Chapter 36

~~Jack~~

“No!” Fiona got up from the corner by the rubble. In all the chaos and commotion, Jack hadn’t noticed, but she’d been hiding. Perfectly understandable, he’d be hiding too if he hadn’t nearly died twice before; already becoming jaded, ha. But Fiona, normally smiling and bouncing, ran over to Damien, and stood beside him as she pointed her hands at the monster. “Triss, get out of the way!”

Jack twisted around underneath the spider, and got to his stomach, facing Fiona, as the madness started. The spider goddess appeared, and all eight of her spider legs were pointed at the creature. It was enough to make the monster give pause as Fiona ran at the creature, tiny little Scot woman, frizzy red hair bouncing as she sprinted up to its waist where the beast’s human stomach met the spider body, and punched it.

The spider goddess that shared the same space as the little redhead punched as well, with all eight legs. From so close, Jack could hear the sickening crunch of flesh and exoskeleton being pierced by a host of sharp limbs. And the shriek that followed was just as sickening. For a moment he felt bad, like they were picking on some sort of animal that didn’t know better, didn’t know it was a menace, didn’t know it was being hunted.

Fiona didn’t seem to feel the same way. Screaming out, she punched the spider again, and again it stumbled, body almost collapsing on Jack as its many legs pushed and dug at the ground around him. Blood poured, trickling down its body, and splashed over Fiona, soaking her jeans and jacket in black and red. And she punched again, as if the very idea that she was taking this thing head on wasn’t a concern.

She took a few steps back, and pointed both her hands at the enormous spider. The demon woman appeared where she was, and Jack could see its many great horns, including the ones that jutted out and backward from where her eyes should have been. He could see the hovering body, the spider dress, the odd limbs, and above all could see the eight blades she sank into the animal.

The creature shrieked as its endless blood began to pour over the concrete. Jack couldn’t see it, not in the dark and the flash of light from the one flashlight, but he could hear it, and feel it as the huge waves of disgusting black liquid splashed over his back and hands. In the flailing and swinging of limbs, the creature vaulted itself toward Fiona, and Jack froze as the titan ran over him at the small girl only three feet before him.

The beast leaned down and swung its arm outward at her, the bone scythe nearly as large as her whole body. It clubbed her with the back side thank god, but the small woman was still sent through the air like a rag doll. In the flickering black, it looked like nothing more than a ball of moving colors, until Jack heard the crunch of flesh on rock.

Fiona landed. She didn’t get up.

“Fuck you! Die!” Triss, somewhere above him with the spider still between them, started tearing and clawing. He couldn’t see it but he could feel the vibrations and weight, feel the rampage of the creature as it started throwing its body around to dislodge the Nosferatu. And the more she slashed and bit and screamed, the more the giant spider monster towering over Jack thrashed around.

Another minute and he was going to be paste. He picked himself up to a foot and knee, and threw himself along the tunnel path as best he could. Kindred legs sent his tiny body flying, and he landed with a hard bounce as rock and metal greeted his suit and bones. Rolling, rolling, he came to a stop maybe twenty feet from the spinning monster, the Azlu now between him and his friends.

Triss was on top of it, on top of its grotesque and massive human half, with her claws around its neck and her crocodile mouth biting into its skull. Black blood gushed over her teeth and down her clothes, along with bits of spider, and bits of human flesh from the hybrid. Too hard to see, too hard to see a damn fucking thing in the darkness with only the one flashlight, but Athalia still had the light up, and was trying to get up as well.

“Athalia, stay down! Stay still!” he said. If she moved it might attack her, and maybe, just maybe, this thing would focus on the things dashing about instead.

He ran around and looked for his pistol. Nope, gone, he dropped it somewhere, where where. Fuck. Still had the knife though, better than nothing.

Not better than nothing. Running was better than nothing. In the chaos Jack had a moment to peek over at the body on the tracks, Damien’s body. He wasn’t moving, but he wasn’t ash. The monster had put a hole through him, actually through him, clean through his fucking body. There’d been a moment where Jack could see withered things fall out of him; withered was normal, they were Kindred, but to see the things fall out of him, spill, and turn to ash, was not the same thing as knowing they were there.

