Sonia suspended her retreat and returned to her home in Lima, the Peruvian capital, on the day she received the vision that nearly split her head in two at the waterfall. And she immediately made plans to travel. Raymond was in Europe, in Budapest, and he had just taken another person's life. That was how he managed to last this long despite Sonia placing one of the most powerful hexes on him: by stealing people's bodies, something he was steadily growing more proficient in. He started his dark experiments in the seventeenth century, four hundred years ago, in London as some twisted version of the ancient art of Alchemy, an art which evolved into what is now called chemistry, now dealing only with the underlying chemical composition of the universe. Alchemy pursued a grander scope, and concerned itself with not just the physical-chemical composition but also the metaphysical, along with the spiritual. Master alchemists transplanted vital organs and did more with dead cells than modern scientists would ever achieve with their industrial microscopes and x-ray machines. It was the Roman Catholic Church, with its Inquisitions and witch hunts, condemning to death and torture anyone who so much as imagined any other spiritual theory than that drafted by a council of aging politicians who three hundred years after the Son of God had been executed, who slowly purged this purest of human arts out of existence.
But Raymond wasn't practicing alchemy. His quest for eternal life had led him into the darkest ends of the mystic arts where things not of this world dwelt. For the last four hundred years, he targeted nations with unstable governments and regular civil conflicts to take root and conduct his experiments, corrupting the lives of thousands of men, women and children. From the Nine Years War of the Grand Alliance, through to the many revolutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and found an ideal haven for his work in Europe during the First and Second World Wars. In all that time Sonia had hunted him down, seeking the evil she brought to life with her own hands. In only a single act of mercy, she doomed millions of lives, and for four hundred years she had tried to write that wrong, but Raymond was just too cunning and ruthless.
The last time she tried to kill him was during the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s. She had missed him then, and she may still miss him yet again, but she had to try. Her fate was sealed: for her role in bringing such an evil into the world, the gods cursed her to never find peace. People will keep on dying in Raymond's experiments, and she would always be responsible for it.
Sonia checked the time on the grandfather clock in one of the three living rooms in her mansion, which was no less adorned than an international art gallery, filled with sentiments from her four hundred years of entering into human civilization. But none of that appealed to her now. At exactly half-past three, her phone rang with a call she had been expecting for hours.
"Carlos," she said in crisp Spanish, "glad you could make time for me."
You could almost hear the man called Carlos wince at the other end of the line. He began to explain, but she wouldn't hear any of it.
Unable to hide her irritation, she curtly said, "I need a plane and documents to Budapest and I need it yesterday."
"Of course, My Lady," Carlos said nervously. "But may I ask your intentions, so I don't leave anything out?"
Sonia took a moment before she spoke, so she didn't shout again. It wasn't fair. Carlos was the head of her one hundred and twenty-year-old law firm which handled her finances and legal interests, though of course he wasn't that old. He was only fifty, and had managed the position only for roughly twenty years. Before then the position had been occupied by his father, and his father's father before that. And Carlos' service was just as stellar as his predecessors'.
She softly said, "I found him."
A brief silence usually passed whenever Raymond was mentioned to anybody who had even a passing knowledge of his... passions. Only the thought of him was so foul that the frail human consciousness tried to block it out at first.
When he managed to collect himself, Carlos said, "Is he in Budapest or is that just a detour?"
"He's there. I'm heading straight for him before he can leave there or grow stronger." There were other things she didn't say, like how she would be holding nothing back, which wouldn't sit well with a legal professional because there would surely be extensive collateral damage.
"I'll get down to it right away," Carlos said, "if My Lady has no other tasks for me."
She said, "That will be all", and hung up.
