Pax screamed when she felt claws dig into her good arm, and into her waist. Although she could not see the beings surrounding her, she remembered the familiar feel of the claws from the demons in her dream. She felt her body slammed roughly against the black metal walls of the palace. She heard the sound of cackling as the invisible demons raked their claws all over her body.
What the hell is happening, Pax? Amara’s voice shrieked into her brain. Pax closed her eyes and swallowed, unable to respond.
“Now, now, boys,” Suja said disapprovingly. “A little hospitality for the young lady?”
The claws stopped roaming abruptly, but Pax remained firmly clamped against the wall at her neck and waist. “Just let Amara go,” Pax pleaded. “Then you can let a giant invisible octopus rape me for all I care.”
Suja giggled in delight. “Oh, darling, don’t tempt me. I have plenty of room in my home for new pets.” The white haired woman floated toward the fjuyen pyramid and placed a hand on the surface. “Triangles are extremely strong shapes. I find them stunning, really. You know, since I left my husband—I have created one beautiful thing each day. What have you done since your deva betrayed you, Pax Burnson? What have you done except rot?”
Pax could not answer. She drew her eyebrows together, and could only think of Para.
“Exactly. You have done nothing. Your merger with Amara, you consider that significant? Ha! So you created a woman. A goddess more powerful than yourself—but she has a weakness. She can only live for thirty minutes at a time.” Suja smiled. “You should know this, Pax. A being is the sum of all their weakness and strengths. It’s like a ledger calculating net worth: your debts are subtracted from your assets. If your weakness is greater than your strength, you are the sum of both qualities. You have deceived yourself into thinking Para is greater than you are—that was a mistake.”
The sound of Amara’s muffled screams were heard as the clear pyramid began to fill with a neon green substance. The blonde woman struggled and thrashed her arms wildly before the green substance had completely covered her from head to toe. Pax tried to see what was happening, but only knew that her friend was in great distress.
They’re worms! Get them off, please! Oh my god, they’re eating my skin! Pax was powerless as the thousands of tiny green worms crawled all over Amara’s pink designer dress. The insects twisted themselves right through the fabric and burrowed down into her flesh. Several seconds passed while Amara violently scratched at herself and suffered from spasms which caused her body to bang against the insides of the pyramid. She released several bloodcurdling screams. Ash, she mentally moaned. Where are you? Help me, Ash.
Pax frowned when she heard her friend call for her uncle. She knew Amara was buckling under the stress of the situation. The blonde woman was too delicate for this type of trauma, and Pax was filled with guilt for putting her in harm’s way
“Do you see these little diggers, Pax? They are sucking her energy as fast as she can gather it. They are depleting her life force. In effect, I have turned her into my own little deva-battery.” Suja smiled. “If only Mrs. Rose Kalgren knew that the solution to renewable green energy was not in one of her laboratory creations, but in her own daughter’s blood.”
“Why are you doing this?” Pax asked with a frown. “What do you need her energy for?”
“I don’t really need it, but it sure is fun to watch those worms wiggle into her body. Look at how she squirms! Those adorable green critters are latching themselves onto her blood cells and transforming pure prana into electricity I suppose I could use her energy to power the planet, but there’s nothing on the planet that needs power.. I just hate to waste good electricity, don’t you?”
Suja twitched her finger, causing a narrow wire to extend from the pyramid to Pax’s neck. The dark-haired woman’s eyes widened as electricity traveled along the wire and began to prickle her skin. At first it was a prickle, but then she found her limbs involuntary quivering. Then her head violently jerked against the wall behind her, and she lost all control of her senses. There was only pain. Pax became vaguely aware of foam leaving her mouth and dribbling down her chin.
“You’re a deva,” Suja said, as she turned her back and swept away from the room. “You can handle a few hours of being tortured by your own friend’s life force. Amara’s energy isn’t strong enough to kill you, but it should sting a little. It should sting at least as much as it wounded me when you called me second-rate. Obake guards! See that she does not escape. If she tries, you have my permission to rough her up as much as you like. I’m going to take a nice long bubble bath. I might even catch up on some reading. Bye, Pax.” Suja waved and was about to leave, when Pax screamed.
