The girls reached for their weapons rather than show him their backs. Soren fired bolts of lightning larger and more powerful than anything he’d ever been able to emit before. The two women struck first were blasted back against the sides of the buildings on either side of the street so hard that even their reinforced skeletons shattered. Their skulls remained intact, though. Interesting. Along with the Achilles heels, they’d been reinforced. Smart. Hard to pull off a back-from-the-dead act without any brain activity.
Artemis and Britomartis swooped down on their dragons, dousing Soren in flames. Excellent; he wanted the former adversaries fighting together. But the flames were useless against him. The human side charred as the mounds of nanites on his surface glowed red hot. But the human flesh reconstituted quickly. The dragon’s heat was a little harder to shake off than Stealy’s boluses of fire shot at him the night prior. But of no real concern for the newly fused dual entity that was Soren and the beast.
Artemis, the more practical one, decided that if the flames weren’t going to do the trick, maybe her dragon’s claws and beak would, or perhaps the crushing power of its grip. She snatched Soren up and into the air.
The huntresses on the ground weren’t exactly standing idly by, watching the show. They were already preparing their countermeasures in case Dr. Frankenstein and his monster both survived this latest exchange.
Soren winced in pain and grimaced from the squeezing pressure of the dragon’s grip. He could feel his bones breaking. But they healed just as quickly. He pried himself out of the monster’s grip and plummeted back to the ground. On his way down, he reached his arm up to both dragons, used them as dual-descent-kites to slow his fall, until he released both from the tractor beam once he was back on terra firma.
The master wizard Artemis and Britomartis were protecting earlier had returned to the scene. Having spied enough of what was transpiring, he opened a portal for himself as he’d done before with his speed painting with different colored lights, stepped through the canvas to fetch whatever rainy-day concoction he’d put aside for moments like this, then reemerged on this side, seconds later.
He blew the powder in his hands at Soren. The magic-infused nanites sped toward him, invading his body. Interesting. They were breaking the union between the beast and the doctor. Soren was becoming distracted by the science and the magic underlying the sabotaging underway. He seemed able to pick apart both sides of the spirit science on the fly. As soon as he understood it—using a mental acumen he never had before—the beast took over, initiating countermeasures; and he was pissed. Boy, was he pissed. He sent the dust right back out of him, straight at the wizard. Shit. Soren had meant this to be more of a teaching opportunity. It was a tough-love regimen he wouldn’t have had the stomach for without the beast activated and incorporated into his nature. But together…. The beast in him might have been willing to play along with that idea, up to a point but….
The wizard didn’t like the ominous undertones of the cloud drifting toward him. He jumped off the roof and into the hands of one of the blind huntresses. “Save me!” he shouted.
She and the other huntresses grimaced their disproval, as she tossed him to the street to free her hands for combat. All the same, they seemed intent on intervening on that dark cloud making its way for the wizard. They blew magic dust at it, confounding the spirit-science of the nanites briefly, while the wizard made his escape—quick drawing his latest energy painting and jumping through, only to just as quickly seal the portal behind him.
The nanites, sensing their quarry was gone, infiltrated the bodies of the eight huntresses instead. Each of the girls tensed and jumped back. “Shit!” was coming out of the mouths of more than one of them. They were waiting for what happened next to know what countermeasures to initiate with their own magic.
But the nanites drifted back out of them, taking their findings back to Soren, where the beast and Soren—once again reunited—could study the data and subject it to their cabbalistic science.
The huntresses didn’t need any cuing as to what was going on. “Once he’s done analyzing that magic-infused nano, he’ll know all our secrets and all our defenses and how to get past each and every one of them,” Britomartis said. She was the intellectual of the group—or what passed for one by huntress standards. Mostly a worst-case scenario worry-wart. But she wasn’t wrong.
“The party’s over girls,” said Artemis, the pragmatist in that two-person team featuring her and Britomartis. “Time to cut our losses and run. Sorry, but we’re keeping the dragons. You’ll make out better without them than we will.”
“The next time we meet, I suggest we have some new tricks up our sleeves,” Britomartis coached.
The blind huntresses went invisible and flew out of the area—using chi blasted from the chakras in their feet and along their spines. So, Soren thought, they’d learned enough about chi channeling from a chi master to help with the cutting and running part, even if they weren’t confident enough with the abilities to fight with it. Perhaps their mastery would be better next time in preparation for their next encounter with the Soren/Beast dyad. “Let’s hope,” the Frankenstein’s beast grunted, responding to Soren’s thinking.
He turned and slipped through a portal, headed—not for the cryogenic tank that now held his actual body, frozen at two hundred and sixty degrees below zero, Centigrade. Not done playing yet, he was headed elsewhere.
The scientist that was Soren pondered how the union of Soren and the beast could allow him to be in multiple places at once. But the answer was always the same—the cabbalistic magic which the beast had access to that Soren did not—unless they remained fused. Soren was really going to have to become a better student of the cabbala.
For now, he could do more than speculate on where the beast was taking them.
