“Your ancestors’ bones you’re whittling on…. Aren’t you, you know, disrespecting them?” Asim pushed. She never knew when enough was enough. She was gifted in that way, and usually riled everyone in the group in a similar manner sooner or later. Her questions were always valid, pertinent, and Aba supposed, caring, in her own way; but her timing sucked. Now was not the time to get Makya to bare her soul. The last encounter with Soren, and getting their asses kicked, must seriously have screwed with her head.
“Disrespect?” Makya kept filing, and the dead air that followed where more response was expected, was growing heavier and harder to push out of their lungs, even as it grew more humid from their own sweat collecting about them.
Asim was Egyptian, with caramel-colored skin, and finer, more chiseled features than Aba’s, than most anyone in the group, really. “Asim.” Her voice resonated in Aba’s head with the sound of a metal rasp filing wood. Her maroon hair was a wig—of the kind common as far back as ancient Egypt; similar in design to the hair pieces one saw etched in hieroglyphs. Asim’s eyes were electric blue and glowed no less in the darkness.
The wizard, Augustus, for his part, Aba noticed, was doing a martial arts kata off to the side. She doubted it had anything to do with magic, and more to do with calming his nerves after seeing his badass spell directed at Soren turned so readily back on him. The handsome young Chinese wizard that had been named after a Roman emperor was clearly determined to do whatever it took to live forever—or long enough at least to join the pantheon of truly great wizards, most of whom were Chinese. Their culture being the most ancient, many of their wizards had perfected the art of immortality thousands of years ago. And, still around, it was that accumulated wisdom and expertise with their craft honed over eons that made them so unstoppable. Aba couldn’t blame him for wanting to follow in such an illustrious tradition. Of course, surviving those first thousand years—prior to getting his hand on the immortality elixir—a well-protected secret among their kind—was no laughing matter.
“My ancestors were all warriors,” Makya finally explained, blowing the bone dust off her latest whittled forbearer’s bone. “They are fighting in the spirit world for me. And if they must fight in both worlds for a time, they will relish the opportunity.”
“Like I said, creepy.” Asim returned to her filing of the lion’s talons on her necklace. As she did so, she mumbled words of power, and her face morphed into that of a cat. Her nose and mouth and the front of her face elongated as the snout pushed out. Asim’s ears grew up and pricked. Her mauve hair turned electric blue, but it still wore like the wigs of the Egyptians depicted on hieroglyphs, even as it grew longer. The silver dollar’s thicknesses of hair collected up by yellow bands, she then flopped over her chest. The tips of those strands of hair dangled at her nipples. The hair behind her shoulders now fell halfway down the length of her arms. Asim had become the spitting image of Bastet, as she was originally depicted on Egyptian pyramids—the fierceness and courage meant to be captured in the lion’s head.
“But that’s not creepy, oh no,” Savita, their Trinidadian, said, eying Asim’s transformation, drawing chuckles from Aba and Heshima, their Kenyan. Heshima’s name meant honor, and her personality didn’t stray far from that. She would no doubt respect Asim’s present transformation and the reasons behind it, because making sure she had all the power she needed to hold up her end of things was the honorable thing to do. That probably explained why her chuckle was the softest, melting quickly into an approving smile.
Asim broke the necklace now that the last lion’s nail had been filed. The nails which fell to the dirt floor migrated to her hands and feet as she bent down on all fours, part of her now.
The wizard, taking the girls in only peripherally, Aba noticed, grew more frenzied with his kata. Aba couldn’t blame him.
Heshima, not just Kenyan, but Maasai, broke away from the group seated in a circle on their dragon’s saddles in the barn to bleed her cow, tethered to one of the dragon’s stalls. She drank its blood from a magic-infused cup and chanted her words of power. Not all her beliefs were strictly Maasai—as that would have given too much power to men. She’d taken what she needed, and left the rest; mostly the ceremonial ware, and a few bizarre rituals Aba wasn’t sure about. The bald dome of Heshima’s skull was tattooed, and had been elongated, wrapped from birth to force the bizarre growth pattern, the way the Chinese wrapped the feet of their female children to mold a particular look. That was not a Maasai practice, but her jewelry was common to the Massai. Her eyes were electric purple, especially radiant in the darkness.
