First Destroy All Giant Monsters (The World Wide Witches Research Association) (21 page)

“Is it ever different?”

“Yeah, well, I don’t know if it counts as different. There are two wolves who are always there … the male, the one who was there when it first started, he wasn’t there last night.”

“Probably because he died a couple of nights ago,” said Amber, tapping her chin and staring at the skyline.

Karl’s heart skipped a beat and he spun to face her, gravel spraying under his feet. “How the hell?”

Amber shrugged and Karl found the gentle movements of her breasts fascinating. Despite the achingly dry air he felt his mouth begin to water.

“I got pulled into this dreamscape the night after I was attacked in your store,” said Amber absently. “I thought it was a contact from a spirit guide, but it wasn’t. It didn’t have the right feel for a contact from the spirit teachers. A pack of wolves ran at me. When I didn’t move one of the males tried to bully me to get me to run. He failed. When I refused to be intimidated, the she-wolf tore his throat out.”

“Thursday night?” Karl shouted. “You saw one of the wolves die Thursday?”

Amber raised an eyebrow at him.

“A friend of yours?” she asked, trying to lighten the mood. It didn’t work.

Karl paled, deflated, and sank to the ground.

“You know … I’m beginning to think the answer to that is yes … and no.”

Amber touched his head lightly. “I don’t think it is helping us to stay here tonight. It would help if you could remember this dream.” She fed a little personal energy into him. “Carry this burden into the light, whereby it may be seen and healed … so mote it be.”

Chapter Six

Karl’s body thudded down onto the thick grass and he lay panting, staring up at the quarter moon. Amber staggered, then fell to her knees, hands digging deep into the grass. Doing spells of this caliber was harder with the weight of all these cords hanging off her spirit. She crawled back to the altar and dropped her fan. Grabbing two bottles of water from the ground beside the altar, she handed one to Karl and collapsed to lie beside him on the smooth grass. Karl broke the seal on his bottle and drank.

“That was …” he groaned and rubbed the cool plastic against his face.

“Do you remember any of it?”

Amber pulled up a blade of grass and studied the color and scent and let the reality ground her. The dreamscape had shaken her more than she wanted to admit, even to herself. The person – the witch – she was dealing with was older, more experienced. The complexity and depth of the images frightened her. She desperately wished there was a way to contact her aunt for advice. It would be such a relief to dump the whole mess in Aunt Lucinda’s lap and go back. Go back to being young and ignorant. Go back to using magic to make her indoor garden grow and casting the tarot for her girlfriends when her father wasn’t paying attention. The situation she was in was too real. Amber never expected to be in a life and death situation involving magic.

She was a researcher. A paper pusher – a digital data pusher. She’d never expected to be pulled out of her self-created digital ivory tower to deal with ghoulies and ghosties and things that ate souls in the night.

“Magic sucks,” said Karl, his breath sighing out of his body almost as a groan, “and I can speak from clear and certain personal knowledge. It sucks the big one.”

Amber lay down on the soft grass, drawing the strength of the living world into her body.

“I’ll admit that magic has its down side,” she said, “and you have plenty of experience with that.”

“Someone has made me a magical punching bag and I …” Karl sat up suddenly and twisted, planting a hand on each side of Amber’s head, leaning over her. “I want magic out of my life. I’m sick to death of it. I want you to dig this stuff out of me and then you can get the hell out, too.”

“Charming.”

Amber blinked in surprise at the attack. She was trying to help him and he was mad at her. The nitwit didn’t even have the sense to stay on the good side of the people who were trying to keep him alive. Then she remembered all the spells layered over his intuition, on his hands, and tied chokingly around his heart. In his current state of health, who knew how much more he could tolerate?

“How can I resist such a gracious invitation?” Amber drawled and wiggled out from under him, “In the meantime, we both need to rest.” She climbed to her feet and extended a hand down to him. “Let’s go inside.”

“To hell with that,” shouted Karl, “Grab your broomstick and get stirring. This has been in me long enough and I want it out now.”

Amber lowered her eyes to the grass. “I can’t do it. I don’t know how yet.”

Karl dragged himself off the ground and clutched the altar for support. Amber was impressed. She hadn’t thought he would be able to stand unassisted for another half hour at least.