Soren had promised to parent the “kids” in his ad hoc family past their early life traumas, working to desensitize them from any amount of horror getting the best of them. The beast seemed eager to please on that score. Soren wasn’t entirely sure how delighted he was to elicit its cooperation, considering how worked up the beast was. Then again, Soren had to make up for lost time, and the beast might well be the one to teach the crash course. Soren felt slightly ashamed that his own metamorphosis had taken so much time away from the kids and his family dynamic. It was time to redress the wrong.
TWENTY-ONE
Player tried to open the door to Stealy’s loft apartment as he normally would, forgetting the perennially blowing category-three twister on the other side. He stepped back, took a calming breath—for what it was worth—and blew the door off its hinges with his wind magic. The vortex beyond was so violent, there wasn’t a single particle of sand or dust that could break free of it to stray into the hall.
He pressed forward, leaning into the wind, using muscles he hadn’t worked this hard in a long time. When you were this beautiful, it wasn’t like you needed to hang out at the gym to get the ladies to fall all over you.
Once on the other side, he slammed the door closed with the aid of his elemental magic and his command of the winds. Like the door needed hinges at this point to stay closed, he thought, worrying about the damage he’d wrought to the door that his elemental magic could do little about. He might be able to sink new pins in the brackets, using what he’d mastered with some of the metals on the table of elements, but as to the splintered wood—he hadn’t progressed far enough into complex compounds yet—not by a long shot.
Inside, the loft would have been torn apart long ago were it not for his command of the earth element, helping to reinforce the structure against the category-three cyclone.
He had to track Stealy using his wind magic to open up pencil-wide tunnels to his eardrums along which he could hear, which he extended in numerous directions from himself at once, like a strange porcupine with very large invisible spines scurrying across the floor.
The instant he located her, he took the most direct path possible toward her.
Not that “direct” meant much in a room that was essentially a glorified obstacle course. The irony of having to work the jungle gym of fallen beams and collapsed stone work, and wildly strewn furniture to get to her wasn’t lost on him. He knew he was a perpetual adolescent who should have chosen to grow up a long time ago. But then, that would spoil all his fun. Even if crawling over jungle gyms was a little regressive, even for him.
The nicks he was taking to the face and neck and body—right through his clothes—reminded him to keep a separate column of wind blowing about him to spare him from the killing force of the category three winds. He wondered if she realized it had taken his earth magic as well to keep the obstacle course from grinding to dust in this cyclone. He’d long since petrified the wood with the aid of his earth magic so not even a category three storm could do much to splinter it.
He finally arrived at Stealy’s protective yurt. She was camped out inside it, under the hi-tech parachute held in shape by the broken beams and petrified remnants of furniture. It felt somewhat cozy, if you could get past the whipping sounds of the fabric against the dome-like structure that was a long way from being perfectly round.
“You look sexier with the war paint, Player,” Stealy quipped, sipping her coffee she had brewing on the fire and shivering. It was eighty degrees under the tent if it was a degree. He tried to wipe the blood from the nicks off his face, but that just contributed to the painted-warrior look.
“Can we fuck then?”
“Jesus, Player, I’m supposed to feel more like a sister to you, now.”
“Yeah, well, of late, I’ve wanted to hump everyone in my little family, the guys included. Maybe Soren was right about me and I am bisexual.”
“It’s the chi energy everyone’s running, you moron, still dialed up out of residual fear after our last encounters with the beast.”
“Whatever. Understanding doesn’t exactly take the wood out of woody, you know?”
She grunted. “What brings you to my little oasis from the world?”
A beam of wood—the size of a two by four—hurtled through the tent, just missing lancing her to death by a few inches. That hadn’t stopped it from splintering on impact, though, and sending a shard into her belly, which she yanked out with a groan and a grimace. Considering her last comment, they both snickered. “Good thing you heal up well,” he said.
He settled in next to her and poured himself some black coffee, using one of the painted white, scraped up, steel mugs. The handles transferred the heat. Not very smart. He had to use his way with metals to keep the handle from burning him. She, of course, could just heal herself. “You want to know what brings me here? Is it me, or have we been demoted to bit characters in our own stories?”
She smiled condescendingly. On her, it was kind of sexy.
“It’s going to take a team of brainiacs to bring Soren down,” she said, “especially without hurting him—assuming that’s possible. Victor—ever the cunning fuck—assembled the team he needed. Can’t blame him for outplaying us.”
“So, go steal us some more magic that we can use to up our game.”
She took another scalding sip of her coffee, which had to be burning her insides and forcing her to heal from it. This woman had some serious self-love issues. It was taking Player’s elemental magic to cool the coffee enough for him to sip it. “Two steps ahead of you.” She gestured to the drawers in the two intact chests of drawers inside the tent.
Getting off his ass, Player clambered up, set the coffee cup back down on her pathetic gas range of a stove, and ripped open the top drawer on one of the chests. “Fuck me. Insecure much?”
“Like you, I really don’t relish being anything but the center of anyone’s world.”
“Well, you just climbed right into the center of my heart, sweetheart.” He held up a medallion on a chain. “Only, will any of this shit work with me?”
“Probably not.”
He slammed the drawer shut. “Should have figured you were in this for yourself, as always, not a charitable thought for the rest of us.”
