Tatters of the King (The Warren Brood Book 3) Read online

  With a small stack of dusty-smelling books on her left and an open notebook on her right, she had intended to spend the evening drowning herself in anything at all she could find about the so-called anthropic principle. Most of the relevant journals and books she’d been reading through were far above her level of scientific understanding. What she was able to glean seemed to support the hypothesis of biocentrism, a concept she wanted desperately to believe in.

  Biocentrism, as put forth by Robert Lanza, postulated that the universe existed for the purpose of life, and that consciousness was the force by which matter was given shape. Sensational headlines on the internet had proudly endorsed the idea as proof that death was an illusion, but that was a drastic oversimplification. Rather, it seemed to support the concept of reincarnation. The universe was a slave to consciousness, and consciousness could neither be created nor destroyed. She was willing to swallow it with an optimistic grain of salt. After all, if reincarnation was real, then that meant there was some hope that Isabella’s death was not final, and that the blood on her hands may yet be cleansed.

  Light from the setting sun shone through a curtain of hanging dust. The slanting beams above the rows of bookshelves would have been at home in a regal castle study in some hopeless fantasy story. She sighed, inhaling the scent of the paper. There was a hint of oak from the table where she sat. She wished she could free her spider legs from the confines of her jacket and breathe in the mingling scents. It was thus with a rare feeling of tranquility that she set her focus on the evening’s reading.

  “Excuse me!” came a shout from somewhere behind her. She looked over her shoulder toward the small computer lab occupying the space near the lobby. “Can I get some freakin’ help here?” It was a middle-aged man in a cream-colored button-down. Though she didn’t know his name, she’d had the misfortune of doing her aimless research with him in the building several times before. He was one of the obnoxious types who was never in his element unless he was complaining at the top of his lungs. Mrs. Wick, the sweet evening librarian, had a saintly patience to put up with him.

  Spinneretta shrugged the persistent annoyance away and resumed her reading. If she let things like that keep getting under her skin, she’d die before she was twenty. Gently, her fingers turned the page in her notebook, past the unkempt scrawl she’d taken down from Isaiah Thorn’s On Magick.

  “The hell is this shit?” the man said with a slur that suggested a certain fondness for the hooch. “This thing’s so slow. I just wanted to check on the Twins’ stats for last season, but I can’t do that very well with this piece of crap, can I? Can barely see the damn screen.”

  Doesn’t he know how to act in a damn library? Spinneretta thought. She heard Mrs. Wick trying to calm him in a hushed tone. It was the same every time.

  “Great! Now it’s fuckin’ froze up. Froze up thanks to all these windows. It’s like this e’ry fuckin’ time. My tax dollars paid for this library, whadd’ya spendin’ it on, eh?”

  Center of the goddamn world, she thought, trying to quell her temper. She could’ve even tolerated the noise if he wasn’t being such a disrespectful ass to Mrs. Wick. A discontent sigh slipped through her lips as she set her eyes upon the text open before her. It was another section on quantum immortality. For some reason, the hopelessly idealistic words caused the other voice in her mind to stir. Ridiculous, her thoughts seemed to say of their own accord. Surely you cannot believe such garbage.

  She jumped in fright as the voice spoke. Ever since she’d first encountered the voice beneath the Golmont building, it had seemed to lurk just on the edge of her mind, emerging in a shockingly articulate thought right as she was on the verge of forgetting it.

  Breath shallow, Spinneretta waited to see if any follow-up would come. It rarely did. Most of the time it went quiet, sometimes giving a vague impression or chortle. Whether it was a symptom of trauma or madness, it seemed content to skulk in the recesses of her mind, in the shadows of her thoughts. But when it spoke as clearly as it had this time, it was impossible not to think herself crazy.

  “Don’t you know how to work one ’a these?” the man in the computer lab hollered. “What e’er happened to Adrian, that guy fuckin’ knew how to do his damn job! Can’t even unfreeze the internet, you stupid old—”

  “For God’s sake!” Spinneretta shouted, knocking her chair over as she tore to her feet and marched toward the computers. “Whatever’s wrong with the computer could be fixed in less time than it takes to bitch about it! It’s nothing worth screaming about in a fucking library of all places!”