“What do you mean you can’t do it? You said …”

“I said it was dangerous,” said Amber taking a leaf out of Smoke’s book and speaking with deadly calm. “I also said I hadn’t any idea what that was and how it’s bound to you. I still don’t, but we have more information. For one thing, you now remember the nightmare, which we have to take a closer look at, and what the heck’s this thing with the wolves?”

Amber started walking the end of the circle, pulling down the energy she’d raised. Karl followed her, ranting, anger boiling purple black in his aura.

“You’re wasting my time. I should have known this was some sort of setup. What am I going to have to pay to get you to …?”

Amber snatched her fan-wand from the altar and shoved the tip in his chest until he stepped back.

“Listen, bozo, money isn’t an issue in this house. You have no idea to what extent money isn’t an issue. But even if I knew how to remove all of the stuff that is on you, it’d take time. Have you any
idea
how many spells you have on you?”

Karl batted the fan away and growled. “No.”

“Neither do I, because they are layered, spell on top of spell. Someone has been using you as a magical bull’s-eye for years and if I were idiot enough to try and take them all off at one time, you would go insane. Assuming that you lived through the process.”

“I want this stuff
off
of me.” Karl gritted his teeth and moved closer to Amber, pushing her back against the altar.

Amber pushed back, her hands flat against his chest.

“And I will help remove them, I promise. But I can’t do it now, and I can’t do it all at once.”

“You may be prepared to wait,” shouted Karl, “but I’m not. Or have you forgotten that I had a near fatal heart attack this morning? You dragged me out here saying that I’m going to die if I don’t get free of this.”

“You’re not the only one in danger,” said Amber, “I can feel what it’s doing to me as well. It’s tearing me apart from the inside. And you know something? We aren’t the only people involved. The web I told you about has hundreds, maybe thousands of threads. That means there might be hundreds and thousands of people who can barely function and have no idea what’s going on. I’ve got to think about them as well. So don’t dump on me.”

“Okay,” Karl took a step back, breathing hard.

“Okay,” echoed Amber, “just so we understand each other, I promise I will do my best to look after both of us until we can get free.”

“Fine,” Karl turned and glared around the circle. “Now what, Sabrina?”

Amber snarled something that would earn her a few pointed remarks from her cousins before continuing in a more moderate tone. “Since I have to find out what’s wrong and then work out a solution we have to think about temporary measures first. Making sure we survive until we get free. Come on up to the house. We should have something to eat and rest. And I’ll do some research in the library. I have some more information now; maybe I’ll find something to help.” Amber’s eyes lost their focus for a moment, then she snatched up her fan and started running from the circle. “Oh, Elementals!”

She reached out to grab the remaining energy of the circle of power and shoved it, hard, back into the earth and started running back into the house. Karl followed close on her heels, refusing to be left behind.

“What’s wrong?” he gasped out.

“My family went into your bookstore to help you.” Amber cried over her shoulder, “Smoke, Lightning, Manny, Rust. They could be caught, just like us.”

Amber pounded up the back stairs and slammed the sliding door aside. In the kitchen Smoke was reading a newspaper, his feet up on a chair. He hit the floor hard and was on his feet the moment Amber shot through the door.

“What now?” he shouted.

“Stand still,” commanded Amber, relaxing her vision and staring at her cousin’s aura.

She sighed and sank down onto the nearest chair. Smoke poured her a glass of cold water and tried to force it into her hand. Amber recoiled, dodging his touch.

“What?”

“Is he caught, too?” demanded Karl, sliding to a halt beside her chair.

“No, thank the Elementals,” Amber rested her face in her hands. “I don’t understand it, but they’re clean.”

Karl hesitated, then groaned. “But I shook hands with him outside.”

Amber looked at her cousin again. The aura shone, bright and clean and covered with an opalescent shell. She reached out and tapped her fan against the glow.

“And this is?” she asked her cousin.

“No idea what you’re talking about,” muttered Smoke, but he carefully kept his distance from the fan.

Amber smiled at Smoke. “Your aura is sealed over, probably by the house. Unless it’s an older spell. One that precedes your coming here?”

