by James Axler
Grant sized her up. She was nearly six feet in height, with long black hair and skin that, trick of the flames or not, seemed as red as any devil’s. He looked her in the eyes and saw only two deep voids of shadow, not even a glint of reflection of the torch she looked into. Lips large, soft, sensual, turned up into a smile.
“I’m glad you approve, Grant,” Neekra spoke again.
“Keep rooting around in my thoughts, honey,” Grant snarled, but his scowl quickly returned to a smirk.
Neekra stepped forward, brushing her fingers along his skin. “Your thoughts are the only thing you can get up right now, darling.”
“The paralytic toxin is the only thing protecting you,” Grant replied. “I’m fairly certain that the rest of my friends feel the same way as me. Except for Brigid. No boner for her, just cold-blooded hate.”
Neekra pursed her lips, her kiss looking like the flower of a rose, eyebrows wrinkled in mock hurt. She even let loose a soft purr of a pout before stepping away from him to address all the prisoners.
“Welcome to the city of Negari.”
Grant sneered. “Maybe you could turn on the lights. All I smell is ass, and all I see is some bitch too dumb to throw on some pants.”
Neekra shook her head.
“He’s got a point,” Brigid spoke up. “Frankly, everything about this city is boring. Including its queen.”
Neekra narrowed those midnight-black “eyes” into slits of concentrated hatred. “I am not concerned with your boredom, Baptiste.”
Brigid reacted to the inflection of her name. Grant could feel it, too. It sounded exactly like Kane, especially when he was in a short-tempered mood when referring to her.
That meant this woman knew everything about them that Kane did, at least as far as her captivity of Kane a few days before went. Grant pursed his lips.
Of course, she seemed to be able to skim thoughts off the surface, and Grant realized that any of his thoughts to date, any plans percolating in between his ears, were hers to spy on.
“Well, hello, honey,” Neekra said, stepping closer to Thurpa. “Good to see you again. I wondered why you didn’t show up with Durga.”
“Get stuffed, bitch,” the young Nagah man said.
She cupped his cheek and leaned in closer. To his credit, Thurpa tried to lean away. Unfortunately, the numbing toxin that made Grant’s arms hang like limp string kept him from moving much. Grant glowered at the scene, and he felt his fists clench at the end of his insensate arms. He could even hear the pop of tendons, and then the rubbery beasts slapped his shoulders, his biceps, his forearms again, and his fingers loosened.
“No getting cross with me,” Neekra whispered in Grant’s direction.
“Then quit bullying the boy,” Grant returned.
Neekra released Thurpa’s cheek and strode toward him. As she grew closer, Grant could smell the stink of rot on her breath. He tried to place the all-too-familiar odor, but it took him a moment to get it. She stank of dried, coagulated blood. He glanced at the things on either side of him and was able to place them, as well.
“Your things are made of blood, aren’t they?” Grant asked.
“Smart man,” Neekra replied. “They’re not strictly blood, but they are close enough to revitalize a corpse. In fact, lads, you found some bodies up above?”
There were burbling, guttural sounds that had no right resembling any language spoken by a human, but Grant realized that he didn’t need to understand. Their thoughts were apparent to their mistress, and that was all that they needed to have understood.
“You’re figuring out so many secrets. Aren’t you, big man?” Neekra asked. She ran her fingers up his naked chest, and he could feel his skin prickling, growing number with her icy touch. Just casual contact between her and him spread the same numbing toxins to Grant, and he shuddered at the growing discomfort stitching from his navel to his clavicle.
“Not casual, actually,” Neekra said. Her whispers were the promise of seduction, despite the bone-chilling numbness that made his chest tighten to the point that his back ached. “I’m doing this all so you know what this devil slut is capable of, even wrapped in this puny excuse for flesh.”