  Seated in the third row of computers, the man ceased his shouting and stared at her as she approached. “Who the hell’re—”

  “Shut up and get out of the way,” she said, threading her way between the stunned Mrs. Wick and the man. She seized the clunky old keyboard.

  “H-hey, that’s my—”

  Through the tinted monitor, she caught sight of the stacked toolbars and garbage applications crowding the browser window. “No wonder.” She hammered the control-alt-delete combination out of muscle memory, summoning the omnipotent task manager to the screen. She located the frozen browser and closed it with a practiced keystroke. The processor chugged a moment, and then the window vanished. With another flourish of her fingers, she revived the browser and navigated to the download page for another browser—one without the venereal parasites of adware. Without missing a beat, she downloaded it, installed it, and launched it.

  “There,” she said, numbly copying the URL from the terminally ill browser and pasting it in the new one. “Just use this instead. And for God’s sake, don’t download any more toolbars. See? Simple. Nothing worth screaming over.”

  The man stared at her, and then looked back at the computer. The garishly animated baseball graphics on the page had resumed their sprightly dancing. “Th-thanks,” he managed at last.

  “Now, how about an apology for Mrs. Wick?” Spinneretta said, gesturing to the woman beside her.

  He scratched his head and averted his eyes. “Sorry.”

  Spinneretta breathed out sharply. “Good. Now go back to your damned statistics, and don’t let me hear you raise your voice again.” Spinneretta left the both of them there, stunned, and made her way back to the long, empty table where her books awaited her return. She lowered herself into the hard chair. For a moment she just waited, half-expecting the man to start howling again, but instead she heard only the soft clackity-clack of the old, crunchy keys. Content, she resumed reading.

  At half past seven, Spinneretta put back the esoteric books, packed up her bag, and was ready to head home. But as she made her way through the lobby toward the purple explosion of evening, a voice called to her from reception.

  “Excuse me, Miss,” Mrs. Wick said. “May I have a word with you?”

  Her heart jumped into her throat. The elderly woman had a hard, serious look on her face, and a notepad and pen in hand. Spinneretta walked up to the counter, already making conciliatory motions with her hands. “I’m sorry about earlier,” she said. “I know I shouldn’t have yelled like that, but, I mean, I was pretty upset. About the way that guy was disrespecting you, I mean. I promise it won’t happen again.”

  But Mrs. Wick didn’t seem interested in her apologies. She gave her an intense, probing look, like she was checking her expiration date and considering throwing her in the trash. “What is your name?”

  “Uhh, Sarah,” Spinneretta replied, nearly forgetting her pseudonym.

  “Do you have a last name, Sarah?”

  She gulped. “Hallström.”

  Mrs. Wick wrote it down on her pad. She tapped her pen against the counter, and a smile began to shine through her grave demeanor. “Well, Miss Hallström. How’d you like a job?”

  “IT administrator?” Ralph said, nearly dropping his fork. “Hell, sign me up for that!”

  Spinneretta shrugged, picking at her tasteless green beans. Her appetite was a distant memory. “It’s whatever. It�
��s not like I’m a real admin or anything.”

  Arthr leaned toward her, one elbow planted on the table. “What’re they going to have you do there?”

  “Fix up all their old machines. Maintenance. Show people where the any key is.”

  Ralph gave a proud guffaw. “Well, make the most of this, kiddo. It may not seem like much, but IT administrator at seventeen is going to look fucking incredible on your résumé one day.”

  Résumé. She swallowed hard. Kara’s cold gaze captured hers out of the corner of her eye, and a buried despair reached up to strangle her. We have no future anyway, she could hear Kara saying. “I think they’d just assume I was lying,” she muttered.

  Oblivious to her brewing turmoil, her father snickered. “All the more reason to dedicate yourself to it, so when they ask about it you can shove your knowledge in their face and make them go whoa. Ya hear me?”

