Loki's Gambit, page 95
part #1 of I Bring the Fire Series
From above them comes a sound like a child’s gleeful, “Whee!”
Amy lifts her head to see two small spiders falling from the tunnel just above them. Before she knows what’s happening, Bohdi is on his feet. His right foot connects with a small spider body before it even hits the ground. There is a sickening crunch and the spider’s body flies through the dead trees. There is a collective clicking beyond the small patch of forest they’re in.
The second spider scurries at Amy’s feet, mandibles twitching. Is it poisonous? She wants to kick it, but somehow she winds up only hopping backward, like her legs are bound together. Before she can regain herself, Bohdi’s already giving the spiderling a smooth roundhouse kick with his left foot. There is another crunch as his foot connects, and then the small creature goes flying between the trees.
Amy shivers. There is something so effortless and natural in the way Bohdi fights. As though he does this all the time…
She twists around to look at him, expecting a cocky grin and glinting eyes. Instead Bohdi just looks befuddled. “Wow,” he says. “I must have played soccer in my past life.”
In the periphery of her vision, Amy sees two of the adults rush forward.
She falls with Bohdi into a defensive crouch—as though they have some defense. But the two spiders merely grab the semi-crushed baby spiders and scurry backward. As they do, the mob of spiders chittering becomes so loud and fast it becomes a furious roar.
Amy blinks. For a heartbeat nothing happens. And then the spiders surge forward from all sides with such force the ground actually shakes.
Another high-pitched cry sounds above. Lifting her head, maybe to avoid looking at her fate, she sees a small spider falling right toward her.
“Amy,” Bohdi shouts.
He reaches for her, but it’s too late. The spiderling is just inches from the crown of her head. She should run, or hit it, or kick it…Instead she catches it. Her hands connect with its fuzzy, round, middle, just at the level above where its stubby little legs begin. Its fur is incredibly soft beneath her fingers, and its body is warm.
The roaring clatter of the spiders instantly goes silent, the wave of their momentum coming to a halt just a few paces from the trees.
The small spider in her hands gives a cheep. Its six eyes open and close rapidly, its little legs pump the empty air, and its mandibles quiver.
“I can’t…I can’t kill it!” Amy cries, knowing she’s being ridiculous. It’s probably poisonous. It would suck her blood in a heartbeat.
Bohdi puts a hand on her shoulder and the little spider squeals in terror, its legs helplessly churning backward in the air.
“Maybe you won’t have to,” he whispers, but he might as well be shouting, the spiders beyond the trees are so eerily silent.
Amy lifts her head. The adult spiders have drawn back, their mandibles opening and closing—but so softly they make almost no sound.
“We have a hostage,” Bohdi says.
Amy’s heart stops. One little spider’s life…has made the whole hive retreat.
“Don’t drop him,” Bohdi says. He pushes Amy forward a step. In front of them, the spiders draw back.
“I don’t want to hurt him,” Amy says, her voice ringing with despair. As they advance toward the spiders, some of the adults drop their abdomens low to the ground. Amy’s not sure if she imagines it, but there’s something sinister in the movement. Bohdi spins beside her, jaw hard. Flicking open his knife, he shouts, “You don’t have to hurt it, honey, ’cause I will.”
He sounds so much more confident than Amy; she shifts nervously on her feet. The spiders crawling on their bellies skitter backward with nervous, light clicks of their mandibles.
The little spider in Amy’s hands squeals, a line of silk shooting out its rear end. Bohdi’s eyes drop to it, and he whispers through clinched teeth. “I don’t want to hurt you, little guy…but I don’t want to be eaten.”
There’s a sort of frantic desperation in his voice, and it’s like a spell has been broken. He’s just as human as she is, just as afraid and conflicted.
Bohdi licks his lips nervously. Rolling his head, he flips his bangs back and whispers, “We’re in a stalemate. In the trees they can’t shoot us with silk, and while we’ve got the little guy, they can’t advance. But as soon as we leave the trees…”
Amy swallows. As soon as they leave the trees and underbrush, they’ll be surrounded by spiders. It will be easy enough for the spiders to trap them both in bonds of silk before Bohdi can threaten their “hostage.”