“You should be doing just what Soren told you to do—practicing with the table of elements. For your kind of wizardry, there’s really no getting around hard work and endless study.”
“All work and no play make Player a dull boy.”
“Hate to break it to you, but you’re dull by default.”
“Bitch—” Something cut him off. A sound that didn’t originate with his category three twister. She had detected it, too, and set her mug down.
“What. The. Fuck. Was. That?” Player asked.
“Soren.”
“More likely the beast.”
“That’s a fucking category three twister out there, Player. You should know. Neither one of them is casually walking through that unless—”
“They’ve fused. He and the beast are one now. That cabbalistic magic is going to be the death of us.”
She rushed to the drawer he’d just ripped open and slammed shut but seconds ago. “Buy us some time, damn it!” she barked at him. “Dial up that fucking twister to category ten if you have to. I don’t give a fuck if you have to blow this building back to Oz.”
Player didn’t need any more provocation. “That’s going to send those shards and pylons jabbing through him as if he were a pin cushion,” he shouted over the now category six vortex outside the tent. Player had had to reinforce the loft structure and obstacle course with his earth magic at the same time. He’d kept a bubble about him and Stealy to keep the canvas from ripping away and to buy her time, to find whatever the fuck she was reaching for.
“Works for me,” Stealy said. “So long as he checks his attitude, I can heal him.”
The monster roared—right over the category six noises going on outside the tent. Again, and again. It must have been as Player had anticipated. He was getting stabbed or bludgeoned to death a thousand times over.
“Let me just blow us to hell out of here,” Player said.
“No!”
“When did you turn suicidal?”
“I’m tired running from my demons. That fucker wants a fight, he’s going to get one. My dad puts his hands on me again….”
Player’s eyes went wide. “Ah, hello, sweetheart, unless you’re firing up some time traveling device, that’s Soren out there, not your dad.”
“You know what I mean,” she said, foraging through the bric-a-brac in the overfull jewelry box that the drawer had been turned into. She found what she wanted, finally, and donned it.
He eyed the amulet around her neck; it looked ancient, and Player couldn’t say much more about it than that; a jewelry connoisseur he wasn’t. But he didn’t care for the way it dug into her neckline the instant it made contact with her skin. “What the hell does that do?”
“Remember David and Goliath? Well the story didn’t exactly go that way. David found some ass-kicking strength that had nothing to do with his faith in God.”
“Blasphemer. You have more of that?”
“Nope. Stay and fight or dart and run, Player. You don’t owe me anything.”
“My father’s very words when he stormed out of my life forever—‘I don’t owe you anything’. So, yeah, considering, I have a score to settle, too. If not with him, with you.”
“Let’s get to it, then.” She didn’t wait for him to figure on a plan of attack before charging out of the tent, which was ill-advised, because he really didn’t have one. Until he did, she was on her own.
***
“Batter, batter, batter!” Stealy said, knowing full well her voice wasn’t carrying over the noise of this wind. Only the strength she received from the amulet was allowing her to take the petrified post and swing it like a bat; for that matter, without the amulet’s magic, she’d have not even been able to stand out here. She had her own brute to throw at the Frankenstein’s monster, now, as immune to flying bric-a-brac as Soren seemed to be.
She took the 2” x 4” beam and batted him clear into th
e petrified wall—harder and more flexible than stone, and so, less likely to crack. And he went flying through the wall anyway, into the hall. Player’s magic sucked him back in and sealed the hole in the wall. Nice to see Player directing his dickhead tendencies at someone else for a change, Stealy thought, wondering where her partner was. If he was still hiding back in that tent, that meant the rest of his magic out here was still just running on autopilot. Charming. She was hoping for a bit more sensitive of a response, more like move, countermove.
Finding herself strangely unfatigued swinging the pylon, she batted Soren yet again, the instant he clambered his way up to vertical—this time high into the sky, right through Player’s apartment above, first through his floor, then through his roof, and high into the sky. Yeah, Player is probably going to be a bit pissed about that.
Soren fell back to earth, scarring her petrified wood floor. The inconsiderate fuck. Then again, that was one hell of a crater. “Thanks for adding the bowl for me to play with on my motorbike, Shitface.” Again, she knew she was talking to herself over the noise of the wind. Then again, her words seemed to rile Soren back to life. Her taunts were getting through. Player must have auto-piloting wind tunnels the size of acupuncture needles that opened up to connect mouths with ears inside here. Damn thoughtful of him—for such an inconsiderate prick. Part of the original design, or a late-arriving modification?
Stealy had tried to steal the heart—literally—of one of Soren’s possessed creatures before. That hadn’t worked, nor would she imagine would stealing his, and she sure as hell wasn’t getting close enough to pluck it out of his chest with her hand, in case she was wrong. But….
First, she needed his robe off him. She tried commanding the winds to blow it off—surprised it hadn’t already. She was delighted to find that the twister accommodated her. She had no elemental magic of her own, but Player must have left her a safety valve in case the twister got her into trouble that even her healing magic couldn’t get her out of. Again, surprising, considering thinking even one or two steps ahead really wasn’t his style. Maybe he was growing as a person.
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