When she got herself good and fired up on the blood drinking and chanting, she summoned her pet rattlesnake to her and it began its journey down her mouth.
That was Savita’s cue to begin slipping into her trance. She was faster and better at entering altered states of consciousness than the others, so she went last to stay in sync with them. Her carnival-like, trance dancing, hearing the calypso rhythms and steel drums pounding in her head, was being carried out in another corner of the barn. Her carnival-like costuming, of course, had been tweaked for a huntress’s purposes—to allow for a broader range of motion. Savita’s short, kinky hair was carved in labyrinthine patterns that might well have been yet another form of magic. Her eyes were electric red, and also glowed in the dark—a shame they were closed now to help with deepening her trance.
Tomoe, their Japanese samurai, named after one of the two most famous female samurai warriors of all time, Tomoe Gozen, had been at her katas for some time now, over in her own corner of the barn—the overhead balcony. Her outcries, together with the swooshing sounds of her slashing sword and thrown daggers—and her leaps and rolls undertaken with power breaths—made it sound as if a fierce battle with invisible warriors was already underway upstairs.
Her eyes glowed orange. Her build was more petite than the other renowned blind huntresses, but her face made up for it in its ferocity; her features—like the familiar template used in Manga anime cartoon characters, as unisex as they were striking. “Tomoe.” Her name sliced through Aba’s mind like the swish of her sword, leaving whispering echoes in its wake.
The souped-up, magic-infused eyes of the huntresses had been meant to enhance their night vision once upon a time. The larger-than-life eyes in general would have also helped in that department. But they’d grown too dependent on the enhancement, and since changed tactics, after coming to the realization that some adversaries couldn’t be tracked by sight, no matter how well they saw through the darkness. Now they veiled their eyes with drop-down white, opaque shields whenever they hunted, making themselves blind to enhance their other senses.
***
Augustus finally made his way to Aba seated in the circle of huntresses inside the barn. “What are they doing?” he asked, taking a seat beside her on the floor.
Aba gave the group another going over with her eyes before returning her attention to the Yorkie toy dog she had been grooming and preening like a prize show dog the entire time she was keeping her eye on the group. Its yaps would draw her attention back to it if Aba’s attentions strayed too far. “They’re deepening their trance state,” Aba explained.
“I thought they were always in a trance state,” Augustus balked.
“Yes,” Aba replied, keeping her voice neutral, “that is to keep all the regions of their mind accessible and integrated, the left and right brain, and their conscious, subconscious and unconscious minds. It makes us very powerful. But this, what we’re doing now, this is scarier still. Now we integrate past lives, bringing them into active memory, and making those lessons learned accessible, as well.”
Augustus gulped. “And if that doesn’t work against Soren and the beast?”
“Have faith, Augustus; faith is the beginning of all magic. You, of all people, should know this.”
“And if the magic doesn’t work?” Augustus repeated with just a hint more indignation in his voice, possibly more than a hint.
“Yes, by all means, shift gears one at a time.” He returned his eyes to the women working on deepening their trance. “Can you tell me something about these huntresses? It might assist me with mating my magic with theirs.”
Aba smiled weakly. “Heshima is all about honor.” His eyes went to the Masai jumping up and down in place, her huge necklace—like the rings of Saturn—flopping up and down on her chest. “She will be the last to abandon you, after each of us has long given up. Savita…” His eyes went to the Trinidadian, whose movements were more in keeping with how they paraded down the streets in Trinidad during carnival, responding to the rhythms of the Calypso music only she heard. “She’s more about the partying and carrying on after exorcising the demons of her past and her ancestors. She’ll be the first to abandon you and our cause. The fighting for her is just a pretense to getting good and sauced. I’m sure there’s more to her, but I haven’t gotten that far yet.”
