Page 35 of Courting Danger
“Ferro, is this your work?” King’s voice was calm, but I could tell that that was through training. Suddenly finding yourself in a bamboo grove would startle anyone.
“It’s me,” I confirmed. He glanced over at me, his head just barely visible over the growing forest. I could read skepticism in his arched eyebrow. He might not know what witchcraft involved, but he definitely didn’t believe that what I was doing was normal.
“How much longer?” I challenged. My best hope was to get him focused on his own work.
If I kept the bamboo contained, I might be able to claim I was doing some normal craft work and it had just gotten out of hand because of my panic.
A kitchen witch doesn’t grow plants on principle, but a naturalistic witch could. I would have to claim that I had had bamboo seeds on me, and not that I was growing the plants out of a bamboo blanket. Maybe I could even say I was a druid, from the old school of witchcraft, one that that’s barely practiced anymore. No one really knows what druids can do, or how they do it. That might pass muster with Paranormal Crimes.
The bamboo grew taller than the spider, penning her in. With three legs gone, she hesitated before trying to climb the tall, flexible shoots.
The first of the baby spiders dropped from the ceiling, and disappeared into the forest I’d grown. A shiver rose up my spine. If I had to get back to King, who was all the way across the room through my bamboo forest, it would mean crossing the path of millions of baby spiders.
Seven
Abreeze rustled the leaves of bamboo as King used alchemy, trying to pull the chandelier down. He clearly saw that I had the spider penned in and knew that it was our best chance of getting it. I heard him grunt and realized that he might need help, and with the bamboo tall and blocking my view of him, I couldn’t tell.
The bamboo rustled and I shuddered. I could stay here, all the way across the room as King squished the spider, but that didn’t solve the problem that eventually we would need to also kill the baby spiders. Unless we just left it for McCallum to clean up.
I rather enjoyed the image of McCallum trying to clean up this mess. He’d probably hire some gardener to come in and prune away all the bamboo that was now growing in his beautiful floor. The poor gardener, expecting to work on the immaculate yard outside, would be brought in and have to face this forest filled with spiders and shadows and darkness.
It was a small bit of vengeance. But it wasn’t enough to satisfy my craving for blood and fire and the sort of pain that would leave McCallum with the same rage in his soul that I felt.
Between the panic at the spider, and some weird emotion that was blooming in my chest from seeing King, I no longer felt that red hot fury that I had when I first came to MacCallum’s house. Instead, I was so focused on my own survival, I didn’t have time for anything else.
The bamboo had grown all the way around the spider, each thread from the long-forgotten blanket forming a tall stalk. More of the baby spiders were dropping into the forest, and I realized that if I could get all of them in, we might have a way of killing them all at once.
I needed to get King in on my idea.
Only he was all the way across the long room, and between us was a forest filled with spiders. I could get through this, I told myself.
With the mass of bamboo between us, there was no way that King could see me, so I let myself use some more of the magic that he would have to arrest me for.
Touching the air in front of me, I felt it begin to spin, wanting to whip back into a windstorm. After a moment of coaxing, it settled, and I began weaving the light.
Luckily for me, between the bamboo and the hour, there wasn’t much light left. The chandelier had been casting long shadows, but when King had started working on it, the bulbs had begun flickering. I coaxed the light until it surrounded me, making me invisible to a glance.
It wasn’t even close to my best work, as that would take more time than I was comfortable spending. But when I opened my eyes, and glanced at myself in the reflection on one of the bar bottles, I was invisible.
Slowly, I crept through the forest.
The spiders moved with unnatural dexterity, given that they were each the size of my hand. I tried not to make a sound, butit was a close thing when I watched one drop on top of another, tearing apart its sibling with sociopathic speed.
Slow and steady, Ferro, I reminded myself. There was no sense in surviving this so far only to get bitten by one of these creatures.
I found myself face-to-face with one of the massive spiders, spread out in the center of its web. Slowly, I breathed in and out, although all I wanted to do was let out one of those primal screams that you could probably build a whole tent around at Burning Man.
The spider turned, searching, as though it could sense me. But I was invisible in every spectrum of light. After a moment it moved to the side of its web, waiting for its prey. Ducking low, I crawled underneath, slithering on my stomach on the smooth wooden floor. The bamboo hadn’t been alive long enough to drop any leaves or overgrowth, so at least I wasn’t crawling through splinters in the making.
I felt something land on my back and begin to crawl across, eight pointed legs that felt like the world’s most hesitant masseuse. Eventually, it completed its trek, and when I was sure I felt the last leg leave my back I let myself release a muffled gasp into my arm.
Then I was moving again, low enough that I was under most of the webbing. Occasionally I did have to reroute when a particularly industrious spider had thrown a web so wide and so tall that it could’ve downed an elephant. Finally, finally I was on the other side.
I hadn’t even noticed I was passing by the massive mama spider until I was suddenly right next to it. It was trying to move through the bamboo, but its feet were too big, the bamboo too thick to let it through. Attempting to climb the entryway wall, it kept slipping down, missing its three legs. I wanted to feel sorryfor it, but I knew the instant it saw me it would try to eat me, so I let the unhappy swirl of guilt go.
Eight black eyes swung to me. Even though I knew it couldn’t see me, I was pretty sure if I got any closer, I would get torn apart like the spiders making war in the forest. On tiptoe, I inched away until the spider couldn’t see me.
I released the glamour, and left the shadows like a fish darting from beneath a coral reef. King was covered in sweat, his white shirt damp and his mouth moving as he drew some large alchemist circle on the ground.
