Silence yielded to sibilant whispers. Thousands of voices blending together like a rushing stream.

Black nothingness gave way to strand after strand of color. Thousands of threads given substance, each strand representing a soul, a life. And the urge to grasp them, weave them together into patterns of her own choosing was a tempting, haunting call that had grown stronger as she got older.

Araña fought against it as she always did, though she knew in the end she would lose. There was no leaving this spider’s place of vision until she yielded.

And she would yield—sooner rather than later. Before the pain of not choosing grew so intense she would grab wildly, grasping two threads without caring about the result, what the intersection of two paths would mean or how their coming together rippled into the future and changed the design of it.

Phantom pain slashed through a heart she could no longer hear or feel as she remembered that long-ago night when Erik lit the lantern and the flame caught her, bringing her to this place. She didn’t remember taking up the thread belonging to the witch, but she must have.

The view of Oakland from the water belonged to the old witch at the bus stop. Even now, it was a clear snapshot in Araña’s mind, an image followed by the memory of pain and nothingness as she’d fought against touching another soul to the witch’s.

But in the end, she’d lost. She’d chosen a second strand, a deep, rich earth brown, not knowing until she touched it that it belonged to Matthew—the stranger whose boat was carrying her away from the mob hunting her. And in that instant when she touched the thread of Matthew’s life, she’d seen Erik’s death without understanding the full truth of it or what crossing the witch’s path would mean.

The first shimmer of pain pulled Araña from her memories. A nameless urgency made her push formlessly through twisting, multicolored strands—forward into some future moment— until a blue-black thread caught her attention and drew her to it.

She couldn’t tell from looking at it what made this soul and life different from all the others, but she knew it was, knew the being it represented was like nothing she’d ever encountered before.

The pain intensified, isolating her until the only choice was to reach out and grasp the thread in a spidery demon touch.

There was a wrenching disorientation as darkness and nothingness gave way to midday sun and the Oakland skyline. She saw it through tattered canvas, the ripped side of a rapidly moving transport truck.

They were several miles away from the red zone. She recognized the tallest building and knew it was near the maze. Beyond it was one of the buildings she’d seen when they sailed toward the docks.

The truck was in an old graveyard. She noticed tombstones fallen among the weeds, a destroyed mausoleum with the words “Our Lady of Peace” above a doorway framing sky and forest.

Movement to the right turned her attention to what was inside the truck, and even without a physical presence, the sight of the dragon lizards with their tails swinging back and forth in agitation sent terror whipping through her. They were contained, as were the hyenas trapped in a small cage above them.

Next to the hyenas a wolf had bloodied its mouth gnawing frantically at the bars of its cage. The warded silver around its neck made her think it was a Were. Her suspicion deepened when she turned farther and saw the werecougar trapped between forms, his body vibrating with despair.

The sense of the future, tomorrow, reverberated through her. Given the proximity to Oakland and the presence of the dragon lizards, she knew she must be in the truck belonging to the trapper the maze owner had spoken of.

There was one last occupant in the truck, the one whose life she’d followed to this place and moment in time. But when she would have turned farther to look, searing agony prevented it, ripping her backward to the present.

She expected an explosion of color, a thousand threads to choose from. Instead there was only the single, blue-black strand in an infinity of darkness.

The pain stopped. Completely. In a way it had never done before while she was still held in the spider vision.

Pure blackness gave way to night. A man lay on a bed of straw, bathed in moonlight.

His wrists and ankles were shackled to a band of metal around his waist. An eerie sigil-inscribed collar encircled his neck, glowing icy blue.

There was no sound in her vision walk save for the sibilant whispers, now joined by discordant notes of music, a fractured rhapsody she instinctively knew belonged to him.

He had a face like the angels she’d seen in Erik’s art history books, too beautiful to look at and yet so enthralling she couldn’t look away. Black hair as long as her own rippled over his chest and back in erotic waves, making her want to reach out and tangle her fingers in it, making her crave what she’d never known and couldn’t have—the touch of a lover.

Despite the length of his hair and the shackles imprisoning him, he was masculine perfection, the epitome of unfathomable power. And though Araña had no true awareness of her body, she had a phantom sensation of her breath catching and her cunt weeping with a need that would never be safely satisfied with anything but her own touch.

The man’s eyes opened, his gaze meeting hers deep in the vision, trapping her in dark pools of blue. And in that instant she felt the shimmering touch of soul against soul and she understood even as the lantern flame released her to tumble into exhausted sleep, this time it was her life that was to become part of the weave.

THERE was nothing for Tir to do other than wait—and endure—as the truck rumbled deeper into the day and closer to its destination. But unlike the centuries he’d spent doing the same, escaping the monotony of captivity by dreaming of freedom and vengeance, this time his thoughts were consumed by the woman.

Not the pathetic creature who had spent the night huddled near the door of his cage, knees pressed to her chest, arms wrapped around her legs, weary terror filling her eyes as she waited for her husband to enter the building at dawn. No, not that woman, but the one who’d invaded his dreams like a vision and filled his body with heat, doing what no woman had done in all the centuries he held in his memory—hardening his cock and filling his testicles with seed, leaving him with the burning need to find her and lie with her.

Tir’s arm muscles bunched, straining against the tethers holding him to the chair as he remembered his actions the previous night. His lips pulled back in savage fury thinking about how he’d turned his back on the trapper’s cowering wife as lust unlike anything he’d ever known burned through his veins.

Never in all his remembered existence had the need for release driven him to take himself in hand as it had after the dream, forcing him to seek relief as he fantasized about a female whose eyes were as black as night and whose imagined touch was a fire strong enough to melt his icy control.

His body hardened with the mere thought of her and stayed that way despite the jolts traveling up his spine with each pothole and bump the truck hit. Lava-hot lust poured into his bloodstream, making him close his eyes and begin fighting against the effect the fantasy woman had on him.

Thinking about the trapper helped. It banked the flames and filled him with cold hatred.

In his mind’s eye he replayed the scene before daybreak—the trapper arriving and entering the cell, sneering with coarse satisfaction and greed when he noticed the erection pressing against the front of Tir’s pants and caught the whiff of semen on the straw bedding.

“Hope you enjoyed her enough to leave a little something behind. It’s about time I had another cash cow here,” Hyde said before ordering Tir to pick up the heavy chair, the shackles on his wrists and ankles making the task difficult.