But now what? How the hell to get past this impenetrable casing? She knew these things weren’t just pretty glass boxes to keep the dust out. Victor would have to be feeble to leave his artifacts on display like this without greater protection.
She concentrated on the artifact she wanted and reached out for it, her left hand moving through the transparent casing. Shit, Stealy, you’re in rare form tonight. Since when can you do that? That’ll definitely save you a ton of time going forward. She was finding out things about her Stealy sense that went way beyond anything she was aware of previously. Could they be the influence of the amulet?
Victor; he was practically upon her.
She grabbed the amulet and yanked it out. It was nothing like the one she’d tried to steal off of Victor initially. This was far more modest, far smaller. But like that earlier amulet, this one also was made of gold and had dials that could slip over one another, four of them. Each dial had Egyptian hieroglyphs inscribed on them; nothing like the Mayan symbols that had been on the one around Victor’s neck. She didn’t have time to play with the bands.
The instant her hand held the necklace, the pedestals started descending into the floor—the ones with the artifacts. Other pedestals started rising out of the floor. And she didn’t like the looks of them at all. Those were weapons—none like she’d seen before, but, chalk that realization up to her Stealy sense, which was saying run like hell.
She donned the amulet, half-hoping it would give her some protection. Once around her neck, it too was invisible. And the guns were tracking for their mark, looking for her. They couldn’t find her. She doubted it had anything to do with her invisibility. Plenty of wizards could cloak themselves. Victor would have had a workaround in place for that. He wasn’t the baddest bad ass on the block for nothing; the guy was scary smart.
Victor!
So much for your Stealy sense as regards your timing, sweetie. It’s never let you down quite this badly before. You’re a sitting fucking duck who isn’t fucking—otherwise you could at least go out on a high note.
Victor sensed something off about the room. Not just the fact that the guns were out. He sensed her. God damn it!
She made a dash for the door while she could, before he could get any more of a lock on her. She was just this second passing by his side. Nope. Wasn’t. Happening. Fuck her if he hadn’t slowed time somehow—and made her visible, all with the sweep of his hand. She may as well have been held in the freeze-frame of a camera shutter. He was scanning her. Her mind felt like it was under laser dissection; she wanted to scream from the excruciating pain, but couldn’t.
And then he waved his hand and released her. “Go ahead, take it. I’ll know where to find it if I need it.”
She hesitated, wondering what for the sudden generosity, but she wasn’t going to stand there long enough for him to incur a change of heart. He grabbed her arm. “Your heart chakra can no longer produce the torus shape, which it needs to maintain balance. The amulet’s sacred geometries will have to be burned into the heart to restore it to health—and stop the energy surges. Once it’s done its work, bring it back to me, or risk my wrath.”
“Wouldn’t think of it,” she eked out. She meant, wouldn’t think of risking his wrath, but realized that statement could have been taken another way. Oh, shit, girl, I think he knows what you mean.
“If Soren can’t figure out how to work the amulet, come get me.”
He released her arm and she ran like she had an Olympic medal with her name on it, and it was the only way to make it to the podium.
***
Soren passed her coming up the stairs. She showed him the amulet without slowing. “See you back at your lab.”
“Yeah, about that… .” She was already out of earshot. “I’m sure being a master thief, she’ll find her way around my deadfalls just fine,” he mumbled.
And then he stepped into Victor’s flat.
Victor was collapsed in his leather easy chair. He looked like a beaten man instead of one who’d just bested a wizard—way out of even his weight class.
“I thought you’d be feeling better, considering everything is going according to plan.”
“Yeah, about that… . I don’t remember it involving the likes of you, or your little friend Naomi, or whoever that ditz, P-3 is. It took all four of us to vacate that guy from the premises and shut the door behind him.”
“So I gather you were able to see into our heads, too, when Naomi created the link.”
Victor groaned, and rubbed his temple. “So you know why I’m here,” Soren said.
“It’s why I gave the girl the amulet. A peace offering.”
“But it’s not peace you’re looking for, is it?
“So long as you can keep trouncing best-in-class wizards, your plan moves forward, and you don’t much care how you do that. There’ll be time enough to deal with the likes of us, your posse, the people making it happen for you, once you’ve acquired the kind of power you need.”
“Well, you’re sure not going to stop me or talk me out of it, which is the other reason you’re here, isn’t it? So it looks like the die has been cast for both of us.”
Soren’s eyes drifted down to the floor. His mood sank even faster.
“Oh, what are you sulking over,” Victor said, hopping out of the chair. He was already at his liquor cabinet pouring them both a drink. “You’re looking at this all wrong. Yeah, sure, I’m risking the earth, which by the way is so cosmically insignificant I’ve had to go to these extreme measures to get the heavy hitters to even take me seriously. But if everything goes my way, you’ll be helping me to scour the heavens for every who’s who of any threat to anybody. Hell, you won’t just be safeguarding the earth, you’ll be safeguarding the heavens. The ultimate hero born of riding the coattails of the ultimate antihero. Christ, are we epic, or what?”