If Jack was still alive, he’d be vomiting. But he didn’t need to be alive to feel shock, to feel the muscles and brain refuse to work together. That moment of hesitation that’d get you killed, that—

Nope, fuck that, fuck that and fuck this. This thing wasn’t Viktor or Lucas, this thing was just a thing. A mindless, really big fucking scary thing, but just a thing. Just a fucking thing. Wake up and move!

He turned around, and sprinted down the tunnel. “Triss, keep it busy! I’ll go get the wolves!”

“What the fuck do you think I’m doing!?” A gargled mess of sounds came out of her mid yell; a mouthful of spider parts and human flesh. But as Jack looked over his shoulder at the raging monster, he could see the thing wasn’t slowing down even as the vampire started to get deeper into its meat.

They couldn’t kill this thing. Maybe the Uratha could.

He sprinted around the bend of the tunnel, toward the sounds of howling, roars, and screams. And fire. Mason had molotovs and a flamethrower, and both would be nigh-instant death if they got him. But a fucking spider monster straight out of a monster flick was behind him, ripping and tearing and killing his friends. He needed their help.

“Avery! Clara! Fucking someone!” The only answer he got was more wolf howls, deep and loud enough to echo in the tunnel and shake his brain in its skull. But there was some light around the curve, some orange and red, some fire light. “Someone, there’s another one of these fucking spider things! Someone I—”

The walls looked like a Jackson Pollock, covered in splatters of blood of red and black, and mixed with hundreds of immense claw marks. The subway tracks were gone, just shards of metal ripped up and tossed everywhere. The wolves still had their lanterns lying around, but they weren’t the biggest source of the light. The biggest source was Mason.

The wolves were still transformed, still in their Goliath bodies, except for Mason. The man’s sack of molotovs was empty, and he held the flamethrower in his hand. A stream of fire left the oddly shaped gun, and while it wasn’t the grand explosion of fire Jack had come to expect after seeing them in a hundred movies, that didn’t change that the rampaging creature they were dealing with was covered in fire.

Covered in fire and still not dead.

Even as the spider half — more like spider nine tenths — of the monster hybrid burned, the werewolves threw themselves at it, at its bone claw arms, at its spider legs, and one of the wolves threw themselves onto the flames of its back. Avery.

The pack leader sank her claws into its spider back, through the flames that flicked upward along her body, and deep through the exoskeleton. Where there hadn’t been enough light to see anything before with the other spider, now Jack raised a hand to block out the flashing waves of amber that scarred his vision. Seeing spots with his eyes closed, and the death cries yanked them back open.

He was supposed to be doing something, supposed to do more than just stand there and gawk at the nine beasts unleashing hell underneath Dolareido, fire included. But, before the thoughts could break through the shock seared into his eyes, the creature started to move toward him. The giant creature currently covered in werewolves and fire was moving toward him.

He took a step back. It was all he could figure out, could muster, as the hellfire ran at him. But before the heat devoured him, Avery jumped onto its human half. Big as the creature’s human, mutated half was, Avery was just as big in her werewolf body, and she sank her claws down and into the monster’s shoulders and neck. Fire continued to spread over its body, over the Uratha, and many had to jump off to stop from catching fire themselves.

Not Avery. The fire enveloped her, over her, encompassed her as she bit down onto the creature’s face. Her enormous, monstrous wolf mouth took the spider by the head, and sank its fangs deep. The cry of pain from the abomination mixed with the roaring flames, until it was enough for Jack to flinch. Flinch was good, flinch was a reaction, and he needed more of those. Get back, get the fuck back from the fire you idiot before it catches you. This isn’t like with Viktor, there’s no explosion to push you away, just pure flame.

As he took a few more steps away from the chaos, the creature fell onto its stomach with a loud crash, the weight of its body vibrating the tunnels and concrete. It’d fallen forward like someone had tripped it, and a glance around it showed multiple werewolves biting and clawing at its legs, enough of them to yank the creature down onto its stomach while Avery continued to wrestle with its human half. The bone scythe arms couldn’t reach her, and thrashed around with less and less ferocity as Avery ripped, tore, and clawed at its shoulders.

