I nudged Trent again, but he didn’t wake up. If he did, he’d probably tell me it was just my adrenaline crashing after spending the last three days moving, or the adjustment of our first night in our new apartment, or the Halloween season getting to me.

Regardless, I wouldn’t be able to sleep unless I figured out what that noise was, so I got up and threw on some sweats and a T-shirt. I decided not to bother with a bra—that was more effort than it was worth at this hour—and tip-toed out to the living room.

Boxes were still stacked high in every room, casting eerie shadows from the yellow lights that lined the apartment complex walkways.

Something black skittered across the linoleum in the kitchen.

I jumped back, my heart slamming through my stomach.

Just a roach, Jack, I reassured myself. That’s to be expected in a new place. You can call the office in the morning and get them to spray.

At least it wasn’t a spider. I didn’t do well with spiders.

I took another step. The floor creaked. I’d have to get used to a whole new set of creaks and quirks in this place.

Thump

There it was again, directly overhead. The apartment above me?

Should I go up there? Check things out?

As far as I knew, the police hadn’t been called, so would I be overstepping too much to check out a noise that might or might not be mysterious?

Maybe the upstairs neighbors were just having some really dramatic sex, or maybe they had a weird work schedule and they were just doing some cleaning.

At any rate, it wouldn’t hurt to just walk up the stairs and see if there were any lights on.

I slipped on a pair of flip-flops and stepped out onto the landing outside my door. Trent and I were on the middle floor of a three-story building. We had a little balcony off the living room that overlooked the green space and small park at the center of the complex.

The evening was cool. October in Phoenix was pretty much the perfect time of year. In the eighties or low nineties during the day, sometimes down into the sixties at night. Tonight there was a cool breeze.

A soft hum of city noises filtered in from the main road, but inside the complex it was relatively quiet and serene.

I looked up, but couldn’t see the door to the upstairs apartment from where I stood, so I crept up the stairs.

I should’ve brought my gun.

No. I should not randomly bring my service weapon to my neighbor’s house in the middle of the night my first day living in the complex. I was being paranoid.

I could see the sliding glass window to the upstairs neighbors’ balcony now. There was a dim light coming from inside. A lamp or nightlight, maybe. Just enough to emit a pale glow around the edges of the blinds, but not enough to give any actual illumination.

I waited a moment, standing on the stairs about halfway up, listening for any sign that anything was wrong.

I had pretty much convinced myself that whatever was happening up there was entirely innocuous and my imagination was running away with me when a shadow crossed behind the blinds in the window.

The thing was huge, covering most of the window, blacking it out for several seconds except for several long spines that looked like huge tentacles or legs.

Once again, my heart thundered, galloping away from me. I stumbled back, losing my footing and sliding down a couple of stairs before catching and righting myself.

I forced myself to breathe and to look at this like a cop.

Possibility number one was that a giant, tentacled monster was thumping around the upstairs apartment.

Possibility number two, the neighbor was up late putting together his Halloween decorations, hence the thumping and the weird shadows.

Or, possibility number three, a roach crawled across the night light in the living room, creating a visual effect that was eerie but completely natural.

Either of the second two was probable.

I waited another few moments. No weird thumping, no more weird shadows.

I inhaled, calming myself down. I could come back up in the morning and introduce myself to the neighbors. If I were the domestic type, I could make cookies to take up to ease the introduction. I might just have to settle for inviting them to come down for coffee sometime.

Not that I was the social type, either… but at least then I’d have an excuse to knock on the door and see if they had a roach infestation or a Halloween decoration progression happening.

At any rate, there was nothing I could do tonight without being a total creeper.

I turned to start back down the stairs when there was another thump. Louder this time.

Loud enough to rattle the sliding glass door.

I turned back around to see the same giant shadow in the window, but this time it thumped against it.

Not a roach on a nightlight.

Still didn’t rule out the possibility of a big-ass Halloween decoration.

Until the shadow was joined by a second shadow and the two began to fight.

A moment later, the otherwise serene night was shattered by the glass door breaking and a giant, long-legged beast tumbling out onto the balcony.

Chapter Two: Murder

I fell backward, rolling down the stairs like a stuntman.

When I stopped at the landing in front of my door, the balcony above me was empty. Whatever the giant beast—or beasts—was, it was gone now.

Back inside, or somewhere else?

And now I really did wish I had my gun.

Or my fiancé.

I pulled myself to my feet and stumbled into my apartment. “Trent!” I called out loudly enough to wake the rest of the neighbors, assuming they hadn’t been awakened by the breaking glass.

Trent stumbled out of our room in just his boxers, rubbing his eyes. “What’s going on?”

“I don’t know… domestic disturbance, I guess? There was something upstairs at the neighbor’s apartment and it broke the window.”

“It or them?”

“Definitely it. Put your pants on, we need to check it out.”

It took him just a few seconds to pull on pants and a shirt and grab his badge and gun.

I grabbed mine, too, and led the way out the door and up the stairs.

Shards of glass on the balcony caught the light, sending twinkling reflections that would’ve been pretty if not for the monster that had made them.

However, the broken glass was enough for probable cause.

Trent pounded on the front door while I called for backup.

No one answered, not that I really expected them to. If there were someone up there, they would’ve yelled or called 911 when whatever it was broke the glass door.

“Wait here in case anyone comes out,” Trent said. He climbed onto the railing and stepped over to the balcony railing, lowering himself carefully onto the glass that crunched beneath his shoes.

He gently moved the Venetian blinds and stepped into the apartment. “Is anyone here?” he called out loudly. “This is Detective Beck of the Phoenix Police Department.”

A pause, then, “Shit. Jack, we have a body!”

The door opened a moment later and Trent waved me inside. “Help me clear the apartment,” he ordered.

I followed him in, gun ready.

The body was on the living room floor, right where we’d put the coffee table in our apartment. The apartment was the same layout as ours, so it was easy to find light switches and make our way from room to room.

No one else was in the apartment, dead or alive, so we made our way back to the living room, where Trent started looking for clues.

I stood by the door, waiting for our backup to arrive.

“There’s a puncture wound on his arm,” Trent said. “No, two. About six inches apart. Possible drug overdose.”

“I didn’t see any sign of drug paraphernalia when we were clearing the apartment,” I said. “And that wouldn’t explain the monster that broke the glass.”

“Start from the beginning,” Trent said. He was still examining the body, but I knew he was listening.

I told him the events leading up to the monster crashing through the window.

“And you didn’t see where it went?”

I shook my head. “I was rolling down the stairs at the time.”

“Is there any possibility it was a someone not a something?”

“I know what I saw,” I said. But even as I said it, I started to doubt myself. Between the roach and the thumping and the weird shadows and my mind running wild with possibilities…

Wasn’t it more likely that I’d heard the victim wrestling or something—maybe fighting over drugs? The tentacle-ridden shadow could’ve been caused by two guys with multiple light sources casting competing shadows. The assailant could’ve fallen through the window after he killed the victim and run away while I was Scarlett O’Hara-ing down the stairs.

“I don’t know,” I finally admitted. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe I am just high strung from the move and getting used to the new place.”

Trent raised an eyebrow at me. “I never said that.”

“No, but you would’ve if I’d mentioned it.”

He stuck his gun in the back of his pants and held open his arms. “Come here.”

I stuck my own gun safely in my back and melted into his arms. “I’m projecting again, aren’t I.” It wasn’t really a question.

“I didn’t say that, either,” Trent said.

He hadn’t. But it didn’t make it less true. Three years we’d been together, and I still had to remind myself that nothing he wasn’t my mom. He wasn’t gaslighting me.

“Whatever you saw, I believe you. And when we figure out what it was and why it looked like that to you, you’ll be relieved. But it doesn’t mean you didn’t see it.”

“Thanks,” was all I could manage to say.

The sound of sirens entering the apartment complex filled the air. Trent released me, and a few moments later, a handful of officers tromped up the stairs toward us.

“What’ve we got?” Trent’s partner, Detective Herbert asked.

I relayed the story, minus the monster—I just called it a shadow I couldn’t identify—and Trent filled them in on coming up and clearing the apartment and his observations so far.

“You guys seriously stumbled in on a murder your first night?” a familiar voice interrupted.

I turned with a grin. Bridget.

My best friend.

Even in the middle of the night, wearing a rumpled uniform, she managed to look like a supermodel.

“Hey, Bridge.”

She lingered out on the landing with me while Trent led the others in to examine the body.

“This is not the housewarming I was planning to have for you,” she said.

I chuckled. “I don’t need a housewarming.”

“Not the point. You guys just got your first place as a couple and you need to celebrate.”

“We just moved in together, which means we already have more stuff than we can fit in a single apartment. We don’t need more stuff.”

“You’re still missing it,” Bridget said. “It’s not about getting stuff—I mean, it is, sort of, but it’s you letting people in to your life and letting them do something for you and be part of the joy of a major milestone.”

“I don’t even like people, why would they want to help me celebrate?”

She rolled her eyes and grinned. “You’re a work in progress. But I’ll get you there.”

Brushing past me, she went inside the apartment. I followed slowly, not sure what I expected to find.

The officers were examining the body, but trying not to touch anything until crime scene techs got there.

“I’ve got mail,” Officer Springer said from the kitchen. “Looks like the apartment belonged to a Samuel Searvine.