“Wait!” Pax shouted at the top of her lungs. The Asura woman turned back, startled that Pax was even able to form a coherent word. Pax moaned, and ripping her good arm away from its invisible restrains, she wiped the foam from her chin. She struggled to straighten her posture and stared directly at her captor. “I’m not second-rate either,” Pax whispered.
“Oh?” Suja asked. “I would love a demonstration.”
Pax began to laugh. At first it was a small chuckle, but it soon became a hysterical roar. The electricity was still feeding into her neck, but the force of the glowing red aura around her caused the wire to tremble.
“Obake! Restrain her!” Suja shouted to her guards.
In her hysteria, Pax could suddenly see the silhouettes of the guards around her. She saw their claws reaching for her skin and let out a piecing scream, causing the wire around her neck to break and the guards to be flung away. She looked out across the room, and suddenly realized that there were hundreds of other Obake guards standing at attention and ready to attack her. She glared at Suja, holding her good arm out defensively to keep the guards at bay with her prana.
“I’m sorry for whatever Sakra did to you. Your palace is amazing and when I arrived here, I thought you were wonderful. But now, after what you’ve done to Amara? You’re not going to get away with this. You’re going to suffer,” Pax promised. “Your power is great, and your reach is immense, but you made one grave mistake. When you reached for me, you overextended yourself.”
“What a moving speech,” Suja responded, clapping gracefully. “I guess we’ll just have to see if you can actually follow through with all those grandiose and pompous claims.”
“I can.”
Pax glanced up at the fjuyen pyramid, and made a split-second decision. She knew she wouldn’t be able to rescue Amara on her own. Not without her arm, and with her body close to the point of collapse. With a desperate internal plea for strength, she pressed her good hand against her solar plexus. Please, she thought as she tried to initiate the transference, please. She exerted more and more energy, pushing herself harder until there was unbearable pain in her body. Pax waited for her technique to commence for what felt like an eternity. It was really just a fraction of a second. Even that delay was far too long in such a situation, and Pax was relieved by the sensation of weightlessness as her body began to dematerialize. She had been able to generate just enough energy to teleport away.
Chapter 19: Removing His Glasses
Pax found herself stumbling against one of the wooden posts at the foot of Thornton’s bed. She inhaled her familiar earthly air and the saturation of oxygen entering her body was blissful. She wrapped her good arm around the wooden post and pressed her forehead against the carved patterns as her chest heaved with her ragged gasps.
Thornton stirred under his blanket at the sound of the noise.
“Thorn,” she croaked out. Hearing the pathetic sound of her own voice, she wheezed a few more times to try and regain her voice. The last teleportation had sapped everything out of her. She clung feebly to the bedpost to keep herself upright. Casting her eyes on Thornton’s sleeping figure, she felt reassured that he was nearby. When she breathed, the familiar scent of him and his bedroom comforted her senses, and she knew that no further harm would come to her. It should have surpris
ed her that even after everything that had happened, she still felt safest in this place above all others; but she was far too tired to be surprised.
I need your help, she said into his mind.
Paxie? Even his telepathic voice was groggy. He reached out an arm as if he expected her to be beside him in bed; upon finding nothing, he frowned and sat up abruptly. The blanket fell from his chiseled chest into his lap, and he reached up to try to arrange his tousled blonde hair. What’s going on? I’ve been looking for you.
I’m here now, she answered wordlessly. There was something about communicating telepathically that was more intimate and exciting than a whisper. Or perhaps it was the sight of his bare torso that was affecting her, causing her body to respond even though it was trashed. Pax turned away and spoke out loud: “I was too proud to accept your help earlier, but I can’t do this on my own. I need you.” She used as stern a voice as she could muster, trying to override and erase the intimacy of being in his bedroom again.