Something. Supposed to be doing something, not watching. Fucking say something!

“There’s another one!” was all he could manage before the rumbling behind him came to join the rumbling before him.

Several of the wolves got up from their death grips on the creature’s thrashing legs, and stared at him with a weird mix of confusion and aggression, as if he’d dropped a water balloon on them in surprise. But their surprise turned to shock as the second spider came around the corner with all the grace of a steam train gone off the rails. The creature’s mass, unhindered by the paltry damage Jack and his friends had done, crashed into the wall on the outside of the tunnel turn, but the spider pushed its legs against the wall as equally as the floor and catapulted itself toward the group of new targets.

Was Damien still alive? Where was Beatrice? She wasn’t on the creature anymore. Was Fiona alive? Were any of them going to live through this insanity? Stop thinking and move!

Jack threw himself onto his stomach. The slam of his weight against concrete and metal was nothing compared to what would have happened if the creature hit him. And the creature ran over him toward the wolves, ignoring him, bleeding and hairy spider body flying over him. All Jack could do was stare on toward the wolves as the new creature bowled them over.

It didn’t care about its companion, or the fire. It cared about killing, far as Jack could tell, and as the monster crashed into the body of its fellow monster, the werewolves did their best to compensate. But Jack could see it in their eyes, their movements, even Avery’s as she jumped off the defeated and almost-still creature. None of them had expected this.

How Avery was not on fire, Jack couldn’t tell, but the woman’s claws had a strange glow to them, almost amber like the fire. And the glow vanished as the new monster ran her down, titan body colliding with hers and sending her flying backward until Jack heard her meat and bone crack and crunch against the tunnel floor.

The pack stood there for a second, and many of them cast quick glances at each other. A second too long, and the spider charged over them, feet and mass pushing aside the wriggling, burning body of the other. The new spider slashed out with its scythe arms while its giant legs shoved the flaming body of its companion aside, wreaking destruction like breathing. And sure enough, one of the werewolves didn’t dodge.

The sound of blade cutting down through bone, muscle, organs and skin, all in the blink of an eye, was familiar. Jack had heard it before, when Viktor had cut him from forehead to crotch, sank a blade an inch through his body. Only reason he survived was because he was Kindred. But no Kindred could survive getting cut in half, not vertically. The wolf woman fell apart, two sides collapsing inward with the momentum and mass of the creature’s blade arm, and splattering guts over the concrete.

The body parts began to transform back into a human, clothes and skin and organs and all.

The pack freaked. Howls turned into weird, half-roar half-scream mixtures. Their eyes opened wide and bloodied chops drooled havoc as they threw themselves at the new enemy.

Jack looked on. Hard to tell what was going on, with two spider monsters fighting for space, one nearly dead and on fire, but at least the far more lively one had gone past Jack and now stood between the wolves. Stood, spun, slashed, screamed, the creature was insane, ripping the walls apart as much as its new prey.

But the werewolves didn’t care, they’d gone berserk. Blood filled the air, burnt flesh, ash, and it whipped everyone into a frenzy of bloodlust. Not the sort of bloodlust a Kindred had; Jack new what that felt like. This was different, this was the bloodlust people got when every fiber of their being wanted to kill, was going to kill, when the primal instinct takes over and the whole of your existence focuses into a single thought and action. The slaughter.

Mason joined them, dropping the — now probably empty — flamethrower, and erupting into his transformation with all haste. Seven titans of claw threw themselves at the monster, two companions missing, Avery a broken mess in the darkness, and now a friend dead. It was not a good night for the Uratha, and it was only getting worse.

One of the wolves started to climb the creature’s side, but the Azlu spun around and caught the wolf alongside the body with a claw. It cut deep, maybe six inches through flesh and bone, and sent the werewolf spinning through the air, adding to the red that decorated the lacerated walls. Another wolf jumped it, and again the creature spun. How could something so massive move so quickly? It got this wolf through the guts with its scythe arm, skewering them out through the back before tossing them aside.