  Spinneretta smiled, but her heart wasn’t in it. What the hell else was new? “I guess you’re right,” she said, if only to appease him.

  “What are you going to be making?” Arthr asked with what seemed a genuine grin.

  “Eight an hour.”

  Ralph’s eyes lit up. “Hey, that’s quite a bit more than minimum wage.”

  “Great.” She only then realized, with a bit of remorse, just how selfish she must have sounded. Her dad was working an unsatisfying security job in Duluth. Robert Carter, after all, wasn’t a programmer, and that meant all of Ralph Warren’s experience and employment history were apocryphal. She knew her parents had been having money issues since the move. How selfish would she have to be to turn down that extra income? She swallowed a gulp of water and resumed staring a hole into her garlic bread. “I mean. I guess it would help out around here, wouldn’t it? Help us get back on our feet.”

  “Oh, don’t be ridiculous,” her mom said. “We’re not so poor that we need to send you all out to work the fields. I’m sure you could use some spending money, anyway.”

  “Yeah. Right.” Somehow that made her feel worse about the whole thing.

  “When do you start?” Ralph asked.

  Spinneretta skewered a small bouquet of green beans with her fork. “Monday. Mrs. Wick wanted me to start earlier, but I told her I needed time to think it over. It’s sudden, you know.”

  An even brighter smile came to her dad’s lips. “Well, if they’re still open, call her back and tell her you accept! I’m telling you, it’ll be good for you.”

  “Who would it be good for?” Kara asked over her half-eaten meat slab. The table fell quiet at the question. She tilted her head and glared at their father, spider legs tapping an impatient rhythm across the table top. “Who would it be good for? Good for Spinneretta? Or good for some girl who doesn’t even exist?”

  Ralph tightened his jaw. “Kara, can’t you be just a little happy for your sister?”

  “For my sister?” Her scowl grew fiercer. “Gladly. But not for Sarah. I don’t know any Sarahs.”

  “Jesus, Kara,” Ralph said. “Give it a rest, please. You can’t keep acting like this isn’t happening. We all have to do our part, and it’s not helping when you keep pulling this crap.”

  The pall over the table deepened. Kara pushed her plate away and stood up. Taking her movement as a signal, Cinnamon emerged from beneath the table and followed as she stormed out of the living room.

  “Kara,” May called, “where are you going?”

  “Oh. Sorry. May I be excused?” It wasn’t a question. The sound of her door slamming was the punctuation mark that ended her display.

  May sighed and buried her head in her hands. Spinneretta subconsciously followed suit. Her still-soft spider legs coiled about her midsection. “Maybe I shouldn’t take that job,” she said, almost to herself. “Maybe instead I’ll just start spending more time with Kara. Try to snap her out of this.”

  “She’s not snapping out of anything,” Arthr muttered. His own spider legs were twitching nervously. “As long as we’re here, and as long as we’re a secret, she’s going to be like this. Until we go back.”

  Spinneretta closed her eyes. “There is no going back.” It was a truth they all knew, but rarely acknowledged aloud. This was their life, and their future was in limbo.

  After dinner, Spinneretta helped wash the dishes before heading back to her room. On the way down the hall, her pace slowed to a crawl in front of Kara’s door. She listened for any sign of life inside, but the only sound was a vague creaking from Cinnamon. She rapped her knuckles against the door. “Kara?”

  No sound. Even Cinnamon’s distant crackling seemed to cease.

  She held her breath. “Kara, are you in there?” But only silence answered. Spinneretta tried to ignore the chill behind the door. A weight formed in her gut, and she kept walking until she got to her own room.

  Mood drained and dismal, she slumped onto her bed. Burying her face in her blanket, her spider legs scooped her cellphone from her nightstand and brought it to her. Her thumb danced a nimble ballet, revealing Mark’s number in her tiny list of contacts. She depressed the call button and slid the phone up next to her ear.

  It rang a few times, and then at last she heard his voice. “Hello?”

  The air left her lungs. Despite herself, she smiled. “Mark Warren,” she said, voice falling gruff into her bedding.

