by Aja James
It had told Medusa that it was doing so to spy for her, to keep tabs on her nemeses, Ishtar Anshar and Tal-Telal.
It lied. Both to its Mistress and to itself.
It went to Dark Dreams for comfort and solace, not because of Medusa’s bidding. It went there to catch glimpses of the little boy whose existence had turned its world upside down.
But if the Mistress ordered it to betray those who provided this sanctuary, this temporary reprieve from its black hole of an existence, it wasn’t sure it wouldn’t do just that.
Benji was indeed there again, this time smeared with flour and chocolate and custard and cream, helping Mama Bear make her delicious desserts in the kitchen.
The Creature in its young man guise had watched them work while sipping a fresh cup of coffee brewed just right. They’d tried to include it in their conversation and teasing, but it simply wanted to observe.
And as it sat on the sidelines and watched real life pass it by, a beautiful anguish like nothing it had ever known unfurled like the petals of a bloody Spider Chrysanthemum in its chest cavity, reminding it of everything good that was ever out of its reach.
So, yes, the mask cracked. The maggots of its rotted soul now came crawling out.
“Loved you like a brother,” it continued tonelessly, though its voice trembled with stress.
“Or as close to love as someone like me could ever feel. It wasn’t all pretense.”
It held the Pure male’s hand and stretched out his arm, using the sharp nail of its index finger to draw a bloody scratch in the Paladin’s skin from wrist to elbow.
Almost immediately, the scratch healed.
Good. The Paladin was back to full strength.
For many months, he’d fought the turning, the process of making him into one of Medusa’s mindless slaves. They thought they’d succeeded the first time, but in the end, he’d still helped Sophia, the Pure Queen (aka the Destroyer), escape.
Though, the Creature couldn’t say whether the loss of Sophia was or was not part of Medusa’s plan. Sometimes, she “let” her prey get away. Sometimes, she staged her own defeat in order to win another day.
Whatever her plan, they’d at least kept the Paladin, though he almost died from his battle wounds that day. Nevertheless, they went ahead with more experiments to ensure his turning was successful this time around.
They pushed his body and mind to such extremes that they almost lost him a few dozen times. It was a tricky thing to kill the soul but not the body. They had to make the body so inhabitable that the soul had nothing to feed off of, but they couldn’t let it starve totally to death so that it would depart the body. Then the body would disintegrate too.
Tricky, tricky.
And the researcher was right. The Creature did like playing with its prisoner too much.
Perhaps it pushed the Paladin too cruelly, not just for the purpose of objective research, trial and error, but because it wanted him to suffer. Pushed him to such excruciating extremes that he’d stepped mostly across the divide between life and death, only to bring him back with taunts about Sophia.
“That’s because I hate you too,” the Creature explained out loud.
It had developed a habit of talking to the Pure zombie, as if the marbleized Paladin could still hear and understand.
And feel.
The Creature wished he could still feel so that it could hurt him so much more.
Sharing pain made the Creature’s own somewhat more endurable. However illusory that concept might be.
“I hate that she loved you. Loves you,” it hissed derisively, “and yet not for one single moment did she ever love me. Not the way I wanted, no matter what I tell myself. Even though I knew her first. Long before you were ever born. And even when she was my wife, she chose you.”
It seldom showed its true emotions, but now it vibrated with fury, its thumbnail digging into the Paladin’s forearm, carving a crescent wound that was too deep to heal in seconds.
It had the Pure male’s life in its hands. Literally. It could end him at any time.
And if it weren’t for the Creature’s weakness, the one person it wanted to keep alive and well, it might have put the Paladin out of his misery months ago.
It had contemplated so many different scenarios in its head.
What if there was no Dalair Al Amirah? What if his soul was extinguished forever from this world?
What if the Creature permanently took his form? Would Sophia know the difference? Could the Creature become the one she loved and control her through that love?
But no, it had tried this before so very long ago. She hadn’t reacted to it the same way, though its form was exactly the Paladin’s.
A soul simply couldn’t be masked, nor could it be copied.
What if it made a eunuch of the Paladin? That’s one way of getting rid of competition, surely? What female would continue to love a male who was emasculated?
But it couldn’t be sure with Sophia. She might just be stubborn enough to keep hanging on.
Endless such scenarios swarmed like vultures in its head. But every permutation resulted in the same probable outcomes. It was too logical to fool itself, more’s the pity.
And in none of these probable outcomes did the Creature end up getting what it wanted.
It finally let go of the Paladin’s arm, the gouge deep enough to trickle a thin stream of blood before the opened flesh knitted itself together around the wound.
Viciously, fury unabated, it stripped away the various needles and plugs and tubes and electrodes from the Paladin’s body.
“Wake up,” it snarled.
“Time to be useful. There’s a war on the horizon, and you’re the general to lead our soldiers into the first big battle.”
Chapter Twelve
It was late afternoon when the eagles arrived.
They first circled above on reconnaissance, Rhys dropping a bundle of clothes near the patch of grass upon which Maximus and Ariel were tangled in their humanoid forms, naked and still intimately joined, so entwined it was impossible to tell where he began and she ended.