For a moment, they both stand paralyzed. A gust of gentle wind sweeps beneath the nest, ruffling dead leaves.
Amy takes a deep breath and catches a whiff of…campfire.
A twig snaps very close in the underbrush to their right. Expecting to see a spider, Amy turns her head, and Bohdi raises his knife.
But there is no giant arachnid about to pounce, just a bright dancing flame, crackling in the brush. There is another crackle, another gust of wind, and a tiny spark floats gently from the burning undergrowth to the trunk of a tree. It disappears among the blackened dead fronds of ivy. And then, with a sound like a soft sigh, a warm orange flame blossoms along the tree trunk.
More sparks rise from the first bit of brush Bohdi set to smoldering. Some land in the ivy embrace of another tree. Another tiny fire starts with frightening swiftness.
“Uh-oh,” says Bohdi. “Errrr…”
A patch of grass erupts into a blaze. The tiny flickers of flame dancing in the ivy fronds suddenly flare—and the tree trunks rapidly becoming engulfed in fire so dense it is like flaming bark. Spreading up into the tree limbs, the fire begins stretching orange tendrils of flame into the spider nest.
Amy lifts her head and gasps. Where the flame touches the nest, the web melts like cotton candy.
A whoosh sounds behind them, and another tree trunk bursts into flames, tongues of fire flicking up quickly into its branches and into the web…Amy turns in place, the fire is spreading everywhere around them. In a few minutes, they’ll be trapped.
Beyond the flames, Amy hears the rise of more spider chitters.
There is a loud crack, and a branch longer than Amy’s arm and twice as thick tumbles down behind them, one end of it lit like the butt end of a cigarette.
“Death by spider or by fire?” Bohdi mutters.
“I don’t know…” Amy says, turning to face their captors beyond the flaming brush. As she turns, a shrill shriek fills the air, followed by another, and another. It sounds like a baby’s cry, and makes the hair on the back of her neck stand on end.
“What?” says Bohdi.
And then the spider in Amy’s arms raises its voice in the same eerily human shriek of terror. Above them, more wails rise up in a horrible chorus of pain and fear Amy knows she’ll never be able to forget it as long as she lives.
Eyes widening, Amy looks upward. Above them spider silk is melting away from the flames as the fire leaps from branch to branch.
“The nursery…” Amy whispers, but her voice is drowned out by the cries of the adult spiders beyond the trees. Their chittering rises in another roar; however, this time, it is higher in pitch, almost frantic.
Beside her, even in the warm light of the growing flames, Bohdi looks vaguely green. But then gritting his teeth, he surveys the distance beyond Amy’s shoulder. Putting his knife away, he grabs her shoulder. “Come on.” Pushing her forward, he pauses just long enough to pick up the branch that had fallen, and begins steering Amy out of the trees that are rapidly becoming giant torches.
Death by spider then, she thinks. That thought dies almost instantly. The ranks of adult spiders surrounding Amy and Bohdi have thinned. All around them, the spiders are jumping into the air, and disappearing into half hidden tunnels in the floor of the rapidly disintegrating nest.
The shrill cry of baby spiders is still rising in the air. Amy’s own spiderling’s shriek is fading to a near incessant whimper. Flipping the little guy around in her arms so its back is to her stomach, she clutches it like a stuffed animal.
Bohdi steers them beneath the nest, between clumps of smoldering grasses and trees, brandishing the branch at any spider that looks like it’ll get close…but there aren’t many. One does send a bolt of silk at them—but Bohdi catches it with an angry snarl with the end of the branch and it disintegrates without smoke or even a sizzle. After that, the spiders mostly skitter away as they approach.
Without any spoken agreement, Bohdi’s and Amy’s feet begin picking up speed, they’re both running as they approach the edge of the nest. The fire is spreading behind and above them, Amy feels heat against her back, and the smoke is making them cough and gasp.
