8 Gone is the Witch (23 page)

They say trust your gut in high-stress situations. Ursula had always been good at that. Me? I have always been good at throwing caution to the wind. I jump in
to things feet first, let the chips fall where they may. Still, I believe that somewhere between Ursula and me, there lies a Goldilocks witch, not too cautious, not too daring, a prudent witch that does everything just right. The trouble is, finding Goldilocks is never easy.

The four of us
stood there, looking at Ursula for what seemed like an unusually long time. I remember thinking how unnatural it was that no one moved or even spoke, as if time had stood still so that the past could catch up with the present.

I began counting to myself, keeping the numbers in my head moving forward so as not to allow my
memories the chance to move back. Though I remained inexplicably immobile, I could still see movement in the trees around me; hear the breeze rustling through the branches, frolicking among the leaves. I was alive and living in a moment that neither came nor went.

Outside
my body, I felt cold, stripped and abandoned. But inside, I was free. Electricity numbed my senses. Its tingle lifted my heart and caressed my soul. Echoes of whispers rolled through my brain like shadows lost in the wind. They pulsed in ripples and faded quickly in ebbing tides of dreamlike mist. It was the coven, the singular voice of many speaking to me from another dimension trapped between then and now.

“Blink,” said the voices
, and when I did, everything changed. I found us all standing in the cave just beyond the entrance. There had been no discussions, no convincing Ursula to come with us. We were just there, and I had no recollection of it happening.

Jerome
went first, leading us down an incline flanked by shoulder-high stalagmites erupting from the ground. The path appeared worn, with some of the stalagmites broken off at the base to facilitate passage that otherwise might have proved impossible.

The walls
, blackened in powdery soot, swelled with churning blue blisters. Some oozing a sulfuric sludge, etching the stone beneath them in vertical tears resembling claw marks.

I
n the lower holes and crevasses pocking the baseline, tiny creatures with beady eyes and spiny legs shrank back in retreat. It made me wonder what they knew that I didn’t.

Overhead
, more calcium carbonate clung to the ceiling in the form of stalactites, some as tall as a spruce and wide as an oak. I saw hundreds, perhaps thousands of them, all dripping with dew that collected in puddles throughout the cave and glistened like stardust on a moonless night.

“
Okay, where’s the difermium?” Tony asked.

Jerome
replied, “Is here. Little further. You come. I take you.”

I saw Tony and Carlos trade looks. I knew what they were thinking. I was beginning to think the same.

Jerome escorted us through a maze of narrow tunnels that emptied into a stadium-sized cavern with towering walls. Though stalactites hung from the roof as they did in the other chambers, the ground there remained hard and flat, void of stalagmites, puddles and rocks. Jerome led us to the center of the great expanse, far from the outlining walls. When it became obvious he had taken us as far as he intended, our collective suspicions solidified.

“What’s going on?”
Carlos asked, scanning the shadows behind us. The nearest tunnels were a hundred yards off and all looked the same.

Tony said, “Yeah. What
is
going on here?” He unsheathed his bayonet and trained it on Jerome’s scrawny mid-section. “You’re not trying to pull something on us, are you, pip-squeak?

Carlos pulled his b
olo and turned its blade up under Jerome’s chin. “I smell a rat. And I think it’s this guy.”

“Aye,
” said Ursula, pointing at the driget. “`Tis thee. The wicked one doth peer with lion’s eyes beneath a veil of fleece.”

“
Jerome?” I wagged my finger at him. “You sneaky little cheeky monkey. Did you lead us into an ambush?”

He backed
away as if clearing from the kill zone. “I sorry,” he said, and I almost believed him. He looked up at Carlos and smiled. “Friend, forgive?”

“
Oh, hell no,” I said. “This can’t be good.”

I saw Carlos
shift his gaze back into the shadows. Tony and Ursula’s gaze followed, and then mine.

“
Damn,” said Tony, squinting into the distance. “Is that what I think it is?”

Carlos answered, “Are you thinking those
beady little eyes are a bunch of pointy-tailed, weasel lizard drigets?”

“Yes.”

“Then yup. It’s what you think it is.”

We all turned to
Jerome with the sole intent on shredding him limb-by-limb.

“
Shit, where’d he go?” asked Carlos.

“
He’s gone,” I said. “The little fucker’s gone.”

Tony
pointed into the darkness. “Yes, but get ready, because here comes the rest of his family.”

They
appeared from every direction, abandoning their camouflage and melting out of the walls in ungodly numbers. Some clustered in groups, perhaps strategizing a plan of attack. Others simply stood by, waiting for their orders.

“We’re surrounded,” I said. “I don’t believe it. They’re every
fuckingwhere!”

The first
few groups broke from their clusters and started towards us. Two dozen spear-wielding frog-faced warriors marched across the open expanse, all of them grunting and thrusting their spears in the air and brandishing razor sharp teeth.

The next wave of a dozen or
so followed, with yet another behind them. Soon a panoramic swell of four hundred or more hunched-back drigets advanced on us from all sides with increasing speed and a singular determination to kill.

“Lilith?”
Tony was already herding us back behind him, as if he could protect any of us with a measly bayonet. “Got any ideas?”

“I don’t know,” I said
, shaking my head. “I’m hoping zip balls work in here. What about you?”

“There’s too many of them. We can’t zip`em fast enough.”

“Then I’m fresh out of ideas.”

