Somewhere up in the shadows, her nest hung. I could hear her humming to herself. The holding tank was full of shadows, and shadows within shadows. Somewhere in its recent past it could have passed for a police station’s drunk tank – empty except for a couple of uncomfortable benches and a commode in the corner – but now sheets of filmy gray silk draped from the ceiling to the floor and between the walls, and silvery-gray bundles that looked like strings of watermelons wrapped in bedsheets littered the floor. One of the benches had been torn right out of the concrete, leaving potholes in the floor.

She’d unscrewed the lights in her tank, leaving it in a sort or perpetual twilight, so I didn’t bother to turn on the lights in the observation room. Doing so would have lit up my table like a stage, and all I would have been able to see in the window was my own reflection. I saw more than enough of that every day. Cupping my penlight behind my hand, I read over the notes on the clipboard. The project title at the top of the first page was a preposterously transparent, ‘Spiderwoman’.

“I’m sure you know the story of Spiderman, right?” On the other side of the glass, the humming had stopped.

I didn’t know what I’d expected from her voice, but it sounded like any average college-aged girl. I flicked off my pen-light and stared through the thick Plexiglas window, searching for the source of the voice.

“I mean, I hear it was a popular comic book, and then there were all those movies, not that I watched them. Not when they were in the theater, anyway. I was more of a Hope Floats kind of girl. Back then.”

I struggled to place her voice in the tank; through the spiracles in the window it sounded distant.

“Maybe you haven’t seen it. You don’t look like you spend much ‘you-time’. Plenty of food time, though. A little round in the face, aren’t you? And where did you get that suit… Wal-mart?” She snickered before continuing in a condescending, teacher-like tone. “So the premise of Spiderman was that this dork is bitten by a nuclear spider or something and starts getting all of these spider-related abilities, like he can climb up walls and shoot spidersilk from his wrists and he becomes this expert tailor – with Lycra, no less. Pretty dumb, right? If he’s got spider DNA floating around in him, why wouldn’t he just grow eight legs or six eyes?  Why wouldn’t his face turn into some palpitating butt-head like in The Fly?”

Some of the shrouds on the other side of the glass swayed, and her voice came from a little closer, I thought.

“I’ve seen that movie now, too. Jeff Goldblum. Yummy!” Now she sighed, almost wistfully. “Well, the premise wasn’t so dumb, I guess. Granted: that spider that bit me wasn’t some atomic freak – it had been genetically altered to manufacture a retro-viral toxinase that was suppose to give cow udders the ability to produce silk, and apparently they hadn’t quite finished working the bugs out. But I guess the end result is more or less the same.”

I flinched with surprise when something clicked against the Plexiglas. Slowly, a silhouette – human, but upside-down – descended until it perched at the center of the window, hovering at the hole there. At the center of the shadow, pressing – almost rubbing against the window, was a bright-red hourglass that seemed to catch all the spare light in the room. I heard sniffing through the spiracle.

“You’re here to analyze me, of course. Like the others. To see what use you may have for me. So let’s go down the superhero checklist, shall we?

“Pudgy, ungainly body transforms into the svelte, muscular, curvy body of a goddess. Check! I’ll even let you touch it if you just come around the other side of the glass…”

I stared back blankly, unmoved. I flicked my penlight on to scribble a few more notes in the margins of her file.

“No?” she pouted. “Or not yet? Maybe later, hmm? So..

“Senses sharpened and refined? Check! Everything’s so much clearer, but especially touch and smell. They’re like new dimensions! You’d be surprised what you haven’t realized you’re missing.

“Ability to scale sheer glass walls and hang from ceilings? I’m getting much better, as you can see, though I still need a dragline. I don’t care who you are – if you can hold your own bodyweight on the tips of your fingers, then you must be some kind of superhero.”

I sat patiently through a long pause, during which she sniffed at the spiracle again. In the moments while the pen-light was out, my eyes adjusted enough to make out the pale smudge of her face at the bottom of her shadow.

“Hmmm. You really are dense, aren’t you? That was an opportunity for you to compliment me. You keep missing those.

“Where did I leave off? Newly-found science aptitude? Hardly! But when a bunch of scientists lock you up for months, you learn how to say ‘retro-viral toxinase’ without getting a cramp in your tongue.

“Super-strong, sticky webbing flying out of my hands?” She chortled. “Half-check on that one, dude. I can spin a better silk than any cow ever will, but it doesn’t come out of my wrists, if you know what I mean… Think about it – where do spiders have their spinnerets? It’s not anywhere by which I want to be hanging from the side of a building, I’ll tell you that. But it’s had its uses in bed.

