New Olympus Saga (Book 2): Doomsday Duet (29 page)

“How about mentally? You know, after the thing with Star Eagle.”

“That. I thought we’d covered that topic back at the whorehouse.”

“How do you feel about it?”

“You’re the empath. You tell me.”

“Yeah, I’m effing Deanna Coy, Chief Counselor of the Starship
Lollypop
. Come on, Mark. I can tell you what I’m picking up, but I want to see if
you
know what you’re feeling.”

“Bad,” I said simply. “Pissed off at myself. A little scared. Oh, and pretty certain we can deal with all that shit a little bit later.” I didn’t know that I wanted to deal with any of that shit, ever. An unexamined life is so much easier to live.

“Okay, you’re right. And after the thing with the Russians at the card game, I’m beginning to understand why you feel like you do. But I guess we should wait until this is over. Okay, moving on. There was something else I wanted to talk to you about, and it’s got nothing to do with feelings.”

“Sweet. Shoot.”

“We’re probably going to be fighting some Big Bads soon. That Mr. Night, for one, and the hairy guy who almost killed John. We need all the muscle we can get.”

“And I’m a middle-weight who’s way in over his head,” I said. “I know that. I’m still coming along.” At the very least I could soak up energy blasts that might hit somebody important.

“So let me increase your powers.”

I paused. We’d joked about it yesterday. Now… Now, if the opposition was tough enough, I was going to get killed. Condor had his gadgets, and Kestrel’s healing abilities were several notches above my own. I was the weakest link. In the fight against the Guardians, I’d contributed fuck all to the cause, other than serving as a blunt weapon – for the op force. “Do it,” I said.

“Just like that?”

“I’m pretty useless right now. Even if you screw up and kill me, I’m not going to be much of a loss to the team.”

“Harsh.”

“True.”

“It’s not, but we don’t have time to argue about it. Let’s power-level you, okay? Just relax and do that self-heating trick you showed me.”

I’d been burned nearly to death a few times, and I wasn’t looking forward to a repeat performance. I did it anyway. The mental exercise Condor had taught me was simple: relax and concentrate on your body; visualize of a wave of warmth, radiating from the center of your chest out towards your limbs and head. I shut off my vision, something I could do in lieu of lowering my non-existent eyelids, and let the warmth come.

I could feel Christine’s presence next to me. She was beginning to do something to me; it felt like a cool breeze blowing through the spreading heat inside of me. Here I was, literally putting my life in the hands of someone who’d had her powers for less than a week. The technical term for what I was doing was suicide by stupidity. I almost told her to stop, that we had Janus around to provide us with muscle, that I might as well play sidekick while the big boys and gals did their thing. And then I remembered the fight at the Lurker’s cave, where Ultimate had gone down right off the bat, and where pasty-face had eaten my lunch. I couldn’t afford to play sidekick.

What the hell. No risk, no reward. Cassandra hadn’t foreseen that Christine would explode me like a water balloon hooked up to a fire hose. Everything would be all right.

It started slowly, a little tingling sensation on the edge of my fingers and toes, gradually spreading into my hands and feet, limbs, torso. It wasn’t a painful sensation, not at first, but still not something I would have chosen to feel. I opened my notional eyes. Christine’s hands were spread out to encompass me between them. They were shimmering with a vague brilliance like dust motes illuminated by sunlight coming through a window. She was looking at me with a rapt expression I’d never seen in her face before. Tears were streaming down her face and past her wide smile. She looked as happy as she’d ever been, happier than when we’d made love.

“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 sabotage 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?