Lar nodded, also grateful for the gift. He might be able to pace the upstairs balcony in Soren’s lab now, as well, without conking his head against the fireman’s pole Soren had put there for him in order to make it easier to access the first floor. The pole was meant to prevent him from getting caught up in the fire-escape access ladder that currently connected the two stories in the lab, and tripping and falling on his head. The handiwork was a considerate modification on Soren’s part—back when consideration was more of a forte—but all he’d really succeeded in doing was booby-trapping the lab further for the perennially klutzy Lar.
“Get going, you two,” Victor said to both of them after letting go of Lar’s hands, even if Lar was still staring in amazement at the activation of the mandala geometries in his palms, the diameter and shape of round silver dollars—only with dials within dials and bands within bands, all rotating on one another, hypnotically, entrancing Lar.
“Aren’t you going to open a portal for us?” Ramon said.
“You may as well practice with making your own,” Victor replied.
Ramon smiled, ashamed he didn’t think of it himself, and delighted by his newfound power. He concentrated on one of the edifices on the big screen after Airy highlighted one of the sites further for him.
“This is the one pyramid where the most cabbalistic images have been found so far,” she said. “You may as well start there.”
Ramon opened the portal to the monument with his right hand. There were scientists working in the chamber of the pyramid he now had access to. “What do I do about them?”
“What I would. Flush them out another portal. Although, in your case, you’ll be limited to points on this planet.”
“Good enough,” Ramon said. “Coming, sidekick?” he said to Lar.
“Ah, for the record, you’re my sidekick, okay?”
Ramon smiled back at him and was the first to step through the portal, Lar following on his heels, and of course, tripping over them.
Victor grunted. “The mandala magic I lent Lar might need some more tweaking. Well, life would be a bit dull without a few unanticipated dead falls, I imagine.”
He shut down the portal on his side, having put them both out of his mind already.
He returned to Soren’s side. “Enjoy your private time while you can, my friend. Because I’m about to get inside your head in ways some would describe as positively predatory.”
TWENTY
The street was little more than an alley, despite the doorways facing them to either side. It would have been dark during the day, far less in the dead of night. No one living inside so far had been courteous enough to offer up one of those entrances or exits as a port of egress from this deathtrap they’d run into. “How does an Asian guy get a name like Augustus, anyway?” Britomartis asked, panting out each word on the run beside him; Artemis flanking him on the other side, kept pace.
“I’ll have you know I have Roman blood in my family—on my distant cousin’s side.”
Artemis smiled. “Hell of a world, when even a master wizard feels the need to pile on.”
“Speaking of, you think it’s time to try something wizardly?” Britomartis goaded. Two of the blind huntresses chasing them were keeping pace from the rooftops. One, a Native American, going by the getup. The other, a samurai warrior, again going mostly by the garb and weapons of choice. Two were keeping pace from ground level behind. One, a Maasai warrior, the other, Egyptian—looking just like one of those several-thousand-year-old temple hieroglyphs. One blind huntress was swooping down from above on a dragon—a Trinidadian. Her carnival getup the giveaway. She was practically upstaging the dragon with those peacock fashion accessories which would have stymied lesser fighters.
“Does that bitch seriously have a dragon as a mount,” Artemis said, looking up, “or am I pumping out so much adrenaline now I’m hallucinating?”
“Where do you keep one of those things in the city is what I want to know?” Britomartis replied. “Stabling a horse is enough of a bitch.”
“You park it on the roof, of course. And you feed it werewolves.” Artemis glanced over her shoulder at the last unaccounted for blind huntress—flying in on her own dragon. This one, a native of Ghana—again the costuming was the giveaway—tweaked for a huntress, of course.
“Well, if the fire breathers are as practical as all that, maybe we should get a couple,” Britomartis managed, getting good at panting out her words even as her breathing was entering the hyperventilation zone, trying to keep up with her legs.
“I say we take theirs. Who the hell has time to audition dragons, as booked as we are?”
“You’re not much of a deep thinker, but your pragmatism makes up for that, partner,” Britomartis said.
“God damn it, wizard, if you don’t pull something out of your ass soon we’re going to offer you up to them on a silver platter!” Artemis barked.
Augustus reached into a pouch and pulled out a fistful of…
“Are those rat pellets?” Artemis scrunched up her face in disapproval. “And me thinking all this time that Asians were as bad with showering as the French.”
The wizard mumbled some words into his hand, then tossed the rat pellets. The swarm of rats that manifested as the pieces of dung hit the ground bolted after the blind huntresses—one and all. The enchanted rats seemed every bit as determined to reach the ones on the roofs and the ones on the dragons, moving with the speed and the ferocity of the demon possessed. The rats on the roofs were already leaping for the dragons and climbing up them to get to the riders.
Artemis noted the rodents were going for the Achilles heels of the huntresses, sinking their fangs into them—yes, fangs—welcome to demon-possessed rats. “Smart. They won’t be running anywhere now.”
Britomartis glanced over her shoulder to reality-check that theory, and found none of the huntresses could even be bothered to flick off the rats, far less slow. “They nano-upgraded their Achilles heels, or warded them with magic. Did we think to do that?”
