*Download File? Yes No*
Sabra Indrani closed her eyes,
crossed her fingers, and then pecked out YES.
*Processing ... Processing
... Processing ...*
“Hah!” she crowed, and began
to laugh.
The sound of her laughter, like
a seal barking in her cubicle, a seal that happened
to also be half underwater and strangling on a fish,
shut her up instantly.
Had there been a mirror amid
the clutter, the sight of half her mouth drawn up in a
manic smile while the other half remained as frozen and
emotionless as the Phantom’s
mask might have killed her joy altogether, but if there
was one thing Sabra avoided, it was
mirrors.
*Processing ... ... ... ...*
She hunched closer to the screen,
eyes widening in alarm. Was this it? Was she
caught?
*Transfer Complete*
“Yes,” she breathed, and slapped
one palm against her desk.
*Next Command?*
“Don’t get cocky,” Sabra murmured.
She typed EXIT SYSTEM / NEVERWAS
Something clicked deep in her
computer, and the image on the screen reverted to
her customary operating menu.
“Now to see if it really worked.”
She popped a disk out and held it lightly
between her teeth as she used her good hand to maneuver
her motorized wheelchair to
the other side of the double-wide cubicle, where a separate
computer was waiting.
In with the disk, and on with
the headset. The microphone pressed firmly against
her skull so the bone-conduction voice recognition program
could pick up her words
without the distortion of her slurred speech.
“Read disk,” she commanded.
The green light came on, the
computer hummed in consideration ...
Sabra held her breath.
A logo appeared dead-center
on the screen. A stylized red XE. Then it vanished,
and a box came up.
XANACRYPT 1.0, PROTOTYPE VERSION
She scanned quickly through,
saw that she’d gotten it all and it was working just
dandy, and then the irony struck her. This time, she
didn’t stifle her laughter, though it
still was the strangled-drowning-seal noise.
“Success, Ms. Indrani?”
“Success, Mr. Vogel. The encryption
program is ours.”
The severe, dark-haired man
stepped into her cubicle and peered at the monitor.
“Well done, Ms. Indrani. Mr. Renard will be very pleased.”
She rolled away from the computer,
and Preston Vogel moved out of her way
with the absent-minded instinct of a man who has spent
most of his life anticipating where
the chair would end up. “Is there anything else you want
me to do as long as those
passwords are still good?”
“Not presently.” He tapped on
the keyboard, fingers flying on both hands,
leaning over effortlessly, and for one bright shining
moment, Sabra hated his guts.
The moment passed, as they always
did, and she went back to feeling low and
empty.
“I could try to get into their
RDRD files,” she offered.
“I don't think that’ll be necessary
just now.”
“Their DefNet development specs?”
Holding the disks he’d copied,
several high-speed backups of the Xanacrypt
files, he turned to her with an expression of faint exasperation.
“No, Ms. Indrani.
Currently, this is all that Mr. Renard is interested
in obtaining. You may now return to
your regular work.”
“Mr. Vogel, anyone in this corporation
can position and monitor those satellites.
It’s a waste of my skills.”
“But it is what you’re paid
for.” His tight little smile was one that she would have
dearly loved to kick into the stratosphere, but that
was a functional impossibility. “Good
day, Ms. Indrani.”
He left, and Sabra turned back
to her computer with a sigh. Minute course
corrections here, re-routing transmissions there. Seventy-five
CySkyEye satellites were
under her direct control, not to mention the two hundred
plus that she could access at
any time, belonging to everyone from NASA to Takami International.
“Waste of my skills,” she muttered.
Punching in a command that would
alert her headset if any of her satellites
needed attention and putting the rest on a basic maintenance
setting, Sabra maneuvered
out of her cubicle and down the hall to the elevators.
The first one to stop was already
more than half full of her fellow employees, so
Sabra waited. The next only had two occupants, but she
clipped one of them in the elbow
with the handbars that jutted uselessly from the back
of her chair -- no one ever, _ever_
was allowed to push her.
The man shifted into the corner
and grumbled something. Sabra couldn’t make
out the words, didn’t need to.
“Sorry,” she said, not looking
at him, more mouthing the word than meaning it.
At each successive floor, people
got on and off, cramming in, jostling each other,
a dense forest of waists and crotches and asses all at
Sabra’s eye level. A charcoal-suited
pudge-ball banged her in the head with his briefcase
as he pushed to the front, knocking
her wig askew.
She pawed it back into place.
Finally, the elevator reached the top floor and she
rolled out into the antechamber.
It was a room of sharp angles,
the ceiling rising like the hollow inside of a cluster
of crystals, all of glass. Sabra always thought of Superman’s
Fortress of Solitude when
she came in here. Glass walls, glass ceiling -- a literal
one in this company, instead of the
figurative ones in so many others -- polished grey granite
floor speckled with black and
silver, and a collection of statues. Roman and Greek,
all generals and senators and
centurions instead of gods or goddesses. All original,
many of them chipped or broken.
Sabra’s wheels squeaked on the
granite, then whispered across a gold-edged
royal blue carpet. Why not emperor-red? she wondered
sourly. Why not Vatican purple?
At the far end of this room
was a shiny black desk twenty feet long and curved
in a near-complete circle, with three computers, ten
phones, and six intercom boxes lined
up on it like soldiers.
Vickie Spears was five feet
nothing, wire-thin, and quivered with the energy of a
cheetah on speed. She was the only employee allowed to
wear running shoes on the job,
and when she wasn’t actually running, she was zipping
her chair on its well-oiled casters
from one side of the desk to the other, fast as a greased
cobra.
A good thing, too, because Sabra
had never seen Vickie’s desk without at least
three phones and two intercoms going all at the same
time.
Still, Vickie waved briskly
and beckoned Sabra over, not missing a word in her
conversation. She talked like the man from the FedEx
commercials, was always twiddling a
pen or pencil in her free hand (if she had one), and
as she concluded that call, she brought
both legs up, braced her feet on the edge of the desk,
and shoved so that she cruised
clear across the circle and seized, without looking,
the next ringing phone as she came to a
halt.
Sabra loathed her.
When she got a breather, Vickie
turned her flashbulb smile -- dazzling then gone
-- on Sabra. “Help you?”
“I’d like to see Mr. --”
“Renard?” Vickie finished for
her impatiently.
“If he’s --”
“Available? Let me check.” Zoom!
Across to the red intercom, as if it led to the
President or NORAD instead of into the boss’ sanctum
sanctorum. “Mr. Renard? Sabra
Indrani from SatCon is here, if you have a minute ...
sure, will do!” Again with the
flashbulb smile. “You can go right in.”
“Thank you.” Sabra rolled toward
the doors, wondering how many other lowly
peons could come up without an appointment and have a
word with the great man. Not
many, she suspected.