“Come on… not even a little laugh? Is it so hard to smile? I can think of other ways to make you smile.” She grinned, and her white teeth flashed almost as brightly as the hourglass on her belly. They had a jagged look to them.

“Stupid costume? Uhmmm… no.  Not stupid, anyway.”

My brow raised – the first change in expression I’d allowed since entering the observation room. She pressed up against the glass again and sniffed.

“Okay, I take that back. It’s not like you’re going to see me bouncing around town in a cherry-red unitard with some kind of logo turning my chest into a target, but this isn’t jeans and a t-shirt, either. It’s just those little fibers in my fingertips and toes – the ones that let me climb – they’re other places, too. When I don’t think about it, they stick out and things get snagged and my clothes ride up and… Well, I guess now that I finally have the body to wear something form-fitting, I have a reason, too. It’s that or go naked, but some of the scientists thought that was too distracting… So, sure – I ended up wearing a Lycra and leather bodysuit, but it was only because that’s what the delicious gentlemen in the white lab coats thought would be the most comfortable for me. I kind of like it now. It’s sexy.

“But I swear I’m not a freak. Really.

“Oh, and my boyfriend suggested the black-widow hourglass, so that’s his fault. I take no responsibility for that.”

I tapped my pen against the top of the clipboard, then wrote something quickly without turning on the light. I could see her better now – see her as a shape instead of a shadow. The red hourglass was distracting, but she did have an idealized figure, and she moved with a creepy grace: alien but sexualized. Her legs had spread wide over the glass, and while she was speaking she had begun to rub her pubis against the window, leaving an opaque gray smear.

“Last but not least… Let’s see… Some idiotic overwhelming desire to go out and fight crime?” Her voice lowered to a sing-song hiss. “With great power comes great responsibility.” She cackled, and for a moment her voice sounded nothing like any average college-aged girl. Then her shadow and hourglass were gone and her words came more faintly, from the other side of the room. “Whatever! I was more dangerous behind the wheel of my Honda than I am now.”

The web-encrusted lumps scattered around the floor of her room disagreed with her, but I said nothing.

“On the other hand, while my sense of ‘duty’ hasn’t gone into overtime, my hormones have. It’s just that they keep me so hungry!” Her voice rose to a whine, and returned to the hole in the Plexiglas with her shadow. Her pale face pressed right up to the hole, and I could see her thick, dark lips pursing through it. “They got my wires crossed, you know? I can’t separate the desire to fuck with the need to feed, and trust me, you’re all some sexy food.” An equally dark tongue flicked out between her lips. “Do you want to know what I fantasize about? What makes me really wet? The others did.” Only one hand held her against the glass now; the other disappeared between her legs. “I think about sinking my fangs into you – yes, you – someplace nice and soft, like your neck or the inside of your elbow, or maybe someplace naughtier, where my teeth can just squish deliciously into your flesh. I can smell your every emotion wafting away from your skin. And then I hold you tight while my venom runs through your veins like heroin. Skin to skin, I can feel the fire burning in you.” She sighed wistfully before her voice became excited. “Have you seen what happens? Have you seen the video? Once the poison spread to your spine you’d get the shakes really bad, but they’d pass as soon as your insides started turning to jello-salad. Do you know what comes next? Do you like kisses? Big, wet, sloppy kisses? Who, doesn’t, right? That’s when the real fun begins, but I don’t think you’d be able to appreciate it by that point. But I do.”

She seemed to have talked herself into a state of arousal, because she was rubbing against the glass again, staining it gray, and then she leaped away from the glass and disappeared behind the shrouds of her webbing. Her voice moved back and forth, coming from first one spiracle, then another. “Maybe I am dangerous. Hunh? I wasn’t always in this terrarium. I mean, I really liked my boyfriend and all – maybe we would have had a future together – but he was too delicious! What do you think I’d do to you!”

She grunted out the last word, and it was accompanied by a loud crack. Light and dark lines shot out like… well, like a spider web through the Plexiglas, centered on the gray smears she’d left. Taut webbing twanged from the other side.

I started out of my chair, sending it clattering to the floor, and clutched the clipboard to my chest.

The Plexiglas thumped inward and crackled again. Little cubes of plastic sprinkled over the ground of the observation room.

“Julie, STOP!”

“Ooooooh. He speaks.” Her shape, now obscured by the lacework of cracks, began to heave against the ruined window, trying to push it through. Her words were punctuated with the strain of her effort. “Or else what?” The center of the window bulged, and more plastic fell to the floor by my feet. “You’ll gas me? They tried that.” This time the bulge became more of a cone, and the layers of plastic separated. “You’ll kill me? I don’t know which department you belong to, but I guarantee your bosses would choose my life over yours.” Pale fingers ending in talons stabbed through the center of the bulge and began to stretch a hole.

