Reawakened (Frankenstein Book 3)

by Dean C. Moore

  She extended her hand, palm up; the mindchip, about the size of a postage stamp, and looking fairly similar, considering the jagged edges meant to connect to his neurons—only made of exotic metals, microchips and nanites—rested in the center of her palm. “You can have it, but only because I know it’ll torture you more than it does me.”

  So, even without Naomi’s mind-reading ability, he’d read Stealy just fine.

  He stared at the chip in her hand. “Um, I’ll need your stealy magic to put it back in my head, if you don’t mind. It’s the quickest…”

  He didn’t get a chance to finish the sentence. She flung the chip at him; it moved through his head as if it wouldn’t respond to space-time again until it was good and ready, at which point it lodged in his brain exactly where it was meant to.

  Soren could feel it establishing connections with his biological brain.

  And to the beast.

  God help them all.

  SIX

  The beast alerted Naomi and the rest of the posse to his presence with a snort and his typically gruff manner—that included his more labored breathing, and his noisome odor. And, of course, the roaming mounds of nanites, like teaming ant hills, were once again evident over Soren’s entire body, marking him up much as they did the last time.

  Soren, still present, and conscious, sharing the mindspace in his body with the monster, felt his body pivot with less grace and elegance than usual, but with considerably more power.

  The beast could smell the fear on all of them. Naomi had already established a psychic link with the others to help grease the wheels in their minds that tended to freeze up in the beast’s presence with positive reinforcement. Soren knew because the beast had already hacked the psychic link between them, though Naomi had deliberately left Soren and the monster out of the loop.

  “Soren,” Naomi said, “open a portal so the kids and I can get to Victor’s lab to find out how best to slow the countdown to the earth’s total destruction.”

  “No,” the beast said in his typically raspy voice and with enough forcefulness to cause Naomi to take a step back.

  “What the beast means to say,” Soren said, taking over communications, shifting to a less threatening tone, “is that the queen is already here. And we’re going to need everyone’s help to check her powers.”

  Soren turned briskly before the others could finish gasping—toward the incoming queen. She had locked on to his location readily. By all accounts she should have gone straight for the savant, whose powers and ability to check the Queen represented more of a threat. Maybe that’s why she was eliminating him from the mental chess board first; before the pawn became a queen by accessing more of the cabbalistic magic that the beast and Soren had access to together. That, and possibly the savant had taken the necessary steps to remain off the queen’s radar for now.

  If so, the queen was looking to Soren and the beast for what exactly? Simply to destroy them? No, to ascertain the nature of the savant’s cabbalistic shielding magic, so she could get around it.

  The idea of the queen getting inside Soren’s and the beast’s head had them both fighting mad.

  That was good, because the fight was upon them.

  The alien queen was materializing in the Yucatan peninsula—towering over the tallest canopy trees.

  For the first time Soren and the beast understood how it was Naomi and the kids froze up in their presence; the sense of horror and dread Dr. Frankenstein and his beast imparted.

  Because it was just such a paralysis they were all laboring to crawl out from under now at the sight of the alien queen—still not fully manifest—more hologram than real.

  Would they be able to set themselves in motion in time?

  The queen was now fully manifest, and so the question had ceased to be academic.

  SEVEN

  The alien queen’s head looked like the deck of the Starship Enterprise. The “crew” populating the wrap around window on “the Enterprise” materialized and dematerialized as her various personas engaged to make sense of what was going on and to determine the best course of action. The “work stations” the “crew” populated also came and went as the queen rewired her brain on the fly, again to give her the best advantage over the situation.

  Naomi didn’t need a translator to interpret the subtext for her. They were all well out of their depths. Her nervous system seemed to arrive at this conclusion ahead of her; she’d peed herself. Their fearsome leader—the most powerful of them all. Nice going, Naomi. Great way to throw fear into the enemy.

  Two dragons tore through the sky, saddled with riders.