He brought the drinks over to Soren, handed him his, and tinkled the glasses together in a toast. He drank his firewater all in one throw. “Go ahead, swill it, it’ll help open you to the mandala magic you’ll need to do the surgery on your friend, Stealy. It won’t turn you into me exactly, but it should hold long enough to get you through the surgery without killing her.”
Soren didn’t need to hear anymore. If Victor wanted to kill him, he had far more dramatic ways of doing so. Besides, vanquishing him didn’t really fit with his revised master plan. Soren felt strange the instant he downed the liquid.
“You’ll feel a bit woozy at first,” Victor explained, “might even limp out of here. But that’s your nanites protesting the mandala magic. Once it teaches them how to make use of the magic, they’ll arrange themselves in mandalas around your chakras, help boost your chakra magic or your chi channeling, however you want to refer to it.”
He padded back to the liquor cabinet, grabbed the decanter, handed it to him. “Here, take the bottle. You might need it for when the effect wears off. With any luck, you’ll figure out how to extend the effect indefinitely. Then you’ll be able to wed your magic to mine.”
“Talk about empowering your enemy.”
Victor chortled. “Yeah, well, I can’t do this alone, not without you. Without everyone else maybe. But I don’t want to sit on that throne alone without a worthy adversary to keep me sharp. Without that, I’ll likely turn on myself. Self-love isn’t exactly a forte, as you might have guessed.”
“Does that mean we’re dating?”
He laughed. “Something like that. You might find my courtship rituals a bit strange. Now, go on, get out of here. You don’t want to waste that whole bottle getting through one surgery.”
Soren turned for the door but then remembered. “Something you should know… .”
“Yes, yes, I caught the insight about the stealth wizards sneaking through the portal unnoticed. Something I should have considered. While you’re attending to your friend, I’ll be tracking them down.”
“So, some did make it through before we could shut the portal?”
Soren snorted. “I should tell you, Naomi is still linked with me, and she tells me you’re bluffing. You did this deliberately. You can’t wait until those genies are back in the jars. You’ve got the pedestals all ready for them. Keep your friends close, your enemies closer. We’re both playing the same game, aren’t we? Only you want enemies of note. You want the ones that scared even the greatest wizards of the cosmos advising you on how to get around them when they come knocking. When you’ve proven you’re enough of a heavy hitter that they can no longer afford to ignore you.”
Victor grunted. He grabbed Soren behind the neck. “God, you’re like a younger brother. Cain and Abel; they were nothing. Compared to them, what a pair we’ll make. I could kiss you, if you like, I’m so turned on right now.”
Soren brushed his hand away. “Take care, Victor; you’re already drunk on your own hormones. I’m happy your plans are working out just fine for attracting worthy adversaries to you. I guess we all need a way to grow beyond ourselves. Me, I’m going to go practice at having real friends. Those relationships are probably likely to be no less testy. Still, I like the upside, down the road, versus the path you’re on.”
Soren exited Victor’s flat, heading back down the stairs. He was still in earshot, though barely, when Victor yelled after him, “We’re both on the same path, my friend, just looking at it from different angles.”
The remark sent chills down Soren’s admittedly souped-up spine.
***
Victor waved his hand. Down went the weapons. Up came the artifacts. Along with one new one. He strode to its location and fondled the lovely, ornately carved bottle. He bent over and stared at his first trapped genie, The Masked Man. “So what do you think of my mandala magic now?”
The bottle, was, in fact, tattooed with mandalas. No ordinary glass, of course. And not forged by Victor alone; it had taken all four wizards chasing the Soul Searcher through the portal, their annealed psychic energy, united by Victor’s mandala magic, to make a prison that would hold. “Well, big guy,” he said, squatting, moving his face closer to the bottle so he could see the face of The Masked Man looking back at him intently. “What’s your first piece of advice that’s going to bring you one step closer to getting out of there and back to oblivion, where you can at least enjoy going at it with your other playmates? Or who knows, I might just let you loose on all of creation again, as one of the nasty, vicious guardians of my dominion, stomping out all comers, and giving Soren and I a little more quality time with one another.” He laughed even as the Soul Searcher seethed.
THIRTEEN
“So, what’s the verdict, Geek-face?” Stealy said. She must have been tired of him staring at the amulet in his hands, shifting dials, clueless as to the meaning of any of the configurations.
“According to Victor,” Soren said, “I ought to be able to divine how to use it to heal you by now.”
“Maybe you should have another shot of courage. I, for one, would be happy to.”
He grabbed the bottle out of her hands. “Strict instructions from Victor, under the penalty of death. That’s for me and me alone. Though, you may be on to something. He poured himself another glass and drank it down.” Winced. Whereas his forehead was throbbing earlier, now both temples felt like a pair of conga drums with a mad drummer determined to beat out a cha-cha rhythm from inside his head.
He looked up from the amulet. “How did you get past my booby-traps, anyway? This place is sabotaged better than the mummy’s tomb.”
“It’s sort of my thing.”
“Yeah, I figured.” He gave her another once-over. “Maybe you could add to your list of things, a propensity for showering, and brushing your teeth. Unless it’s part of your magical defenses to ward off all guys for miles.”
