Reawakened

by Dean C. Moore

  “You better hope.” Stealy throttled down on the motorcycle and raced them toward the wall even before Ramon could open up a portal. He had to admit, it was an effective way to get his mind back on track. She linked with his mind to give him a fix on where they were going, and then then he opened the portal.

  One look at what was on the other side, and suddenly he was groping for the distraction once again of imagining what it would be like to hook up with a girl who put her coming of age drama on hold for seven thousand years—just to be with him.

  SIXTEEN

  Soren had slipped off his robes. His nakedness wasn’t quite the allure to women it once was. So, with the beast’s cooperation, he freed himself from the encumbrances of the roving mounds of nanites on his surface. Even “prettified” into designer tattoos, they were too off-putting for Natura, who didn’t trust the nanite swarm intelligences any more than she trusted the beast. When the tattoos flew off him to lose themselves in the Yucatan forest, Soren felt as if he were just trading one tormentor for another; now her mind was more focused on how the nanite swarms were going to disturb her natural world than on Soren’s Siren-like beauty, which is where he needed it to be.

  He dialed up the chi energy flowing through him. He hadn’t played the chi master card in a while, but he knew he could run enough energy through his meridians and chakras to have werewolves wanting to hump him, far less the much easier human prey.

  This was an uncomfortable situation, at best. He had a father-daughter relationship with Natura, despite being only a few years apart. Her damaged childhood and the trauma she’d experienced at the hands of her parents had made it easy to adopt a father-daughter roleplaying game with him in their ad hoc family as a way of rewriting her past, of painting over painful father-figure images with healthier ones. They could return to that roleplay later, but for right now, he needed the less age-regressed version of Natura to come to the surface, the one that was in the sexual prime of life, and all too willing to succumb to foreplay.

  The chi energy soaring through him now would be enough to light up the forest of the Yucatan. She wasn’t exactly playing easy to get. Most mortal women would have succumbed at a far lower energy setting, and a good percentage of paranormals as well. But her fear of the beast was as powerful as the more age-appropriate urges starting to take her over in response to his flowing chi.

  It was dusk in the Yucatan Peninsula, the time of day chosen as much for the ritual as for the hypnotic and romantic aesthetics—for it was a transition time—a time ripe for magic that involved yin and yang balancing. And as the sunset was fading fast into darkness, Soren decided to open her third eye further so she could appreciate the degree to which his chi energy was setting the forest aglow; the way it funneled up from his root chakra and out his crown chakra, only to cascade down upon them as the waterfall of energy reached its pinnacle yards above their heads. With their minds interlinked, Soren could tell that the funneling cones of energy spilling out of his chakras along his spine reminded her of the trumpet flowers favored by her hummingbirds; the association seemed to relax her further. Suddenly he was “Nature Man,” someone with whom she could relate better.

  She disrobed with a thought, her outfit shrinking off her like the leaves about a rose pulling back. She sauntered toward him and sat on his waist, thinking more of bathing in the fountain of chi energy, and seeing his lap, as he maintained his lotus position on top one of the Yucatan pyramids, more as the pool where the sacred waters gathered. Even without the mind link, he could surmise as much, or she would have mounted his hard phallus, instead of teasing it against her surface.

  He gently traced his finger over her skin, drawing the cabbalistic patterns he needed to invoke the primitive life forms of bacteria he wanted to invade his body. She had relaxed now—sensing the beast withdrawing further—to combine her magic with Soren’s thought projections. Giant forms of the microscopic organisms, the size of banana slugs now meandered across her body. Any other girl on earth would have been entirely creeped out, but this was Natura; the more of the natural world got stirred into their lovemaking, the more she relaxed into it.

  Thoughts of unfaithfulness to Naomi skittered across Soren’s mind. But if he was married to Naomi, at least in his heart, he was even more married to his mission to uplift those about him so they could become the powerful celestial wizards they needed to be to follow on Victor’s and his coattails. That meant putting aside conventional morality for now, for however that made him feel—mostly not good. He tried to frame this activity as un-amorously as possible under the light of a scientific investigation. But his own teenage hormones were making short work of those rationalizations.

