Reawakened (Frankenstein Book 3)

by Dean C. Moore

  Soren and the beast had procured the magic necessary to redirect the transmission being used to cloak the planet across many galaxies at the queen herself. The focused pulse so strong, so unexpected, that it had flushed her consciousness out of this world in an instant. To manage this much, Soren and the beast had done the impossible, worked the cabbalistic magic to draw key figures to them that would unlock the doors they needed to unlock—from manipulating others to awakening the savant, and then Vima; employing a mix of Natura Cabbala magic with sex magic and triad magic—the various magics forged on the fly with the impressive way Soren and the beast had of mining that mind chip in his head. They had even orchestrated the minor players of Stealy and Ramon to do their bidding, causing them to be inspired, to arrive at necessary revelations when needed—all without hearing the whispers of Soren and the beast in their ears. And last but not least, maneuvering the master manipulator himself, Victor Truman, to use the full force of his mandala magic to augment the savant’s warding magic, to broadcast it across the heavens, exposing any number of off-world civilizations that would be ripe for the plucking by the alien queen and her cabbalistic spirit science. The savant had tweaked her warding magic to shelter the civilizations which would be no challenge at all for the queen to impose her will on. By so doing, she’d bought the Earth wizards time to prepare for the queen’s return. If they used that time well, they might well be ready for her, and this time, prepared to seal her fate for good.

  The question was: did the fools realize just how temporary a victory this was?

  No. Only Soren and the beast saw the truth for what it was. He would whip the sense of euphoria out of them quickly enough with the way the beast had about him.

  Just as well. Cosmos had her own role to play in things, and no time to waste. She would get help where she least expected it, with any luck, the next go around, from Soren and his crew, but she couldn’t depend on it. They were playing well out of their league. And Soren’s project, to uplift all the wizards about him to celestial grade wizards—a fool’s undertaking at best. What a bleeding heart. What a blind optimist. Human nature being what it was, he’d have been better off forging an alliance with Cosmos—If she were of a mind to entertain such things.

  But he had nothing to offer her, not really.

  She sighed dismissively. Soren’s people at least would know a brief reprieve. But for Cosmos, what was it Earth people were fond of saying, “No rest for the wicked?”

  With a thought, she beamed herself off world.

  The passive, mousy Naomi, along for the ride, determined to learn her secrets…. Let’s hope she learned enough to survive the mind blowing game of life played at the level of celestial wizards, for which she was wholly unprepared. If not, Cosmos’s desires to permanently occupy this body just got that much easier.

  ***

  Naomi screamed like only a banshee could scream. It was her sincere desire to shatter the wormhole Cosmos was opening with her mind that would take Naomi further away from Soren. She had been feeling the pains of the distance between them for some time. She knew that her only way back to him was to throw off the yoke of her own oppressor, in a rebirthing ritual that she seemed to be sharing with the entire human race at present.

  Still, she had a part to play. It might take her awhile to best Cosmos and to reclaim her body. But if Soren was involved with uplifting the wizards in his inner circle to celestial wizards—Naomi was now running point for him. She would learn from Cosmos—whether Cosmos wished to impart such knowledge or not—how to play among the celestial wizards and not get squashed. And she would find a way to dial in Soren and the others—even from out in the depths of space—or die trying.

  TWENTY-ONE

  Ramon rolled off of Stealy, both of them gasping and laughing; his dick now soft, she’d pushed him out of her even without trying.

  “I can’t believe we did it!” Ramon exclaimed.

  “You can’t be that naïve.”

  The sound of Soren’s voice had Stealy and Ramon jolting off of Victor’s penthouse hardwood floor. They didn’t bother to cover themselves; they were as pissed as they were startled.

  “But we did it, I tell you!” Ramon’s voice was as passionately assured as it was a moment ago; much like Victor, he’d never consider doubting himself, nor would any evidence to the contrary cause him to; until proven otherwise, he was simply in the presence of inferior minds; and there was really no proving otherwise.

