Screw it. He stood up on the limb of the tree, tossing the empty banana peel, and holding on to the trunk, raised an arm—the one he was going to use to assist him with this spell. He hadn’t found his courage; he’d merely calculated that with all that was going on, a little old magic spell—successful or not was likely going to go unnoticed. No one was ever going to trace it to him; even if they did, he’d be out of here long before then.
“Stand down, wizard.” The voice nearly knocked him off his feet. It was the beast, thought projecting into Augustus’s head. There was a hint of Soren in the voice, but not much. “That’s all the invitation the queen needs to awaken; someone utilizing cabbalistic magic.”
At once Augustus understood his blunder. He was happy to back down. Relieved really. Even if he didn’t buy it—Soren’s reasoning was based on a likelihood, not a certainty—Augustus was not about to go up against Soren and the beast both; Screw the alien queen, to his way of thinking, Soren and the beast were the bigger threat.
Once a painter, Augustus rapid-drew himself a canvas to step through; flailing his arms about as he painted with light; the same way he’d gotten here was the way he was leaving. The picture of the barn the blind huntresses were using for a lair came into focus, along with the riders and the dragons that had left before him. He stepped through the portal, which rapidly sealed behind him.
***
Aba stood perched on a tree branch of one of the canopy trees, high up off the forest floor, regarding everything that was going on throughout the battlefield. None of it any good.
It was time to cause some earth tremors of her own.
The ones coming from the grumbling Yellowstone volcano could no longer be discerned from the shockwaves emanating from the alien queen’s footsteps.
Aba extended her arms and chanted her words of power.
As the earth shaking beneath them grew more violent, the earth goddesses arose from below. The clay-like effigies came to life like Harryhausen animations from days gone by and rubbed their pregnant tummies.
One by one, those tummies opened and swallowed up the alien queen. As quickly as she manifested another body for herself, another tummy-generated portal swallowed it up.
Inside those cauldrons the queen baked and stewed within concoctions brewed up with Heshima’s blood magic. Aba had linked with Heshima’s mind now to procure the necessary amniotic fluid that would birth the alien queen into another dimension—any dimension but the one Aba occupied now.
The ploy seemed to be working.
So, she was not impervious. Good to know, kind of reassuring really.
But the alien queen could make time work for her better than the blind huntresses. She erupted out of one of the wombs that held her, scarred, smoldering, furious, only to find the next trap sprung on her as another of the earth goddesses sucked the alien queen into her womb.
The game would continue in this fashion with the hope that one of Heshima’s concoctions would do the trick. Her blood magic was fierce and had never let them down before. None of the blind huntresses dared to let a drop of their blood fall on Heshima for fear of having their powers stolen from them. Aba was beginning to wonder if that was a mistake. They might not be able to take on this queen without finding ways to combine all of their powers—and perhaps not just through Heshima’s blood magic.
The alien queen found her way inside all of the pregnant wombs of all the earth goddesses, multiplying her body to test all the prisons at once; she had shifted from defense to offense.
Aba had no idea how the alien queen had pulled this off; Aba’s own magic was set up to prevent such teleportation fantasies. But the queen had a point to make evidently, and Aba didn’t care for the innuendo.
When the alien queen erupted from all four remaining wombs—all four versions of her at once—Aba considered her point made.
The four versions of the queen melded back into one, walking toward one another, marshalling their energies, their powers, and perhaps the lessons learned from the various incubation chambers.
The blind huntresses had dealt a permanent blow to the opposition for all their efforts; the alien queen’s opposition.
For she was now fully awake.
The sleepwalking state broken, Aba ordered the last of the blind huntresses off the battle field with a shriek meant to crawl over the dragons’ squawks; it would have made Tarzan proud.
The blind huntresses were leaving their comrades in arms—fellow wizards whose names she had not even caught—in a worse position than when they entered the fray. For this she was truly sorry. But if they couldn’t live to fight another day, then they couldn’t be of help when it really mattered.
EIGHT
Stealy motored her bike up to Naomi, its idling engine like the growl of an angry beast. “Enough of this,” Stealy said, as she observed the last of the dragon huntresses flying off. She freed her whip from its roost on her waist. It was infused with cabbalistic magic—a gift from Victor and his team of scientists who had been studying the same magic that infused Soren and the beast—in hopes of keeping them in check.
Soren, or rather the beast just held out his hand toward her without even shifting his attention from the alien queen. “No.” That was all the beast said before Soren took over communications, speaking in a tone less gruff and less raspy. “That’s just what she’s waiting for, someone to use cabbalistic magic. It’s why she’s here. She can smell it on me, can tell I’m rotten with it. And now that she’s fully awake, she’ll realize I don’t know how to wield it properly. And she can come in to my mind and get whatever she wants. I’m afraid there’s nothing any of you can do. Pull back. Let Victor and I handle this.”
“Hate to break it to you, pal, but Victor isn’t even on the scene,” Stealy said testily. “But don’t you worry. I can beat a strategic retreat with the best of them. I’ll steal some magic that will work against that superbitch.” She throttled up her bike and was off in a roar that would have sent male lions into heat, or caused them to retreat into their caves; one or the other.