“Your hair is back,” he observed as he rubbed his eyes and looked up at her. She had forgotten this fact and she nodded wearily. Thornton cleared his throat and stretched out to grasp a cardboard box lying on his night table. “I have a present for you. I wanted to give it to you earlier, but…”
“There’s no time to…”
“Please open it, Pax.”
She swallowed as she used her good arm to lift the lid from the box. When she saw the robotic metal dog, her eyes flooded with tears. “Bree,” she said softly. She immediately lifted the dog to her chest, and clutched it tightly.
“I haven’t activated her, but…”
“Thorn, I need your help right now,” Pax said. A tear splashed from her eye down onto the mechanical puppy. “There’s danger. We have to fight.”
“You’re wounded,” he suddenly noticed. He moved closer to examine her limp arm and his eyes widened when he felt all the spots in which the bone had been splintered. “Good Sakra, Pax! Where on earth have you been?”
“Not Earth. Sakra’s wife,” she said softly, feeling fatigue lower her eyelids. “Fight her.”
“I’m not strong enough to take on Suja,” Thornton said. He noticed that Pax was falling asleep on her feet and reached up to take the mechanical puppy from her arms. “You could have gone to Raymond or my dad for help. They’re both stronger than I am. Why did you come to me?”
“I don’t know,” she answered, hesitating. She noticed that she was no longer holding Briar several seconds after the dog had been taken from her arms. She tried to focus on Thornton’s face in the darkness. “You’ve always been there when I needed you.”
“I always will be,” he said. “Paxie, you need to know…”
“May I lie down here for a sec?” she asked. She was already keeling over, and the top half of her collapsed lifelessly on the bed.
“What kind of a question is that?” he asked, reaching down to grasp her waist and drag the rest of her onto the bed as well. “You’ve only slept beside me thousands of times.” He positioned her unconscious head on the pillow beside him. Moving to his night table again, he opened the top drawer and pulled out a vial of Sakra’s water. He used his thumb to part her lips slightly and trickled several drops of the healing fluid into her mouth. Once the bottle was emptied, he tossed it away and moved to her side, slipping his arm around her ribcage to hold her. He pressed his forehead against her shoulder and entangled his leg around hers. “I missed you, Paxie.”
* * *
Pax bolted upright violently, looking around in a terrified panic.
Thornton rubbed his nose where her shoulder had clipped him in her vigorous motion. “What’s wrong?” he mumbled sleepily.
“I can’t believe I fell asleep!” Pax yelled, furious with herself.
“It was only for a few minutes,” he told her.
“Why didn’t you wake me?” she asked, turning to him angrily.
“You were tired and wounded, as though you’d been fighting.” He raised himself up onto his elbow to study her in the dim lighting. “Your arm was crushed, and you were bleeding all over like you were shredded by claws.”
She reached up to feel her arm and was happy to see that it had healed—Thornton had taken care of her like she knew he would. “We have to get going now,” she said fiercely, trying to overcompensate for the fact that all she wanted to do was lie down again. Her body and mind were both shot. “That’s the first time I slept without nightmares since…” Pax put her face in her hands.
“Me too,” he said softly, reaching up to stroke her newly-lengthened hair. “I promise you that we’ll have many more restful, dreamless nights as soon as I do whatever you need me to do.”
Pax nodded, feeling her sense of purpose return. “Mara is being held captive by the Asura and a small army of creatures called Obake in a pyramid-prison made from a substance harder than diamond. On Venus.”
Thornton began to chuckle. When his hilarity evolved into a full-fledged laugh, he was abruptly halted by the force of a full-powered, burning-hot slap across his face. He saw the literal fire in her eyes, and swallowed. “Okay. So, you’re not joking. Venus?” Thornton pushed himself upright and levitated to the ground. “I’ll have to tell Father.”
“No,” she pleaded. “It’s my fault. He’ll kill me.”
“How is it your fault?” he asked.
“I used powerful magicks and attracted the attention of the Queen of the Asura.”
