He kept scribbling on his pad. “Knight to d4.”

The careless speed of the reply annoyed her. “You could at least move your own pieces.”

“When you beat me, I’ll move all the pieces.”

A hiss seeped over her stiff lower jaw. “You’re such an arrogant ass.”

Eyes still on what he was writing, he reached out with his left hand and squeezed her biceps. “That’s why we’re perfect for each other, love.”

She chewed her lower lip and moved the enemy knight. “What are you writing?”

“You know what I’m writing.”

The answer softened her a little. “Another one?”

“Actually, the same one.”

“How is that possible—all the months I’ve known you, you’ve only ever had the one page!” She scanned the configuration of pieces. She had seen this board before, hadn’t she?

He paused writing to scratch his glistening bronze scalp. He took in her concentration, and she sensed him tense with amusement. Freshly annoyed, she slapped down his left hand when it offered a neck rub. “We’re replaying one of those stupid classics, aren’t we?”

“You said you wanted to get good at this game.”

“I am good at this game. I said I wanted to get great.”

“Yes.” He continued with his page for a few moments. “You’ve set quite an agenda for yourself. Harvard graduate, leader of the people, chess master, mother . . .”

“Yes. All that.” She moved her queen to the far right edge of the board, away from the attacking knight and closer to the enemy king. “And more.”

He glanced at the board. “Rook to f8. Ah, nice try, dear; but you know I mean the other rook. So you’ll do this all by the age of twenty-three? That doesn’t leave you much time.”

She smiled back, moved the correct rook, and settled back on the couch. Her next move was clear—the forward rook was nearly useless where it was—but she wanted to make sure she wasn’t missing anything. A deep breath cleared her head. The scent of his cologne mixed beautifully with the cabin’s crackling fire. This Vermont getaway had been his idea; she did not believe in vacations or pauses. Now that she was here, she had to admit this weekend was a pleasant enough diversion from their last semester of studies.

“I’m graduating a year early. That gives me two years for everything else.” She wasn’t sure herself if this was ample time, or not nearly enough.

“And what happens if you don’t get everything done by your appointed hour? Will all the beaststalkers in the world vanish into thin air?”

“Not right away,” she admitted. Seeing no traps, she went ahead and slid her rook over one square. “It will start with some of them losing faith. I’ve been away at college for a few years. Folks back home may forget, or change their minds. People get distracted by rainbows and illusions. They forget reality.”

“No one can possibly forget reality with you around.”

“That’s why I need to get back. You promised you’d move with me to Minnesota. You agreed there are good medical schools out there and that you’d apply. Well, graduation’s coming in two months. And you haven’t said a word about it—or more to the point, packed a bag.”

His gentle smile never faltered. Carefully folding the page over, he set it and his pen on the floor of the cabin and shifted closer to her on the couch. “So what’s my next move?”

“You pack your fu—Oh, you mean the game.” She cocked her head at the board and saw the pin. Was there anything she could have done to prevent that? No, and it wasn’t that big a deal. “Rook to h6, right?”

“Correct. To threaten your queen.”

The next two moves were quick. She moved her queen out of the way, and he slid down the file to take her bishop. There was something imminent in this game; she could feel it—why couldn’t she remember?

His left hand returned to her neck. This time, she let him rub.

“What am I missing?”

“I could tell you, but then you’d be angry with me.”

She reached back and patted his forearm. “Yes, I would.” It was difficult to hide her impatience with the way this game was going. He had the initiative. Every move seemed to bring his pieces closer to her king, and her own pieces farther away from his. She was bringing no pressure, doing nothing proactive. He was doing; she was reacting.

The enemy queen, she noticed, was isolated from the rest of the assault. She could corral it, cut off its escape, and perhaps force an unfavorable trade. It would take away his initiative and give her a chance to mount her own assault.

Her mind raced through the next few moves. Where would he go? Yes, she could see two or three possibilities. None were particularly threatening. Whichever way he went, she would be able to deflect his moves with increasing force, until he was cornered and had to submit. She would define the battlefield.

Using her left hand—the right was scratching his leg as he continued to work the base of her skull—she lifted her rook to slide it over two files and threaten his queen.

“Queen to g3.” He gave his countermove before her castle had landed in its new square.

