Platinum Storm

by N X Hunter

  “Hime-sama used imagery in creating her wards against the yokai!” the assistant said.

  “Indeed she did! Perhaps there is hope! Tell me, woman, do you use your art powers to protect people from yokai?”

  “I don’t know what yokai are. I use my art powers to help people decide which doll to buy their kid at Christmas.”

  Her sarcasm was lost on the priest.

  “What is this Christmas, where people buy their offspring magical dolls?”

  This priest sure jumped to some weird conclusions, but Anya felt it was getting her further to just go with it.

  “Christmas, well, it’s a religious holiday, but it’s sort of more a social thing these days – gifts, parties, decorations, lots of food and alcohol… It’s not just for spiritual people.”

  “Feasts with sake! For the blessings of the gods! To keep the yokai at bay! Ah, now we are getting somewhere! And so, you make the charms, in the form of dolls, and they keep the children safe? Maybe you truly are our Hime-sama!”

  Is this guy an idiot? I design the boxes for action figures…

  But now that she had realized these men weren’t looking to cause her harm, and were probably not especially sharp, either, Anya had calmed a little. Yes, whatever was going on here was undeniably weird. She had no idea where she was, or why she had gone from enjoying a Sunday morning coffee in her apartment to being in a big, crudely furnished room where everything looked to be made of wood or paper, with a couple of weird guys going on about strange stuff. But her survival instincts weren’t telling her she was in immediate danger. They were telling her to find out what was going on, and gain some kind of hand. She resigned herself to the situation – if only out of curiosity.

  “Sure, why not. So, umm, why did you want me, or Hime-sama or whoever to be… wherever this is? I’m happy to help you out, but then can you please just send me home? I’ve got a lot of work to do...”

  “Home? Oh, you misunderstand! You came here when we raised the summons because this is where you are destined to be! Our Hime-sama was lost in another world, her soul wandering in the fog when she was most needed here in her homeland! Now that I, the master priest Mamoru have brought you back, you can fulfill your destiny and save our lands from the yokai once more!” the priest said theatrically.

  Anya frowned.

  They can’t really mean to keep me here. They’ll send me back once they realize I’m no real help to them.

  “As I said, guys, I don’t even know what ‘yokai’ means. In fact, I don’t know what half the stuff you just said means. Actually, how can we even be speaking to each other?”

  As she spoke, Anya indicated around the room, where hangings displayed words in a character set completely foreign to her.

  This was a good question. These men looked like they were from a different time, and a different continent, yet Anya understood them, and they understood her.

  “You can’t read?” Mamoru asked, looking horrified. Clearly his Hime-sama was a learned woman.

  “I can read! I just can’t read this language you have written all around here. But if we are speaking to each other, and it’s only some of your words, like yokai, that I don’t understand, well then… What does that mean?”

  “Master, I think it’s possible that in the world she was reborn into, people use a different language and way of writing. Probably, we can understand each other because there’s some spiritual link between her and our world or something, but maybe that doesn’t carry over to reading… It’s perhaps a little bit… uncouth to suggest that she never learned to read…” the assistant said.

  Anya got the impression that this youth was used to gently correcting his master, and had long since found a way to do it that didn’t cause offense.

  “Of course, of course. I am sorry, ummmm… what, should we still call her Hime-sama? I’m still not convinced...” the priest said, touching a finger to his cheek thoughtfully.

  “Anya. My name is Anya. Just call me that, convinced or otherwise.”

  “Anya… Anya. You know not of the situation we are facing, this much is clear.”

  “I’ve been trying to tell you that!”

  “And you really don’t know about yokai? Maybe they just have a different name where you come from?”

  “Master… It seems she understands our words, but when there isn’t a direct translation her mind knows, she just hears what we actually say. That would mean the word yokai is so unfamiliar to her that there isn’t a way that that concept can be communicated in her language.”

  Anya was starting to like this, as yet, nameless assistant boy.

  “Exactly. You have said some things I didn’t understand, and I just heard them as new words. It happened the other way around too, just like when I said ‘Christmas’ and you didn’t know what that was. Whatever mechanism allows us to understand each other is also telling us where there are big differences in our worlds. So if I don’t know what yokai are when you speak of them, it is not because of a language thing, it means I really, truly don’t know what they are.”

  The priest Mamoru sighed in resignation, realizing that what Anya and the kid were telling him had no logical counter-argument.

  “Then, we have a Hime-sama that doesn’t know of the yokai? This is going to be a lot harder than I anticipated.”

  Continue reading Tiger, Tiger, exclusively on Amazon, and available on Kindle Unlimited.

  A Preview of: Samurai Angel

  By NX Hunter writing as Carly Chase

  Jael didn't know that angels could fall in love with humans. Rochelle didn't know that angels existed at all - let alone that they could be in the form of impossibly beautiful men.

  However, when Rochelle (a stressed out African-American advertising executive with natural hair, and doubts about her natural talent), jokingly prays to a long forgotten goddess for inspiration, she finds a stunning Japanese man with an ethereal glow, a set of wings and no clothes standing behind her desk. When Jael sees the beauty of her soul and falls passionately in love with her, both of their lives change forever!

