Reborn (Frankenstein Book 1)

by Dean C. Moore

  She made a pained face as if she couldn’t deny the truth of what he was saying, but she just didn’t have his boldness. Something had happened to her once upon a time to take it away from her. “Who, or what stole your courage, Naomi?”

  “Not really sure what or who, just like I’m not sure of when, why, or how. But this mousy disposition… I was someone else once.”

  “Did you know your very name embodies spiritual unfolding? It includes the word ‘om’ at its center, the sound Eastern mystics from countless spiritual traditions use to center themselves in meditation. Your very name is a gateway to the Godhead.”

  She snorted dismissively. “And what does your name signify?”

  He grunted. “I always thought it referred to how sore I feel getting in and out of that chair and that tank, beaten up either by jolts of electricity or revelations too deep to ponder.”

  She smiled ruefully, the smile showing more sadness than humor, or perhaps more empathy.

  “I can’t speak for you, but if you truly want me to get over myself,” she said, “then I suggest we make love.” It seemed like a strange request, considering she had her right foot up against the wall again, and was talking at him from the farthest point in the room she could get to, afraid to get any closer. For his part, he had become increasingly distracted by what the sharp lines of the room did to make the curves of her body stand out, no matter where she positioned herself.

  “I was going to suggest the same thing, too, but for all the wrong reasons.”

  She chuckled softly without parting her lips; he was beginning to think half-hearted was part of her false persona, the one that had taken hold of her. “But to be fair,” he said, “I think I’ve already divined the nature of your problem. It’s not someone else who put the fear of God into you, it’s you. You fear your own powers. You’re a Sponger; by definition the most powerful of us all. That kind of power… I’d suppress full awareness of it too. I mean, who could handle the responsibility?

  “I have nothing like that kind of power, and look what I did, trying to get my hands on a taste of what was just beyond my reach. I buried the truth so completely, I could no longer find it when it was staring me in the face. Imagine what it took to go to my library, every day, reach for a book—for it always to be the wrong one. Not the one that I truly needed. The one that might well have all the answers.”

  “I don’t disagree. It’s just that….”

  “That you’re a Sponger. So it makes sense that if you’re to get over yourself, you’d use somebody else’s abilities to do it. Just make sure it isn’t one more workaround that gets locked in the closet in back of your mind, okay? Make sure you use this one to open the vault, and let whatever’s in there out.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I read a lot of urban fantasy, and if the hero is driving the story, then it must be the hero to dispense with The Masked Man, and with Victor. His sidekicks can help up to a point, but….”

  He laughed. “You must not read a lot of stories with co-protagonists then. They both drive the story forward.”

  “Have you ever known two people our age who spend this much time trying to talk each other out of sex?”

  He laughed. “Precisely why we have to get it on now, before we lose suspension of disbelief, altogether,” he said, taking her by the arm and dragging her upstairs.

  NINE

  Victor had prepared a veritable gauntlet for The Masked Man. People on the street had started referring to the entity Victor had conjured as such because every time he met up with some Woe’s Me Type, he took their hands consolingly, and they got a look at what was on the other side of that façade he showed the world. And they ran off screaming. It was Victor’s guess if they lived at all it was because they weren’t getting on his last nerve. And they were hardly why he’d been summoned anyway. The challenge was never meant for the riffraff.

  For that reason, Victor had lined up more suitable entertainment for him. The first was the grand wizard, Mordly. He was getting a bit long in the tooth, but he still had game. He was currently blocking The Masked Man’s path on the sidewalk, in the middle of evening rush-hour traffic, horns blaring. Bikers on motorbikes and ten-speeds, to get around stalled traffic, were already zipping by between the lanes, taking off side view mirrors in the process. The sidewalks themselves were pretty crowded. Though no one was looking to get between those two wizards.

  There Mordly stood, ornately carved wooden staff in hand, the twisted dragon’s body of the staff culminating with the dragon’s head, the wizard’s white beard down to his navel, his long grey-white hair below his shoulders. And any wrinkles in time he was likely to make with all those words of power he was spewing weren’t likely to cut any deeper than the ones on his face. The Latin he was mumbling—that wasn’t some spell he’d memorized. Those were beings he was channeling, far more powerful than he was. He may have been a hack in the spell casting department, but he was one hell of a channeler, and could pipe through some serious heavyweights Victor wasn’t sure he’d want to face off.

  Mordly was concentrating on the ball of fire taking shape in his hand, the size of a bowling ball. Seriously, Mordly, Victor thought. Please tell me you summoned something stronger than a fire thrower.

  The ball left Mordly’s hand, continuing to grow in size as he kept mumbling. By the time it reached The Masked Man, it was big enough to envelop him without entirely obscuring him. The Masked Man reached out of the translucent sphere with his hand and retrieved an apple to chew on from the sidewalk vender’s shelves of produce. Meanwhile, the sphere started to suck up the street. The fruit stand. The front of the store. The pedestrians on the street. The cars full of motorists. The street lamps. The billboards. It had uprooted an entire fucking building from down the road a bit that had been built in another era—evidently on a shakier foundation. Shit, Mordly had summoned a black hole into being—with a little help from one of his friends. You go, Mordly! Not even Victor was sure he could pull that off, if he tried.

