends to be true—that she could call stars down from the sky, that she could sing and enchant everyone who heard her, that she could transform her shape at will.

But the one thing that has to be undeniably true about her is the spiders.

“Samson,” I say, feeling him stiffen behind me.

I turn to face him. We’re still in the protective bubble. His eyes are wide and panicked, but I cup his cheek, force his gaze to mine.

“I know you don’t like them, but remember: spiders are good.”

“Vicious…legs…” he mutters.

My face scrunches up. “Vicious legs?”

“They are vicious, and they have legs,” he clarifies. “Too many of ’em.”

I laugh, but it’s clear this is no laughing matter to him. “Okay, but spiders are good, actually, especially fae spiders. You can’t judge them for how they look.”