Professional courtesy, cripple
to cripple, she thought bitterly.
The doors had a motion sensor
like at the supermarket. They were as shiny black
as Vickie’s desk, trimmed in silver with the Cyberbiotics
crest in the middle. The crest split
as the doors opened, and Sabra entered.
In here, the glass/glossy/shiny
look had been abandoned in favor of teak so
heavy you could hear it groan. The ceiling was done in
Italian frescos. Bronze shields,
shortswords, and helmets with arched bristle-brush plumes
hung behind the desk. One
entire wall was given over to monitors, so that Halcyon
Renard could keep watch over
every corner of his kingdom.
He was in front of them now,
in his state-of-the-art chair that was so much nicer
than her own ... why, it did everything but knit him
a sweater and give him a pedicure, and
as she couldn’t really see his feet inside the bullet-shaped
enclosed front end, she wasn’t
that sure about the pedicure.
A shrunken, wizened scarecrow
of a figure. Lank ivory-yellow hair in patches on
his liverspotted scalp. Bony claw-hands. Skin like ancient
parchment. He didn’t seem so
much aged as mummified.
And if not for her wig, people
could have confused the two of them from the rear.
Even from the front, in poor lighting.
“Miss Indrani,” he said, his
voice at once strong and cracked, old and powerful.
“Always a delight. Congratulations
on successfully ... acquiring that program. It will give
Cyberbiotics a substantial edge in the market, and a
correspondingly substantial bonus
for you.”
“Mr. Renard, I’m sorry to bother
you, but I don't think my skills are being used to
their fullest capacity,” she said.
“No? Miss Indrani, you just
penetrated one of the most labyrinthine security
systems on the face of the planet. You don't find that
enough of a challenge to your
skill?”
“I do, but now it’s done.”
“Ah, I see.” The skin of his
hands rasped together as he steepled his fingers.
“You’re not satisfied with your current work.”
“It’s not that --” was he going
to fire her? “-- it’s just that I feel I could be doing
so much more. For the benefit of the company.”
Renard looked at her for a long
time, his eyes diamond hard. Sabra was sure
she’d blown it, he was going to tell her to turn in her
keycard and good-bye.
“I don’t think it’s your job
you’re unsatisfied with,” he said instead, after that
long scrutiny was done. “Isn’t it?”
“I enjoy working here,” she
affirmed.
“It’s yourself. Your health,
your physical condition.”
She blanched, but coming from
him, it was more all right than it might have been
coming from someone else. A little bit.
“Believe me, Miss Indrani, I
know the feeling. I once thought that I would do
anything, anything, mind you, to be free
of this chair. Of this weak, old, dying body.”
Sabra nodded as fervently as
she could.
“But let me tell you something.
For a time, I got that wish. Not in the way you
might think; I’ve gone flatline more than once and there
is nothing to report, no tunnel
rushing toward a grand loving light, no dear ancestors
calling in welcome, no pearly
gates, not even --” here he chuckled dryly, “-- not even
the flicker of fire and brimstone.
No, I’m talking about something else.”
“Mr. Renard, I don’t think I
understand.”
He steered closer, and patted
her arm with one clawlike, reptilian hand. “I’ll tell
you about a time I had a new chance at life and strength,
and how I came to see that it was
better to be myself, be true to myself, and not let my
honor and dignity be corrupted by
mere physical power.”
* *
June 6th, 2000
Tuesday, 9:30 AM
“Do you mean to tell me,” David
Xanatos said in a tone of carefully controlled
fury, “that six weeks before we were due to release it,
Cyberbiotics came out with their
own version?”
“It’s nearly identical
to ours!” The gravely mis-named Don Vaughn, Head of
Product Design, threw a software box on the table. CYBERCRYPT,
the box read.
“It is ours,” Owen Burnett
informed Xanatos. “In all but the most minor and
insignificant details. Our product, stolen, changed slightly,
and marketed.”
“That wily old son of a bitch!”
Xanatos exclaimed, not without a bit of
admiration. He fixed Vaughn with a heated glare. “Someone
on your team --”
“No!” Vaughn protested. “No
one on the team would violate their contract oath;
I’d stake my life on it! The system must have been infiltrated
from the outside.”
“Impossible,” Xanatos said flatly.
He looked back at Owen. “Have we had any
staff turnover in that area in the past six months?”
Owen shook his head.
“Investigate it,” Xanatos told
him. “If it’s not an ex-employee, it must be a
current one. I want to know how, who, and what kind of
incentive plan they were offered
that made it worth risking pissing me off.”
“Yes, Mr. Xanatos sir.”
“I’m telling you --” Vaughn
began, then shut up.
“We’ll get to the bottom of
this,” Xanatos said. “You can go back to your office,
Don; Owen will be in contact with you if he needs anything.”
Once Vaughn had left, he
added, “Start with him.”
“Of course.”
“Before you go, any other bad
news from my competitors to further wreck my
day?”
“Nightstone Unlimited announced
yesterday that they expect to have their
energy-bending stealth body armor ready to release within
a year.”
“Spiffy. How close are we?”
“Not close at all.”
“Well, Owen, I tell you what.
If Mr. Vaughn turns out to be right and it _was_ a
case of outside infiltration, I want you to find out
who did it --”
“And implement the usual strategy,
sir?”
“Exactly.”
* *
June 30th, 2000
Friday, 7:10 PM
“Sabra! I’m so glad you could
make it!” Robyn Canmore opened the door
wearing a teal-blue silk blouse over snug white pants
that showed off her figure to
excellent advantage. “Most everyone else from the P.T.
group is here already.”
Sabra smiled noncommittally
and wheeled herself into the apartment. “Nice
place.”
“We’re very happy. It’s smaller
than the old house, and there’s no pool, but the
morning light is perfect for Jason’s studio.”
“He’s still painting?”
“A gallery over on 54th Street
is going to do a show of some of his pieces next
month. Isn’t that exciting?”
Sabra put on her brakes and
indicated one of the compartments on the side of
her chair. “There’s a bottle of wine in there ... a housewarming
gift.”
“Thank you!” Robyn crouched
with supple ease and found it.
The penthouse apartment was
of the style in which one large space was divided
into rooms more by arrangement of furniture than by walls.
The only closed doors were
those leading into the bathroom and bedrooms. Robyn was
right, it was a lot smaller, and
with half a dozen wheelchairs crammed into the living
area, it was crowded as well.
Nice of Jason to invite the
cripples, Sabra thought. Shows he’s not thinking he’s
better than us now that he can walk again. Or does he
feel obligated, guilty, because he
can and we can’t?