“And her?” Augustus gestured toward the Egyptian staring at a portal she’d opened up with an upturned palm revealing street scenes from ancient city of Giza. Each time she roared, some dignitary on the other side of the portal—whipping a slave or engaged in some form of cruelty—screamed from the sound piercing their ears. Their ears would proceed to bleed, and the aristocrats would collapse, dead, as their brains continued to ooze out their ears.
Aba just shook her head, observing the same thing he was seeing. “I just know better than to mess with her. If that’s ancestor magic, I’m frightened to know who she’s related to. Most of the time she’s like Bastet of later times, catlike, coquettish, flirting with the other women. More about sexual and sensual pleasures than anything else. She bleeds the tension out of the group better than anyone; until she’s like this, when she’s better than heightening it than anyone.”
Augustus’s eyes returned to the Native American, blowing on her whittled bones as if she were making flutes. Then they drifted over to the samurai whose ferocious battle with non-entities above had never stopped. He really didn’t need to ask about these two huntresses. He thought he had enough to go on for his spell magic, but rather than risk it… “And them.”
Growing impatient with the inquisition, Aba’s tone shifted. “Tomoe mostly fights male rivals to prove her superiority in all things, including combat. Soren is the perfect enemy for her. She couldn’t be more fired up if she tried, or more fearful, I imagine, as she has the most to prove of all of us on that score. Female samurai were charged with defending the home, no more, in their day. She still hasn’t lived down the shame of that.”
Aba lifted her eyes from brushing the Yorkie toward Makya. “Makya is possessed by a different spirit every day. It’s her way. You get used to it after a while. Not sure this one is any worse than all the others. Though it’s a bit like living with a split personality with more alters than you can count.”
As far as Augustus could tell, this alter was all business, focused and intent on revenge against Soren—at all costs. Personally, he would have appreciated a little more personality in the bargain, a little less single-mindedness. All fighting machine, even in downtime, didn’t do much for settling Augustus’s nerves.
Augustus studied Aba finally. “I guess you’re the leader of the group because you’re the sanest of them all.”
Aba snorted. “That’s not for me to say.” She bit off the head of her Yorkie and drained his blood into a cup. Then she put his body, and the cup, on a tray of food he’d taken to be her dinner, but apparently were also part of a ceremonial offering.
She then went to a shrine she’d erected against one of the barn walls, knelt, and started mumbling things, intermittently shaking the Yorkie like a rattle to spray blood over her wood carvings and ceramic effigies.
Augustus growled. “Spoke too soon,” he mumbled under his breath. “Guess we can chalk your personality up to bait and switch.”
The ground shook beneath them. Augustus felt his body turn to jelly, the size of the bowl he was jiggling in determined by the back and forth motion of the shifting earth.
All the blind huntresses opened their eyes at once—showing the opaque white that ensured their blindness; they were signaling the hunt was on, in their own inimical fashion.
“What is it?” Augustus asked. His big hands for such a petite frame were held out and splayed in front of him, ready to be summoned into action by his spell casting if necessary; all his defiance, typically focused through pinched, thick, black eyebrows, intent eyes and a small but ample-lipped scornful mouth, were aimed at the huntresses, Aba in particular. Aba’s Afro-American features, with the prominent, broad, flat nose and full lips, and her ebony complexion played well against her white tunic and white-ivory bow. With just the whites of her eyes showing, the eyes were no less radiant, overshadowing the supernatural whiteness of her garment. But what stood out most for him was how she resembled ancient earthenware carvings dug up from many thousands of years ago. Did this woman trace her ancestors back that far—or was she one of the ancestors?
“It’s started,” Aba said.
“What!” Augustus snapped, losing his cool. He wouldn’t know what magic to invoke if he didn’t know what he was up against.
“The end of the world.”
FIVE
Naomi opened her eyes, face up to the sun as she was on her lounge chair, at the latest rumbling of the ground below her.
Soren simply turned over on his lounge chair stretched out and set parallel to the ground without opening his eyes. “Love the vibrating bed idea, darling. You should have thought of it sooner.”