Sonia arrived in Budapest by four a.m the following morning and checked into a suite in a four-star hotel in Budapest, with a view of one of the most historic rivers in the world, the river Danube. It wasn't her first time in the city, though she didn't own a home here, but her memories weren't fond memories. Some of Raymond's worst atrocities were committed here, during the second world war. Tens of thousands of Jews and other ethnic minorities perished in his experiments yet he was so cunning that history never had any mention of his name, let alone his true nature. It was no wonder that he would have returned here to steal another body, but Sonia hoped that this time she could end him permanently.
But she couldn't move out at once. The sun would be out within a few hours, and Sonia wouldn't move out before dusk again. She took a shower and lay on the warm, soft rug. Her heart had been heavy for a hundred generations, but she never found it hard to fall asleep as soon as she wanted and this time was no different. She closed her eyes and sank beneath the plane of consciousness, falling back eight hundred years to her first meeting with the devil himself.
*
Sonia lived in the forest, far from the village, because she was the guardian of the entire region, and not just the village, even if she had been born of them and had lived her earliest years with friends and family, until the previous Guardian showed up unannounced and claimed that the gods had chosen her for spiritual instruction. She never spent another day in a bed since, or even inside a hut. She learned of the legends of the true origins of the universe, from the primordial chaos before time to the singular event modern people came to term the Big Bang, which occurred after another singularity, the soulfire, manifested a consciousness and sought to break free of that chaos in search of its own individual expression. It was this breaking free that caused the Bang, but the physics professors would never know that.
The soulfire was the Original, the One and the All (for it permeated through every living and non-living form in the known universe), and Sonia's teacher taught her its secrets. It was the awareness of these secrets that made her beyond human, beyond the most extreme ravages of time. When practiced as an art and exercised willfully it was flair -- no longer soulfire -- at work, for the soulfire could not be comprehended completely or contained fully by any mortal, not even those who have mastered only an inconsequential fraction of its secrets, but flair provided the next best thing. The willful and scientific study of flair made up the root of Alchemy, which became perverted by the premature minds of humans.
She heard him on her way back from the beach. The sea had washed up a wreckage and she went to inspect it but found nothing of value. On her way back she found an ox that had fractured its legs in a nearby hole and nursed it back to health.
Raymond was lying in an awkward position on the ground, stiff and dying from the venom of a snake. He was so innocent, so vulnerable, she didn't think twice before using flair to stay the flow of the poison. She carried him to the cave at the mouth of a spring she called home. He was terribly light, and not because she was terribly strong. She lay him on a soft bed of leaves and took off his clothes, then summoned a few gallons of water from the spring and washed him clean, all without touching his body, or the water. Not until it was time to take out the poison.
She performed the surgery with her bare hands, using nails that could dig through rock. It was as simple as seizing the venom through its inferior soulfire and cutting open a vein to let it out, an operation carried out so expertly that not a single drop of blood came out with the brown venom. Then she washed him again and dressed the wound, before washing his clothes and leaving him to sleep.
When Raymond woke up... actually woke up, opened his eyes and saw the rocky walls, and felt all the regular sensations of life, he cursed and started to sob, defeated. What sort of meaningless torment was he being forced to live, that he could not find death even when seeking for it? In his childhood, it had been a cultural taboo to speak of any form of misfortune because you risked calling it upon yourself. In the last two -- or three? -- He had no idea how long he had been here, but he'd cursed God numerous times before and even after washing up in this strange land. He had sought death, and had been denied countless times.
Something danced in the field of his vision and he blinked... to see, standing before him, the most beautiful creature that had ever been created.
Sonia arrived carrying a bowl of fruit, to find her patient awake. She was irritated by the way he looked at her, and only then realized that she was scantily covered. She dropped the bowl and was gone faster even than she had come in.
In the days that followed, Raymond's strength grew and his guardian grew more comfortable with him, making sure he never lacked nourishment and ensuring that he never came to any danger. The forest was teeming with ridiculously big jaguars and panthers, as well as plenty of ox big enough to feed the whole of Tripoli for a night. Each of the predators looked like they could have torn Saladin's army apart on their own, yet around Sonia, his guardian angel, they were meek as sheep. But like all good things in his life, his stay in heaven didn't last, because his angel soon wanted him gone.
