First Destroy All Giant Monsters (The World Wide Witches Research Association) (16 page)

Which meant if she wanted to leave …?

Amber groaned as she extended her attention up into the Ethereal Planes. Air would not be a good choice, no Air in the Ether, no Water either. Not Fire – it was still angry at her. Earth, now that was the best choice. She was, as was all human kind, of Earth. She, her body, currently rested on Earth.

She reached through her life cord, through her body, and down into the earth beneath and pulled. The energy stirred slowly in response. She directed a small amount of the flow toward the filament and it lengthened. A little more. A little more and with each gulp of power the filament loosened. It was like coaxing a kitten with treats. A bit at a time. Slow and greedy.

Finally there was more energy being given to it from her spirit than from her body and its grip loosened, lengthened. It followed her, like toilet paper attached to her shoe, out into the Ethereal Planes.

Amber checked that her life cord was still strong and attached before looking out over the Planes. The strands of the web were still there but seemed weaker, thinner, today. Withered. Amber ran her bodiless fingers beside one of the strands and cried out in shock and pain.

Each one of the filaments she could see was attached to a different person. All those lines throbbing against the Ether represented a life being drained away.

So many people. So much life energy. What was this creature and were Lucinda and Robyn part of this web? Were they desperately giving Elemental energy to this creature to survive? And would the creature realize that Amber could connect to Elemental strength giving it more, so much more than an ordinary mortal?

Uh.

That was a thought. She cut off the flow from Earth and her spirit clenched as the weight of the web settled on her again.

So heavy. So demanding. She could barely hear the sound of the bells. She directed her attention down and was relieved to see Smoke patiently marking the seconds.

Okay.

She was out of body, tired, and had a job to do. Hanging around in the middle of everything was not helping matters. The sooner she understood what was happening the sooner she could get free.

And if Lucinda and Robyn were involved in this, given their personalities, they’d be in the middle of it.

So, Your Honor, that was when I decided to do something incredibly stupid.

She looked at the web. For the most part the filaments were long, thin, and weak. She searched about, first one direction then another until she saw the web thickening. Just a little.

Okay.

Could be right, could be wrong. Make a decision, Amber.

She followed it.

Distance on the Ethereal was misleading Amber discovered. Although in the real world Laurenville was just an hour down the road, on the Ethereal it seemed to take awhile to reach it. She wasn’t at all surprised to see the filament she was following touch down at the bookstore. Karl Benn, seated behind his desk in the manager’s office, was definitely part of it.

She paused to examine him. There was a mass of thin threads entering him, including the one attached to her and a different sort of thread as well … leading away?

Odd. It was heavier and it felt different. Hesitantly Amber ran her “fingers” along the strand. If the filaments were like old-fashioned phone lines then this thing leaving Karl was a six-lane highway.

Firming her intention Amber leapt into the Ether following the highway.

She had to pay attention to see the world beneath her as it might appear to human eyes. Generally towns and cities appeared as colored smudges, stains beneath the glow of the Ethereal. If she concentrated she could
see
the buildings. It was easier to see people and their auras within the buildings than the brick walls, but she decided, after realizing the bright light she saw was two people making love, that she’d look at the outside of the buildings, thanks very much.

It wasn’t long after that she overflew an urban area. There were some fragile ley lines barely visible beneath the Ethereal glow so it didn’t surprise her that the cord she was following was now massive, thick, and pulsating with energy. The cord descended through banks of high rise buildings down to a building near a river.

She flew around it, astonished when she could not find the cord leading out of the building. Then she mentally slapped herself on the forehead. If it went in and didn’t come out that meant that it had stopped somewhere inside.

A destination.

For the first time she’d found an end to the web that didn’t appear to be attached to a person.

That also meant that the spider might be inside this ordinary appearing building.

Odd that the web was at the terminus of a single thread rather than the center, but she was the one using the web analogy. It might not be like a natural spider’s web. She thought about letting out a sigh of relief. She might not be facing a spider monster.

