An Angel's Touch

by Susan D. Kalior

  I cast Black Light Shields around them again, but as before, they dissipated in seconds. I could not do anything, so I repeated what I knew over and over to no avail. The sloshing anger in my stomach expanded, burning my insides, filling my chest, my limbs, my head.

  Jen gathered a screaming baby in each arm and tried to stand to step away from the smoke. She held the babies the best she could, each one weighing her arms down. Then she stumbled and fell to her knees, the babies slipping a bit from her grasp. She was dangerously weak. She needed to heal herself. But that took time and protection from interference. She laid the babies down again, and gathered them beneath her in the most protective way she could. She was crying, and the babies were crying, and somewhere inside me, I was crying too.

  I had to help her. I had to. I tried again to walk. I could not. I tried again to teleport. I tried to manifest a rocket launcher, to at the very least, annihilate Quen-tan. My magic did not work. Only my telepathy seemed active.

  Jen tried to create a bubble around her and the babies like I’d taught her, but she was too weak.

  Quen-tan laughed at her, deeply amused.

  I said, “She is dying Quen-tan. If she dies, then she will die a full powered Goddess and she will be free to fly the celestial skies once more. And you cannot take her apart, for only she can split her self into seven pieces.” I said loudly as if giving instruction, “And she will not.”

  Quen-tan’s big, fat, black, thorny head swooped back to me exposing teeth, amusement now rage. His large voice swelled over me. “You have betrayed us, Ixion, worse than before. We offered you everything—and you chose,” he jerked his head to Jen and the babies, “this—again.” His three rows of teeth, lining his upper and lower jaw, bore multiple fangs. I only had two. Smoke wafted from his nostrils engulfing my face. It felt good. He said, “She gives herself to you; you can still turn her to stardust.”

  I just stood there, my cocky ass self, even though I had nothing to be cocky about. But inside, that sloshing fury spilled into my vast inner being.

  “No, then?” said Quen-tan. “Well, I cannot turn her to stardust.” His eyes slid her way, “but . . . there are other things.” His Dragon lips stretched back in a sinister smile. “And you can watch.”

  He swooped his big, fat, black, thorny head back to Jen, then said to her, “You are so easy. I should snack on your babies.”

  I had to help her. Had to. If only the Shens could enter the sixth realm without a ride. Then I remembered how Jen’s Angel’s Three had come into the sixth realm and dissolved the Black Box in which Diego had imprisoned me. They could enter the sixth realm without a ride, probably because they were not human. I summoned Jen’s Angels Three, hoping Quen-tan was too preoccupied with Jen to notice.

  I heard a whispering in my ear, “Hey there.” And then in my other ear I heard, “Hi there.” And, “Ho there.”

  I slid my eyes to the right and left, but saw nothing.

  She whispered, “We are trying to be invisible, but it is hard. We are very dense in the sixth realm.”

  Help her, I said with my mind.

  “We will try,” whispered Pink.

  “If we can,” whispered Yellow.

  “When the moment presents itself,” whispered Orange

  “Diego,” said Quen-tan, smiling. “Do it.”

  Diego approached Jen.

  I said coolly, “You are a coward Quen-tan, scared to do true battle with her.”

  He growled, “She has been a thorn in my side for ten thousand years!” He swooped his head to me. “You too.”

  I sent the telepathic message to Jen to block her mind given the best way for Tazmark or Dragon to undo another is to enter the mind and move into one’s being from there.

  Diego waltzed up to her and clutched her huddled shoulders with his sixth realm sharp nails digging in. He pulled her backwards with force, ripping her from the babies. Her gown had caught under her knees and tore at the abdomen when Diego tossed her on the white sand beach, landing her on her back.

  She appeared to have difficulty breathing. Diego had knocked the wind out of her. My sloshing fury expanded, lumping in my throat.

  Diego straddled her, holding her shoulders down, as if he really must. His hatred was for me, and it was me he aimed to crucify.

  The babies screamed, sensing the loss of their mother. Diego threw something like a cone of silence over them.

  Jen inadvertently whimpered, but a defiant sort of whimper—a reaction to the great energy it took to bar his mind from invading her.

