Amber settled on one of the heavily cushioned window seats and patted the place beside her.
“Are you ready to talk about the nightmares?”
Karl fought down a nervous shudder at the memory. They’d been a deeply personal, hidden part of his life for so long. Someone had been invading his mind, his dreams every night and he’d had no defense against that mind rape. Right now was not when he felt like having a revealing personal conversation and certainly not with a witch.
“Not yet. I feel like …” he laughed and leaned back against the cushions. “You know how it was when you were sent to the school counselor to talk about your career? You wanted to ask him what made him so smart. What made him able to judge whether or not you’d make a good rocket scientist or rock star? After all, if he’d any brains or skills he sure wouldn’t be a school counselor. Don’t get me wrong, but what sort of witch are you? Should I be looking for big balls of light and red shoes? Or are we talking flying monkeys?”
Amber chuckled and folded her legs comfortably under her.
“I suppose I should regard this as a job interview.” She held out her hand, “Hi, I’m Amber Kemp and I’m the temporary head of the World Wide Witches Research Association and Pinochle Club. Until a few days ago I was just the head of the research department.”
Karl spluttered for a moment before grinning back at her.
“You’re what?”
Amber ignored his reaction.
“And I was the A.V.P. for Information Technology in the third largest financial institution in the world. Most of my department got laid off in the latest round of acquisitions. I was also the head of the research coordination department for the WWWRAPC and maintained the website for my Aunt Lucinda, a research witch.”
Karl nodded, trying to keep up with the flow of information. Who she’d been was not as important to him at this moment as what she could do. His mind caught up with his ears and he blinked at her. The last thing she said was just too weird.
Karl rubbed his temple and leaned back in the carved rocking chair he’d chosen. “Okay. What is a research witch?”
“My aunt originally was what’s called a hereditary witch. She trained with her grandmother, who trained with her grandma. And so on. Get the idea? Only Aunt Lucinda is a bit … different,” Amber smiled. “She couldn’t just accept doing things just because that’s-how-it’s-always-been-done. She used to ask her grandmother questions. Like how a plant knew it was being picked at midnight when it was pouring down rain? Once she was taken to Boston to collect dirt from the grave of a hanged man, and she kept asking, ‘Does the dirt have to be from above his coffin or below? If it doesn’t matter which, can it be dirt taken from anywhere in the cemetery? Wouldn’t it make more sense to take dirt from where he was hanged? Does it make any difference if he were a guilty man or innocent, and could you use the dirt from a suicide’s grave if he died by hanging?’” Amber talked faster and faster as shivers passed through her body. “Aunt Lucinda isn’t … well, she is unique, and she is a great witch.”
“I can imagine her grandmother wasn’t too pleased with her questions.”
Amber laughed, loud and shrill, rocking back and forth on the window seat. “So Aunt Lucinda says. She did what she was told until her grandmother died and then she sort of, well, she started experimenting. She calls it ‘deconstructing magic.’ She looks at all the components of a spell and starts trying to do the spell with pieces missing or substitutions. She’s trying to work out what is really necessary for magic and what’s optional. She’s working her way back to the basics.”
“Magic is useless,” snarled Karl, “for anything but making people’s lives miserable.”
“Guns don’t kill people, people kill people,” quoted Amber, her words coming faster and faster. “Magic itself is neither good nor evil. You can kill people with words and destroy lives by passing a good, kind, and well-thought-out law. Magic can be used for many things. Magic users have their own codes of ethics. Just like every area of society, we have our criminals.”
“Okay,” he said, “Don’t imagine I’m going to accept everything you say at face value. I’ve too much practical experience with the ‘criminal’ element of magic to trust a witch. Any witch.”
Amber shrugged and hummed, hugging herself and swaying from side to side.
Karl watched her. If this was her normal behavior there was something wrong with her. If he didn’t know that she’d not even had a cup of tea he’d think she was drunk.
