Shadow Born. James Axler
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had gone too far, committed himself to an experiment, become something that was greater than Enlil, and this was a world where none could be greater than he. He had not crossed a universe to become the second-best in his own Olympus. He was to be Zeus, the mightiest of the mighty, yet Negari dared to slap their leader in the face.
Igigi had been meant to be the servant class—never mind that Neekra was the result of Enlil’s night with one of those serfs.
“What is good for you, Father, is forbidden for me?” Neekra gasped, stretched against the wall, naked and helpless. She wouldn’t shrink, not even as vulnerable as she was now.
Enlil pressed against her. “You act as if I care what happens to you.”
Then Enlil showed Neekra exactly how much he “cared” about her, brutally, slowly grinding her cheek against the wall with his forearm as he drove into her again and again. All he was doing was stoking the fires of hatred, the hunger for revenge that would cross centuries unabated, growing only in depth of spite and disgust.
Soon, Neekra whispered into the ear of her younger self, something that did as little for the remembered image as if she’d given promises to a baby photo of herself.
The dream broke. A little bit of vision was still left in the dead eyes of Gamal, and she saw collapsed figures all about her. She’d gone to full armor in an effort to protect herself, her “piggyback brains” from being assaulted by the humans who caught on to how she’d reconfigured the man’s body to accommodate the telepathic organs, the biological computer that granted her the seemingly impossible powers necessary to shake the world.
No one around her was conscious. She tried to move, but all around her was crust; her flesh turned to ash with black, ugly sap crawling from cracks in her surface.
Don’t have long, she thought. Nehushtan will awaken the least injured with the least energy first, then tap into him.
Neekra stretched to reach for one of her spawn. Some must have been left alive.
And there were. She could feel two of them, staying deep in the rubble of crypts that had been struck by grenades and bullets. Those two hid, knowing that there would be others to come to her aid immediately. Neekra had programmed them that way, making certain she had a backup plan in case things went to crap.
They had gone beyond crap. The spark of life in the carcass she inhabited was fading fast, and as she did a mental inventory of herself, she saw the deterioration of the protein strings that made up her “telepathic antennae”—the webbing of natural materials that turned her into a living psychic transmitter, able to manipulate thought as well as cellular structure. The protein “biocomputers” also could create the telekinetic fields that gave her superhuman strength and durability far beyond even her father’s brute force at his prime.
She pushed out a blackened polyp of tar, separating cracked chunks of Gamal’s ashen corpse. Gamal had been one of the people she had been drawn to, three charismatic figures who would be attuned to her, to be her pawns. Neekra’s body was somewhere, operating on autopilot, chosen by Enlil to be the guardian of the tomb of Negari, her lover. Neekra was an excised intelligence, her lobotomized body an engine of destruction whose sole purpose was the death of anyone foolish enough to attempt a rescue of the Igigi who dared to ascend to unearned godhood.
Whether Neekra’s wandering ghost was an afterthought, or a callously calculated punishment, she knew she was a nomad. She was an infection, capable of only infesting one host at a time. To find that host, she was limited to a psyche that could handle the power of her mind and spirit; otherwise she would burn him out, but it still needed to be a mind that she could overpower.
Now, all she had for a body, for a means of travel, was the combination of two blobs of semisentient snot that she’d birthed from Gamal’s body. She could last in them for a while, but it was nothing like she could do with a host such as her last one.
She injected what little of herself was left into their cytoplasm, mixing with them, letting the two amorphous entities unite. They each had undamaged protein string centers—four, in fact—which she laced together into a matrix that could sustain her until she could recover.
With that, the blob carrying her consciousness stretched out pseudopods, latching on to imperfections on the ground, swinging itself along, making for the corkscrew that would lead her to the surface.
The light-sensitive sensory organs in the membranes of her host body cringed at the overabundance of sunlight, even though dawn wouldn’t break for another five minutes.
All she needed was to scurry to a thicket of thorns, burrow under the sand and wait.
Hiding was her only solace, at least until she could find someone, something.
And then it would be a game of catch-up.
Kane and Durga had been put on a trail now. They had been after her hiding place. There, they would subdue her body and then attempt to destroy it. But by battling her, they would loosen what bonds held Negari in place.
Doing that would free him, and if Neekra had caught up by then, she’d retrieve herself and awaken as she was meant to be.
She crawled under the graying, ever-lightening sky across the arid dirt toward the dry grasses of the tree line.
A scaled foot set down in her path.
It was Durga. He’d vowed to destroy her, and now she was vulnerable to him. The mega-cellular form she was trapped in couldn’t withstand the deadly venom he stored in his fangs. He had used enough to blind her previous avatar, but...
“Don’t cringe from me,” Durga spoke gently.
He knelt before her on the dirt and reached out, cupping her balloon-like form.
“You and I have a journey to complete,” he whispered, cooing to her as if she were a baby, scooping her up and cradling her in his arms.
“Come now, darling,” Durga said to her. “We have to find your tomb.”
Confused, weak, unable to communicate for the moment, she was wound in a blanket that prevented her from stabbing Durga’s skin with cilia, tiny little barbed stingers that could suck the blood from his flesh. The blanket protected her primitive visual stimulus organs, though, and concealed her from the burning heat of the sun.
She now rested in a bucket seat and heard the rattle then rumble of an engine firing to life. They had been in a jeep belonging to the Panthers of Mashona, the militia run by her old host, Gamal.
“Tell me where to drive, my sweet,” Durga whispered. Except it wasn’t a whisper. He was contacting her with his thoughts.
Neekra thought back to the pain and fire of the staff within her torso, a reminder of another era when the ancient artifact was used to send her to flight. When Suleiman Kahani battled the thing within the crypt after it had slain the slavers.
Neekra recognized what her father had wrought from her and recognized landmarks about her. Her battle with Kane had been the final key to remembering where she and her lover had been interred. Neekra, at Durga’s mercy, passed on that information.
She prayed that she would not regret this decision.
Kane made certain that there was nothing left down below in the necropolis. For the past two days, his friends had been prisoners down there, captives of the two beings he searched for traces of. An apocalyptic battle with one of them had ensued after her erstwhile companion seemed to turn on her, warning Kane about his plan about destroying their alliance and the avatar of their ally.
The her was Neekra, a bodiless entity who had taken possession of a militia warlord by the name of Gamal. Neekra’s power was such that she was able to turn a tall, muscular, powerful man into a crimson-skinned goddess full of voluptuous curves and able to give “birth” to amorphous spawn. Those things she created had been the basis for vampire mythology, semiliquid entities