Beetle Juice by Piers Anthony Page B

right,” Vanja said. “We don’t care at all about any such guilt. Every boy wants to look at every girl nude. Every girl secretly wants to show it off.” Her clothing faded momentarily to nudity. “Who’s next?”
    â€œI will do it,” Wizard said. “My secret is truly guilty, because it derives from an episode when I was adult and knew better. The giantess who governed our region was a beautiful woman, when she tried to be, and she sought to seduce me and thus bind me to her. I resisted, of course; I was in a long-term happy marriage. But once when I was scrying for her she quietly stripped, stepped into me, kissed me, and seduced me. I fought against it, but her sheer eroticism overwhelmed me.”
    â€œWe saw her,” Vanja said. “She was like me: lovely, wild, and unscrupulous.”
    â€œWe did see her,” Tod agreed. There was a mental flash of a remarkably sexy nude woman in motion.
    â€œShe mesmerized you,” Veee said fondly. “You couldn’t stop staring at her bare body.”
    â€œShe was standing right over me, fifty feet tall, her legs spread,” Tod said reminiscently. “Then these two jealous females hauled me out of there.”
    â€œYou were freaking out, you letch,” Vanja said.
    Wetzel saw the enhanced image in Tod’s mind. “I would have freaked out too,” he said. “What a view!”
    â€œSo we don’t blame you for falling under her spell, Wiz,” Vanja said.
    â€œThereafter I guarded myself with magic,” Wizard said, returning to the subject. “Not the neat repulsion mind-frame we have recently learned, merely a field that made me difficult to approach close enough for sex. I was on guard, and it never happened again. But I knew my wife would not understand, and I hid it from her. Thus my infidelity was compounded by the lie that was my concealment. It remains my deepest shame.”
    â€œThat will do,” Tod said. “Fashion a chamber around that memory. Encapsulate it. Then when you have a secret to hide, bring it into that chamber and leave it there. It may take time to perfect the technique, but if you practice you will improve, until there is no evidence of your shelter, even to telepaths.”
    â€œI will,” Wizard said.
    â€œI think it is my turn next,” Tod said.
    There was a gust of wind. Veee looked at the sky. “Storm. It may be a bad one.”
    Vanja changed to bat form and flew up. The wind caught her and blew her to the side. She landed and changed. “Bad one,” she agreed. “We haven’t seen weather like this before. Not in the amoeba. It’s just one thing after another.”
    â€œI suspect the Amoeba,” Wizard said. “It is putting us through a course, forcing us to develop techniques we may need for the mission.”
    â€œFor a thing that takes no direct action, it’s pretty active,” Tod said sourly.
    â€œIt is merely a particular trail, one with challenges,” Wizard said. “We need to organize in key ways before the crisis comes.”
    â€œWell, right now we’re in danger of getting blown away,” Vanja said. “We need to find shelter, and there’s nothing I’ve seen from the air.”
    â€œI will scry,” Wizard said. “I am better with subjects I can touch, but I am touching the air and can fathom it to an extent.”
    â€œWe know there’s a storm,” Veee said. “Scry the ground for shelter.”
    â€œGood thought.” Wizard put a hand down on the ground. “Oh, my.”
    â€œDon’t get cute, Wiz,” Vanja said. “What’s the answer?”
    â€œYou won’t like this.”
    â€œI’m not a child! Out with it.”
    â€œThe only suitable cave within range is that of the mind monster.”
    Vanja stepped back as if struck. “You’re right. I don’t like it.”
    â€œWe escaped it,” Tod