She wove through traffic, greeting
the people she knew (mostly her fellow
physical therapy sufferers, gathered in a clump over
by the windows and looking as self-
conscious and out of place as Sabra felt; them, and Preston
Vogel, who stuck so close to
Robyn’s side they might as well have been handcuffed
together).
Small world.
Where was Jason, anyway?
Oh. There.
Damn.
Why’d he have to be so gorgeous?
He’d joined the group four years
ago, already well-built, and his arms and
shoulders and chest and back had only gotten more impressive
from propelling his
wheelchair, from swimming, from hauling the deadweight
of his lower body. Once he got
back the use of his legs, sheathing them with slabs of
muscle again, he was amazing.
Too young for her, anyway. Too
young by about fifteen years. Even if she
could walk and move, even if she still had her looks,
she’d be too old for him.
But still ... damn.
That dark hair, those riveting
turquoise eyes, that smile ...
Would it have killed him to
stay in his chair? To stay a paraplegic? To stay, in
a word, accessible?
Pointless dreaming. What good
would it do her if they were both in their chairs?
She would still be too old for him, and her age would
be the least of her problems. The
man wasn’t blind.
The doorbell rang again, and
Jason went to answer it himself this time. He came
back with a striking toffee-skinned brunette, and just
by the way they stood together,
Sabra knew there had been a time when they’d been involved.
Not anymore; their faces
both wore that could-have-been look that she was sure
they were unaware of.
Still, whether it had been or
not, whether it was over or not, it sent a stab of bitter
jealousy into Sabra. Totally unjustified, stupid jealousy.
There was no dancing. Diplomatic
Robyn Canmore would have made sure of
that. Let’s not torture the cripples. Like waving food
in front of a starving person. So no
dancing ... but Sabra could see how feet tapped in time
with the music, how they
wanted to dance but sublimated their irritation
at the guests who made it impossible.
As soon as the last wheelchair had gone out the door,
Sabra was sure the furniture would
be pushed back, and the music would be cranked.
Oh, damn, was it so much to
ask?
She recalled what Mr. Renard
had told her last February. While most of her mind
dismissed it as utter bushwah -- golems, please, did
he really expect her to believe that? --
she kept coming back to the moral of the story.
Be yourself, be true to yourself,
honor and dignity ...
Easy for Renard to say. He’d
had a life before ending up in his chair. A wife, a
family, the luxury of walking and dancing and making
love.
He hadn’t had his life begin
and end on the same terrible night ...
* *
May 16th, 1978
Saturday, 8:15 PM
“Oh, Sabra, we are so proud!”
Her mother hugged her, then stepped back and
smoothed Sabra’s hair, which was waist-length and the
color of coffee without cream.
Her father smiled and nodded.
“You will go to college, to medical school, become
a great doctor, join my practice --”
“Dad!” Sabra laughed. “I just
graduated! I will do all those things --”
“Get married to a good young
man, have beautiful babies,” Gayle Indrani put in.
“Mom! That too, that too, but
tonight is my night, and if I don’t get out there,
Danny’s going to think I changed my mind! The party starts
at eight-thirty.”
“Have fun,” her mother said.
“Be careful,” her father added.
“I don’t know if I like you going to a bar. You’re
only eighteen.”
“The bar’s closed tonight, Dad.”
She checked her lipstick in the mirror. “We’re
just going to dance and drink soda, I swear.”
“If anyone sneaks alcohol in
--”
“I won’t drink any,” she promised.
“And if Danny does, I won’t let him drive me
home. I’ll get LeAnne to give me a ride, or I’ll call
you.” She smiled playfully. “If you’d
given me a car for graduation ...”
Halim Indrani laughed. “Maybe
when you graduate from college.”
She hugged them both, kissed
her mother on the cheek, and hurried out as
Danny honked for the third time. Her hair swung against
the back of her short white dress,
the skirt swishing around her lean thighs -- she still
couldn’t believe Dad let her out of the
house wearing it; he must have realized after seeing
her in her cap and gown that she
wasn’t a baby anymore -- her platform shoes glittered
silver in the headlights as she ran
around Danny’s car and slid into the passenger seat.
Danny leaned over and kissed
her. “Hey, Sabra, want to skip the party?”
“What? But everybody’ll be there!”
“That’s why!” he said with a
wink. “Everybody’d be there, so we’d have the
Lookout all to ourselves!”
“Danny Clark, I am not going
to spend my graduation night parked at the end of
Swamp Creek Road watching out for alligators and mosquitoes.”
“Aw, come on, Sabra, the only
thing you’d have to worry about biting you is
me!”
“Maybe later. Right now, I want
to dance!” She turned on the radio and found
the Bee Gees just ending, followed by her all-time favorite
song (this month at least), ‘Oh
What a Night.’ Sabra sang along, rocking her hips and
shoulders.
“Have you told your dad you
want to become a dancer instead of a doctor?”
“No ... I’m still trying to
figure out if I can be both.”
Danny roared with laughter.
“Surgeon by day, disco-mama by night!”
“Danny, a dog!” Sabra shrieked,
pointing.
“Shit!” He swerved, and then
things happened very fast.
She heard herself screaming
and babbling in the dizzy, spinning confusion.
“Danny what was that bang did a tire
blow slow down stop the car I’m going to be sick
look out for the truckthetruckthetruck!”
* *
September 11th, 2000
Monday, 1:30 PM
“Coffee, Ms. Indrani?”
“No, thank you,” she said to
the man who looked uncannily like a blond Preston
Vogel.
“Mr. Xanatos will be along shortly.
He’s very interested in meeting you.”
Sometimes she was almost grateful
for the paralysis in the right side of her face;
it prevented her from revealing her emotions. Interested
in meeting her? Yes, Sabra just
bet he was ... he couldn’t have proof or he would be
formally pressing charges,
wouldn’t he, but he had to be up to something, men like
him always were.
“I’m interested in meeting him,
too.”
“Have you been with Cyberbiotics
long?”
“Don’t you know?” she countered.
The corners of Owen Burnett’s
eyes crinkled in faint amusement. “As a matter of
fact, I do ... you’ve been with Mr. Renard for ten years
and four months. Prior to that, you
were at Futuretech in Sacramento, California. Three years
and two months. Before that,
Stanford and postgraduate work at MIT.”
“And before that?” Sabra challenged
him with her gaze.
He remained unfazed. “The Deschutes
Rehabilitation Center in New Orleans,
Louisiana; the Villejeune Community Hospital in Villejeune,
Florida; DeLeon Junior/Senior
High School in Fontagna, Florida ... need we go on?”
“No. What’s this about, Mr.
Burnett?”
“As I said, Mr. Xanatos is interested
in meeting you.”
“Very true. Thank you, Owen.”
David Xanatos said.
