Hunted [Wild Hunt Series: 1]

18: Walk into my parlor

In a tangle of dark limbs the spider demon had hefted Jessie into the trees before my body could even react to the horror of seeing the poor girl carried away into the late afternoon. The  Oaks loomed high around me as I stood stock still, trying to process, trying to figure out what the hell had just happened and what I was supposed to do about it.

Do I pursue? Do I leave her? Jessie had made a grave mistake and if she did that sort of thing again she'd put us both in danger, said perhaps the smarter part of me. But she was also just a kid. And she might not even be alive. I wasn't sure after seeing what the same creature had done to the Minotaur.

Was she even alive? Was it worth it? Was it a trap?

It'd happened so fast, but I'd never seen any of the demon's eyes turn toward mine. It had seemed focused entirely on Jessie, its intended target, but then, what kind of a peripheral vision did spiders have anyway? Maybe it did see me. Maybe it saw both of us and was using her as a lure...Or maybe spiders couldn't see distance for shit.

I slapped my cheek to shake out my racing thoughts. The bracer on my arm wiggled more than it had earlier. Shail's claws had cut clean through the leather, and while he hadn't ripped it off, I wasn't able to repair the damage. I just had to lace it tighter and hope that maybe  somehow I could make a patch for the spot, find a replacement, or some other solution that my brain was moving too quickly to work out right now.

Speaking of the crag cat, he had his paws braced on a log, contemplating that shiny lizard- but when it sailed into the waning sunlight my somewhat-helpful companion turned his eyes toward me. In the growing shadows, his eyes held that distinctive flash, a quiet reminder of how quickly night would set on once the sunlight disappeared from treetops.

I looked back upriver, toward the hideout I'd been starting to feel good and secure about, and knew right then that I wouldn't sleep a wink without finding out the truth about Jessie. She was job. She was what I set out here to save, and even though I told myself I had to stay out here as long as I could, I still felt guilty. What if I had just turned tail and run back to the castle with her? At least one person would be safe and alive.

Now the curtain of night would fall upon us and there was a reasonable chance that neither of us would make it out alive. Taking a deep breath, I fixed my bracer as best I could, kept my knife out and ready and headed off in the direction I thought they went.

Shail trailed after me some distance behind my rushed jog, maybe because he was bored or hungry or had decided to be useful again. Whatever the case, I felt more comfortable with him at my back as we wound our way through the forest. Every so often I'd glance over my shoulder, just to make sure that the cat hadn't detected something I couldn't. But I kept my eyes up toward that dying light, scanning the darkening boughs for a dangerous silhouette.

The sound of water had long-since been swallowed by trunk and bush when the trees themselves took on a fuzzy, soft light in the higher limbs. I wasn't sure at first if it was my eyes going fuzzy from all my straining, but even the path ahead seemed grey-green and light. I'd stepped a few more feet when the first, thin line broke over my face and stuck to my hair and neck.

Flinching, I pulled away the sticky substance and held my hand before me. Caught between my fingers was a tiny bit of webbing- and worse, the woods ahead were wrapped in it. The innocent, fibrous substance  painted a beautifully sinister sight as the sun sank lower and lower, outlining sickly luminescent shadows. The Oaks here were dead and rotting, their leaves consumed by cotton-candy levels of webbing. I'd seen pictures of this sort of thing before, of massive groups of spiders that had come together during a flood to shroud the trees in a soft cocoon, but this-  this was Shelob's lair level of nasty. Even the air had grown still.