We will, her spiders whispered, and the ring grew warm.
Seven, eight, nine. She took a deep breath.
“Here goes nothing.”
Ten.
She raced down the stairs to the sound of shattering glass.
The scene in the basement took her totally by surprise.
It was all the same junk from before, but it had been reconfigured — organized, somehow, though into what Maria couldn’t say. Across the room, Derek appeared to be strapped into a makeshift suit of armor comprised of pots, pans, and deconstructed furniture. The clock he’d been “repairing” earlier was now on his chest plate, counting time. He was wielding a fireplace poker like a sword, and the reckless anger in his movement as he struck out at Arturo was the only thing that kept the whole image from being comical.
Maria breathed in sharply as the poker connected with Arturo’s chest, but the sound of her gasp was drowned out by more glass shattering. It hadn’t been Arturo at all, but his reflection in one of the many old mirrors. By the looks of the shattered glass on the ground behind Derek, this had happened before.
She was still standing there, agog, when Derek started to turn his eyes in her direction. She’d been given one instruction — don’t get distracted — and already she’d blown it. She was about to ruin the entire rescue.
Arturo appeared farther into the room, and he shouted, “Hey! Junk heap!” Derek whirred around in rage.
Maria ducked behind a nearby dresser, scrambling to take in the rest of her surroundings. She needed to find her mother and Rafi and get them out of here fast, before the Black Widow returned.
Then, in the corner, she saw something ghastly — something that robbed all the air from her lungs. It was the spiderweb to end all spiderwebs, strewn between the wooden beams that seemed to hold the whole foundation of the old building in place.
Mom and Rafi weren’t just strung up in the web — they were wrapped from neck to foot, so that their faces were visible and visibly distressed. As the spiders had warned, neither of them appeared to be awake, which was probably a good thing. If Rafi were awake, he’d be hysterical. He never liked small spaces or being forced to keep still.
Maria made her way from one hiding spot to the next in a low crouch, dodging left and right as Derek turned with his weapon. Arturo was clearly trying to lead him away from the web, but he was limited by the placement and number of mirrors — a number that was getting smaller as Derek demolished one after another.
Finally, Maria reached the web. Up close, she could see that Rafi’s lips were tinged with blue, and the color had drained from Mom’s face. They couldn’t be gone. They couldn’t. Whatever was keeping them unconscious must have sent them into a kind of shock.
“Aha!” Derek shouted, parrying once more with the poker. The glass of one more mirror crashed with the resounding cascade of a chime, and a cuckoo clock somewhere in the rubble echoed in the silence that followed. But that was the last mirror, and when Derek spun on his heel, he was standing face-to-face with the real Arturo. Over Arturo’s shoulder, Derek saw Maria, and he knew he’d been had.
“Maria, hurry!” Arturo called. She’d failed his orders again. She was just so tired, disoriented, and scared.
But she pushed on because she had to. She clawed at the web until it was thick in her fingernails. When her hands started to get stuck, she used her teeth.
“Help me,” she pleaded, and her spiders went to work immediately. But this was no ordinary spiderweb; it was thick like plastic and almost as strong. If only she’d thought to bring a knife.
Meanwhile, Arturo struggled to keep Derek away using what looked like the leg of an old table. It was stranger than any duel Maria had ever imagined, and clumsier, louder, and more dangerous, too. Maria didn’t want either of them to be hurt, but it was finally sinking in that this wasn’t her best friend — the Black Widow’s power had seen to that.
“Wake up, Rafi,” Maria said desperately. “Help me get Mom down. Please, wake up.”
But Rafi would not wake up. And even as Maria tugged and bit, and even as her own spiders struggled alongside her, she heard a scuttling sound, and she knew she was already too late. The enemy spiders were here, and they were out for blood.
In droves, they rushed over her hands and arms; they swarmed her face, knocking her glasses askew. Forced to let go of the web, Maria flailed about, trying to rid her body of the onslaught. But for every spider she shook off, two more appeared. Bulbous spiders, brown-and-red spiders — there were even bright yellow and glassy green spiders — all of them crawling on her skin with legs like little needles. And then there were black widow spiders, with their poison-red hourglasses.
In the moments when she could see her surroundings through the maelstrom of fear and color, she realized that the spiders were turning on Arturo as well. Arturo was stomping on the spiders left and right; he didn’t seem to have any of Maria’s qualms about hurting them. With each spider Arturo killed, the rest of the swarm became angrier and angrier.
When Maria finally felt the spiders moving in the same direction, and the direction was down and away from her body, she entertained the hope that they had changed their minds once more and decided to help her. But if that were the case, her own brown recluse spiders wouldn’t sound so panicked. And what’s more, she couldn’t move her arms or legs. The enemy spiders had wrapped her in a web so tight, she could hardly breathe. Arturo looked to have suffered the same fate, and he was beyond miserable. After decades of successfully evading capture, he’d finally been caught, thanks to Maria’s stupidity.
Derek was winded. He clutched his sides and gulped down air, and for a fraction of a second, he looked like the boy Maria knew. But then he stood upright and glowered at her, as if she had done something to him and not the other way around.
“Derek, help us out,” Maria pleaded. “You don’t have to do this, you know. This isn’t who you are. We can get away from her.”
“No. We can’t.” His voice was monotonous, impossible to interpret. “There’s no escaping her. The Black Widow is everywhere, in us and around us.”
And, as if fulfilling a prophecy or obeying a command, the spiders began to pool at Derek’s feet, pouring out of the walls and the ceiling and the heaps of antiques. They scrambled to climb on top of one another, a mountain of spiders that grew higher and higher.
The teeming pile became tighter and denser, until it looked almost solid, and Maria couldn’t distinguish one spider from the next. Then the pile began to take shape, squeezing in at the bottom and expanding out at the top, the very peak separating into long, thin bands like hair.
Finally, it wasn’t a pile at all. It was a woman. It was Luellen.
Only it wasn’t Luellen — there were a few key differences.
This woman had eight eyes and two terrible mandibles. The mandibles clacked together in a grotesque imitation of speech, and whether it was because words actually came out or because Maria was wearing her ring, she knew this was the Black Widow, and the Black Widow was hungry.
The Black Widow surveyed the room with those eight horrible eyes. She took her time, too, gloating in her victory.
“I have waited many years for this moment,” she said. “But I knew the rings would come to me in the end.” She turned to Arturo. “I think I will take the Brown Recluse first, so that I can savor killing you afterward. I have spent too much of my life hunting you down, oh amazing one, but it will hardly matter when I have all eight rings.”