My stomach dropped. I was going to be sick. “Holy shit,” I whispered, stepping closer so I could see the victim’s face. “I know him.”

Chapter Three: Moving

Trent was by my side in an instant. “What do you mean you know him?”

“I mean… I don’t know him know him, but… I know who he is. We went to the same high school. He was a couple years ahead of me. Total douche. One of those guys who thought he was all that, but mostly he was just a jerk to those he deemed lesser than himself. I don’t think he had any idea I existed.”

“Is that him?” Detective Herbert motioned toward the body.

“I think so? It’s been more than a decade since I’ve seen him, but it kinda looks like him.”

That was apparently enough for him, because he motioned Trent and me out. “You two should go get some sleep. We’ll get complete statements in the morning, after the techs get through processing the scene.”

Bridget walked us down.

I invited her in. “Well, I was hoping to show you this place in the daylight, but, here it is.”

She grinned. “It looks better than the one upstairs. When are you coming back to work?”

“I took the whole week off. I have a ton of PTO I need to use before the end of the year anyway, so it seemed like a good time to take off and focus on getting settled.”

“Yeah, good call. I have Wednesday off. I’ll come over and help unpack some stuff.”

She was like that. She just took charge and made decisions and made it work. Her no-nonsense attitude made me think she was stuck-up when I first met her, but she adopted me as a friend on day one at the police academy, and honestly, I probably wouldn’t have made it through without her.

“Thanks, Bridge. I’ll see you Wednesday.”

I shut the door and locked it behind her. Immediately, Trent’s arms were around my waist and he pulled me close again.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

“Fine. Why?”

“Really?” His look told me I should know better.

“It’s been a long day. I saw something weird. But I’m a cop. It’s not like this was the first dead body I’ve seen.”

“But you knew him.”

“So? He was a bully. He wasn’t someone I’ve even thought about in years. Of all the dead bodies I’m going to come across in this job, it’s not surprising that I might’ve known one of them at some point.”

“Still. It’s okay to have emotions.”

“I have emotions,” I protested. “It’s just that none of them involve that guy.”

“Fair enough.” Trent smothered my neck with kisses. “You know, we were too tired last night to christen the new apartment, but I’m wide awake now.”

I giggled and let him drag me to the bedroom.

###

Trent was gone by the time I woke up in the morning, but the apartment smelled like coffee, which was as much a symbol of his love as the ring that sparkled on my left hand.

I shuffled to the kitchen. He’d even unpacked my favorite mug and left it on the counter for me. I smiled and poured myself a cup.

He’d left a note on the counter next to the coffee pot: Please come down to the precinct when you get a chance to file your official statement.

After unpacking various kitchen items while sipping my coffee, I took a long shower, washing away the stress from the night before, then headed in to the precinct.

It felt weird to be in that context not wearing my uniform. For one second I envied the detectives and office staff who didn’t have to wear uniforms… and quickly shoved that thought aside. Trent kept trying to talk me into taking the test to qualify for detective, but I wasn’t ready for that. That was way more responsibility than I could handle right now.

“Hey, Jack,” Trent said when he saw me. “Here’s your paperwork. You know the drill.”

I did. I sat at my desk to fill out my statement, absorbed in finding the right words to accurately describe what I saw without sounding like I was hallucinating.

Finally, I finished and stood to take my paperwork to Trent.

He was at his desk, scrolling through something on his computer, probably for his serial killer case.

“Here,” I said, handing him the report.

“Thanks,” he said, not looking up.

He wasn’t ignoring me—he was just hyper-focused on whatever he was reading. I’d had to figure that out and accept it as part of his work-mode.

“What’s that?” I asked, pulling a chair from the empty desk beside him and sitting down.

“Our serial killer.”

“What’ve you got? Maybe I can help.”

He turned to look at me then. “We’ve figured out that the poison contained elements of several different types of venom. Based on autopsies, it was injected directly into the victims’ bloodstreams. It likely took a few to several minutes for the toxin to overwhelm the system, which would cause the victim to experience intense pain, possibly violent spasms or seizures, before going numb and dying slowly.”

“That’s horrible. You’d have to be really pissed at someone to kill them that way.”

Trent nodded.

“You have motive yet?” I asked.

“Not really. We’re still looking into common denominators. So far we have a few mutual friends on social media spread across the victims, but they all had different jobs, lived in different parts of the city—no obvious connections other than the way they died, and this.” He handed me a photocopy of a note. Written like a 90s-era ransom note, with the letters all cut out from different magazines, the note read,

You had your glory days, and thirteen years have passed

Enjoy this day, unlucky one, for it will be your last

“That’s creepy. Did anyone file a report?”

“Nope,” Trent said. “We assume they all thought it was some sort of Halloween joke and ignored it.”

I glanced at his notes, the names of the victims. Leslie Foster. Joe Creeger. Fredrick Shay. Mike Vaughn. Rosella McCafferty. Felicia Wheelin.

Some of those names triggered memories in my head.

Too many of those names for it to be a coincidence.

I gulped back my suspicions. “I’m gonna go work on some more unpacking. Call me if you need me.”

He leaned in to kiss me. “Have fun. I’ll try not to stay too late today.”

“See you tonight,” I said.

I hoped I didn’t look as uncomfortable as I felt.

As soon as I got out to my truck, I texted my mom. I hadn’t talked to her in months—not even to tell her Trent and I were engaged. But this was important.

Do you still have any of my old yearbooks?

She waited six minutes to text me back, which meant it was intentional. Under five minutes, according to her, was a reasonable amount of time for someone to reasonably respond if they thought your message was important. It didn’t actually matter whether they were in a meeting or in an active interrogation, more than five minutes meant you didn’t matter to them. So six minutes was her way of telling me my message was unimportant to her.

Why would I have that? I got rid of all your junk when you abandoned me.

Abandoned her. That was rich.

But unimportant to the task at hand.

Okay, thanks, I texted back. That was enough interaction to last me through the year.

I stuck my phone in my pocket and drove the twenty minutes to my old high school.

The receptionist at the front of the school was from my year.

Eleanor. A long time ago, we’d been friends, but after sophomore year, we grew apart.

“Hey, Eleanor,” I said, my smile genuine, grateful to see a familiar face.

It took her a moment of staring before recognition dawned on her face. Recognition was immediately replaced with an aloofness as frosty as the peppermint gum that made a minty cloud around her. “Well, hello, Jacqueline. I didn’t expect to see you here.”

What was her problem? Once upon a time we were study buddies. Possibly even friends. I had no idea why she was being weird toward me now. But I just smiled. “I just go by Jack, now. And honestly, I never expected to be back, but apparently my mom threw out my old yearbooks—you know how my mom was. I was wondering if there was any way I could take a look at the ones from the years I was here.”

She narrowed her eyes at me. “What for?”

“Research project.”

“I’ll see if there are any in the archives that you can purchase.”

I didn’t really want to buy them, but if that was what it took…

Eleanor stood and disappeared into a back office. She returned an inordinate number of minutes later with a stack of yearbooks. “I don’t know when you were here, but here’s what we had in the library. The librarian said to make you fill out this form, but you may borrow these.”

She pushed the yearbooks and a sheet of paper across the desk toward me.

After filling out the form, I pulled out the yearbook from two years before I graduated and flipped through the pages of seniors.

Samuel Searvine. Joe Creeger. Fredrick Shay.

I pulled out the yearbook from the next year, the year before I graduated. Leslie Ray. Ray wasn’t right—but maybe Foster was her married name? Mike Vaughn.

Then the one from my graduating class.

Rosella Tito—again, maybe McCafferty was a married name. Felicia Wheelin. It was too much to be a coincidence.

Trent hadn’t made the connection yet, but he would.

All the victims went to the same high school.

My high school.

Chapter Four: Memories

I checked the yearbooks out from the library and raced back to the precinct. Breathless, I slammed them all down on Trent’s desk.

He looked up at me, surprise written all over his face. “What’s this?”

“The victims,” I said. “They all went to Shadow Mountain.”

The color drained from his face. “They all?”

I nodded and flipped open the yearbooks.

Trent whistled as he compared the yearbook photos to the ID pictures of his victims. “This is good work, Jack. You really should think about applying to be a detective.”

“It’s not really good detective work to remember the bullies who traumatized you in high school,” I grumbled.

He stared at me. “Wait, what? They were all bullies?”

“Yeah, they… Oh.” That was a connection he’d made before I did. “That’s the motive.”

He grinned at me. “That’s the motive. Now we just have to find the perpetrator. Who else did they pick on?”

“Who didn’t they pick on?” I said. “None of them were really friends with each other—it wasn’t like they were all the popular kids at the same time. Samuel Searvine was a thug and he had his posse of wannabes. Joe was a class clown type. Always doing something for attention, including belittling the nerds. Leslie was a cheerleader—everyone was beneath her, and she was a compulsive liar, spreading rumors about anyone she saw as a threat. Fredrick was like… king of the nerds, I guess? He was a smart kid, and he wasn’t particularly popular, but he liked to put others down and make them think they were stupid, even when they weren’t.”

Trent was typing notes as fast as I talked. “This is good, keep going.”