  “Those aren’t my dragons!” Natura exclaimed, stepping toward Naomi.

  “No kidding. They don’t look like they have a friendly bone in their bodies,” Naomi said without taking her eyes off the sky.

  “There’s no way anyone could have found this place. It’s warded with my magic,” Natura protested feebly.

  “Those huntresses wouldn’t be impressed by your warding magic. As for the alien queen… I get the distinct sense she thinks she’s dreaming all this, because she hasn’t been awakened for millennia. That’s probably the only advantage we’ve got for now. I suggest we take advantage of it.”

  Naomi’s voice had shifted tone; Natura took note but was equally distracted by what was going on in the distance.

  The huntresses had already swooped down, painting the alien queen in brushstrokes of fire across a clear blue sky the way Jackson Pollock threw paint around—with the same wanton ease. The alien queen didn’t even bother to react, just stared back at the dragons and their dragon riders with a “What the fuck?” expression on her face, assuming Naomi’s alien-face reading talents were all that.

  The rest of the alien queen’s body resembled that of a tall praying mantis—an extremely lean, exoskeleton-protected mass shaped with one thing in mind—pure lethalness—while exposing the least amount of surface area to the enemy.

  Erupting overhead in what at first appeared to be a meteor storm, the fireballs cascading down on Soren’s and his posse’s heads resolved themselves—into more fire-breathing dragons.

  Naomi gasped. “The blind huntresses.”

  “They never work together. This is common knowledge,” Lar protested, hugging his tome full of magic to his chest and stepping closer to Naomi. “Far less with huntress riffraff like those other two.”

  “Desperate times,” Naomi mumbled without taking her eyes off the drama unfolding in the sky.

  “So much for my warding magic,” Natura uttered self-deprecatingly. “They’re turning my magical forest into hellfire and brimstones. My animals are getting killed without anyone even noticing they’re there!”

  “Easy, Natura. You can tend to them later. Right now, we’ve got bigger problems.”

  “You do. To hell with all of you!” Natura sprouted Mercury’s wings on her feet, and matching white wings sprouted out of her back. Cockatoo-like white feathers now crowned her head, as she flew off to attend to the scalded monkeys falling from the trees, caught up in the dragon’s flames aimed at the alien queen.

  Naomi growled. One wizard down—probably their most powerful, after Naomi herself. Natura could have brought those animals back from the dead after all this was over, but she couldn’t control her emotions. So much more work needed to be done there. This battle didn’t exactly come at an opportune time.

  ***

  Makya blew on her Pan flute she’d made out of her ancestors’ bones, the notes cutting through the screeches of her dragon and the squalling of the other fire breathers. The dragons shrieked their protests, responding to the inaudible-to-human-hearing notes with a rising fury.

  The acoustic blasts from the flute sent cracks along the alien queen’s exoskeleton, starting with the metal-glass visor she used for an eye on to this world. But the cracks were healing rapidly, forcing Makya to blow other notes on the multiple pipes to continue to drive fissures through the alien’s body.

&
nbsp; Finally, no single note alone was enough to coax the cracks to propagate along the queen’s surface. So Makya played the alien queen a melody from ancient times. That seemed to be doing the trick just fine, even as her dragon swooped in and turned up the heat on those flames, driving them straight into the rapidly trailing crevasses along the queen’s limbs and torso. Makya’s dragon—also in a trance-induced state—could procure flames that burned at far higher temperatures than normal so long as the trance held.

  Makya’s sisters-in-arms weren’t exactly waiting to see if her magic would be enough.

  ***

  The samurai huntress, Tomoe, dove down through one of the fissures created by Makya’s flute-generated melody, taking full advantage of her petite frame.

  Once inside the alien queen’s brainpan Tomoe resumed her kata she had been practicing in the barn not too long ago, sweeping her sword about her in a dance of aerial acrobatics, this time meant to severe the neural connections as rapidly as the queen restored them, looking for a mental configuration that would shake off the dream and return her to her slumber. Maybe the more hacking Tomoe did, the less likely the queen was to realize she was no longer merely dreaming.