“No, we did not. Make sure to thank them for the pointers.” Artemis glanced over at the wizard. “What else you got in those pouches?”
The wizard reached for another soft-leather sac on his belt—lined with such receptacles—untethered it, repeated the stunt of earlier. Only this was…
“Vampire dung?” Artemis scrunched up her nose and lowered her lips in a scowl at the same time.
“Can you tell which one of us has the sensitive nose?” Britomartis asked. “If I don’t rinse my snatch in every creek we cross, she threatens to cauterize the ‘wound’ for me with a blowtorch.”
This time the vampire pellets turned into baby vampires in midair as the wizard tossed them after mumbling his words of power. The creatures flapped their wings and headed to their targets—the fangs in their mouths held wide, looking like just the thing to sever carotid arteries with. The bat-like beings took to the air until they were high enough to dive down like falcons. And then they plummeted—without making a sound. Not even flapping wings—which were now held at bay.
It didn’t matter. The huntresses must have heard the displacement of air—like a faint whistle. Artemis—also the one with the fine hearing—thought she could just barely make out… but she couldn’t be sure.
The blind huntresses were. They grabbed the infantile vamps inches from their necks around the chest and crushed their ribcages. Artemis and Britomartis could hear the bones crunching from where they were. The baby vampires now killed by a thousand small cuts—all delivered courtesy of their shattered bones—dropped to the ground hard; it was suddenly raining baby vampires.
“Can you crush one of those things in your bare hands like that?” Britomartis asked, her panting taking the edge off the whine.
“Yeah, right. I thought of setting up a gym at home,” Artemis said.
“In Shelley’s London?” Britomartis balked, the whining taking her voice to a whole other register. “How period-appropriate is that?”
“The Chinese have been using them for thousands of years,” the wizard said.
“Thank you,” Artemis replied. “Saves me from explaining why I was going to go with an Asian theme.”
“So that’s how they use their downtime?” Britomartis’s voice now had an edge of disbelief, glancing back at the ferocious, all-business expressions of the huntresses.
“I hate it when someone besides us is elevating the huntress brand. It opens the door to all kinds of self-pity.”
“What else you got, wizard?” Britomartis’s tongue lashed. “Last chance before we gut you ourselves and find someplace to hole up and soak our feet.”
“You’re not going to like it.”
“Trust me, we’re very open to accommodating any kind of crazy shit right now,” Artemis interjected.
The wizard reached into another pouch. This time he blew the dust onto his two huntress protectors.
He was now running alone. That was because Britomartis and Artemis were now pulling away from him—on wings. As they rose into the air, they took arrows fired from the bows of the blind huntresses on the ground. The ones Artemis and Britomartis caught, they flung back at the ones firing—faster than the arrows had been freed from the bows. The blind huntresses ducked the arrows anyway, firing back without missing a step.
The arrows Artemis and Britomartis couldn’t catch, bounced harmlessly off them, to the surprise of the two ladies.
As they continued rising into the sky, they came into reach of the huntresses on the rooftops. Having seen how the latest arrows fared, the blind huntresses switched to magic-potion-doused boomerangs. Artemis recognized the telltale phosphorescing edges. The boomerangs—flung with uncanny accuracy considering their targets were moving the entire time—stung and drew blood, but otherwise barely registered to either one of them.
Artemis and Britomartis put the eye drops in their eyes from the two-ounce brown bottles gathered back at Augustus’s safe house. A couple eye flutters later, and they fired lasers from their eyes—back at their attackers on the roofs. Without missing a beat, the blind huntresses held up their boomerangs as they caught them on the rebound and used the reflective metal to displace the laser beams right back at their winged assailants. But the rays had no effect.
Artemis and Britomartis were now taking fiery boluses to their persons from the dragons now that they were in range of the creatures. Both winged huntresses could fly faster than the dragons, however, and had no trouble ducking the flames. For the most part—the flames that did reach them felt warm, as opposed to flaming hot, and did no damage.
But the women were tiring. It was as if the magic made them immune to most everything, and lent them powers, but it also enervated them. And, considering the blind huntresses showed no sign of tiring—thanks to their even more impeccable self-conditioning—Artemis’s and Britomartis’s increasingly debilitated states would be a real game changer.
Artemis and Britomartis were also psychically linked. They decided together to fire their steel fingernails—stuck on at Augustus’s safe house and magical supply store in one—at the blind huntresses on the dragons, in hopes of appropriating their mounts. The winged huntresses’ unconscious minds seemed to be serving up “intuitive insights” on how best to utilize their new bodies. The huntresses on the dragons took the tiny blades to the body, winced in pain, but that was about it.
The nails of Artemis and Britomartis grew back almost instantly, and the added bones and tendons in their fingers—evolved with the help of the magician’s magic—fired them the instant the miniature catapults built into the fingers were loaded. Each time, the girls targeted the tendons that would be needed for the blind huntresses to use their weapons, even more so than the muscles, which Artemis and Britomartis figured were too well conditioned to be easily put out of commission anyway.
