She could just let nature take its course; that’s what predators were for, weren’t they? Keeping the prey population under control before famine decimated even greater numbers. But she’d seen werewolves cornered like that before. Their blood lust took over, and then it wasn’t about hunting for survival anymore; it was all about the massacre.
It’s now or never, Stealy. She donned the glove over her left hand. Time to see if this thing really works. She backed up the bike and then throttled it up and hurtled off the roof. Definitely not a stunt for anyone without healing magic—for the shattered spine on impact alone—and without a motorbike whose shock absorption was boosted with yet more warding magic. There was no point being a good thief of other’s magic if you didn’t use the skill for days like today.
The bike landed with a thud that was masked by the werewolf’s howl. And the scream of her engine was dampened by the screams of the crowd as the wolf lunged. But Stealy got to the werewolf first, swiping her gloved hand through his chest and grabbing hold of the mark of the beast—the very tattoo that permitted his shifting. She was already clear of the wolf and the circle of terrified humans when she dared open her hand. Sure enough, the mark was on the glove itself. She let it slide off her and into a puddle of water—recently melted ice yielding to the exhaust manifold on her braked motorcycle, where the ink dissolved into harmlessness.
By the time she spun the bike around the werewolf had shifted back to human form and was shivering from the cold. He was beseeching the crowd. “A guy has to eat, you know?”
“Yes, we know,” came one of the adult voices from the throng. That was a split second before the entire crowd charged him. They were tearing him limb from limb with the cutlery on their persons that everyone carried with them in these parts to take advantage of whatever roadkill they could find.
“Nice one, Stealy. Not sure if you made things better or worse with that stunt. Depends on whether you’re more a lover of magical beasts—or of the more common human variety, I guess.” She sighed and sped off on her motorbike. Her assignment was to help alleviate suffering where she could so Soren would be less guilt-ridden when a cure for him was found. She just wished someone had given her clearer instructions on the matter, as making situations better as opposed to worse wasn’t exactly a forte.
For the first time her bad-ass nature was coming back around to haunt her, making her wonder about investing so much in such a one-note character. Maybe “bitch” could be more like the drum section from now on, Stealy, providing the steady rhythm underlying your personality that gives you something to play against, for variety. That or find another mission.
***
The carnival had come to town. Some circus magician had rounded up every were-beast in Shelley’s London: a were-tiger, a were-dragon, a were-lion, a were-snake; and the gallery didn’t stop there. An impressive collection, considering that some of those shifters were quite rare in the district. The cages holding the shifters obviously contained warding magic that kept the prisoners from shifting. Once he’d finish setting up his circus, the circus magician would no doubt release them into larger cages where they could shift for the audience’s amusement. And no doubt, even starving people might hand over some choice food items for a chance at some entertainment when times were this rough.
The parade down Main Street was quite the procession, with each of the imprisoned morphs being carted separately in their own cages on their own carts. The drivers would have been underlings easy enough for the circus magician to intimidate into doing his bidding, even if the line of work didn’t sit entirely right with them.
From Naomi’s perch, high-up on the rooftop of the three-story building, the circus magician’s magic seemed to extend to the crowds as well, who were showing up in record numbers—considering the cold outside—to “Ooh” and “Ah” over the tattooed morphs, wearing their tattoos somewhere on their bodies that indicated the animals they shifted into—when allowed to transform.
The tattoos had their own kind of hypnotic allure, but Naomi could tell the circus magician was compounding it somehow. He was a spindly man, made all the more spider-like by being a stilt walker. He headed the procession, waving and tipping his candy-cane-striped top hat at people that matched his candy-cane striped pants and blue jacket—all in keeping with Britain’s flag colors of the time. Periodically, he’d take off the jacket to expose his chest and back—which were adorned with countless animals. So that’s how he does it! Naomi thought. He can shift into every animal in his collection, outfight them. The bruises on the morphs in the cages—she’d thought initially that they got that way from abuse—but not that kind of abuse.
Naomi reached out to the minds of each of Stilt Walker’s captives. Nearly two-thirds of them were the benign kinds of shifters, either imprisoning themselves so as not to harm people when they shifted, or, if indulging the shifting, changing only when an opportunity to slay a human predator presented itself, thus saving many lives for each one they took. If Naomi was going to intervene in this little drama, she was going to need to be surgical about it. Leave the captives in the cages that were better off left in the hands of the Stilt Walker.
She telegraphed what she was doing into the Stilt Walker’s mind in hopes that he would understand. Instead, he was incensed, and tried to use his influence with the crowds on her, after he got done searching for the one inside his head and latched onto her. But he wasn’t strong enough to sway Naomi. “I don’t mind you plying your trade, so long as you just lock up the shifters which are better kept locked up. But if you stray beyond those parameters again, you’ll find out just what else I can do.” He chafed at the bit some more, evidently not used to being anything but the alpha in the crowd; but something told Naomi that with time he’d come to accept the compromise. He might even end up doing some good if the people he imprisoned got some time to come by a change of heart on their approach to life. So, like Houdini, they could spring the locks on their cages the next time the circus blew through town and passed her by.
