Player sighed again. “I miss the days when ‘the bitch is back’ was less of a generic expression.” He tromped to the door and slammed it open, sending the owls flying out of their roosts, and out of the hole in the wall he’d left for them, in search of comfort food no doubt. The instant reaction to the outburst helped him dial it down a notch, and he closed the door more gently.
He opened the door to Natura’s space across the hall. “Whoa!” He closed the door quickly behind him and leaned against it, as if he was afraid of the truth getting out.
It looked like a scene out of fucking Narnia. There was a white unicorn, and a purple male lion, and a host of psychedelic colors attached to creatures he really had no name for… a magical forest…and a babbling brook.
Player stepped toward the brook and gazed into the crystal clear waters. One of the koi came to the surface. “Hey, pal, throw me some of that fish food, will ya? It’s hell trying to get your voice to stand out in this menagerie.”
Player gulped and threw a shovelful of fish food—heaped in a mound by the river bank—at him. A lot of the fish swam to it in gratitude, shouting their “thank yous” in between gulping the food.
“All…all of…” all of a sudden he was having trouble getting his words out. “All of these creatures talk?”
“Duh. What’s the point of having a purple lion if he doesn’t talk?”
The purple lion padded up to him, sniffed him and growled. “Careful, buddy, I’m still not sure how I feel about you. You smell like a very concentrated cologne I’d be entitled to call ‘Eau de arrogance’.”
Player grimaced, ignoring him, hiking toward Natura, ensconced in her hammock, reading a book about faeries. In transit he passed by the lion, his yawning mouth and fangs inches from his face. “Christ, that thing is big.”
The sounds of the babbling brook called Player’s attention again. “Still haven’t figured out how you got flowing water up here—in a river, no less—when my plumbing is on the fritz. It’ll take my elemental magic just to take a freakin’ shower.”
“Be a doll, hon, and fix the ceiling,” Natura said, turning a page in her book—she’d yet to look up from it.
He glanced at the hole and the support beam lying on the ground—for now, acting as a makeshift bridge across the creek for the—what were those things? Oh, shit. They were twelve-inch-tall straw men and women carrying colored pebbles on their shoulders—part of the landscaping crew. Player shook his head and banged his temples with an open palm, and blinked real hard, still not convinced his mind wasn’t playing tricks on him. But the little straw people didn’t go anywhere, except, of course, across the bridge. When the opposing lanes of traffic couldn’t get past their impasse, a fight broke out.
“Keep it down, guys,” Natura said, without looking up from her book. “I’m trying to read.”
The straw people pulled the zippers on their mouths shut—literally—gagging their screaming, so they could settle their fights a little more quietly—not so they could stop the fighting.
Player returned his attention to Natura. “You just want me to plug the hole in the ceiling, or you want some skylights to go with the roof?”
“I want you to remove the roof entirely, you ninny. Hello, park setting in a bottle is not the theme here.”
“Ah, ha.” Player whipped up a tornado high in the sky that dipped down just enough to rip her section of the ceiling off, before whisking it away until it found some place safe to dump it.
As soon as he did so, the trees started growing up through the opening in the roof, and the crawling ivy, already covering the walls, meandered onto the roof as well. The ivy along the walls started flowering and attracting hummingbirds—of unimaginable colors.
When Player entered the room, he thought it was maybe a two-to-three-acre setting; now he was thinking more like ten acres—something to do with her nature magic. Outside, the building wouldn’t be any bigger, so he had no real explanation for how she was doing what she was doing.
“What about that 12” x 12” across the creek?”
“Oh, yeah, lose that, and give me a nice arching stone, bridge, will you?”
Player clamped down on his jaw until his jaw muscles were starting to lock up. Then he hurtled the beam up and out of the loft space through the roof and grew her the arching stone bridge with his earth magic.
She finally glanced up from her book. “Magnificent. You’ve got an eye for these things. You sure you aren’t gay?”