Like ice water, the realization she had lost filled her throat. Queen to g3. She swore and whipped her rook at the fireplace, ripping a hole in the wire screen and splashing sparks from the dead center of the placid blaze. His hand slipped off her neck before she could rip it off.

The entire game rushed into memory now, five seconds plus an eternity too late.

“Marshall versus Levitzky,” she spat, staring at the cabin ceiling. Her stomach churned.

He nodded. “Nineteen twelve, at the Eighteenth German Chess Congress in Breslau. Some know it as the Gold Coin Game, because spectators showered Marshall with—”

“Screw you and your history lesson.” She got up and kicked the board, feeling like she was going to vomit now. “Screw you!”

Without moving, his placid gaze followed her sharp movements. “I love you.”

“Did you hear me? I said screw you!” Tears were filling her brown eyes. She couldn’t help it. This was so humiliating—the loss, and her reaction, and how calm he was. She was supposed to be the one in control. She was supposed to be the leader. She was supposed to win.

“I heard you. I love—”

She spun around and screamed at the loft above them, where they would spend the night. He had already brought their bags up—hers had two changes of clothes, and her toothbrush, and the handle of her sword poking out the side. He liked to watch her practice with it. “Queen to gee-fucking-three! How hard is that to remember!”

“Cut yourself some slack, Glory. The Gold Coin Game is one of hundreds of games you’ve been learning these last few months. You can’t possibly expect—”

“I expect everything,” she interrupted. She said it with both shame and pride. The second time she said it, pride won out. “I expect everything!”

“You can’t have everything.”

“I’m almost there.” She knew how it sounded, but when she sat back down next to him and took his hands in hers, he squeezed back. The danger that she would throw up diminished with his touch. “I’ve finished college. The election back home is later this year; Victoria tells me the town is waiting to vote me in. She already has more than a hundred beaststalkers well trained. Within a few years, we’ll have at least two hundred. That’s not counting people who aren’t beaststalkers, yet still want to fight. Then we can move on the enemy.”

“If you can find them,” he said seriously.

“If I can find them.”

The fire carried the conversation. All they could do was stare at each other.

He can see my heart, she told herself. Can he see my mind, too? Can he see the plan? Is he playing with me, testing me?

Again, her father’s voice echoed. Tested.

She pushed it all down deep, along with the last of the nausea, and smiled at this man she loved. He smiled back, reached in, and touched her belly. She placed her pale hand over his.

“I promised you I would help you,” he told her. “And I will.”

“When?”

“After we move to Minnesota.”

Her breath caught in her throat. “When?”

The fingers over her belly tightened—a gentle hug for the tiny life within. “Before the baby’s born. I’ll take some time to help you during the critical months.”

“What about medical school?”

“School can wait. This is more important. You’re more important.” He nodded meaningfully at her abdomen. “She’s more important.”

She reached in and kissed him, all thoughts of chess moves and gold coins and her father and beaststalkers chased away. He kissed her back, then pushed her off. She sighed as he reached down for the paper and pen again.

“Now,” he told her with a warm chuckle, “I have a love letter to finish before your conquest for world domination begins. If you don’t mind . . . ?”

“Stop saying that,” she snarled. “If I could just ‘look harder,’ I would! What the hell kind of teacher are you, anyway?”

“The only kind you have,” he told her with his trademark maddening calm. Will that be a genetic trait? Her hand went unconsciously to the swell of her abdomen. The constant bouts of morning sickness had ended after they moved back to the Red River Valley, and this phase of the pregnancy was more pleasant. Glory knew she glowed, even when he wasn’t telling her so.

Right now, she wasn’t glowing as much as glowering. The barn was chilly, the hay was uncomfortable to sit on, and their efforts had come to nothing. Again. “You told me it would only take a few weeks.”

“I told you,” he corrected her with some ice in his voice, “that I had no idea how long it would take. It could be a few weeks . . . or a few years. Or never. No one’s ever tried to teach this sort of thing before, to someone like you. I’m powerful, even unique among my kind, but I’m not omnipotent. I don’t have delusions of inevitability, like some people in this relationship.”

That got her to kick his shin, hard. “Don’t make fun of me!”

“What, I should bow and scrape instead?” He stood up and tried to hold her by the shoulders, but she avoided him. “Glory, I’m not like the others. I’m not going to worship you. Not like that, anyway.”