  Jael was once a fierce samurai warrior, but he never got to live out his destined life as a man because he was chosen by the goddess Meret to be ascended, and become one of her five angels. Over the centuries since Meret turned her back on the mortal world, the beautiful goddess has become bored and cruel, and now rules her angels with a tyranny they have become too accustomed to to fight. When Rochelle helps Jael see the way his spirit has been broken, and shows him love and kindness, Jael makes a decision - to break free from Meret's clutches and live the life of a true man, with Rochelle by his side.

  Of course, Meret won't let that happen easily, and Jael's rebellion sparks a war among the five angels, as well as causing Meret to use her godlike powers to try and take revenge on Rochelle for turning her angel against her.

  Jael will do anything to regain his true samurai spirit and protect the mortal woman he loves - but can he win?

  Prologue

  Deities, just like people, have needs. For Meret, the main motivator – in fact the only thing that made her able to continue on for the endless centuries – was devotion. There had been times in the long history of the world when she had had this devotion from so many people. When great artists had begged for her to be their muse, and kings and generals had appealed to her for the inspiration to form a strategy that could see them overcome whatever desperate situation they had encountered in their petty human wars. Musicians would hear her voice in their heads and know that their next masterpiece was a blessing she had given them, and poets and playwrights would know, too, that the fictions they spun were really truths whispered to them by the fickle goddess.

  Over time, though, she had been forgotten. Humans had become arrogant, believing that they didn’t need any spark from the divine to conceive of amazing things. Perhaps they were right.

  For centuries Meret had continued to appear before frustrated people who needed inspiration - sometimes for
their own survival, sometimes to set the world on the right path, or sometimes just for fame - and given them what they needed. Yet humans had changed. They no longer understood that subtle gifts from gods really were gifts from gods. They believed that their great inspirations came from the world around them, or the other tedious mortals they interacted with, or worse still, from something special within themselves. The ungratefulness and ignorance of it! Meret had turned her back on them. Let the writers be blocked and the strategists stumped. Let the art and the music stagnate. Let them figure out their next big discovery on their own.

  But the humans? Well, they were just fine. And if there was one thing worse for a deity than not having one’s gifts acknowledged, it was seeing that your vengeance too had gone unnoticed.

  So, for well over a century (although who was counting?), Meret had made do with the devotions of those who would never forget her. Her five angels.

  Long ago, in the age of heroes, when Meret’s following was still alive, she had chosen five powerful warriors who met certain very specific criteria, and given them immortality, in return for becoming her ever loyal, sworn defenders. Giving them immortality hadn’t just meant making them undying, but ascending them to the rank of angels - existing no longer as men but as exquisite divine creations of beauty, dignity and great power, though with their carefully hand-picked human souls and desires intact.

  And over the centuries, these men who had proven themselves in battle in some of the toughest periods in the world’s history, from Sparta to feudal Japan, and from the Medieval battlegrounds of England to the gladiatorial arenas of ancient Rome, had had only to prove their devotion to Meret. She tested this devotion in many ways, some of which had become cruel over the centuries. But she was otherwise directionless, and the angels were strong.

  There were no threats to her now, of course, from envious demigods or their zealots. The fearsome angels now served only as protectors of Meret’s being by ensuring, with their love and worship for the goddess who had created them, that she didn’t fade from the world altogether. Or fall into despair at her own obscurity and take her own life.

  And so six immortal beings, the goddess and her five adoring angels, lived together on a plane that the world no longer cared about. Meret could see it all, should she choose to, but there was nothing left for her now in the realm of humans. The angels had outgrown their early curiosity about how the world they were born into had developed, their only fascination now the goddess, and her worship and pleasure. This, and the competition she had fostered between them for her favor - a competition that had run through the ages and inspired some fierce fights. These were fights that the humans might have been interested to see, had they known that there were ancient, powerful angels effectively brawling over the chance to kneel before a goddess and let her rest her feet on their backs for twenty years.

  The angels had few of the needs and drives of humans - an immortal needs no survival instincts, and they were now, despite the almost human form in which they appeared, structures of divinity rather than flesh, who didn’t need food or sleep. They still had intellectual needs, but their biggest drive was the approval of their goddess. They loved her fiercely, and only felt true fulfillment when they were making her happy. They still had physical sensations, but the way a divine creature feels physical pleasure is uniquely and intensely tied to their emotions, and so the only ecstasy they knew was tied to the physical ecstasy they were called upon to give to Meret.

  She had made them this way. She chose men for her bodyguard who were not only fighters, but who had also never known the love of another woman. Motherless warriors who had been raised without comfort and whose adulthood had been full of all of the harshness and discipline of battle and none of the pleasantries of lust or courtship.

  Though she had also chosen men who had beautiful souls, and who under different circumstances might have been great talents in the arts. She needed men who would appreciate her unique power to inspire the souls of inquisitive, creative people, but she wanted to be the only beauty they had ever known.

  It would be this vanity that would bring chaos to her life for the first time in eons.

