He nodded.
The creature already knew he was coming. It had every advantage over him. Last time, they’d gotten the drop on it, and Kiara had been there to fight alongside him. This time would be different.
Victor took a deep breath, felt for his auras on the edge of his awareness, and then began walking into the chamber. The room felt humid and stuffy, like a clothes dryer opened in mid-cycle. His onyx aura was useless as far as assisting him to see through the darkness, but he could still hear, still listen intently for any sound of the monster’s approach.
He was scared, more than he’d ever been before in his life, and not just for himself. The idea of dying in a struggle against the creature wasn’t a pleasant one, and it made his palms sweat. The burgeoning seed of fear in his chest, however, was for Kiara.
Images flashed through his mind. Her body on the ground, torn open and unmoving. Scraps of blonde hair and clothing mixed with broken bones, blood and ichor. The sound of her screams, echoing out against the walls of the room with nobody around to hear them.
It all fed into Victor’s anxious energy, which raked his nerves raw with its intensity. He took several quick steps, as though proving to himself that he was still functional, and at least capable of moving forward.
A noise came from the darkness in front of him. Victor gritted his teeth and jogged forward, preparing his scarlet aura for an attack beyond anything he’d done before.
“Ella!” he murmured, under his breath. “Watch my back!”
“Got it!”
Victor slid to a stop as another sound came, this time slightly offset to his left. He turned about slowly in a complete circle, taking in the darkness surrounding him and cursing.
“Face me!” he shouted. “I’m right here! Come and get me! We’re on your turf, you get to throw the first punch!”
There was silence for a few more seconds, and then a sickening wet snarl sounded from behind Victor.
“It’s coming!” shouted Ella.
Victor ducked into a roll and let out a small burst of flame behind him, designed to distract rather than destroy. A long tentacle swatted through it, as though knocking a cloth out of the air. Victor dropped down to one knee, took aim, and let out another attack, testing the creature’s reflexes.
It dodged with a surprising amount of speed and made a noise that sounded a bit like a demonic laugh. The movement took it out of the tiny visual horizon Victor had in the cloud of murky darkness, and he was forced to move forward after the monster to keep it in view.
A tentacle lashed out at his head and Victor ducked a split second too slowly. The slimy appendage landed a glancing blow across the top of his head, bruising his skull and batting him to the side. Victor unleashed a splash of weak flame, more to cut through a bit of the darkness than to cause injury. The sparks landed on the monster, illuminating it.
Several tentacles burst forward at once. Victor snarled, dodging one of them and grabbing onto another with his hands. It was almost impossible to hold onto, but he used his scarlet aura to push heat energy directly into it, leaving deep burns in the shape of his hands on the creature’s ghoulish skin. It opened its grotesque, human shaped mouth, and let out a cry as it charged forward.
That was precisely what Victor had been waiting for. He poured his energy into his scarlet aura and threw both of his hands forward, as though trying to physically push the monster back. Two blasts of flame that looked fit to burst out of a jet engine erupted forth, aimed directly at the creature.
It moved faster than it should have been able to. Several tentacles charred and crumbled to ash, along with a bit of its deformed upper body. But it continued to move, and the attack had taken everything out of Victor.
“Fall back!” shouted Ella. “You need a minute to recharge!”
Victor started to tell her no, when two tentacles swinging in unison slammed into his chest, throwing him a few dozen feet through the air. He landed hard and tumbled over several times before coming to a stop. His shoulder ached from a possible dislocation. One of his ankles was badly twisted. Every inch of his spine cried out with pain as he tried to stand up. Blood dripped from his nose and mouth, and stars spun across his field of view.
He was against a wall, and he wasn’t alone. Naked, and stuck to the wall from the neck down in a cocoon of a strange, mucousy substance was Kiara. Her eyes were closed, and Victor couldn’t tell if she was breathing.
“Kiara…” He reached over and shook her. “Kiara!”
