Did he mean to paralyze Natura with fear? For the first time, she was able to move, unfolding her arms from around her legs, and crawling out from beneath the roots of the tree of life whose strength she was drawing on now. Her magic tree was smarter even than her lion; she invested it with so many more nanites than she’d been able to put inside the lion’s head, using the spirit-science that Soren had taught her to use.
She remembered the boldness she’d shown the night she helped to fight off Dr. Dark. And the memory lent her strength and courage now; as did focusing on her bond with all the creatures of the forest—and with every living thing, every blade of grass.
The tree of life was telling her to use her magic now. Urging her. Giving her ideas. The lion was right; she wasn’t fighting off this big bad monster alone. The tree of life continued to share its strength and knowledge with her, showing her just how powerful she was. She was actually the most powerful wizard of the family—stronger even than Naomi herself, who had lost touch with most of her abilities.
Soren sensed her coming into her power. And he reacted. The bully. Those mounds of metal spiders detached from him, uniting into larger figures—metal raptors, like pterodactyls. Not smart, buddy. The natural world is my domain and you just brought those things one step closer to me.
Since he refused to stray from his perch atop the pyramid he’d beamed down on, she elected to run his way. Like Mercury, she grew wings on her feet and ran after the raptors, high into the air. The wings sprouting from her back gave her still more command of the air. And her hair, morphed into a crown of feathers—like a cockatoo—the same matching white color to the wings on her back and her feet. Her crown feathers, moreover, did things…unexpected things.
She startled at the fireworks escaping her crown feathers’ tips, like the sparks of an arc welder’s torch. The sparks actively sought out the raptors, attacking them like swarms of locusts. Her archetypal Jungian unconscious—connected to the minds of all living things—was bubbling up the cabbalistic magic needed to procure the nanites, and morphing them to break through Soren’s defenses. Terms and concepts she had no knowledge of were now accessible to her, thanks to also being inside Soren’s mind and the beast’s mind both—by way of Naomi.
This was like that time Soren operated on her and she was a lot more afraid than she needed to be, which she realized as soon as Naomi had explained to her what was going on.
The tree of life, dialed into the group mind Natura shared with Naomi, was releasing its own nano dust now, like pollen.
If the first wave of nanites had downed Soren’s raptors; that had only served to royally piss him off.
He and the brute—of one mind and one feeling on all things now—charged off the top of the pyramid, making a beeline straight for her. But he was running through the thick, pollen-saturated air, courtesy of the tree of life. And its mind was so much more powerful than even Soren’s. It threw more varieties of nano at him than he could counter at one time. And his ability to create new spirit-science virtually on the fly to frustrate his enemies was not lost on her—not now that she was linked to his mind too. But the attack was still too much for him.
In one final, furious scream, he leapt into the air to deliver his death blow to Natura; but he bleeped out of her world in mid-strike; he could not hold his form here any longer.
Natura panted as she came to a stop as if she’d crossed the finish line after a long race. In a way, she had. She’d been running for a long, long time from one enemy in particular. Her brother, older by seven years, who’d raped her ritualistically from the time he was twelve, and she was just five. He had been handsome, like Soren, and though her strongest memories of her brother were as a teenager, not much younger than Soren, what she did remember was that as he’d matured, and grew into himself, his way with the ladies just fueled his sick habits, turning him into even more of a predator—and a more successful one, whose victims came to him, never suspecting.
Natura got so mad thinking about him she screamed at the top of her lungs, so loud that the echo thundered through the sky, the repeated bursts only gradually receding in the distance.
It was the first time she’d felt the weight of her brother lift off of her. He wasn’t gone, not exactly. And Natura could tell he wasn’t done haunting her. But next time, she’d be ready for him, readier than she’d ever been.
TWENTY-FOUR
Naomi drifted down from her perch high up in the rafters. Victor had had time to forget she was even there. She was now floating out in the middle of the lab, high above their heads, but well away from the rafters. Whatever she was looking for, it wasn’t incarnate, at least not yet.
“Speak to me, Naomi.” Victor’s voice remained commanding while he struggled at keeping it as neutral as he knew how to be.
“It’s Soren.”
“Shit,” Victor mumbled.
The others were all in scientist mode. One glance told him they weren’t going to be of a damned bit of use. “Keep him away from the apparatuses,” was all he got out of Aeros, who was too busy arguing mindchip to mindchip with the others to be bothered to look away from the big screen that had their attention. As it had gone with him, so it had gone with the others.
“A nanite swarm, buddy?” Victor coached Aeros. “Seriously, I’d settle for a fucking nanite fart, right now.”
“Not this close to the equipment!”Aeros barked. “None of us are going to be any good to you unless you take this fight outside. Just protect the damn machines!” he shouted even louder at Victor.
The entreaty coincided with Soren materializing in front of Victor. Victor threw up his mandalas around all the equipment in the lab—including the hibernation chamber, currently empty, and the cryogenic tank—still holding Soren, amazingly enough. The mandalas bent over the experimental stations like cloths thrown over statues prior to their unveiling. If Soren got near any of those mandalas, he was slipping into another dimension. It might well be the best way to contain him if the cryogenics tank couldn’t do it.
