by Aja James
Gabriel and Inanna were too late as well. By the time they leapt onto the wall, Dalair and Benji were already airborne, several feet away from the edge, their bodies arching backward in this strange suspension of time.
But Sophia had been close enough.
Without thinking, without fear, she threw herself off the wall along with them.
In that frozen, elongated moment of time, she stretched her arms toward them, the two rays of Light in her universe. She wrapped her arms around both of them and shut her eyes—
As time started again and they plummeted toward the unforgiving concrete below.
Chapter Seven
Her Creature was coming along nicely.
As in, his body hadn’t given up the ghost yet. Despite how her instruments and chemicals broke him down particle by particle in the process of remaking him into her ultimate creation: an earth-bound dragon.
As she’d learned through trial and error, there was more than one way to go about it. In the Creature’s case, she had to apply some brute force to make all the pieces fit.
Over the past excruciatingly long days—long for Lilith because while she was patient, she simply couldn’t wait for the outcome of this particular experiment, and excruciating for him because…well, a thousand needles inserting over and over into one’s blood vessels, tissues, organs, and bones probably hurt rather keenly without anesthesia—they’d had some fits and starts. There were a few near-death experiences where she had to resuscitate him and drag him back into the living.
Thank the gods for modern human medicine. This would have ended in abject failure had she still been working with tools from the ancient world, magic notwithstanding.
To the Creature’s credit, he seemed to want to live as much as she wanted him to survive. Despite the endless, immeasurable pain he endured, his body and mind didn’t give up. Any normal being might have sought the numbness of oblivion rather than continue to suffer like he did, but no.
He wanted to reach the ultimate state. And his will was inconceivably strong. He simply refused to die.
They were past the most difficult part now. Lilith finally found a human DNA strain that his body didn’t reject. She really should have thought of this before; probably might have saved him countless hours of torture.
But, oh well, no harm done. He survived. A little suffering was good for the soul.
In the first batch she tried DNA from the store she’d accumulated over centuries of cultivating orphanages around the world. Human children who resulted from parents that had special ingredients blended together.
When that didn’t work, she tried DNA from humans who’d interacted with him in the past. Sophia and Olivia, to be specific.
When Medusa had tasked the Creature to abduct Sophia years ago, he’d taken a sample of her blood then. But it didn’t work. His body rejected her human ingredients. Whatever their connection was to each other, it wasn’t physical.
Lilith thought next that Olivia’s genetic materials might do the trick. After all, she was the only human he’d been physically attracted to, across the millennia that she’d observed him. If she hadn’t personally witnessed the first time they’d met, she wouldn’t have believed it. The Creature, for all his flagrant sexual charms, and countless exploits in service of Medusa’s schemes, did not seem to like sex at all.
Lilith had been visiting him in one of his previous nightclubs in a secret part of lower Manhattan. In her Pure One form, Wan’er’s form, though it was merely a shell to house her fox spirit, she was still able to provide the Pure blood he needed to keep his ravaged mess of a body functioning.
It was almost pitch black in the club, save the weak beams from laser lights that revealed the sea of undulating bodies in flashes of ghoulish, careless, drugged-up orgy, moving mindlessly to the thumping beat of electronic instruments and synthesized techno grunge.
Back then, and for all of his existence until very recently, he never knew who she really was. He only knew Medusa as his Mistress.
He thought Lilith was merely another tool in Medusa’s arsenal, just like him. Perhaps he considered her beneath him, even, since Medusa sent her to him to feed his Pure blood needs. She was his food, a source of information, a mad scientist in Medusa’s labs. Nothing more.
Oh, how wrong he’d been.
Which was why, when he took her bare arm in his hands, pulled her wrist to his mouth and bit into her vein, he didn’t even notice her. He hardly recalled she was there when a human woman dressed in white wove her way through the tightly-packed throng.
With her light blond hair piled in waves on top of her head, pale skin and clingy white dress, the dim laser lights caught the human’s form more than others. She was like a ghostly moon floating across dangerous dark waters.
The Creature had been in a young man’s form, a random, albeit beautiful body he assumed to disguise the monster within. He sat in an open lounge reserved for exclusive patrons of the club with Lilith, one level above the common rabble below, a position that allowed him to survey the masses like a king on a throne.
It was one of a handful of times, in the millennia that she’d watched him, that Lilith recalled the Creature fixing his gaze on one particular human with interest…and something else blazing in his blood-red eyes. She watched as those glowing obsidian orbs tracked the woman in white’s movements across the floor.
As far as beauty went, the human was hardly the most beautiful Lilith had ever seen. But then, when one regularly interacted with Immortals, when one was one of those Immortals, humans tended to compare poorly as a rule.
Lilith couldn’t deny, however, that there was something about this human. She was very young, for one thing. Probably got into the club with a fake ID. The glow and vitality of untainted youth created a halo of light around her, making her practically pulse with energy. If Lilith hadn’t been in her last skin, she might have been tempted to take this human’s body instead.
It had been…tantalizing.
