First Destroy All Giant Monsters (The World Wide Witches Research Association) (2 page)

No, children, this book was definitely not like the others.

The title however was enough to stop his heart.

“
First Destroy All Giant Monsters
? Monsters?
Monsters
? Oh, damn it. Then the lassie needs to come home now, right?”

Behind him the library door opened with a long squeak. A squeak that in this well maintained house should not exist.

Smoke left the room at a run.

* * * * *

The sky above Karl was a vivid burning orange. The rocky ground a dirty blue. There were no trees, no shelter, and no water of any kind or color. He sprawled on the ground remembering there was nothing here, nothing but the heat and the chase.

Karl panted, drawing in sooty tasting air that tore his throat – hot and sharp. His arms trembled as he pushed upright, staggering to his feet. The world around him shook and swayed and he stumbled, slicing his knees on the sharp stones. Too tired to feel the pain he watched as the blood dripped silently from the wounds.

Dry air sucked the sweat from his skin and caked his hair with salt. Beyond the sound of his own breathing he could hear the howls of the hunters, celebrating. They’d found his scent again and ran lightly over the dusty ground toward him.

He fought to his feet. No matter how many times he made this run, or how much his body ached to lie down and die, his pride, his spirit would not surrender. So he ran, lurching barefoot over burning rocks: naked, weaponless, and alone.

The pack crested the hill behind him and he glanced back to see the leader pause to lick his blood from the stone. Her pelt was glossy black where; when he’d first seen her – how long ago? – it had been matted and grey. In the sickly light her eyes glowed a brilliant green. She watched him, mouth open in a vicious canine grin as she licked the last spots of blood. The pack clustered close awaiting her command. With a flick of her head she fired them off, howling after him.

Unaffected by the heat and the dust, they covered the distance in an instant. He turned to run, feeling as if he were wading neck deep in mud. They would catch him. They always did. He couldn’t find traction, couldn’t find speed. Couldn’t … couldn’t escape.

One moment the bitch crouched far behind him on the stone, the next she was before him, blocking the path; rearing up she leapt and crashed onto his chest. He pushed futilely at her, his hands tangling in her pelt as he tried to hold her snapping teeth away from his throat. The other wolves rushed at his legs, knocking him to the ground. Fur, paws, and claws pounded against his skin. He could taste their fetid breath as their jaws snapped above his face. Heat and pressure built in him, filling his mind, his body. Each inch of him aching – stretching. It was as if he tried to contain a burning building’s worth of flame within his body. Fire tore through his nerves and muscles. His back arched as pain crested, overwhelming his mind, his strength. He screamed as the pressure and heat fled from him, leaping through his limbs and out into the pack. Used and exhausted his body thudded limply onto the heated stones.

Tongue lolling the she-wolf stalked toward him and gazed into his eyes. Her hips and legs swaying, eyes heavy lidded and sleepy, she appeared satisfied, almost sensuously satiated. She studied his agony filled eyes then raised her muzzle and howled. Her pack joined her in song.

Gasping and trembling Karl came upright in the bed. The twisted sheets were tangled around his neck and chest restricting his breathing. Blood ran from the injuries he’d torn into his own skin. There was a thin slice across his chest. Broken, abraded skin on both knees. He pulled the sweat soaked sheets away from his body and thudded down onto the mattress to lie staring up at the ceiling. The alarm clock beside his bed read 5:16 a.m. With one arm he reached out for the bottle of water and the painkillers he’d left waiting.

Once he’d swallowed the medication and half the water his arms dropped heavily back onto the bed and he lay unmoving, concentrating on calming his ragged breathing. The details of the dream faded. All he could remember was the terror. No different from yesterday morning or the day before and the hardest thing to face … tomorrow morning would be the same. The same terror. The same pain. The same mysterious injuries. It was hardly the first time he’d ended up bleeding from injuries no one could explain. His feet ached and burned, legs trembled with fatigue even though he’d been lying in his bed for hours.

