Soul Taken (Mercy Thompson #13)(32)

I followed his gaze. I yipped a warning, but it was too late. Something pale the approximate size and shape of a VW Beetle dropped from the ceiling on top of Adam, flattening him on the floor with a boom that rattled the house.

I leaped upon its broad and smooth back, hoping to find a place I could get some teeth into, something that might get it off Adam. I’d expected to land on something soft, but the surface was as hard and cold as an ice-skating rink. My nails landed with a click, and I had to scrabble to stay on top of it as it moved under me because I could find no purchase.

The creature was near white with a greenish cast in the warm light of the floor lamp. It looked as much like a spider as it did like anything else I’d ever seen. Its body was divided into two rounded segments, one—the one I’d hopped onto—much larger than the other, and it had six long legs with two joints in each. If someone who had never seen a spider tried to make one based on a kindergartner’s description, it might have looked like this creature. Especially if the kindergartner was afraid of spiders—and couldn’t count to eight.

Fine “hairs” covered the hard shell of the body in patches, and they had more in common with cactus spines than with anything as friendly as actual hair. They dug into the tough bottoms of my feet like fiberglass fibers. The connection between body and head was hard, too, covered with plates like armor, and gave me no place to worry at with my teeth.

The legs were covered in longer slivery needles that lay down against the surface. I’d learned how to kill porcupines without getting a muzzle full of quills. If I bit at just the right angle, maybe I could avoid being stuck.

I had to try something because Adam was beneath it.

It shuddered, shivering like a maraca, complete with sound effects. I felt my feet slipping, so I flung myself back off the creature in the hope that once I was on the floor, I could get traction to pull off a leg strike.

The smaller round section, which turned out to be its head, spun as it tracked my motion. It was an uncanny movement—as if it were connected to the body like a trailer ball instead of bone or sinew. It reminded me of the way an owl’s head moves, but creepier. I got a brief glimpse of its open mouth—no teeth or tongue but dangling bits that wriggled—and it spat at me, a cupful of clear liquid that it obviously thought of as a weapon.

I accepted its judgment and sprang out of range as if the spit were acid. It landed on the wood and the edge of a Persian carpet and dissipated in a fog. I decided to continue to treat the spider spit as if it was dangerous.

In the back of my head, I kept track of how long Adam had been down beneath the creature. Seconds were hours in a fight, and I had counted three already.

Fortunately, Adam on the ground was the farthest thing from Adam helpless. While I was trying for a good angle of attack for one of the legs, Adam surged to his feet under the weight of his attacker and flung it into the piano with thunderous effect. Stefan’s piano had survived when someone heaved me into it a while back.

Either Adam threw harder or I didn’t weigh as much as the Volkswagen-sized monstrosity. The piano collapsed in a shower of splinters, ringing soundboard, and broken wires that lashed the creature hard enough to leave a few small cracks in its shell.

The spider-thing righted itself with a stomach-turning flutter of spindly legs. Then it skittered—if something that large could be said to skitter—back toward Adam.

Looking only a little the worse for wear, he waited for it with a calm face and my cutlass at the ready. It leaned back and balanced on four legs, striking at Adam with the two closest to him.

Adam avoided the first limb with a subtle twist of the weapon and a slight movement of his body. He caught the leg with a glancing blow as it swept past him. He didn’t hit it hard, but the blade sang out as if the leg were metal.

My cutlass wasn’t the thick-bladed version made famous in cartoons and bad pirate movies, though it was stout enough. Its blade was slightly curved, and short enough so that it could be used in close quarters—like on a pirate ship. Zack told me they’d picked it because the length suited my arm, and also because it was a prize for winning the pirate computer game the whole pack was obsessed with.

Adam’s first strike had been to test the way the blade felt against the leg, and he’d gotten some feel. The spider-thing’s second leg was only a hair’s breadth behind, and on that one Adam tried to take out the joint. Again, he didn’t hit it full force—as he would have with something that was ordinary flesh and blood. Instead, he caught it a glancing blow, the way he would have dealt with another, equally strong blade.

He thought that whatever formed the outer layer of the leg was as strong as or stronger than steel or he’d have hit it differently. Again, the blade sang out as it rebounded a bit off the leg.

There were going to be no easy victories here—and I was afraid that I was as useless as sunscreen in Seattle. I was fast enough, I thought, to avoid its attacks. But if that cutlass in Adam’s hands wasn’t doing much damage—neither could I.

I did take a good look at the creature’s underside in hopes of finding some weak point, but it was, as far as I could tell, made of the same stuff as the rest of it.

Adam took a third strike at the joint between leg and body. The creature could put its body anywhere from flat on the ground to about six feet in the air, and at that point the joint was level with Adam’s shoulder. It didn’t make that clanging sound, but I couldn’t see that it did any damage at all—visually, anyway. The spider-thing jerked back with a hissing noise of about the same volume as dropping water into hot grease. So he must have done something.