The tunnel started to shake. Vibrations ripped through the walls and ceiling, cracked them like kitchen plates, sent dirt and rubble down on the madness around Jack. Down onto the pack and their target.

Like a whip crack for the brain. Get back, go find the others, see if Damien survived, if Fiona survived, see where Triss was.

He almost turned around, but a single step back summoned bad luck like a reaper to the door. The creature’s frantic movement came his way again, spinning and turning, eight legs and two blade arms stabbing and crashing against the walls and ceiling. Each wolf that managed to get onto its back earned more death cries from it, and it responded with claws flinging wild, cutting deep into the concrete and metal. And it was all coming Jack’s way.

The ceiling began to collapse. Rocks fell onto them, all of them. Gigantic slabs cracked open against the floor around Jack’s feet, and the tiny Ventrue threw himself to the side as one bigger than him nearly crushed him. He was becoming intimately familiar with concrete, and sighed as again the hard surface greeted him with all the softness of ... concrete.

The creature turned to him. With all the wolves and chaos going on, how it noticed him and him specifically, Jack couldn’t fathom, but in the tunnel barely wide and tall enough to fit the monster, it turned to look at little him sitting against the wall, and it screamed. But the ceiling was falling in, caving in, and the wall Jack had his back to started to collapse backward. The spider’s arms raised again, and for a moment Jack thought it was going to slice him in half like that woman he’d seen before. But it tried to stop the ceiling instead, arms catching an immense chunk of rock the size of a car.

And it succeeded. Easily. But it was the chunk after that, and after that that beat the monster down, ripped into both its bodies, and made the creature fall forward toward Jack.

The world went black as it fell onto him. Something behind him gave way, but in the ear-splitting destruction and carnage, he couldn’t hear it. He could feel something though, feel a wall crumble, feel the brick-shape of it fall backward, and him with it. And then the excruciating pain of having his back pressed to slabs of the hard material.

But it was enough to get moving, even as the spider collapsed and pressed its abdomen down against him, where the human and spider mutant merged. Heavy, oh god so fucking heavy. He poured his vitae into his limbs, and pushed, pushed until he thought his wrists would snap and his elbows would pop. But with some wiggling and shifting, he pushed against the monster’s body hard enough to get himself out from underneath its stomach.

And into darkness. The wall collapsed; hell, everything was collapsing. And the flickering light from the fire was buried in rubble in moments. Only the lanterns the wolves had brought with them still lit the area, but all Jack had of that was minor reflections against stone. He was in a new area.

He kept backing up, a glance over his shoulder proving his fear. There was nothing, just black, just empty black. The ground beneath him wasn’t level, no smooth surfaces, and as far as he could tell the collapsing tunnel was in front of him only, not in the new room he’d been pushed into. So, something carved into the earth then, dug out. Like a den.

Oh good fucking god he was in something’s den.

He squeezed his left hand. Knife, the knife was there. Somehow he’d managed to pick it back up the half a dozen times he’d fallen. He put it into his right hand, and continued to back away from the large opening the spider creature was tearing through.

The wolves were relentless. They bit and chewed and clawed at the creature, even as rocks fell on them, even as the tunnel continued to crumble around them. Jack stared on as slabs of concrete and steel rods rained on them, crushed some of them, their limbs, their bodies. They didn’t stop. They sank their fangs into the spider, and one of the large wolves managed to rip a leg twice as long as the werewolf was tall from the spider’s body. The monster’s shrieks echoed in the chamber Jack had backed into, that the monster was crawling into, that the werewolves were being dragged into.

Eventually Jack’s back found rock and dirt. So much softer than concrete. He touched it with his open hand, and gulped as he felt something too soft. Spider silk. No need to look, not that he’d be able to see it in the darkness. But after having touched, tripped on, gotten stuck in, and unfortunately tasted spiderweb in this unfortunate and, as predicted, suicidal mission into the tunnels, he was starting to recognize it on contact.

And as a tiny ray of light managed to break through the crumbling walls, he noticed some white shapes, hanging from the ceiling. Cocoon shapes. Human bodies, wrapped in webbing.