“I’ll leave.” My hand had already begun to turn the handle on the door behind me.

“I’ll catch you.” She laughed. “And then we’ll play.”

“No. You won’t. And then we’ll never be friends.”

“Friends!” she snorted. “I don’t have any friends anymore.” But she had pulled her fingers back through the hole and lined up her eye to look me over. Her eye had no sclera; it was only a glistening black almond set in pale, almost blue skin. “What do you want?”

My voice lowered half an octave as I stoked it full of confidence. “The better question is, what do you want?”

Her voice, in turn, became impatient. “I told you. I need to eat. It’s been a week since I’ve seen anyone in here.”

“Then I’ll feed you.”

Her eye widened, then narrowed to a slit. “Not a pig or a dog. They already tried that. I could barely keep them down, they made me so sick.”

“Oh, no,” I countered. “That wouldn’t be a good way to start a friendship. Trust me – I’ve done my reading.  I know what you want.” My mind turned quickly, running through what I was about to do, and I stepped forward to set down the clipboard. “But you have to do something for me first. ”

“What?”

“Turn on the lights – I want to watch.”

The suspicion bled from her eye to be replaced with a crow’s foot wrinkle. “A voyeur, eh? I don’t mind. But you’re the one who has to make the first move. After all, I’m going to have a meal today whether I come through this glass or not. So tell me your name.”

“Williams,” I grunted.

“You’re a liar! No-one as boring as you look could have such a boring name, too. You’re a Suckaluckovitch or a Bloodowski or a Thormagnusson. But it doesn’t matter. Williams is good enough. It’s something I can call my new ‘friend’.”

Then she was gone – in a quick leap she sprung out of the view of the ruined window. Up from the ceiling came sounds of scraping and scratching.

Once she was gone, I slumped and let out a long breath I hadn’t realized I was holding. Beneath my suit I was sweating profusely; I pulled a handkerchief from my pocket and dabbed the beads from my hairless hairline, from my brows, my lips, and from behind my neck where it bulged out above the collar of what really had been an expensive suit. My hands shook and I nearly fumbled my glasses to the ground when I cleaned them with my tie. I only just managed to shove my handkerchief back into my pocket, take a deep, calming breath, and fish out my camera from its case before the neon lamps above the tank flickered on, one at a time.

“There you go, ‘Williams’.” She lowered herself back down to the ruined glass, and poked her fingers through the hole again, widening it by an inch. “Now where’s my dinner? Or have you decided to play with me after all? You’re my type, you know. Alive, and all.”

I cleared my throat. “Thank you, Julie. Now please step back to the corner.”

When she backed away from the window, I pushed the lens end of the camera through the hole she’d made and focused on her. I caught her face full in the light and tightened the focus further – I’d need to pull some HD stills later for the department. She still had the shape of the face in her file – mostly. Her blue lips were swollen, puckered into a grin, and behind them gnashed a whole row of glistening fangs. Two obsidian jewels glistened on either temple, blinking like her still-human-shaped eyes. She’d tied her black hair back the way a lot of girls did, but it had begun to slicken and merge into something single, hard and glinting like chitin.

I zoomed back to a wider frame, to take in her whole body, and I had to force myself to swallow the lump in my throat. Something had erupted from her back – proto-limbs bursting through seams in her bodysuit behind her shoulders and above her hips. The tiny hands at the end of the arms mimicked the movements of her real hands and tried to clap in delight as the door in the back of the tank opened. The little feet on the end of foot-long, double-jointed legs flexed and stretched out from her hips. Something about the way she moved made me thing she hadn’t even noticed the deformities.

The door to the tank knocked open, slamming into the torn-out bench, so I zoomed out to an wider frame. The room was even more of a mess than it had seemed in the dark: between the tattered sheets of silk hanging from the walls and the ceiling, cords as thick as my smallest finger dangled like jungle vines. Some of the bundles on the floor had a disturbing “mummy” quality to them.

The screaming – the shouting and cursing in some foreign language – began even before the door opened, but now a slender man in his late twenties, arms wrapped in a straight-jacket, stumbled into the room at the end of a long pole, and the volume increased. The pole quickly retracted and drew back, slamming the door shut behind it, and the man screamed again. I didn’t know his name – he was an informant gone bad sent over by another agency, an illegal from those boats that always turn up in the harbor. In other words, no one who would miss him would come looking for him. I didn’t feel too bad for him – I didn’t feel much one way or the other. He wasn’t crazy, despite the straight-jacket. One of the sick yahoo’s on my team had gotten his kicks earlier by describing in detail what was in store for him, and that was the only way we could keep this guy under control afterward.