Then she was not so relaxed.

It might be something worse.

She considered looking about for some landmarks. A sign – Welcome to Wherever, USA and coming back to her own body to look about. She’d be less vulnerable as a person than a spirit. A person could do magic.

She flew around the building slowly so that she could look into windows, then repeated the forehead slap.

She didn’t need windows.

Obviously this out-of-body thing took some getting used to. She wanted to take a deep breath, but that was pointless. She wanted to go home and get advice, but from whom?

There were no guarantees that whatever she chose to do would be a good idea; therefore … she entered the building.

To her surprise her destination was a perfectly ordinary huge loft apartment. Along one side, floor-to-ceiling windows framed by heavy bright colored velvet curtains opened over the grey waterway. She slipped through the walls, flickering through one extravagantly decorated room after another. Antique rugs, thick and vibrant covered the wooden floors. Stark furniture and occasional tables existed to support delicate sculptures of the female form divine, or wolves. Wolves running, leaping, and hunting.

Wolves.

Oh.

So the dreamscape and the wolf dream
were
part of the web.

Not an ordinary apartment, then. And not an ordinary nightmare.

Amber drifted on. To her spirit eyes every item, surface, and wall was blurred by layer upon layer of the clinging threads. The filament she’d followed might have entered as a single line, but inside the room it fractured into many, many thinner lines. She passed through another wall into a barely furnished bedroom. The only item of furniture in the room was a white sheeted king-sized mattress on the floor surrounded by the melted wax of hundreds of candles. The walls, ceiling, and floor were painted black with silver and gold sigils marking the cardinal points. The floor around the bed was marked with images Amber remembered vaguely from a textbook on the Qabalah, within a painted circle of power similar to the one Amber had drawn on the library floor miles ago.

Amber had a brief flashback to the cop shows she’d watched. Smiling slightly she visualized herself standing, one hand on an outthrust hip, putting a candy in her mouth and turning to her partner.

It’s a sad day when a witch goes bad, Danno.

But it wasn’t funny. All her aunt’s lectures about abuse of power and ethics came back to sit in her nonexistent stomach like lead – or was that the web she was feeling?

No.

She didn’t like the feel of the room. It was heavy, cloying … full? She didn’t doubt that if she came here in her own body she’d hate the place. It was too much like a scene from a bad Hollywood sex/horror movie.

This definitely was the bad woman’s room.

Not a man. The feminine sculptures in the other rooms, even though they showed naked women, were more the type of things collected by a woman asserting her feminine power.

The woman who lived here probably wore enough eye makeup to make it difficult to open her eyes.

Yech.

Either way, she was convinced this was the room from which the web was cast.

There wasn’t a monster, in the strictest sense, behind the web, but a person. This was the beginning and the end of the spell. She hovered over the floor memorizing each of the symbols painted there. When she got back to the library she’d have to look them up in the Qabalah. It might give a clue to the purpose of all this. The web. The spell. Everything.

She hadn’t seen any sign that Lucinda and Robyn were here, had ever been here. No sense of their energies on the web. That was both good and bad. She didn’t want to think about the bad.

Turning her attention upwards she lifted toward the ceiling. To her complete shock the ceiling refused to let her through.

She sank back, running hands over the black surface and drew back … covered in threads that pulsed and pulled.

It wasn’t paint on the walls.

It was the web.

Chapter Five

It took her quite a while to exhaust her profane vocabulary.

She stared at her hands, covered in fibers.

Shit, she was in trouble. The fibers had attached themselves to her spirit form and were trying their damnedest to drain her dry.

One filament was bad enough. All of these and … And she was feeling exhausted.