The little spider she carries cries again as they reach open air. Bohdi and Amy come to a skidding halt. Amy looks up through the branches of the forest they find themselves in, slightly disoriented. Where before the sky had been a beautiful blue, now it is dark and overcast. Her heart lifts. Thor?
“Smoke,” Bohdi whispers.
A hot wind licks against her back. Flames jump from beneath the nest to the undergrowth in the forest around them. The forest isn’t as dry as the vegetation choked beneath the nest… Still, Amy hears the crackle of twigs snapping in the fire’s heat.
In her arms, the little spider lets loose one of those too human shrieks, and Amy pulls it tighter on impulse.
Behind her comes a soft clicking. Amy and Bohdi both turn slowly to see a single spider standing about twenty paces behind them, the nest melting away over its head.
The spider in her arms wails, and its little legs pump the air. Amy feels tears welling in her eyes and it’s not just from soot. In the back of her mind, she knows this is just some primitive part of her brain responding to a baby’s cry, an evolutionary impulse—that really isn’t suited to this situation.
The baby’s cries become whimpers. Amy bites her lip, and lowers her small hostage to the ground.
“What are you…” Bohdi stammers.
The large spider darts forward before Amy can answer.
Bohdi grabs her hand, yanks her back with such force she spins around, and then pulls her into a dead run through the trees. For an instant, Amy thinks the spider is letting them go, and she feels a weird sort of kindred with the creature. And then she hears whistling behind her, and then something hits her back with enough force to knock her to the ground. Turning her head in the dirt, she watches as Bohdi shouts and sinks the end of the smoldering branch into a band of silk that’s attached to her coat.
As the silk melts away, Amy scrambles to her feet, and Bohdi charges the spider with a yell. Hoisting the baby on its back, the spider skitters away, chittering angrily. Without a word, Bohdi grabs Amy’s arm, and they take off again. They don’t stop running until they reach an open bluff. By that time, even Bohdi’s gasping for air.
Releasing her hand, he walks a few paces away and bends over, panting hard. She expects him to say something about her being an idiot—for not kicking the spider and then for letting it go. She’s been holding him back and putting him in more danger the whole time.
But Bohdi only stands there. Wiping his face, now smudged with soot, he looks back the way they came. Still panting, Amy looks, too. Clouds of smoke are obscuring the sky. She can’t see the nest at all. Wind is carrying the flames into the forest they’re now standing in.
Jaw tightening, Bohdi says, “The drone turned on back there. Steve will keep looking for us.”
It’s at that moment Amy realizes that besides losing Thor, they don’t have any Promethean wire…or any supplies at all, really.
She can’t bring herself to answer.
Bohdi closes his eyes and his body sags. He looks…beaten. And it’s so strange, after all they just went through.
Trying to be encouraging, she says, “You did really great back there. I mean…it’s like you just knew how to…” Kill spiders. Take hostages.
Looking down, Bohdi’s lips tighten. “I did get some combat training in the Marines.” He doesn’t meet her eyes, and she can’t read his mood.
Amy tilts her head. “I didn’t realize the Marines taught you how to fight giant spiders.”
Looking up, Bohdi says, “They didn’t…maybe I should suggest it be part of the standard training?”
His lips curl up, just a little; and Amy smiles, just a little.
Bohdi’s jaw goes tight, and he looks away. “Those baby spider screams…” With jerky movements, he runs a hand through his hair. “That sucked.”
Amy bites her lip. She wants to console him, to tell him she’s glad she doesn’t have a forelimb pinning her to a wall, and mandibles piercing her skin. Opening her mouth, she inhales a lungful of soot.
“Looks like I started a forest fire,” Bohdi says. “We better move before Smokey the Bear catches me.” He doesn’t smile at his joke, and Amy just coughs on the smoke.
Chapter Nine
Leaning against the wall in Macy’s, Steve clutches Claire’s ice skates and his own skates under one arm, pondering the oddly accusatory text on his phone.
You lost Amy Lewis.
The text is from Prometheus.
He wasn’t aware that the mysterious source that the FBI has for all things magical knows Lewis. That Prometheus is concerned with her fate is more than interesting, but Steve has had enough interaction with the elusive contact to know a direct question will get him nowhere.
