CHAPTER 13

Dana released the newcomer, who now turned her attention back to the crowd.

"Hi. My name is Eulalie." She smiled nervously and gave everyone a wave. "Emily said that I should come here if I ever got in trouble, so...here I am." From the waist up, Eulalie looked like she was in her mid-twenties, with raven hair that covered most of her face and hung past her shoulders. Her dark eyes were like pools, and Mike was drowning in them already.

From the waist down, she had the glossy black body of a spider.

The group walked to the front door with Mike in the lead. The porch creaked under their collective weight as they gathered and a gentle breeze caressed the nearby pillars. He reached for the front door, ready to allow Eulalie inside.

When his fingers touched the knob, he hesitated.

It wasn't because of his magic. One of his many gifts from Naia on inheriting the house was the ability to not only sense danger, but also to somehow know when someone was a good fit for the house. He felt neither of these things right now, but still couldn't put his hand on the knob and officially invite her inside.

Instead, his mind focused on the shiny chitin of her lower body, the rustling movement of her many legs and the strange rounded pads at the bottom that made soft scratching sounds when she walked. Spiders clearly didn't have needle-thin feet at the end of their legs, but that was a fact he never expected to confront in such a wild manner.

Eulalie's body reminded him of the Andersons' basement. They had been friends of his father, and their basement had been far more comfortable than the back seat of his mother's station wagon long after he had died.

The Andersons never spent much time in their basement, which had worked out in his favor for a couple of weeks. However, it was thick with cobwebs that his mother had dismissed, and not all of the webs had been empty. In the middle of the night, he had wandered through a particularly thick web on the way to the bathroom. What he had thought was just a few sticky strands of web stuck to his face was revealed in the dim light of the bathroom to be a burst egg sac of baby spiders that scurried frantically all over his mouth and nose.

His screams had woken the whole house, causing his mother to berate him in front of their hosts for being such a pussy. He was only nine at the time, and when the Andersons kicked them out a week later, his mother had blamed him for it.

Standing at the door of the house, his skin was once more covered in those imaginary spiders. The others noticed his apprehension, most likely wondering if he had sensed something dangerous about their visitor. The moment was officially awkward, which was now compounding the situation.

Eulalie didn't seem to notice. She moved past him and opened the door herself. Once inside, she looked around and then turned to Mike with a grimace on her face. "Sorry to be pushy, but where's the bathroom?" She bit her lips and flexed her legs, doing a pathetic little dance in his front hallway. "I've been in that box a really long time, and even I have limits."

Dumbfounded, Mike pointed toward the hallway by the stairs. She shouldn't be able to come inside without his invitation. Had Emily invited her in at some point? "It's near the back door, you can't miss it." He didn't bother asking how she was going to fit on the toilet.

"Thanks!" She ran down the hallway, startling a cluster of rats who had been watching from the safety of the stairs. He heard the door slam, and then turned to face Lily and Dana.

"Give me the very brief version," he spat at them. It wasn't so much that he was mad that they had withheld the information, but the shock of seeing a half-spider woman had thrown him off entirely. Now that Eualalie was out of sight, his heart felt like it was working properly again.

"Eulalie and her sister Velvet live out in Oregon," Dana said.

"With Bigfoot," Lily added. "And their father."

"Excuse me, did you say Bigfoot?" This was from Beth, who stood behind everyone with Sulyvahn. "Seriously? How tall is he? What about his, uh, hands?"

Sulyvahn laughed. Abella, who stood in the back, let out a grunt of disgust and jumped into the air with flapping wings. The yard was nearly empty now, save for a few centaurs who were moving about and cleaning up the celebration of Spring.

"They're good people," Dana said. "Their father asked us not to tell you they were living there."

"Why?" Mike asked. "It's not like I was going to kick them out or anything."

"It isn't like they would know that," Lily told him. "And besides, there's another reason."

Dana tilted her head in curiosity, but Mike held up his hand for silence.

"Look, I get you thought you were doing the right thing," he said. "But what would have happened to her if neither one of you had been here? Abella would have killed her, and I wouldn't have known better."

Lily and Dana exchanged a look. He could see that Lily wanted to argue, but knew that he was right. Dana, as always, was inscrutable.

"Well, good thing we were here then," Lily responded. "So get over it." She pushed her way past him into the house. The others followed, but Tink paused before stepping through the door.