Years ago he’d danced all night, fought in each elimination round of the karate contests with ease. He’d been strong. Healthy.

He laughed weakly – what? Was he such an old man now he thought of his youth as years ago? Not that anyone could tell by looking, but he was barely thirty. Not an old man by any measure, but God, he felt old.

So old. So tired.

So tired of being tired.

He turned onto his side and watched the trees outside his window moving in the breeze, lit from behind by a flickering Diner sign. That small normality drew him further away from the nightmare. He knew from long experience that he would get no more sleep tonight. In an hour or so his strength would return to the point that he would be able to fall out of bed, take a shower, and get on with pretending he had a life. Until then, he watched the light and the trees.

Waiting.

* * * * *

Amber Kemp, Assistant Vice President for Technical Services, hit the key that would send her program changes down into the development test server. A glance at the clock at the bottom of her screen had her rubbing her face and groaning. The changes, if they worked, needed three hours to run – maybe. If they didn’t work first time through then she was looking at days of searching through the undocumented code of two different proprietary programs looking for the conflict, then dreaming up a fix.

She raised her head and glanced around the computer “lab.” Most of the time she worked seven floors up and one building over in the main IT department. Tonight, since it seemed likely she’d be pulling an all-nighter, she’d elected to work in the extremely secure room that actually contained the main servers for Trishanara Bank.

The alternative was to be the only living person on her floor (she never counted the two ghosts or the gremlin) and while she was confident in her ability to cope with any moron who might disturb her, there was something primal and spooky about being the only person in a room that usually contained two hundred.

Ghosts didn’t bother her; silence did.

Besides she didn’t want to accidentally zap a security guard. Such things caused talk and with the recent merger making people nervous she didn’t want any weird, well,
weirder
gossip going around.

No one paid attention to the little scented garden of stones and incense that she’d put on the corner of her desk to calm the ghosts (girls will be girls) or to the broken antique Atari that she’d made into a home, and a trap, for the gremlin. After all, a certain measure of eccentricity was required of a computer dweeb.

She glanced at the clock again. It was too late to go home, too early to start a new day’s work.

Keeping an eye out on the night crew she reached into her handbag for her extremely tiny and well hacked micro-mini computer. There was no “real” work to do until the program patch she’d created finished loading, assuming the damned thing installed without conflicts. She didn’t trust the old undocumented program to behave itself so she couldn’t risk a power nap, but she could spend a little time checking in on her aunt’s reason for living – the website of
The World Wide Witch’s Research Association and Pinochle Club.

She worked her way through the security levels of the website. Most people idly traveling the interwebs would only see the superficial, outer layer of the site. It had some interesting information about the origins of witchcraft, a couple of essays refuting some of the stranger myths of magic, pretty pictures of public rituals, and a few light and innocuous spell outlines to satisfy the dilettante or the new seeker after knowledge; but deep under passwords and security firewalls that wouldn’t be amiss in a large bank or paranoid small nation was the real work of the WWWRAPC.

Since her days as a high school geek, Amber (head of the AV club, chess club, and science fiction fan club) had held the title of Information Coordinator of the WWWRAPC. It was her job to maintain the website, check the site for spell requests, see which ingredient was being tested this week, and randomly assign spell requests to one of hundreds of witches associated with the project, who were scattered around the world.

Aunt Lucinda took care of the correlation of the results, thank all the Elementals, although Amber’s most recent contribution to the project was the creation of a data mining program for the twenty-five years of data already collected.

Amber checked the membership list, made certain that those witches who were supposed to be casting spells filed the spell as completed (or gave a good excuse), and sent a few reminder emails to the customers asking them to file their response reports – and ignored the flashing urgent message from her private email box.

A few months ago her aunt had started nagging – there was no other way to describe it –
demanding
that Amber give up her life of leisure, luxury, and technology in New York City and head out to the boondocks to begin her long overdue magical apprenticeship.