  But the wizard inside the black hole was immune. His shoestring tie, with the Navajo jewelry clasp with the turquoise stone centered in the silver carving, barely billowed in the breeze. But if Mordly kept this shit up, the black hole would devour the rest of the street—including the part Victor was fairly attached to, considering he was standing there.

  The Masked Man walked toward Mordly, dropped the apple, cupped Mordly’s face in both his large hands, stared into his eyes, and whatever entity was inside Mordly fled quickly enough, leaving him alone with this guy. Mordly screamed the screams of the damned before The Masked Man released him to the pull of the black hole, where he was quickly vacuumed out of existence. Then The Masked Man shut the black hole down himself.

  As to the street that looked as effectively hollowed out as if someone had dropped a bomb…. He restored it to the way it was with a wave of his hand.

  Victor gulped. This guy was everything he was hoping for, and then some. It was the “and then some” that was worrying him. Victor had no clue how to get around him. He was hoping the gauntlet of wizards he’d lined up as stumbling blocks would force him to show some weakness that could be exploited. Instead, it just showed up what weaknesses in himself Victor was woe to admit he had.

  Then he realized the trap he’d fallen into.

  Somehow, he’d summoned a Soul Searcher. The fucking wizards who specialized in making people face their worst fears; that way, they’d do themselves in so the Soul Searcher didn’t have to raise a finger. They were one-trick ponies, by definition. How then, did this guy pick up all these other abilities? He certainly had no idea what would be thrown at him first, so presumably, he had quite a grab bag full of tricks. Victor would be able to confirm that soon enough, but for right now, it was a fair supposition. So was this guy also a Sponger? He’d almost have to be.

  Then the real horror dawned on Victor. Those intricate geometries that he’d used to open up a doorway�
� if he’d gotten the settings wrong, and opened instead a gateway to another dimension…. This guy could well operate by principles that couldn’t be affected by the forces of this universe. Meaning no magic and no science could reach him. Instead of reaching one rung up the ladder he could pull himself up by, he’d reached several rungs up at once, and there would be no reaching that next rung from his current level of magical abilities.

  Please tell me, Victor, you’re not the hack you have to worry about. Because that would really suck.

  The next wizard descended from above, jumping off a several-story-high rooftop, his cape swirling dramatically about him. Okay, who was this guy? Victor thought he knew most of the major players by now. At some point or another they’d all tried their stuff against one of his monsters brought through his portals. But maybe not. Maybe some were like this guy, they only came out to play when they sensed no one else could stop what was going on. This latest entrant wasn’t even part of the scheduled lineup. He was a complete wild card.

  Truth be known, he looked like one of the superheroes from the Superhero district in that getup. Look, buddy, I enjoy a good superhero as much as the next guy, but against a master wizard like this, even you have to know to cut your losses, right?

  Guess not. Cue sigh. Victor groaned loudly enough to give away his position. But there was too much action going on for anyone to notice.

  The city, in grid-lock, in the middle of evening rush hour traffic…. And you could hear a body drop from the top of a building. As it so happened, you could hear the superhero’s body drop, his connecting with the asphalt, even the swirl of the cape in the wind. The bubble of ‘sound proofing’ was widening. The noises at the periphery were of people climbing up the cars to stand on the roofs to get a better look at the free entertainment.

  This was The Jaded as Fuck New Yorkers district, in case anyone was wondering. People might die—horribly. But if it was cinematic enough; pass the popcorn, please.

  And while they didn’t go in much for role-play here, they weren’t unaware of what was going on in the adjoining sectors. An added bonus: some of these cynical bastards might well be overflowing with magic themselves, if they could be coaxed into doing anything with it. Well, after today, consider Victor, Coaxer Extraordinaire. Anyone catching wind of what was going on was either pissing themselves or thinking of investing in something a little more potent than bulletproof Kevlar.

  Victor switched his attention back to the superhero. Dude, did you not notice the black hole crushing down on Mordly with the gravity of a thousand collapsing suns—enough to devour our entire world, and then some? So just what do you think you’re going to throw at him? A sneaky superhero punch?

  Where do they find these people?

  The guy with all the flashy muscles and red latex, the well-chiseled, granite-like facial features, levitated briefly, before shrinking down to the size of a flea and shooting himself up The Masked Man’s nose, presumably headed straight for his brain. Okay, Victor was tracking him now, well, his thinking anyway. If he was an Atom Man type, capable of shrinking down like that, then he, too, would no longer be subject to the physics of their world, certainly not to the physics of Einsteinian space-time; to Quantum Physics, maybe—assuming he couldn’t shrink down further still to escape even the laws that governed the quantum realm. Okay, if that was true, then this guy was a real contender. Suddenly Victor didn’t mind him crashing the party and doing his research for him. Otherwise, Victor might well have to try this approach himself, if only to rule it out.

