Later, cupping her breasts, then hips, he moved his tongue, and his lips, and his fingers and his hot, steamy breath to the smaller chakras in the palms of her hands, the balls of her feet, her elbows… her knees.
Flicking her nipples even more erect, he stroked the long length of her body with his questing fingers and nails.
The more she succumbed to his ardor, the more her aura lit up like a Christmas tree, the more the reaction spread, until every cell in her body was tingling—almost begging for release that he denied her.
Their soft moaning had long been competing with the creaking from the shoddy woodwork of his quickly-plastered-together flooring. Their breathing had become more audible as well, racing through the air like the sound of a small locomotive in the apartment as they each came to the point of no return.
Occasionally, their muscles would spasm on their own, like runaway snakes no longer comfortable with their place in the warren, and so shifting over the bodies of the other snakes that impeded their release from the nesting hive.
Speaking of snaking muscles, the Kundalini energy serpents that resided at the base of the spine, well known to chi masters, started slithering their way up their spines, crossing one another, like they did about the staff of the symbol for the medical profession. As the swirling bands of energy rose, Soren’s and Naomi’s minds would release more feel-good hormones from their pineal glands that would drive their ecstasy to new heights.
They shook with the pent up passion demanding release, shuddering violently, as their bodies refused to open up any more to this much ecstasy at once. They hadn’t done any preparations for this kind of lovemaking. They should have made sure any blocks in their bodies had been cleared with meditation first.
All the same, their convulsing coincided with another breakthrough. Soren exploded like fireworks within her, and that was the only breakthrough he was focused on right now. But she had, almost like a bad dream, merged with The Masked Man instead. Her psychic abilities, fired up by the rising of the kundalini serpents, which she probably didn’t have words to describe or concepts to catalogue…. It didn’t matter. It had done the trick. Only at what price?
Carelessly vicious after the intimacy they had just shared, she drove her middle fingers into his temples to share what she was seeing with him. Victor was sacrificing the bishops and the knights on his chessboard to see if anything could stop the enemy queen, played by The Masked Man. He’d sicced Mordly on him, the second rate spell caster, but the first rate channeler. Whatever out-of-body entity Mordly had summoned, which seemed far more powerful than anything Soren had yet encountered, vacated the premises of Mordly’s mind when he saw how ineffectual his powers were against The Masked Man. Soren wouldn’t have thought opening a black hole would be ineffectual against anything, but it hadn’t worked on…. So, he was also called the Soul Searcher. The essence of his magic…. Soren should have guessed.
Victor threw Realm Defyer at The Masked Man next, some superhero dude with the ability to shrink down so small he could defy basic physics. In fact he could pull the rug out from Einsteinian-space-time, and if that weren’t enough, he could slip past the quantum realm, shrinking down even further, to pull the rug on it. Both stunts should have ended their universe and possibly several others twice over. But for the magic of the Soul Searcher.
The shock and horror from the realization of how out of their leagues they were, even both powered up like this by their lovemaking, and Soren and Naomi rolled off of one another, panting, saying, “My God.” Soren would have felt much better if they were referring to their lovemaking, which had probably been rather pedestrian to any hidden cameras despite everything going on beneath the surface.
“It’s hopeless,” she said.
Soren winced. It was easy to take that remark as a condemnation of their lovemaking. But he knew what she meant. “I caught a glimpse of what Victor was up to, as well,” he said, sitting up at the side of the bed. “He’s gone back to his lab to find the sacred geometries that will locate the source of the avatar the Soul Searcher has sent into this world. He’s going to use the pattern overlay like a search beacon. And once he finds what he’s looking for, he’s going to snip the cord.”
“You think it’ll work?”
“It might. But his more-is-less approach is what got us into this mess in the first place. I think I’ll try my less-is-more approach first.”
She sat up, folded her legs and leaned her back against the wall, straightened her hair. Her nakedness yielded to the clothed attire of a black leather superhero outfit that was nearly as fetching; it certainly didn’t hide anything about her figure. My God, had she absorbed enough nanites from all the tongue bathing he was giving her and the saliva of his wet kisses, re-tasked them already to do her bidding in the clothing department? Had they just woven that outfit like millions of little spiders too small for the eye to see, happy to do her stitching for her? Nanites, mind you, built for something else entirely, namely healing the physical body when it became too overloaded by his cybernetic systems?
It blew his mind she could display such power and such a learning curve and continue to underestimate herself so. He was going to have to work on that. For now, he tried not to let the latest magic trick, which illustrated all too well his own credo, as well as Arthur C. Clarke’s—that magic is just science too far advanced for us to comprehend it—distract him from the task at hand: manhandling The Masked Man back to oblivion from whence he came.
It dawned on Soren that his “back to oblivion” analogy may not have been as imprecise a statement as the idiom would tend to indicate. Perhaps Victor had miscalculated with his sacred geometries. Intending to lay down a pattern that wove together the energies connecting this universe and the next, to create the bridges needed for whatever entities to crawl in here from dimensions x, y, and z to boot…. Instead he’d opened the door to non-incarnate entities not housed in any one universe.