Okay, um… Mike was a quintessential jock. The guy all the girls wanted. Had a new girlfriend every other week, but the rumor was he’d dump her if she didn’t sleep with him within the first week. And if she did sleep with him, she’d last maybe a month before he decided to move on.”

“You dated him, didn’t you?”

I glared at him. I both loved and hated that he could read me so well. “Yep. Made it to a week and I wouldn’t put out, so he told me he never liked me in the first place.”

“What a jerk. He doesn’t know what he missed out on.”

I smiled, my heart warming. “He really didn’t miss out on much. I was kind of a gangly weirdo back then.”

“You mean you’re not still?”

I playfully punched his arm. “Brat.”

He grinned and gave me a quick kiss. We weren’t supposed to be affectionate at work, but I wasn’t on the clock, so we weren’t being as conscientious about the rules as we normally would.

“What about Rosella and Felicia?”

“Rosella was student body president her senior year. She really took on the role of gatekeeper, and liked to make up arbitrary rules and narc on people who didn’t follow them. She was a dictator in the making. And Felicia… she was just kind of a bitch. Rich, thought she knew better than everyone. Good grades, and smart enough to look down on everyone else, but also… completely unoriginal. She had this huge superiority complex, but everything out of her mouth was regurgitated.”

“And they all bullied you?”

I shrugged, suddenly self conscious. “I guess, but maybe not directly. Like I said, I don’t know if Samuel even knew I existed. But at the same time, he looked at me with utter disdain if I crossed his path. In some ways it was worse than bullying, because we had a couple of the same classes—”

“Wasn’t he a couple years ahead of you?”

“Yeah, but I was in some advanced classes. So we had classes together, and we were even on a couple of group projects together, and he never even acknowledged me. I was so far beneath his notice I might as well not have existed.”

“Okay, what about the others?”

“Do we really need to go into all of the people who made high school miserable for me?” I asked.

“No,” Trent said. “I’m just trying to figure out a pattern. Because if they bullied you, they bullied others. I’m trying to find a common denominator. Someone who hated them enough that ten years later, they’re getting revenge.”

I exhaled. “That could be like half the school, honestly.”

“You’re my missing link, Hon. I could try to look up every person who went to that school for the same years you were there, but if you could help narrow it down…”

He left the sentence hanging, but I knew where it was going. I could help him track down a killer. All I had to do was relive four traumatizing years.

“I’ll see what I can come up with,” I said. “But I need a break. I’m going to go home and unpack some boxes while I think about it, okay?”

“Okay. Thank you for this. This gives me a really solid lead that I can start tracking down.”

Once back at the apartment, I started in the bedroom, unpacking our clothes. I fully intended to shut thoughts of serial killers and high school bullies out of my head as I immersed myself in my plans to spend the rest of my life with the man I loved and who, more importantly, loved me more and better than anyone ever in my life.

Unfortunately, my mind didn’t want me to do that. My thoughts swarmed with memories of all the encounters I’d had with the victims. The time Joe mocked my outfit—the one outfit I had that I was proud of, because I’d saved up and gone to the mall and bought it with my own money off the clearance rack at the store all the rich kids shopped at, just so I could have the same name brands they did. Except the store didn’t have anything that fit me, so I’d squeezed my awkward teen body into an outfit two sizes too small, thinking I looked good anyway, only to be ridiculed for weeks afterward, until the mob found a new victim. Or the time Rosella ratted me out to the History teacher, claiming I’d copied someone else’s answers. Someone I’d been in a study group with, where we’d tag-teamed the answers and shared them. But the teacher still took her word, and Eleanor, my study buddy, also corroborated her story, just so she could stay out of Rosella’s crosshairs for another week.

Countless incidents, all of which chipped away at my sense of self, until I had no idea who I was.

And it wasn’t just those who were on Trent’s list. The bullies were as numerous as the victims.

Oh, shit. The realization came to me as I was folding my underwear into my drawer.

I called Trent.

“Hey, Babe, what’s up?”

“I know who the next victim is.” 

Chapter Five: Miscreants

“His name is Allen Jessup,” I said. “Another jock.”

“You’re sure?” Trent asked me. “That’s the next victim?”

“Maybe not the next, but he’s definitely going to be on the list,” I said.

“Why? What about him?”

“The thing with Allen was that he wasn’t always a jerk. He came across as really kind and thoughtful, especially to the underprivileged or those with special needs. He took a disabled girl to prom one year because he thought no one else ever would and he wanted her to experience a prom.”

“Sounds kind of dickish to me, assuming that just because someone is disabled that they need the popular kid to lift them up and give them their one perfect moment or something.”

“Exactly,” I said. “But nobody I went to school with was as enlightened as you are, and so Allen had all the teachers eating out of his hands for being this really sensitive soul who went out of his way to be generous and kind to the undervalued. So the kids on the bottom rung of the social hierarchy got his positive attention, and the kids who matched his social status got his positive attention, and the teachers all thought he was God’s gift, but the kids in the middle…”

“He was a condescending jerk to them. Bullied and mocked and so on, I’m guessing,” Trent said.

“Exactly. If someone from my high school is on a murder spree, then I can pretty much guarantee Allen Jessup is on their list.”

“I’ll send a protective detail out right now. Maybe we can prevent a murder. And if we’re lucky, maybe we can catch a murderer while we’re at it.”

I hung up the phone and went back to unpacking.

I had done the right thing. I was a cop, and I’d taken an oath to protect and serve.

But a small part of me couldn’t help feeling like some of those guys deserved it.

An hour or so later, I’d finished putting our clothes in our drawers and had moved on to the closet, when I was interrupted by a knock at the door.

Who could that be? Trent had keys, and Bridget wasn’t supposed to come over until tomorrow.

I glanced through the peephole, but didn’t see anyone. Part of me tried to be rational and reassure myself that I was being paranoid. But after a murder happening upstairs the night before, I was on edge.

Leaving the safety chain locked, I opened the door and peeked out.

No one.

One of the neighbor kids, maybe? I didn’t know my neighbors so I had no idea how many little hoodlums might be living nearby and think it was funny to ring a doorbell and run away.

I should get one of those creepy, motion-activated skeletons or witches that cackle to deter the neighborhood miscreants from my doorstep.

What time was it? I glanced at my watch. Almost seven. Trent should’ve been home by now.

My stomach growled, reminding me that I’d skipped lunch. We didn’t really have any food in the apartment. Maybe I could get Trent to bring home takeout.

Just as I reached for my phone, it rang.

Trent.

“Hey, Babe—” I started to answer, when he interrupted me.

“We’ve got another body. I’m not sure when I’m going to be home.”

I exhaled, trying to tuck my disappointment away where he wouldn’t notice it. “Okay. I’m not going to wait up, then.”

“I love you,” he said.

“I love you, too.”

I hung up and wandered to the kitchen. I didn’t even know what restaurants were around here. Maybe I would just drive around for a little while and see if anything looked interesting.

Grabbing my phone and credit card, I trotted down the stairs. I’d apparently left the light on the balcony turned on, because moths and mosquitoes and other flying insects were swarming around. In Phoenix, it didn’t get cold enough for the bugs to go into hiding until at least Thanksgiving.

Oh, well. I’d turn it off when I got back.

I found a little Chinese food restaurant less than a mile down the main road from my apartment. I loved Chinese food, and this wasn’t a chain restaurant, so there was no telling how it might turn out.

I wasn’t a huge fan of surprises, but I was willing to take the risk in order to discover good local eateries.

They had a take-out option, so I picked a couple entrees—enough so that Trent and I would have leftovers—and sat at one of the little tables to wait.

The restaurant had Halloween decorations up—painted murals of cartoon witches and ghosts in the windows, and some fake spider webs with plastic spiders crawling up them.

I wasn’t a big fan of Halloween. I didn’t have anything against it, per se, but my mom never let me dress up or go Trick-or-Treating when I was a kid. My mom didn’t let me do a lot of things. One time I snuck out to go with a friend, and when my mom found out, she screamed at me for hours and grounded me long enough that it wasn’t worth the effort to try again.

I didn’t go to college, so I didn’t get the benefit of frat parties or any of those redeeming fun times. The only memory besides the one where I got grounded was a sophomore in high school. The school had a costume themed dance for Homecoming that year. My mom was on a weekend trip with her latest boyfriend, so I went to the local thrift store and found myself a costume and showed up at the dance with the couple of people I could tolerate socially.

It started out fine, but little by little, the popular kids drifted away, leaving only us pariahs milling around awkwardly. I didn’t realize it at the time, but they even convinced the chaperones to step out. Once it was only the outcasts in the room, a couple of the jocks barred the doors to the gym—right after a bunch of them threw jars full of spiders into the room.

So a bunch of nerds were locked in a room with broken glass and freaked-out spiders.

Eleanor was kind of a science nerd, and she liked spiders, so she was the voice of reason in the moment, scooping up the poisonous ones and stuffing them into one of the jars that had held fruit punch where they couldn’t hurt anyone, and shooing the harmless ones away.

By the time the adults figured out what was going on and got back in there, half a dozen kids had to be taken to the ER for spider bites. One of the guys in my small group, Alejandro, had been bitten by a brown recluse and ended up needing skin grafts to repair the damage to his leg from the bite.

