The fly walked along my eyebrow maybe a good twelve seconds before I summoned enough annoyed energy into my hand to smack it. Sunlight warmed me where I lay sprawled against the cocooned bodies of the demon's previous victims. Every part of me ached. I thought—AKA I wasn't really sure because the light was making my thoughts somehow fuzzy and disoriented—I thought I might've thrown up a couple times before I managed to stagger onto my wobbling legs. 

It was then, when my fingers pushed against desiccated limbs to stand, that I heard a crinkle in my wake, a musical crunch as my feet pushed into decayed leaves. I looked over my shoulder at my resting place for the past twelve hours or so. 

Crystalline silk spread across the scene in geometric splendor. The heavy frost illuminated the sunlight, added a fuzzy gentility to the grotesque scene. I leaned forward as much as my stomach could bear and squinted down at the radial strands as they melted and combined with other bits of the spun web. No, the fuzziness was definitely my eyes. I rubbed my face with gloves stained a rich blue-violet, remembered dimly what I'd done last night, and looked down at my clothing with mild surprise.

The spider's hemolymph- that dried, beautiful fluid stained into my attire, had frozen into a black pile of goo near my feet, the remnants of what I'd wrenched out of the demon's abdominal area. On closer inspection, I couldn't tell at all what I was looking at.

My stomach clenched. I moved away thinking maybe it was for the best that I didn't know what I'd shoved my fingers into. 

Further on, the monster himself lay well and truly dead.

But it took me about twenty minutes to feel bold enough to kick and yell at it a leg to make sure.

He lay curled into a ball, six legs tucked tightly into its heavy abdomen. Filthy, ratty hair fell across its many eyes, eyes that reflected the green sky above. I grimaced, looking at that lifeless, fanged expression, a sneer even in death, and turned my attention further down its body. 

A big, inky stain with still-wet fluid poured from the gaping hole I'd ripped. 

Looking at it in the light of day, I had to wonder why on earth I thought it would heal from that kind of injury. I'd gutted it. You don't just make a new spleen or whatever it was I'd tangled into my fist. What had the Walrus told me? Scratches and such heal fine, but if you lop off a limb or a head...? Internal organs applied to that rule, I supposed. 

I looked again, just to confirm the sneaking suspicion I had. The demon hadn't been frozen, just the stuff around where I'd fallen. So after a week of trying to Elsa my way through this Hunt, I turned some leaves and spider web into frost when I was under the influence of venom. Or already passed out. Yippee. Such progress. After finding my knife, I scratched at my bitten neck and leaned against the frozen pile to think.

The afternoon sunlight was a smarting reminder that I had to get out of here. My head was pounding, my muscles ached like it was the day after ten hours of a full body workout, and I was so thirsty I was tempted to lick the dewy frost if I didn't know about the maggots and flies crawling over and beneath the fragile surface. 

When I turned my attention on escape, however, the webbing around the clear was thicker and more dense than when I'd first stumbled into this mess. If it wasn't for laying in one spot all night waiting for the demon, I wouldn't have known which way I'd come through. The spider had spent at least some of the time before our fight weaving repairs to his realm. It took several minutes to hack a reasonable hole into the webbing, at which point the forest opened up to the same, nasty level it was outside of the spider's den: coated from leaf to root in webbing, but manageable if you didn't mind walking through enough sticky, fibrous strands to make a lip gloss. 

But the major cutting had exhausted my legs. I had to take a break, and returned back beside the demon. For a long time I stared down at the spider, and then I knelt against its abdomen and pushed the stiffened legs out of my way. I wasn't yet feeling strong enough to walk on out of this mess quite yet, but a vague inkling of an idea came to me.

That spider's venom had incapacitated me pretty damn well. Poison was used in various places around the world to coat weapons. I wasn't sure how that worked, how effective it might be or how long the effect would last, but it didn't seem a particularly bad idea. 

It was just disgusting to squat down beside the demon's stinger and make a few delicate incisions and peel away the exterior in search of a venom sac. Working back from the sting, I separated a yellowed, almost bulbous object that looked, based on my vague understanding of arachnid anatomy, thanks art, as though it were attached to the sac itself. Taking it with me would be the best option, but somewhere in my cutting and pulling and rendering, I'd nicked the organ and a clear liquid was already seeping through. Instead I did my best to coat the knife's surface, let it dry, and coat it a couple more times. Sure, it might not have done much or act fast enough to incapacitate anything that was fighting back, but something about a poisoned blade appealed to me, and I deserved to that little comfort after last night. 

