The Spider

20

A sharp poke in my shoulder woke me sometime later.

At first, I wondered who it was, but then I realized that it was probably Finn messing with me, trying to make me get up before I wanted to.

But wait . . . why would Finn be in my bedroom? We weren’t kids anymore, even though he still teased me like it. And he didn’t even live at Fletcher’s house anymore . . . I started to slide back into the darkness . . .

The poke came again, a little more insistent this time.

“Go away,” I mumbled.

All I wanted to do right now was drift back to the quiet, black place where I’d been. It was nice there. Warm, safe, soothing, peaceful.

The poke came a third time, followed by a small hand gripping my shoulder and shaking me. My head snapped to the side, causing an ache to roar to life in the back of my skull and pulling me out of the dream that I’d been in. Or was I still dreaming now? I couldn’t tell, but I finally managed to open my eyes.

Charlotte’s face loomed above mine.

I blinked and rose onto my elbows, the room spinning around at that small, simple motion. “Charlotte? What are you doing in here?”

A cool gust of air-conditioning hit my body, and I realized that I was still sprawled across Sebastian’s bed, completely naked. I quickly grabbed the sheet and flipped it over my body. More pain spiked through my skull at the movement. I groaned. My head felt so strange, so fuzzy, as if I’d drunk far too much champagne, although I’d only had one sip.

Charlotte stared at me another moment, then bolted into action. She moved around the room, grabbing my silver dress and throwing it at me, along with my panties, purse, and shoes. I watched her, wondering what she was doing, blinking and still trying to clear the fog from my mind.

Charlotte saw that I wasn’t doing what she wanted me to. She shook her head, stomped over to the bed, and shoved the gown into my lap.

“You have to get dressed,” she said, her voice stronger than I’d ever heard it before. “You have to leave. Now.”

“Leave? Why? Did something happen? What’s wrong?” My words slurred together, and my voice sounded faint and far away, as though I were standing in a cavern and listening to my own echo.

Exasperated, Charlotte reached over and dragged my champagne glass out from where I’d hidden it behind the lamp on the nightstand.

“Because Sebastian drugged you,” she whispered. “Because he’s planning to hurt you. I heard him talking to Porter about it earlier. That’s why you have to leave. Right now.”

What . . . ? Sebastian had drugged me? Well, that explained this strange, disconnected feeling and the raging headache I had. But why would he drug me? Why would he be planning to hurt me? He cared about me . . .

Didn’t he?

Charlotte grabbed my arm, but I shooed her away. Somehow I managed to slide out of bed and get to my feet. Despite the fact that I was wobbling like a newborn fawn, I turned my back to her and managed to shimmy into my panties and the slinky silver dress.

“Hurry, hurry, hurry,” she whispered, helping me slide into my high heels. “His meeting won’t last much longer.”

“Where?” I croaked. “Where is he?”

“In the library. But you don’t want to go that way. You can still sneak out the front with the last of the guests. But you have to hurry. The party’s over, and everyone is leaving.”

I staggered over to the windows and peered outside. Sure enough, a long line of limos and town cars were coasting down the lighted driveway. I frowned, struggling to make sense of things through the thick fog that just wouldn’t leave my mind.

Why wasn’t Sebastian here? Whom was he meeting with in the library? And why would Charlotte think that he wanted to hurt me? As far as he knew, I was just a simple waitress, just the girl he’d been seeing the past few weeks. Sebastian couldn’t possibly know that I was secretly an assassin . . . he couldn’t possibly know about my being the Spider . . . he couldn’t possibly know that I’d killed his father . . .

Could he?

The thought chilled me to the bone.

Charlotte kept running around the room, this time grabbing my purse and shoving it into my hands. It took me a couple of tries, since my fingers felt as awkward, clumsy, and detached as the rest of me, but I managed to pop open the top. My silverstone knife lay nestled inside the bag, the one weapon I’d brought with me. I hadn’t thought that I’d need the rest of my knives, not here, not tonight, not with Sebastian.

He’d made me feel special . . . he’d made me feel safe . . . he’d made me feel loved . . .

I spaced out, and it took me a few seconds to blink away my confusion and focus on my knife again. Still, I hesitated, thinking that maybe Charlotte was jealous, that she was trying to get rid of me for whatever reason, and that was why she was saying all of these terrible things about Sebastian. It would be perfectly understandable, given the fact that she’d lost her father and everything that she’d suffered at his hands. Grief could make people do strange things.

But I couldn’t quite quiet the doubts that whispered in my muddled mind—or ignore the mutters that rippled through the stone, even blacker and more ominous than before.

So I reached into the bag and pulled out my knife, feeling the hilt dig into the spider rune scar in my palm, silverstone on silverstone. The solid, familiar weight of the weapon helped ground me and cleared some of the fog from my mind.

Charlotte’s eyes widened when she realized that I was holding a knife, but I stepped forward and shoved my purse at her. The knife was the only thing I needed out of it.

“Here,” I said, staggering toward the bedroom door. “Hold that for me.”

I didn’t know what was going on, but I was sure as hell going to find out.