The perpetrators were never prosecuted. Aside from the usual, “It was just a prank and they didn’t mean to hurt anyone,” types of crap, there was also the, “we don’t know for sure who was behind it or involved in it,” plus a couple of parents with money who paid off some of the victims’ families, so they all got away with it, leaving the rest of us with arachnophobia.

In retrospect, that sense of unfairness and the desire to see justice served might have been the first time I considered law enforcement as a career.

But that was a long time ago, and I’d come a long way since then.

I turned toward the kitchen to see if I could tell whether my food was ready yet, my gaze sweeping past the decorations hanging on the wall. 

One of the spiders moved.

I jumped, my chair sliding back and falling over.

My breath came in short, panicked gasps as I stared at the fake web. But it was nothing.

The air conditioner had kicked on, sending a draft to make the web move. The spider was still fake. I was no longer in high school. I was, in every sense of the word, safe.

The waitress came out with my food. Still shaking, I handed her a tip and went out to my truck.

I sat there for several minutes just trying to calm down.

I thought I was over that incident, but apparently not. Or maybe it was just everything hitting at once. The murders, the high school triggers, and the stress of moving all bundled into one giant ball of anxiety-inducing insanity.

By the time I got home, I was in a much better state of mind. I unlocked my apartment and turned the light on.

Movement.

Tiny bodies with lots of legs, scurrying away from the light.

Spiders. Dozens of them.

And they were definitely alive.

Chapter Six: Malevolence

I backed out of the apartment, locked it, and ran down the stairs, then all the way to the front office.

It was closed. Because of course it was.

They closed at six and it was after eight. There had to be a maintenance number I could call—someone I could contact to get an exterminator into my apartment.

But all of those numbers were on the move-in paperwork. Which was in a drawer in the kitchen. In the apartment, beyond the mass of spiders.

I stood against the wall by the office, practicing the breathing techniques I’d had to learn in the academy.

What did I know?

There were spiders in my apartment.

How had they gotten there?

Maybe they’d been there all along, but they’d been hiding because there was so much activity, but once I was gone for most of the day they felt comfortable coming out.

Maybe also they’d been attracted to the roaches. Circle of life. They were helping.

No big deal. They were just spiders. Probably harmless. They could be taken care of.

But I couldn’t sleep there tonight.

I knew I wouldn’t be able to get ahold of Trent while he was in the middle of an active investigation, so I called Bridget.

“Hey, can I crash at your place tonight? There are spiders in my apartment and Trent’s in the middle of a case, and—”

“You need a sleepover because of a couple spiders?” Bridget’s tone was mocking, but also loving and playful.

“Okay, first of all, it’s not a couple spiders, it’s like an entire swarm.”

“Spiders don’t swarm.”

“Or nest or whatever a giant infestation is called. And I can’t get in touch with the front office to get a contracted exterminator in until tomorrow, and it’s gross and I am a strong, independent woman, but I don’t want to be in there with spiders crawling all over my face in the middle of the night.”

She laughed. “I adore you, Jack. Of course you can come over. I’ll see you in a few.”

A short while later, she welcomed me—and my Chinese food—into her apartment. Hers was nicer than mine. Even with Trent and me moving in together, we were still on a pretty tight budget. I had no idea how she could afford this.

“I already got the guest room ready, and some of your clothes are still here, so I put those in there, too.”

I sent a quick text to Trent letting him know where I was, then joined Bridget in her dining room for a meal of warmed-up take-out Chinese.

It was surprisingly good. If I didn’t end up with food poisoning, this place would be on my top ten list.

Somewhere in the dark hours of the morning, Trent showed up at Bridget’s and joined me in the guest room. He wrapped his arms around me, and suddenly I was safe. No spiders or high school bullies or even my mom could get to me here.

In Trent’s arms, no matter where we were, I was home.

###

Trent and Bridget were eating breakfast when I woke up the next morning.

Bridget handed me a fresh cup of coffee and shoved a bowl of cereal and a gallon of milk my direction.

“Good morning, Gorgeous,” Trent said, lifting his face for a kiss.

I kissed him and sat down, helping myself to the cereal.

“I called the front office,” Trent said. “They’ll send out an exterminator today, and we should be good to go home tomorrow. Bridget already said we can stay here until then.”

“Thanks, Bridge,” I said.

She grinned at me. “You know you’re always welcome.” She turned to Trent. “Did I ever tell you I tried to get her to move in here after the academy? But she’s so damn stubborn she thought she’d be taking advantage and she didn’t want to ruin our friendship. Like she could get rid of me that easily.”

“I know,” Trent said. “I had to buy her a two thousand dollar diamond ring to get her to move in with me.”

“You did not pay two thousand dollars for this,” I said.

“No, but that’s just because the jeweler was a friend of my parents. It’s worth that. And you’re worth a million times that.” He leaned over to nibble my neck.

“Ew! I changed my mind, you guys can’t stay here.” Bridget gave an exaggerated groan, but she was smiling.

“Fine, we’ll stop,” Trent said. He released me and shoved a bite of cereal in his mouth.

“What happened last night?” I asked. “What’s going on with your case?”

“He’s escalating,” Trent said.

“The murderer? In what way?”

“The victim was not just killed, he was… mutilated.”

I gagged on my cereal. “Define mutilated.”

I was still a cop. Even if it grossed me out, I needed to know the details.

“The victim was a woman named Tessa VanTassel—maiden name was Fraley. You know her?”

I nodded. “My grade. Typical spoiled princess. A bully, but not more so than anyone else. How was she mutilated?”

“While she was still alive, she was tied up. The poison that was used to kill her was slow-acting, but it paralyzed her. So she was still alive while the killer tore little chunks out of her skin and while the poison liquefied her internal organs.”

I shoved my bowl away and focused again on deep breathing.

Trent reached out and grabbed my hand. “I know you’ve thought about this, and honestly, I would love to keep you out of it, but we’re getting nowhere with this investigation. We’ve talked to significant others and parents, and old classmates, and no one seems to have any idea who could be holding a grudge this long. At this point, your entire high school population over a three- or four-year period is on the suspect list. There’s a solid chance you know the killer. Is there anything you can think of that might help?”

My throat constricted. “I really would love it if I could, but I can’t. I know you think I’m this dark, morose personality, but I’m secretly an optimist, and I genuinely can’t think of anyone who would be capable of this.”

“Would you be willing to come down to the crime scene and look around? See if anything triggers your memory?”

“Yeah, of course,” I said. “I’ll do whatever I can.”

###

Tessa VanTassel—an unfortunate name—her house was a veritable mansion. Not quite a Scottsdale estate, but in that borderline area where it was huge and sprawling and had all the most elegant modern fixtures, but cost a slightly smaller fortune to purchase than living in actual Scottsdale.

Trent led me past the cops working the scene and into the room where the body was—an office that faced the back yard, with one big window that overlooked a gorgeous green lawn. The office had one of those stupid Pinterest décor themes, where all the books were turned backward so it was a neutral color palette, with pricey figurines in bold onyx and jade standing sentry at carefully chosen intervals.

Tessa’s body had been removed, but the place where it had been was obvious. Strings hung from the bookcase against one wall, lightly flowing in the drafts that blew through from the constant opening and closing of doors. The strings were wound tightly in places, looking almost like a cocoon.

I had to run out of the house and to the sidewalk so I wouldn’t contaminate the scene when I lost the little bit of cereal I’d eaten.

Trent followed me out and put a hand on my back. “Are you okay?”

I wiped my mouth and stood upright, nodding. “It wasn’t poison that killed them,” I said when I could speak. “It was venom.”

Chapter Seven: Marked

Trent’s jaw tightened. “That explains why the scene was set to look like…”

“A spider’s web,” I said. “It wasn’t a set. She was killed by a spider—or spiders. They all were. I don’t know how, but I do know why.”

“Tell me,” Trent said.

It all went back to that one night. Everything that was happening was because of some idiot children who liked to pick on the losers to make themselves feel better.

And now the losers were getting revenge.

Trent had to stay and work the scene—but I had my own work to do.

I started by going down to the precinct and looking up the police reports from the dance. Technically, I was still on vacation, but this was too important to let a silly thing like working off the clock stop me.

I compiled all the witness reports, all the statements from both those locked in the gym and those who’d made it out. No one claimed responsibility, and there was no one who could say for sure which students threw the jars of spiders into the room.

Maybe they would’ve tried harder if someone had died, but a bunch of nerds ending up traumatized and even the few who ended up in the hospital wasn’t enough to risk the scholarships and futures of the elite on something they could never prove.

I remembered a handful of students who were there that night, but it was a huge school, and I was a wallflower. But using the yearbooks, the police reports, and the newspaper articles I found archived online, I started to create a master list.

People I knew for sure were not in the room when the spiders were released. All the murder victims were on that list. Then, people who I knew for sure were in the room. Including myself.

A few hours later, I had the list of suspects narrowed down to about twenty-five percent of the student body.

Which was still a couple hundred students, but at least it wasn’t the whole population.

At the top of that list were the kids who’d ended up in the hospital. They had the strongest motive, although certainly any of the kids trapped in the gym had motive enough.

Then, I tracked down where those people were now, and filtered out the ones who had moved out of state. Some of them might have had the opportunity to come back to exact their revenge, but if they were currently living elsewhere, it ruled out opportunity.