In the meantime he needed information. A way to judge how much she was doing to actually help him and whether this was just creating a future problem. He wanted, needed, to be free and had no intention of going from being captive to one witch, to victim of another.
“What do you do for your aunt?”
“I was recruited to head of the research department. It’s paperwork mostly. The website I set up coordinates the activity of several hundred witches. We have a bimonthly peer review journal, grants, and a central clearing house for spell requests.”
Karl shook his head and stared at the stained glass ceiling.
“This is completely ridiculous.”
“I’m not surprised you think so. It’s been hard for me and I sort of grew up with magical history. My aunt contacted me asking for the website and other stuff years ago. Somehow, the idea of a witch in a white coat staring at computer screens is stranger than one wearing a Halloween hat and stirring a cauldron. But I loved being involved in the work. Being part of the change of magic from a superstition to a science was thrilling. I had to keep it from my family, though. My dad must have watched too much 50’s TV when he was growing up. When he found out my mom was from a magical family he went ballistic. They almost divorced over it. But Mom went through a ritual to have her magic removed and they got back together again.”
“I take it he doesn’t know you do magic.”
“Up until a few days ago I did very little. I had my wand,” she waved her fan at him, “and a few personal protections to keep stuff from breaking or being stolen, but that was it. Like I said, mostly computers and the research.”
“Then what?”
“Then I was told my aunt was missing and I had to come here.”
“To look for her.”
Amber stilled for a moment and looked out of the darkened window.
“At first I thought so, now I’m beginning to think I was called so urgently to deal with what’s happening to you. To everyone who went into your store and all the other places similarly infected. It’s spreading.”
“What are we going to do?”
Amber lifted her hands, they were trembling again. Karl took one hand in his and stroked her fingertips, sending confusing signals through her body. Elemental Fire felt like that, only this was soothing and awakening together. She struggled to focus. It was getting harder to see, harder to hear. She blinked rapidly and stared at the three Karls that were looking back at her.
“When exactly did this start?” she said, trying hard not to slur her words. “Can you remember any event just before you started getting sick?”
“It came on gradually …” Karl sighed, continuing his gentle massage. “I can’t really give you a date. I was fine the first year. If I was tired then it was from staying up all night havi …”
Amber shivered, the book she was clutching flew from her hand. Her whole arm shuddered and the tremor continued spreading until her whole body was shaking. Karl pulled her across the window seat, trying to catch her before she fell to the floor.
“Smoke. Smoke. She’s having a seizure!”
A thunder of footsteps answered his shout and the dwarves charged up the ramp. Smoke took in the scene with a glance and sent his brothers running back down again with sharp commands.
“Are seizures contagious?” asked the smallest of the brothers and was slapped by the nearest.
“Don’t be bloody stupid,” snarled Smoke. “We should have expected this. It’s power exhaus
tion. I thought since she was good after the spell she’d be okay. Hold onto her. Don’t let her hurt herself. She’s overextended herself. Too much magic, too soon after almost losing her way on the Ethereal. We’ll get her settled in a circle of protection for the night and she’ll be right as rain in the morning.”
Karl held the trembling woman tight against his chest. He could see her eyes moving frantically back and forth under her closed lids.
“Are you certain?”
Smoke didn’t answer.
Smoke and Karl carried Amber, wrapped in a blanket, down to the ground floor. Karl cursed his lack of strength the entire distance, afraid at any moment she would slip through his fingers and crash to the floor. He’d never been so grateful to get somewhere as when he lowered her to the daybed. He helped her cousins push it away from the wall to the center of the stone tiled floor. Lightning drew a white circle around it.
“Come here, lad,” said Smoke, fetching a sheet of paper from a printer on a side table. “This is the simplest spell there is. You’ll have to restore the circle of power for her.”
“You’re joking!” shouted Karl. “I can’t do magic.”
“Neither can I!” Smoke shouted back. “Do you think I’d ask a complete stranger to do something for our Amber, if we could do it ourselves?”
