New Olympus Saga (Book 2): Doomsday Duet

by C. J. Carella

  “I see you,” she whispered. “I see you, Mark.”

  I’ll be the first to admit I can make quite an impression on people, but this was the first time somebody had been overjoyed just by looking at me. I knew she was using her special senses, but what the hell was she seeing through them?

  The tingling became more intense. The inner warmth I had summoned became hotter, painfully so. This is where I burst into flames, I thought, but I didn’t. It got hotter, and the tingling became unarguably painful, but neither sensation reached unbearable levels. It was nothing I couldn’t handle; a little pain never hurt anyone.

  Not two seconds after I had that inane thought, my head blew up like a rat with a cherry bomb stuffed up its ass.

  At least, it felt as if I’d exploded. My senses, my being, everything that I was, scattered into every possible direction. It didn’t hurt, but after the – dispersion was as good a word as any, I supposed – I lost all connection to my body. I was floating through a swirling kaleidoscope of colors, except ‘I’ did not have a physical presence. I could perceive the lights somehow, but had no optical receptors, no head, nothing. I’d become a being of pure mind without corporeal expression. I’d mostly stayed away from drugs even before what happened to Fay, but a few years back I’d gotten drunk and depressed enough to drop a few tabs of acid with a fairly adventurous girlfriend who sold the stuff under the counter of her herbal medicine store. That mind trip had been intense, but it couldn’t hold a candle to what I was experiencing now. I’d either lost my mind or had really exploded and this was some sort of afterlife. In the second case I expected an express elevator to Hell would be showing up shortly.

  Mark. Christine’s voice called out to me, sort of. I didn’t hear it, not really. It was like a thought or memory had manifested itself inside my mind.

  That’s me, I replied. I was still getting used to being called Mark. Nobody had used that name on me since I was a kid. And she had to remember not to use it in public.

  Well, don’t expect me to call you Face-Off, or Face, when it’s just us. For one, Face is a character in a silly 1980s TV show in my world. And for another, I don’t sleep with people named Face.

  So you can read my thoughts now.

  Right now, yes. We are connected, like we were when I healed you back at Dad’s creepy crib by the lake. Remember that?

  A little bit. I’d missed most of that. Being at death’s door makes it hard to focus on stuff. I recalled the highlights, and they’d been intense enough. So what’s happening now? And why did you look so happy back there?

  I’m ramping up your connection to the Source. And trying to add a couple of things here and there. Copy and paste, kind of. And did I look happy? I was. I got a good look at you. Do you know how beautiful you are, Mark?

  Depends on what face I’m wearing, I guess.

  Not your face. You. Under all the pain and the rage, the real you that’s still there. It’s… The thought-voice dissolved in a burst of emotion, and I got a glimpse of what her empathic abilities felt like. I could tell the waves of pure joy washing over me weren’t mine, but the feeling was infectious and it swept me away. I’d never felt anything like that before; the closest had been when I was looking into her eyes when we were making love, and that didn’t have as much impact, as much immediacy as what I felt now, echoing her own feelings; two minds – or souls, if such things existed – mingling, becoming one without losing themselves. It was fucking amazing.

  It didn’t last long. Probably for the best. If it had lasted much longer, it would have been unbearable to return to the real world. As it was, when the swirling lights went away and I found myself back at Condor’s Situation Room, I felt cold, alone, diminished. Luckily, I’m used to disappointment; I shrugged off the feeling quickly enough.

  Christine’s hands dropped to her sides and she wearily sat down on the nearest chair. “You okay?” I asked her. I reached for her hand and she held mine. The contact felt good, a small remainder of how close we’d been.

  “Yeah. That just took a lot out of me.”

  “Me too.” I actually found myself missing being in full telepathic contact with her. If someone had told me I’d enjoy having somebody else inside my head, I’d have laughed in their face. Except, of course, she wasn’t just somebody. Nobody else had gotten so close to me, not Father Aleksander, not even Cassandra after years of friendship. She’d gotten to me in just a few days. Sure, the empathy had played a big role in that, but that wasn’t all it was.