Grant’s jaw ground tight. He glared at her, but instantly he put himself into the Zen mind-set of kyudo. His thoughts were gone. It wasn’t the easiest state to attain, but he’d pushed himself into it. All that ran through his mind were sensations, sounds, sights, smells. He was in the moment, thinking of neither the past nor the future. Nothing was put into phrases or words, except for the meditation-like concentration.
Grant wasn’t new to meditation, but his martial arts training alongside Shizuka had helped him achieve such a clear, unrestrained mental state with greater facility.
Neekra wasn’t going to pry anything out of his brain in the foreseeable future.
Unfortunately, that kind of protection wasn’t going to be afforded to Thurpa or Nathan.
So, whatever luck that the Cerberus group could rely on, it was going to have to come from a blindside. Grant fought every instinct to turn his thoughts to the man he called his brother.
* * *
PERCHED ON THE RAILING, still eighty feet from the bottom of the shaft, Kane peered down on the assemblage, his vision augmented by his contact with the pre-Biblical artifact they knew as Nehushtan. Kane was a little perturbed at the change within the staff’s appearance. The twin snakes had shifted in their relation to each other, and now with the way they had combined what had once been two serpentine heads was a cat, one with all-too-human eyes. The appearance of it stank of ancient blasphemy, and its glassy stare unsettled Kane.
The change in mien, however, made the staff more familiar to Kane on a subconscious level. He recalled his discomfort at an earlier incarnation’s reception of the staff as a thing of black magic, but only initially. It also was sleeker, seemingly taller and more adapted to use as a mere walking stick, albeit one that could be pressed into service as a spear or club if necessary. Perhaps it was Nehushtan’s gambit to disguise itself, meaning that Brigid Baptiste had succeeded in putting together her imitation stick.
Not that Kane should have been surprised. The girl, Lyta, stated that Brigid had pressed the original artifact into her hands and bid her to escape. She’d stayed behind and fought against the pursuers, at least until she had picked the time to surrender.
Kane dropped down, listening to Grant and Neekra go back and forth. They’d been in these straits so often that they had the ability to seem bored and unimpressed while at the same time picking up as many details as their enemies would accidentally provide. So far, there wasn’t much that Grant or Brigid gave away. In lieu of Kane’s presence, Grant took the lead, bumping egos against the thing shaped like a woman.
The “blasphemy” of Nehushtan and its change were second only to that which he could see in the entity of Neekra. It was as if he were looking at a double exposure, the woman as she wished to appear, and then the poor thing that she had usurped, hijacked, demolished.
She unfortunately had to look like former Panthers of Mashona Warlord Gamal, standing naked because Neekra felt as if she were wearing enough “layers” by sheathing herself in the skin of a man. Kane grimaced at the knowledge that she’d taken over the man, despite all his crimes.
What was worse was that he could see, through the power of Nehushtan, that Gamal was still in there, still conscious, still alive and in terrible agony because she’d taken every muscle, every bone, every cell and wrenched them out of place to change him from a tall, muscular man into a voluptuous, sexy woman.
She had not been gentle in changing Gamal’s plumbing.
And then, to rub salt in the new wound between his legs, Neekra had tried out her sexual organs with Durga. The tales and scars on the current queen of the Nagah, Hannah, were evidence that Neekra had little regard
for her body. Or maybe she didn’t feel the body the same way a normal human would. She’d taken up residence in Gamal’s meat and bones, but “feeling” through him must have been like interacting with the world in a biohazard uniform—numb, detached. And, thus, by exposing her puppet to the kind of cruelty and ferocity that only the brutal Durga could provide, she was able to feel her lover.
And for that to happen, she needed to override that filter, subjecting Gamal’s carcass to enormous stresses and agonies.
Or perhaps, what she considered pleasure was agony.
Kane shuddered at that thought.
Neekra had played with him, forcing him to endure psychic horrors that left him emotionally exhausted. Had the trauma she’d inflicted on him in her psychic attacks been one iota of reality, he didn’t think that his body could have survived the shock.