Player’s face flushed red. He knew because his reflection was coming back at him from the water in the creek, and because his face felt ten degrees warmer as well, and his head felt like it might explode. He stomped out of the room; the several acre hike to the door did nothing to calm him down.
Downstairs, in Stealy’s loft, which spanned both sides of the building, minus the portion that Soren had cut out for himself, well…. Player took one look at what was going on down here and said, “Shit. How is this building still standing?”
“You mean your earth magic isn’t responsible?” Stealy said, jumping her bike off of one of the collapsed 12” x 12” beams she was using as a ramp to get airborne with her motorbike.
He gulped. “It is now.” He extended his arm and fortified the roof without messing with any of the collapsed support beams—they were all collapsed. The stone work just grew thicker and fortified with metal meshing—wrought iron—he was growing from the wrought iron fence about the property, coaxing it to trail through the stonework like climbing ivy.
“Don’t you mess with my jungle gym!” Stealy shouted, coming off the top of one of her ramps angled for vaulting her bike high into the air. She seemed all too delighted by what time had done to the place, collapsing most of the overhead structure to provide her a natural obstacle course, which, if anything, she’d rearranged to make it more fun for the indoor bicycle racetrack—evidently her form of meditation—running that track over and over again, and then possibly getting off the bike, only to change up the course.
“Just dust the place,” she said, flying off another high-rise. The ceiling must have been sixty-four feet in here, at a minimum. It had been maybe thirty-two feet in his loft upstairs. There was no way any of this was natural, and while Natura might have been able to pull off the space warping effects on her own, he knew as a fact that Stealy didn’t have any such magic. He suspected Naomi had her hand in things—though he wasn’t sure how. She was probably holding out on all of them—a Sponger, maybe. That, or Stealy had pickpocketed some trinket with magic. Whatever….
Player whisked the dust out of the room, temporarily blinding Stealy and sending her crashing to the ground, her bike skidding out from under her. “Nice one, asshole.”
“Any time you want to ride that obstacle course in the middle of a sandstorm, I’m your guy.”
“Not a half bad idea.” She dug out a pair of goggles from a saddle bag, and gave him the thumbs up, and he whipped up the sandstorm for her. “Yeah, this is way better,” she shouted. “Far more challenging.”
“I really just did it to fuck with you,” Player mumbled. “When people can’t even tell you’re fucking with them, Player, it’s time to seek out the nearest Dr. Evil you can find for a consult. Maybe you’re sick, and you just don’t know it.” He was mumbling to himself as he was hiking out of the room.
He stopped before he got to the door and turned back to her. “You’re going to live in a perpetual sand storm?” he shouted.
But there was no way she could hear him, not without his command of the winds. He tunneled a path to her ears, and repeated his question.
“Yeah, what the hell? Suits me. If it gets too cushy around here, I’ll self-destruct. Unless you think it’ll be too much of a drain on your power to run it twenty-four/seven.”
“Cute.” He hiked on in the direction of the door, mumbling, “I swear, you’re so easily goaded, Player. You’re going to have to work on that.”
He tried to pull the door open, but cou
ldn’t against the gale force winds. “Shit!” he finally gasped, surrendering the struggle. He used his elemental magic to rip the door open with a gesture, after standing out of arm’s reach of the door; then he jumped through and slammed it shut. It was like jumping through a portal into another world. The second time he’d incurred that sensation in under an hour.
He peeled himself off the floor and dusted himself off. There was sand in his shoes. He stripped to get it all out. “She has a point, though, about not trying to make things too cushy all at once, Player. You’d likely self-destruct if your every waking moment wasn’t a fight for survival. That or you’d take what you’re experiencing for a psychotic break, and never find your way back to reality.”
“Why is everyone around here suddenly talking to themselves?” Naomi inquired walking by and catching his striptease number.
“Because we’re pathetic, lonely people who no one can stand to be around; hearing our own voices is the only company we’ve ever known.” He studied her face. “But you’re referring to something else, aren’t you?”
He peeled his underwear off—it was the last piece of clothing on him. Shook out the sand. “Hey, lift up my ball sac for me, will ya, and brush out the sand for me?”