  Chapter One

  In the pleasant, Grecian style courtyard, with its beautifully manicured, vibrantly green grass, Abraxos knelt before the cool marble pillar, his strong wrists in golden cuffs that he knew were not truly made of gold, but of some kind of unbreakable divine material - just like him. The pillar, and the grass, even the sky, they were not of the world he had lived in when he was a man, and they did not age. He had been cuffed to this pillar for what must have amounted to decades of his total life over hundreds of years, and never had the surface changed - no cracks, no loss of color from the permanent sunlight, no dirt, no dust.

  Another golden chain was wrapped around his torso, keeping his wings from spreading. He had asked Meret once why she needed to chain and cuff him, for he would never spread his wings or leave her side. She had not given a satisfying answer, instead punishing him for questioning her by refusing to let him see her for 40 days. That had been about 400 years ago and he had stopped wondering. It made her happy to have her angels like this, and so the restraint and the demands that she made felt beautiful to him.

  Meret circled around him. She was dressed in little but a slip of the finest white silk, as fine as spiderwebs, but not of Earthly materials. She also wore jewels of the greatest clarity wherever jewels could adorn her - at her slender wrists, snaked around her upper arms, around her ankles and toes, at her throat, and in her crown. She possessed caverns-worth of jewels, all gifts the angels had sought for her from all corners of the Plane of the Gods. Beauty was something that enthralled Meret, and beauty she could own and merge with her own was the best kind of all. Her rich, dark skin glistened and her long black hair shone, and her eyes were as clear and bright as the jewels she wore, and burned with the power inside of her.

  She fingered the golden whip she was holding. It was a beautifully made thing, with a handle inlaid with opal and the whip itself made of the golden leather of what must have been an impressive beast - slain by Abraxos himself and then fashioned into the whip by his angelic brother Dalquiel.

  ‘Do you love me more than Dalquiel does?’ she asked the cuffed angel, her voice soft and melodic.

  ‘Yes.’ Abraxos replied with certainty. Nobody loved Meret better than he.

  Meret flicked the whip, its tip landing sharply on the top of his sensitive, bunched up wing.

  ‘Dalquiel took the whip 100 times yesterday. He didn’t flinch or cry out, he showed his devotion to me by instead thanking me with every lash. It was quite beautiful, Abraxos. He received my attentions as one who truly loves.’

  Abraxos said nothing. He knew what this meant. He had to do better. The whip hurt. Despite their powerful, immortal bodies, the angels were extremely sensitive - particularly on the wings. While they couldn’t be truly damaged or scarred by the lashes, the sting could be as intense as the sting of a scorpion to a human man. Meret loved to restrain her angels and do things that were hard for them to endure. It proved their love for her, and made her happy, and so it made the angels happy too - but it was a strange happiness that they had to earn. But pleasing Meret was one of the only kinds of contentment the angels knew.

  She whipped him again, suddenly. He inhaled sharply.

  ‘Thank you for the gifts of discipline you give to me, my holy queen.’ he said passionately.

  Meret stroked his hair, which shone beautifully in the permanent noon sunlight of the Plane of Gods.

  ‘You are a good angel, Abraxos. You have always taken pride in your devotion to me.’

  She whipped him hard again, the hit landing so hard that birds took flight from nearby trees at the sound. Meret, who didn’t have wings herself and had certainly never been whipped, could only guess at how much pain her proud angels went through when she did this, and it thrilled her that these incredible, powerful men would take such punishment witho
ut complaining or turning on her, just because they loved her so much. The rush of it never got old. Especially with Abraxos. He’d been quite a man when he was human - a leader of armies, as well as a fearsome warrior in his own right. And yet he adored his goddess so much that he, who had struck down so many powerful adversaries, would take anything she would do to him gladly.

  The swell of power inside Meret as Abraxos intoned another prayer of thanks for the lash of the whip, another dedication of his love, made her dizzy with pleasure.

  ‘I will leave you here, because I seek pleasure from the other, unbound angels. There will be 98 more lashes, when I decide to revisit you. Then you will have had 101, and so proven your love for me today exceeds even the love of Dalquiel. Won’t that be a magnificent thing!’ She stroked his face.

  Yesterday, today - these could mean anything. The sun never rose or set, the angels never slept, and Meret slept only when she was satisfied, sometimes for what might be years in the time of mortals. She spoke of time as if it still had meaning, yet since she had stopped returning to the mortal realm, measures like days and years were really just words to mean before, now, later…

  The angels had a better sense of time in the human world than Meret did, but only because a part of their role was to watch what the world produced in terms of the things that had once interested the goddess. They knew all of the languages of the humans, and were tasked with telling Meret the stories and singing her the songs that the people had come up with without her. This was mainly so that she could feel sure that nothing they had made in her absence was as good as the material the people she had influenced had made. The angels would sing, or read to her works from all over the world, and all would agree that even the best of them were nothing without the touch of her divinity.

  Right now, Jael was concerned with this, meditating on the human realm and absorbing its art, ready to report back to Meret. With Abraxos cuffed in the courtyard, that left three angels Meret could enjoy, now that the mood had taken her. They would be somewhere nearby, and would come to her immediately at the sound of their names in her beloved, honey-sweet voice.