  Now for the tricky part.

  The beast needed to join this union for the magic to take. Only he had the final piece for joining the cabbalistic magic to Natura’s nature magic in a way that wouldn’t draw the alien queen’s attention. This hybrid magic, moreover, was what they were going to use to check the alien queen’s power—even if she managed to circumvent the savant’s magic—which was more a matter of when than if.

  Each time the beast came to the surface, Natura lifted herself off his phallus, his gasps interrupting her moaning. This back and forth continued for a while until a new party entered.

  She had cleared the guardian at the gate—the beast—that had sensed her presence first; some seven-thousand-year-old fetus, forever frozen in amber, a furtive, but flamboyant entity, having waited too long to gain entry into this world.

  Just as Soren thought this couldn’t get any weirder, the Beast linked the embryo entity with his mind and with Natura’s and Soren’s. And strangely, Natura didn’t freak out, but was suddenly humping him like crazy. If she kept this up she was going to make him come way before Soren was ready, way before the new magic they were creating together could mature properly.

  But her heart had gone out to this embryo entity from another time; its name—her name—was Vima. Latin for “Life Force” or a close bastardization, anyway. The beast liked the innuendo. Soren wasn’t sure he did. Just what were they birthing into this world exactly? And make no bones about it, this fetus was using Natura to come into this world. And why was Natura so eager to grant her wish? Her thing was for animals, not people. Ah, the girl was like her, a sister, of sorts, with magic that complemented Natura’s. But how exactly? She wasn’t saying—Natura apparently able to limit how far Soren could go into her mind; and Soren, of the lot of them, keener to pick up on rhetoric since he was the most left-brained and analytical of the lot of them, had major reservations of releasing an entity trapped in amber for seven thousand years. Usually someone determined to lock something away for that long had some powerful reasons, not just powerful magic, behind the incarceration.

  The beast was overriding Soren’s concerns, refusing to let him take control. In their evolving struggle for dominance, they’d matured their relationship to the point where they shared the stage of his mind well, ceding control to one another based on which personality served the situation best. But the beast was not cooperating this time; he was forcing the issue. Why?

  So, Ramon had fantasies of coupling with this fetus—that would grow into a mature teenager rife with raging hormones in a matter of days. Lovely. This was just getting weirder and weirder and more ominous by the moment. Soren was fighting back the impulse to ejaculate now; it was the one thing that would require his cooperation in this, and his last best hope of getting all parties involved to let him in on exactly what secrets were going unspoken here.

  The beast, growing angry and frustrated, forced himself onto the stage further, the sex growing rougher as a result; and the more the beast’s animal passions took over, the less control Soren was going to have over his erection.

  Just what the hell was going on here?

  The beast wanted access to the magic only the triad of Stealy, Ramon and Vima could procure. Magic that also had ancient roots. Apparently, Ramon had dialed in a past life that was
thousands of years old and had access to secrets the beast needed access to, in order to advance its understanding of the cabbalistic magic, in order to get around not having the mental real estate needed to decipher a language designed for a much bigger brain. The triad magic between Stealy, Ramon, and Vima hinged on Vima reaching sexual maturity as quickly as possible. And Soren was becoming the bottleneck impeding the progress of the beast’s plans.

  Sorry, but Soren was still not playing along. He needed to understand more. He insisted on it.

  The beast had learned by now the importance of getting Soren to weigh in on a situation; the depth of his analytical acumen was as crucial to the beast enhancing its power as the beast’s own intuitive insights into the cabbalistic magic. Grudgingly, all too painfully reminded by Soren of the stakes, the beast surrendered more information.