She didn’t respond. Her skin felt cold, and her body looked emaciated and frail. The creature let out another roar from across the room. Victor turned in its direction and took a step forward.
“You don’t have enough energy to use your auras!” hissed Ella.
“I don’t have a choice,” said Victor.
He ran forward in a desperate, foolhardy charge. The creature met him head on. It didn’t use its tentacles to attack, but rather, relied on its other weapon, the one Victor had forgotten about.
The blast of viscous saliva hit him full on in the face. He had just enough time to realize that he’d lost, that it was really over, before his legs gave out underneath him.
CHAPTER 21
Victor opened his eyes. He was in his apartment, lying in bed. He sat up sharply, scanning the room for threats, and trying to parse out why he felt so sure that they must be there.
The door to his room opened. Kiara was standing on the other side, alive and well. She smiled at him and climbed onto his bed.
“Victor, hey,” she said. “I figured I’d stop by and wake you up…”
Her hand ran up his leg through the covers, tracing a circle around his rather impressive shaft of morning wood.
“…But it looks like you’re already awake.”
“Kiara…” Victor blinked, trying to remember why it was so odd for her to be there, and failing.
She’s so pretty. And she’s… naked?
Kiara was naked, and Victor was suddenly sure that she had been when she first walked in. Her breasts were nicely formed, not as large as her older sister’s, but impressive, none the less. She straddled Victor and slowly began pulling the sheets back, planting kisses on his chest and neck as she went.
“We should be together,” she whispered. “You know we should.”
“Why…?” Victor shook his head. “Why are you here?”
“Am I not supposed to be?”
Victor pondered the question. The answer was on the tip of his tongue. It was about to come to him when more two more women entered the room, both naked, and faintly familiar.
“Just relax and forget about everything,” said Kiara. “You can think about complicated stuff later, once we’ve had our fun.”
The women pulled the sheets off the bed and began kissing him all over, their lips hot and pleasurable. Victor moaned as Kiara moved closer to his cock, nuzzling her cheek against it.
“You want me to do this, don’t you, Victor?” she whispered.
“I… I don’t know,” he said.
“Just say you want me to do it,” whispered Kiara, “and I will.”
There was another woman in the room, standing in the doorway. She had long auburn hair, freckles, and eyes full of concern. Her clothes were still on, and it looked like she was trying to shout something, but no sound was coming out of her mouth.
“Who… are you?” Victor started to sit up. Kiara brought her lips down over his cock and his hips jerked up as the pleasure slammed into him. He moaned and a small laugh escaped his throat. Nothing had ever felt so good, not in his entire life.
“This is what you want, isn’t it, Victor?” asked Kiara. The other women were kissing and suckling now, too. He felt like a god, receiving tribute from his worshippers. He felt amazing, so incredibly good…
And he recognized the woman. It was Ella, and she was crying.
“I can’t save you this time.” Her words were quiet, barely audible over the chorus of kissing and sucking noises.
“You have to come back on your own.”
“Wait!” shouted Victor. “Come back from…”
“That’s right!” said Kiara. “You have to cum, Victor.”
She sucked his cock aggressively, as though she was trying to lock him in place with her mouth and lips.
That’s exactly what she’s doing!
Victor blinked, and then forced himself up. His cock practically cried out in disappointment. The girls grabbed onto his arms and body, trying to pin him back down in the bed.
“No!” He shouted. “I won’t!”
He could feel his auras again, suddenly. He bound his scarlet aura, with no effect. Immediately he moved on to azure, which was also ineffective. Victor focused, and bound his onyx aura, harder than he had with the other two.
He blinked, and the scene changed in an instant. Victor was flat on his back, in a lot of pain, and slowly sliding across the ground. Something was wrapped around his ankle, and as his awareness returned to him, he remembered what it was.
His body slid another foot or so, dragged by one of the tentacles of the creature. Victor pulled himself halfway up into a sitting position and then hesitated, letting himself go limp again.