Sonia had to explain to the stranger -- who called himself Raymond -- that he couldn't stay with her. She had only nursed him back to health so he could find his way back home. Raymond said he no longer had a home, and she told him if he stayed too long with her he wouldn't have a life: if any of the hunters from the village found him, he would be sacrificed to their gods in a ceremony that would involve him being flayed alive. He told her that that was preferable to living without her and she thought he was crazy. She also thought that it was the sweetest thing she had ever heard.
So she gave him a gift. A simple marble, at first glance, but she had used flair to work a spell into its soulfire, giving it the ability to manipulate space and time. He was to simply walk to the beach with the stone, think of any place he wanted to be in the world, and dive into the ocean.
She finally managed to convince him after a long time that going back was the best course of action to take and she could not have him be killed after spending all that trouble taking care of him. In fact, if he didn't leave now, she would personally throw him into the sea. He left, and she never expected him to return. But he did return, and brought with him an army.
*
Sonia woke up as the sun was dipping behind the skyline across the Danube river, of which her hotel suite got a brilliant view. She stretched off the floor she had slept on, and started to prepare. There wasn't much to arrange for. When she tried found him she would murder him with her bare hands, using a dagger if necessary. Her clothes were shorts and a vest and the coordinates were stuck safely inside her head. She could practically tell his location from the hotel, but she knew that with Raymond, finding him was a completely different matter from killing him.
She wore a black dress over her clothes with the knife strapped to the inside of her thigh. She then used a map to determine his location, using the general direction her innate radars pointed and the intensity with which she felt it. She managed to narrow his location to a forest over a hundred kilometers south of the city, along the river. And afterward, she put away the instruments and started out of the hotel.
Sonia's mind was so fixed on her objective that she didn't notice the man trying to catch her attention until she had almost knocked him out of her path. She stopped at once and sent the offender such a glare that he nearly scurried back from where he came. He had no idea how close he had to a broken neck or permanent paralysis. That was why she detested mingling in human circles: they were just too fragile.
Sonia noticed something else -- that she had terrified the young man severely and people were starting to pay attention, so she softened her features and asked him to watch his step.
He said, "Yes, forgive me ma'am", and handed her what appeared to be an invitation card. Then he assumed a formal tone and said, "My employer would like you to accompany him to the dinner party in commemoration of the engagement of --
"I'll be there," Sonia said and hurried out, then hailed a taxi and ordered it south.
*
Raymond was sitting comfortably on a couch in his Director's office while she stood still and tense before him, awaiting judgment for failing in her duty. He stared at her with narrowed eyes. It was such a pity that he was in such a glowing mood, with his current body being the best yet. Although he was also aware that even if he was otherwise annoyed he still wouldn't have punished her too much because Sheila wasn't one to fail him often. But she couldn't be let off that easily nevertheless.
Still... . "Sheila," he said, eerily calm, "I never knew you to be careless."
"It will never happen again Father," she said. "We'll recover him."
Raymond looked at her from the corner of his eye for a long time. He said, "How long has it been?" he asked.
"Three days," she said.
"So how has he remained missing for that long? Where were the guards? And the security protocols put in place to prevent such an event?"
Director Sheila couldn't give a ready answer to that question. The look on her father's face due to her extended silence was damning, but it wasn't carelessness. The boy was just the most efficient thing that had come out of their experiments since the inception of this facility. Indeed since she had begun working for her father.
Finally, she shook her head and said, "they couldn't stop him."
He stared at her.
"He belonged to the second generation of subjects," she explained. "During their infancy, all twenty of them regularly succumbed to illnesses. It was something we were already used to from earlier generations, and accordingly, for those that managed to survive into their preteen years the illnesses regressed completely, and as the years developed they developed increasingly incredible physiological abilities. There were only three survivors left before Kyle, the subject who escaped, and it would take only a few more years for any of the three to be ready for a transplant. Father, those three are unlike anything we've ever witnessed before."