Sabra’s throat clenched as Xanatos
came in. Trying to put him on the defensive,
she exerted the effort to heft the twisted thing that
was her right arm.
He clasped the gnarled lump
of flesh at the end of it with no outward reaction.
“A pleasure, Ms. Indrani. A lovely name ... Indian, I
believe?”
Sabra dropped her arm back into
her lap, not really sure what had just happened.
“Yes. It means ... goddess of the sky.”
“How ...” he glanced at Burnett
as if they shared some private joke. “Fitting.”
“Pardon me if this is a rude
question, Mr. Xanatos, but what’s this all about?”
He sat down, and Burnett withdrew
to a discreet corner. Like Vogel, he seemed
part administrative assistant, part butler.
“Ms. Indrani, you might assume
that I’ve asked you here to discuss the
XANACRYPT files.” He shrugged, a devilish gleam lighting
his brown eyes. “Spilled milk.
I will admit to some curiosity about how you got through
our security programs, but
that’s also neither here nor there. The main reason I
wanted to speak with you was to let
you know that a position has recently opened up in our
Investigative Planning
Department --”
Sabra’s strangled-seal laugh
barked forth unexpectedly. “You ... you have a
department dedicated to stealing from your competitors?”
He smiled. “Just one more area
in which Xanatos Enterprises is still leading the
field.”
“And ... correct me if I’m wrong,
but you’re offering me a job?”
“I’ve reviewed your personnel
file and it is plain to me that Mr. Renard is not
utilizing your abilities to their full potential. Further,
while his salary plan is in the upper
range for the industry, I think you’ll find that ours
is at the very top.”
The left side of her mouth worked
silently. When he named a figure, it fell open
altogether, and she was oblivious to the twinge as scar
tissue stretched in an
unaccustomed manner.
“In addition,” Xanatos went
on, as if he hadn’t boggled her enough, “while
Cyberbiotics is one of the top companies developing robotics
and computer sciences,
here at Xanatos Enterprises, we have a much wider range.”
He paused enticingly. “Such
as cybernetics, genetic engineering, and some of the
most advanced medical technologies
on the planet.”
Sabra still couldn’t answer,
torn between wanting to call him a bastard for what
he was doing and wanting to grab the offer before he
changed his mind.
He leaned back and waited.
Finally, she found her voice.
“If you have these ... medical technologies, why
haven’t I heard of them?”
“They’re still very much in
the experimental stages.” He rolled his eyes in a ye-
gods-how-I-must-suffer manner, though not directed at
her. “You know how slow they
are to approve anything these days. My scientists could
invent a cure for cancer
tomorrow, but the FDA would still dawdle and drag its
feet and let every petty bureaucrat
and lobbyist have their say, while people kept dying.
But within our own company, we
tend to be a little more flexible. Our employees have
access to all manner of advances long
before they’re made available to the general public.”
“What about your family?” She
knew it was risky, poking him when he could get
mad and snatch away the brass ring he was dangling before
her, but she wanted to see if
she even could poke this supremely confident man. “Like
... say ... your father-in-law?”
Xanatos’ laugh was rich and
warm. “Believe me, Ms. Indrani, I would gladly put
the resources of my medical team at my father-in-law’s
disposal ... but his pride interferes.
Halcyon is a brilliant man and a resourceful man, but
a stubborn one.” He smirked. “I
guess it’s true; women choose husbands who remind them
of their fathers.”
Sabra, who only understood that
Mr. Renard would die of starvation rather than
take a peanut-butter sandwich from his arrogant son-in-law,
hitched her left shoulder in
the closest she could come to a shrug. “That could be.
I appreciate the offer, Mr. Xanatos,
but you have to realize that this isn’t something I can
decide right now.”
“Of course not. If you’d like
a tour, Mr. Burnett would be happy to oblige.” He
grinned. “You’re already familiar with our computer network,
so you may as well get a
look at the rest of the place.”
“Yes, I’d like that.”
“Very good. Owen?”
“Right away, Mr. Xanatos.”
Five minutes later, she found
herself driving her humming chair down a long hall
which was tinted glass (and heart-stopping view straight
down on Manhattan) on one
side and textured black wallboard on the other. The wallboard
was decorated with abstract
paintings in bold colors; to Sabra, they looked like
the sort of thing a talented but hurried
child might do, but she realized they were probably worth
millions and she was too
ignorant to know it.
Owen Burnett walked beside her,
never seeming to need to alter his pace or
giving the impression that she was going too slow or
too fast to suit him.
“You worked for Cyberbiotics,”
she said.
“Yes, though I left Mr. Renard’s
employ in 1987,” he replied evenly.
“Does your boss make a habit
of taking things away from Mr. Renard?”
“I wouldn’t call it a habit.”
“What would you call it?”
He pressed the elevator button,
then turned to her with a small quirky smile. “A
hobby.”
* *
November 15th, 2000
Wednesday, 10:20 PM
“No!” Aiden gasped. “You’re kidding!”
“Would I kid about that?” Lexington
swiveled his stool in a fast circle. “It’s so
great, we’ve got to see them! Ultimate coolness!
Tell her, T.J.!”
Aiden looked dubiously to the
sandy-haired young man rooting through the
fridge in the clans’ suite. He’d probably never be comfortable
around most of the
gargoyles, she thought, but at least when it was her,
or Lex, or Brooklyn, he did okay.
Especially with Lex, after they’d teamed up to solve
the Ventura riddle last month.
T.J. straightened up with a
couple of sodas and tossed one to Lex. “Aiden? You
want?”
“I’ll pass on the soda, I want
to know if Lex is pulling my tail.”
“I’ll do that later,” Lex promised,
skittering his fingers down her back.
She eeked and smacked at him.
“Well, T.J.? This better not be just a tired old
Internet rumor!”
“No, swear.” He tried to make
the scout’s honor gesture, botched it into a heavy
metal sign, and ended up with a half-assed ‘live long
and prosper’ before giving up and
shoving his hand in his pocket. “I saw it myself. She
really did, that creepy troll-woman --”
“T.J.! That’s mean!” Aiden cried.
“Sorry, but she is. Half
her head one big scar ... like the Phantom of the
fuckin’ Opera or something. Anyway, yeah, she got into
the ILM computer and
downloaded designs for all the ships in the next movie.
She’s working on getting the
aliens now.”
Aiden tipped her head doubtfully.
“Really?”
“Really! I told you! Sheesh,
you won’t believe your own mate --” Lex began.
“My own mate was convinced Gillian
Anderson was going to play a female
Jedi,” she said archly. “That one died on the vine, didn’t
it?”
“Well, okay, maybe I was impulsive.
But this came right from their own
computers!”
“Why’d she do it, anyway?” Aiden
asked. “I can’t imagine that’s going to help
Mr. Xanatos’ company any.”