“I don’t know how,” said Karl, his heart beating frantically. “I won’t do it.”
“I’ll guide you through it,” said Smoke impatiently and for a moment appeared to ignore the other statement. “In my family – that is, me, Uncle Robyn, my brothers, and our parents – we have this agreement. When the children of my family get to be of age we have to decide: do we want to use magic and be responsible for everything we do? Get involved in other people’s problems? If we don’t, then we give all our powers to a witch, make that witch more powerful, and that witch protects us. The whole family. The whole clan. If we do, then we keep our powers, train, and use them. The boys and I, we chose to give everything to Uncle Robyn’s wife, Lucinda.”
Karl stared, realized that his mouth was in fact hanging open and snapped it shut.
“What … what are you?”
“None of your business. But our family has a contract with Amber’s family. We can provide strength to our chosen witch, but we can’t do the spells ourselves. I can’t do this. Do you think I’d be asking you if there were any possibility I could do it myself? We’re talking about my favorite cousin, for Elementals sake.”
Karl glanced around the room looking for an escape and met the eyes of each of Amber’s cousins. They were watching him with the same expression he’d last seen in the eyes of a golden retriever puppy. Being someone’s last and only hope wasn’t a responsibility that Karl wanted to have on his soul. For a moment he thought about the difficult choice Smoke and his brothers had faced and wondered why they’d chosen to surrender power. Smoke seemed a strong man, courageous. How had it been that he’d ever chosen to shirk responsibility? Why had he turned away from something that important?
Then Karl looked down at the pale and faintly trembling Amber. Bands of steel wrapped themselves around his chest and his breath came short and hard. His head throbbed in rhythm with his heart, and his vision clouded.
He reached one hand toward the paper. Immediately he bent double, his knees buckling. A headache clamped him like a burning crown. Karl clenched his hands into fists and held his arms to his chest. His heart was beating so fast he expected it to explode. Tremors passed through his body and his stomach felt as if a million knives were being stabbed through him. He lurched away from Smoke, swallowing rapidly to keep his recently consumed tea where it belonged.
“I don’t think he can do it,” said Rust softly.
The cousins exchanged confused looks and stood, stunned, in the center of the room.
“I guess you’re right,” said Smoke, “You’re off the hook, Karl. Rust, take him to the guest room. Bed him down and make sure he’s got everything he needs.”
Karl staggered from the room, down the dim corridor, bounced against an invisible boundary, and permitted himself to be directed into a small bedroom. Despite his orders, Rust didn’t stay. He vanished, closing the door with a faint click. Karl didn’t bother looking for a light, but paced, bumping into barely visible furniture. He tucked his trembling hands under his arms and swore.
They’d asked him to do magic.
Pain stabbed through his head again at the thought.
Why had they asked him? He was a victim of magic, not a doer.
Gradually the pain behind his eyes died, and his heart beat slowed to normal rhythm. Smoke said Amber needed to rest within a circle of protection tonight. Karl stopped pacing and turned toward the library. He’d do it. Amber was as sick as he and she hadn’t hesitated to do magic for him. It wasn’t as if reading one collection of nonsense words was going to ruin his life. Any further than it had already, that is.
Immediately the bands wrapped around his chest again, crushing the strength from his body. Something twisted into his heart, into his bones, sending him crashing to the floor.
He heard Smoke and the others talking in the corridor while he struggled to breathe, the sound buried behind thousands of angry bees. Moments later came the unmistakable sound of a car skidding to a stop on the gravel driveway and footsteps rushing up the wooden stairs.
Voices disappeared in the direction of the library.
Karl tried to rise, to breathe, to twitch even, but his body was deaf to the commands of his will, just as it was in his nightmare. The headache raged, stabbing into his brain, and he curled around the agony, his hands pressed to his ears and the world faded away.