Now I just had to figure out means.

The spiders were the key. Somehow, the murderer had managed to gather enough spiders to kill an adult human without leaving an infestation behind.

On the other hand, maybe there was an infestation. The guy above me was killed by spiders, and the next day my apartment was infested. Maybe the spiders that had killed Tessa were around, hiding in the pantry or something, but the techs hadn’t found them yet because they were too busy with the crime scene.

How many spiders would someone have to set loose in a house or apartment in order to kill someone?

Enough small spiders—or one or two spiders that were big enough.

I recalled the shadows I’d seen in the apartment above mine. And the web in Tessa’s office that had trapped her entire body.

I watched a video one time of a small snake that got stuck in a spider’s web and the fight that ensued between the snake as it writhed to get free and the spider that tried to wrap it up faster than it could wriggle out.

The spider won.

But that was a snake that was already stuck and didn’t have hands.

How big would a spider have to be to entrap a person?

And how on earth would someone get a spider that big in the first place, let alone transport it to the victim’s house without being seen and get it out of there, again without being seen and without being attacked themselves?

I had seen it—but it disappeared in a split second.

Where did it go? Did the murderer have a way to call it back home somehow, or was there a giant spider wandering around my apartment complex, waiting for unsuspecting people to walk into its web under the stairs?

Well shit, now I’d never be able to walk around the stairs or into dim corners again.

I shuddered and brushed phantom spiders from my arms.

Looking up, I saw Trent walking toward me, looking like he was about to pass out from exhaustion.

He smiled at me. “What are you doing here?”

“Research,” I said. I beckoned him over and showed him a printout of my spreadsheet. I walked him through what I’d found so far.

“Of the kids that were in the gym when the spiders were released, four are deceased. One died in a car accident a couple years ago, one got cancer and passed last year, one died of a drug overdose, and one committed suicide. About a third of them no longer live in the state, which means this is our suspect list.”

“Why are these people at the top?” he asked.

“They’re the ones who ended up in the hospital, and below them are the ones whose siblings or significant others were in the hospital.”

He skimmed the list. “You’re on here.”

“Yeah, I was in the room at the time. I have as much motive as anyone.”

“But you didn’t do it.”

“Well, I know that, but we can’t prove it. Until we have official alibis written down, I’m still a suspect.”

He grinned at me. “You’re amazing, you know that?”

Heat infused my cheeks. “I’m just doing your job.”

Laughter erupted from him. Not just because it was funny—it was the kind of laughter that released tension and stress and made hard things bearable.

When he could breathe again, he asked me for a copy of my spreadsheet. “I’ll have people start questioning suspects and getting alibis and narrowing down our list a little more. I got a call from the apartment manager earlier saying the apartment is clear, but we shouldn’t sleep there until it airs out a little more. You should go back to Bridget’s.”

I stood and stretched. I hadn’t realized how long I’d been sitting in that same position until the tingles from my legs and feet waking up told me it had been way too long.

“When do you think you’ll be back?”

“I don’t know. I’m going to try to wrap up what I can in the next hour or so.”

I printed out a second spreadsheet. “These are all the people that I think might be potential victims. You might also want to ask any of them if they’ve received the note.”

“Thanks, Hon,” he said, pulling me in for an embrace. “This is invaluable.”

I smiled, but didn’t say anything. I had a hard time knowing how to respond to genuine compliments or accolades.

I was asleep by the time Trent got to Bridget’s. I woke up just enough to acknowledge his presence, and then went back to sleep. He was gone when I woke up. Bridget said he’d left early, saying something about a possible break in the case.

Bridget had to work, too, so I decided I could no longer delay the inevitable.

I needed to face my apartment sooner or later, and the office said it was clear. I stopped by the store on my way and armed myself with dusters and trash bags and a new heavy duty vacuum, which we needed anyway but hadn’t gotten around to buying yet, and made my way home.

Setting my purchases down on the landing, I rifled through my things for my keys.

A piece of white paper caught my eye.

There was an envelope on the doorstep.

I reached down and picked it up, opening it slowly.

Inside was a piece of white paper. A note. Made of scraps of letters from magazines.

You had your glory days, and thirteen years have passed

Enjoy this day, unlucky one, for it will be your last

Chapter Eight: Misunderstanding

I definitely should’ve been arrested for reckless driving or public endangerment or something, the way I screeched out of the apartment complex and flew toward the precinct.

“Trent!” I had to fight to keep my voice at a reasonable level when I ran to find him at his desk.

My hand shook as I handed him the envelope.

“What is this?”

“It was on the front doorstep when I got home this morning,” I said, panic edging my voice.

“This is good,” Trent said.

“Good? You think this is good? I’m being targeted by s murderous psychopath who is going to kill me with spiders, and you think this is a good thing?”

Trent pulled me into his arms. “That’s not what I meant. I’m not going to let anything happen to you. But this is the first time we’ve known who the victim would be before it happened. This means we can catch them.”

“Oh, you just happen to have a giant spider trap hanging around?”

“A what?”

I apparently had forgotten to share my theory that it wasn’t multiple little spiders but one giant one.

“Big or little, doesn’t matter,” he said when I finished. “Either way, nothing is getting past me to get to you. And now we have a chance to find out who is behind this.”

He led me to a conference room and handed me a copy of my own spreadsheet. “Can you think of anyone who might have a grudge against you for any reason?”

I glanced at the names, but I’d already been over most of them.

“Not that I can think of,” I said. “I didn’t have many friends, but I didn’t have any enemies, either. And I was literally in the room with them, so there’s no way they could possibly think I was in on it.”

“What about for any other reason—anyone who might’ve been jealous of you or thought you didn’t like them?”

“That’s hardly fair—most people, if they thought about me at all, probably thought I didn’t like them, and that was mostly true. But I never did anything to anyone.”

“I know it’s a stretch, but if you can think back to any incidents at all and write down any interactions that could’ve been perceived as bullying…”

I rolled my eyes. “If it’s their perception, how would I possibly know if an interaction was taken that way? Do you have any idea how many times I’ve perceived something as an attack and the person didn’t even remember the incident?”

“Please try. You may be our best shot at finding this person before anything else happens.”

He left me alone in the conference room, then, and I started taking notes, starting with my top suspects.

Alejandro Chavez, Eleanor Sherman, Aaron Black, and Keith St. Jude were the friends I’d attended the dance with.

Alejandro was in the section on the top of the list, because he’d been bitten and had to go to the hospital, but I didn’t think he had anything against me.

Eleanor was acting weird toward me when I went to the school to get the yearbooks, but there might be plenty of reasons for that, including just surprise at seeing me in her workplace that many years later.

Once upon a time, I had an unreciprocated crush on Aaron, Alejandro had one on me, and Eleanor had one on Keith, but we’d all gone to the dance as friends. None of them would have targeted me, as far as I knew, so I could put them lower on my list.

One of the other kids who’d been hospitalized was Allison Brewster. She had this notion that we were in competition for the top spot in our biology class. The teacher had said he was going to recommend whoever had the highest grade for some scholarship or other, and Allison snarked at me all year about how she was going to get it and I wasn’t.

I didn’t actually care, since I had no plans to go to college anyway, but she was convinced I was her greatest rival.

Turns out neither of us got it—the highest grade and subsequent recommendation went to Alejandro, who, last I heard, was going into bio-engineering or something. But I bumped Allison to the top of the list because Trent told me to think about any potential misperceptions, and Allison was definitely the type of person who would have misperceptions that would lead to grudges that lasted for thirteen years.

The only other kid I knew who’d been hospitalized was Andy Villanova, and he was living in Wisconsin now. The others, I was either only barely acquainted with or didn’t know at all.

So that meant I had to move on to the others who had been in the room.  

I skimmed the list and came up with a small handful of names. Violet Petrowski, who dated Mike right before I did and blamed me for the breakup because he’d moved on so quickly. Jose Viera, who’d told everyone we were dating despite that I’d only ever said like three words to him. Mickey Hoffman who tried to sell me drugs and later got busted maybe thought I’d been the narc, but that was just a guess. Andre Sena, who was the type of kid who would pass on the bullying he received down to the kids lower than he was on the hierarchy, got into it with me one time because I told him to knock it off when he was picking on the freshmen.

But all of those interactions just seemed so petty. Normal high school stuff. Not the kind of thing that would lead them to murder-by-spider revenge.

I continued to skim the names, but nothing I could think of would mark me as a target, and pretty much everyone on the list had something against the victims they’d already killed.

The victims were obvious. So what connection did I have to any of them that would link me in the killer’s mind?

I couldn’t think of a thing.

Trent came into the conference room. “What do you have?”

“Not much,” I said. I handed him my notes.

“This is good. We’ve talked to most of the people who were there that night and we’ve got alibis. Some of them have alibis for some of the attacks and other have alibis for other attacks. There’s only two people on the list who don’t have alibis for any of the attacks.”

A huge weight dropped from my chest. This whole thing was almost over.

I waited for him to drop the big reveal.

A scream from somewhere outside the room drowned out his words.

Chapter Nine: Masses

I jumped up from the table and ran after Trent, wishing not for the first time that I had my service weapon, which was still back at the apartment.

The precinct was in chaos.

Running. Hiding. Screaming.

Shots fired.