“Shake the gravel out of your
brain, lovebunny!” Lex cried, grinning like a prime
doofus.
“Lexington!” She blushed nearly
Angela-colored. “Don’t call me lovebunny! I’m
warning you!”
T.J. smothered a laugh when
she snapped her crested head around to look at
him.
“Sorry,” Lex said, sounding
anything but. “Anyway, try this on for size --
Xantasia IV!”
“Oh! Oh, that wouldn’t be nice
at all! Steal the designs and put them into a video
game before the movie even comes out? That’s terrible?”
“I hate to break it to you,”
T.J. said, “but we work for a terrible dude, remember?”
“Though they’d sue his butt
off,” Lex said. “Or try, anyway. That’d be a
showdown, wouldn’t it?”
“But she didn’t do it for Mr.
X.,” T.J. went on. “She did it because Jimmy
Pransky bet her she couldn’t.”
“Pransky? The guy with the Sith
Lords tattooed on his back?”
“That’s the guy,” Lex said.
“Hey, have you seen his tattoo?”
“Yes.” Aiden made a face. “They
look anorexic. I thought we were obsessed,
but he makes us look tame.”
“This coming from the female
with an Obi-Wan
Is Hot website,” Lex commented.
“You know that’s really Birdie’s!”
Aiden protested. “It’s just on my site because
she doesn’t have one!”
“That story on there is disgusting,”
T.J. said.
“So disgusting he read it like
five times,” Lex said in a theatrical aside.
“There’s something not right
about fictional characters doing it,” T.J. continued.
“That woman who wrote it must be sick in the head.”
Aiden cleared her throat and,
blushing anew, tried to turn the conversation back
to more suitable paths. “Anyway, why’d Jimmy make that
bet? Besides because he’s a
slobbering rabid fanpuppy?”
“Because he was the hot
hacker stud around here until she showed up,” Lex
said. “He wanted to see the new girl try and fail, so
he could hang onto his title.”
“I thought you were the
hot hacker stud,” T.J. said.
“You know how Jimmy got hired
here?” Lex asked.
“No, how?”
“Went into the Human Resources
computers and added himself to the payroll,
then just showed up for work one day and said he’d lost
his keycard. They scanned his
thumbprint, found it was already in there, and issued
him a new one. He was here two
weeks before Xanatos figured it out.”
“Pretty slick,” T.J. admitted.
“But even he couldn’t get into ILM. It took
Sabra, what, six days? Doing it on
her lunch breaks and after work?”
“Something like that.”
“Is it just me, or is that a
little scary?” Aiden wondered.
“Everything about her is a little
scary,” T.J. said. “And no, don’t jump down my
throat about it, it’s not just because she looks like
Quasimodo’s bastard half-sister. I just
don’t ... hell, I don’t know. I’ve got --”
“-- a bad feeling about this!”
Lex and Aiden joined in.
“Trust your feelings,”
Aiden added in a ghostly voice.
“Quit, you guys. I get that
‘follow your instincts / trust your feelings / use the
Force’ crapola from Puck and Alex ten days out of the
week; I don’t need it from you
too!”
* *
December 26th, 2000
Tuesday, 5:30 PM
“Hey, Sabra!”
She looked up. “Hi, Jimmy.”
“Whatcha doing?”
“Going over my first-quarter
review.”
“So, they going to keep you
on?”
“Seems like.”
He grinned. “Good. I like the
competition. Hey, are you braving the snow or
crashing in the dorm with the rest of us?”
“My ride called to cancel. They’re
snowed in.”
“Them and half the city. So
you’re staying?”
Sabra gestured to her chair.
“How far do you think I’d get on my own?”
“Oh, yeah.” Jimmy Pransky scuffed
his feet self-consciously. “Well, anyway,
we’re going to make a party of it. Kayla from Accounts
Payable is making chili, Walt
Traynor from RDRD is making margaritas, and we’re going
to have a classic-Trek film
festival. Wanna come?”
Sabra’s innards coiled at the
very idea. “Thanks, Jimmy, but I’ll pass. Spicy food
and alcohol are no-nos. I’ve got some things I want to
catch up on here.”
“Why are you still working?
It’s after five, all the management people have the
week off for the holidays, and the big boss is out of
town. Relax a little!”
“I’ve got to stay sharp if you
want that competition,” she said. “Remember, I’m
still trying to get a handle on the computer system.”
“Shyah, right!” he scoffed.
“Like you don’t know everything already. Okay, but
if you change your mind, we’ll be in the dorm lounge.”
“Okay.”
He left, and Sabra turned back
to her desk with a sigh of relief. Why did all the
cutting-edge companies have to be staffed by overgrown
kids whose biggest concerns
(barring the poor social skills that tended to go hand-in-hand
with a career in the tech
industry) were when the next version of Quake was going
to come out and where they
could find nude pictures of Lucy Lawless on the Internet?
Her quarterly review was on
top of a thick manila folder. Now that she’d been
with Xanatos Enterprises for three months, she was eligible
for the advanced health plan.
She opened the manila folder and began reading over the
options that the considerate Mr.
Burnett had carefully highlighted for her.
This couldn’t be right!
Damn it, what was this, some
sort of a joke? There was nothing on here that
hadn’t been on her previous plan. Up to and including
acupuncture, hypnosis, and drug
therapy.
“Where’s the rest of it?” she
murmured.
Acupuncture wasn’t going to
fix her legs. Hypnosis wasn’t going to let her get
rid of the catheter that fed into a concealed tank in
the base of the chair. Drug therapy,
okay, fine and well, she’d made sure to refill her painkiller
prescriptions before leaving
Cyberbiotics but was starting to run low; it was good
to know she’d still be covered. But
this was not what she’d been led to expect!
Where were all the things they’d
told her about? Nerve replacement treatment?
Regenerative tissue compounds? Genetic reconstruction?
Cybernetic enhancements?
Exoskeleton brace-frames with neural interfaces?
At the bottom of the last page
was an asterisked footnote in very small type.
Sabra couldn’t decipher it even when she leaned close,
so she slapped it on her scanner,
enlarged the image, and read it aloud.
“Employees who have been with
the company for a year or more are eligible for
the Deluxe Care Plan ...”
A year or more!
She snatched the paper off of
the scanner glass and crunched it in her clumsy
fist. A year or more! And what might the Deluxe Plan
offer? Suppose it only covered
marijuana for medical purposes, and had a footnote about
how those who’d been here
five years or more could get the Ultimate Care
Plan?
“Don’t you people care I’m dying
here?” she moaned to the ceiling tiles.
Either the scent of chili had
gotten into the ventilation ducts or she was
hallucinating it. So damn good, but she knew the agony
she’d be in if she ate even a few
bites.