“Soren, the world is ending. Open your eyes.”
“You don’t think you’re being a tad melodramatic, hon? I mean, I agree, if anyone has the right to make a statement like that it’s someone on our team, being as we’ve either been the cause of the world ending many a time, or the solution to the infernal problem, or both. But I tell ya, I’m just not feeling it.”
Soren screamed as he was suddenly falling into the abyss. He was good and awake by the time he hit bottom.
As it turned out, the “abyss” was a portal opened up by Victor, who had soared in on his mandala bridge and was determined to get Soren’s attention.
Soren picked himself up off the ground. “What the hell, Victor?”
Victor glared at Lar. “You didn’t tell him?”
“Tell him what?” Lar replied, squinting his eyes at the brightness outdoors; he had become quite the cave dweller of late.
Victor groaned as he put two and two together.
For his part, Soren was surprised to find his entire team surrounding him in the circle; Not just Lar was in attendance, but Stealy, Player, and Natura, as well, and of course, Naomi, who alone had the right to be there; this was sort of their unofficial honeymoon. If Victor thought he had a right to be mad, he could get in line, because Soren was well on his way to feeling furious.
“Just great,” Victor said, continuing to stare down Lar. “Turns out the psychic, trance-channel you is yet another alter which you lose access to the instant you default back to being Lar.” Victor took a deep breath and held it, ironically to keep his head from exploding, as he shifted his attention back to Soren. Soren was the only one of Naomi’s posse he had any use for.
“What genius here neglected to tell you,” Victor said, referring to Lar with a dismissive gesture, “is that Captain Klutz stumbled onto a chamber in one of the Antarctic pyramids, unwittingly breaking the seal on a several-thousand-year-old hibernation chamber holding a family of four aliens, one of which was the savant we were studying when last we met.
“The savant, since awakened, is currently helping us to decipher the rest of the cabbalistic language she wrote millennia ago. But if her efforts fail to thwart the queen of the oppressor race—heading toward us n
ow—her fallback is to destroy this world. Therein ends my public service announcement. As you know, I don’t much care whether this world ends or not, but out of respect for our friendship, I figured I better I tell you.” He turned to Lar again with his latest nasty look before turning back to Soren. “When I couldn’t read your mind, I figured you were kept out of the loop somehow; otherwise your well-warranted excitement level would have made your mind easy to read.”
Victor stared guiltily at Soren briefly—knowing full well that he was the bane of Soren’s existence—before surfing off on his mandala bridge, disappearing into the daytime sky.
Soren regarded Lar who still looked at him cluelessly, shrugging his shoulders. “I swear I don’t know what he’s talking about. I’d say he was making up the whole thing if Captain Klutz hadn’t stumbled onto this.” Lar showed Soren the book.
The picture of the volcano at Yellowstone erupting was clear enough, but as for the rest…
The ground shook under their feet; in light of that, Lar’s handing Soren the book when he did seemed all the more apropos.
Soren, still wiping the cobwebs out of his eyes, took a look at the diagrams and symbols that went with the picture of the volcano and shook his head. “I can’t make hide nor hair of this, Lar. Maybe with my mind chip…”
All eyes turned to Stealy who had stolen it from Soren with her stealy magic—right out of his head—because she was pissed at what the beast had done to her—to them all. She still didn’t look any less determined to hold on to it forever—world ending or no.
Soren held out his hand anyway. “Hand it over, Stealy. You know as well as I do I’d just as soon have you hold on to it forever. I’m rather enjoying my sabbatical from the beast and from a life of self-importance. The rest of you might be drama queens who live for this shit, but honestly, I’d just as soon put all this nonsense behind me.”
Stealy looked like she believed him. If anything, she looked as if she might hand over the chip after a confession like that because it was now a better form of punishing him for what he’d done to her and to the rest of them. If Soren wanted no part of his superpowers because it tormented him—and she was around at the time to attest to just how much it tormented him as much as everyone else—then by all means, give him the chip, if only to see him suffer.
Reawakened (Frankenstein Book 3) Page 4