It thinks I’m still hallucinating. I should take advantage of that.
The monster slowly moved toward the wall, toward where Kiara was cocooned. Victor waited as patiently as he could, counting his heartbeats as he prepared his next move. He opened his eyes and looked around for Ella, and when he didn’t see her, he clenched his teeth and tried to will her into coming to his aid.
She appeared a few feet over to his right. The tentacle monster dragged him the last of the distance to the wall, and Victor felt its grip loosen on his leg. He frantically waved his hand at Ella. She understood immediately what he had in mind.
Ella grabbed onto his hand tightly. Victor focused his will and bound his diamond aura, buoyed by the extra focusing power his connection with Ella gave him, and lifted off the ground.
If the situation had been different, Victor would have savored the moment. It felt like he was on an amusement park ride, and lifting up into the air gave him a sense of pleasurable vertigo. The monster had dropped the veil of darkness in the room at some point, and he could see across to either edge of the cavern.
A tentacle lashed up at him, but Victor was out of range. He heard the monster make a wet, snarling sound, and he twisted into a smooth barrel roll to avoid the curving arc of another glob of hallucinatory saliva. Ella had shifted so that her legs and arms were wrapped around his waist and shoulders, like some kind of ethereal ghost girl jet pack.
“You can’t do this for long, Victor,” she whispered.
“I don’t think I’ll need to.”
Mainly because I’ll only get one chance at this.
He summoned all of his remaining energy. Some of it, unsurprisingly, had been inadvertently replenished by the sex-charged dream sequence. Unfortunately, it wasn’t quite enough to give him any sort of confidence about what he was about to attempt.
Victor pushed himself further up with his diamond aura, until he could set his hand against the roof. It was full of thick, foreboding cracks. He focused his mind, binding his azure aura while still keeping himself in the air.
He filled the largest of the cracks with ice, followed by the next largest, and the one after that. His diamond aura began to weaken. Victor could feel himself sinking, slowly but surely. The monster waited at ground level, it’s tentacles whipping excitedly like the mauling bar on a grain thresher.
Victor summoned the last of his energy and bound his scarlet aura, launching a modest fireball at the ceiling and forfeiting his ability to hover at the same time. The fireball rushed up and collided with the roof, and Victor fell down and collided with one of the monster’s tentacles, and then the ground.
A deafening boom came from above them. Chunks of concrete the size of cars fell through the air. One of them landed partially on the monster, pinning its tentacles to the ground and limiting its mobility.
Victor made a mad dash past it and over to Kiara. Her condition was unchanged from before, and he ripped at the cocoon with his fingernails in desperate, clumsy movements. She came loose, and no sooner than he’d thrown her over his shoulder did the wall behind her crumble into dust, revealing a small tunnel, wide enough only for a single person to walk upright through, appeared.
“Run, Victor!” screamed Ella. She was flying through the chaos of the collapsing roof, straight toward him. Behind her, Victor could see the monster making one last, desperate charge at him, concrete raining down on it and dust filling the air.
Victor sprinted into the tunnel, carrying Kiara in his arms. He’d only just barely crossed the threshold into it when a resounding boom came from behind him, dust and evicted air swirling against his back as the ceiling of the cavern gave out. Chunks of concrete protruded slightly into the tunnel, sealing off the route he’d come in through. There was no sound after the last noise, no sign whatsoever of anything having survived.
“I saw it go under,” whispered Ella. “You did it, Victor.”
He smiled weakly and gently leaned Kiara down to the ground. Her face was chalk white, and she was barely breathing.
I did it? No… I failed.
CHAPTER 22
Victor wanted to collapse. His entire body ached, and he was pretty sure that he had at least a couple of cracked ribs. But it wasn’t about him anymore. It was about Kiara, and saving her.