No caffeine. No spicy foods.
No alcohol. No citrus. No carbonated beverages.
No grease. Minimal sugar. Minimal seasonings.
With a miserable cry, she slammed
her left fist against her thigh. The pain, which
had been at its usual low-key drone, woke and began snarling.
Like an animal. Like a bear.
Like a bunch of bears, disturbed in their caves. Only
in this case, their caves were her
bones. Pelvis, femurs, the crookedly-stacked disks of
her spine.
She relaxed her fist and let
the crumpled paper fall to the floor. Closing her eyes,
feeling the hot trickle of tears down her left cheek,
she concentrated on her breathing and
tried to will those bears back into hibernation.
Eventually, it worked as well
as it ever did, and she was able to steer her chair
into the attached bathroom and dab cold water on her
face. She paused by the door,
listening to the hush of the hall now that everyone had
either gone home or taken the
elevator down to the ninety-eighth floor, where the dorm
and lounge were located.
The last thing she wanted right
now was company. Instead of seeking out her
co-workers, she went back to her computer and did just
what she’d told Jimmy she was
going to do, delving deeper into the complicated web
of Xanatos Enterprises.
Every now and then, she ran
into a strange blockage or dead end. Intrigued, she
began working at one of them, puzzling around the edges.
Interesting that there would be
things Xanatos would keep so well-guarded, even from
his own Investigative Planning
Department.
Some of the first things she
uncovered were related to the gargoyles, and Sabra
nearly yawned. Gargoyles. Big deal. Really, who cared?
Not her, that was for certain. She
figured she got more appalled looks from the citizens
of Manhattan than even the most
hideous of gargoyles.
Ah, but this stuff about cloning
... that was a little more interesting. Especially
the part on brain-taping. No help to her, but interesting
all the same.
Next, she learned about the
mutates and the upgraded Pack. She got into the
video record library and found each step in the proceedings
captured for posterity in
gruesome detail.
Why would those people, perfectly
healthy and exceedingly fit even before,
need or want that done to them?
Same reason, probably, that
perfectly healthy and fit people wanted plastic
surgery, hair weaves, and liposuction. They were too
damn stupid to realize how good
they already had it.
She watched the videos again,
shivering at the expressions of the subjects as
they put themselves through sheer hell for no reason.
Oh, she was tired, she ached,
but she couldn’t face going down to the ninety-
eighth floor. Couldn’t face dealing with the pitying-but-trying-not-to-show-it
attitudes of
the other snowbound staff. Preferable to put it off and
stay here. Even if she fell asleep in
her chair. She’d done it before, and the soreness that
would clutch her spine after a night
spent sleeping upright would be better than the grueling
task of trying to get her chair
into one of those little rooms, get herself into a narrow
bed, and the rest of it.
“Hello, what have we here?”
She’d clicked by mistake.
The video showed a room set
up like a small private theater, full of gargoyles and
people (and one mutate, she noticed). Including Xanatos
himself, and ... was that Owen
Burnett with his tie bound around his head?
They looked half-drunk and jovial.
A light came up onstage, sensual music
spilled from the speakers on either side of her monitor,
and Sabra’s jaw dropped as she
found herself watching a female gargoyle doing a striptease.
Indigo skin and miles of
golden hair and a body like a work of art, reveling in
her own sexuality and the power she
wielded over the thunderstruck audience.
Sabra groaned harshly and lashed
out at the monitor. She struck the on/off
switch, plunging the screen into blackness, but the music
kept winding its way into her
ears, so erotic and compelling, the kind of music that
demanded the body sway to its
primal rhythm. Yet when her own body tried to do so,
the pain snarled up her back again.
She turned off the speakers,
waited ten minutes, and turned them back on. Now
there was only silence. When she reactivated the monitor,
the video clip had come to an
end and she was looking at the menu again.
Ah, there ... she’d clicked
on something named godiva_bachparty.
Godiva. That made sense. All
she needed was the white horse and the peeping Tom.
Wait ...
She went back to the stuff she’d
found about the gargoyles. They were all listed
alphabetically in the security protocols, the sensors
that were supposed to compare any
incoming gargoyle with the ones already registered to
prevent unauthorized guests.
Hudson ... Gabriel ... Goliath ... but no Godiva.
Not one of the clan, then ...
and she thought she remembered seeing that name
elsewhere in her electronic wanderings. She did a quick
search, and found it in the RDRD
section.
RDRD?
That didn’t make sense ... what
would a gargoyle stripper have to do with
Robotics Division Research and Design?
Uh-oh, that one wouldn’t open
without a password.
Sabra thought for a moment,
typed COVENTRY, and chuckled bitterly to herself
as it opened up nice as you please. Her chuckle died
on her lips as she began to read what
was on the screen.
* *
January 8th, 2001
Monday, 9:45 AM
“I’ve reviewed the phone records,
Mr. Xanatos, and she did not call in sick,”
Owen said.
Xanatos rested his elbows on
his desk and curled his hands in front of his chin.
“It’s not like her to be late.”
“No, her attendance and punctuality
have been exemplary.”
“Did you contact the CareVan
people?”
“I’ll do so immediately.” He
flipped up the top of his Rolodex.
While Owen did that, Xanatos
skimmed the log entries for the past few days to
see if there was anything needing his attention.
He and Fox had spent the weekend
in San Diego, a much-needed mini-vacation
of their own after spending the holidays at Dad’s place
in Maine. Three days of mild
seventy-degree temperatures and sunshine had taken away
the winter blahs.
But from the moment he’d set
foot in the building late last night, he’d had the
disquieting feeling that something strange had happened
while he’d been away.
Nothing in the logs supported
it. Except for one missed entry, 7:00 Saturday
evening, all of the log notes were made right on schedule
and contained nothing
remarkable.
Owen hung up, looking mildly
perturbed. “The woman I spoke to said that Ms.
Indrani wasn’t waiting for the van this morning, and
didn’t respond when the driver
buzzed her apartment. They put her down as a no-show,
though they mean to bill her
anyway.”
“Of course they do. No pity
in the naked city. Call her, Owen. If you don’t get an
answer, send someone over to check in.”
“She has seemed distracted lately,”
Owen said as he dialed. “Perhaps she’s
feeling unwell.”
“I’ve been thinking about that
... we should bend the rules and offer her
complete access to the full range of the company’s ...
benefit
plan. The sooner the
better. It would be a shame if something were to happen
to her, when she has such a
brilliant mind.”
“And it wouldn’t hurt to have
that brilliant mind forever in your debt,” Owen
added. “There’s no ... ah, the answering machine ...