Whatever upgrades the blind huntresses had given their Achilles heels, they either hadn’t thought to take the retrofits further, or couldn’t afford to. The blind huntresses, realizing they could no longer wield their weapons—not their bow and arrows, not their boomerangs, not even their poison dart tubes—and seeing the winged girls swooping down for them, jumped off the dragons.
Artemis and Britomartis took hold of their new mounts, as the two dragons the blind huntresses had dethroned landed on one of the roofs below.
The blind huntresses were already attending one another, pulling out the fingernails and toenails with their teeth that had wedged inside them and were continuing to slice through their tendons. They were pulling out the corks on vials with potions with their teeth, as well, using the flexibility in their backs to reach the pouches on their waists while their tendons were still out of commission. It was a safe bet those potions were quick healing remedies to mend the wounds. Magic or nano elixirs, whichever they were, Artemis and Britomartis had no doubt the blind huntresses would be back in action soon enough. The multi-ethnic lot looked no more demoralized for the sudden turnabout.
The girls on the dragons realized the magic the wizard had doused them with was wearing off. They had to concentrate what remaining psychic energy they had on bonding with their dragons, before the beasts determined to rid themselves of the newly acquired parasites.
More troubling still—the blind huntresses looked like they were getting ready to take things to the next level themselves, with magic of their own, either appropriated from other wizards or…. Shit, they’d long incorporated wizardry into their fighting. The realization struck like a lightning bolt. They just refused to use that magic unless their opponents were worthy enough to justify it. Fair fighters to the end.
And where was that wizard when Artemis and Britomartis needed him most? He was gone, that was where. Fled beyond even the range of their huntress’s enhanced tracking senses.
“Look!” Britomartis commanded.
Artemis switched focus back to the blind huntresses. “Something has them spooked. And it sure as hell isn’t us.”
***
Soren tracked the blind huntresses in an out-of-body state. He had become used to astral traveling when in his tank back in his lab. But this was different. There was an enhanced level of control. He could dog his quarry like a swooping falcon stalked field mice.
The women, though blind, sensed him. Remarkable. They flinched, turned, ducked, swiped at him with a weapon, whenever he got too close. They were genuinely scared. Good.
The next huntress he descended on blew magic dust at him, exposing the beast. She actually screamed, and dove off the roof. His illuminated presence had been spied by all the huntresses on both sides of the dispute. No one took the apparition kindly.
Soren was still more ghost than physical form.
He was going to have to fix that.
Soren yielded more sway to the beast, which seemed to intuit how to do things in a flash, bypassing Soren’s need for scientific understanding; maybe it was less about intuition, and more about wielding the cabbalistic magic at the beast’s disposal.
The Frankenstein’s monster manifested on the rooftop, next to one of the huntresses—their “eagle hunter”—the Native American. He dangled her by the neck over the ledge of the roof as she fought to get his hand off her. He was going mostly for dramatic effect, and it was working. The other huntresses—on both sides—watching what was going on, were changing their focus, directing their energies now at him. Good. The beast seemed to relish the contest. Soren relished the idea of seeing the huntresses, who were formerly adversaries, working together.
Soren’s increasingly dual nature—as the beast continued to take on a sense of his own identity and his role in things—was intoxicating for both parties. They were communicating better now than ever—learning to fight as one. Increasingly accepting of each other.
It was that trust that led Soren to snap the huntress’s neck that he had a hold of. He was curious to see where the scientific experiment would lead him. The beast released his grip on the now limp body. It plummeted three sto
ries to the ground.
But no more bones broke. Interesting. Their skeletons had been toughened—the way martial artists toughen theirs by repeatedly hitting and kicking stone columns and walls. Her five teammates on the ground—including the three that had dived down head first from the rooftops, only to slow themselves and turn in midair to land on their feet—joined their dead friend. They hadn’t come to grieve. They’d come to resurrect her. Excellent. Soren was quite keen to learn just how much their wizardry was enhancing their huntress’s abilities.
Soren scanned the dead one’s body with his mandala-magic enhanced eyes, empowering his chi abilities—allowing him to blast energy at her, even from this distance, along the entire EMF spectrum, to receive the intel he needed—all without harming his eyes.
So, the girls aren’t using nano, just magic. Without access to his spirit science they would hence be vulnerable—magic alone was not going to keep him at bay. But these ladies—they weren’t the type to be bested for long. They may well start to employ his methods to see if they could beat him at his game. Good. That was, after all, the point of this little exercise.
The words of power being uttered by their leader that had the dead huntress by the neck were creating a vibratory effect. The sound waves were coaxing the shattered vertebrae in the neck back together. As the songstress took her voice up an octave, those bones started to anneal together. One of the other girls breathed a glowing energy mist into the Native American’s mouth that completed the resurrection. The once-dead girl gasped and sprang to her feet ready to fight.
Soren jumped off the roof of the building. He landed with such force it sent cracks along the street that climbed up the sides of the building. He’d landed with the impact of a small meteor, and even their unscientific minds knew that just wasn’t possible, unless… Unless what? Maybe their small minds would be coaxed to get a little bigger pondering a solution to the quandary. Though that would come later. For right now, they were more interested in staying alive.
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