“What the—” Trent hissed, running toward the lobby.

A wall of officers pressed themselves against the door, holding it against something huge and powerfully strong.

Through the frosted glass, a shadow bashed against the door, shaking it with every thump of its enormous body.

I was reminded of the video of the spider versus the snake. The tiny spider no bigger than the snake’s head, stronger than a writhing, wriggling snake fighting for survival. The proportional power of the spider with its gangly limbs and horrible beady eyes. The pure resolve of both creatures, fighting for survival of the fittest.

The spider won.

Trent rushed forward and helped to hold the door closed. I joined the crowd of cops, receptionists, and others who happened to be in the precinct as they clustered at the back of the room.

Thunk

Something crashed against the fire door that led to the back lot.

Someone screamed, and the cluster of bodies pressed back toward the center of the room.

The metal door shook as the thing on the other side rammed against it. Again and again.

A dent started to form in the metal, and the next hit was enough to trigger the fire alarm.

Crash!

The frosted glass in the door to the lobby shattered, raining glass down on the officers holding it closed. A huge, hairy leg pushed through the open hole, feeling around for the officers below it.

The leg wrapped around Officer Richmond, yanking him up and dragging him through the broken window.

“Ken!” I screamed.

Leaving the safety of the herd in the center of the room, I ran toward my coworker. On my way, I grabbed a mop that was left standing against the wall.

“Move!” I screamed at the officers still blocking the door.

Trent shoved a couple of them out of the way and pulled the door open for me to run through.

The giant spider—because of course we’d be dealing with a giant mutant spider that was almost as big as I was—held a flailing Ken in its grip. It seemed to be alternating between trying to bite him and contain him with its web.

I hated spiders. And now there was a giant one attacking the place I worked.

No. Not one giant spider attacking the precinct. Two. Two, like the two I’d seen in my upstairs neighbor’s apartment. Attacking him and then disappearing for no reason I could discern.

Why were they attacking the precinct? Was it because Trent was getting too close? Would they disappear after they killed him, like they did with the neighbor, leaving us without a trace?

I couldn’t let that happen. I would not let these monsters kill again.

Ken was putting up a valiant effort. But Ken was like the snake. It was only a matter of time before he wore himself out.

The spider won. The spider would always win. Unless someone else intervened.

Using the mop like a bat, I ran toward the spider and flailed against the leg that held Ken.

My strike didn’t even seem to faze the monster.

My presence, however, did.

The spider paused, almost like it was sniffing the air, its many huge eyes focusing on me, and dropped Ken on the floor.

Less than half an instant later, it reached for me. I stumbled back, waving the mop like a sword, trying to stay out of its reach.

Trent pulled me into the main part of the precinct and slammed the door shut… but the window was still broken.

Though the creature was huge, it had no problem scurrying through the open window.

I dodged around the corner. At the same moment, the monster on the other side of the fire door finally knocked it off its hinges. It, too, zeroed in on me, ignoring the cluster of other humans and skittering straight toward me on its giant legs.

I ran down a hall and found the first unlocked door—a maintenance closet. I slammed and locked the door, but I knew it would only be moments before they broke it down, especially if they worked together.

Why was it after me?

Obviously it was intentional—I’d gotten the note on my doorstep this morning. But how? How would the spiders know to come after me specifically, and not just eat whoever was closest?

Were they trained? How could someone train a giant spider to go after a specific person? But that must be what was happening, because as far as we knew, there were no tangential killings. Only the people who’d gotten the notes were attacked.

Except Ken—but Ken was between the spider and me, so maybe it was just trying to get him out of the way, or it wasn’t sure who to kill until I got close enough for it to recognize me or whatever.

Thunk against the closet door.

I just hoped Trent would figure out some way to kill them before they killed me.

Thunk. Thunk. Thunk.

The door rattled, the hardware that kept it locked starting to come loose.

I had my mop. What else could I use to defend myself?

I glanced around, hoping to find a giant can of Raid or something. Didn’t see one, but found the next best thing—an aerosol can on something that warned that it was flammable and a flame thrower that was used to keep the weeds under control.

There were some face masks on a shelf, so I threw one on and got ready.

Shouting out in the hallway told me Trent and at least a few others were trying to distract the spiders away from me, but they seemed wholly focused on me.

And they were apparently really hard to kill.

By the time the spiders crashed through the door, they were oozing some sort of goo from multiple bullet holes and one of them was missing a leg, yet they still weren’t deterred.

I flicked the lighter, then sprayed the aerosol can directly at the first spider.

Its hair caught and the flame quickly spread across its whole body. It let out an unearthly screech and finally retreated a few steps, catching its counterpart on fire in the process.

I kept spraying flammable substances and fire at both spiders until they curled in on themselves and collapsed belly-up on the floor of the hallway.

I didn’t let up on my flamethrower until my aerosol ran out and both spiders were blackened and crispy and no longer twitching.

Smoke from their charred bodies had set off the fire sprinklers, and the fire alarm from the back door was still wailing, a sound that was now joined by sirens from the fire department and the thump of boots from the fire fighters.

Trent reached for me to pull me out of the closet and away from the still smoking spider bodies.

The fire fighters came around the corner and stopped, clearly not quite sure what to do in this situation.

Then, from the front of the building, someone yelled.

“Holy shit, there are more of them!”

Chapter Ten: Misdirection

I leapt over the spider bodies, back into the maintenance closet, and grabbed every aerosol can I could find.

Tossing them out to Trent, I yelled, “Set them on fire!”

There are a lot of guys who consider themselves alpha males who are drawn to professions like law enforcement and fire fighting. Giving them an excuse to set shit on fire—especially since the fire department was on scene to make sure the blaze didn’t get out of hand—was like handing a kid a stick and a piñata.

By the time I got out to the parking lot where the fight was happening, there was a row of cops and fire fighters and even a few receptionists and other office workers creating a wall of flame to hold the spiders at bay.

Ken, a snarl of rage curling his lips, was at the front of the line, blasting the spiders with a blowtorch, getting revenge for his near death experience. Where had that come from? It wasn’t in the maintenance closet… Then again, Ken was the kind of guy who might just have one sitting in his car for emergencies.

Most of them weren’t as big as the ones that had attacked first. These were mostly only a couple feet across, which, if I’d seen them first would’ve freaked me out plenty, but after seeing one that was five feet tall, these didn’t seem nearly as intimidating.

But a couple dozen less-giant venomous spiders would kill me just as dead as a couple giant ones.

At least with the big ones there was less chance that they’d manage to run and hide somewhere.

Speaking of, after the first wave or two got incinerated, the others began to approach more slowly. And as the fire killed more and more of them, the remaining ones began to back away, then to turn and run.

“Don’t let them escape,” I yelled. “They’re lethal!”

Of course, that was easier said than done, especially when the spiders, as one, turned the other way and started running down the alley behind the precinct.

Like ants or a flock of birds, they veered together around the corner.

I ran after them.

“Jack, what the hell,” Trent hollered, running after me.

“They’re… homing…” was all I managed to say between breaths as I ran.

I rounded the corner just in time to see the last of the spiders scurry up a ramp into the back of a large box truck.

The ramp was pulled in and the back slammed shut by a person in what looked like a hazmat suit.

The truck didn’t have a license plate and it peeled away before I could note any identifying features.

“I’ll put an APB out on it,” Trent said, but his voice did not sound hopeful.

Now that the spiders were gone, the adrenaline rushed from my system, leaving me drained.

Trent put an arm around my waist and together we trudged back toward the precinct.

“Right before the attack, you were about to tell me the only people without an alibi for any of the murders.”

“That feels like a year ago,” Trent sighed. “The two people on your list who didn’t have alibis were Allison Brewster and Keith St. Jude.”

“It’s gotta be Allison,” I said.

“How do you figure?” Trent asked.

We got back to the precinct and I showed him my notes. “Allison had a personal grudge against me because of a stupid misperception about me. She thought I was her rival in biology, and she was always trying to compete with me over something stupid. And Keith—there’s no way it’s Keith. He was just ordinary. He’s, like, an engineer or something now. Wasn’t into biology or spiders, wasn’t injured at the dance, wasn’t even bullied that much—he was just… Keith. But Allison was locked in the gym that night and she was one of the kids who had to be hospitalized. Plus, she was really into biology and she’s one of the few people I know of who had the potential to create an army of kill-on-demand mutant spiders.”

“Is that what we think these are?” Trent asked.

“What else could they be? They’re bigger than Australian spiders—”

“You interact with a lot of Australian spiders?” Trent teased.

I gave him a playful glare. “I watch a lot of YouTube. Anyway, these things are unnaturally large, and they’re poisonous, and they’re trained to hunt a specific target, and to come back when they’re called—or to retreat to the safe location when they’re in danger, maybe. At any rate, they’re not natural, and they’re being controlled, and Allison is the most likely suspect.”

“Okay, then. I’ll bring her in for questioning.”

“I want to come,” I said. “I want to see the look on her stupid, smug face when she sees I’m not dead yet.”

We geared up with hazmat suits—seeing the person in the back of the van inspired us—and flame throwers to go invite Allison Brewster to come in for questioning.

Just before we left the precinct, Ken came to find us. “We just got lab results back on the venom. You ready for this?”