  Vima had the backdoor access key to the alien queen’s mind. Yes, the magic the Natura-Soren-Beast triad was formulating now would get them inside the alien queen’s head undetected. But, only for a time. And not for long, as the alien queen was mastering the working of the natural world with her current analyses. And that meant she would soon have a bridge to the magic Natura was helping Soren and the beast to forge.

  Soren sighed. He still wasn’t convinced.

  So, the beast put it in terms he could understand. He showed how Vima’s womb magic hinged in part on her placental covering. The shielding magic of the placenta would keep Soren surrounded as he sent his thought projections into the alien queen’s mind. It would wear like both a thick outer skin and a placental shield both, through which the alien queen could not penetrate. Not without giving up secrets as to her own rebirthing magic. So, even if she overcame Vima’s defenses, they could well come away with a prize even more worth garnering. With the essence of the queen’s rebirthing magic at their disposal, they could take one hell of an end run at her.

  Finally, Soren relented, coming inside Natura, moaning in tandem with her, their loud utterances like wild animals testing one another in the forest.

  And so it was done.

  Soren, psychically linked with Natura and the beast, could already feel the embryo developing a mile a minute inside of Natura.

  And something else.

  A last piece of vital information withheld from him.

  Vima had access to early “holy trinity” magic, what numerologists referred to as the power of three. She could not only join the triad of Stealy, Vima, and Ramon to the triad of Soren, the beast, and Natura; she could catalyze other triads as well. And she was already prompting Soren to put the idea in Lar’s head. Lar had been seeking a way to become part of the ménage-a-trois with Ry and An, the androgynous transsexualists from the Transhuman Sector. For whatever reason, he had a thing for hermaphrodites. And Vima was promising now to bless such a union with empowerment that would dissolve anyone’s resistance who belonged to that triad to the idea of sex magic.

  Of all the forms of magic Soren had been exposed to in his short lifetime, sex magic had never really percolated far into his conscious mind as a valid avenue to anything. Maybe because, being male, he often had less lofty designs on getting laid. Not even when, during their last adventure, after coupling with Naomi had opened a portal and a psychic union to one of the most powerful celestial wizards Victor had managed to summon from the great beyond. That should have been wakeup call enough for Soren to at least entertain this form of magic further. But it just hadn’t registered.

  Now that the concept was being forced into his consciousness, he wasn’t sure how he felt. But that was his nature, to keep analyzing, to keep delaying. Fools rushed in, or in his case, the beast, who could make far more of far less information in far less time.

  And the beast was signaling the go ahead for the sanctifying of the Lar-Ry-An hook up. In fact, he had already psychically linked to their minds and put the idea in their heads, along with Soren’s far more detailed rationalizations that Soren himself had yet to arrive at. But Soren’s mindchip had filled in the blanks for him. Soren had forgotten that the beast could now access the mind chip; now that he was playing nicer with Soren, he had full access to Soren’s jacked up left-brain abilities.

  But Soren didn’t have time for more protests and more deep dives into this whole rapidly evolving sex magic and triad-magic that he was getting a crash course in whether he liked it or not. That was because Vima was eager to pay off on a promise.

  Gifted with life at last, she gifted him back with her placental shield magic. And the beast had already furthered the new magic forged of cabbalism and nature magic, which Soren labeled “Natura Cabbala.”

  How could the beast, even with his far more sophisticated and intuitive grasp of the cabbalistic magic percolating through Soren’s body…? Ah, the bastard had accessed Soren’s mindchip, wrote some algorithms of his own—using the cabbalistic and nature magic hybrid symbols.

  The magic of the Natura Cabbala, much of the understanding of which was still beyond Soren’s reach, was advanced enough now, courtesy of the beast, and indirectly through the triad magic, to shoot Soren headlong into the mind of the alien queen.

  Ready or not.

  SEVENTEEN

  Soren’s avatar felt no less a part of him; he was entirely one with it, even more married to it than he had been when in the cryogenics chamber in his prior adventure, battling the last celestial wizard whose wrath Victor had managed to rain down upon the inhabitants of planet Earth.