Instead, Steve taps out a quickly: Can u help?
There is a moment’s pause and then the screen lights with another message. No one can see clearly into Nornheim. And my doors to the realm are closed.
Doors closed? Steve closes his eyes trying to remember. Skírnir had said something like that about the gates in Asgard, hadn’t he?
Another message pops onto the screen. Your drones our only intel.
Steve’s brows knit. Not comforting.
Another message from Prometheus blinks on the screen. Keep me informed.
Typing fast, Steve taps out: Wait. We need more wire. Bohdi had “borrowed” most of their reserves of Promethean wire.
There is a long pause and then a reply: I have none on hand.
Steve runs his tongue over his teeth.
But then another text appears. It will take time. Goodbye.
Scowling, Steve checks the time on his phone—again. It’s still another three hours before they check in on the drones. He shifts the skates under his arm. If their sources can tell them nothing helpful about the realm, they’re at the mercy of human tech. He scratches his chin…and perhaps human myth? Haven’t both Amy and Loki said that mythology is a skewed reflection of actual events?
He shakes his head. He can’t do anything now. It’s after five o’clock on a Saturday. He needs to give it a rest. Slipping the phone back into his pocket, he lifts his head and scans the crowd at Macy’s. Where is Claire?
Steve and his daughter had come to the department store to buy Claire a new pair of mittens and to get a snack before going skating in Millennium Park. She’d just gone to the bathroom. He turns to look down the hallway toward the restrooms. A little Chinese guy is pacing nearby, too. Also waiting for a lost female relative?
A voice, elegant and contralto, comes from beside him. “Are you looking for someone?”
Steve turns his head, and has a bit of a disconnect. The tall woman, in knee-high black suede boots is a dead ringer for the ’80s pop-singer, Sade. She has full lips, nearly Asian eyes, skin a little darker than copper, and a strong nose that verges on being Arabic. Her rich contralto voice almost makes him think she is Sade, but this woman is a little younger, maybe late thirties.
He always had a thing for Sade. Steve opens his mouth, but it takes a little while for words to come out. “Ah…yes…my daughter is in the bathroom.”
“Oh!” says the woman. “I was just in there, and I think I saw her! She looks exactly like you, right? But small and pretty.” She smiles.
Steve nods, and the woman waves a hand. “Don’t worry, it’s just a bit crowded…a lot of skaters coming in for hot chocolate, I think.”
Is that a hint of a Nigerian accent? It’s…sexy. “Oh…” Steve suffers through his speechless moment, then his face melts into a smile. She is so beautiful, he can’t help it. Trying to reclaim some dignity, he says, “Do you skate?” And then mentally kicks himself. Steve only skates for Claire. She loves skating, and years of ballet training and a few skating lessons have given her the speed and grace of a snowflake. Steve is just barely capable of not embarrassing himself. If this woman is good at skating…
She smiles again. “No, but I’ve always wanted to learn. I had no idea there was skating nearby. I’m new in town, and by myself.”
“New in town?” Steve manages to say. And by herself?
The woman nods. “I have just taken a position at Northwestern University.”
Steve lifts his chin, impressed. “A scholar?” Smart and beautiful? Is manna raining from heaven?
She nods. “Of myths and folklore.”
“Oh…” says Steve. “That is…” very interesting, and strangely apropos. The hairs on the back of Steve’s neck tickle, and he almost reaches into his pocket for his magic detector. But it’s silent…and that would be ridiculous…and…He straightens. Claire will be out in a minute. He needs to act fast.
Holding out his hand, he says, “I’m Steve Rogers.”
She smiles and proffers a hand adorned with elegant gold bracelets in his direction. “My name is—”
From behind Steve, someone starts speaking fast in Chinese, and Claire’s voice cracks through the din of the department store. “You!”
Steve turns around to see Claire coming slowly down the hallway, a frail, elderly Asian woman leaning on his daughter’s left arm. The other arm is pointing just past Steve. Claire’s chin is high, and her eyes are flashing. The small Chinese man who had been pacing down the hallway is scurrying to the old woman.
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