Ms. Indrani, this is Owen Burnett; I
apologize for the imposition, but in accordance with
our policy of employer concern,
someone will be coming by your house later this morning
to check in with you.” He hung
up.
Xanatos kept poring over the
weekend’s log. No sick calls at all. No problems.
No nothing. But he couldn’t shake the feeling that something
was rotten in the state of
Denmark.
“Did the gargoyles have any
excitement while I was gone?” he asked.
“No, everything was nicely peaceable.
For a change.”
Xanatos grinned ruefully, knowing
that Owen was referring to Goliath’s reaction
a month ago, upon waking to the news that his cherished
Amber had spent the day
touring Manhattan in the company of such notables as
Harry the Hammer, an anonymous
‘tart in a fur coat,’ and Tony Dracon.
“I’m glad he’s finally done.
I thought Dr. Masters was going to poison himself,
just to make sure he went out quick and easy before Goliath
took him apart and put him
back together in interesting ways.”
“On a related note, sir, it
might be wise to reconsider the childcare arrangements.
With all due respect, I volunteered to look after Alexander.
I had no idea that my duties
would extend to include all the clan’s offspring.”
“Understood, Owen. Good point.
Who’s with Amber now?”
“No one; blessedly, she’s sleeping
through more now that all of her baby teeth
have come in.” He held out his wrist, showed Xanatos
on his watch-monitor the image of
a child sitting by the window in Alex’s nursery.
“She never sits still that long
unless she’s stone, so you must be right. I’ll talk to
Elisa about it.” He scrolled through the attendance records,
then paused. “Hmm ...”
“Trouble, Mr. Xanatos?”
“This is odd ... Sabra Indrani
clocked out Friday night, but the security log
doesn’t record anyone seeing her leave.”
An hour later, as Xanatos was
sitting thoughtfully at one of Sabra Indrani’s
computer workstations, Owen came in with more news.
“The plot thickens,” he said.
“I sent someone over to the apartment as you
ordered. Our man found a woman from Life Assist talking
to the police. They were about
to call us.”
“Life Assist -- one of those
in-home nursing services?”
“Yes. This woman, Tanya Ellersby,
said she comes over early Mondays,
Wednesdays and Fridays to help Ms. Indrani with housekeeping,
cooking, and more
personal matters. When she arrived, no one answered the
knock. Mrs. Ellersby used her
spare key to get in. The apartment was just as she’d
last seen it, Friday morning. The
meals they’d prepared for the weekend were untouched,
the bed hadn’t been slept in.”
“So she hasn’t been home all
weekend.”
“That’s how it appears, sir.”
Xanatos knocked his knuckles
thoughtfully on the edge of the desk. “And she’s
not here, either ... but no one actually saw her leave.
Speculations, Owen?”
He raised one finger. “Security
was lax Friday evening and her departure either
wasn’t seen or wasn’t noted in the log.” He raised the
second. “She left by some other
route than the front doors or the parking garage.” He
raised the third. “She’s still in the
building.”
“Did the CareVan pick her up?”
“According to their dispatcher,
she called Friday afternoon and canceled,
claiming to have made other arrangements.”
“Other arrangements,” Xanatos
mused. “We could be jumping to dire
conclusions, when she’s done what Fox and I did and gone
off for a romantic weekend.”
Owen just looked at him.
“All right, maybe not. But who
would have picked her up? She has no family in
the city.”
“If I might hazard a guess,
Mr. Xanatos?”
“Be my guest, Owen.”
“Cyberbiotics.”
“I see where you’re going with
that. She spent the past three and a half months
learning everything she can about Xanatos Enterprises.
Then, Friday, with copies of all
our most valuable data in her briefcase, she hopped a
ride with an undercover
Cyberbiotics operative and went back to Renard.”
“It’s a possibility.”
“I know ... but I don’t think
that’s what’s going on here. For one thing, she’s
hard to miss. I can’t imagine her leaving without being
seen. Unless your theory includes
a corrupt security guard.”
“Always an option.”
“For another ... call it a hunch,
Owen, but I think your third speculation was the
best. I think she didn’t leave the building Friday night.
She could have gotten hurt in one
of the ladies’ rooms, trapped in a supply closet, something
like that. I want a complete
search.”
“Right away.” Owen pursed his
lips. “Though if an injured employee has been
laying in one of the restrooms all weekend, we’ll want
to have a discussion with the
janitorial staff.”
“See to it. In the meantime,
I’m going to see what files she’s been working on
lately. Just in case there’s something I’m overlooking.”
* *
“David, you’re not going to believe
what’s happened!” Fox said without
preamble.
He gave her a distracted kiss
on the cheek -- actually, he missed, it was on the
ear -- as he and Owen hurried by. “That’s nice, dear.”
“David? Where are you going?”
“Just checking up on something.”
To Owen, he said, “I don’t know how much of
it she might have been able to put together, but if she
lets him out, you know he isn’t
going to be happy with us.”
Fox followed, still trying.
“Someone broke into my window display at Devon’s
Saturday night. The FoxFire Fantasies collection. They
stole four of my gowns! The ones
I made for Angela! David, are you listening to me? Who
would want -- ”
“Lexington and T.J. took every
precaution,” Owen said.
“Yes, but she’s the best in
the business. If she’s decided he can help her, none
of Lex’s passwords are going to keep her out.”
“Who?” Fox increased her pace
to keep up. “David, Owen, what’s going on? Are
we going to the dungeon? What have you been up to now?”
“I’ll explain later,” David
said, which was an improvement, at least he was
answering instead of ignoring. Then he opened a door,
he and Owen promptly filled the
doorway, both of them groaned in dismay, and Fox couldn’t
see what made them so
aghast.
“I hate it when I’m right.”
David slammed a fist on the doorjamb. “But I hate it
more when I’m almost right.”
Fox shoved between them. “Will
one of you clowns tell me what is ... oh, my
God, David, who’s that woman, what’s wrong with her?”
“Her name’s Sabra Indrani,”
David said, moving further into the room. “She’s
with my Investigative Planning Department. Or was.”
“Is she dead?”
“No,” Owen said, having regained
his composure. “She’s alive. Barely, and for
how long, I don’t know ... not that it matters.”
“Oh, hell.” David waved his
hand in front of the woman’s open, staring eyes.
then he straightened up and looked at Owen. “Indrani.
Goddess of the sky. And what did
I say?”
“If memory serves, you said
‘how fitting,’” Owen replied.
“Remind me to kick myself later.”
“Noted.”
* *
January 6th, 2001
Saturday, 6:30 PM
Sabra opened her eyes and blinked
until her vision cleared.
What time was it? she wondered.
Instantly, she knew. 6:32 P.M.,
on the evening of January 6th, 2001. Eastern
Standard Time. Saturday.