“What were you doing?”
She hesitated. “I was trying to hurt you.”
Thornton smiled. “You already have. You don’t have to trap me in lava at the earth’s core or turn me into a cockroach to get back at me. It hurts badly enough when you avoid me.”
“Very good to know. So what can we do about Amara?”
“Do we need a ship? Because Kalgren Tech just sold the newest model of…”
“No. We need to get over there now. I have to teleport us.”
“Okay. Well, I’ve got a book on my desk, and a few more hidden in the safe behind the Cézanne.”
“I hate that painting,” Pax said, dragging herself from the bed and moving to sit on his ergonomic office chair. She looked down at the tome that lay open. She ran her fingers over the ancient writing, using her prana to translate the Sumerian script. “A treatise on inducing an individual to forget… Thorn!”
“Sorry. Just some light reading,” he said, clearing his throat as he turned the dial on his safe.
“Were you going to use this on me?” Pax asked as she hastily turned to other bookmarked pages. She found more perception-altering techniques and turned to him suspiciously.
“I’m not sure,” he answered honestly as he pulled a few books out of the safe. He sent her a sheepish and apologetic shrug. “But I was considering it. I’m not sure how far I was willing to go to get you back… Pax, are you smiling?”
“No,” she said, turning away rapidly to conceal the small smirk which she couldn’t keep from her face. “This is messed up. But it is kind of… sweet.”
“You find it sweet that I was considering rearranging your brain to make you love me again?” he asked with a frown.
She released a small chortle. “Well, if anything, it’s passionate. But right now we need to be passionate about getting Amara home safely.”
“Right. Little sis is in distress, as usual.” He approached the desk and deposited several giant books on the polished mahogany surface. “I’m not sure how much of this I can actually manage to do successfully. The collection isn’t as impressive as yours, but you better believe that if a demigod ever imagined a creative way to use his powers as a weapon to cause suffering and mayhem, it’s in here.” Thornton pressed his index finger down on one particular volume.
“Good,” Pax said, staring at the book. “It’s what we’re best at, after all. There are hundreds, maybe thousands of invisible Obake guards. Suja created them to be extremely cold blooded creatures which would freeze at the temperature
of the planet Earth. So… do you think there’s a recipe somewhere for an instant ice age?”
“Whoa. That’s serious stuff, Paxie.” He was frowning thoughtfully.
“We need serious. We need deadly.”
“That’s my girl.” Thornton lifted his glasses from his desk and slid them onto his nose. He began scanning pages rapidly. He suddenly glanced up at her body. “Uh, you’d better put something else on.”
“Why?” she said, looking down. When she saw what she was wearing, her cheeks reddened.
“I don’t know how you feel about doing battle in a transparent nightgown,” he said with a smirk, “but personally, I will find it distracting.”
“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “Most fabrics won’t be able to sustain the heat on Venus.”
“Don’t you have an aramid vest somewhere around here?” he asked.
Pax drew her eyebrows together. She moved over to his dresser and opened one of the drawers where she used to keep her own clothing. She dug through to the bottom and found the old training vest she had used when she first learned Ruby Form. “You still have all my clothes here,” she said softly.
“I wasn’t about to get rid of them anytime soon.” A mischievous sheen came into his blue eyes. “Unless you gained a few pounds and wanted to bring some new stuff over.”
Pax rolled her eyes and closed the drawer abruptly. She opened a drawer containing Thornton’s clothes and withdrew one of his old t-shirts. She tugged the garment over her head before returning to the desk. “Let’s get to work.” She sat down and extended her fingers, creating a black glow around the tomes. Using her energy to absorb the information was a physically grueling method when she was already exhausted, but far faster than reading. “This is going to be the hardest thing I’ve ever done,” she suddenly realized as the difficulty of the incantations registered in her mind.
Thornton squeezed her shoulder reassuringly. “We’ll do it together, Pax. I need you to tell me everything you can remember about the place Amara is being held.”
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