Unfortunately for Aunt Lucinda, that demand had arrived the very same day that her father had sent a “gift” – the payment for her first semester in a graduate degree program in Statistical Analysis and Bioinformatics.

Never mind that Amber hadn’t expressed an interest in the subject. Never mind that she was happy with her current position and hoping for a promotion once the agitation from the merger calmed down.

Both sides of her family had ambitions on her behalf. Had plans for her life. Had
strong
opinions on what she should do with her time on Mother Earth.

She should be grateful that her mother didn’t once hint that grandchildren would be a good idea; that would have been the absolute, totally, very last straw.

In the interest of not being arrested for Patricide and Auntie-cide Amber changed all her phone numbers and email addresses, did a find-me-not spell for other forms of family communication, and for the last few months she’d hidden from the two branches of her family – the scientists and the psychics.

There was nothing in the world that could make her more jealous of orphans than having to deal with the reality of a “caring” family. It was enough to make ear wax melt.

It was Amber’s New Year’s Resolution never to be the piñata in her own personal family feud.

The cycling of the security doors echoed through the lab giving everyone inside enough warning to put their forbidden food and drink out of sight and wake up those taking a cat-nap. Amber flipped her mini laptop shut and let it slide back into its bag. Two of the other night duty computer dweebs glanced toward the door, then dropped their eyes and tried to look busy when a “suit” came in with a security guard.

The presence of a suit in an area usually occupied by the barely business casual crowd was a source of concern, especially at Oh-My-God o’clock in the morning. Amber winced in sympathy for whichever of the dweebs the suit was here to see and turned her eyes elsewhere.

It was a most unpleasant shock when the hollow footsteps stopped beside her workstation.

“Ms. Kemp?”

Amber raised her eyes slowly, pausing to check out the name tag attached to the suit before sighing. Nothing good could come of seeing the new Chief Technology Officer at this hour of the morning.

Nothing good at all.

An hour later Amber leaned against the wall of her apartment building elevator, eyes closed, and tried not to think. The weight of the box in her hands was not anywhere near as heavy as the dragging weight on her heart. She’d been fired, laid off, cut loose, outsourced, dumped, let go … all without any notice at all.

They’d waited.

Damn them all, they’d waited.

They’d known for days that she was going to be fired. They’d let her attend meetings, work on projects, brainstorm with the newly merged team, and when an emergency had occurred, asked her to work all night to find the fix.

The fact that she was the only one with the particular broad set of skills and computer language knowledge to handle the fix didn’t make them think they should keep her. No. They used her one last time, then kicked her to the curb.

Then they had “let her go” as if she were a kite or a balloon.

There you go. You aren’t important. Go fly away and don’t let the door hit you in the ass on the way out.

The evil little … insects.

Her ex-boss had spent the night in his office shadow-monitoring her work, each keyboard stroke and click, and when she’d dropped the patch into the server he’d called security, blocked her passwords, and after she’d spent the whole day and night working on an problem only she could solve, stood over her while she emptied out her desk drawers and served her with the Do-Not-Compete papers.

An unbearably smug asshole from Human Resources had come in early to process her paperwork (to be fair it was the nervous smugness of the-one-who-is-still-employed-but-worried) but it hadn’t stopped him from ordering her escorted from the building by a security detail.

So much for her brilliant career in the big city.

How the hell was she going to explain this to her dad? Her mother would be supportive and sympathetic, but her dad would consider it just another example of Amber’s inability to cope with the real world. It wouldn’t be the economy’s fault or the merger’s or any other such thing, but the influence of Amber’s mother’s crazy relatives.

The contamination of the psychics.

If Amber would only take after her father’s practical side of the family no doubt she would still be employed. No doubt her new employers had somehow sensed the existence of the far-out side of her family and rushed her from the building least she contaminate their scientific essence? Practical banker’s souls?