“I know you’re not like the others.” Her jaw fixed underneath her steel brunette stare. “I know exactly what you are. Lucky for you I’m the only one.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

Too far, she told herself. She could see his calm deteriorate, revealing a more passionate interior. They both knew that on these grounds, over one hundred fervent killers waited at her beck and call. They also both knew she was his only lifeline in this quiet, rural corner of Minnesota—the sort of people who couldn’t attend crescent moon rallies had long ago moved away from this town, or been moved away.

On one hand, it was satisfying to see him crumble. On the other, she couldn’t afford to lose him over this. She willed herself to end the conflict. She, after all, was in control of this situation—if she could start it, she could end it.

“It means I’m sorry.” She sighed, batting her dark eyes. “I didn’t mean . . . I don’t want you to worry about that. Ever. I won’t tell anyone about you.”

He relaxed, and she congratulated herself on her effective problem solving. “Do you want to keep going?”

“One more time?” she suggested. “Victoria asked me to lead a training this afternoon; she needs to take Charlie to his two-year vaccinations.”

“All right, let’s both sit down. Here’s your drink.”

He poured from a canteen and then handed her a small shot glass, filled halfway with a dark green viscous liquid. The color and smell made her wince.

“Again? Are you sure? Maybe this stuff is making it harder . . .”

“Unlikely. My ancestors researched this matter over the course of hundreds of years. Igniting the power you seek requires certain fluids to be present in the body. I am rare among my kind—or anyone’s kind—in that I come from the sole family that possesses these compounds genetically. I’ve trained others who don’t have them—but they were all a lot more like me than you are, and they all needed to drink this. Over time, some of them didn’t need it anymore. Maybe you’ll get lucky.”

She snorted tartly, and took the glass. “Yeah. Lucky.” She downed the contents in one gulp and winced at the taste. It was like poison.

That’s because it is poison, she reminded herself.

“Keep your eyes closed. Are you ready?”

“If I don’t die first, yes.”

He chuckled, and she returned a small smile. It helped that they were in her old barn. She had fought straw enemies here, thinking they were imaginary creations of her father’s restless mind. Not real. Not a threat. The barn was full of light and sawdust and good, sweet smells. The barn reminded her of farming. She could do anything in here. Anything.

“The trick,” he told her for the hundredth time, “is trying not to clear your mind. Life is messy, full of debris and cobwebs. The sooner your mind accepts that, the sooner it will open to other possibilities. So resist your instincts. Don’t clear your mind. Imagine everything that’s going on around you, right now, all at once. The dust, the hay, the beetles creeping in and out of the floorboards, the flies buzzing in the corners, the air currents pushing against them all.”

This part was easiest for her, since she was so familiar with her surroundings. She knew not to try to focus on any one particular image, but rather to take them all in at once, to revel in their complexity. This is how they see things, she reminded herself as the taste of the vile liquid finished sliding down the back of her throat. The most powerful among them can see, because they embrace complexity. They go beyond black and white.

“There are hues,” he continued as if reading her thoughts. “Shades between where the sunlight strikes the windows, and the darkest corners behind the bales of hay. See them?”

“Yes,” she said with steady breath.

“Now you must see them moving, interacting. A fly doesn’t stay in one place for long. Neither does a color. The sun moves, wind moves, dirt moves, water droplets move, and they all move color with them. Let your mind’s eye see all these things happen, everything breaking down into shifting patterns of color . . .”

This is where things usually started to break down for Glorianna. It was bad enough that she was supposed to see things with her lids closed, and that all these details were supposed to mesh into a crazy palette. But when he began insisting that she track the tint of invisible things like air and vapor as they slid around everything else, she began to grind her teeth and wish she had drunk more of the poison. She managed, this time, to keep her jaws apart.

“Inhale, taste the sun as it flows into your mouth. Exhale, taste the darkness as it passes out of your body. The sun contains all colors, and the gloom gives shape to the light, defines the colors we see and don’t see. As your breath moves, you will see the colors move.”

The sun sure tastes better than that junk I just drank, she thought idly before getting annoyed with herself and doing what he asked. In with the light, out with the darkness. In with the light, out with the darkness . . . in with the light, out with the darkness. In with the holy CRAP!

