It tugged on them, but it couldn’t free them.
The trap had worked, so I turned around and jumped over the wet bar. I had reached the water. Flicking the faucet on, I turned the head so that it was spilling all over the bar top, then onto the floor. Once I was sure that Derek McCallum’s expensive wooden floors would never be the same, I ran for the bamboo blanket. It was like a beacon in my mind, already awake, curious what I had planned for it.
The spider was making a horrible shrieking sound, and then I heard ripping as it pulled off the two of its legs that had gotten stuck in the witchcraft flytrap. With five legs, it somehow looked more frightening. Its eight beady black eyes didn’t have eyelids to narrow, but somehow it still looked menacing.
I had made the giant spider very angry. That primal part of my brain, the caveman that was still drawing in charcoal on the walls, took notice. He seemed to be saying,Hey, Parker Ferro. By the way, this is how everyone else I knew died. Giant spider, very few legs, very angry.
I tossed the blanket onto the floor, where it immediately soaked up the water. Crouching down, I put my hand on the fabric, pushing more of my magic into it. The bamboo wouldn’t care if my magic was red, in fact it might work out to my benefit.
“Hey,” I whispered. “You don’t look so good. You’re all bleached out, all white. You’re not supposed to be white. You’re supposed to be green and tall, so tall that you practically touch the ceiling. I’ve seen the movies. People can do martial arts in you, that’s how tall you are.”
The bamboo didn’t need to be told twice. It remembered forests so tall that they blocked out the sky. Individual threads loosened and slid through the water, like roots underground. Bamboo shoots sprouted up almost instantly.
“Don’t forget the other side of the spider,” I coaxed. “In fact, if you could just make a cage?—”
A tearing sound interrupted me, and I looked away from the fence the bamboo was growing around the spider. Glancing up, a black shadow spread across the ceiling.
No, not a shadow. Baby spiders. The giant egg sack had hatched.
At the sight of the moving darkness, the caveman in my brain banked his fire, put away his charcoal sticks and left the building. It was terrifying. It was the kind of thing that made my stomach take a very long elevator ride down to the basement.
Thousands upon thousands, maybe even millions of baby spiders were darting across the ceiling.
I had to stay focused. I would deal with the baby spiders when they became an issue, which couldn’t be now. Right now, theirmotherwas the issue.
My original plan had to work, if it didn’t, then King and I were both about to become food for the spider’s millions of babies.
I ran more water across the floor, watching it with a careful eye. It was definitely going to ruin McCallum’s hardwood, and I didn’t regret that at all. The water hadn’t soaked in yet; instead it puddled on top, the varnish keeping the floor safe for a few more moments.
With the influx of water, the bamboo began to spread throughout the room, first only a few inches high, then a few feet, and soon enough they would exactly as tall as I remembered from Wuxia movies on late night TV.
“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.
CHAPTER SEVEN
A breeze rustledthe 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 feltthat 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.