  “Spinny.” He sounded happy to hear from her, which was just enough of a joy to warm her chest.

  “Can you talk now?” she asked. “Or are you going to tell me you’re busy again?”

  A quick laugh flowed from the other end. “I am free at the moment. Is something wrong?”

  “Life.” She rolled over and stared at the blank ceiling. Outside, cicadas were calling to one another with false promises. “I just . . . I really needed to hear your voice.”

  His cheer grew somber. “I thought I was clear before: I don’t want to hear about you getting depressed.”

  She groaned. “I’m not. I mean, I’m trying not to. But Kara’s really been dragging my mood down these last few weeks.”

  “She’s still giving you trouble?”

  “It’s like she’s a totally different person now. It’s like forcing her to conceal herself is killing her.”

  “I am afraid it doesn’t surprise me. You were always used to hiding your spiderosity. She wasn’t.”

  His comment was embarrassing. She wouldn’t have hidden her legs under her jacket for so long had she known that permanent exile awaited; she’d at least have tried to enjoy the freedom a bit more. She took a deep breath and let it out through her teeth. “I thought she’d have adjusted by now. I thought she’d understand the situation and be somewhat okay with it.”

  “I wish I knew what to tell you. Have you tried bribing her with ice cream?”

  “Har-har. I’m seriously at a loss about this, and your solution is ice cream. You’re a real sage.”

  “Forgive me. I haven’t much experience dealing with this sort of thing. I merely remembered that she likes ice cream.”

  Ice cream. She remembered getting sundaes with Mark and Kara way back when, before NIDUS had revealed itself and her world had begun crumbling away. Even in those trivial memories, Kara was always shining a bright smile that could illuminate the underworld. Her blue eyes were always filled with joy and hope. Spinneretta’s mind fixated on the image of her eyes for a moment, somewhat uneasy as her thoughts flashed back to the Repton Scriptures.

  Despite the heat, she hugged a blanket around her for the mote of comfort it granted. “When do I get to see you again?”

  “Unfortunately, it may be a while yet.”

  She bit her lip and groaned. “It’s not fair. You can’t imagine how lonely I’ve been.”

  “I can certainly try.”

  “But you shouldn’t.” A pause. “How’s your search going?”

  “It’s about the same as ever,” he said with an air of sadness.

  “Where are you now?”

  “I’m in a town called Brattleb
oro.”

  “Where the hell is that?”

  “Vermont.”

  “Oh.” She found herself tracing circles on her skin with her still-tingling spider legs. “That’s so far away. What brought you there?”

  “Something of a long story, I’m afraid.”

  “I’m listening,” she said, snuggling into her blankets. His voice was already making her feel a bit better about everything.

  “Well, about two years ago, Annika found some records that pointed toward Lily becoming a ward of the state in New York. I believe after she was found, she was either adopted or placed into foster care. The problem is, identifiable information is restricted to relatives far closer than first cousins. Since I wasn’t close enough to even file a request for consent, I had to grease the wheels to find more information.”

  “Why didn’t you just use your magic and force them to tell you?”

  “What do you think grease the wheels means?”

  “Aha.”

  “In any case, I got the names of the parents whose custody she was apparently placed into, but that information was old when I got it. Even Annika couldn’t find any records of those people living anywhere in the state.”

  “Was it a false lead?”

  “I know not, but assuming the name was correct, we had to accept we weren’t going to find them in New York. That left forty-nine states with dense records to sift through looking for someone who may not even exist. A discouraging figure. That was when Annika told me she’d found some distant relatives living in California. The possibility your father still had some semblance of the Sight seemed a worthy diversion, so I went on a trip.”

  “And that’s when you showed up.” A wave of nostalgia came as she remembered opening the door and seeing him for the first time. She could still hear his initial well met clearly.

  “Right. And now I’m back to document hunting. I decided I’d do it on my own, so as not to burden Annika further, and started with the states nearest New York. Last week I found a matching pair of names in Vermont, and so I headed out here to check. I have no idea if it’s the same people, but I’m keeping my hopes up.”