  “I bought us some time; that’s all,” Soren said, easing the hood of his monkish robe off him.

  “You bought us some time! Well, you’re ballsy I’ll say that.”

  “Shut up, Ramon,” Stealy said. “We were played. You’re just too proud to admit it.”

  “If he or the beast was inside my head,” Ramon gestured toward Soren even as he kept his eyes locked on her, “you think I wouldn’t know? You may not have much by way of mind power, but a mandala magician can magnify his mind power ad infinitum, if need be. I had all I needed…”

  “To see everything but the truth.” Stealy hissed at him. “I should have known it would have taken but hours, if not minutes, for the alien queen to accomplish what she did with the kind of mind power at her disposal. The likelihood of us chancing upon Vima, engendering triad magic and sex magic, to say nothing of drawing Cosmos—a celestial grade wizard no less—into the web, could not have been our doing.” She refocused her distant eyes on Soren. “Congrats, daddy. You’re still the baddest bad ass in all the land, despite my pretensions to the contrary.” The way she said “daddy” left no uncertainty as to how she felt about his role in things. The prick.

  “You know I can’t work under these kinds of pressures and with these timelines without the beast. And he doesn’t coddle like I do. I guess we’re all going to have to get used to that.”

  “What’s the real game being played here?” Ramon asked with all the testiness he must have absorbed from Stealy during their recent bout of lovemaking.

  “I believe you’ll figure that one out for yourself, mandala magician—without any help from me. That much should please you.”

  Soren opened a portal with his hand and stepped through it, returning to the Yucatan, which he used as a base of operations these days. Not the real Yucatan, of course, the magic-warded replica created by Natura in his basement lab in the Victorian London sector of Syracuse, New York, of all places.

  “God, I hate that guy!” Ramon roared.

  “What game is he playing with us?” Stealy was less interested in his childish outbursts than in his brief moments of clarity—whether or not inspired by Soren.

  “Soren only has one purpose any more, to upgrade us to celestial wizards so we can follow him and Victor across the heavens. Now you have what you need to let me wallow in my anger and self-pity a while longer without interruption.” Ramon high kicked the genie jars perched on their pedestals off their roosts one after the other, when he didn’t punch them off their perches or sonically blast them off with his latest screams.

  Stealy sighed and lowered her eyes. “Cut the guy a break. Left to his own, he’d probably just curl up with Naomi and lose track of the world altogether. It’s the bleeding heart in him and saving the rest of us and the rest of the cosmos from Victor that got him going down this road. And without him, we’d probably all be goners by now.”

  Ramon was still lost to his latest emotional outburst. It was doubtful he’d heard a thing she said. But now she needed his attention.

  She picked up one of the genie jars and stuck it in her backpack. Ramon came out of his fugue on a dime. “Put that back.”

  Her gesture had had the desired effect, alright. Count on his fear of Victor to sober him. “I might, if you pull your head out of your ass and get us to Vima. We’re not getting off this planet without her. And I don’t see how we’re going to graduate up to celestial wizard status without her.”

  “Vima can wait, and so can this little project of Soren’s. I’m tired feeling
his lash on my back, goading me on to become something I’m not.”

  “No, it can’t. Don’t you get it? We’re not going to free ourselves from the alien queen unless we graduate up to celestial wizard status. Soren can’t save us this time. He didn’t tell you that because in his own way he’s still coddling. He can’t help himself. But go ahead, tell me I lie.”

  Ramon turned to stone. He stopped blinking. The hollowed out expression on his face just etched itself deeper and deeper.

  Finally, he said, “Fine. You win. Just put it back.”

  She set the genie jar back on the pedestal; ironically it was the only one still occupying a pedestal after his little rage siesta.

  Ramon opened the portal.

  There was a young girl, maybe six years old, standing on the head of the Sphynx in Egypt. “That’s her? That’s Vima?” Stealy said aghast, though she really didn’t need to be told.