When my muscles felt better and the forest looked a little less blurry, I forced myself back onto my feet, carefully sheathed the blade, and headed out into the still forest. 

*

Shail crouched about thirty yards from where I'd left him, his maw full of something nasty. A twitching trunk-like appendage and several squirming legs met their fate in a few quick bites, and there was one less disgusting tick-spider in this wretched universe. The cat's round ears flipped forward at my approach, but he didn't rise to greet me so much as just acknowledge that I'd dragged myself down onto the ground beside him. Walking was what got me here, and not much more than a mile and a half, I'd wager, but I was thoroughly winded and still rather dizzy from whatever toxins lingered in my body.

Dakota perched on a fallen log, picking dirt from beneath her fingernails. Her white gown with the cropped bottom was a little filthier than last I'd seen her. After a moment, she lifted a barefoot up onto the stump to examine her toes. "So here you are," she said, focused on her feet. "It dead?"

"I'm fine, thanks for asking. Where's Jessie?" I asked, standing wearily. 

 She thumbed to the other side of the log and carried on with her task. "Had to wedge her in good and throw a couple leaves across her. Your cat was sniffing around until these things dropped down on us in the night and tried to suck our blood." 

"Really?" I said, nearly flinging myself across the log. In that moment I didn't care about what had happened to Dakota, not any more than she cared about me. She was clearly fine, or she wouldn't be picking at her nails like we had somewhere to be. "And you just left her there on the ground all night?"

Jessie was a pale, barely visible hand buried beneath a thin covering of leaves and twigs. I dug her out and pulled her cold head against my chest. Dakota was still cleaning her toenails when she caught on to my stare. 

"What?" she asked, flipping her hair over her shoulder. "You wanted me to drag her out for cat food?"

"We're being hunted like animals and you can't be the tiniest bit more human?" I hissed, pulling debris from the child's hair. "She was scared. She didn't realize what she was doing."

The former cheerleader shrugged her dainty shoulders. "I'm just being a realist here. She's basically dead. I know in life we all get attached to our firsts, be it a boyfriend or kiss or a rescue, but you've gotta let her go, Tay." She picked up Jessie's wrist and let it fall with a knowing frown. "Even if there's something left inside of her, this isn't alive."

"I came back."

Dakota snorted. "You're like twice her weight."

I scowled.

"I don't mean it like that!" she said, swinging down off the log completely.  She watched as I combed my fingers through Jessie's hair and let out an exasperated sigh. "I'm just saying, she got a big dose of shit in her teeny little veins. You do the math."

"She might come back." But the more I looked at Jessie's ashen face and unblinking eyes, the more I knew Dakota was right. I closed Jessie's eyes softly. "I have a place, that one I told you to go to," I decided. "We'll bring her there."

"Now?" I nodded. Dakota, maybe because she felt bad, or maybe because she saw the way I was struggling to stand up without tilting, accepted the burden of Jessie without my asking- but not without a hissy, "Fine, whatever. Dress her up like Snow White and hole her up somewhere so she can be your own personal Schrodinger's cat, but can we talk about us?"

"What about us?"

"How's this gonna go?"

I thought about the previous night, and about how I'd nearly had my ass handed to me by a spider. A big spider, but a spider nevertheless. How would I fare in combat against the bigger, stronger, more vicious monsters prowling the forest? It didn't take a genius to know the answer to that. Looking at the young woman ahead of me, in her bare feet and carrying what she considered to be dead weight, I called after her, "You ever stolen something before?" 

She glanced over her shoulder with a raised eyebrow. "Seriously?"

"I didn't mean it like that," I said, with just the smallest grin. For just a moment I thought I glimpsed a smile on her face, too. As I whistled for Shail, Dakota filled me in on her multitude of escapades smuggling beer and other cheap goods out of our local country store. 

By the time we'd settled Jessie into what I told myself wasn't her final resting place, Dakota and I had sketched out the basics of a plan. With her looks and my...Ladyship or whatever it was I brought to the table, we had a chance. Not a very good chance, mind you, but it was something.

Now we just needed to hunt down a Lord of the Hunt. 

See you soon :3