“So what do we do?”

“Ah, hello? Don’t you know what fresh out of ideas means?”

“Please!”
cried Ursula. “Hand me thy key!”

“
What’s your plan?”

“
Methinks there be no time to explain. Quickly.”

I
removed the key from around my neck and gave it to her. She held it to her lips and kissed it before instructing the rest of us to step back. Carlos immediately put his arms around Tony and me and pulled us into a tight-knit huddle.

“Urs, do you know what you’re doing?”

She
returned a sly grin and replied, “Aye. `Tis a trick is all. I learned from the Grimoire.”

“
The Grimoire? See!” I hit Tony on the arm. “You could learn from that girl. Would it kill you to read from the Grimoire once in a while and maybe––”

“Please!” I felt Ursula
smack me on the side of the head with her open palm. “I need thy silence!”

“Uh, did she just hit me?”

I looked up at her just as she turned her back on us to face the wave of drigets that had advanced the closest. She held the witch’s key over her head and began twirling it in the air. I realized then what she was about to do.

“Go get`em girl,” I
whispered, so not to distract her. Under the glistening gold halo of the whirling key, I heard her recite these words.

“
Mothers of the coven, hear our plea. Pass thy fury through this key. Spare no force, our plight is dire, grant us thee thy ring of fire
.”

We looked up after hearing those words and saw a magnificent jet stream of flames blast from the end of the key some ninety feet outward. It twirled overhead like rotors on a helicopter before laying down a solid ring of fire three-stories high.

The
intense blaze incinerated the first wave of drigets, pushing the remaining troops back in a scattered frenzy.

Carlos cupped his hands
above his brows and peered through the flames at the chaos beyond. “Holy cow! What did you do, call in a Napalm strike?”

“Nice
work,” said Tony. “That will hold them off for a minute maybe. But we’re still stuck here.”

“
We’re fine as long as the fire holds out,” I said. “Ursula. How long does the Grimoire say the fire ring will last?”

Her expression grew suddenly
perplexed. “How long?”

“Y
eah. How long before––”

Poof!

“Uh-oh,” said Carlos.

“It’s out
,” said Tony.

I backhanded
him on the chest. “No shit, Dick Tracy.”

“Tell her to do it again.”

“I don’t think we have time. Looks like they’re regrouping.”

“
Hey, over there!” Carlos pointed, drawing our attention to a break in the drigets’ ranks behind us. “It’s a hole. We can make a run for it.”

And we did.

We ran our asses off. A few of the drigets closest to us tried to head us off, but Tony cut them both down easily with his bayonet. Another grabbed Ursula’s hair from behind and pulled her to the ground. He was just about to sink his teeth into her neck when Carlos sliced the bastard’s head off.

We picked Ursula up and dragged her until she could regain her footing and run on her own again.
Though we made it a good distance, the effort to kill the few drigets that had gotten in our way had slowed us down considerably. We were still out in the open, vulnerable, and worse, the larger troops were again on the move.

“
Tony. We’re not going to make it,” I said. “We have to try something.”

“Like what?”

“I think we can use the zip balls now.”

“
You think that will stop them?”

“No
, not if we fire them at the drigets. Like you said, there’s too many of them.”

“
So, what did you have in mind?”

“
The stalactites.”

He knew exactly what I was thinking. We
stopped running, but told Carlos and Ursula to go on. With the advancing troop of drigets nearly upon us, we conjured up the biggest, badass zip balls we had ever spun up in our lives. On the count of three, we launched them at the ceiling and then took off running again.

The
zip balls impacted simultaneously. Two massive electric blue bursts of energy rocked the cave to its core, filling the great cavern with the light of a thousand Roman candles.

The double explosions blasted a crater in the roof
some fifteen meters wide. Tons of dirt and debris rained down on the drigets front line, killing dozens and wounding many more. The resulting shockwave traveled along the ceiling in a conical pattern from the crater’s center outward, shearing off hundreds of stalactites, all of which crashed down on the remaining drigets.

W
e were not out of the woods yet, though. Not all of them were dead. We ran until we caught up with Carlos and Ursula, who had inadvertently stumbled into a dead end tunnel and were on their way back out.

“
Keep going,” Tony said, palming Carlos’ chest and pushing him back. “There’re still out there, wounded, but they’re coming.”

“
Can’t, it’s blocked.” Carlos hiked his thumb up over his shoulder. He was out of breath and sweating profusely. “It’s a dead end. We have to turn around.”

We looked back
through the tunnel. The dark passage stretched for fifty feet before turning, beyond that, somewhere, a herd of pissed-off drigets were coming.

Tony turned to me.
“What do we do? More zips?”

“No.” I
quickly surveyed the condition of the crumbling walls and ceiling. “Another zip will certainly cause a cave-in. We’ll suffocate.”

Carlos said, “
Better that than getting eaten by those things.”

“Look!” said Ursula
, pointing at an odd-shaped boulder jetting out of the wall.

“What
? I don’t see anything.”

“On my word, that boulder moved.”

I went over and set my hand on it. “This one?”

“Aye. Think naught of it
, if I am wrong, yet I know what I saw.”

“
Come on. How could it––”

T
he damn thing suddenly thumped out of its nestled perch and nearly landed on my foot. I jumped back, a little startled and a lot afraid. Carlos readied his bolo and Tony his bayonet.

“They found us!” Carlos
yelled. “The bastards found us!”