  Diego pushed his resolute face up to hers, bearing fang.

  She repelled his energy with her big blue eyes, and declared, “No!”

  He said with a crooked grin, “All those times you were raped and raped and raped, little girl—remember?”

  He knew her human wounds lay there. He knew, and I felt her waver. My sloshing, slathering fury blanketed the expanse of my inner being, burning me alive from the inside.

  I sent her the message, Hold the mind block.

  I clairvoyantly beheld Diego’s next move. He dallied visions before her of past rapes, so that when she viewed him, she would view her rapists.

  Her head thrashed side to side. She threw out a block, a hard block—a goddess block. But her bleeding body was weakening too much.

  And he bulldozed his mind against hers. I felt it then, he broke through, soaring into her being.

  My thick fury boiled. I felt sick.

  Diego exited her being, having extracted something that belonged to her. A golden blob with a pearly sheen that hurt the eyes hovered in the air over her chest.

  Diego pulled out a fist-sized, plain silver box from the pocket of his matador jacket. He opened the hinged lid. With his mind, he willed the golden blob inside the box. It went in as if going to bed. He closed the lid and put the box in his pocket.

  Jen had fallen unconscious. Diego got off her and stepped over to Quen-tan. Then he faced me and said, “The box is Shen proof, Juan. Light beings cannot open it.” He smiled. “Now she can die.”

  My eyes narrowed, and when I spoke, smoke seeped from my mouth. “What did you take?”

  Diego paused for dramatic affect. “Her unconditional love.”

  My heart cramped. And it was almost impossible not to make the noises that come with pain. Her unconditional love: I had worked hard for that. She had worked hard for that.

  Quen-tan lowered his snout to me, flaring the webbed appendages above his ears. His black, orange-flecked eyes blinked. “Now it is irrelevant what becomes of her. Without her unconditional love, she is an unfit goddess and disentangled from you.”

  But she wasn’t. As long as ‘I’ loved her—she wasn’t.

  Quen-tan laughed. “Oh, I have other plans for you.”

  Pink, yellow, and orange lights sparked from Diego’s matador pocket, and the silver box popped out, along with Jen’s Angels Three. Apparently they could condense their size quite small. And in a whirl of sparkling energy, the box disappeared with the Angels.

  Quen-tan said with irritation, “What were those things?”

  Diego scowled, “I don’t know.”

  Well, her unconditional love was not in her, but it was in good hands—hopefully.

  Quen-tan said tersely, “Diego, take something else.”

  Diego went to her with a gait something between a waltz and a stomp. He mounted her hips again and moved into her unconscious mind, siphoning a silver blob of energy. It hovered over her face. He held out his hand, manifesting another smooth silver box. He magically opened the hinged lid, and the silver blob was sucked inside. The lid came down. He climbed off her and again took his place next to Quen-tan.

  I glared at him, my insides on fire, wondering what he stole this time.

  He held the box up and grinned. “Her memories.”

  Yellow and orange sparks whizzed by Diego, scooping the box out of his hands. The sparks and the box disappeared.

  Diego said, “Damn it! What
are those things!”

  Quen-tan snorted and said impatiently, “Steal something else Diego. Make the next one stick.”

  He climbed on Jen again and invaded her being for the third time. He siphoned a blue blob into another manifested silver box. He put the box in his pocket, and cast a repelling spell all around him.

  “Now, what did you take?” I said with lethally repressed rage.

  Diego grinned. “Guess.”

  A swirl of orange sparkles dive-bombed Diego’s pocket, but shot backward hard and then fell to the sand. Orange appeared. Her shrunken body sat on the sand haphazardly like Tinkerbelle. Diego picked up the little fairy angel by her tangerine wing.

  She cried out.

  Diego laughed.

  He took the silver box from his pocket, opened the lid, and dropped Orange inside with Jen’s blue blob. “I hope you will be happy together,” he said.

  Quen-tan commanded Diego. “Retrieve the other two boxes from those pests. Then go to Dracovar Prime. Place all the boxes in our Divine Light proof vault.”