He gently carried her down the tunnel, holding her in his arms for as long as he could before stopping to take a break. The tunnel sloped upward and curled in slow circles. Several times in a row, he was forced to stop in order to melt through grated gates with his scarlet aura. The last one was a thick metal door that looked like it belonged in a fallout shelter, and he felt lucky to manage even to melt the lock.
Finally, Victor reached a solid hatch in the ceiling with a ladder leading up it. It wasn’t locked, though the circular handle mechanism took all of his muscle strength to twist open. He pulled it down, and pushed the heavy manhole cover over it up and off, and found himself inside of a condemned building, on the outskirts of town.
This wasn’t marked on the blueprints.
He made another trip down for Kiara, carried her out and onto the front porch, and then focused his attention and called Lucy over the nano connection.
“…Victor?” she asked, after a brief pause.
“Yeah, it’s me.” He set a hand on his head and looked up at the night sky. “I got her out.”
“Where are you? I’ll leave right now!”
Victor groaned slightly, squinting at the nearest street sign. His exhaustion was hitting him in full force.
“Evergreen Street,” he mumbled. “Not sure what address. You’ll see us.”
Lucy said something else, and then the line went dead. Victor sat down on the steps, feeling an overwhelming urge to close his eyes and go to sleep.
He did manage to, for at least a few minutes. The sound of a car rolling up on the street in front of the building was enough to pull him out of it. He looked up, expecting to see Lucy’s red sedan pulling to a stop.
Two black BMWs with tinted windows were waiting for him instead. Several men climbed out and hurried over to him. Victor struggled to stand up, the hairs on the back of his neck prickling up.
“Whoa, whoa, easy there, champ,” said the man in front. “We’re from Monteiro. We’re friends.”
The man grinned in a way that was not at all reassuring. Victor shook his head.
“No…” he said. “I have help on the way, I don’t need-“
“Take the girl,” said the man, nodding to the group behind him.
“No!” Victor stood up, doing everything he could to summon energy into his nanites. He had nothing left, and all he could do was make a feeble attempt at shielding Kiara’s naked body.
“You’re coming with us too,” said the man. “You’re both going to the same place.
Don’t worry, everything’s fine.”
“No!” shouted Victor. “No!”
He got off a few punches, the force of each of which barely enough to make the man flinch back. They carried Kiara away, one of the men throwing his suit jacket over her as they loaded her into one of the cars. Victor didn’t stop fighting, not until one of the men retaliated, landing a punch to his temple that made him see and feel black.
CHAPTER 23
“You’re finally awake.”
Victor blinked. He was in a room that he recognized, one of Monteiro’s private hospital chambers. He was naked, and sheets were pulled up and over his chest. A heart monitor slowly droned on with monotone beeps in the corner, and the air smelled of antiseptic and bandages.
There was someone else in the room with him, and not anyone he’d been hoping to see. Eli Monteiro sat in a chair directly to his right. He had a moderately concerned smile on his face that Victor would have mistaken for being genuine if not for his experience with the man.
“Kiara.” Victor took a deep breath and let it out through his nose. “Where is she?”
“She’s safe, Victor,” said Eli. “We’re giving her the best care that money can provide.”
Victor hesitated, doing his best to stifle his anger as he met the man’s eyes.
“Has she woken up yet?”
Eli frowned and shook his head.
“Not yet,” said Eli. “But I’m sure she will, eventually.”
“Lucy,” said Victor. “I want to talk to Lucy.”
“Lucy’s here,” said Eli. “She’s with her sister. Everything’s fine. There’s no need to-”
“Now.” Victor balled his hand into a fist and felt for his auras. “I want to talk to Lucy, now.”
Eli lifted one finger up and smiled, as though they were in the middle of a card game, and he was about to reveal his winning hand.
“You need to get some rest, Victor,” said Eli. “And so does Kiara. You’ll need to be a trooper for now, son. For you and her both.”
Forbidden Magic: The Complete Collection Page 43