* * * * *
Amber looked around the blue stone dreamscape and started swearing. This was going too far. It was bad enough she was pulled into this situation and her life was in danger, but invading her dreams over and over; that was just cruel.
“I am so tired of this,” she announced to the dreamscape.
There was no response. No reaction. She trudged across the burning stone looking for Karl. He was sure to be around here somewhere. The problem was, pretty soon so would those blasted wolves.
She sighed and stopped. Truth to tell, she was not in any position to challenge the wolves right now. At the very most all she could do was survive yet another energy drain. On the upside Karl was at the farm at Five Corners so when she woke she’d be able to give him a little energy and get him on his feet. If he had another heart attack at least this time she wouldn’t have to drive cross country to find him.
In the morning when they’d recovered they’d have to brainstorm. He had to have some idea what this was about. Who was responsible? What did they want, beyond life energy?
On the downside, she hated the thought of hiding from the wolves.
And the energy drain.
She hated the thought of giving something of herself to something so evil. It was horrible. She was being violated, that’s what it was. She had no way of preventing someone from reaching into her and taking away her vitality.
Given that she wasn’t ready to fight back, letting them know she was here was unwise. Hiding was necessary, not cowardly.
Oh, but hiding put a foul taste in her mouth.
Discretion was the greater part of valor so she valorously hid behind a rock. Just wait until she got to the person behind this. She’d … she’d.
She’d forgotten the time. The reason for the dreamscape.
The power drain took her by surprise, dragging her to the burning ground. She lay gasping, her fingers clawing the unyielding surface. It hurt. It hurt. It burned, her tears burned. Her lungs caught and clenched. It … she tried to scream, but her voice was trapped inside.
And then the pain was gone and she was hanging in a cat’s cradle of black sticky fibers over the eternal glowing Ethereal Planes.
She was the spider. The center of the web. The mind of the spell.
She could see down each filament, every thread.
Off in the distance she could see people weeping, gasping on their beds, writhing in their dreams. Energy was flowing from them, from complete strangers and away. Away into the hungry maw of the web.
The web didn’t care that the donors were soul-deep exhausted.
That they were dying.
Slowly, painfully being drunk to death.
No wonder the invading filament in her body dragged like prison chains. The other victims could not recharge as she could. Currently she was the only person with the strength to bear the weight and that was only because she could connect directly to Elemental energy. Hundreds, thousands of drained spirits clung to her, each helplessly crying out. Amber hesitated only for a second before extending her reach to Earth, to Air, to Fire, to Water. She was on the Ethereal. She could feel the Elementals close and thrumming their energy through the Ether.
She was surprised when the power came. Before she lost the link she directed a gentle trickle of power down the strands to her fellow sufferers. Some were lying alone in bedrooms. Some surrounded by panicked relatives and physicians. Others in hospital rooms connected to hissing machines.
Oh, my God. Karl wasn’t the only one who almost had died the day before. She hadn’t thought to look. Hadn’t considered for a moment that anyone beyond herself and Karl had suffered. Amber released a little more flow. So many suffering people. So many near death. She could not revive them all. Nothing could be done to truly rescue them until these links were broken. But for now – this moment – she would give them enough to survive another day. Just enough and no more. If she gave them more it would only be stolen by the energy thieves tomorrow morning.
Amber’s spirit form tightened, intensified. Her resolution firmed. This task was her responsibility. Whoever was behind this was about to discover war had been declared. For these crimes she personally would see justice done.
Amber spun as the echoes of her thought rippled through the Ethereal Planes. She raised stunned eyes as a multicolored streak descended toward her. The streak separated and for a moment she was bathed in a rainbow. The colors consolidated into five areas of brilliant light. Amber’s spirit bowed as the Elemental entities – Earth, Air, Fire, Water, and Spirit took form. Their flickering forms were too bright for her to look upon for more than seconds.
First Destroy All Giant Monsters (The World Wide Witches Research Association) Page 18