Lillik’zeil stood in the center of the Lower City square. Her human eyes were dull, tired, as she watched the citizens milling about in the mud and gloom.

  They were grim and withdrawn. Their eyes kept flicking to her with suspicion and distrust, she could imagine the feeling, that twist in your gut when you know something is wrong. Over half of them were likely thralls. She wondered how many more were eyes for Carmilla.

  It wouldn’t matter. She wouldn't check before she killed them.

  The Spider undid the clasp at her throat.

  She let the soaked wool cloak drop to the ground. It landed with a wet slap against the cobblestones.

  She drew herself up to her full height, limbs unfolding with a sickening series of bestial clicks.

  The illusion of humanity vanished. Her massive thorax stretched out behind her, glistening with rain. The only human part of her remaining was a suggestion of a torso and two pale, mutated arms, topped with a face that was merely a mask—a thin strip of human flesh around her eyes, surrounded by a crown of unblinking, obsidian spider eyes.

  The nearby citizens paused. The bustle of the market died instantly.

  “Forgive me.”

  She spoke only to the rain.

  Then, her human eyes closed.

  She surged forward.

  She moved fast—unnaturally so for something of her size. When she wasn’t pretending to be human, she was a blur of chitin and hydraulic pressure. Her legs fired, shooting her across the square in a heartbeat.

  Her spear-like front legs punched through the chest of the closest innocent with a meaty thwack.

  Before the body could even hit the ground, she pulled them close, her spinnerets flaring. She wrapped them in thick, white silk in seconds, binding the dying body into a tight cocoon. She fired a line of webbing upward and hung the bundle from a shop awning.

  The silk stained red from the inside out.

  They didn’t scream. No one did, yet.

  The crowd stared in shock and horror, their minds unable to process the violence. They watched their neighbor be harvested, bound, and hung up like stored meat in the span of a single breath.

  Lillik tore into the second one.

  Then, they started screaming.

  “I’m sorry.”

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  She muttered it as she gutted the third.

  “I’m sorry.”

  She whispered it as she decapitated the fourth.

  The Thralls tried to resist, throwing themselves at her with makeshift weapons—rusty knives, table legs, hammers.

  Likely, they weren’t even Thralls.

  It didn’t matter.

  While she tore a woman apart with her mandibles, she felt a dull thud against her lower thorax.

  She pivoted slowly, her multiple eyes focusing downward.

  A child stood there, trembling, clutching the shattered remains of a wooden stool he had smashed against her chitin. He was weeping, staring up at the nightmare that was eating his family.

  “M-Mom…”

  Lillik froze for a fraction of a second.

  “Close your eyes, child.”

  She didn't use her mandibles. She used her spinnerets. She wrapped the boy alive, binding him in loose, chaotic webs. He was stuck, but not suffocated. He would be able to claw his way out once she was gone.

  She left him wriggling on the cobblestones and moved on.

  Lillik tore through a safehouse down the street. They had barricaded the heavy oak door with a dining table, but she punched through both wood and bone in an instant. The entire house was a webbed den by the time she skittered out through a second-floor window, the glass shattering in a spray of glittering shards.

  Hour one: Thirty-four lives.

  Hour two: Fifty.

  They grew better at hiding the longer she stayed in one place. They learned to run.

  “Run,” she muttered to a fleeing group, her voice a chittering rasp. “Run.”

  She tore into another home. Two survived the initial breach. She caught one before he could make it to the cellar.

  She moved through the streets, a blur of shadow and death, leaving a trail, red silk in her wake.

  Some wept. Some ran. Some fought.

  They all died the same.

  She left only a lucky handful alive at each site. She tried to spare whole families, but it became harder and harder to differentiate the prey as she went. The blood made them all smell the same.

  “I’m... click-click-click... Sorry.”

  She moved to another square, staring down at the panicked townsfolk below from the gargoyles of a cathedral. They pushed and scrambled over each other to flee.

  She descended from the roof.

  She feasted.

  Her words started to be swallowed by the clicking. The apologies became shorter, then nonexistent.

  The first night was a challenge. She hunkered down in one of the safehouses she wiped out, leaving webbing and traps on every surface, before she laid in wait, perfectly still. When the mutants came, the poor little bats got tangled in her webs.

  They fought, scratched and screamed, but their claws scraped uselessly against her chitin.

  By the second day, the streets were empty. Most of the townsfolk stayed barricaded in their homes or had fled to the Mid-City. Anyone left in the slums huddled in cellars, in attics, in churches. They prayed to a Goddess that could certainly hear them, and was probably laughing at them.

  Lillik’zeil thought of Nomi.

  She fought to keep her mind, even as her movements stopped being efficient and started being predatory. She found herself stalking shadows, waiting for movement, enjoying the terror.

  No.

  She shook her head, mandibles clacking.

  She was Lillik’zeil.

  She wouldn’t lose herself here. She had saved thousands in her life; she would save thousands more. She was a healer. She would become a monster for four days.

  But not forever.