The insides of her lids suddenly flooded with color, as though she had opened them in a hallucinogenic haze. Her head jerked in surprise, and she felt his touch on her arm.

“Don’t open your eyes!” His excitement mirrored her own. “You’re almost there, my love. Just sit still. Let your eyes adjust. They’re beginning to perceive things through skin, starting with your lids. In about sixty seconds, they’ll be ready to see what you’ve asked to see.”

The next minute was one of the longest of Glorianna Seabright’s life. She felt triumph, impatience, foreboding, and relief all at once—she had done it! She had crossed the threshold from visionary to omniscient. Finally, the guesswork would be over. Finally, Victoria would not have to keep meticulous lists, written under a crescent moon, of who was “naughty” and who was “nice.” All Glorianna would need to do was glance at an individual, and there the answer would be: friend or foe, ally or spy.

The hues began to fade, and in a panic she dropped those thoughts and took in what her new vision was telling her. The warmer air currents by the window were soft green; the dew droplets evaporating off the sill were blurred streaks of silver. Things like walls and floorboards and bales of straw were darker and hidden like undiscovered deep-space objects behind the bright galaxy of dust that swirled around them.

“Okay,” his voice finally came. “Open your eyes, and look at me.”

It almost disappointed her when she saw the world virtually the way she remembered it—all the colors flipped back to normal, and the dust became less visible, and the background objects leapt back out at her. But the second she took him in, she knew it had worked.

Behind his beautiful, dark brown skin, she could make out the musculature surrounding his jawbone. His throat was a lovely cascade of pumping arteries and strong tendons. Beneath his broad shoulders, his heart—I can see his heart, she marveled—pounded with exhilaration. His ribs were strong, though one bore a hairline fracture from a childhood accident he had told her about. Below the lungs, she could make out the lines of several different organs. Unlike him, she had no medical training, and the sorcery gave no insights into the difference between, say, a gallbladder and a pancreas.

Still, when Glorianna spotted it, there was no mistaking it. It was something Gray’s Anatomy would never diagram, an autopsy never reveal.

There it was, nestled below the sternum, suspended like an extra liver among the digestive organs. It was segmented into two somewhat spherical shapes, one larger than the other. Like everything else in her vision, it was translucent. Unlike everything else, it had eight delicate, milk-hued, diaphanous appendages that gently folded back and stroked the vertebrae that shielded his spinal cord.

He had never let her see him during a crescent moon. Back in New England, he would go off alone to his family’s Vermont cabin. Here, he had found an abandoned nearby farm with a working water supply and enough privacy to shield him from prying eyes. No one ever questioned the man that Glorianna so obviously trusted, not even Victoria. Glorianna herself respected his wishes and never followed him to either location, when the infernal crescent hung in the sky. Until now, part of her thought maybe it was all a ruse, a game he was playing with her to test her—and one day, he would return early as a glorious man, his skin as dark and smooth and human as ever, smile at her with that irritating smugness, and tell her the truth.

This was the truth, of course. Right here. It always had been.

It moves, she realized, thinking of the life building in her own abdomen. Even when it’s dormant, it’s there, pulling strings and thinking things through . . .

“You can see it, can’t you?” He leaned forward, causing the strange shape within to flex.

All she could do was nod. She felt beads of sweat gather on her forehead, and a wave of dizziness crashed into her.

“Uh-oh. Close your eyes.”

She did so, quickly. The nausea didn’t go away. This was no morning sickness. It was the idea that, if she looked within herself, she might see the same thing inside her unborn child, spinning a web within the tiny body, inside her own.

The bile rushed up and greeted the traces of poison in her esophagus, and the combined forces made a rush for the border. She couldn’t stop it. It all went right into his lap, and he stood up with an exclamation of disgust.

“Sorry,” she told him a few minutes later, after he had toweled them both off. She wasn’t.

“It’s okay,” he replied, unruffled once more. “Your body isn’t built for this sort of magic. We’re going to need to work on it more, so you can sustain the vision for as long as you need it. I imagine you’ll—” He paused.

“What?” She fretted about her appearance. She had bile dripping down her chin, her dark hair would be a mess, and—

I’m worried about how I look? When he has that thing inside?