Kane had dealt with those who had warped perceptions of right and wrong, of pleasure and pain, of good and evil. But he recalled the alien feeling of how she was inside his brain, how he’d barely been able to conceive of her until she grew more and more willing to give him a form to imagine.
What if that was just a ruse, a false face?
What if she’d crafted that just to lure him in, to provide something, someone to sympathize with?
It wouldn’t be the first time that someone had utilized arcane means to draw the attention of the Cerberus redoubt group. So baited, the explorers were drawn in by a vulgar trap merely for the purposes of eliminating them, as had been attempted by the barons or their more evolved forms, the Annunaki overlords. However, other times they had been pulled in, as a tool, a blunt instrument utilized to smash a rival, as in the case of Lilitu’s attempt to eliminate her brothers.
That fiasco had ended with a gigantic, living starship swatted from the heavens above, and the deaths of at least a few of them; others had been scattered to the winds, ultimately leaving the earth even more vulnerable to a son of their leader, Enlil.
Kane stilled his thoughts.
Neekra had proved to be a powerful psychic entity. She’d literally trapped him and Durga into a shared consciousness, isolated from control of their bodies. Together, they had been seemingly cast across a universe, into the space between dimensions, but it was all a ruse, a waste of mental energy and time. And where Kane had been told by Brigid Baptiste that dreams, no matter their depth and their seeming duration, occurred only within a few seconds of hyperkinetic brain activity, Kane realized that he had felt the length of centuries as he’d struggled across the faux multiverse constructed by Neekra. And then he’d suffered agonies across more millennia when they had burst the illusion and been drawn into psychic battle with her void form.
The thing that struck Kane right now was her seeming lack of knowledge of his presence. His mind had touched hers, and over the past few days, Kane had been hearing her whispers, perhaps mental shadows, traumatic memories of the time he’d spent as her prisoner, perhaps her way of keeping in touch with him in the present. She should have had some kind of scent of him.
He glanced down to the old staff. Nehushtan, in addition to enabling him and Lyta to see in the darkness, was creating a hole in the devil queen’s perceptions, allowing them to get this close. Even so, he had no urgency to go any further. Almost as if when he took one step closer, the bubble of comfort that the ancient artifact wrapped him within would burst and the hordes of Neekra would rise, screeching from this infernal pit, rushing after him.
Kane glanced at the stick once more, and he realized that the staff had reconfigured itself to keep Lyta and him safe. When they’d first met, the staff had been styled like the Caduceus, providing health and healing to its users. Now its head resembled a cat and appeared to mirror more closely the tales of the ancient traveler Solomon Kane, whose juju-stick was purported to have been cat-headed. He and Lyta were now stealthy and able to see in the pitch darkness where their enemies could not. Making use of the eyes of a cat, figuratively or literally.
“We need to back away,” Kane murmured softly to Lyta. She nodded.
“You can’t talk to them anyway,” Lyta returned. “You all seem to have lost those cheek plates.”
Kane nodded. “We go any closer, Neekra will see....”
There was a warbling that silenced Kane, and they ducked back from the railing, crouching low.
Arms snapped past their level, reaching up and snagging the walls above them. The pliant, stretchy sub-humanoids hurtled up through the pit, gibbering in excitement.
Kane could not imagine what could give those creatures their enthusiasm, but then he thought of the corpses above. If these creatures were anything like their mistress, then they would seek out bodies to usurp. And, thanks to Kane and his allies, those monstrosities would have an embarrassment of riches. He grimaced at the thought but was thankful that it was a group of dead men who would enslave innocents, rather than the emaciated, helpless prisoners that they’d formerly held.
Of course, with their new bodies, they would come back down. And who knew what kind of senses they possessed? Even worse, what if they were being sent out to hunt for Kane and Lyta. Neekra might have peered into the minds of her prisoners and seen they were missing. As underarmed and under-equipped as the two of them were, Kane didn’t relish the concept of going toe-to-toe with reanimated corpses under the command of a body-stealing demon deemed too dangerous to leave free by the Annunaki.