She stifled a smile. “At least you’re not trying to hypnotize me with that thing by swinging the pendulum back and forth, like last time.”
“What, too desperate?”
“If you have to ask….”
“What’s wrong with Soren? He’s the only one you seem to worry about, these days.”
She grabbed his dick and squeezed. “If you ever expect this to be anything but a pacifier you suck yourself by curling up like a pill bug—don’t think I didn’t see you the last three times you did that—you better stop whining like a child every five minutes.”
“You hold it any longer, I won’t have to stretch all that far.”
She let go of him and groaned. “Get the others. Soren has gone beyond talking to himself to mumbling what sounds like words of power to me. It was sending chills up my spine. Whatever is coming, I want us all there—in case it takes all of us to put him down—without hurting him or bringing this building down on our heads. Let’s do try and remember the parameters, Player, a.k.a. Mr. Act First and Think About the Repercussions Later.”
“Dress me. It’ll go faster,” he said with rising urgency, so she understood he wasn’t still hitting on her. She glared at him. “Stop pretending you’re anything but a Sponger. I was just helping the girls put the finishing touches on their rooms. And….”
She waved her hand and his clothes flew onto him, only his underwear ended up in his mouth, gagging him. “Hope you’ve done your laundry recently.”
He pulled out the gag. “No worries. I like dangling in the wind. It’s the rest of you who have to figure out how to control yourself when I’m in tout naturel mode.”
“Now, Player!” she barked. “The others.”
He used his elemental magic so his voice would come just short of shattering their ear drums, snapping them out of whatever daze they were in, no matter where they were. “Soren needs us!” Player let the urgency in his tone communicate the rest.
Naomi and Player were already running toward Soren’s lab at the north end of the building.
“Why didn’t you take advantage of the nano-network you had Natura set up between us?” Player asked.
“It’s down. That or the rest of you are particularly insensitive to my rising sense of alarm.”
He scrutinized her face. “You sure you’re not being melodramatic? It’s been my experience girls can be very melodramatic.”
The corridor walls were maybe twenty-feet apart—again thanks to Naomi’s interventions, or so Player suspected. That meant there was more than enough room for these giant faces to pop out of the walls just a little larger from chin to the domes of their skulls than Player was tall, at his 6’ 2”. The demonic faces—no two the same—didn’t get any friendlier when they opened their mouths wide. One sent a slithering snake after Naomi and Player that was its “tongue.” Another belched up black Hercules beetles with mandibles that looked just big enough to separate a head from a neck in one pinching motion.
“Run!” Naomi shouted.
“Yeah, no shit!”
They bolted toward Stealy, making an appearance through the wall at the other end of the hall—as in clear through, hurtling her bike through an opening made by a bolus of fire shot from her palm—that simultaneously took care of at least one of the faces. She kept firing the boluses of fire up the hall in their direction, keeping the snaking tongue off them and the Hercules beetles, which she burnt back and dusted by the score. “What the fuck?” she barked as they caught up to her.
“Hurry,” Naomi barked, not even slowing. Stealy spun the bike around and tore after them on it, vaulting over their heads to take the lead.
They all arrived, more or less at the same time—courtesy of Player whipping up mini-tornadoes to speed him and Naomi along—at Soren’s lab. They looked down on it from the upstairs balcony. Natura had arrived on the back of a cheetah.
“Oh, my,” she said, observing the plague of beetles pouring out of the devices in Soren’s lab. She extended her hand to hold back the horn-snouted scarab beetles with their iridescent backs trying to spit drug-laced needles their way, coated in whatever toxic venom those things produced naturally, was Player’s guess. Under Natura’s influence the needles fell short, landing in the wall below and the railings of the balcony. The beetles stopped firing briefly, as her control took deeper hold.
“Sweep this room, Player!” Naomi shouted.
Player caught up the creepy crawlies rising up from Soren’s nanite-machines—each of the microscopic nanites popping like popcorn kernels the instant they were spit out, or perhaps unfolding like origami from microscopic to macroscopic scale—the horned beetles just a bit smaller than the Hercules beetles they’d encountered upstairs.