“We’re ready,” Trent said. He was polite, but I could hear the thread of irritation in his tone that wanted to snap at Ken to spit it out.

“It’s not just one venom. It’s a blend. Black widow, brown recluse, and wolf spider are the primary ones, but there may be traces of others in there.”

“See?” I said. “She made a monster-hybrid-spider. Wolf spiders aren’t the most venomous, but they’re vicious hunters. Brown recluse and black widow are some of the most venomous in the world.”

“Why do you know so much about spiders?” Trent asked. “Do I need to put you back on the suspect list?”

I glared at him. “Let’s go arrest Allison.”

We raced to Allison’s house, sirens blaring, and surrounded the place.

Geared up with our hazmat suits and our flame throwers, we approached the door.

But we didn’t need to worry about Allison.

The door hung wide open, broken and dented, and spider webs covered everything.

Allison’s corpse hung in a web in the living room, already desiccated from the spider venom that was liquefying her flesh.

That meant Allison wasn’t the murderer.

Which only left Keith St. Jude. ‍ ‍

Chapter Eleven: Mistaken

“I guess you were wrong,” Trent said. “It’s not Allison.”

“Maybe it still is her, but her spiders turned on her,” I suggested.

“Maybe. But if so, we’ll find evidence of her spider-splicing lab somewhere close. But Babe… you may have to face the reality that your friend is guilty.”

“Yeah, but Keith? That… wow. That doesn’t seem right. I wouldn’t have guessed him in a million years. Do you mind if I stick around? He was one of my better friends. I’d really like to know how he got from who he was then to a psychopathic murderer.”

“Of course. You’re on his list, and you deserve some closure after all this.”

We followed the same procedure with the hazmats and flame throwers that we had for Allison’s, but they were unnecessary.

There was no sign of spider hybridization at Keith’s house, either. Keith came without protest, but he was clearly confused.

More so when he recognized me. “Jacqueline?”

“It’s just Jack now. I mean, Officer Davidson.”

“What’s this all about?”

Trent shoved him into the back of his cruiser. “You know what this is about.”

I rode in the front next to Trent while Keith sat in the back and peppered us with questions. Why was he here, what had he done wrong, what was he being accused of, was he under arrest?

He wasn’t—not yet. But Trent still advised him of his rights and said we’d talk at the precinct. The look Trent gave me was clear—don’t give anything away.

I hated this. Hated that I wasn’t allowed to say anything, that I wasn’t allowed to ask anything, that I couldn’t be part of the process and I had to wait until he was officially questioned.

Trent did let me sit in the observation room while he and his partner, Detective Herbert, questioned him.

The more they asked, the more confused Keith appeared. Maybe he was just really good at resisting, but his reason for not having an alibi was that he was working from home this week due to being sick. He offered to let us check his work logins and notes, though he admitted they were sporadic enough that it wasn’t a fool-proof alibi.  

He denied having anything to do with spiders or holding any grudges against any of the victims, or anything else.

And the more he talked, the more I believed him. This was a dead end. Keith wasn’t the murderer.

So, who, then?

Everybody else had alibis for at least some of the murders.

But the murders were perpetrated by spiders that could hunt a specific target, which meant it was possible to sic a spider on a person and have an alibi.

I looked at my notes and compared them to Trent’s, along with the alibis for everyone else on my list.

One name kept coming back to the forefront.

Eleanor.

She had alibis for about half the murders, a couple of which were near enough to the victims’ houses that she could’ve dropped off her death spawn, gone out in public so she was seen by witnesses, and then come back to retrieve them.

A couple were on the other side of town. That was harder to explain.

But she was the one who, at the dance, knew which spiders were venomous and which were harmless. She collected the venomous ones so they wouldn’t bite us. She could’ve figured out how to splice genes or whatever the hell one would have to do to create monster spider hybrids.

She had motive. She had means. And she had opportunity.

Plus, she acted really weird when she saw me at the school. Maybe I triggered some sort of unresolved conflict that I didn’t know we had, and that’s why she put me on her list.

I needed to talk to Trent.

Just as I was about to go interrupt him, he told Keith, “Why don’t we take a break. Get some coffee. We can come back to this in a little bit.”

He and Detective Herbert left the room, promising to return with coffee in a minute, and I hurried out of the observation room to meet them.

“We’ve got nothing,” Trent muttered to Detective Herbert. “We can hold him for a bit, but we can’t charge him. We have less than zero evidence.”

“That’s because he didn’t do it,” I said breathlessly.

“What? Do you have something?” Trent asked eagerly.

“Just a theory so far, but my gut tells me it was Eleanor.”

“I thought she was your friend,” Trent said.

“Yeah, but so was Keith.”

“She had an alibi.”

“Only for some of them. She could’ve dropped her spiders off and created her alibi and then gone back to retrieve them. Trust me, Eleanor is capable of this. We need to go.”

“Okay. I trust you,” Trent said. He turned to Detective Herbert. “Would you put him in holding—at least until we get back?”

Detective Herbert nodded and left to go do as Trent asked.

Once again, we donned our gear, and headed toward Eleanor’s address.

She lived in a moderately sized house a little north of the city proper. It wasn’t precisely a rural area, but she didn’t have any neighbors close by.

She did, however, have a really pristine looking shed out back, perfect for creepy-ass science experiments, and parked next to it was a big white box truck with no license plate.

The officers fanned out, circling the property.

“We’ve got her,” Trent grinned.

I gulped. “Do you mind if I talk to her first? I just… I need to know why.”

Trent nodded. “I’ve got your back.”

I removed the mask that covered my face and head and walked toward Eleanor’s front door.

She must’ve seen me coming, because she opened it before I had a chance to ring the doorbell.

“Hello, Jacqueline.” The overpowering scent of mint coming from her almost knocked me over.

“It’s just Jack now. You don’t seem surprised to see me.”

She shrugged. “I assumed you’d figure it out sooner or later, after my babies failed at the precinct. It doesn’t matter. I accomplished what I set out to do. Well, almost. But don’t worry. They have your scent now. It’s just a matter of time.”

“Yeah, so said your note. I just don’t understand why. The others—Samuel and Leslie and Joe and the rest—they were terrible, and we all left high school traumatized by them in one way or another. But what did I do? I thought we were friends. How’d I make it onto your hit list?”

She narrowed her eyes at me. “You know what you did.”

“I really don’t.”

“You were sleeping with Keith when you knew I was interested in him, just to prove you could take whatever I wanted.”

My mouth dropped open as I tried to process the nonsense she’d just spewed at me.

Before I had a chance to defend myself or say anything to counter her claims, something moved behind her.

A huge, hairy shape with eight legs, about a bazillion eyes, and long, glistening fangs rose up and started toward me.‍ ‍

Chapter Twelve: Misanthropy

I dodged out of the way, back outside and into the open, where Trent waited with his flamethrower.

The spider skittered out after me. When we planned this arrest, we made it clear we weren’t planning to set the house on fire, but neither were we willing to let giant venomous attack-spiders run loose if we could stop them.

I cleared the front door and dove toward the lawn. As soon as the spider reached the sidewalk, safely away from the probability of the house getting hit, Trent let loose with his flame.

“NO!” Eleanor screamed. “Ricky!” She ran out, around the blazing spider, forcing Trent to turn off the fire so he wouldn’t accidentally hit her.

She rushed Trent, knocking him back. He stumbled over the edge of the sidewalk and landed on the ground, and Eleanor started kicking him.

I grabbed my cuffs and ran around the still-twitching, still-flaming spider, and knocked Eleanor off Trent. In a few swift, practiced moves, I subdued her into a hold so I could cuff her. “Eleanor Sherman, you’re under arrest for the murders of Leslie Foster, Joe Creeger, Fredrick Shay, Mike Vaughn, Rosella McCafferty, Felicia Wheelin, Tessa VanTassel, and Allison Brewster. And for assaulting an officer. You have the right to remain silent.”

I read her the rest of her rights, then added, “And why the hell would you name a giant spider Ricky?”

She exercised her right to silence on that one.

A wildlife team had been called in to contain the spiders in the shed out back, and a few officers stayed behind to monitor that situation while Trent and I took Eleanor back down to the precinct.  

I joined Trent in the interrogation room for this one. I tried to let him take lead, but there were a few things I just had to know.

“What made you think I was sleeping with Keith?” I asked.

“Please. I saw the way you two were together, and Leslie confirmed it.”

“Leslie was a pathological liar. Which you probably know, since you killed her. We were never anything more than friends.”

Trent shot me a warning glance.

I turned back to Eleanor. “How did you do it? How did you make them huge, and combine the worst traits of so many different spiders?”

“It’s called gene splicing, and you aren’t smart enough to understand.”

I clenched my jaw, trying not to let her bait me. “So you spent the last thirteen years genetically engineering spiders to become killing machines so you could murder everyone who bullied you and a handful of people who you had an unfounded grudge against?”

She remained silent.

“How did you train them to target a specific person?”

Again, silence, but I could see her twitching. She really wanted to brag—but just asking her wouldn’t work. I had to bait her, just as she baited me.

“Never mind. It doesn’t really matter. Spiders hunt in different ways—wolf spiders in particular use pheromones to communicate and mate and hunt and whatever, so you probably just threw some hunting pheromones in my apartment, and then let loose that infestation so they associated my scent with either food or a predator. See? You’re not the only one who passed biology.”