  The Soul Searcher seemed to be tracking his adversary’s zooming about inside him with his eyes, which had a vacant look, even as he threw glances at various regions of his body. And snorted. What was the snort to convey? Amusement? Bewilderment? Was he simply flabbergasted at the foolhardiness?

  He reached inside himself and yanked out ‘the flea,’ held it in his hands until it was more the size of a Ken Doll, Superhero Ken, presumably. From there, Realm Defyer—let’s call him—was subject to his own physics-altering magic, his body unable to stabilize for long, alternately being crushed and expanded and warped by the changing physics going on inside him.

  The Masked Man looked up at Victor and winked—clearly knowing exactly who he was—and showed him what transpired inside him while Realm Defyer was flying around inside there. Sure enough, Realm Defyer was sabotaging the space-time continuum by pulling at the vibratory strings that shaped this realm several rungs down from the quantum realm. The ‘melody’ Realm Defyer was playing on those vibratory strings should have destroyed a big chunk of space-time. Unlike the black hole—which just crushed everything out of the physical world down to a scale so small, it was no longer in this realm, but pure energy shooting into another universe—Realm Defyer’s magic worked differently. If you could call it magic—but why not? Science done at this level may as well be called magic.

  Think of all creation as a melody played on God’s harp. Well, change the melody and all of creation disappears, not just this planet, not even just this universe, but the multiverse. Presumably, God was playing many overlapping melodies at once that defined many such multiverses occupying the same space and time, which couldn’t be gotten to by black holes, or exploding suns, but they could be gotten to by Realm Defyer.

  Only Soul Searcher’s magic prevented all of that. No doubt, God, the master musician in this analogy, would simply continue generating new multiverses with new melodies, without missing a beat. Realm Defyer could never wipe them all out in the time he had spent inside Soul Searcher. But that could only mean one thing. Soul Searcher didn’t exist in any of these physical universes that he’d just saved from oblivion. Or rather, he wasn’t tethered to any one of them; he might well be able to roam about any number of them, but his tether was to someplace else. Like with astral traveling, if you didn’t know what he was tethered to, you really couldn’t touch him. Unless, of course, as with actual astral traveling, the traveler remained away from the body for too long, leaving it to die unattended.

  That was Victor’s first clue as to how to bring down The Masked Man.

  It wasn’t much, but it was a place to start. It suggested a way of putting the genie back into the bottle.

  Victor had seen enough. He didn’t stay for the rest of the floor show. Just long enough to get a snapshot of everything that Realm Defyer was in his mind. That kind of magic and that kind of science might well come in handy later—for a time when Victor could use the weapon—and he no longer cared how many universes were destroyed if it was a way to put an end to a wizard operating at this level, or one higher still on the stairway to heaven he planned on climbing.

  He assigned the back of his brain to capture the rest of the scientific experiments being played out by the other wizards on his behalf, all keen on stopping The Masked Man—evidently all having taken in the sky show earlier that night. That or seen it on replay on television. If anything else useful came of those exchanges, Victor’s unconscious would bubble it up to the surface for him.

  That was one nice thing about being a mandala magician. His access to sacred geometries allowed him to open his mind to things he didn’t fully understand, so completely that he learned the material in a flash. Just like a monk staring at a complex geometric figure to concentrate and focus the power of his mind, until he fathomed the essence of a thing. Mordly’s channeled entity, like this Masked Man, couldn’t have his essence flash-captured in such a manner because they didn’t entirely belong to any one realm that Victor was in contact with. Still, possibly if he had more time to stare at them with his third eye, he might well penetrate even their secrets. But something told him Soul Searcher wasn’t going to let that happen. The second he tried, The Masked Man started moving toward him, having dispensed with Realm Defyer.

  Victor broke the psychic link, tipped his hat to Soul Searcher, and backed off, heading down a side street. Apparently Soul Searcher’s sense of fair play only extended so far.

  For right now, V
ictor had another goal in mind. Could he use his sacred geometries to create for himself a search beacon that could cut through not only time and space, but any and all dimensions? Could he use it to find the body the Soul Searcher had tethered himself to, and cut the line? He would either be destroyed then, or he’d be sucked back from whence he came. And with a way to neutralize a player with such power—Victor could safely say he’d jumped not one rung, but several rungs up the ladder toward his goal of total mastery of all creation. Maybe his greatest blunder could well turn out to be the biggest boon to his project yet.

  So the game was afoot, as Holmes used to say, carrying over his Holmes-Moriarty analogy to him and Soren. Let’s see if Soren could continue to keep pace with Victor or if he’d just get left in the dust with all the others.

  TEN

  Soren’s hands canvassed Naomi’s body above her clothing, working zippers, buttons and snaps slowly to prolong her tortuous desire. He kissed his way along her newly bared skin.

  As Soren slowly undressed her, their reaction to each other spread like wildfire.

  The longer their lovemaking extended, the more Naomi opened to Soren. And the more of his abilities she absorbed, the more sensitive she became at her main seven chakras—the energy centers for the body. They became erogenous zones for Soren to explore where she was now highly sensitive.