  Diego nodded and flew off—on the hunt for Jen’s Angels Two and their precious cargo. With the Shen proof boxes on their person, they’d not be able to escape into the Seventh Dimension. I wanted badly to fly after Diego. But still, I was in this—paralysis. And what of Jen’s body? She was not doing so well. I could feel her life force fading.

  “Okay,” said Quen-tan, pushing his big, fat, black, thorny face up to mine. “Now she can die.”

  I wanted to gouge his eyeballs. My repressed rage had created a firestorm within me on the brink of exploding. I’d never had to repress rage before. My glare was hot, but I said coolly, “Or you.”

  Quen-tan said, “Her life force weakens in her human body. Soon she will be dead. And no matter what her next form—without unconditional love,” he half-laughed, “what is a love goddess? Without her memories, she will not know who she is. And in that she might not even fair to be a bracing challenge—ever,” he looked up, “out there.”

  “You don’t have those things—yet.”

  “Oh those little pests, you mean? They are no match for Diego. Besides, Diego has harnessed one thing more of her—and that alone is enough to disable her.”

  I tried to read his mind to discover what it was, but still his Black Light Shield was too strong. He swooped his big, fat, black, thorny head back to her. But he stared at me. He poked her with a talon, just to see my reaction.

  Reason and sanity burned away, and without thinking, I began to suck in volatile energy from the source of such energy. It mixed into what already raged within me. And though this offered no solution, defeat was not in my nature.

  Quen-tan sensed this combustible energy building in me. He grinned at me with amusement. “I see I am getting to you. Good. Because you have certainly gotten to me.”

  He lifted the dragon talisman from Jen’s neck and laughed. “It did not protect her—from me.”

  No it did not—but I would . . . somehow. Something was happening to me. I was losing my mind, my sense, my reality. Solar flares blasted wildly in the vast inner realm of my being. The flares had dark spots with shadows edging them. Then the dark spots seemed more dominant. I moved into them, soaring into the dark side of the void—life’s void. And in that darkness, and of that darkness, something dark rose, darker than I’d ever known. It rose through a canal of light, the antimatter of matter, the shadow of all persona. The backdrop that holds life. My powers felt a thousand fold, but still, what could I do?

  “Now—for you.” Quen-tan pushed his big, fat, black, thorny face to mine once more. His eyes turned ultra violet, infrared, then shocking white.

  This volatile energy consumed me.

  He said, “I sentence you . . .”

  And in this consummation, I felt an unexpected love for this little blue planet that had housed me for so long.

  Quen-tan continued, “To the Black Box . . .”

  I could not contain this massive volatile energy. Without thinking, I inadvertently sent it into the earth. I could see it in my mind, filtering into the faults between tectonic plates all over the world.

  Quen-tan finished, “Forever!”

  The third realm earth vibrated hard. Even in the sixth realm, the Dragons stumbled in an effort to hold their footing. This quaking seemed to create a disturbance, not of extreme catastrophic proportion, but more moderate—attention getting, like a wake up call. Second sight visions of the third realm reeled in my mind: Birds taking flight. Buildings shaking, the weaker ones caving. People running, screaming, crying. And in a fast forward time frame, like time-lapse photography, time fell into—no time . . . for all were in the moment. Future and past became now. And from this, I bore witness to what lay ahead. For a while, arguments would stop. Wars too. Because there was no escape from world calamity, it brought out all the best in people. They would help each other on a global level. Collective humanity would scream themselves awake from the spell I’d put them under.

  Quen-tan roared, “What is this!” He tried to cast a Black Box around me, but somehow the energy gushing inside me served as a force field.

  He kept trying and trying.

  My vision of the future reeled on. Something was emerging from the people of earth. Great humanity seeped into the air and changed the vibration of mass consciousness from too apathetic to overbearing compassion. Earth’s call for destruction had begun to change to a call for healing. It only needed time to finish the transformation.

  I sighed a collective sigh of all humans and their anguish of the ages. Tears washed my face. And as my tears fell, rain poured from the skies unto lands everywhere. The people would cry too, ashamed for blaming and fighting and killing each other. Who would have thought that it was ‘I’ who’d incite Redemption? That it would be ‘I’ who would save this world from apathy, from destruction—from me. Fuck, I was using chaos in the name of love.