“It’s your eyes,” he told her. “They’re a bit . . .”

“A bit what?”

“A bit, well, less brown. They used to be the color of chocolate; now they’re more like, I dunno, coffee. With cream. Can you see okay?”

“I can see fine.” She didn’t want to talk about chocolate, or coffee, or cream. Every one of these words made her want to yark all over again. “You were saying we’d work on this more?”

“Right. I imagine you’ll be puking a few more times, before we’re completely done.” He wouldn’t stop peering at her eyes.

“No more today,” she ordered. It wasn’t the vomiting, or the fact that Victoria’s little Charlie had an appointment. She could not look at this man again right now.

She began to gag again, and he quickly escorted her to a bucket in a corner of the barn.

Once she had finished, he excused himself.

“Where are you going?” she asked.

He smiled at her. “Back to the house. I was thinking as I watched you—”

“How gross this is?” She meant him; fortunately he took it the other way.

“—how much I love you, no matter what,” he finished. “I want to write it down.”

The letter that never ends. She began to chuckle at the thought, though she had different reasons for doing so than what he probably imagined. Yes, you go write that letter, darling. That’ll be all we have left, before too long.

“You’ll be okay?”

“I’ll be fine,” she whispered, before she felt a new surge and leaned over the bucket again. She thought, Shall I look? Shall I see in me? The child?

No.

Glorianna dumped her gear inside the foyer closet. “Yeah.”

“See anything interesting?”

It was a question he had asked every night for the last fifteen nights, since she first gained his vision. Each time, it came out more coldly than the last.

In the hallway mirror, she caught a glimpse of herself. The brown had almost completely left her eyes, leaving milky irises in their wake. “I suppose.” In fact, she had seen many interesting things, all perfectly visible to her now without benefit of the poison, which she had been drinking less and less of, and absolutely none tonight.

“Leave any of it alive?” This was a new question, and the bitterness was unmistakable.

She did not answer. Instead she returned to the closet and pulled out one piece of gear.

She had known this day would come since the day she met him. Since the day, in fact, months before, when Glorianna first heard rumors of this young sorcerer, formulated her plan, and sought him out in New England. He had fallen in love with her, as she’d hoped. She had not expected to love him in return, but that was neither here nor there.

He had given her what she wanted. She could see without his help, without his poison, without anything from him at all. And she now needed to make sure he did not live long enough to regret his choice. Because a werachnid powerful enough to give a gift like this was powerful enough to take it away.

She had considered crippling him. That way, they could continue their lives together. But she had learned these past days, through extensive experimentation with strangers, that the crippling technique did not remove the horrific image inside her victims—it left the soulful corpse inside, eternally rotting like an undead thing, continually reminding her of the ugly truth.

She couldn’t bear to have it inside him, dead or alive, anymore.

Sword drawn, she entered the living room. She was certain he would hear the ting of the sword as it left the sheath, but at this point victory was inevitable. Her speed and strength would be too much for him. They were nowhere near a crescent moon, and his sorcery was slow. Unless he had hidden something from her . . . ?

As it happened, she didn’t have to worry. He was sitting on the couch facing her, hands clasped, as imperturbable as ever. He didn’t react to the sword.

“You’re breaking off the engagement, I suppose.”

Even a week ago, she would have smiled at the wry humor. Today she could not hear the irony. She could not smell his delicate musk, or see the hard slopes of muscle underneath his button-down shirt. All she could see, hear, and smell was the horrific shape wriggling inside his abdomen. This thing killed him, Glorianna told herself. He would have been perfect, but it ruined him.

Those thoughts made it just easy enough to step forward and thrust her blade through the translucent invader’s body.

He reached out immediately—but it was not to block the strike or hurt her. Instead, he grabbed her hands on the hilt of the sword, and squeezed them. A sob escaped her as she let go and knelt down beside him.

“I’m sorry,” she cried, touching his beautiful bronze face. Now that the spider within had been slain, she could sense so much from him again. He hadn’t shaved that day. He had recently finished drinking a glass of red wine—a cabernet. His warm breath flickered past the liquid filling his lungs.

“Okay,” he told her, barely nodding. One hand reached into his shirt pocket before the blood seeped into it and pulled out a single folded piece of paper. “Still love you. Always will.”