These were the genies trapped in the bottles. And possibly for very good reasons. In all likelihood, other wizards in coming up against them figured since they refused to play nice and wanted to stomp through all of creation like a bull in a china shop, that they needed a time out. So they’d been bottled up in these nowhere places.
And Victor—the idiot—had just given them a way in to our realm, into Soren’s world. Entities, mind you, that wizards, working several levels up from any magic that the most powerful people on Earth could muster, had struggled to bottle up in the first place. Shit, Victor, I thought I was risking all creation in sacrifice to my ego—you make me look good!
His one hope was that such an all-powerful entity had an Achilles heel—that they all did. He jumped off the bed, making a beeline for the crystal. He had to find a way to shatter that crystal, to destroy the avatar. It was the only way to put the genie back in the bottle of oblivion.
“I think I know how,” Naomi said.
Her voice startled him. He had a way of pushing her out of his conscious mind so completely when he was focused on his work that he lost all awareness of her physical presence in the room. He was going to have to work on that too. She was clearly still linked to his mind. Her telepathic abilities dialed up by the sex hormones. At the rate their bad guys were evolving, they were going to have to take them on while having sex. “You couldn’t possibly,” Soren said, and regretted the words leaving his mouth. It was condescending in the extreme. Science Savant was not about to be outdone by Paranormal Princess—not on a bad day.
“It’s crystal, right? Okay, liquid crystal, that, according to you, works by somewhat different properties. Well, even so, crystal is crystal, which means it should shatter in response to the proper harmonics. You just need to play it a tune, let the vibrations blow him to hell.”
He broke eye contact with her to think through this mad idea. “It can’t be that easy.”
“Well, of course not, dunderhead. We have no speakers that can produce the kinds of sounds likely to shatter the crystal, and that’s assumi
ng it wasn’t morphing from one second to the next. And even if we could design the sound system, it’d likely take more time and money to build than we have, being as you’re talking technology that’s ahead of its time.”
“Yes, well, technology that’s ahead of its time is a bit of a forte with us transhumans. God forbid we build anything that belongs in the here and now.”
He stomped off. He couldn’t believe he was mad at her for getting the answer right almost immediately—as if they had time to waste on his blundering about with the wrong solutions before hitting on the right one.
“You’re welcome,” she mumbled, sounding bruised from the encounter. He couldn’t blame her; he was sure what he did back there qualified as emotional abuse.
He stopped his stomping, turned around, and trudged back in there, yanked her off the bed and kissed her. “Sorry my ego got in the way for a second there. You just saved us a lot of time—time we don’t have—which means you may have just saved us all. And I wanted a partner that could speed my research to stay ahead of the likes of Victor, help me to find solutions I’d hit on myself eventually…. Just that I live in a world that doesn’t kowtow to ‘eventually’. Come on, I think I know how to build those speakers.”
She followed behind him but she didn’t have to follow far. He stopped, turned around again, and climbed her like a tree. She twisted her face up. “Yes, I figured out how to let the nanites harden me into an oak tree if need be, so I can support any amount of weight. Thanks for asking.”
“Figured as much,” he said, absently, as he crawled back down with the book in hand retrieved from the overhead arched ceiling. She didn’t seem to appreciate the books raining down on her head any more than the tree-climbing.
He flipped to the pages with the diagrams for the sound system, showed her. She flipped to the back of the book, noticed the artifact. “So you’re starting to remember the things you once suppressed.”
“Maybe there was something in your saliva from all those kisses that migrated to my brain to help with unlocking the doors.”
“Yes, that would be me reprogramming your nanites for you.”
Wow, he thought. She could merge with his mind so completely, she could activate abilities he himself hadn’t learned to activate by accessing all of his brain at once, instead of just one or another piece of it. For the most part, he alternated between left and right-brain dominance; never both sides working in perfect harmony, to say nothing of getting his conscious and unconscious minds to cooperate better. “Remind me not to play the condescending bitch card with you again; you’re way better at it than I am.”
She smiled and kissed him on the cheek. “Like I can afford to be distracted right now,” he said. “Maybe you can turn yourself into something ugly to get us through this.”
“Sorry, your nanites are too primitive to turn me into a true shapeshifter. You’ll just have to wait for me to touch a real one of those.”
He grimaced, not appreciating the snide remark directed at his nanites’ technology. “Like I said, you’re way better at being bitchy. So let’s agree to play nice, huh?” He gave her a peck on the cheek and once again, quickly forgot about her, lost in the book. He did remember hearing a groan from her direction before his tunnel vision dampened all sound as well.
Only, how to make sense of the book? The science, by definition, was beyond him. And the tank that had taken him to where he needed to go, perhaps amplifying his psychic abilities, and taking him to the solution even before the problem presented itself…. Well, the problem with the tank was that there was no guarantee it’d take him back to where he needed to go to comprehend this science. That it would put him inside the head of the scientist who was likely ahead of his time, too, meaning, it would have to be the head of that particular scientist. The tank would take him someplace useful, sure, but maybe working on some other problem his unconscious mind was working on and not his conscious mind—that right now he needed to be in charge.
