Page 83 of Sweetwater and the Witch

“I don’t know about you, but I plan to save the sympathy for us.”

“It’s going to be a long night, isn’t it?”

“A very long night.”

Chapter Forty-Two

The demons, goblins, and monsters came out in full force after nightfall. The hallucinations were auditory as well as visual. The startling, unnerving, frightening visions were accompanied by howls, cries, and shrieks that seemed to emanate from the bottom of hell.

“Or that pool in the other chamber,” Ethan said. “It’s probably the source of the energy in here.”

Ravenna rezzed her senses to suppress an army of the living dead tromping toward her. She assumed the vision sprang from some horror movie she had watched in her youth. She managed to dampen it, but another hallucination immediately took its place.

Exhaustion was going to be the biggest threat, she thought. If she and Ethan let down their guards, there was a risk they would get sucked into a nightmare. The more terrifying danger was that they might not be able to find their way out. Storms of paranormal energy could do strange and unpredictable things to the human mind.

They were sitting back-to-back on the floor of the cave, comrades in arms, drawing strength from each other’s energy fields. Harriet was lounging against Ravenna’s thigh, munching a dainty pate a choux filled with chocolate pastry cream and contributing the heat of her own aura to the battle.

As far as Ravenna could tell, she wasn’t affected by the nightmares swirling around the cave. She seemed to have at least some immunity. Dust bunnies were, after all, native to Harmony. They were at home both aboveground and down in the Underworld. But Harriet evidently sensed that the humans had some serious problems with the sort of energy that swirled in the chamber.

“Do you think there is a monster in that pool?” Ravenna said, mostly to keep the conversation going. Talking helped—at least it helped her. It kept her focused on reality.

“Who knows?” Ethan said. “Our pal Joyner certainly panicked, but I’ve got a hunch we would have panicked, too, if we had gone into that water.”

“For sure. We humans have only been here on Harmony a couple of hundred years. We’re still adapting. There’s so much we don’t know. We haven’t even begun to map the surface, let alone the Underworld. We’ve only been able to make a serious start in the last seventy-five years or so.”

After the Curtain had closed, cutting off all hope of return to Earth, the First Generation colonists had been forced to focus on survival. With all of their Earth-based technology failing, there had been little time to explore and chart their new world. Then, just as they had begun to recover, Vincent Lee Vance had fired up his cult and attempted to take control of the fragile governments of the four city-states via a guerilla-style war in the tunnels. It wasn’t until after the rebellion had been crushed by the hastily established Ghost Hunters Guilds that the descendants of the First Generation settlers had finally been able to begin the process of discovering the secrets of Harmony. In an ironic twist, VincentLee Vance had died in the Underworld without ever knowing his impact on history. It was the rebellion he had orchestrated that had made the four city-states unite in what had become the Federation.

“What are we dealing with?” Ravenna asked.

“Something called Vortex, evidently,” Ethan said. “And according to Gabriel Jones, the Arcane Society seems to think Vortex may be as big a threat as anything the Aliens left behind. They are convinced that it’s got to be stopped before it really gets off the ground.”

“What is it?” Ravenna asked. “A super-powerful weapon?”

“No one seems to know for sure, but Jones told me the goal of Old World Vortex technology was to artificially enhance natural human psychic talents and expand the range of the senses.”

“Talk about playing with fire. There’s so much we don’t know about the mind-body connection. The brain is still very much a mystery.”

“That’s why that kind of research is illegal.”

Ravenna suppressed another storm of visions. “This Vortex project sounds like a conspiracy theory, doesn’t it?”

“Some conspiracies are real.”

“Think this one is?”

“If someone like Spooner, with his money and his power, believes in Vortex enough to take the risk of committing murder, I’d say that makes it real enough to cause trouble.”

“True.” Ravenna pulled the picnic basket closer and examined the remaining contents. “I vote we hold the high-carb goodies for later when we’ll need fast energy. Let’s stick with the proteins for now.”

“Good plan,” Ethan said.

She uncovered a tray of exotic cheeses, cured meats, olives, and nuts and set it on the floor where they could both reach it. Harriet finished her pastry and fluttered to the tray to examine the contents. She helped herself to some meats and cheeses and reclined against Ravenna’s thigh again to savor the meal.

They all ate in silence for a while. Ravenna was suppressing another wave of visions when Ethan spoke.

“For the record,” he said, “I would just like to say that this wasn’t what I had in mind for our next date.”

“No?”

---