Prologue
A delicate spider’s web spans the angle where the ceiling meets two walls. The web, clear of a spider or any spun bundles of morsels, quivers. A rhythmic thumping is intermingled with guttural moans and barely restrained cries of passion.
The head of a wooden bedstead rocks and thumps against a wall. A male hand clenches a fist full of sheets. Shapely feminine legs straddle a sweat beaded body, rocking and grinding. A man’s face, with features on the tipping point of adolescence and rugged maturity and eyes erotically charged, leans upright. One of his hands hand cups a breast of the woman, his mouth hungrily nuzzles the nipple. The woman, with skin the delicious colour of bitter chocolate, arches her back. The manicured nails of one hand carve bloody furrows across his chest. He moans.
She cups the back of his head with her other hand, crushes his lips with hers. She pulls away just far enough to stare into his eyes. Their gazes lock and his entire body stiffens and quivers. A primal moan, low and rough, tears out of his mouth. Followed by an ephemeral green essence. His body spasms and twitches. But between the strength of her knees gripping his hips and the hand locked behind his head and his sight transfixed by her eyes now glowing and eerily white, he was helpless.
She hungrily inhales the green essence gushing out of the young man, savouring every bit. His body, only moments before youthful and vigorous, changes. As more of the essence pours out of him, his body withers, flesh sagging and grey. She closes her eyes and savours it, like some savour a fresh island breeze. She opens her eyes. Between her legs and draped across her hands, all that remains of her paramour is a thin, empty sack of skin. A moan of a different sort escapes her lips. She scuttles backward, tumbling off the bed on to the floor, horror in her eyes. She crawls to a corner of the room, pulls her legs to her chest, wraps her arms around her knees. Sobs wracked her body.
Light brightens a window, the first rays of the morning sun. The young woman still curled pitifully in a corner now glows a faint blue as if she was covered in burning alcohol. The light of the new day steals across the room. She whimpers. Her body glows a brighter blue. The shadows of the bed, inches from her curled feet deepen. Two hands with manicured nails reach out of the depths of the shadows and grasp the edge where shadows meet the floor. A man, dressed in a pale red silk shirt, tailored slacks and hand stitched leather loafers hauls himself out of the shadows cast by the foot of the bed as if those shadows were simple a hole of moderate depth.
He dusts himself off, looking down at the woman with an arched eyebrow of disapproval. He clicks his tongue against his teeth, crouches next to the shadow he climbed from and pulls out a jet black garment bag.
“You really should get dressed,” he states in a matter-of-fact fashion.
“You promised you’d release me. That I wouldn’t have to do that again!” She points an accusing finger wreathed in a now brilliant blue glow.
He shakes his head as if they had been through this before.
“Only death will release you. And you are too valuable to me for that,” He holds the garment bag out to her. “Now get dressed,”
She stands. Her features now indistinct due to the blue glow enveloping her body, flickering and dancing like a flame. She jabs her hand into the garment bag. Inky shadows mingle with the glow where her forearm disappears into the garment bag shaped shadows. Her hand reappears clutching a limp caramel skin coloured sheath. Slowly the sheath of skin hungrily crawls over her glowing fingers and arms, extinguishing the azure glow and leaving silky smooth flesh. Before long, a lithe naked woman stands in the place of the otherworldly glowing creature.
The man nods in satisfaction and turns to the swath of skin on the crumpled sheets.
“What are you going to do about him?” she questions.
“The skin of an unrealised demigod can be useful in a few rituals. Failing that, I’ve got more than enough material to make a new cover my favourite reading lamp,” he replies as he scoops up the empty sack of skin and stuffs it into the shadowy garment bag.
The woman picks up her lacy panties from the floor and steps into them. The snazzily dressed man turns to her. She reflexively covers her breasts with one arm. “One more thing darling,” He gestures negligently with the finger of one hand. He casually hooks the garment bag in midair, curls the fingers of his other hand. She stiffens with her head thrown back. A roiling ball of energy rips from her mouth. The well dressed man stares at the ball of green light hungrily. With one hand extended to the woman holding her motionless, he opens the buttons of his pale red shirt with the other. Beneath the shirt, the flesh of his muscled chest parts revealing a toothed maw between his pectorals. He pulls the roiling ball of energy to him with his free hand and stuffs it into the gaping maw. He releases the hold on the woman and she crumples limply to the floor. Without another glance he turns and steps into a sliver of shadow and is gone.
A tiny spider skitters up the window blinds and disappears through the open window.
Sitting on a cement block and with his T-shirt clad back propped against the trunk of an out-of-season mango tree, a dreadlocked man in dark sunglasses plays cats’ cradle with a silvery length of string strung between the fingers of his ten fingers. With a few flicks of his wrists the string twists and changes through a series of intricate geometrical designs.
The tiny spider works its legs across the bark of the tree trunk, moving closer to the dreadlocked man. It dances across the fabric of his t-shirt, along the length of his arm and into the centre of the cats cradle that now looks a lot like a delicately spun spider’s web. The dreadlocked man leans closer to the spider, cocks an ear as if listening intently.
“Huh! Just because Ogun isn’t big on playing his child support, doesn’t mean he’s going to let Mister O prey on his bastards,” he mutters.
The tiny spider gesticulates with two of its foremost legs. The dreadlocked man leans forward, looking over the top of his shades. “Yes I know Little Sistuh. Me being the one to tell Mr. Technology myself is a bad idea. But there is nothing saying that I can’t make a little mischief getting someone else to tell him,” Eric Nedd says as the tiny spider scurries back along his arm and up his neck to disappear into his hair.