As she lifted the letter from his hand, he slumped across the couch. His eyes stayed open, fixed on a point somewhere across the room. The thing inside him shriveled and disappeared.

It was horrible, this victory. She couldn’t bear to touch him anymore, or the sword she had slain him with, or the couch he lay on. In fact, she wasn’t sure she wanted anything left in this house at all. She would set a fire, she resolved right there and then, and leave it all behind. Leave it with him. She would take only herself, and their child inside her. And his letter.

She unfolded the single thin page.

Immediately, she realized she had made an irreversible mistake. The invisible sorcery pricked her skin all over and settled in her flesh, sinking deeper with every word she read:

With cold fingers, she lowered the letter and looked at his face again. It was still staring. She turned and faced what he had last seen in this world.

The marble chess set stood peacefully in its place on the corner accent table. One white rook was chipped where it had hit the back of the hearth in Vermont. They had not played since they moved here. She realized now he had been playing all along.

Something swelled inside her throat. At first she thought it was bile. Then she thought it was an unbearable sadness. Then it spilled from her, and she realized it was rage.

“YOU’RE WRONG, ESTEBAN!” she found herself screaming at his placid face. “YOU DIDN’T KNOW! YOU COULDN’T HAVE KNOWN! I BEAT YOU! I WON!”

She leapt across the room and kicked the corner table, smashing it and sending the grave-faced pieces flying. “YOU WON NOTHING! YOU DON’T TEST ME! YOU DON’T CONTROL ME! YOU DON’T TELL ME WHAT I CAN AND CAN’T DO!”

Whirling back to the couch, she closed her fists until she felt blood seep over her palms.

She reached forward and yanked her sword out of his body, causing him to roll off the couch and land facedown on the hardwood floor with a thud.

“Don’t wait up, darling,” she hissed as she made for the foyer to get the rest of her gear.

Hours later, she was back. She had to stop at several bars in several towns—she had decided to pass on a couple of dragons to find another disgusting spider, like her dead monster of a fiancé. She hadn’t bothered to try to disguise her intentions; she had simply pulled out her sword and beheaded the brute. And then she had left. But not empty-handed.

“I’m home again, sweetheart!” she shouted from the foyer, dropping everything except the head, barely feeling the gore that trickled out of its neck stump. “And I brought you a present. I’ll bury it with your body, you arrogant son of a—”

She stopped dead at the doorway to the living room. There was blood on the couch, and chess pieces and table shards all over the floor . . . but his body was gone.

“Esteban?”

Deep in the pit of her stomach, a coil of uncertainty began to wind up. She swung the head toward the floor, stepped back into the foyer, and picked up her sword.

“Esteban, my love. Have you been holding out on me?”

She advanced into the living room, feeling her insides churn harder. Then she screamed.

Right away, she could tell that the massive spider that filled the room was him, and also nothing more than a ghost. Its translucent legs trembled with fury, and four pairs of shadowy eyes fixed upon her.

*Tested,* it told her in her own father’s voice. *And failed.*

As the apparition dissolved into smoke, Glorianna felt the coils of fear tighten in her belly. The subsequent pain was sharp and unexpected. By the time she and her unborn child were alone again in the room, she realized it wasn’t fear causing the abdominal cramps at all.

Of course, unlike her, he had killed their child to make a point.

She squelched the thought. He had written the sorcery. He had goaded her with that note. She hadn’t known the consequences of ignoring it. He had.

This was more nonsense, she assured herself as she squeezed a dull fingernail under the clipboard blade that also held her chart. His plan was clearly flawed. True, she couldn’t kill anymore. The bastard probably had even worse in store for her if she did. Fine. She didn’t need to do the killing. She would have others do it for her.

She had the houses emptied, and the hospitals purged, and the cemeteries exhumed. She had the historical landmarks torn down, so that tourists would not come to visit expecting them; and she refurnished city hall to her own liking. She sent out word that the newly incorporated town of Winoka welcomed beaststalkers, as well as any who sought protection from the horrors of the crescent moon.

For the next sixty years, the town never bothered to hold a local election. There was no need: Glorianna was their leader. More than a leader: a saint. More than a saint: a goddess.

When she asked her disciples, they denied her nothing—not even the occasional child to raise, to fill the void in her heart that Esteban had ripped open.