With the warding magic lowered on the cages on the better-behaved morphs, they shifted and tore through the bars, quickly disappearing from sight through holes in the crowd that “magically” opened for them. Sheer terror was a form of magic all its own in how it could cause people to react with superhuman reflexes to pull themselves out of harm’s way, even as others froze up.
The bars on the torn cages healed up—courtesy of the Stilt Walker’s interventions. “No worries, ladies and gentlemen, those particular shifters will be back in time for the show. Just a small taste of tonight’s festivities, that’s all.” The crowd clapped and whistled; gasps of awe blended with sighs of relief. Like any true salesman, the Stilt Walker had managed to turn the setback in his favor.
Naomi retreated from the roof. Was that good deed enough for one outing? In a world of perpetual need? She doubted it, but she had to keep her strength up to handle Soren back at home. If she risked depleting herself too much out here, that could not only cost him his life, it could cost her and the rest of his posse theirs.
She still had no idea how she could neutralize the warding magic of the cages, only that she could. The fact that exercising long-forgotten powers didn’t trigger the associated memories to go with them was a troubling sign.
It could mean that once again she was acting as if possessed by that former life instead of as herself—and that the old her was getting better at pretending to be the new her—well enough perhaps to force Naomi out of her own head without her even knowing.
She had yet to share with Soren the real reason she kept her powers in check.
She wasn’t sure herself anymore if fighting off possession was just some drama she’d created to justify her perpetual victim status, so she never had to own the full extent of her power.
That former life trying to possess her could well be no more than an alter ego trying to burst out from the cage she’d put around herself, dampening down all her powers—much like the we
re-beasts in the carnival magician’s cages, who had a similar Houdini number to pull off if they were ever to get free.
Time would tell if her fears of cutting loose were justified or not.
***
The latest flash snow storm had caught the Victorian England district—Soren’s neck of the woods—off-guard. This, in a time when the icy downpours were becoming all too common.
Player strolled the boulevard, right down the center of the street. One of the horses pulling a carriage had been buried in snow up to his neck. He was neighing frantically for release. The driver was still trying to shovel out the aristocratic lady in the coach, screaming, “To hell with that damn horse! Get me out of here!”
The driver doing the shoveling was aged and his hands had turned blue, except for the tips of the fingers, which were already black. The woman saw them, didn’t seem to care. She shifted her attention to Player as he walked by. “Help him, you no-good creep!”
“I think you have me confused with yourself, ma’am,” Player said, doffing his imaginary hat to her and bowing in an exaggerated manner, before continuing on. Still, he wanted to save the horse. There was no point getting on Natura’s shit list unnecessarily.
He was supposed to practice his elemental magic, working through the ingredients on the periodic table. Maybe this snowstorm was the perfect opportunity. If he could introduce the right mix of electrolytes to the water, he’d not only lower the freezing point, he’d make it healthier to drink; and compensate perhaps for the poor conditions of the soil being used to grow produce and feed livestock—against all odds.
He started pulling sodium, potassium, calcium, magnesium, chloride, from any source he could find—much of it from the pollutants in the upper layers of the atmosphere. And he combined just two of those elements to form hydrogen phosphate, and hydrogen carbonate.
Player worked the dust cloud of ingredients down into the snow like a good chef, mixing everything together with his wind magic, and working the crevices between the snow crystals to make the most of the chemical interactions.
The secret sauce was working, just not well enough to turn this lake of snow and ice into flowing water. He was going to have to use a cheat.
Propylene glycol. The stuff that kept frogs from freezing over in winter. Just a dash, mind you, or he’d end up making people sick. Imbibing the stuff was like drinking liquid soap.
He finally got the mix right after pissing of any number of passersby only happy to yell obscenities at the known elemental wizard for kicking up more shit in the air for pedestrians to choke on, as if they weren’t coughing enough from the crystal snowflakes jabbing the lining of their lungs like spike pollen.
Regrettably, a couple of the collapsed buildings, which were so far gone and denuded of fire-worthy wood to be useless as shelters, ended up crumbling further after he robbed the cement of calcium. The propylene glycol he’d flown in on one of his twisters clear from the transhumanist district—where they stored the stuff in tanks for their ongoing experiments in cryogenics and suspended animation. Tearing the tanks open in midair with his wind magic and raining that stuff down on people didn’t exactly win him any more friends.
He couldn’t be bothered to explain himself, being as pissing people off was his idea of a pleasurable pastime.
Sadly, there were enough of the other electrolytes to be had from all the dead bodies, buried in the snow, or just lying about on the surface, that his elemental magic could get to and reclaim. He figured no one would mind—well, probably a lot of people would, considering he was messing with the dead, but they could get over themselves.
When the magic finally took, the resulting water washed away everything. The persnickety people, the horses pulling the carriages, the pets at the end of leashes; they were all caught up in the flow of the river. “Nice one, Player. Maybe you should change your name to Lar.”