The wolves hadn’t predicted this had they? They seemed just as surprised and confused as he was. They’d expected a spider monster, but they hadn’t expected two. Though they’d long given up caring about the confusion, far as Jack could tell, as the wolves threw themselves onto the monster and tore into it.

But the monster wasn’t getting slower. Maybe that’s why they needed fire? Jack had stabbed this thing, him and Damien had sunk easily a hundred bullets into it, and now it had half a dozen titans of carnage ripping into it, and it still wasn’t going down. Worse, it was still heading toward him, slashing and cutting into the werewolves while dragging its enormous body through the rubble and rock toward the little Ventrue.

So he turned and kept moving. Occasional flashes of light from above exposed the dug tunnel ahead, bits of moonlight or streetlight maybe showing through some old drain pipes or cracks in old, abandoned tunnels that were still lit. Just enough light for him to see, if only for the split moment it occasionally streaked his surroundings. Nothing but rock, with the occasional bit of root or vine, the occasional worm, occasional insect.

A flicker of light let him see movement below him, and he stepped on it with a quick snap. A spider. For a moment, he expected to hear the animal shriek louder than it already was. Either it didn’t care about a random spider, or its shriek volume was already maxed out.

More of the webbing greeted him, but in the dark he couldn’t see shit, just shadows and dark colors. Enough to at least dodge a few of the webs, but others found his feet, his legs, and one cut across his chest, big webs, enough to give his body pause before his weight pushed through. The texture was all wrong, like nothing a spider would make, and touching it made him shiver worse than a spider crawling down his back. It was all wrong. What the fuck was this thing?

Shrieking yanked his head back, and he choked on a scream as the creature jammed its body into the dug tunnel. It fit, just barely, and from how it moved, it looked like it was familiar with the den tunnel, familiar with the pressing walls and the height of the ceiling. Guess it was the one that dug it then.

But the spider didn’t get far. It cried out and turned its human half around as much as it could to slash out at the wolves biting and clawing at its body. One of them climbed over its spider back onto the human half, and did her best to grab its shoulders, pin it, shred and tear open its neck. She succeeded, and human flesh came off in chunks, only to heal. Not heal in seconds, but fast enough Jack could see the wounds close between each flash of light that managed to reach them.

“Go! Run!”

It was Clara. She barked at him, the words almost lost in the inhuman shape of her mouth.

“Where the fuck do I go!? I can’t see anything!”

“Try—” Her voice came to a sudden halt as the monster’s claw managed to reach up and over her, and come down, a giant trying to throw a pest off its back. It succeeded, and the titan wolf landed in front of Jack on her back, head closer to the creature than him.

She got up and turned to face it, backing up and snarling, barking, roaring at the spider as it came closer despite the host of wolves slashing and clawing at its body. But, at least now Jack had her between him and the animal coming to kill them all.

“Get back.” Her arm came out, and she reached down with her hand — fucking god a giant hand of claws and blood — to push back against his chest. “You found. Nest.”

“Wonderful! Fucking wonderful! I thought the nest was the tunnel we just came from!” He did as she asked, and kept backing up. The spider lunged at them, but the tunnel couldn’t fit the motion. Big enough for the creature to crawl through, but it was smaller than the subway tunnel, small enough to keep the creature from leaping.

Clara ducked the sideways slash, and stepped beside the following vertical slash. Big bad wolf was doing a dance, but Jack could only see freeze frames of it as they backed away through the tiny lights that managed to reach them.

The light! Fuck, the light coming from above meant there had to be some way to get to it, break through the layer, get up and out of the spider’s lair. It had to mean that. Fucking had to. He was due some good luck right about now.

“Climb!” He reached out for the wall beside him, and fell.

A strange sensation when you reach for something expecting to go up, but you go down. Vertigo. Whole world flips upside down and you feel every instinct for what’s up or down just vanish. Dizzy to the bone. And if you’re falling for longer than you think you should, it’s like the world has just imploded in your brain.

And it exploded when his back and skull collided with the ground, after cutting through a couple inches of water.

He sat up, panic gripping him, wrenching his heart up through his throat as he prepared to sink. But the water was genuinely only a couple inches deep, and he forced himself to stand as he looked around.