The tornado that was sucking the insects up overhead, which had ripped the skylights and the roof in this section out, was doing its job, but then what? “What am I supposed to do with these things?” Player yelled. “I can’t just dump them anywhere.”
He expected the answer to come from Naomi—any answer, even a “How the fuck should I know?”—but instead it came from Victor, flying in on his mandala arc. “You leave that to me.”
Victor extended his right arm and broadcast an energy beacon into the sky from his palm chakra—displaying as a complex geometric pattern of many colors—that opened up a portal which vacuumed the demonic insects into a parallel universe the instant Player’s tornado put them in reach of it.
Everyone’s attention shifted back to Soren.
Stealy had been using her fire magic on the room, shooting bowling-ball-size-and-shaped bolus after bolus of fire at the morphs that had had time to change from insect form into full-fledged humanoid creatures, the height of a tall man. They had unfolded, again, origami-like, from their earlier configuration, and using the same shape-shifting magic. The black, gnarly figures, still displayed the shimmering green iridescence, as if to highlight their grotesque figures which might otherwise be obscured in their infernal blackness; their shapes a cross between Giacometti sculptures and upright Praying Mantises. The morph was complete only when they formed rifles in their hands that could propel—what?
So far their intended targets hadn’t had a chance to find out. Stealy was staying ahead of the newly appearing humanoid figures, as the trumpet-horned beetles had to be incarnate a while before they could morph yet again into these upright, bipedal forms. But Player’s tornado hadn’t swept all the remaining beetles up; some were scurrying about the floor, and had found safe refuges from the sucking motion of the twister.
It was all the Fab Five could do to hold on to the railing by twirling a leg or two through it to resist the pull of Player’s twister. Poor Lar—who’d turned Naomi’s and Soren’s love nest into his own private bedroom—un
able to peel himself away from the books—was still trying to attach himself to the railing with his belt, but—typical Lar—couldn’t quite manage to fasten the buckle again, and his strength was waning.
Finally, the suction of the twister caught Lar up in it and he screamed. Victor, immune to the tornado, quickly yanked him out of its grip and flung him to the edge of the room—downstairs—straight out of the fire into the frying pan.
Exhausted, and more pissed by the second, Stealy shot a bolus straight at Soren, hoping to snap him out of it. In truth, their relationship was a bit testy on a good day. When the flames made contact with him, they turned into fiery demons all too happy to come back at her. Victor was forced to open another portal with his mandala magic, sticking it like a round shield in front of Stealy, which swallowed up the charging fire demons as they made for her throat.
She didn’t even have time to say, “Thank you—” not that that was her style.
The latest Pop-Tart humanoid figures were turning on Lar. Stealy’s fiery boluses weren’t doing shit anymore, leaving her no choice but to jump off the balcony and join the fracas below. She got to the one about to jab its tail—unfolded from its back where it had been fastened, out of the way, like one of those ninja washubi swords—into Lar. Stealy used her thieving magic—typically employed for reaching through impenetrable housings protecting fine art in galleries—to yank the inside workings of the creature out—reaching inside two regions of its body at once—the equivalent of its head and its heart—neither of which were where they were supposed to be. But that was part of her Stealy sense—an ability to know where the valuables were actually located. The creature dropped to the floor, its lancing tail missing jabbing Lar through the chest, as he hunkered down against the wall on his backside, his arm up against his face impotently in defense—exposing his chest. The point of the creature’s tail had jabbed itself into the woodwork of the wall he was pressed up against, caught between his chest and his arm.
Lar didn’t get a chance to say, “Thank you,” either. Lar had his arm out and he was mumbling words of power at some point behind Stealy. She turned in time to see this latest creature which had morphed from the earlier bipedal form yet again, standing about fifteen feet tall this time—like the queen of the insect people. What was the next stage? Did the queen turn around and drop babies of its own?
Reviled (Frankenstein Book 2) Page 12