The pull of the river wasn’t enough to drag him along, of course, but he could see from his vantage point as he continued walking the street how it was playing hell with the people taking refuge inside the buildings as well. He flooded out quite a few continental breakfast nooks, restaurants and cafes, all catering to the rich bitches who could afford to treat End Times as nothing more than a movie someone was filming outside the windows of their refuges from reality. Their curses shouted his way were drowned out by their subsequent gurgling sounds. He smiled back at them and clapped their performances of “How to be truly Distraught Over the Smallest of Things While Being Entirely Oblivious to World’s End.”
The water sinking into the basement rental units were flushing out whores and their upscale clients, who were also now being carried away in the river as well—not exactly properly dressed for the occasion. Some of the men floating on their backs were still posting their flags at full mast—minus the flags.
A cult, committing mass suicide in their basement church, found their concoction diluted as the congregation choked on water, floating downriver. The ones reviving didn’t look particularly grateful for his untimely intervention. Some were firing their pistols at him, which didn’t really work against an elemental magician who could so easily redirect the bullets with the winds, but that didn’t seem to stop anybody. The fact that churchgoing people carrying pistols struck Player as more worthy of such a strong emotional reaction was a point wasted on everyone but him.
But the people rushing down from the second stories on up to catch the water in pails for drinking and showering were only too happy to give him a nod and smile of thank you. The pets trapped inside, too, signaled their approval in their own way, sprinting to the river’s edge to lap up the water.
When the city’s water reservoirs refused to freeze over and the more lasting effects hit home, maybe these people would have more solace in their hearts for him then. Until such time, well, he could enjoy the mix of adulation and scorn. There was no point transitioning to an adulation-only universe before he could accept such a reality without self-destructing, after all.
The rats being flushed out of the buildings’ basements and pipes, Player transferred to his owls back at home, carrying them on the wind, so they could enjoy live food for a change, instead of frozen dinner, subsisting as they had been on dead, frozen rodents. When not even rats can find a way to stay alive, you know the world has become too hostile a place to derive many sick jokes out of. Maybe with his interventions he could dial the suffering back enough so people could at least start laughing off their hardships once again.
He was supposed to be working on becoming a better person, too, after all, not just saving the world Soren-style to alleviate Soren’s guilt at a later date. And if he had to become a better person for the good of their little family, well, then, the rest of these bastards deserved the same opportunity—or the same torture. And they might just get it if he could make things just sufferable enough to make a few of them learn to laugh off the pain. It was working for him—sort of; he wasn’t sure laughing at other people’s suffering was part of the deal.
That was enough wholesomeness of character for one day for him, in any case. Back to saving dear old Dad. Player headed home, wondering what the hell trouble Soren had gotten himself into now that only Player and the others could get him out of; don’t think that thought didn’t give him no small amount of satisfaction. Too many double negatives?
TWENTY-THREE
The Yucatan peninsula had seen a lot of sacrifices in its day. Many on the tops of these very pyramids. But as the lion peered out at the monuments across the valley, half-immersed in jungle, something told him they’d seen nothing like the one they were about to see today.
From his perch atop the tallest pyramid in the valley, he watched as lightning cracked the sky—already overly-illuminated, to his thinking, by the light of the full moon.
The creature that manifested at the foot of that lightning was none other than the Frankenstein’s monster—fused with Soren now, and seemingly unstoppable.
Natura had dialed up
the lion’s mind, making him the brains of their little operation; that was smart of her, considering how she tended to shut down like a scared little girl at the first fright. But Naomi had stirred in her own magic now, and so he was dialed into her mind as well, which is how he understood what had just taken shape exactly where Soren had woken up before—in another life. Just one of many rebirths this guy was getting a little too comfortable with for the lion’s liking.
And how had the Frankenstein’s monster manifested at the tip of a bolt of lightning? By borrowing lessons learned from the Masked Man in Soren’s last adventure, and filling in the blanks in understanding with the aid of the cabbalistic nanites, which added a fierce combination of science and magic both, to empower his ability to mow down any and all adversaries.
And this night, he’d picked Natura as one of those adversaries.
The lion bounded as fast as four legs would take him in her direction. He could sniff her out readily in the crisp night air. “I can’t do this all on my own, girl. You need to crawl back out of that shell you just retreated into at the sight of Soren on top of that pyramid. The beast will smell the fear on you as I can. Get moving, girl! And get that magic flowing through your veins. Naomi is inside your head as she’s inside mine. You’re not fighting the monster alone. You’re fighting it alongside us.”
He hoped the pep talk would take, but his own animal instincts were taking over, putting a quick end to his penchant for playing psychiatrist. The rest was up to Natura. All he could do now was buy her time.
***
Soren had levitated the monkish robe he kept about himself off him. It hung now from a vine on a tall tree—in the shape of a hanged man. The vine looped around the neck of a shadow figure that phosphoresced about the edges—like Dr. Dark—the nanite creature that Natura had helped Naomi to fight off the night they’d met Soren for the first time.
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