  She had hopped on her motorbike and kick-started the engine. Ramon had already climbed on behind her. “Who else do you know who can stare at you with eyes like that? Like….”

  “Like ageless wisdom married to innocence in an abomination to end all abominations.”

  “Exactly,” he said. The bike’s engine roared, and they sailed through the portal, soaring over Vima’s head to land behind her before Stealy spun the motorcycle around.

  ***

  “Where are we headed next, Your Freakness?” Stealy sassed.

  Vima turned to them, dressed in an outfit that refused to respond to the strong winds. Her long dirty blond hair with fiery highlights—much like Soren’s—refused to budge either. Her rainbow eyes—each band of color in the rainbow surrounding the black pupils in their proper order—gave her the appearance of being able to see across all of time. But unlike the rosy tint that a rainbow typically put on things, her eyes were simply terrifying.

  “I’m afraid only the mandala magician can answer that question. His last life incarnation has the answer to the riddle. But he’s locked it away in his mind so deep that not even I can reach it. Makes you wonder, doesn’t it?”

  Stealy reached around behind her on the bike and hurled Ramon off it. “Well, what of it?”

  “It’s instinct. All mandala magicians do it. We hide secrets in the sacred geometries of our minds for safekeeping. That way we can also work on the mysteries until we puzzle them out with mind power to spare, using the sacred geometries to….”

  “Spare us the lecture, genius,” Stealy carped. “We get it. The question is, has any of those fractal selves come up with anything yet?”

  Ramon looked inwards; he had to check for himself; up until now it hadn’t occurred to him to. Finally, his eyes focused on the two women again. “Yeah.”

  He picked himself up off the Sphynx’s head and dusted himself off. “I’m telling you that from now on, you’re not going to like it. Just remember, in the final analysis, I surrendered to pussy power.”

  “Watch your language in front of the six-year-old girl,” Stealy said, with a vicious smile.

  “The six-year-old who’s possibly as old as time itself? Cute.” Ramon hopped on the motorbike and opened the portal by stretching his arm over her shoulder and aiming his palm like a projection lens.

  “That looks like the inside of another Egyptian pyramid,” Stealy said.

  “Yeah, we can probably drive there in a reasonable timeframe. Not that anyone in this party could be bothered to pay homage to the real world.”

  Stealy figured it was better Ramon get the sass out of his system now; the less resistance he had to pressing forward, long-term, the better. And with that thought in mind, she throttled down on the bike and hurtled them through the portal.

  The bike came to a landing and skidded to a stop before the Egyptian god Anubis. Ramon was right. Stealy didn’t like this at all. Not one bit.

  TWENTY-TWO

  Player plopped himself down in front of the psychic and her peregrine falcon sidekick. The bird, as blind as he was with his hood on, perched on the table with its black cloth and its tarot deck. He listened to each plucking of the card from the deck and its face up placement on the velvet cloth. The clairvoyant was dressed more like one of the blind huntresses than a mystic, and her eyes nearly as white with cataracts; she wasn’t blind, but she couldn’t hunt with those eyes anymore. So it was time for another occupation.

  “Trust me, lady, I’m one customer who will blow you back to Kansas for lying to me. And no huntress, even at the top of her game, is going to save you.”

  The soothsayer smiled feebly; his threat just seemed to set her blood to pumping; up until now she had been looking at the cards blankly. The street, filled with the clickety-clack of horses hooves landing on cobblestone and wooden carriage wheels creaking for the lack of grease, the sounds of leather slapping the horses backsides collectively, couldn’t provide the soothing ambiance that people of this sector were looking for; they were missing one key ingredient. There it was: the snarl of a werewolf trimming the herd of useless, pretentious Victorian men and women far too full of themselves to really matter for all that they were sure they mattered.