"So, there are two others like him?" Raymond said.
"Yes," she replied.
"The men you have hunting him; you have faith in them?"
Sheila looked away briefly, but Raymond didn't miss the apprehension in her eyes.
"Send those two after him," he said. "It wasn't a request."
Sheila frowned. She said, "Father, they're too delicate to risk out in the field without any prior preparation."
"How much preparation did this Kyle get before making a fool of you and your entire squad?"
Sheila blushed. She didn't say that each of the three had different interests. Zorya was a cyber prodigy and consistently earned the facility millions of dollars by hacking the networks of the most secure financial institutions, Wyatt never left the medical wing and at his fourteen years regularly performed surgery with the doctors' supervision. Kyle never left the library, had could flawlessly depict any section of the world map from memory. Between the three, he was leagues ahead of Zorya and Wyatt in terms of ability to adapt to the outside world.
"Father," she said, "They'll fail."
It was Raymond's turn to frown. He said, "You have an awful lot of faith in this boy", then he abruptly rose to his feet, a gesture which made her flinch. But he calmly walked to the window and gazed out at the multiple buildings of the facility, and the calm river in the distance.
With his backsaid, "So what do you propose?"
Sheila was silent for several seconds. Finally, she said, "Let him be... for now. We're not really expecting him to forget the impulse that made him rebel in the first place. If he is captured he will still attempt to escape again. And for every man who even gets a glimpse of him out there twenty die. That's the situation as it is. So I say we leave him alone and watch how he develops out there as a sort of... case study, if you wish. That's what I think."
She waited for some kind of response for him but none came. So she concluded with, "The prospect of capturing him isn't worth the costs."
Still with his back to her, and still outwardly calm, Raymond said, "I do not agree with you, but we'll have it your way. I'm healthy now, and that's what matters most, but you better hope to Heaven that those other two survive into their twenties..." then he turned, flashing a reptilian grin, and said, "or yours will be my next body."
*
Two nights after the successful Myanmar operation, the Doctor again came to meet with Kushim at midnight with a different set of bodyguards this time. As before, when he came in he grabbed Kushim in an embrace, but while that of two nights ago came out of the excitement of seeing an old friend, this one was as a result of a gratitude too complete for the human mind to express through words. But Lucas recovered in half a minute and they followed the same ritual, Kushim serving all four drinks and both elderly men seating themselves to talk business.
Lucas began without even a mention of the last assignment and with a glance at the guys at the door, Kushim understood that that was just another spy protocol for discretion. The men at the door probably had no idea about the Myanmar operation, or about Lara.
"You thought the last op was something," Lucas began, opening a file. Kushim caught the map of a Central European city before the old man continued. "Six months ago, a group of local hunters in a small town south of a city in Central Europe went on a regular hunting trip in the forest, and never returned. Two months of searching turned out nothing, and the town reluctantly moved on. Then a group of kids went missing... ."
The Doctor paused to ensure that he had Kushim's attention. The Persian gave him a grave stare as if he knew what was coming.
"The kids were found," the Doctor said, "in bits and pieces, as if they had been attacked by some ferocious creature. The remains of all six kids fit inside a bag half the size of my briefcase."
Lucas paused again, and Kushim knew he had to say something now. "What happened?"
"After another group of people went missing from another town linked with the same forests two months ago, some men were sent in to find out," the Doctor replied. "We lost contact with that first group the instant they entered those woods, and three weeks later we sent a second group to find out why."
The Doctor drained his glass and didn't speak until he had poured himself another shot. "We sent a third group two weeks ago. In one week, I am under orders to send in something else."
Kushim said, "What's that? Me?"
Lucas chuckled sadly. "An airstrike," he said. "We're burning down the entire forest."
