Page 2 of Villains and Vengeance
I’m on borrowed time. I know that, so it’s best to take as few chances as possible. Getting captured because I needed an extra Hostess cake isn’t how I want to go.
I hear steps outside the room and, my heart jumping into my throat, I abandon my mission, launching myself back to the rope. I climb faster than a coconut farmer and pull up the silk just as Dante comes back into the room.
He sniffs and turns around in a slow circle before he throws back his head and roars. I make sure he can’t see me as I peer down at the unhinged prick from the hole above him, unable to shake the idea that he’s going to catch me. Every day he seems to get increasingly irrational, the search for me beginning to consume him. Every day he reminds me more of someone who, believe it or not, is even scarier than he is.
Shivering a little, I turn and climb back into the darkness. I can’t see much in here, but I don’t need to. I’ve been hiding out in the Mountain for a while, and I know the tunnels I frequent like the back of my hand.
I shimmy through the shaft until I get to an opening that leads into a wider passage. These ones are used by the other supes, so I wait and listen before I emerge. After that, it’s a few hundred steps to relative safety.
I reach the main cavern and feel a tremor in the lines as she comes.
‘It’s just me,’ I whisper and put my hand out even though I still tense and cringe a little in case this is the day she decides to eat her human buddy.
But she just brushes against my hand with her bristly pedipalps.
The first time she did that, I thought I was a goner, but she uses them a little like fingers to check things out and they’re actually oddly soft and fuzzy, kind of similar to kitten paws …on a four-hundred-pound spider.
She nudges me. I know what she wants me to do. I think she got sick of me sleeping on her web like it was a hammock, so she made me a kind of bedroom out of silk suspended in the middle of the cavern this morning. I call it the White Bunker.
‘Yeah, I know. I promise I’ll snuggle up in the bunker in a little while,’ I tell her. ‘I love it. Really. But it’s almost time for the new meat to get here and I have to find out what kinds of supes are arriving.’
I need to be in the know to stay aheadand alivein here.
She nudges me again and then leaves me, climbing up into her web while I jump down to the bottom of her cavern. I put down my backpack and grab the flashlight I stole off one of Dante’s guys last week. I’m not sure how it works exactly, but I’ve been using it for days and it hasn’t shown any signs of dying so it’s probably got a conjure on it.
I pick my way through the rubble, taking pains not to look at the dried upremainsthat are scattered around in various states of decay. Everyone has to eat and all these supes were dumb enough to venture into Siggy’s territory. I sometimes wonder if that’s why she keeps me around. She definitely knows that me being here draws in the supes who can smell me. They’re lured right to her lair to be sucked dry like Capri-Suns, so it makes sense to give me room and board alongside her.
I slip down another tunnel and venture out of the web that defines Siggy’s borders. I hear scratching, the tell-tale signs of another arania close by and I slow down. Siggy might be my friend and protector, but there are reasons she has a soft spot for me. There are others of her kind here and they definitely won’t differentiate between the human guest and the supes they call dinner.
I make my way carefully, making sure I don’t touch any of the webs that are spilling out of the other tunnels. I always count my steps, so I know I’m close. When I get to a small hole in the side of the tunnel just big enough for me, I climb into it, arriving at my look-out spot high in the wall of the main cavern of the prison.
This is the Mountain’s hub after Dante’s ‘throne room’. The food gets delivered via a portal that opens in the stone circle at the center of the space. There are tables where the inmates play games and socialize off to one side. The fights happen in the high ring at the back of the cavern.
Dante presides over them like a benevolent ruler. To a lot of the inmates, I guess he is. He might be a psychopath demon, but he runs this deep, dark penal colony and keeps things ticking over relatively smoothly as far as I can tell. I mean, he has rooms for torturing his enemies or those he considers weak, of course. The pixies that are sent here are smaller than most of the others, so he uses them as servants and they get punished badly if they fuck up.
His throne room always has one or two half dead supes hanging in it until they expire and start to smell. He has a special way of gutting his victims so they stay alive for days. He lets his men entertain themselves with the unlucky ones and their screams usually make me retreat to Siggy’s territory where I can’t hear them so clearly.
I scan the cavern. As usual, a ton of supes are in here too, milling around and waiting for the portal to open even though it isn’t supply day. New prisoners appear like clockwork from all over and it looks like I’m just in time to see the next group roll in.
A bright light momentarily blinds me and, when it recedes, a group of fifteen or so supes are in the middle of the stone circle. The ones who have a human form are mostly in them, except for a couple of the wolf shifters. There’s also an orc at the back who looks pissed.
The ones who haven’t been in the Mountain before look around like they’re lost. They always do when they first get here. Dante usually gives them an audience with him during the first week and decides which supes he wants for his guard, his help, and the unlucky ones bound for his torture rooms.
But there are others in this batch who have probably spent time here before. They look confident, not terrified. One of them strides forward and I gasp, throwing myself up against the wall almost involuntarily at the sight of him.
It can’t be!
Not able to help myself, I inch forward to look again. It’s him. I’d know that aristocratic baring and that long, dark hair anywhere. Four guys stand at his back. Iron, Axel, Jayce, and Daemon. Ugh! He brought almost the whole clan with him.
I facepalm.
No. No. No. Shit. Shit. Shit.
When is this streak of bad luck going to END?
I peer down. None of them have even bothered to demon-up in the face of all the hardened criminals around them. They don’t look scared to be here either though I don’t remember ever hearing that any of them had been sent to the Mountain before.
‘Relax,’ I mutter to myself.