She had picked Lar up in one hand and thrown him on the bike behind her, even as Lar fumbled with his tome, trying to find a spell to invoke that would help the situation. But unable to access his alter Cypher, who wouldn’t even need the book with his eidetic memory to recite words of power, he was helpless, and he knew it.
He gave up, and closed the book. “Fuck it, you’re right; we’re outta here.”
***
Player, his jaw clenched until the muscles just to the rear bulged to the size of apricot pits, his fists clenched, swirled the twister about him just a bit longer before using it to whisk him away from the scene. Naomi realized the feeling of impotence must have been flowing through his veins like battery acid.
With the rest of the posse gone, Naomi was left alone, standing just far enough back from Soren to be safe. The beast would backhand her clear of the battlefield without a second thought if Soren’s words weren’t sufficient warning.
Victor soared in on his mandala bridge, jumped off it to stand beside Soren. Victor gaped at the alien queen. “Looks like it’s down to you and me again, pal, like always.”
“I’m not sure what we can do this time, Victor,” Soren said. “I don’t dare use my cabbalistic magic.”
“Let’s see how that bitch handles my mandala magic. I’ll be happy to open a portal and drop her inside a dimensionless space bubble.” Victor’s words sounded bold, but his voice betrayed him as he turned to face the alien queen.
“Please tell me you confided with that menagerie of cosmic wizards you have collected in your genie jars at home as to our best course of action,” Soren said.
“Um, that would have been smart, wouldn’t it?” Victor swallowed hard as Soren glared at him and the beast inside him simply snarled. “Sorry, pal, got so caught up in watching the action here and gleaning for myself what my next move was going to be….” Soren presumed one of the transhumanists in Victor’s detail had dep
loyed insect droids with spycams throughout Natura’s forest that lent Victor the eyes he needed to spy on the action. “You know how I am; I do my best work on the broken backs of others. I needed this half-baked assault team to fail to mastermind what actually might work.”
“And…?”
“The system leaves something to be desired, that’s what. What never failed me before is starting to fail me again and again, spectacularly.”
“Step out of the way, both of you.” The voice that came from behind them was Naomi’s. Only it wasn’t. Soren didn’t recognize the tone—until he did.
“Oh shit!” he said turning toward her. By simply raising both arms up and out, she sent both Victor and Soren sailing through the air with her telekinetic energy—Victor, a mandala magician who was immune to such things, and the beast, likewise, had the intuitive insight and reflexes to see what was coming next and to adjust his density so her telekinesis would be powerless to move him. And still they had both gone flying.
Naomi vaulted into the sky to a point about level with the alien queen’s chest, and there she hovered as she held both her hands wide, her fingers tensed like tiger’s claws.
The sky turned black as pitch as the earth rotated out of the sun’s gaze. Then, the sky opened up—literally, not figuratively. As with the venting of a plane’s cabin depressurizing too quickly at an opening door in midflight—everything got sucked up and out—including the alien queen.
It took all of Victor’s powers and the beast’s to anchor them where they were. There was still no breathable atmosphere, but that would not prove much of a challenge for either the beast or Victor. The beast would have access to Soren’s personally designed nanites to saturate his body with all the oxygen he needed; even without using the cabbalistic ones. Victor had his mandala magic which could synthesize oxygen from within the sacred geometries that functioned on a microscopic scale and that saturated his body and were the source of much of his magic.
The heavenly stage cleared of Earth’s upper atmosphere, every star in the sky exploded in the manner of a quasar—firing a focused pulse of light and energy straight at Naomi. Those laser beams should have taken light years to reach them, all the same. Soren was no newcomer to celestial physics, and Victor was even more accomplished in that arena. But whatever magic Naomi was playing with—laws governing Einsteinian space-time be damned.
Once those beams converged on her she channeled them out of her fingers straight at the alien queen.
The queen hadn’t been standing in the forest all this time just waiting for them to make their next move, any more than she was now simply drifting in space. She was assessing her enemy. The beast could tell she was sucking in all intel from the internet, every computer and satellite on the planet, every human mind, like a psychic vampire on a par with none other.
And now that Naomi had made her move, the queen was assessing what she was up to and the queen’s best defense against her.
The queen combusted into a cloud of ash like a volcano cutting loose upon impact with the squiggly veins of energy coming at her from Naomi’s fingertips. The cloud, caught up in Earth’s gravity field, dispersed, covering the world like a blanket thrown over a sculpture not yet ready to be revealed to the public.
It couldn’t be that easy, Soren thought.
With the queen vanquished, Naomi resealed the sky, like zipping up a jacket. The vacuum to space had only held for the magic warded area that Natura had carved out. The rest of the planet had remained unaffected—mercifully.
But the dust of the queen rained down everywhere on the globe now, refusing to be burned up in the atmosphere, refusing to be blocked by it. As her dust choked the lungs, so it choked off all hope of escape—at least metaphorically.
Victor and Soren looked around for Naomi, but she was gone.
Victor rolled over on his side toward Soren. “The mousey chick you’ve been dating? She did this?” He coughed to clear his lungs. “It’s always the quiet ones, I tell ya.”