“You’re lucky I need you to fix me, or I’d steal your heart—right out of your chest.”
Soren sighed, tossed the amulet back at her, tired of staring at it. “Sorry, just feeling frustrated at myself, so I’m taking it out on you. This mandala magic… who in God’s name can get their minds around this stuff?”
And then it just happened. His hands lifted out in front of him, cupping her breasts, at first. “Hey, I think he’s in to smelly chicks with bad breath. What good fortune,” Stealy quipped.
Naomi, giving them both some space, looking down from the upstairs balcony—she liked things from high up, he’d come to notice—smiled, refusing to be provoked by either of them.
Soren ripped the clothes off Stealy. “Hey, I’m really not that into you.”
He ripped his own clothes off. After giving him a once-over, she said, “Okay, this one time, maybe.”
Naomi stifled a smile from up top. It clearly took a lot to rattle her. For Soren’s part, he felt as if acting under the spell of the fever. He was burning up, perspiring like the ground with morning dew.
He tossed Stealy onto his examination table with one hand. “Hey,” she balked, “I like it rough, but this is ridiculous.”
Soren stepped onto the crate for the added height he needed, pulled the light over, and the downward facing mirror, so she could follow along with the surgery.
He fired lasers out of his eyes down the center of her chest, and ripped her chest open with his bare hands in tandem with a sonic blast coming out her mouth, before sticking the clamps in place to hold the ribs back on either side. “Shit! You’re lucky I’m a healer, buddy, because that really hurt.” She punctuated the remark with more screams. “Have you heard of fucking anesthetic?”
“Oh, yeah, forgot about that. Naomi, there’s some up there if you want to throw her the bottle.”
“Nah, she’ll be fine. Teach her to hit on my boyfriend right in front of me.”
Stealy groaned—the way a woman does, giving childbirth. “You two deserve one another,” she gasped out as if talking over a crowning baby.
As it turned out, Soren was using his laser eyes to carve the mandala shape into her heart. Not at the surface. That would have been too easy. He had to carve it against the far back wall of the adjoining ventricular cavities. Of course, to do that, he had to stop her heart first. That required shocking it. He used his own hands to do that, sending the pulse through his cybernetic wiring. Then he had to slice the heart open; for that he used a traditional scalpel.
The laser carving done, Soren traced his finger over the pattern he’d carved, permitting the nanites to migrate from his fingertip into the pattern itself, where they would hold that pattern going forward. Henceforth, they would add to their numbers and morph the shape of the mandala as needed to rebalance the torus of energy the heart put out as she absorbed more forms of magic. Soren’s nanites alone wouldn’t have been able to do all that prior to fusing with Victor’s mandala magic.
Finally, Soren pulled the two chambers of her heart back together. “Okay, you can commence with healing yourself,” he instructed his patient. “Just don’t heal the mandala shape at the back of your heart, or all of this would have been for naught.” He watched as she healed the heart walls he’d sliced through and recommenced her heartbeat without any help from him.
“Maybe if you took the rib cage spreader out,” she coached.
“Yeah, sorry, the damn fever. Not thinking straight.” He pulled out the device, screwed it back together and laid it back on his worktable with the other surgical instruments that didn’t look anything like surgical instruments; more like the stuff that might belong to a carpenter or a car mechanic in a steampunk novel.
He enjoyed watching her heal up. She sat up on his table and gave her neck one of those chiropractic twists, by holding her chin with one hand, and the back of her head with the other, and snapping her neck. After which, he noticed her head was facing the wrong way. “Did you just break y
our neck?”
“Just making sure I’m at a hundred percent. The broken neck is healing, so yeah.” She rotated the neck back around, and it was like looking at the chick in The Exorcist, probably one of the few places you could go in the film world to find an alternate reality half as scary as the world they inhabited.
Being as she’d just killed herself with that stunt and brought herself back to life in time to hear the question he’d put to her, Soren was forced to concur with her assessment.
“What about the power surges?” he asked.
“Nothing,” she said. “I can always feel them building in between discharges. I think you did it, doc.” She leaped off the table. “Christ, you can give yourself shin splints jumping off that thing. Did it occur to you to dial it down a bit?”
“The dial’s broken, I’m afraid. Been meaning to fix it, but simple mechanical devices really aren’t my thing.”
“Yeah, I noticed, so I repaired some of your traps and deadfalls for you to help you with keeping looters out, all save for me, of course. So you can consider this medical bill paid.”
He smiled back at her. “Honestly, the shower and the brushed teeth will be payment enough.”
She shook her head; then craned it to Naomi. “Good luck. I dated a smart ass once. I think I dealt with it by using one of his French kisses to bite his tongue off. We got along famously after that.”
Stealy gave them an “I’m out of here” salute and bounded out of the place like a cat freed from a cage it had been too long imprisoned in.
“Who’s next?” Soren shouted upstairs.
Naomi turned and index-finger gestured to someone using his bed upstairs as a waiting area. Player popped his head out, looking fit to be tied. He swirled a tornado about himself and used it to whisk him from the upstairs balcony to the floor below, before climbing up on the table. Soren hadn’t even bothered getting off the crate he was standing on to operate from.
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