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  “But…how?” I somehow managed to ask through my giggles. “I don’t want to be mean but you’re limp as a stalk of month-old celery. It would be like trying to jam a marshmallow into a keyhole.”

  “Shut up, I say!” he shouted again. Then a crafty look came over his face. “I will impregnate you—I have the means to do so right here!”

  He reached into the side pocket of his suit jacket (which he was wearing inside out—I think I forgot to mention that) and pulled out a prescription bottle.

  “See?” he demanded, fighting with the child-proof cap for a moment before finally getting it off. “I have everything I need right here!”

  Upending the bottle, he spilled a handful of blue, diamond-shaped pills into his palm.

  Uh-oh…I knew what those were. I doubted there was anyone on my home planet who didn’t. My giggle fit dried up as abruptly as it had started. Teeny must have seen the serious look on my face, because she stopped laughing too.

  “Ah-ha—now I have your attention and respect!” Doloroso snarled triumphantly. “As you can see, I will soon be at top sexual function and you will deeply regret your levity.”

  “Leah,” Teeny whispered, her eyes fixed on the handful of blue pills he was holding out. “Is he telling the truth? What are those things he’s holding, anyway?”

  Those little blue pills, each printed with a name so common everyone on Earth knew it, made me think of something. It was a story, my friend Charlotte had told me, about a man who had come in through the ER after taking them. “He thought that if one was good, two would work even better,” Charlotte had said dryly. “And they worked, all right—he had a very big problem by the time I saw him. A big and painful problem.”

  Zoe and I had giggled at her story but then I had thought nothing else of it. Now it gave me an idea.

  “I’m afraid he is telling the truth, Teeny,” I said, pitching my voice low, but not too low for Doloroso to hear. “Those pills will grow his, uh, Vienna Sausage into a big old bratwurst. All he has to do is take two or three of them and wait about half an hour.”

  “What’s a bratwurst?” Teeny wanted to know but Doloroso had already taken the bait.

  “Ha!” he exclaimed. “I know what you’re trying to do—you think I won’t take enough to be effective. Well, I’ll show you how effective the last living Assimilated can be!”

  Lifting his hand to his mouth, he swallowed a good portion of the pills. I bit my lip as I saw at least ten slide down his throat. Wow—now all we had to do was wait.

  I just prayed the effects of an overdose would work on the alien inside the human body the same way they would on a regular Earth body. Otherwise I was in deep, deep trouble.

  Grav

  “What do you want with me?” I demanded after Doloroso had gone, taking Teeny and Leah with him. I wondered if I would ever see them again—if I could save them from the fate that bastard had in mind. In order to do that, I had to get free. But what could I say to make the Widow free me?

  “What do I want with you?” she mused, beginning to pace back and forth on the platform across from the web where I was still stuck, covered from neck to ankles in the white, sticky thread. Her long white robe belled out around her invisible feet and I wondered what she was hiding under it.

  Not that I really wanted to know.

  “Whatever it is, you’ll have to untie me if you want to get it,” I said, hoping I was right. To my surprise, she nodded.

  “In fact, you are correct Gravex. But to be completely candid, I wished to untie you anyway. It’s true that you have a most fearsome reputation—the most wanted male in the galaxy, some say—but a male has to prove his worth to me in order to become my mate.”

  “Your mate?” I looked at her in disbelief. “Lady, you have got to be fuckin’ kidding me.”

  She frowned. “I am afraid I am completely serious. And you ought to be flattered—I have searched for cycles to find one who was worthy to mate me and host my young.”

  Okay, I didn’t like the sound of that—not one fuckin’ bit.

  “And what makes you think I’m the male for the job?” I demanded. “I don’t even like kids—especially not when they’re half-spider.”

  “Ah, but half spider—or Spidier~o as my mother’s people were called—is a glorious thing to be.” She gave me a very unpleasant smile and began walking forward, flowing with casual grace on her unseen feet from the platform to the web where I was a prisoner.

  “Spidier~o? Never heard of ‘em,” I said.

  “No, you wouldn’t have. We are a race from beyond your little galaxy.” She made it sound as though the Goddess’s Cloak—or what Leah’s people called “the Milky Way”—was tiny and obscure—an out of the way place that was hardly worth mentioning. “I came here to make a place for myself and my young—but then, for years I was unable to find one worthy of mating me,” she continued.

  “And you think I’m worthy?” I said bitterly. “I don’t think so, Lady. I couldn’t even get free of your damn web to protect the females in my care.”

  “As to that, don’t be too hard on yourself for failing to get free.” She glided closer, looking down at me from her immense height. “The tensile strength of my silk is ten times that of a steel cable of the same thickness. No living being in your galaxy could break it.”

  “Then why pick me or any male of the Twelve Peoples?” I demanded. “Why not take one of your own kind—another uh, Spidier~o, for a mate?”

  “Ah, well I am afraid that is rather a delicate problem.” The Widow adjusted her long, white gown carefully. “You see, there are no males of my species. We are females only, which is why we need a male from another race to quicken our eggs with sentience and then host them until they hatch.”

  “What are you talking about?” I was getting that bad feeling again—a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach that let me know shit was about to get real—and I don’t mean real pretty. “What quicken? What sentience?”

  “It’s very simple, really.”

  She was standing right over me now—looming over me is more like it. I thought I understood how smaller females felt around me now—it wasn’t a fun feeling.

  “You see,” the widow continued. “I already have the eggs in my sac—thousands of them. And within them, thousands of tiny Spidier~os are growing. But without the seed of a sentient male, they will remain mindless—as unthinking and un-self-aware as my other pets.” She motioned to a few of the large spiders who were standing at the edge of the web, clearly waiting for orders.

  “So you need my, uh, seed to turn them from mindless spiders to thinking spiders?” I couldn’t imagine anything worse. A spider that knows who you are and can go after you is a pretty bad thing. Especially if that particular spider knows you’re its daddy. “Sorry,” I said. “I don’t want any part of that mess. No fuckin’ thank you.”

  “Ah, but you don’t understand—each of my young will look like me.” The Widow pointed at herself as though this was a big selling point. “Which means from the waist up, they will be devastatingly beautiful.”

  “Uh, right,” I said, eyeing her white body and bulging red eyes. “Thanks but the answer is still a resounding ‘no.’”

  “But you haven’t asked about their appearance—my appearance—from the waist down.” A slow, cruel smile curved her pale lips. “Shall I show you, my future mate? Shall I introduce you to your future daughters?”

  Before I could say, ‘no, absolutely fucking not,’ she had thrown open her long white gown.

  I looked—I couldn’t help it. I looked because it was one of the most bizarre things I’ve ever seen and let me tell you, I’ve been around the galaxy and seen some shit.

  Her breasts were tiny and pointed with pale pink nipples but those weren’t what held my eyes. I had thought the Widow was just extra long in the legs—and she was—in a way. But she had eight legs, all sprouting from a bulging white body which dragged against the web