Three of the humans panicked, but they still raised their weapons, trying to get shots in.
I moved faster, tail snapping out like a striking whip. I crushed two of them against a wall with a sickening thud and knocked a third into a row of stone planters, hearing the crack of their bones.
Their guns went flying in the other direction.
Another eight humans dropped from the helicopter.
Behind me, Rune didn’t shift. Instead, I felt her focus sharpen along the bond.
She set Cthulhu’s carrier gently down, opened the top, and lifted the spider onto her palm.
“You’re going to love this,” she whispered to him, her voice soft and delighted in a way that would’ve made my skin crawl had she not been my mate.
Instead, if I had been in my regular form, she would’ve made me hard.
I fucking loved her.
Cthulhu tilted his head and blinked at her. Then, without hesitation, he sank his fangs into her finger.
Her lips parted on a soft inhale. Euphoria flooded our bond, bright and dizzying, her venom-rich blood roaring with the new venom overlaying it.
My heart lurched, but I felt it the same way I did every other time she took in a toxin. It slid through her system before it was neutralized by whatever the Fates had done to protect her.
She was fine, which meant I could focus.
I lunged at another human, knocking him off his feet, tail whipping out to slam two more into the pavement. One tried to stab at my side with some kind of weapon I didn’t recognize, but I knocked him away.
In my periphery, Rune became a blur.
She moved through the humans with spy-trained grace, flipping over one’s back and hooking a foot behind another’s knee to bring him down. She pressed Cthulhu to exposed skin, necks, wrists, and cheeks.
The spider struck, fast and eager to spread his venom to the humans.
The results were immediate.
Wherever he bit, roots erupted.
They burst from the humans’ ears, nostrils, eye sockets, mouths, twisting in bark-like tendrils that shoved flesh aside as they grew, wood spreading under their skin, and hollowing them out from the inside. Their screams cut off as their throats filled. Limbs went rigid before turning wooden.
In seconds, they were no longer human bodies; they were grotesque, tree-like statues in tactical gear.
One particular human rushed Rune with a syringe in hand, clearly aiming for her arm.
She spun away and slapped her fingers against his exposed wrist. She excreted Cthulhu’s venom.
The human grew roots and hollowed out just like when Cthulhu bit.
So, my mate wasn’t just immune to a fae creature’s venom, she could wield it, too.
She crouched beside him and pressed Cthulhu gently to his chest.
The spider crawled off her to the corpse.
I finished off the last of the attackers with a brutal smash of my body and scanned the area for more threats.
The helicopter wasn’t fleeing. It hovered, rotors thundering, clearly waiting for an extraction that wasn’t going to happen.
Cthulhu scuttled up the bark-like neck and disappeared into the hollow mouth of the human’s corpse, vanishing inside with a strange, pleased chirping sound that made the scales at the back of my neck rise.
