Deadly Violet - 04 by Tony Richards Read Free Book Online

awful load of mojo at his fingertips, including the power to heal injuries, which the majority of adepts do not have. Once he’d dealt with our arachnid friends, he set about repairing Ritchie.
    Popped his shoulder back, simply by waggling his fingertips around the injured joint. And healed his ankle too, which turned out to be broken. The creatures’ mandibles had applied that much pressure to it.
    But healing a body is one thing. Healing a mind, another. We still had to call an ambulance for the young sergeant. He was pretty badly shaken up, and more about his wife and cousins than the battering he’d taken.
    And we’d no idea what kind of effects a supernatural spider-bite might have. The skin around his lower leg had been broken in several places, so he needed to be kept under observation for a while.
    Which meant we were already one man down, a good one too. And that’s not the kind of math that I’m a fan of.
    “Couldn’t you see what was happening?” I asked the doctor, once the ambulance was gone.
    He usually has twenty-twenty vision when it comes to second sight. But the only he did was shake his head.
    “I got a vague sense something bad was going down, enough to bring me here, but that was all I got.” He peered at me slightly skewy. “You and Cass have dealt with creatures much larger than that. So what exactly was the problem?”
    I explained to him how things had panned out. Not one spider but a whole procession of them. The terrifying strength they’d demonstrated. And the fact that weapons had a very limited effect on them. The more of it I told him, then the less it sounded like it made a whole big load of sense. But the doc appeared to get that fact, then move on past it.
    “Vallencourt’s wife going through the mirror, then those things appearing?” I asked. “I’d guess that they’re connected. Am I right?”
    His fingertips went to his lower lip. “They certainly would appear to be. The purple coloration and all.”
    “So we’re dealing with some kind of place where everything’s invulnerable and super strong?”
    He gave that some consideration, but then shook his head.
    “Those spiders had thin legs and soft-looking bodies, so I’d doubt that’s the case. I’d say we’ve come in contact with a new plane of existence, where the natural laws do not apply.”
    Which struck me sideways, pretty hard. If Raine’s Landing does nothing else, it certainly is good at throwing up surprises.
    “Another dimension?” I blurted.
    And he nodded.
    “Can you sense anything else about it?”
    In the past, he’d regularly reached out with his mind and found out a great deal about a given threat. But this time, Willets looked blank.
    Then he murmured, “Everything’s a mess.”
    Well, that was no big revelation. But not, apparently, what he was on about. So I stared at him, waiting for a fuller explanation.
    “I mean – it’s not merely what’s been going on. I keep trying to reach out and find the source of this. And it’s like trying to find a cotton ball in pea-soup fog. The vibes out there are totally fouled up. It’s damned unusual, even for the supernatural.”
    Which left us with what?
    “Everything is out of whack,” he told me. “Normally, even bad magic flows to recognizable patterns. But there’s none of that here. Whatever’s coming down on us, it’s nothing I can even get my head around.”
    Back in the fall, we’d had something attack us that had come from right outside our Universe, and I wondered if the source was that.
    “The Dweller in the Dark?” Willets mused. “No, the Dweller’s a malignant nothingness. Whereas this is …” He paused, and swiveled his head around like some disgruntled owl. “Utter confusion.”
    And that didn’t sound the least bit promising. It meant we had no obvious way to find an answer to our problems. Spider things and shifting walls and disappearing families and purple lights. You added them up, and they came to a big fat