The Creature felt a similar draw, for his eyes narrowed and homed in on the human woman. He discarded Lilith’s wrist, not bothering to lick the puncture wounds closed, and stalked down from the elevated lounge, his black-clothed form immediately getting lost in the sea of people.
For some reason, Lilith stayed and observed. She had nothing pressing to attend to, and she was curious to see what could have motivated the normally jaded, careless Creature into action.
She watched him reach the human woman like a bullet finding its target.
The girl gasped in surprise when he turned her around and trapped her in his arms until their fronts were plastered together. Without a word, he moved them together in an erotic rhythm, their bodies one, mimicking copulation so explicitly, others around them noticed too and slowed their own dancing to ogle.
The young woman closed her eyes and arched her long, pale neck, her cheeks flushed with passion. Lilith and everyone else saw it too—she was orgasming right there on the dance floor. Continuously. Endlessly. Shuddering and moaning helplessly.
Until finally, the Creature whispered something in her ear, his face hidden in her hair. Her eyelashes fluttered in acquiescence. And together, they disappeared.
The next time Lilith saw the Creature, he was in one of his preferred forms, a darkly beautiful thing of indeterminate gender. She asked him what happened to his little human morsel from weeks ago, and he replied in his usual tone of ennui that he didn’t know and didn’t care.
“I drank her blood and took her soul…half of it anyway before I stopped myself. She’s probably dead by now,” he’d said emotionlessly.
But the human hadn’t died.
Lilith kept track. She had a good sense of “fate”; it served her well and helped her survive as long as she had—the weakest of all Immortal creatures. A parasite, really. Fox spirits lived by cunning and deception.
She recognized the importance of the encounter even if the Creature hadn’t. She discovered that the human woman’s name w
as Olivia. And she would bear a son:
Benjamin.
Presently, Lilith smiled a serpentine smile.
All these millennia, Medusa had plotted. With her ever expanding networks of power, violence, manipulation and greed. She’d amassed mortal and immortal soldiers alike, used Lilith’s science to turn them.
To what end? Lilith always wondered.
Medusa had always been driven by her emotions, gods rest her dead-as-dust-never-to-be-resurrected soul. Only Pure souls could be reborn; the rest of them had only one spiritual shot at existence. Medusa had wasted hers.
She plotted to overthrow Queen Ashlu’s rule because she was no longer the prophesized Princess to inherit the throne. She imprisoned and tortured Tal-Telal for over four millennia as petty revenge against her sister, Ishtar Anshar. She started wars as knee-jerk reactions to some small slight. She was so bloated with her own self-importance and arrogance that she never suspected the most dangerous enemy within—Lilith.
Medusa had no end game. She simply wanted to wreak havoc and pain upon the world that abandoned her.
Unlike Lilith.
But her goals were her own. She would never reveal them. They weren’t destinations to be reached; she would never be “done.”
There was no end. There was only the infinite middle. Only the strongest, the cunningest, most invincible mattered in the grand scheme of things.
Lilith thought back to the human ingredients that finally meshed with the Creature’s.
It was sheer luck that she found it in the database at Columbia University Medical Center. The samples from one Ava Monroe Takamura, contributed to research toward finding a cure for her father’s Parkinson’s Disease.
She was the only human subject that successfully absorbed the serum Lilith created in one of Medusa’s labs years ago. A serum that was derived from a genetic material dubbed Genesis, which was portentously taken from the Tal-Telal, who was the Creature’s sire.
She’d never thought to reverse the injection—to take the human’s genetic material and combine it with the Creature’s. Her focus had always been to create stronger humans for Medusa’s army, not weaken Immortals with the subpar human gene.
But in this case, the missing human ingredient would make an Immortal stronger than all others. How ironic.
Lilith licked her forked tongue from her subject’s clavicle all the way to his forehead in one meandering swipe.
Mmm. He tasted delicious. She wanted him to wake up and play.
But his body was still recovering from its near-death experiences, the endless days of remaking. He needed rest, his cells in the process of rebuilding.
For now, she would count her blessings, take stock of her gains.
What was better than possessing an earth-bound dragon? Having not one but two of them in her arsenal. Supposing that Benjamin followed in his dear papa’s footsteps. With her own Hydra form, they would make three.
Not since a long-forgotten time had three earth-bound dragons existed at once. They would be gods on earth. And she would rule them all.
Lilith couldn’t wait to begin.
*** *** *** ***
It takes fifteen seconds for an object of their combined weight to fall and splatter to their bloody, bone-shattering deaths from a fifty-story building.
Give or take.
That’s what went on in Sophia’s head as each second stretched into infinity.
With her eyes tightly shut, she felt almost weightless. Her arms wrapped tightly around Benji and Dalair, her face tucked into the little boy’s chest. His small arms had wound around her neck, and one of Dalair’s steely arms held both of them in a relentless grip.
Though she was approaching imminent demise at over one hundred twenty miles per hour, Sophia felt no fear. Incredibly, she was completely at peace.
A blanking calmness pervaded her. The same tranquility she felt before the last battle that ended the Great War when she had been Ninti. The opposite of the ravaging fury that consumed her before she unleashed devastation upon ancient Egypt and Persia as Kira.
