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

by Carter, D. L.

  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.

  Fro
m 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.

  The frantically beaten chime pulled at her spirit hard, back the way she’d come, but the sticky fibers here still enveloped her, holding her back. Drinking her. Amber struggled against the threads. She might be out of the bedroom, but the energy of the web was directed to drawing things in. Nothing was supposed to leave.

  And time was passing.

  Amber reached out to the sluggish Earth energy. It was barely perceptible under the weight of the city and refused to rise to her call.

  “Come on, guys,” Amber stretched her immaterial fingers through the tight web. “Come on, give a little.”

  The ley lines nearby were thin, fragile, ground down by the number of people in the city and the pathological web presence in this chamber. Earth was tired, but she didn’t have a choice. Using what little personal energy remained she stirred up the Earth energy feeding it into the threads, encouraging them to lengthen a little and watched the flash of the energy as it passed along the fibers.

  Ah, there it goes.

  It was going to be like unraveling knitting. She could do it, with enough time and energy.

  Again and again she drew in power and poured the new strength into her bindings. They throbbed, gulped it down greedily and relaxed, temporarily satisfied.

  The journey home passed in fits and starts. Every time the web tightened and tried to drag her back Amber gathered energy and fed it. Amber struggled, balancing strengthening the enemy with the need to get home and wished she could weep with frustration.

  Finally she saw the milky-white glow of the Five Corners Farm wards. She sank toward it, desperately reaching out toward her body, safe inside.

  The house raised a warning flare on the Ethereal as she approached.

  Oh, darn it to heck and back, muttered Amber, sliding back out of reach.

  Amber could see the glow of the ancient lode stone in the basement. It was no surprise to see the house shields being strengthened against her. Amber could hear the frantic beat of the chimes echoing on the Ethereal. She had no idea of the time, no idea of the condition of her body, but she could feel her spirit’s weakness. She had to reunite body and spirit soon. The house shields shook and pulsed in warning. It hadn’t wanted to permit her physical body through the door, now it was rejecting her spirit form. Amber shook loose a small fragment of her remaining energy and reached toward the shield.

  The house recoiled in shock; its deeply ingrained spells quivered in recognition of a family member but remained strong against her. Obviously her current appearance, almost completely covered in contamination, had set up a conflict within the spells. The house’s purpose was to protect and nurture the family. Its function included prevention of invasions of evil. Now it had a family member coming home, weakened and under attack and burdened by a toxic spell.

  Covered in evil.

  Surely the house could sense she was out here, that she was dying. If she could get a message to Smoke he could take her body outside the house wards, except he wouldn’t. Never would. If he got a message demanding that, he’d assume it was from someone who wanted her to die. Smoke, even if Amber were able to communicate with him, knew the dangers of moving a spirit-traveler’s body. He would never take a helpless person outside a circle of protection, or a member of the family out of the house if they were under attack. Amber thought about screaming in frustration.

  She had to get in. Years of research and planning by much more experienced witches had gone into creating the house protections. Attacking would be a waste of her waning strength even if she could cast spells. Amber drifted closer to the house. There was a pulse in the wards. Instead of dodging Amber reached out, accepting the sting, the pain of the blow.

  There was a startled awareness in the energy and she felt another pulse pass over her, through her and the pain withdrew. She rested her spirit against the outer wards. The house acknowledged her, did not push her away, and she welcomed the familiar warmth. Amber extended a tendril of herself to the wards, letting her fear, her awareness of danger, leak in. The house shuddered again and extended the shield to surround her, encasing her in a shell.

  Not enough, thought Amber, Nice compromise, but not enough.

  She reached out to the house again, letting fear of impending death cross into its awareness. She needed to be with her body. There was a pause while the house considered. Amber glanced in. Now she was inside the wards she could see Smoke again. He glanced up directly at her then closed his eyes, his lips moving. Amber couldn’t hear what was said, but the house did. Still enclosed in the shell the house pulled her through the wards and held her captive. Amber’s next communication was a feeling of failing strength, of her desperate need to be near her body. The house yielded, depositing her contaminated spirit in the library and strengthened every inner ward to keep her there.

  Home, thought Amber, as her spirit sank into her physical form. She shuddered as she felt th
e disgusting mass of binding cords entering with her.

  She rolled onto her side, her stomach heaving. Bile rose in her throat and she vomited on the floor.

  Instead of a howl of triumph she let out a wheezing breath. Tears of pain leaked from her eyes and her fingers clawed desperately at the floor.

  “Clear her airway,” came a familiar voice and a rough hand wrapped in a towel wiped her mouth.

  “Smoke? Smoke,” gasped Amber.

  “Is she seizing?” demanded another voice, further away. Rust. She had never been so grateful for sound.

  “No. Throw me that pillow and that blanket. She’s ice cold.”

  To her shock it was not Smoke, but Manny who was sitting patiently ringing the meditation chime. Smoke was seated, supporting her head in his lap with his hands on each side of her face. He looked almost as pale and exhausted as she felt.

  He’d been feeding her his strength! While she’d been traveling he’d been keeping her alive with his own life force.

  Lightning and Rust were waiting just outside the circle. When she moved, Rust jumped up, respectfully cut the circle, and ran to her side. Lightning covered her with a blanket. Lifting her carefully between them, the cousins walked toward the main library door and prepared to carry her into the house. The door slammed shut, hard.

  “You wanna see how fast I can get an ax and smash through that door?” Smoke snarled, and his brothers bared their teeth. “She’s sleeping in a proper bed tonight!”

  The door swung open, with such a well-if-you-insist air that Amber tried to laugh. All that came out was a dry wheezing cough. She blinked weakly at her cousins.

  “How long …?” she whispered.

  Smoke cursed in several different languages as they carried her into the ground floor guest room. “Little girl, next time you go tripping the light Ethereal … will you listen to your come-back call? You were gone sixteen hours.”

  “The house didn’t want to let me in, Smoke. I’ve got stuff on my spirit now. So much …”

  “What?” demanded Smoke. “Amber, what happened?”

  “The web. Oh, Smoke, the web. The web is the monster! And it’s got me good and proper.”