Kane also had an additional chilling thought. The overlords must not have been capable of killing her. Or perhaps they’d had the idea of weaponizing her.
Kane remembered the “living weapons” in the undersea Tongue of the Ocean base, the horrors within which the spirit of Kakusa had hidden.
The similarities to the mollusk-like sacs of coppery blood who’d just surged past were too great to ignore. Kane clenched one fist, wishing to hell that he hadn’t been stripped of his gear.
No. Wishing for things to unhappen was a waste of time.
Kane had plenty at his disposal, and he started thinking of what he could do to go one-on-one with Neekra.
Logistics be damned, Kane was the last line in the sand against the body thief. And utilizing every ounce of his resourcefulness in a foreign land and nearly alone, he had to do what Enlil could not do with his legions of Nephilim and star-flung technologies.
Kane hoped that he wouldn’t have time enough to entertain a single doubt.
Chapter 10
Lyta followed Kane, the two of them linked together by the length of the staff Nehushtan. Its uncanny powers allowed them to see perfectly in the dark and their footsteps to land no louder than the wing beats of a butterfly as they raced toward the surface entrance. They were heading to another opening in the earth, where they hoped that the vampiric horrors wouldn’t be gathering bodies. And if they were...
Lyta would face that challenge when she came to it.
As it was, the healing power of Nehushtan made the past week of arduous marching and minimal subsistence fade away. Lyta wasn’t certain how this was, but considering the nervousness that Brigid had in protecting the staff, it was certain that the object possessed incredible power. Whatever energies were held within the stick, she no longer felt thirsty, hungry, not even sleepy or achy. Lyta’s medical background was limited to bandages and rinsing out wounds, basic first aid that was of use on the frontier of Zambia’s wilderness. But she did know that she’d lost body fat, which meant that she’d also lost a lot of moisture in her body. She didn’t see how any stick could undo such damages, but she was certain that whatever energies it was pumping into her, they must have come from an incredible power source.
She just had no idea how that energy could be transferred, let alone stored or even directed in terms of increasing her visual acuity as well as her relative health.
Lyta didn’t want to think about how she’d “known” that Kan
e was down the path she had taken to the underground. Just as the staff was a power source, it also appeared to be some manner of intelligent organism. It even felt warm and alive to the touch, and it had changed right before her eyes.
Then again, she and Kane were running from creatures that had no skeletal form and seemed to be interested in the corpses of the men Kane and his allies had slaughtered to rescue her and the others.
And since these things were tough enough without human form, surviving gunfire and explosions, the thought of them reinforcing themselves with the bodies of others was terrifying. Like Kane, she had seen what Neekra truly was—physically and spiritually. She saw that Neekra had molded, warped, raped the warlord Gamal’s flesh. Neekra had torn him apart cell by cell, nerve by nerve, ripping him asunder and recasting him as a woman.
It was not a pretty thing. Again she felt disturbed that she had received this information from Nehushtan. The stick proved able to fill her in on the back story, gave her a taste of the physical horrors inflicted on Gamal’s flesh.
She could also read the discomfort in Kane as he looked on the thing that used to be Gamal. Nehushtan was giving them a warning not to be taken in by the appearance of the woman.
Kane had also informed her that the rubbery beasts were most definitely some basis for vampire legend. They utilized their near-spineless abilities to invade people’ homes, as if they were made of mist. Seeing the horrors swing up the shaft of the underground chimney, Lyta had little doubt that the creatures were swift, deadly predators.
Moving as quickly as they could, they kept the staff as a tether between them because of the silence it bestowed on them and the ability to see in the dark. A stumble would give them away, make them vulnerable to Neekra’s minions.
Even if there were no more of the creatures than what they’d seen, she and Kane were outnumbered. And Lyta figured those must have been let free because there were others down there to guard their new prisoners.