Kushim stared at him. For a long time. He was thinking: of how he'd heard a lot of crazy things in his unnaturally long life, and had witnessed firsthand the potent catastrophic power of human stupidity, and this one threatened to turn as bad as the worst of them. In the end, all he managed to say was, "That's crazy."
Lucas said, "The guys up there are getting nervous. They think something in those woods is hunting and eating people. The fear is caused by the fact that there may be a best there, and if nothing is done soon, we may be subject to an invasion... of sorts."
Kushim said, "And what if this airstrike doesn't solve the problem? What if the nest is still there?"
The Doctor drained his glass and said, "Listen, brother, if I could answer those questions I'd be heading down there myself. That's why I'm passing the job to you: so that those worst-case scenarios don't come to pass. You get in there, you find out what's going on down there, and you eliminate it."
Kushim nodded. "What's the play?"
"This one is more overt. You don't have any counter-intel groups to worry about. Your flight will be ready in a few hours."
The Doctor got to his feet to signify the end of the meeting. Kushim stood up to walk him out. Just as they reached the door the Doctor stopped with a start.
He said, "I forgot something. There's an event tomorrow night taking place at the Buda Palace in Budapest. The heirs of two of the country's top families are celebrating their engagement."
Kushim flashed a puzzled smile. He said, "You think some people from these families have added hunters and schoolkids to their menu?"
"Not exactly. But a lot of powerful men and women in the country will be gathering there. It won't hurt to get a feel for the vibes they give off. I was under the impression that people like you can tell when other people like you are around each other."
"It doesn't work like that," Kushim said.
"It doesn't work like that, or it doesn't work at all?" the Doctor said. The Persian shrugged, so the Doctor clapped him on the back and added, "Relax, if anyone there is messing with darkness you'll find them. If there's no one, then you can enjoy the rest of the evening hunting our monsters, eh?"
Kushim smiled at the old boy's good humor and wished him and his bodyguards goodbye. He shut the door, and went to work studying the file.
*
Sonia stopped the taxi at the side of an empty highway lane bordered on both sides by dense forest. She had to pay ten times the fare just to get the driver to shut up and forget about his concerns for her well-being, as he felt that it was an unnatural destination for such a beautiful young woman to be visiting in the dark. Then, not caring that he was still watching, she started into the woods, in her pretty black dress.
A few feet into the treeline, she peeled off the dress and shoes and set them into the bag she brought, before climbing fifty feet up a tree to stash it, before returning to the ground in an outfit better suited for battle. The knife earlier strapped to her thigh was now in her hand, and she started to hunt for her prey.
Raymond was within these woods, less than a mile directly ahead of her. She wouldn't be surprised to find a secret facility where he currently carried out his twisted experiments. She would kill him and tear the damned place down, brick by brick. Sonia was running so fast the surrounding trees were a blur, yet she didn't miss a step or even almost collide with a branch. She could see, hear, and feel nothing but the flair in the distance, which was why she didn't notice that she was being followed. Until she was nearly killed.
A sharp chill shot from the base of her spine to the nape of her neck, jolting her off balance. She somersaulted and crashed into a tree. Her durability combined with her velocity sent her through the tree like a cannonball, splitting the tree clean in two. And then through another, before her reflexes kicked in and sharply reoriented herself midnight to come to a perfect stop on the ground with a grace that would shame an Olympic gymnast.
Sonia bared the knife and looked around. To her, everything was clear as day, but it wasn't her eyes she was straining then. There was something in the woods, something dark. She couldn't tell anything about its nature, but that it was not of this world. It seemed malicious yet impersonal, like a mischievous god with a dangerous sense of humor.
She turned around slowly... searching intently. It was taunting her, moving, now here -- now there. It wasn't Raymond. Even he couldn't possibly be in consort with such darkness. Could he? No, not yet. She didn't doubt the possibility, and that frightened her -- to think that she would be responsible for bringing such an evil into the world. And then, just like that, it was gone.