  I wanted to say something else to her, but I couldn’t think of anything that wouldn’t make me sound ridiculous. She looked at me and grinned, her empathy still at work. I knew what I wanted to say to her, but it was too soon. It’d be stupid to say it. The real world ain’t Romeo and Juliet, and real people don’t fall in love in three days.

  When in doubt, change the subject. “So did it work? Did I gain a couple of PAS points?”

  “There’s one way to find out,” she said. She watched me for a few seconds. “Okay, stand against that wall, just in case.”

  “Just in case of what?” I asked her, but did as she said.

  “Just in case it didn’t work,” she replied, and blasted me in the chest with one of her telekinetic bolts. She didn’t telegraph the attack with a hand gesture or anything, just glanced my way and next thing I know I got walloped hard enough to kill a normal human.

  She’d hit me that hard a few times during our practice bout last night; it had hurt like a motherfucker and I’d ended up flying all over the place. This time, the blast didn’t budge me an inch and didn’t hurt at all. I felt the energy hit an invisible barrier a few millimeters away from my skin, a barrier that surrounded me everywhere, from under over the soles of my boots to the top of my hairless head.

  I was speechless.

  “It worked! Achievement unlocked!” she said, grinning like a loon. “You’ve got a protective aura now. It will absorb a ridiculous amount of damage and greatly attenuate anything above the absorption threshold. In other words, next time that big buy with the stupid stuffed lion hat punches you, he’s not going to ruffle a hair on your head, uh, if you had hair on your head.”

  “That’s amazing. His name’s Hercules-8, by the way.”

  “Oh, okay. I get the symbolism now. The stuffed kitty hat is supposed to be the Nemean Lion, right?” I nodded. “What’s with the number at the end?”

  “Hercules is a pretty popular name,” I explained. “There’s about a dozen or more Herculeses or Herculii running around, and about as many Herakleses, and that’s just in the US. So they got assigned numbers based on seniority. But that’s not important now. What else did you do to me?”

  “Well, I pumped up your strength. Heh, that sounded kinda dirty. And I increased some of your pre-existing abilities, although I’m not sure how that’s going to work. From the way your color palette is shining now, you are a Type Three now. Gratz.”

  Jesus. What the hell couldn’t she do? “How did you manage to do all that?”

  “It wasn’t easy, let me tell you, and it got a bit scary a couple of times. If we hadn’t made that connection back when I helped heal you, I wouldn’t have even begun to figure out a way to do it. But I just sort of merged our, I don’t know, let’s call it Chi, our Chis, and I did a little copy-and-paste of my protective aura onto your Chi, and then increased the bandwidth of your connection to the Source, so now you can draw on more energy to heal, to lift things and to punch faces. Beyond a certain point, super-strength stops being about muscles, and the ability to lift things becomes a touch-based telekinetic thingy. I kinda figured that out the first time I saw a picture of Ultimate flying around with a warship in his hands. That wouldn’t work without telekinesis, he would just end up ripping a hole in the ship or breaking it into pieces instead of picking it up. So, what he does, what you’re going to be able to do, is to grab the whole thing with his mind. It’s not a conscious process, though, so don’t think too much about it, or you may sab
otage yourself, okay?”

  “That’s fucking amazing,” I said as soon as she paused, just to interrupt her verbal waterfall for a bit. “You’re fucking amazing.”

  “Thank you,” she said.

  I knew what I wanted to say to her, real world be damned.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Christine Dark

  New York, New York, March 17, 2013

  OMG, L-word alert!

  It was on the tip of his non-existent tongue, held back by nothing more than the fear she would freak out if he said it. Well-justified fear, because she had no clue what she was going to say or do if he did.

  Don’t say it back unless you mean it, her brain piped in. Stupid brain. Yeah, don’t say it back and leave him hanging. But her stupid brain was right, lying would be even worse. But, would she be lying if she said it back?