But to Victor’s surprise, Soren wasn’t interested in the lab, or in any of Victor’s team. Just Naomi. Why? Soren had adjusted his stance and his eyes in her direction.
All the same, Victor wrapped his fellow scientists and teammates in his mandalas as well, entirely covering them, as if Spiderman had taken up a thing for geometric patterns and for cloning himself—in both sexes.
Soren and Beasty Boy would have to be entirely fused for him to pull off this Houdini trick of escaping the tank—Victor didn’t need Naomi to tell him that, though she’d be getting a piece of his mind for holding out on him this long. She was still protecting him, despite everything.
Well, Victor supposed they all were, in their own way. Victor wasn’t getting off this planet without Soren by his side, and that drove a hell of a lot of loyalty, even among bad boys with no such concept. And make no bones about it, Soren had joined him on the bad boy circuit. Victor’s life story was now desperately in need of a hero, with one too many anti-heroes.
One too many anti-heroes. There’s an insight there, trying to break through, Victor. Let it. Of course….
Who usurped you from your throne as the baddest bad boy in all the land? The Dark Matter Man. He’s using Soren as his voodoo doll. Fusing the beast and the scientist in him to get access to both the magic and the science. From the very first day the celestial wizard has been trying to perfect the spirit science—going after the most powerful wizards in every district to study them, and going after the best scientists in the transhuman sector. But with a Dr. Frankenstein and a Frankenstein’s monster under its control—especially, the greatest of them all, Soren and his own beasty boy—fused into one no less—and their cabbalistic magic, the Dark Matter Man could complete its lessons in everything it needed to rule over this world.
“Soren, you’ve got to break free of Dracus’s hold over you!” Maybe it was time to refer to the Dark Matter Man in his female guise—now that she was threatening to c
ome between Soren and his girlfriend. Getting him to think of her as a home wrecker, a cheap slut wooing him with intoxicating hormones that couldn’t possibly hold up to the tantric-lovemaking hormones that Naomi and Soren were used to secreting together—yes, getting him back in touch with that could well serve Victor now.
Naomi had finally dialed him into her little cabal of psychically connected team mates, and he took full advantage to get that last piece of rhetoric he’d been spouting off in his own mind inside Soren’s head. But with the beast in charge, he wasn’t sure rhetoric was the right tool. It would likely wash off the beast like water over rock.
Soren emitted lightning—this time like a Tesla ball—in all directions about the room, and not just from his hands; his entire body had become the Tesla bulb. The lightning shot out of his head, his chest…but it just got sucked down the portals Victor had wrapped around his people and their equipment. Why would Soren waste energy like that?
Shit, Victor. The beast might be beyond rhetoric, but he’s certainly not beyond logic.
Victor prepared himself for whatever Soren was dragging through the portals at the end of those fishing lines—warping space by pushing the edges of the room away from him to give him room to maneuver, without taking everyone down with him.
Even more ominous than what was about to come through those portals—that Victor dare not shut down for fear of exposing his people and their experiments—was the fact that Soren couldn’t be bothered to police his energy expenditure. He couldn’t be bothered to keep from antagonizing his own people and turning his own team against him—all while taking on his nemesis’s team of players. Shit, that was one bottomless well of power he’d tapped into, and Victor had no idea how to come between him and the source of the power. He needed the infernally-late-arriving results from those experiments for that! Damn Soren and his sense of timing.
The star attractions were arriving—coming straight through the portals—now that the bit players had receded off stage, courtesy of Victor’s space-warping magic. These entities were no less corporeal, and made the Frankenstein beast man look positively handsome and tame.
The new arrivals’ skeletal faces were etched in armored metal—part of ruggedized, go-anywhere, battle-anywhere exoskeletons. The glowing eyes recessed beneath diamond lenses that would resist most any assault, possibly coated with a refractive material so even lasers bounced off them. Still, they were not of the same species. Their cranial shapes fanned, splayed, mushroomed, ballooned into helmet-like “hard hats” far more stylized than any seen on this planet; the craniums doubled as shields or stabbing weapons in addition to housing their brains. Lovely chaps. Absolutely lovely. Call it a first impression.
Victor had been recalibrating the portals they’d come out of the entire time, to frustrate Soren’s ability to get a lock on any entity in any one dimension. But the countermeasures had failed. Spectacularly.
Victor’s mandala magic allowed him to see inside the minds of his adversaries, enough to know that whatever he was up against, this was not going to be any quick battle. So, Soren wanted the room. The beast seemed able enough to make his point clear, even if it was a creature of few words.
Victor decided to give it what it wanted rather than antagonize it further. He opened a mandala portal beneath his feet and sucked himself and his opponents right out of their space-time into another.
***
Naomi didn’t exactly appreciate Victor skipping out on her and leaving her to face Soren all on her own. But she’d understood why he’d done it. They had been psychically connected at the time.
And she understood what Soren was up to, as well, possibly better than he did, now that the beast was in the driver’s seat.
But that wasn’t going to help her out of this fix.