The eagle screech was loud and clear: get dressed, people! I don’t want to be blinded! Unless you’d rather make your own way back to camp twenty odd miles from here on foot.
Maximus and Ariel expediently dressed themselves, and caught a ride back with Apolla and Rhys.
When they were deposited on the main plateau, they doffed their trappings and shifted into animal form at the same time, reveling in their new powers and eager to join their Shou-Jing brethren.
The other animals came up to them to investigate, awed and joyful, curious and shy.
Maximus and Ariel stood side by side and greeted the others back with sniffs and chuffs and purrs and rubs.
Azad stayed back, warily watching from a safe distance, barely able to meet Maximus’s eyes. Once a male had proven his dominance unequivocally over another male, the latter knew his place and left it on pain of death.
Cassandra, however, wasn’t so smart. Or perhaps she hadn’t accepted what everyone else knew was true just by their mingled scent: that Maximus and Ariel were Destined Mates.
She ventured a little too near in her cheetah form, admired Maximus in his giant white tiger stripes just a little too openly, and WABAM!
A black panther paw with claws fully extended slammed into the side of her head like a freight train.
Before Cassandra could even utter a whimper, Ariel was upon her, following up the first knock-out punch with the other paw, smacking Cassandra’s head so hard it about spun one-hundred-eighty degrees on her neck.
The cheetah fell back onto her side, dizzy and disoriented from the panther’s strikes. But Ariel wasn’t nearly done.
She pounced on the cheetah, pressing the feline onto her back and closed her jaws around Cassandra’s throat.
If you so much as look at him again, I’ll tear your eyes out.
She closed her jaws a little, sinking her sharp teeth
deep enough to puncture the cheetah’s throat.
Cassandra wriggled uselessly and whined in distress.
Cheetahs were the fastest cats, but once they were caught, they didn’t have a whole lot of fight to put up against the more aggressive and bigger cats like a pissed off alpha female panther who was extremely territorial about her male.
Ariel let her struggle a bit more just for shits and giggles. She half debated whether she wanted to close her jaws entirely and make an example of Cassandra.
Unfortunately, a corner of her eye caught Maximus’s, and though he looked amused, he also clearly conveyed to her that she should let Cassandra go.
Ariel grumbled to herself and moved her jaw in the process, adding gnaw marks on the cheetah’s throat along with the puncture wounds.
Cassandra lay there quietly, limp beneath Ariel’s bigger, more muscular frame, playing possum, totally submissive.
Finally, Ariel released her and sent her scrambling away with another smack of her massive paw to Cassandra’s hind quarters. For good measure, she roared her most ferocious roar to hasten the cheetah’s departure, whose scared-shitless barks as she beat a speedy retreat, truly sounding like the “hyena” Ariel had trash-talked about before, made a few of the other animals snicker and chuckle and shake their heads.
Satisfied? Maximus communicated when the cheetah could no longer be seen or heard.
Ariel sat beside him on her haunches and primly cleaned her paw with her sandpaper tongue.
Not by a long shot, she communicated back. I want the names and serial numbers of all the females you ever rutted with.
Ariel…
His voice in her head sounded exasperated, but he was also laughing.
She wasn’t joking though. Not even remotely.
But they didn’t have time to debate the issue further, because the Tiger King had arrived.
The other animals parted with respect as he slowly stalked forth in his giant white tiger form.
Maximus and Ariel bowed their heads in unison when Goya stood before them, the powerful aura around him filling his subjects with wonderment and admiration.
Tentatively, Goya stepped a little closer to sniff the air around Maximus, his long whiskers twitching.
When he stepped back and wordlessly commanded Maximus to look into his eyes, the younger male was flooded with a sense of relief and rightness. And most of all—
Acceptance.
The soul-deep pain had receded from Goya’s ice blue eyes. It was still there, but it was pushed to the far back. What came to the fore and shone in his gaze as he held his son’s was a chest-bursting pride.
Cub.
It was the only thought Goya had communicated to him in all this time. But to Maximus, that single thought expressed everything he needed to hear.
Goya stamped his front paw in the ground with kingly force and roared.
It was a roar of triumph and elation and, most of all, whole-hearted approval.
Maximus joined in with his own mighty roar. Ariel did too.
And soon, the entire plateau was a raucous of roars, growls, hisses and screeches.
It was a crazy cacophony of beastly sounds.
And it was music to Maximus and Ariel’s ears.
This was what they’d been searching for all their existence. This was their long-awaited homecoming.
*** *** *** ***
“Why don’t they join us?”
Ariel asked the question of Rhys, who was leisurely turning the spit of wild boar over a crackling fire.
After a few days in their company, Ariel had deduced that Rhys was typically in charge of cooking. He didn’t seem to trust others with the task, a self-pronounced “foodie” of the animal spirit world.
There were a little over two dozen of their Kind in this enclave. The majority of them were humanoids with animal spirits, but a few, like Goya, were animals who could take human form.
A couple of them did so regularly because their Mates were mostly humanoid; one a vampire, the other a Pure One. But the rest, including the Tiger King, preferred to stay in their animal form.