I don’t think he’d even spotted Julie; he fought his way back to his feet and back to the metal door, began shouting at it and kicking it until the metal dented.

Julie danced excitedly in her corner, squeezing her thighs together like she was holding a full bladder. She licked her lips. She grinned at the camera and said something I later was able to transcribe as, “All wrapped up like a present! You shouldn’t have!” And then I had to move the camera quickly: she scampered up the wall, ducking between her own shreds of silk, and dropped down onto the guy from the ceiling.

For a few moments they wrestled and rolled against the wall. There was no contest – he had no hope of winning; he was just being handled while she got herself into a better position. Once her legs were wrapped around his hips and her arms around his shoulders, she bit deep into the base of his neck. His cries begin to gurgle away, then fade to mewling as she stroked his hair and pumped her venom into his blood. A thick, black-green ichor dribbled from the corner of her lips, but she didn’t release his neck until his legs wobbled and they slid together to the floor.

She still sat in his lap, her thighs clenched around his hips, when he began to shiver uncontrollably. She hugged him and kissed his face and whispered into his ear until the shakes passed and his eyes glazed and his mouth fell open.

He was no small man, but she tucked him under her arm and clambered up the wall into the funnel of thick, corded silk in the ceiling corner, draped him over a cluster of threads, and secured him with a few stick strands that squirted out from between her thighs.

I tightened the focus again, and caught her grinning down at the camera.

“Mmm, baby.” With quick, efficient movements she’d broken the straps on the straight jacket, and while it fluttered down toward the floor she tore off his shirt in pieces. His slacks were next, but once the fly opened an erection popped up like a light-switch. “Did you know,” she called down to me, “That it takes a muscle relaxant to make a hard-on? I can tell you that he’s really relaxed now.” His pants and shoes snagged in a lower tier of webbing, and she didn’t bother with his socks.

I had to zoom in again to see what she was doing, and I almost pulled right back out when I saw her fingers down in her crotch, and refocused to find her kissing and whispering to his erection like a pet. But this was for the record, so I rolled my tightening shoulders and shifted my legs to make more room in my pants. I didn’t have the same excuse for an erection.

“It doesn’t last long, though,” she continued, whining just a bit. “Unfortunately. Another half-hour and he’ll be as soft as jelly all over. Maybe next time I won’t be as hungry and you can get a better film, eh?” Her fingers came away from her crotch trailing strands of silk which she wrapped around his neck. Over the next few minutes she wrapped him, sometimes using her fingers to guide her threads under his arms or around his waist, sometimes crouching right over him and rubbing herself against him while she turned him like a rotisserie beneath her. Either way she seemed to enjoy it – she moaned and gasped and giggled as convincingly as any aspiring porn starlet, and spoke to her dinner in tones too low for me to pick up. I thought her hips gyrated and bucked more than was strictly necessary. She fussed over her work, snipping threads with her teeth, tightening loose ends, adding more silk wherever her spider mind told her to.

I stayed longer than I meant to – longer than I should have. With the glass broken it was still too dangerous, and if I let myself relax she could be on me in seconds. But she seemed to be delighted up in her nest, the rest of the world forgotten, and I really didn’t expect any trouble from her once she was done eating. I thought it would make me sick to watch her feed, but it didn’t. I’m glad I made the room in my pants. I won’t admit to being aroused either, not officially. Not if I want to stay the lead on her case. I was transfixed by her movement.

She hung him head-down like an IV from an anchor point on the ceiling, tested to be sure he was secure, and climbed up to wrap herself around him. Her legs clutched his, her arms twined around his shoulders, and her bluish face pressed against his mummy’s head while they dangled, swinging gently. With one clawed finger she cut a hole through the silk that covered his mouth, spread his teeth apart, and closed her lips over his before his liquefied innards began to spill out.

While she suckled for the next hour, I watched, never thinking about moving. My arousal had passed, though there were moments when she dry-humped the cocoon – probably to wrap it in tighter silk and squeeze more of him into her greedy mouth – when some part of me tingled. She moaned happily, and her belly swelled as the cocoon shriveled.

When at last she cut the spent cocoon free to tumble to the floor, and fell back herself to laze in her funnel, her belly had plumped up to about the size of a watermelon. The Lycra in her bodysuit had stretched along its seams, as though it had been designed for exactly that purpose. She rubbed the bulge with satisfaction. “Are you still there, Williams.” It wasn’t really a question.

“Yes. Are you happy, Julie?”

“Yes, very. For now.”

“Then we’re friends.”

“For now,” she agreed.

It was a good start, and my section chief would be happy. I had no idea how long it would take for the drugs they’d pumped into that man to work in her system, but I could wait. I used the time to wonder just what kind of bribe I’d have to give her to win her trust after that.