“ ... mother fucking hell.”

A waterway. A really, really, really big, old waterway. A vertical one that cut nearly a hundred feet up, like some sort of enormous drainage sewer, something that could handle flood levels of water if Dolareido ever got hit with that much rain. And as he stood, he turned around to look at their new area; like a fucking arena, round walls surrounding them, and a sky-high ceiling.

There were some tunnels that connected to the top of the vertical drain, way out of reach, with grating blocking them off no doubt. Course Clara would be able to open them, if they could climb up to reach them. The concrete bricks around them were smooth-ish, and not something he could climb, but werewolf claws could climb them probably, if she could sink her claws into the concrete.

His new partner in this chaos fell into the water with him, but at least she managed to turn and land on her feet. Like a cat. If he was Triss, he’d make the joke.

Triss. Fuck, Triss, was she alive?

“Did you see if any of my friends were alive?” he said.

Clara, still in her werewolf form, walked over to him, water and blood dripping down from her fur. He could see again thank god, now that the very old, very large manhole above cast some light down the massive tunnel hole to them. In the dark for as long as he’d been, a little light went a long way. And from so close, he did a double take on Clara’s body. Much as she was a tall, muscular werewolf, she had the curves of a woman too. Weird thought to have, but there it was.

“No.” The she-Goliath stared up at the hole they’d fallen down from. The hole was ten feet up, something that’d been dug out of the wall, based on how weirdly the concrete was broken, and claw marks where the wall was opened up. “You. Escape?”

He pointed at the drainage holes around the base of the main drainage tunnel, near their feet. All of them were quite short. The grating covering them would be no problem for a werewolf to remove, but only a foot wide meant the small exits were just there to taunt them.

“Maybe the drains above us? They’re much bigger, we can—”

Screams cut through their reprieve. The spider creature reached the tunnel exit, or entrance, and vaulted toward them. Or at least it tried to. Three of the wolf titans were at its side, and with claws wrapped around the beast’s arms, they braced their feet against the walls to keep it from escaping the tunnel. Easier prey, Jack imagined, when the giant creature couldn’t turn around very well.

Jack stared up at the menace trying to get them. Him. It was trying to get him. The fuck did he do? He did go into its nest, and he was the first one to do that, maybe that was why? The crazed monster’s human eyes were staring death into him, and its mismatched arrangement of spiders eyes over its temples and forehead looked more like nebulae of obsidian death than eyes.

“Let’s go.” Clara reached out, picked him up, and threw him onto her back like throwing on a book bag, with about as much grace as well. But the impact of his small body against her fur was surprisingly nice, compared to all the concrete he’d been hitting lately. Soft.

“Wait, your friends. Shouldn’t you help them? I can take care of myself.”

“Idiot. Shut up,” she barked. The words were harsh, guttural, a struggle for her chops to say. But good enough to get the point across. The giant wolf ran up to the wall of the vertical tunnel furthest from the spider, and slammed both hands into the concrete. Inertia hit Jack hard enough to flatten him against Clara’s back, and bounce, before the wolf started to climb. She got up a foot, and slammed her claws into the concrete hard enough to sink them into it an inch.

It was like a scene from a cartoon. She made a grunting sound for each foot she climbed, and they grew louder as she her feet lifted off the floor, and she had to carry all her weight and his weight on one hand at a time between each new hold she made. He’d half expected her to just jump, or maybe throw him up there first. But neither would have been a sure thing. Climbing up there was a sure thing.

The spider landed onto the sewer drain floor, its thrashing weight sending dirty water splashing along the walls and high up to where Clara was scaling the concrete. Werewolves jumped in after it, three of them. Not seven or six, just three. And those three were covered in blood, leaking it, even as their wounds were closing with some insane healing only an elder Kindred could match. Staring down at them, with his hands hooked around the werewolf’s shoulders, Jack could only wince as the three remaining wolves shrank as Clara took him higher and higher.

Kindred generally lost their fear of heights after a while. You’d need to fall a couple floors to hurt an ankle, and a couple more on top of that to even risk injury. But the higher he and Clara went up, the more he found himself terrified of falling as the spider started crawling after them.