Sonia looked around a bit just to make sure, but she was certainly alone. The darkness was gone. She tried to convince herself that it was soulfire from any of the numerous worlds sharing the earth's plane of reality that had leaked out onto this location. It happened occasionally, she thought, but couldn't hide the fact from herself that she was shamelessly trying to lie to herself.
A crack showed on Sonia's outward calmness as she shuddered. She almost couldn't resist the impulse to sob. Whatever was roaming these woods didn't concern her. A long time ago she had been guardian and protector of a village with the lands and seas surrounding it, but it was a faraway land, and a very long time ago. She hadn't been the guardian of anything since her people were slaughtered four hundred years ago. She had had nothing to live for but the intent to rid the world of the monster she wrought. When she killed him, she would be facing a vast future with nothing to care about, but she didn't want to think about that now. She had been hunting him for nearly three hundred years now without any luck, so it wasn't like he was automatically dead simply because she found him now.
Sonia honed in on Raymond's flair again... and this time she felt it about a hundred yards away. Which shouldn't have been possible. She hadn't been running that fast, or for that long either. But it was him, sure as she was Sonia.
Her heartbeat faster in her chest. Something strange was going on here. She stood paralyzed by uncertainty for several moments before regaining her resolve again. She needed to find him first. He would have answers. She started to run again. Two seconds later she was hit by a speeding train.
Her world went dark and the breath was driven from her. Sonia felt the chill in her spine again, and she knew right then that if she remained where she lay, she was dead. With one mighty effort, she gathered her strength and screamed, pushing with every ounce of her strength, fighting against something she couldn't even see.
She didn't know how long she fought like that,
*
Kyle was surprised to find a stranger entering the woods from the highway about a mile away. It was a woman, and before he could tell what was happening, he started to approach her.
Skillfully, of course. Like he was hunting her. He was uncomfortable with the irresistible attraction he felt for her because he knew how manipulative such impulses could be. He could make himself attractive or not with only a thought, so he knew that not all desires were pure -- or even yours.
This one was a mix. The attraction was there, but he was in complete control of his senses, which made him guess that the subject of that attraction wasn't creating the attraction on purpose. He was the one hunting her. He skirted around in such a way he approached in a wide arc, rather than straight towards her. Before Kyle knew it he was running.
Because the strange woman was no longer alone.
*
Sonia heaved in one massive lungful of air and flipped up to her feet. She had lost the knife and her head was spinning, but she was still alive and mostly unhurt. She tried to see more of her attacker than its malicious flair, but it was hard. Her vision danced in spots so that the creature was now here, now there. But it was a creature. It had form, the form of a lupine predator the size of a small elephant.
It bared its teeth and snarled, and she thought she could hear a vicious cackle in there. It knew she was finished. She had suffered a bad concussion from the earlier hit and couldn't focus. Still...
Sonia braced herself on shaky feet and drew up her hands to defend herself. She wouldn't get Raymond after all.
From ten feet away the monster lunged. It should have covered the space in less than a tenth of a heartbeat. But it didn't. A human-sized cannonball crashed into it and both catapulted in another direction. The thunderous boom of a tree being felled nearby alerted her and she turned to see two figures amidst the ruins of the fallen tree. One was the beast, stunned and senseless on the ground with only minor jerky motions showing that it was still alive. And the second figure was... Raymond?
*
Kyle got to his feet first, even though his ears were ringing. He felt like he just tackled a speeding bus head-on. It didn't feel nice.
He staggered back one step at a time, as the creature twitched where it lay, for it had taken the brunt of the charge. But Kyle didn't want to risk turning his back on it lest it proved to be faking its condition. He managed to put ten yards between them before the beast staggered to its feet. It was still hurt, but its pain was buried under a rage with an intensity Kyle wouldn't have thought possible.