Perhaps it was because she had Dalair in her arms this time. Whatever happened, they would be together. Her only sadness and regret were for Benji.
She squeezed her favorite little person tighter and willed numbness and peace into his body and soul. The way she’d willed it into Inanna moments before. The way she’d protected and strengthened the souls of hundreds of Pure warriors for the battle that won their freedom millennia ago.
So, when a giant metal claw descended like the hand of god from out of nowhere and clamped around the three of them, putting an abrupt halt to their rapid downward trajectory four seconds into the free fall, Sophia jolted with shock.
Had she splattered on the pavement so soon? Was she dead? Because it really didn’t hurt like she imagined it would.
When she opened her eyes and looked up, she saw a helicopter hovering above, a thick steel cable extending from its belly to the claw that cinched them. They were being steadily reeled up into its bowels. Dalair used the arm that wasn’t wrapped around Sophia and Benji to grasp the cable and steady their dangling weight.
Surreal.
Even though Sophia should have been used to the danger and “excitement” that came with her day job as Queen of the Pure Ones, she rarely got to see action up close and personal. Up until recently, before she graduated from university, she’d been a relatively normal human teenager on the cusp of adulthood. Sheltered, protected, kept in the dark about most things.
In just the past year, she’d been abducted, Awakened, journeyed across the Middle East and faced down an army of enemy soldiers… If her life got any more exciting, she might have to carry defibrillators wherever she went.
Being transported in a giant claw by helicopter was certainly a new experience to add to her ever growing list of unique experiences.
Sophia narrowed her eyes at the rapidly receding scenery of Manhattan beneath her. The rooftop of the Shield was still close enough to make out four dark figures standing in a line on top of the wall, watching their departure.
How had they flown so far already?
The helicopter also continued to climb as it sped away from the epicenter of the city. By the time the three of them were reeled all the way up, Sophia had ascertained that they were headed north. Perhaps slightly northeast. She couldn’t be sure, given the disorientation of dangling so high in the sky, added to the speed at which they were traveling.
The claw had opened enough as they approached the helicopter’s belly that Dalair pulled himself and Benji out first, propelling the boy inside with a solid push before reaching down to grasp Sophia by the upper arm.
She pulled herself up his body and clung to him with all her strength, her eyes shut tightly against an onslaught of vertigo. She didn’t open them until he’d pulled both of them inside and the side door of the helicopter slid shut to seal them in.
“Stay,” he instructed in that detestable flat voice, gesturing with a glance at the two side-by-side seats against the opposite wall of the helo.
“Buckle up.”
Not looking to see if she and Benji obeyed him, he navigated to the front, hunching as he moved within the medium-sized aircraft, though Sophia didn’t have first-hand benchmarks to compare with.
When he took the pilot seat, she realized suddenly that there had been no one manning this flight. The steering wheel, or whatever it was called in a helicopter, turned and adjusted by itself. It looked like a yoke, actually. There was a copilot seat in the cockpit as well, with a similar handle-bar in front, shifting in sync with the one on the left.
She tapped her nearly invisible ear piece, hoping that by some small miracle, she’d still be able to contact the Shield. Unsurprisingly, however, the signal was scrambled. Only static could be heard. She didn’t know whether it was because they’d flown too far out of range or because the helicopter’s technology prevented unauthorized communication. Likely the latter.
Tamp
ing down her frustration and disappointment, she put on her calm, “big sister” face and turned to her young charge.
“Are you all right, Benji?” Sophia asked softly, making sure he was strapped in before doing the same for herself.
He nodded, big blue eyes bright with…excitement. Not worry.
“That was awesome, Sophie!” he whispered loudly. “But next time when we jump off a building we should wear parachutes. I’ve always wanted to go skydiving.”
Sophia’s eyebrows hiked up her forehead.
“Really,” she muttered, feeling another wave of nausea coming on.
Sophia would rather stay on solid ground. No deep sea or sky-high adventures for her, if she could help it. Unfortunately, this particular jaunt was taken out of her hands.
Benji nodded with even more eagerness.
“You know when Cloud turned into that giant green dragon and saved the day? I really wish I could have ridden on his back. Or the white dragon that Aella took Ere on. I love flying! And now we’re in a helicopter! I’ve never been in one before.”
At least one of them was having fun.
Sophia was glad Benji treated this abduction like an adventure. She was determined to bring him home before his enthusiasm could be soured by reality. Which meant that she needed to figure out how to stop them from reaching their destination. She really didn’t want to know what their enemies had in store for them.
Suddenly, Benji’s face fell.
“I wish Mom and Dad could have come with us. I hope they’re all right. Uncle Tal and Mama Bear too.”
He grimaced in recollection.
“Mama Bear was hurt because of me.”
“Not because of you, Benji,” Sophia quickly corrected. “You didn’t do anything wrong.”
He nodded again and looked past her toward the cockpit, where the back of Dalair’s seat blocked most of him from view.
They could only see the tremendous width of his shoulders narrowing to a trim waist, one muscular arm attached to a vein-wrapped hand gripping the throttle between the seats.