  He was so beautiful.

  She’d looked into his soul, or something close enough to it to merit the name, and it had been truly amazing, the most beautiful thing she’d ever seen. Nobility and strength and kindness and love and things she couldn’t name or even describe, all mixed together into something warm and gorgeous and chocolate-flavored with a hint of mint that she wanted to eat, to love, to fuck, yes, to fuck and to hold and to marry and have children and grandchildren with and…

  Get ahold of yourself, woman!

  The problem was, Mark’s had been the only soul (yeah, soul it was) she’d looked at. What if all souls were equally beautiful? What if she was just echoing his feelings and one day she’d wake up and regret what she’d done? Yeah, he was beautiful, but there was plenty of bad stuff in there, too: anger and fear and suffering, spread all over his beautiful soul, and sure, in some ways they made it more beautiful still, but they also scared her.

  What would John’s soul look like?

  Holy crap, it had gotten pretty quiet for quite a while.

  Mark didn’t said anything, just looked at her, and she felt the moment pass. He’d seen the panic in her face and had tacitly rescinded his offer. No L-word for you, Pissy Chrissy. Bummer, but also phew! But bummer so badly. She’d hurt him, she could feel that, but it could have been worse.

  The silence was getting pretty bad, though

  Say something!

  “Hey, did I tell you about my two disastrous boyfriend experiences?”

  Say something else! Stupid, stupid!

  “No; not in any detail, that is,” he said, and leaned back on the chair. “I think we’ve earned a little break before we go help Condor, so tell me about them. The a-hole and the d-bag, right?”

  He still remembered their conversation that first night. So sweet. And he wanted to hear about her exes. So weird.

  You brought them up, weirdo. All you had to do was say you should go check on Condor and the disruptor thingy. Idiot.

  This time, she agreed with her brain. She really was an idiot.

  “Okay. I really didn’t date much in high school. The first serious thing with a boy happened during freshman year at MU. His name was Dean. Dean Crenshaw. He was cute, funny, played the guitar. He even looked a little bit like Dean Winchester, which was cool even though I’m more of a Sammy kind of gal. Sorry, talking about a TV show in my universe. Anyway, he was my first.” First time: scary and messy and painful, and it had been over just as it was beginning to feel good. After that things had been a little better but she’d always felt like she was missing out on something; if that was what sex was like, what was all the fuss about? “I caught him cheating on me. It was pretty bad.” Go into the gory details? In for a penny, in for a pound. “He tried to make it my fault. Didn’t quite come out and say it, but he sort of implied that if I’d been any good in bed he wouldn’t have had to go somewhere else.” And she’d bought it too, that was the worst part. He’d made her feel ugly and worthless. It’d gotten so bad she’d thought about dropping out of school. Thank God Mom and Sophie talked her out of it.

  “The other guy was Jerry Bordeaux. He was French-Canadian and very pretentious. He had an opinion on everything, and if you didn’t agree with him he was great at figuring out ways to put you down and make you feel stupid. He was smart, but not half as smart as he thought he was. And when he lost at anything, an argument, or Trivial Pursuit, anything, he got mean. But he wasn’t all that bad at first.” He’d made her feel pretty, for one, which had been a godsend after the self-confidence tailspin she’d been in after Dean. And the sex had been oodles better; Jerry had always been proud of his ‘She comes first’ policy. Thanks to Jerry Christine finally realized that Dean had been the one that sucked at sex, not her. “It got worse later, though, because he needed to be right all the effing time. He was always putting me down for liking computer games and ‘genre fiction.’ Said I wasn’t serious enough.” And when he broke up with her, he’d said he’d never found her all that attractive in the first place. Nice parting shot, d-bag. “That ended like six months ago.”

  “Dean and Jerry do sound like a couple of clowns,” Mark said. “Although it would have been funny if their last names had been Martin and Lewis.” She didn’t know what he was talking about, but she let it go; he didn’t know what she was talking about a lot of the time, so turnabout was fair play.

