Atticus’s POV
Spiders are such misunderstood creatures. Leave them alone, and they’ll leave you. Unless you are its mate, and then be careful courting one or she’ll bite your head off.
I was in no such danger. Let the seducer play with such fire.
I looked over at poor Pepper. Poor silly Pepper, who always thought she was one step ahead of me. Oh well, I sighed. I would like to have said she would be sorely missed, but if I had my way (and I always do) I knew she wouldn’t be. Even by me.
Pepper stared at me with frantic tearful eyes as David’s body convulsed and spat before us inside the belly of the firebug.
“What can we do? He’s dying!” she cried in a hoarse voice.
“It’s too risky for you to do anything,” I baited.
“Do what?” she demanded, “Let me be the one to decide.” She was in my face now, tugging at my lapels.
I looked down at the floor to give a solemn air of hesitation, but really it was to hide my smile.
When I had composed myself, I looked back up at her and said in a grave voice, “You need to keep his body alive until the soul returns…”
Pepper looked back at the body wracking with fits in the belly of the lightning beast. She nodded, and understood. If she entered the bubble to save him, how could she not know where her soul would fly off to? I smiled at my own pun.
I took out an object I had been keeping in my breast pocket for the occasion. A small compact mirror.
“Use this,” I said placing it in her palm. “Keep staring at the visage to remind yourself where your soul belongs. It will be…an anchor.”
I knew she was too smart for this ploy, but I was counting on her desperation.
She clutched the mirror and nodded, then walked towards the light.
Pepper stepped into the bubble and bent down towards the body, its face beginning to turn blue. She put her hand on his heart and pressed him down, and then hovering over him on her knees began to administer the breath of life.
I watched her watching her own reflection in the mirror, like a fool. I watched as the reflection began to refract while she thumped on the dead man’s chest, like knocking on a wooden door. A shave and a haircut…
I waited as the Pepper’s in the reflection became many fold, like the eye of the fly. My daughter, my wife, my lover, my sister, my niece, the constant fly in my ointment in every world I entered to execute my plans.
I watched her round rump bob as she administered another thump on his rattling chest…
And another…
Two bits…
He was about to answer the call, now was my time.
She hadn’t realized how close I was standing to the plug, but I could see her see me in the reflection, lean down and…
I almost felt like wise little Gretel kicking the poor misunderstood witch into the oven.
…pulled the plug from the socket.
The lightning bug exploded in polystyrene beads, and then.
She was gone. Not even her body would remain. Why would it? This Pepper was Prime, and all would follow her into non-existence.
I looked up from the warm plug cooling in my hands. I could feel his eyes upon me before acknowledging his presence. Why would I? Hadn’t I summoned him here for this very moment?
“Atticus,” Gabriel growled at me from the corpse of dead lightning bug, standing over David’s near dead body. “What have you done?”
He didn’t notice the spiders crawling through the walls.
Of course not.
I smiled, “Just a bit of fun,” I teased.
Gabriel sighed as spiders gathered and swarmed from the recesses of the walls.
“You are an old fool,” he bared his teeth.
“Of course, I am,” I smiled back. “It is my designation after all.”
It is then he notices the spiders. The hoard crawling to him. Crawling back to him, as she always does. Cling to his ankles, and legs.
I limp away and close the big red door behind me, shutting him in to his fate, as I begin to hear him coo with a bit of fear in his voice, “What’s this my love. It is all a misunderstanding…I assure you…”