Smoke had told her that nothing was felt on the Ethereal Planes. No pain, no pleasure, no perception of time or distance, and particularly no fatigue. Which was the blessing and the danger of the Ethereal Planes. She could travel beyond her strength and not know it until the life-bond broke. If she was feeling anything, particularly tired, then things must be very bad. Either her body was failing under the weight of the web or she’d been gone far too long.

She had to get back.

She stiffened, concentrating, and tried to remember how long it had been since she’d heard the chimes. Damn. No. She couldn’t hear them.

It might be because of the web or way back at Five Corners her body was no longer capable of hearing.

Don’t panic. Don’t think panic.

She pushed herself off the floor, thudded against the webs set into the walls and fell halfway back to the floor before her spirit stopped. She glanced around. Her spirit was hanging in mid-air looking for all the world as if she were suspended in a black hammock.

She struggled against the threads, trying to roll off the damned thing, and found her body caught, tight. With each movement the threads tightened more.

Damn it.

She approached the walls again, trying to see if there were any gap between the threads. Looking instead of touching. Would she live long enough to learn not to do that again? They were so tightly compressed that there was no space at all.

This … this is bad. In case I ever wondered what the definition of bad was, this is it.

She’d come into the room with one tiny filament of the web attached to her; now her spirit body was nearly cocooned by the web.

She tried to sense her beating heart, to breathe. In the very far distance came the familiar resonant bells.

Oh, thank you, Elementals.

She wasn’t dead yet.

From the speed of the beat she assumed that Smoke had become worried some time back and was trying to summon her home. A nice idea, and one with which she was entirely in agreement. However, an impatiently beaten meditation chime was not the key to getting out of this trap.

Which meant she was stuck in here until someone got her out, or she figured it out herself.

Or the owner of the apartment came back.

Oh, goodie, it
was
possible for the situation to get worse.

The clock is ticking. If Smoke is worried then I have maybe another hour before my body gives up waiting for its occupant and starts to die. So, let’s count that as a major problem and put getting home at the top of today’s to-do list.

Amber directed her attention to the walls and ceiling. As she’d no wish to be a bodiless, restless spirit haunting this apartment she had to get back home. This place was designed to keep energy in and she, even though bodiless, bore enough Elemental energy as well as her own life force to be subject to those marks on the floor. Since she was bodiless she couldn’t erase any of the spells or cast her own.

Damn it all. She knew the direction, she needed to get home; she simply had to get past this triple-cursed, sand-blasted, decaffeinated … lobster trap …

Amber examined her own thoughts. Lobster trap. Now there’s an interesting idea. The walls were covered in a mishmash of threads, so thick as to be patternless.

Unless they weren’t patternless.

Witches tended not to like things that had no rhythm, no design. They danced widdershins or deosil. They did spiral dances to raise power and circle dances for the turning of the year. Stone circles, rings of power. Witches loved the twisting path of power.

She looked down at the floor again.

Yes, that one. The gold painted Qabalahlic symbol at the north of the room. That was an energy raising spiral right next to a twist-turn-bind-and-ground symbol.

Since the witch had left her spell running when she left the circle it made sense that she would keep the energy turning to keep it fresh. Self-generating energy spell. Very clever.

Amber touched the mass of threads that covered her body, running a little energy down three threads and watching the movement of light along the edges as it spiraled away.

Yes, and indeed, yes
!

She added a little more to another set of threads and only the fact that she didn’t have a throat stopped her from shouting. The threads were not woven or randomly slapped about, they were
spiraled
. Just like the trick entrance to a lobster trap. A tunnel of threads let her through and then tightened behind her. Logically, to get out she needed to loosen the tunnel again.

Aligning herself midair with her cord and the mass of adhering threads, Amber started to rotate, watching the cord closely. It seemed to her after a few rotations that the cord was getting thinner, tighter. She stopped and started turning in the other direction. Soon the threads were loosening, gradually opening up into a small tunnel. Making a mental note to howl in triumph as soon as she had the necessary equipment, Amber extended her spirit down the narrow pathway and out into the apartment.