Wait a second. Did he actually understand what was on the page? The more he concentrated, the more the doubts and fears and anxieties surrounding not comprehending melted away; the more he lost himself in the work, the sharper things came into focus.
He visualized the acoustic weapon taking shape in his hands that he needed, saw every assembled part with the kind of detail only a designer and manufacturer could. And it started materializing. What the hell!
The shock broke the concentration, and all of a sudden, he was no longer in his private time-tunnel; he was back in the moment, and Naomi was touching his shoulders. “You did this?” he asked.
“You figured it out. I just helped you focus and clear your mind. The gun part…. Yeah, we did that together. I allowed you to borrow my manifesting ability. I still don’t have enough of your scientific acumen to build something like that. Chances are I never will. I can absorb completely only those things I have a strong affinity for. You said it yourself, I’m more Paranormal Princess than Science Savant.”
He stood up, the futuristic assault rifle balanced between both hands, looked up from it, and kissed her. “Just so we’re clear, you’re the sidekick. I’m the superstar. My ego may have shrunk a bit, but I don’t think it’s up for being pistol whipped.”
“I’ve done well standing in the shadow of mediocrity for years, honestly; this is nothing new.”
“Ha-ha. By the way, I also do the jokes. You’re just there for the setup lines.”
She seemed content to let him get the last word so he could go play with his new toy. He bounded off the balcony, he was so excited, not bothering with the ladder. Shortly after he landed and was on his way, she shouted down at him. “You’re on your own from here, lover. I can’t show what I can do out there, or you won’t have time to check the Victors of the world and correct for their latest mistakes. You’ll be too busy fending off comers trying to take me out.”
He nodded. “You’ve done plenty. Take a break.”
After he was gone, she mumbled, “Of course, that doesn’t mean I can’t find some sneaky, underhanded way of helping you from a distance. Not all of my powers require I be at the scene of the crime to have an impact.”
ELEVEN
Victor’s flat was little more than a very high-end, very exclusive, walk-through museum, showcasing artifacts related to geomancy—and the very first known uses of mandala magic—he’d gathered from all over the globe. The spotlights throughout the penthouse suite allowed the highlighted items to shine like fine jewels. When at home, they were often objects of contemplation. He would fiddle with them as one might a Rubik’s cube, shifting their geometries about to help him tune into this or that universe, see if he could divine its essence, what made it so different—and so potentially useful.
And in an intruder’s presence, everything would be whisked out of sight by the morphing apartment. The podiums sunk into the floor, and were replaced by other podiums—ones mounted with laser weapons—crafted by geomancers; he’d found a few of those over the years too. You got hit by one of those lasers, you didn’t just fry or dematerialize, you got blasted into another dimension. And the weapons were attuned to make sure wherever you landed, you’d surely miss where you came from.
He wasn’t sure what artifact was going to trigger the insight he needed tonight, so he ambled through his display, passing his hand over the various items lovingly, as if his abilities worked like some touch-sensitive psychic’s. They didn’t, of course, not to that degree, but enough perhaps to unlock whatever locked door in his head he needed to open.
Nothing.
He groaned in frustration, but that just burst the dam that had been holding back his annoyance of earlier with The Masked Man. The groan grew into a primal scream that shattered the bulletproof, magic-resistant windows. Resistant anyway to anybody’s magic but his own. He sighed and with a wave of his hand the shards collected themselves up and found their proper places beside one another in the fully-restored window panels.
He collap
sed into his leather easy chair and let his head loll back. As he relaxed into a meditative trance, his third eye burned with the glowing imprint of one of his mandalas. That mandala began to morph, as if the prismatic colors were playing a game of interdimensional tag, the fluidly changing, complex geometries constantly in flux now, helping him to focus, to think.
How the hell was he going to construct a beacon that homed in on oblivion, not on any one space-time? The whole point of geomancy was to gain control of the physical world! His space-time geometries connected to actual universes. The feat seemed to require a different kind of wizard entirely. Mordly might well have been that guy. His demons may have been banished to oblivion along with The Masked Man and these other entities he had never wished to give entry into their world. Precisely because they were so bad-ass, it had taken the best wizards in all of the heavens to bottle them up. First he had to best those guys, and only then could he think of going after the ones even they didn’t want to tangle with more than once.
But if Mordly had found a way into oblivion, to at least channel their powers without actually releasing them…. Well, the fact was, Mordly was gone. Just thinking about this option was little more than masochism.
He had to find another way.
Wait! The Seed Pattern. There had to be an original sacred geometry that gave rise to all the others, the ones that would ultimately underlie each multiverse, act as its energy body, determine how the life force flowed through it, just like the maps of the energy body for the human body and for the planet earth of which he was more familiar. Was this not how embryos and ultimately babies and beyond that, children and later, adults, arose from a single, fertilized egg? If he could isolate that seed geometry… then you might well collapse all of creation down on our heads, you idiot! But maybe…. All you need to do is design an interference pattern for it—and if that doesn’t destroy every multiverse at once—then it might well let out every demon trapped in oblivion at once, you mega-idiot!
Reborn (Frankenstein Book 1) Page 9