The hand holding her midsection tightened, and she felt the fingers burrowing into her skin, the arms of the spider stabbing, clawing, ripping her in half. Blood pooling on the forest floor, her intestines spilling out. Blood, copper, shit, the smell of shit from her guts, ripped open, on the ground, on his fingers, everything, everything. She screamed, it was almost a word, but it wasn’t quite a word, just a scream, a primal scream, the last sound she would ever make as the fingers wrapped around her head like vines, preparing to snap it off at the root.

“WHERE IS YOUR MASTER?”

Then a telekinetic blow struck the creature, jerking her off the ground before the monster lost its grip, dropping her onto her side. On instinct, she grabbed her stomach to shove her intestines back inside her, tried to stem the bleeding. She heard a struggle, screeching in Pequod-phonemic. Ampersand’s tinny voice, the other one’s voice a strange, garbled heap of sounds. She grabbed her intestines from off the forest floor, shoved them back in, curled into a ball. She looked at her hands, looked for the blood, but there was none. Her guts had not been ripped out, there were no viscera all over the ground, no hole in her torso.

She got up on her knees and looked over to see the flashlight illuminating the two of them, Enola easily overpowering Ampersand, standing over him, the mass of a grizzly bear that moved with the speed of a grasshopper. Ampersand was on the ground on his back, writhing, struggling against whatever force Enola had placed on him.

Cora ripped the pulse emitter out of her hoodie, aimed at them, and fired.

The flashlight shorted out, and her vision went black. She heard a heavy thud and then only silence so deafening it made her ears ring. She pushed against the terror that was locking her muscles in place, crawling along the ground, feeling around where she thought the flashlight had fallen, all the while keeping her gaze on the inky darkness where Enola had been. She could barely see the silver white of Ampersand’s skin, but nothing of Enola, not even his eyes.

After a few minutes of grasping, she found the flashlight. Remarkably, after she swapped the batteries and turned it off and on a few times, the flashlight came back to life, and she shone it in the direction the fight had been. They were both lying there unconscious, Ampersand on his back, angled to one side, and Enola lying prone on top of him. She nearly dropped the flashlight in horror at the sight of him, his hands especially, so uncannily evocative of that one most terrifying species of spider.