Kyle resisted the urge to turn and flee for his life, convincing himself that the creature was only using its hormones to play with his mind. In turn, he decided to give like for like. He took in a deep breath and started to rapidly drop his oxytocin count... but stopped suddenly.
He turned to the woman standing ten yards away and, snapping his fingers with a quick gesture up the nearest tree, he said, "Lady, I'd get up there if I were you. This is not going to be pretty."
Kyle returned his gaze to the monster, which peered at him intently, perhaps unable to comprehend this new prey that wasn't a prey at all. With a smile, Kyle dropped his oxytocin to zero, a sort of final warning. A universal don't-fuck-with-me declaration directed at one single entity. If they hadn't been alone, every other creature present would have advised the monster to retreat only by the speed at which they would make themselves scarce.
Yet the giant wolf managed to resist, which was a shame really. Kyle would have loved to avoid taking its life, because he was just that type of person, but this was speedily turning into a mortal battle. It wouldn't quit until he was dead, and he wouldn't rest until it quit. Whether he liked it or not, one of them was going to die, and he would very much prefer for the death to not be his.
Both predators instinctively began to circle each other slowly. It wasn't the creature's fault. It had a problem: there was a hormonal imbalance in its brain which affected its ability to perceive danger properly and totally ignore all instincts of self-preservation. He couldn't even tell what gender it was because it was broadcasting its rage over everything else. It was simply a severe case of insanity. Kyle didn't want to kill it, but he wasn't a neurosurgeon, and he doubted that it would let him take it back to the facility for treatment if that was even an option.
He almost whispered an apology to the beast, because something was happening. Keeping his oxytocin so low for such an extended period induced his body to infuse another, more potent, substitute. Subconsciously, his body knew that he was playing with his hormones because he was in distress; doing it for so long meant the danger remained. So, purely in the interest of self-preservation, it manufactured something that would give him a better edge in the inevitable battle. Something like adrenaline on steroids.
The beast seemed to perceive this because it lunged at him then. Kyle followed suit in the same split-second, but his move was a feint. Just before they made contact he impossibly flipped three feet up without pivoting off any base. He timed the move to perfection: the beast was right beneath him as he completed the final arc of his turn and he drove his hand into its center mass.
With a ground-shaking crash the beast flew into the earth as if hit by a cruise missile. If that blow hadn't killed it, it didn't matter, because Kyle immediately dropped in for the kill. He landed atop the creature's limp body and grabbed its jaws in both hands. With one savage effort, he screamed like a demon possessed, ripping its jaws clean in two and not stopping till he had pulled the top half of its skull clean off the rest of its head.
*
Sonia watched everything from her perch up in the tree. Only moments earlier, the boy did something to himself that made Sonia immediately want to throw up and run away, but she managed to resist, and so she witnessed his flair devolve even further into something completely inhuman. He wasn't Raymond then, but in only a few seconds he proved to be no less of a monster.
She watched the boy destroy the creature with little effort, beheading it to ensure that it couldn't heal itself again. Then, with the threat gone, she saw something puzzling. The boy staggered off the beast's body, except that now it was turning before her very eyes, changing form, its entire physiological structure shrinking and growing less furry. Within seconds a naked headless woman was lying where a giant wolf had just been.
Meanwhile, the boy found it hard to maintain his balance. She felt his flair grow warmer, except that that warmth was soaked in fright. Even he was terrified of what he just did.
He fell on all fours and threw up. Then he collapsed and didn't move again.
It was only then that Sonia descended from the tree with her tail between her legs. She approached the boy tentatively, the effect of direct exposure to such a dynamic flair leaving a bitter aftertaste in her mouth and her mind. She stopped when she got to him and gazed down at his tiny boyish frame. The innocence on his face brought her a wave of nostalgia, and not for the first time that night her head felt heavy.