“Not Naomi,” Soren said, raising his torso up off the ground and leaning on his elbow. “That’s the past life that’s been looking to possess her all along, biding its time, waiting for the perfect opportunity. And it looks like we just gave it to her. Naomi is gone and I have to figure out how to get her back.”
Soren pulled himself to his feet, as did Victor, who brushed himself off. “Isn’t that her job, I mean, to claw her way out from under the psychic oppression of the uber-bitch from a past life?”
Soren looked at him rebukingly, with eyes that could kill on account of his callousness, before sobering. “I suppose. Looks like we all have to be born again into this world, and repeatedly. We grow as much as we can in our old form before we have no choice but to molt out of it entirely. I thought that was just true of us Dr. Frankensteins and our monsters who seem to live for our back-from-the-dead acts. But I suppose it’s true of us all.”
Victor grunted. “Well, that bitch alien queen won’t be coming back from the dead anytime soon, we can be thankful for that.”
“You fool!” It was the beast in Soren sniping, in his typical raspy roar. Victor actually took a step back. Again Soren took over the communications; Victor couldn’t stand disrespect, and he didn’t want the two of them fighting over nothing. Not when they had real enemies to contend with. “The alien queen has compacted her psyche into every one of those dust particles, multiplied herself countless times over. It is not her first rebirth, and it won’t be her last. Our only hope to contain her, as you did the others, is to decipher this cabbalistic language the savant bequeathed to us and wield it against her with the force of an army of gods.”
Victor nodded, his eyes vacant as he ruminated on the matter, and as he coughed out the dust already settling into his lungs. His mandala magic would whisk the queen’s many seedlings out of his lungs, or so Soren hoped. Soren assumed the beast would use his cabbalistic magic to the same ends. But how safe were they really? How safe were any of them?
Talk about strategic retreat. The alien queen had exited the stage merely to reincarnate in a stronger, more impervious form.
And Naomi?
She was fighting off a celestial wizard mano a mano, while the rest of the world took on the alien queen, wielding a combination of advanced science and cabbalistic magic that would be all but impregnable to anything earth’s best wizards could throw at her. She had become the latest celestial wizard to be put down. But at least the rest of the good guys had numbers on their side. Naomi had no one, just herself. The soaring sense of omnipotence Soren felt whenever reunited with the beast left him, like the air venting from a popped hot air balloon.
Victor was right; he’d be powerless to help Naomi in the one battle that really mattered.
ACT TWO
THE SECOND COMING
NINE
Stealy walked in on Ramon inside Victor’s penthouse suite. The suite was warded with magic to prevent such unsolicited entries, but with her particular skill, that didn’t slow her down much.
Ramon looked up from the medallion he was fretting over in his hands at her. “Shouldn’t you be out stealing yourself some magic that might actually work against the alien queen?”
“Didn’t you hear? Naomi dispatched her.”
“The shrinking violet?”
“I’m guessing she decided to take a step forward on her character arc.”
“Yeah, right. I don’t care what hidden powers she has, there’s no way she….” Ramon noticed the way Stealy was caressing the display cases Victor had decorating his apartment, containing the ancient medallions. “And get your hands away from those medallions!”
“Easy, Tiger, or I might just sit on your face.”
He smiled. “Promise?” Suddenly he was less guard dog and more petulant teenage boy, a lot easier for her to manage.
“I thought you could use some help picking the one medallion that might actually be of some use to us against the alien queen.”
“Yeah, I
could actually.” He’d morphed into the real him finally, as he was in this moment, anyway, exasperated, overwhelmed, slightly panicked.
Stealy had found the case she wanted. “Here, this one.”
Ramon rose from his roost—a projection of mandala energy from a complex geometric pattern in the floor that served as a kind of magic carpet. He took a step toward her. “You’ll need me to access—” She reached her hand through the solid metal-glass housing that was protected by any number of spells and security tech in addition to being housed in a bulletproof casing. “Guess not. Forgot about your gift for a second.”
She tossed him the medallion and he put the one he’d been wasting his time on back on its perch in its case. With his attention properly focused finally, he said, “Thanks.” He glanced up from the medallion again at her. “You wouldn’t happen to have a feel for exactly how this is to help us, would you?” He answered his own question by reading her expression. “No, of course not. I guess that’s asking too much.”
The floor shook violently. In the distance, out the floor-to-ceiling windows forming the window wall overlooking the city, they could see even the hi-tech skyscrapers of Swank Town straining to absorb the shock. Several buildings had serious fissures running along them which the nanites built into the structures at the time of their construction could not compensate for. Atmospheric nanites were swarming to the scenes of the disasters, throwing generation after generation of more modern microscopic robots at the compromised edifices to compensate for the shortcomings in the high-rises. Soon the cityscape would be as good as new. But what of the other sectors?
Observing the goings on out the window, occurring secondary to the rumblings of the Yellowstone volcano, Ramon said, “Forgot for a second that I’m caught up in more than one end-of-the-world drama playing out simultaneously. Where will I fit it all in my small mind?”
Reawakened Page 6