  And why did I tell him about them? As a plea for him not to be an a-hole? Or maybe she was just letting him know she was an effing doormat, so he might as well wipe his boots on her on his way out of her life.

  “My first time also didn’t go so well,” he added. She picked up another emotional spike from him, one she recognized from the shopping trip earlier in the day.

  “So tell me.”

  He did.

  She almost wished he hadn’t. Way to make her feel stupid for whining about her First World problems. Let’s see. Her boyfriends were kinda douchy to her. His girlfriend ended up dead of a heroin overdose. Her life was Hannah Montana, his life was The Wire and never the twain shall meet. Except hurt was hurt, fear was fear, and at least now they’d shared the things that had hurt and scared them. She didn’t want to be used and put down, and he didn’t want to be abandoned and betrayed. Maybe sharing their bad experiences would help them avoid repeating them.

  She sat on his lap and rested her head on his chest while he told his story, and held him tightly and kissed him when he finished. They spent a few quiet minutes together, and for a little while things were okay. If he played the L-word card now, she’d probably say it back and mean it.

  “We probably should go check on Condor,” was what he ended up saying. The L-word ship had sailed for the time being. Let’s call that a phew-moment and move on.

  She got up, feeling a little guilty. They’d wasted quite a bit of time on fairy tale stuff, hadn’t they? But they could be dead in a few hours, so maybe they hadn’t exactly been wasting time.

  “Let’s go.”

  * * *

  Good news for a change! W00t!

  Behind a glass wall, the disruptor thingy had been set on a mount so it could be fired remotely. Condor had discovered that when a Neo fired the darn thing, he got hurt just by being close to it. The disruptor spewed its nauseating purple-black energy stream at a practice target – and the energy dissipated a couple of feet away.

  “How did you do it?” Christine asked.

  “As it turns out, an electro-magnetic field will stop the disruptor stream,” Condor explained. “The protection is temporary, however; the beam will eventually push through the field. I got the idea from something Janus said, about his encounter with an alien who had been infected with the same kind of energy. I think I can cobble together a portable generator that will give us a good twenty, thirty seconds of protection.”

  “That’s not a long time,” she said, her enthusiasm deflating.

  “For a Neo, that’s a long time,” Mark replied. “Think about how much damage you or I can do in thirty seconds.”

  “Okay, good point.”

  “I can have five generators done in another hour,” Condor said. “Sur
e, the cops may come a-knocking, but my security systems will give us a heads up if that happens. I think it’s worth the risk.” Nobody disagreed. “All right, go take a break while I work.”

  Kestrel led them out of the lab and into the lair’s rec room, which had fond memories for Christine. That was where she and Mark had first gotten to know each other, the day she’d woken up and found herself on Earth Alpha. Everybody got drinks and sat down.

  Janus was looking at her a lot. Not in an ‘I wanna do you’ way, not at all, but he was definitely interested in her.

  “John spoke very highly of you,” he said when she looked back at him.

  “He was nice.” And incredibly hot, she didn’t say out loud. “I really hope he’s okay.”

  “After we deal with this situation, I’m going to rescue him and deal with Daedalus.”

  “I’ll come along for that,” Christine said, pretty forcefully.

  “And I’ll be right behind you, Armageddon Girl,” Mark added.

  “Armageddon Girl?” Kestrel said.

  “Mark wants me to use that as my code name. I think it’s a little too much.”

  Kestrel’s little fuck-me smile made a triumphant return. “I like it.”

  Why am I not surprised? “I don’t know if it fits me. And I don’t like the ‘Girl’ part, either.” Of course, Armageddon Woman sounded worse. Armageddon Lass? Yech.

  “The way John spoke about you, it just might,” Janus commented. “Your story matches what I saw during my travels outside the solar system.” He briefly described his encounter with a crazy evil alien, the only survivor of an advanced civilization he’d found; his description of the dark thing in its aura made it pretty clear who’d been responsible for all the insanity and genocide and stuff.