  Alien lifeforms on Tomoe’s scale manifested about her, less devoted to their work stations and more devoted to fighting her off. Their skill with their alien weapons was every bit the match for Tomoe’s sword play; Tomoe was wielding two swords now, both her long blade and her short blade.

  The alien weapons directed at her were foreign in design, but wielded like Ninja shuriken, so she dealt with them in the same manner.

  But the suppleness of the alien bodies, and their way of moving…the fact that they had additional limbs…. It was like fighting off multiple incarnations of Shiva, the many-limbed Hindu deity.

  It was time for Tomoe to get out while she still had her head. She was no match even for a somnolent, dreaming, alien queen.

  Using all the springiness she had in her legs, she vaulted up and out of the alien queen’s brainpan, using the bodies of her attackers as ladders to get up to the cracks in the skull, hoping to slip through one before the alien queen healed the opening.

  Tomoe nearly made it before the fissure closed on her, severing her at the waist. Luckily she had had time to skewer her lower body at the tip of her sword, which remained pinched in the crack. As Makya’s flute bought her a second chance at life, Tomoe pulled out her lower body the instant the crevasse reopened.

  Tomoe felt her consciousness fading away as her dragon swooped toward her. With any luck the dragon’s magic, or Aba’s, would bring her back from the dead. It was the best Tomoe could hope for at this point.

  ***

  Savita danced to the carnival rhythms only she could hear, beating out her jig with her bare feet across the soaring wings of her dragon, screeching out her song that were words of power masked as a calypso melody.

  Carnival revelers from parades gone by along Queens Park Savannah in Trinidad materialized, decked out in their warriors’ garb; and, acting in character, they threw themselves at the alien queen. They, too, had incarnated as giants, able to match the alien queen’s size and strength.

  Their fighting showed skill and bravery; their moves as practiced at avoiding counterpunches as any dancers caught up in a sweeping piece of choreography.

  But Savita’s magic was no match for this alien queen, who brushed off her carnival attackers as if tearing through a curtain of cobwebs.

  From Savita’s trance state, she could sense that the queen felt herself caught up in a nightmare of some kind; she was questioning if something had gone wrong with her hibernation pod. But her analytical functions were gradually dialing up. Soon she would realize she was not merely dreaming. Soon all would be lost.

  Savita let go of the revelation for fear of panic sweeping over her. If that happened, she would lose the trance state; her greatest powers would be lost with it; it was simply not an option, now of all times.

  ***

  Asim incarnated as the Egyptian god Bastet. She towered over the alien queen, even as Savita’s carnival warriors receded, dissolving into apparitions before disappearing entirely.

  Bastet reached out her hand and held the queen off the ground about the neck. The alien queen flicked her tail at her—an armored whip with all the cutting ferocity of a giant chain saw. It should have sliced through Bastet, but had no effect.

  The lion-human hybrid and demigod levitated into the sky with the alien queen, taking her off world, until both had disappeared into the sun.

  Meanwhile, Asim stood on the back of her dragon, statuesque. As opposed to her giant-sized avatar, this Asim was human-sized. As for the demi-god whose help she had solicited, she could only hope….

  When the alien queen broke back into the atmosphere, landing on the ground as if she’d simply been hopping off one of the giant canopy trees, Asim shrieked. Her trance was broken.

  The alien queen had thrown off a demi-god!

  What more could Asim do? She fled on her dragon, finding Savita beating a path away from the battle ahead of her. There was nobility in a strategic retreat.

  Heshima’s own sense of honor couldn’t condone fleeing the scene. The fool would remain until she was killed; of this, Asim was certain.