That got her.

“Hunting pheromones?” she nearly shrieked. “This is a science that no one has ever achieved before. Spiders can’t be trained. They aren’t motivated like other animals. It took years of genetic engineering to breed them to the right size and potency, with the right drive to hunt, and a keen sense of territorialism, and—”

She stopped.

I probably should’ve hidden the grin I was wearing.

Fair enough. Time to get back on track.

“Okay, so after the dance, you what? Saved all the spiders in jars and started experimenting on them? Gene splicing and selectively breeding them to make them huge, combine their venoms, and make them fierce, easily-directed hunters?”

“I’ll write my scientific discoveries from prison and you can read them. Even there, I’ll be ten times the woman you’ll ever be.”

“Dude. It was never a competition. You’re as bad as Allison. I don’t want your scientific accolades.”

“Clearly,” she sneered.

“Wow. Rude.”

“Officer Davison.” Trent’s tone was a warning.

“Anything else you want to know?” I asked him.

“Are you willing to sign a confession?” Trent asked. “I’ll let the DA know you were cooperative and he may be willing to cut you a deal.”

“I don’t need a deal,” Eleanor scoffed. “I am a scientific genius and I have made breakthroughs unprecedented throughout history. My work will go on long after I’m gone, and I’ll be in biology textbooks for hundreds of years.”

“This wasn’t about scientific discover, this was about revenge,” I said.

She just shrugged. “Does it really matter my motive? The fact is, I did something no one has done before. And I the process I made the world a better place.”

I raised my eyebrow.

“Admit it,” she said. “During the course of your investigation, can you honestly say you never once thought they deserved it?”

I gulped down my guilt. “Doesn’t mean you get to enact justice as you see fit,” I said. “That’s not how it works.”

 She laughed at me. “I think we have proven that it is.”

“Well, we have more than enough to convict,” I said. “You didn’t get away with it.”

“Didn’t I?”

She genuinely didn’t care about getting caught. About the inevitability of a life in prison. She’d killed the people she believed wronged her, and she was happy about it.

Except for me. She hadn’t killed me.

“I think I’d like a lawyer,” she said.

Trent exhaled slowly. We wouldn’t get anything else out of her.

Not that it mattered.

Eleanor stood and looked at Trent. “I’ll see you in court.” She turned to me with a smug smile. “Unfortunately, it will be too late for you.”

Just then, the door to the interrogation room rattled as something huge and heavy rammed into it.

Eleanor’s grin was so feral it sent shivers down my spine. “Didn’t I tell you? I couldn’t have done this alone.”

Chapter Thirteen: Manacled

The door shook again, making the hinges and lock creak.

“What do you mean you didn’t do this alone?” Trent demanded. “Who are you working with?”

“Alejandro,” I breathed.

Eleanor just continued grinning that weird, unhinged grin.

Trent and I exchanged a worried glance.

“Get behind her,” he commanded.

“What?” I asked.

“Stand behind her. They’ll have to go through her to get to you.”

Eleanor laughed. “They won’t care. They aren’t puppies—they have no loyalty to me. They’ll gladly kill me to get to her.”

She really was a raving looney.

And hell if I was going to hide behind her when it just meant I was going to get both of us killed.

There had to be a way to reverse their programming or whatever it was.

They thought I was food—or a predator—and they were coming after me specifically. They’d go through Trent or Eleanor or whoever else they needed to in order to get to me.

I had no idea how many spiders she’d bred for this, or how long until they either died off or found a new target. So I had to make them think I was no longer a threat.

But how?

I stepped away from the door that the spider—or spiders—had almost gotten through, right next to Eleanor, who was still handcuffed to the table so she couldn’t move.

Close enough to smell her breath.

“That’s it,” I whispered.

“What?” Trent demanded. He had his gun out, even though he knew bullets would only be marginally effective against the spider once it got through.

“When it gets through, I need you to run ask Rachelle at the front desk for her essential oils kit. I need peppermint, and lots of it!”

“What are you—”

“Just trust me!” I yelled over the sound of the door breaking in.

The spider came toward me and I hid behind Eleanor while Trent ran out of the room.

It drew close, and as I suspected, got confused by the permeating aroma of peppermint wafting from Eleanor.

“Spiders don’t like strong scents, especially peppermint,” I said, still using her as a human shield. “You’re going to die in prison, and I’ll do everything I can to make sure your scientific ‘discoveries’ never see the light of day. You may be the biology wizard, but I’m a damn good cop.”

The spider edged around the room, looking for me, my scent, and being deterred by Eleanor’s peppermint.

Which was probably exactly why she always smelled like it.

I held the spider off long enough for Trent to return with Rachelle’s essential oils.

He tossed a small jar at me.

I threw it on the ground, smashing the glass, then took a shard of peppermint-laced glass and charged the spider.

It saw me coming—I could tell by the way it shuffled backward, away from the overwhelming scent of peppermint—but it didn’t have much room to escape. It had angled away from the door, which was where Trent stood, and a bunch of other officers had joined him, armed with their flame throwers.

I cornered it and stabbed it in one of its eyes with peppermint glass.

It shrieked, in much the same way as the other one had when we’d finally killed it with fire.

I lashed out again, taking out its freaky eyes, one by one.

It swiped at me with its long, hairy legs, but the peppermint was disorienting it, and before long, I had succeeded in blinding it.

It huddled in the corner, curling up on itself, and I finally backed away.

“Kill it,” I said.

I shoved my way out the door and down the hall, straight out the back door which was still wide open from the earlier attack, and into the alley.

As I suspected, the white box truck was there.

That meant Alejandro was in it.

Ducking around the fence where I wouldn’t be seen, I made my way to the front of the truck.

Alejandro wasn’t in the driver’s seat, which meant he must be in the back with the spider collection.

Gun drawn, peppermint cologne splashed all over me, I made my way to the open back door of the box truck.

Alejandro stood inside, anxiously looking at his phone, presumably waiting for word from Eleanor.

I stepped out so he could see me. “Freeze!”

He looked up, shock that was quickly replaced by anger, then followed by defeat flashing across his features.

“It’s over, Alejandro. Your spiders are dead, and we have a confession from Eleanor, including her implicating you as her partner.”

Not strictly true, but then, I wasn’t obligated to tell the truth to a suspect.

He raised his hands slowly. His eyes darted to a giant terrarium fixed to the side wall of the truck.

“Don’t even think about it,” I said.

I wasn’t sure what was in there, but I wasn’t going to risk him letting more spiders out.

He sighed and stood still.

“Get out of the truck,” I said.

He stepped carefully down the ramp until he stood a few feet away from me. I backed up a little—I didn’t know what he was capable of.

“So you’re the brains behind the gene splicing, huh?” I said.

He did not have the same smirk Eleanor had. He just looked dejected.

“What happened? She convinced you everyone was out to get you and helping her was the only way to see justice done?”

He didn’t answer, but his expression confirmed my conclusion.

“Hands behind your back. You’re under arrest for accessory to murder.”

He complied, and I cuffed him.

“Walk.” I pointed him in the direction of the precinct.

“There’s just one thing I want to know,” I said. “Why me? Eleanor got it in her head that I was sleeping with Keith, but what did you have against me?”

“You really don’t remember?”

“Remember what?”

He sighed. “I asked you to Homecoming, and you turned around and invited everyone else to come with us. I made it clear I was asking you on a date, and you shoved me into the friendzone so hard I was reeling for months.”

I blinked slowly. “You helped murder eight people and tried to murder me because I misunderstood that you were asking me on a date?”

His shoulders slumped.

“That’s some next-level incel shit, dude. I can’t believe you let Eleanor talk you into this. I suggest you make a deal with the DA and testify against her, because this… this is ridiculous.”

We got inside the precinct and were surrounded by cops. Alejandro was taken into custody, and the wildlife group was called to deal with the box truck.

In the chaos of the next few hours, Trent and I found each other.

I leaned into his shoulder, relishing his strength and support. “I know we just moved, but I want to move again,” I said. “I don’t think I can live there anymore.”

He pulled away and turned me around to face him. “Hey. If you want to move, we can do that. But you just won. Personally, I think you should own the hell out of that. If we move, you prove to Eleanor that she got to you. But if we stay—you prove that the spider didn’t win. You won.”

###

I sat in our living room, drinking coffee and reading. Essential oil diffusers in every room created a constant peppermint cloud throughout the apartment.

Trent came home from work, kissed me, and handed me a sheaf of papers.

“What’s this?” I asked.

“It’s the practice test for the detective exam.”

“Trent, I told you, I’m not ready for this. I don’t think I can handle being a detective.”

“And you don’t have to. But Jack—you’re good at this. You figured out what Eleanor was doing, and how, and why. You are the smartest, strongest woman I know, and I think you’d make an awesome detective.”

“Trent—”

“I’m not saying you have to commit,” Trent assured me. “Just take a look at the practice test and give it some thought. Okay?”

I sighed, but I couldn’t help smiling.

No one else in my life had ever believed in me the way Trent did.

Maybe he was right.

Maybe I could be a detective.

And maybe, one case at a time, I could make the world a better place.

I wouldn’t let the spiders win.

The End

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