  “Tell me, where have my friends gone?” Player felt left out in the cold; for all that, he still couldn’t identify with the man being eviscerated feet from him by the werewolf, which would glance up at them in between swallows of ripped flesh. The passersby on the street hardly gave the still-alive werewolf victim the time of day, though some did tip their hat to him and make the sign of the cross at him. Those promenading the street and passing him by were, one and all, though, gripping their purse-drawn pistols, and loading their shotguns with silver, just in case the animal decided one victim wasn’t enough. The werewolf was taking all that in as well. The man enduring the vivisection by canines held out his hand, calling out, “Help me, help me!” The breathiness and hoarseness in his voice compromised how far he could throw it.

  Player, for his part, echoed the man’s sentiment. “Help me,” he said to the woman doling out the tarot cards.

  “Your friends are headed off-world, if they haven’t already left, hoping to find the magic and science they need to defeat the alien queen upon her return,” the mystic said, tapping the Queen of Spades with her middle finger.

  “Upon her return?!” Player was confident they were done with the bitch; maybe if the others could just share his inflated sense of self, they’d feel reassured too. “Does everyone rise from the dead these days?”

  The tarot lady didn’t bother answering that question. Player sighed. “Okay, how do I join the fray?”

  The tarot reader gathered up her cards, and spilled some gold dust on the table instead. She had rheumatoid arthritis; Player was certain she used the gold dust for that. Why she felt inspired now to…. The gold dust was forming into the periodic table of elements. Whoever this woman was, she was no faker. Perhaps she had been one of those huntresses that had always had a bit of a gift for magic; but so long as her huntress skills were dominant, she could never develop this part of her psyche.

  She tapped the cloth in the position of the two missing elements on the periodic table he was meant to fill in. “These will give you what you need.”

  He doubted it. They might be part of the solution to his conundrum. But not the whole answer. Not that it mattered; the odds of isolating both of those elements in time to get in the game were pretty low. “Don’t suppose you could tell me how to do my job?”

  She held out her hand for payment. The falcon spread its wings and shrieked at him and took a peck at his hand. He was as determined to collect payment from Player as the soothsayer. Lucky for the bird, Player had a thing for winged predators; and he was used to the owls he lived with commenting no less harshly on his lack of graciousness.

  “What form of payment do you want, woman?”

  “Gold is preferred.”

  Player summoned his wind magic. Even with her cataracts, the psychic looked up at the approaching tornado, alarmed. It touched down around them,
and by the time it had departed, mounds and mounds of gold coins, ripped out of the nearest bank, had nearly buried her alive. She rose from her seat smiling. The falcon was already at work deterring greedy hands, snipping off fingers that got too close.

  What did Player care that he’d just robbed the people of his own district, possibly of their life savings, to pay the woman? She’d done her job and done it well, and he, well, he was a work in progress as far as playing the good guy went. He could progress on that tomorrow. Today he had work to do; he was not about to be turned into a minor ensemble player yet again by the stiff competition for Soren’s attention, which forced the other “kids” in their surrogate family to constantly enhance their magic to hold on to some relevance to him. Player’s own father had been a bear. And his surrogate dad, played by Soren, just a few years older, who customarily excelled in the role, was nonetheless proving no less difficult to please.

  Player tapped the shoulder of the young, crusty-faced girl pulling a red cart on wheels behind her full with dead rats; they were heaped up to the point of falling over the sides, causing her to stop frequently to throw the fallen mice back on the pile. “Trade you your cart for….” He pointed to the stacks of gold the psychic was still trying to figure out how she was going to cart away herself.

  The little girl shoved the handle she was using to pull the cart into Player’s hand, and made off to the pile of gold coins; once there, she used her skirt as a pouch. Player expected the psychic to snarl at her or possibly sic her falcon on her; what did Player care? He’d gotten what he wanted. But as it turned out, the little girl belonged to her, and she mostly got a chewing out for getting rid of the one thing that could have been of use to the mother: the cart.