  ***

  Heshima jumped off her dragon, landing on the forest floor at the feet of the alien queen. Her dragon, meanwhile, dove down and sunk its fangs into the alien queen’s right leg. The blood disgorged showered Heshima on the ground. She relished in bathing in it and in drinking it. Blood magic was her thing. With the alien queen’s blood flowing through her, she would know what to do, receive the insights from her higher self on how to act, what additional spells to invoke.

  Her dragon had responded to the lash of the alien queen’s tail and to her shriek, flying off before causing the queen so much injury that it forced her out of her sleepwalking state.

  Heshima quickly morphed into a male of the alien species the queen belonged to and promptly proceeded to mate with the queen.

  Still in a semi-coherent state, the queen did not fight off the coupling, at least no more so than was warranted by appropriate courtship behavior. After a brief skirmish, and mock protests and fighting, preening, rebukes, she accepted the penetration of her person.

  That was all the invitation Heshima needed to shoot the semen into the alien queen, genetically altered by Heshima’s magic with a lethal dose of a biochemical toxic to this species.

  Heshima hopped off the queen, morphing back into her former self, and hopping back on her dragon that swooped down to pick her up.

  The queen screamed and crawled about on the ground on all fours, squirming and convulsing in agony. Her outcries did not elicit empathy but terror. The tone and tenor spoke of something so alien and so unspeakably powerful…. Her body smoldered and her exoskeleton collapsed as if small black holes were erupting inside her, forcing the metal-composites that comprised her outer shell to fold in on themselves.

  That was indeed what was going on—Heshima could see it in her mind’s eye through the power of the blood magic that had a hold of her.

  What caused Heshima to lose her connection to her altered state of consciousness was seeing the queen reversing the biophysics going on within her to eradicate the black holes, bursting them like boils. She was slowly reversing the effects of Heshima’s insidious attack.

  Heshima refused to leave the battlefield. Instead, she chanted new words of power, looking to slip into a different altered state along a different brainwave frequency than the one she was on before; the electromagnetic frequencies emitted by her grey matter altered yet again along entirely different lines. She sought out new information about the queen, continuing to carry out studies on the alien’s blood still coursing through her.

  But Heshima needed time. Could Aba and the others who remained on the battlefield buy it for her?

  ***

  “Any reason we’re still hanging around?” Britomartis asked. She
was seated on her dragon, flying alongside Artemis, who was mounted on her own dragon. Both dragons landed, perching on the limb of one very old, very massive tree, the branch nearly as thick as the Lincoln tunnel. “We’re clearly well out of our weight class.”

  “Yeah,” Artemis replied. “The last time we met up with the blind huntresses, we stole their dragons. Let’s see if this time we can steal some of their wily ways. I want to feel a little less like a minor league player the next time I meet up with these guys.”

  “Fair enough. You want to know the odds of us surviving, even this far away from the skirmish underway, the longer we stay here?”

  “No, not particularly.”

  Britomartis sighed. “Maybe that is the pragmatic response.”

  Artemis’s arrows could pierce a werewolf’s heart. Britomartis’s boomerangs could slice off the head of a dragon. Right now, they felt like children’s toys, and they, like the children wielding them, refusing to grow up and face reality.

  ***

  Augustus was doing what he did best, hiding out in a tree, accepting the gift of a banana from a monkey that came with a screech. The monkey looked no less terrified by all the fighting going on with the alien queen. He was binging on his favorite comfort food, and then, seeing what distress Augustus was in, brought him over one banana at a time to help him through the ordeal with his favorite coping mechanism—but only what he could spare; the rest he kept for himself. He’d already thrown up a bushel of bananas, but that hadn’t stopped him from scarfing down the latest dose of comfort food.

  Augustus was furious with himself. It was time to make his presence felt or surely the blind huntresses who guarded him would abandon the mission, figuring he wasn’t worth his weight in water. But intervening with the alien queen meant circumventing his greater mission—of staying alive—long enough to become a dragon morph, and to rise to the pantheon of the greatest of all wizards—and the most ancient.