This was the same situation she had found Raymond in, eight hundred years ago, and she regretted the decision she made to heal him every moment since. But she was going to take a chance on this boy, because she owed him her life. She bent and carried him gingerly in her arms, and was shocked to find that he was sleeping quite soundly. She smiled, and started toward the highway.
*
It was a ship of sorts, made entirely of metal. Inside, a lot of work was going on, with dozens of humanoid figures clad in protective clothing working the pumps and seamless pipes and tubes in an industrial-level metal smelting process. In a higher deck were the living quarters of the ship's masters. The workers never slept, never stopped working, so they didn't need such luxuries.
R'no was a master of the ship, heading purposefully for the master of the ship, Captain Kh'n, with some distressing news. Two guards stopped him at the entrance to the captain's quarters... but only briefly, as they received instructions on whether or not to let him through, instructions which were inaudible to everyone but themselves. Moments later he was kneeling in salute in the captain's cavernous chambers with magnificent views of the grand luminescence of space, which the master shared with half a dozen fully-armored highly-trained warbeasts.
He did not know how long he was left kneeling there before Cpt Kh'n said, "Speak."
R'no said, "We lost one."
Silence followed to which R'no understood that he had erred. He corrected himself immediately: "A warbeast has been slaughtered," he said, "by an earthling."
Another silence followed. Finally, the captain said, "That's impossible."
R'no tapped on the gauntlet on his arm and a holographic image appeared before the master. R'no said, "Not until two hours ago", and played the video.
A view of a forest appeared and the image closed in to reveal a scene involving two earthlings and one of his warbeasts. They had crossed into her territory and were about to pay for that folly with their lives. It was nothing personal, simply an exhibition of natural law. What Kh'n saw in the next thirty seconds made him lose all appetite for the delicacy he was enjoying, out of view of R'no who remained behind his pleasure divan.
When he finally managed to find his voice, he said, "Bring me this earthling who murders my children."
*
The sound of fists heavily striking a punching bag filled the gym as Raymond tried to test his new body. He felt great; thanks to nanotechnology and the biochemical breakthroughs of the twenty-first century, each generation of clones was physiologically better than the last. He wanted to see how long this body would last before Sonia's curse caught up with it. The last one, which had been the best yet worked fine for twenty-three years before the curse began to tear it apart from the inside out, through multiple terminal illnesses at once. But he was getting tired. Of all of it.
Raymond needed a body immune or at least beyond the reach of Sonia and her grudge. The last three survivors of the latest breed of subjects held much promise, according to Sheila, all having pushed the boundaries of physiological reality. But between the three of them, it was the boy Kyle who was the most... complete. His escape from the facility reminded Raymond of his decision to desert the Holy War and in turn the mercy of God. But it was too early to draw conclusions. The three would have to live past their nineteenth birthdays before they would be suitable for the cognitive transfusion process he used to transfer his consciousness into another body, which was the only way he could evade the full wrath of the curse.
He heard Sheila walk in and decided to take a breather. He grabbed a bottle of water and watched her approach. She smiled and said, "How do you feel?"
"Amazing," he said. "I don't know what I'd do without you."
Raymond took the gloves off and let the sweat dry on his skin rather than use the towel Sheila handed to him. The session was over. Together they started out of the gym.
"These two," Raymond said as they walked, "Zorya and Wyatt, do they socialize?"
"Only at work," she replied. "In the IT complex or the restricted medical wing, they're each perfectly approachable in their own domain. But everywhere else, they're aggressively territorial and antisocial."
Raymond wondered for a moment and said, "We may have to change that soon." Then he changed the topic. "Isn't there anything else to do around here other than sticking people with needles and writing papers about it?"
Sheila's brows furrowed at the unusual request and she smiled. "Unless you want to play with the kids over in the civic center," she said, "I'd suggest you go take a look at the banquet taking place tomorrow at the Buda Palace."
Raymond shrugged. It was a change in routine if nothing else.