The Tesla bulb effect ended when Victor took the hint. Soren held out his hands to her, fingers splayed, and the nanites were melting off his fingertips, coming for her.
Technically, she was dialed into the fused creature that he’d become, able to access his science and his magic both. But utilizing either to solve this problem in real time—that would have meant surrendering the mousy creature that she turned into whenever challenged to dial up her powers beyond what any person had a right to lay claim to. That kind of power and sentience resided in larger bodies, like Gaia and Mother Nature; different words for the planetary consciousness. In a similar manner, suns and supernovas and black holes had sentience only they could hold on to—though whether or not they were all sentient, she couldn’t say.
She did what she had to. She accessed the tree of life, calling upon Natura’s magic to get her out of this. But her access to the tree of life and its supersentience had been cut off. Not by Natura. By the beast. Naomi took advantage of her last remaining move, though she wished she could say it was a conscious act and not another spinal cord reaction.
She expanded her group mind effect, dialing in the supersentiences of those conscious suns and supernovas and black holes—finding them along the chi lines that Soren, the chi master, used here on Earth—but had yet to learn how to use on a cosmic scale—something that Victor was more adept at, but even he couldn’t do what she was doing now, even without entirely understanding how she was doing it.
And then Soren’s nanites reached her, saturating her, attempting to sever all links to her group minds, configured like Russian nesting dolls; the one of her ad hoc family, nestled within the larger dynamics of Victor’s and Soren’s teams, nested now within the even larger dynamic of the supersentiences she’d had time to reach across the cosmos, tapping those chi lines that connected up the God body—all of manifest creation itself.
Strange how the cabbalistic magic he was using to saturate her understood what she was doing. And still it didn’t back off.
Even as the supersentiences of the suns and supernovas and black holes weighing in on her problem piped her the solutions she needed to shut down his nanites. Soren wanted to know how they were doing it. The knowledge was more important to him than anything. Of course, that was the Dr. Frankensteins and their fringe science for you.
Something else happened before Naomi could flush Soren out of her system. The Sponger that she was…she thought that at one point she’d absorbed too many powers for one person to have and that her conscience had shut her down. But while that might have been true, it wasn’t the entire story.
The reason she couldn’t always access all her abilities was because some of the abilities were from another lifetime. Prior to reincarnating here on Earth she had been a far more powerful Sponger, on another world, in another time. That was the one currently reaching out to the sentient suns and black holes and supernovas now to work her magic and her understanding for her in her own particular spirit science. But that older-self wanted more than to share its knowledge with Naomi. It wanted to possess her, to take her over. It had been looking for a way in all this time. And only Naomi’s unwillingness to own that much power had kept her out.
What was once little more than a paranoid fear was now a certainty.
So, now the Catch-22. Open fully to all of her gifts—so she could keep Soren in check, and lose herself in the process. Or let the Dark Matter Man—let Dracus—have him as her boy toy, as her voodoo doll.
That was one hell of a rock and a hard place to be stuck between.
The realization had caused Soren to sever the mind link with her as she severed it with the past life. Both of them equally shocked by the same realization.
Victor popped back into the room in time to catch the expression on both their faces, his enemies either vanquished or left where he’d deposited them.
And then Soren was gone, surrendering this physical incarnation. Perhaps his psychic connection with the nanites he’d deposited in her body had opened the door for him to be reverse-hacked by Naomi’s older self from a former life—wielding mind power the likes of which even his cabbalistic magic was not going to help him with. And he’d fled before tha
t could happen. Or—
“What the hell just happened?” Victor blurted.
Naomi had no desire to let him in on her and Soren’s little shared secret; and so she had severed the mind link with Victor even before he’d returned, or rather her past-life-self had, who alone could maintain it across time and space.
“Forget it,” Naomi said. “A little hurt that only lovers can truly inflict on one another. That’s all. We have way bigger problems on our plate.”
“Yeah, no kidding. Dracus has turned Soren into the one tool she needs to achieve total conquest of this planet.”
“And there appears to be no stopping him,” Naomi said, staring at the cryogenics tank.
“We don’t know that yet,” Victor insisted. “Until I hear back from Ramon and Lar, I remain hopeful.”
“Soren has gone there now to cut them off at the pass,” Naomi informed him. “You won’t be able to call them back in time. The pyramid chamber they’re exploring—inscribed with the cabbalistic symbols—will keep them out of even your reach.”
He glared at her, realizing she was seeing into the future again, and he didn’t like the gravity it lent her words. Not at all.
“Then I’ll go there myself!”
Naomi shook her head slowly, her eyes glazed, seeing more into the future now than the past. “Something tells me, whatever the outcome, good or bad, we want to let this play out.”
Victor took a deep breath and held it, his own eyes glazing over. When he finally let the trapped air in his lungs out, he let it out hard. “I have one move left.”
“As do I.”
He averted his eyes. “Let’s hope I don’t have to use it.”
“I assure you, I feel no differently,” she said, her eyes dropping to the floor as well.
It appeared they were both facing down bigger demons than The Dark Matter Man.
Reviled Page 23