Those who were mostly animal were commonly referred to as “Beasts,” Ariel learned from Leti, and those who were mostly humanoid were whatever their base forms determined them to be—human, Dark or Pure One. They simply possessed the Gift of “animalism.”
The Beasts referred to them as “Lesser Beasts.”
“If you haven’t noticed by now,” Rhys answered, “we Lesser Beasts prefer our meat slightly more cooked than raw. I myself like a bit of seasoning. What I wouldn’t do for some nutmeg and star anises. “
“Besides,” he continued, removing the boar and spitting a quarter of elk, “even if we all share the possession of animal spirits, the Beasts fundamentally don’t trust humanoids. And with good reason. Animals are purely instinctual. They feel everything keenly. They don’t lie, cheat, or plot evil schemes.”
“And we do?” Ariel asked somewhat rhetorically.
“We do,” Rhys answered in all seriousness, “Just by virtue of the way our brains are wired. Even the best of us can feel envy, can manipulate or pretend. Animals don’t have these vices. Which is why they are made physically stronger, to compensate for their innocence and naiveté.”
“That’s your explanation, anyway,” Leti countered, taking a delicate bite of her boar leg. “It’s your excuse for why Kanye beats you every time in one-on-one combat.”
Rhys bristled, and so did the feathers of his wings, which he almost always wore even when in humanoid form. Like a living cape.
“Kanye is a Harpy Eagle. Even in normal size, his talons are longer than a bear’s claws!”
“Excuses, excuses,” Leti tutted.
“But then how is it that Goya is King?” Ariel asked, sitting back against Maximus’s chest while he fed her the most succulent pieces of meat with his own hands.
Oh, heaven!
“He may be the strongest, but he can’t wish to rule a body of people he doesn’t trust,” she reasoned.
Leti nodded.
“This is true. He would not rule anyone if he had his wish. All he’d ever wanted was a Ma…”
Maximus’s eyes met Leti’s, and she trailed off, but Ariel knew what she was about to say.
“A Mate and cubs?”
“Yes,” Leti confirmed quietly. “It is what all animal spirits desire most. A place that is their own, with their own clan or pride or nest. And to be free.”
Ariel could feel Maximus stiffen behind her with vicarious pain for his sire. Goya had had everything taken away from him. But he’d persevered to build a clan for himself. He’d enabled others to have what he never did.
Until now. Until Maximus returned to him.
“Are there many animal spirits in the world?” Ariel asked, steering the conversation into less personal territory.
“You’re looking at most of us,” Rhys answered. “There might be a few more out there, alone or, if they’re lucky, with their Mates and young, but probably no more than a dozen. Beasts are the rarest of all.”
“You see,” Leti explained, seeing the unspoken question in Ariel’s face, “those of us with animal spirits project a certain aura. Others can feel it strongly. It both attracts and repels. Attracts because of our power and sexuality and, for the most part, purity.”
She slanted a look at Rhys that said, except for that one. That one is nowhere near pure.
Rhys rolled his eyes back at her.
“And we repel because of our strength. In our giant animal forms, there are very few things in this world that can defeat us.”
“So few,” Ariel murmured, reflecting on the number of animal spirits in the world, feeling strangely disheartened.
Talk about an endangered species!
“There were more, once upon a time,” Leti said. “But those who were discovered by humanoids were quickly enslaved or tortured or killed. Over time, perhaps as a matter of survival, the offspring of animal spirits took on
more humanoid characteristics than their bestial side, until very few Beasts remain.”
Ariel wondered what Rhys and Leti’s base forms were—human, Pure or Dark. Normally, she would have simply blurted out the question, no matter how private, but she had another one burning on her tongue.
“How long have you been here on this mountain? Don’t you miss civilization? Especially you, Rhys, who seem to have experienced more of it?”
“Don’t let Leti fool you,” Rhys said, “she was far more pampered than I ever was before she came here.”
It was Leti’s turn to roll her eyes.
“Of course there are things I miss,” Rhys answered, ignoring her. “Access to an endless variety of females, for one.”
Leti snorted.
“Drink and five star cuisine,” Rhys went on. “Modern installations. Beds. Music…”
“Not the Internet?” Ariel asked.
“Why would I care about that?” Rhys countered. “Why surf on the web reading and watching what other people are doing when you can do things yourself? Why message others on your phone or social media when you can talk to them directly, reach out and touch them?”
“We animals are highly tactile creatures, if you haven’t noticed by now,” Leti added. “We’re more physical than cerebral. Some of us even less cerebral than others.”
“It’s okay if you just say you’re slightly stupid, Leti,” Rhys responded to her dig at him. “No need to stumble through big words.”
“Are you two long-lost siblings from different species or just raring to screw each other’s brains out?” Ariel interjected most inappropriately.
Both Rhys and Leti sputtered on air, unable to formulate a comeback.
“Come on, Mad Max,” Ariel said to her Mate.
“I, for one, am raring to screw your brains out. Shall we?”
*** *** *** ***
After the Dark King’s visit, Clara and Eli hadn’t discussed the decision that was put in front of them.
They’d made desperate, searing love, trying to release the fear and worry for each other’s and, most of all, for Annie’s safety. Then, they slept like the dead as a way to postpone the inevitable.