  Quen-tan roared fire in my face, I think to distract me from whatever it was that I was doing.

  Whatever had held me immobile dissipated. I could move again. My hands felt larger than life as they filled with a protective wrath. Humans had given me so much; now I would give it back. And whatever was happening in me, happened so fast, I had no time to consciously calculate. It just happened. I blew out every Gankor I had on Quen-tan, freeing the starving souls within me. And just as they pierced Quen-tan’s scales like bullet holes, I sent the memory essences of every creature I ever toyed with or killed, from mass crimes, diseases, wars, and natural disasters, through those holes, and soaked him in the humanity of millions.

  A hurricane wind of humanity entered Quen-tan. He puffed up, billowing more and more and more. His eyes bulged. He roared, and in the middle of that mighty roar, he exploded. Chunks of Quen-tan flew out into the massive Dragon army.

  Narrow white fire streams bombarded me, inducing instant pain. The Dragons were retaliating. Welts bubbled on my skin. I fell to my knees in agony. Through white fire streams, I looked at Jen, still unconscious, close to death. The cone of silence had fallen away from the babies, and they screamed.

  I summoned the last of my energy and sent it into Jen to give her moments more to live. I’d done it once before in Montana, and it had worked.

  Staring at her, I toppled to the sand on my side, hair falling across my cheek over my neck. My hand clutched sand. Jen, oh Jen. Viewing her unconscious, lovely face, I took a shot to my head. Everything darkened. Everything stilled. All I could hear was my breath, gasping. “Haa ahh.” Stay alive. “Hah ahh.” Stay alive. Eternal . . . moments. “Haa ahh.” Unsure how many breaths were in me, I rolled onto my back to assess the situation. Red strata sky, getting darker. A shadowy head appeared. Someone was standing over me. Long black hair and purple.

  “A mother’s work is never done.”

  “Aruka,” I said weakly. Blood dripped from my eyes, down my neck. “I can honestly say,” I gulped hard, “I’m pleased,” I gasped for air, “to see you.”

&
nbsp; “I bet,” she said casually. “You took a hit in the head, but it looks more like a graze. An inch to the right and your brains would be cooked.”

  “Gee mom, thanks.”

  She pushed her head down closer to me. “How are you really? Are you salvageable?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, my head searing pain. “How did you stop them?”

  “Once the Dragons arrived, the Tazmarks believed my claim. We’ve been watching you clairvoyantly from the third realm at a distance, so they wouldn’t get us too. We pooled our power and put them in a giant Black Box, a little trick I learned from the Dragons, part of their ploy to lure me into their trap. Well . . .” she cackled, basking in her revenge.

  A blood glob almost choked me when I realized that, ironically, I, the most powerful Tazmark, was now the only one who didn’t know how to form a Black Box. I turned my head sideways and spit out the fluid. “I am impressed.”

  “But I am just a silly female.”

  I gasped for air. “Apparently not.”

  She said, “The Black Box won’t hold long. The Golden females in there emit a sort of antidote that eats away at the Box. We have much to do before they break out. They will go to Cyrus and undo your work, and make earth sound the cry for destruction once more. Then they will want to ‘Black Box’ you and store you eternally in Dracovar Prime.”

  “Yes, I suppose they will try.” I turned my head. The babies calmed some. Jen was still out cold. “She,” I said, “needs healing. The other Shens . . .”

  “Yes,” said Aruka. “You must heal too.”

  I tried to move.

  “Oh, stay put,” said Aruka, “we will get them.”

  Aruka and a four of her merry gang of Tazmarks sauntered over to Jen and the babies, a disconcerting scene if not for the turnabout of events.

  Aruka scooped my son into her arms against her velveteen gown, long bell sleeves hanging. Her eyes beamed desire for such a delicious morsel.

  Cecelia in her purple sparkly cocktail dress and spiked heeled shoes, knelt and lifted my daughter by her ribcage, holding it out in front of her, leaving little feet dangling from the white baby gown. “Interesting,” she said, “Tazmark and Shen—won’t you be scrumptious in a hundred years.”