Someone moaned behind me, from the direction of Agent Brown’s people. I heard a gun cock and whipped around, every nerve in my body shrieking alarm. Hunter shrieked a wild, dominant cry, picking up on my distress, and leapt into the air, wings snapping open as he dropped himself between the NASA team and First. Gunfire rent the air. Hunter screamed again. I whipped around in time to see him charging Agent Brown’s team, holes in his beautiful wings, pure fury in his tone.

“Call them off!” I turned back to the vice-president. “Tell them to stop firing, or he’s going to kill them all!”

She didn’t say anything. Her eyes were fixed on First, on the specter of a spider the size of a fully grown ox stepping delicately to the ground.

I whirled again, running toward the scene unfolding behind me as the NASA agents fired and Hunter advanced, wounded but alive, determined to have his revenge.

I heard Mandy scream. I heard a gun fire. Hunter pounced, sending NASA agents tumbling in all directions as he bit the head clean off the nearest one, gulping it down before starting to rip his victim into pieces. The others shouted, trying to steady their weapons.

Slowly, I turned.

Mandy was on the ground between First and the vice-president’s group, blood spreading slowly from the gunshot wound in her chest. She wasn’t moving.

Chapter 21

Vancouver, British Columbia: August 17, 2031

The end of the invasion

1.

First moved like lightning, faster than I would have dreamed possible for an arachnid of her size under gravity like ours. The physics of her body must have been bolstered by her vegetable nature, keeping her from collapsing under her own weight. She raced to Mandy’s side, a silk-like substance spurting from her abdomen, arms already working frantically at constructing a pale green cocoon around the body of my friend.

The shouts from the NASA agents were getting rarer as the snarls from Hunter grew more consistent. He was shredding them, ripping through them like so much tissue paper, and I couldn’t be sorry, not in the slightest, not in the least. I couldn’t wish them another ending, because they’d been the ones to start firing, and because of them, Mandy was—Mandy was—

I ran without thinking about it, ran straight for the Vice-President of the United States, a nice woman, a pleasant woman, a woman I had voted for, and my hand was raised, and my fist caught her square in the jaw, sending her reeling backward, so that her ass impacted with the side of one of those fine black cars that had been intended to get her here, to the slaughtering grounds, safely. Her guards shouted, beginning to turn on me, and she raised a hand.

They stopped dead. So did I, arm cocked back to hit her again. She looked at me with anguish in her eyes.