Smoke settled back in his chair, his pale face thoughtful. “Ah, now. Now I know what you’re talking about. Yes, that’s it.”

“What is it?”

Smoke smiled. “I asked Lucinda and Robyn to put a protection on us when we first arrived here. Didn’t want to get hit by any stray blasts of anything. Not after giving up our magic.”

She turned her attention to her third eye, and closing her mundane vision, opened her higher sight.

“So what did you see?” demanded Karl.

Amber laughed quietly. “My aunt and uncle covered Smoke and the others in the psychic equivalent of full body armor,” said Amber, “and now the house has put a protection on a few of the rooms, as well. It looks like the house will permit me and Karl in the kitchen, the library, and the guest bedroom downstairs. That’s it. The house, it’s covered everything that is vulnerable within it to prevent contamination.”

“Psychic condoms,” laughed Smoke. “Sure and you shouldn’t leave home without one.”

Karl glanced from Amber to Smoke. After a moment he sighed, tension visibly draining from his body. Then he snorted and almost fell off his chair, shaking with laughter.

“Never have psychic sex with a witch without one.”

“Available in many colors, all of them shades of black,” added Smoke grinning.

“They’re a shiny white, actually,” muttered Amber as she watched her favorite relative, and the irritating pain-in-the-Ethereal ass store manager rolling about, laughing and making condom jokes. They ignored the comment – assuming they’d heard it.

She stood and walked stiffly across the room. Men, and she used the term loosely when referring to her cousins, were born with a teenage sense of humor and never grew out of it. Filling the kettle with water, she set it on the stove and fiddled with the burner. She dropped her favorite soothing tea into the pot and waited, watching the steam rise. Her aunt’s gang, her family, what could she do? They were themselves and she just had to live with it. She welcomed Karl’s laughter. His anger in the circle had frightened her. Not that she feared harm to herself. She smiled into her tea cup. Anyone making the mistake of seriously attacking a witch in front of her family wouldn’t have long to regret it.

At the table Smoke and Karl were telling each other jokes, that based on the tone of the laughter, she was glad she couldn’t hear. They looked comfortable together, leaning companionably on the kitchen table eating spicy pretzels. She could remember lounging about with her parents and her annoying brother, playing silly board games and throwing candy at each other many years ago. She didn’t have many happy memories about her family. Most of them were buried under the memories of family fights. Family tension. All the battles of magic versus science.

It was nice to see someone happy. Just for a moment. Nice to see that Karl could put his prejudices aside for a few moments and be human. Even if Smoke wasn’t.

Amber closed her eyes, remembering the spreading dark stain. Every time someone entered Karl’s store they walked out contaminated. She wasn’t certain that it was spread by casual touch onto other people, but there’d been other places visible on the Ethereal Planes that were spreading the infection. How long before it reached all the way to Florida? How long before her crazy brother, who practically lived in bookstores and internet coffee shops on the West Coast – how long before he got caught in the same web that had caught her? And Jim with no magical abilities at all.

Turning off the kettle she stalked from the kitchen.

“I need to make a phone call and then you and I need to talk.” announced Amber, stabbing a finger at Karl.

Karl barely glanced at her. Amber hurried to the library. Her mother, bless her paranoid soul, was going to go ballistic.

Her mother’s phone seemed to ring forever and be picked up too soon.

“Mom?”

“Amber. Baby. Where are you? I haven’t heard from you for ages.” Her mother’s voice echoed cheerfully down the line. There was a pause and before Amber could shape an answer her mother continued, her voice rising shrilly. “The caller ID says ‘hello niece.’ What are you doing at Lucinda’s house?”

“Mom.”

“Your father told you not to have anything to do with her.”

“Mom.”

“Have you any idea what could happen to you?”

“Too late,” whispered Amber, her heart pounding in her throat.

There was a pause and all Amber could hear was her mother’s heavy breathing.

“What is it? What did Lucinda do to you?”

Her mother’s voice trembled. Whether it was with anger or fear, Amber was not certain. It suddenly occurred to Amber that telling her mother that Aunt Lucinda was on her second honeymoon and incommunicado wouldn’t be the best plan. Something soothing and a little stretch of the truth would be the best technique.