  Soren’s mind was not on his impressive ability to be in two places at once; but on how long he could hold out inside the queen’s mind before he would never want to leave.

  Communing with her was a heady and intoxicating experience. He was inside the mind of a supercomputer of supercomputers, the ultimate artificial intelligence in the known universe—at least the biggest one that they’d been made privy to.

  She may have been an entity born as much from magic as from science, considering the nature of the cabbalistic spirit science she wielded, but Soren and the alien queen shared one thing in common—left-brain domination—and that made her mind the most splendid place to be of all; as terrifying in how overwhelming it was as it was exciting.

  She was busy cataloguing every lifeform on the planet, from the most microscopic scales up. She already had a deeper understanding of each lifeform, what made it tick, what drove it, than modern science had. She was inside each lifeform with armies of nanites that could evolve themselves to deepen their union and understanding of the lifeforms they interpenetrated. The nanite science Soren had released on himself seemed primitive by comparison; even compounded as it had come to be with Victor’s mandala magic, and of late, with the cabbalistic nanites. And now, he was rocking the triad magic of his union with the beast and with Natura—which held even now—so he could understand what he was taking in. He was also assisted by his latest generation of nanites, the Natura Cabbala. With all the forms of magic he had going for him, despite his relatively small mind, he might be able to wrestle control away from the alien queen, shedding her influence over some of these lifeforms—but over this many? Forgeddabout it. He was going to have to find another workaround.

  Soon she would have everything she needed to subject every lifeform on the planet to her will. Her legacy: a kind of zombiefied existence, sustained by the fact that no one would feel subjugated. Rather, each life form would feel uplifted, sharing in a larger whole more consciously than ever before. In fact, the experience felt to Soren much like what spiritual mystics taught about how to meld more completely with the Godhead, the All. The meditative practices Soren had partaken in all his life had inched him in this direction; but this, this was the real deal.

  The beast was already chomping at the bit. He sensed the alien queen’s manipulation even more than Soren did, and had even less patience for it.

  If Soren wished to truly check the alien queen’s power, he was going to have to run some probing analyses of his own.

  He sought out the blind huntresses
and the one they were protecting, Augustus. The beast had been aware of their attack on the alien queen all this time. Such as it was. In their current state, they had become little more than allies.

  Soren needed to understand the nature of that alliance.

  So he took advantage of his ability to be in multiples places at once, as he had done before. And he went into each of the huntresses’ and Augustus’s minds simultaneously; exploring the nature of their union with the alien queen.

  ***

  The alien queen’s mind was so powerful, she wasn’t just immersing the blind huntresses in their own virtual reality worlds so they could undo the psychic knots of tension from their past lives that had carried over into this lifetime, and that, until undone, would act like aching, festering wounds, draining the huntresses’ psychic energy and compromising their ability to be fully in the moment.

  No, the alien queen was doing one better. She was opening access to alternate timelines where the blind huntresses could incarnate and implicate themselves into dramas that would allow them to work out their unresolved dramas from the past.

  It was in such a life that Soren found himself now, as the knight in tarnished armor, requesting the metal worker to fix his sword that had broken in battle. Aba was playing the part of the smith.

  She took a look at his long blade, and laughed. “You either need a better weapon, or the sword needs a better swordsman.”

  “Well, can’t do much about the fighter, I’m afraid,” Soren said, surprised at how easy it was to slip into character. “So I suggest a better sword.”

  “This blade hold any significance to you?” she asked, turning both halves of the weapon over in her hands.”

  “Yes, it was my father’s.” Soren didn’t have to make up the line. His entire history had been written in for him in this lifetime—and engineered to heal his psychic wounds. The queen was as much inside his head as Aba’s, even if she hadn’t consciously detected his presence. His placental shielding was doing what all placentas did, allowing in mother’s nutrients from her body, permitting it to percolate and enrich the amniotic fluid in which he bathed.