She inhaled deeply, the bottom
of her peripheral vision catching a deep blue and
gold coverlet rising and falling with her breath. For
once, she didn’t awaken to cramps
anywhere in her body, and she was content to lie here
not hurting for as long as she
could.
In fact, she actually felt good
for a change. She’d had days where no part of
her was giving her particular misery, but this was different.
This was how she remembered
waking up on summer mornings when she was a kid.
She yawned and stretched ...
... and froze.
Stretched with both arms?
Slowly, she raised her right
arm. It moved easily and painlessly into her line of
sight.
Now she had a cramp,
but it was a cramp in her brain as she saw the
shapely blue-skinned limb.
She brought her left hand to
rub her eyes, but halted it inches away to stare at
the four fingers tipped in shiny gold polish. Then, ever-so-carefully,
she touched her face.
Her forehead rose into a row
of thin quills that swept back like a tiara. Instead of
eyebrows, she had thick ridges. Her nose was pert, her
cheekbones high, she could _feel_
on both sides of her face instead of just on the left,
the legacy of the nerve damage
erased.
“What’s happened to me?” she
said, feeling the full pouty lips move beneath her
fingertips, expelling the words as if she were blowing
kisses rather than speaking.
It flooded into her mind, the
knowledge of what she’d done.
Claiming she had extra work
to catch up on, staying late Friday night until the
janitorial crews were done and the security guards were
engrossed in the late-late-late
shows.
Re-routing their cameras just
in case, so they couldn’t follow her progress.
Using a password she wasn’t
supposed to have to make the elevator take her to
the castle level.
Finding the workroom secreted
away where the dungeons used to be.
And then ...
She sat up, every muscle working
smoothly and in concert, spine flexing easily.
She swung her long, lovely legs over the side of the
slab and extended her feet, taking in
the promising curves of calf and thigh, the ballerina-arched
talons with gold tips, the
spurs rising from her knees. All of it in deepest indigo.
Oh, yes, mustn’t forget the
tail that draped off the slab like a tropical serpent
lounging on a branch.
She tried to curl it and did,
bringing the spade-shaped tip off of the floor.
Her delighted laugh was Mae
West noting that when she was bad, she was
better. No fish-choking seal, not anymore.
Shifting her shoulders, she
heard and felt wings moving against her back. First
left, then right, she extended them in midnight blue
fans, then brought them around her
body like a cloak.
She hopped down from the slab
and stood upright, looking amazedly around the
room from the perspective of more than six feet in height.
Nearby was a computer with a
VR helmet hooked up to it, and a small box that
looked like a tape drive (with the GENERAL logo on the
side, she saw, and remembered
buying it on the black market a week ago along with the
other equipment).
And sitting in front of the
computer ...
Sabra moaned in horror and backed
away until her tail bumped into something.
Oh, she’d avoided her reflection for years, always sure
that the reality was as bad as she
imagined it to be, but now, seeing it from the outside,
the reality was worse than she’d
imagined, a million times worse! Even what few unavoidable
mirrors she’d passed hadn’t
shown her the full extent!
Then again, maybe it was because
mirrors and imaginings had never shown her
catatonic, with a slack mouth and blankly staring eyes.
It was like looking at an exhumed
corpse. If not for the shallow movements of the chest,
the figure in the wheelchair could
have been dead.
She turned away, but not before
seeing the threads of blood that had dried on
the old Sabra’s temple, crusted around a metal ring the
size of a half-dollar.
Yes, she remembered that, too.
The brain tape implant, which she’d pressed
against the side of her head with her thumb until it
clicked and the sharp spiderlike rays
around its outer edge had snapped over to dig into her
skin ... the squeal of the needle-
drill concealed within the device burrowing through her
skull ... the way her eye on that
side had squeezed helplessly shut as the probe sank into
her brain ... the subaudible
vibration as the recording process began ...
She had no recollection of removing
the tape and putting it into the drive. Which
made a certain amount of sense. She knew she must have
done it, though. Must have
made all the right connections, then transferred the
data on the brain tape into the memory
of the Godiva robot.
Robot? Unfair word. Robots couldn’t
feel,
and she did. As if every nerve in
her synthetic (but so lifelike!) skin was alive and humming,
every muscle in her artificial
(but so perfect!) body was operating at peak performance.
Robots couldn’t think,
either, could only do what they were programmed to do.
“It worked!” She wanted to shout,
spoke softly instead. “It worked, I’m alive, I
can walk, I can move, I’m whole!”
She hugged herself, then ran
her palms over her torso. She was nude, the harem-
girl outfit from the video nowhere in sight. Her breasts
were huge but upright and gravity-
defiant (when she stroked them, she felt the tingle as
her blue-black nipples drew erect;
was it a function of her mind or had the engineers somehow
managed to simulate even
that?), her waist narrow, her hips flaring, her buttocks
high and taut, with that tail
sprouting from the base of her spine and those wings
from her shoulderblades.
Oh, alive and whole, able to
touch, able to react to a touch, wonderfully vibrant
and fresh and full of sensation!
* *
Breckenridge liked the day shifts
the best.
He worked a rotating schedule,
four ten-hour shifts Friday through Monday.
One week it would be days, 6:00 AM
to 4:00 PM. The next week, swings, 2:00 PM to
midnight. The third week, graveyard shift, 10:00 PM to
8:00 AM.
Played hell with his sleep schedule,
and played hell with his marriage too; Mary
Ann had left him two years after he’d come to work for
Xanatos Enterprises and was now
married to a nine-to-fiver up in New Jersey someplace.
But the pay was good, the perks
were good, and the occasional dash of weirdness kept
things interesting.
Still, he liked the day shifts
best. Even on the weekends, there were people
coming and going, some willing to stop and chat for a
few minutes.
The swing shift, though, especially
on the weekends, was mind-numbingly dull.
That was the thought that was
going through his head at quarter to seven that
Saturday evening, when the elevator doors slid open and
_she_ stepped out.
He’d been eating a Mars bar
and dropped it into his VIP Magazine, smearing
chocolate and nougat across Drew Barrymore’s cleavage
-- something that many men
might have liked to do in real life, but Drew had nothing
on the indigo goddess crossing
the lobby toward him.
“Fell asleep at your post, Breck,”
he told himself. “Fell asleep and you’re
dreaming. Dreaming like a sex-starved teenager. Good
God, man, it hasn’t been that
long since you got laid!”
“How long has it been?”
the indigo goddess asked huskily. There was a half-
taunting, half-inviting smile on her lips.
“Uh ... uhhurrr ...” he said,
her voice playing his nerves like a harp.
“You’re looking at me,” she
crooned. “Do you enjoy what you see?”
He bobbled the approximation
of a nod.
“What else do you enjoy?” She
unfurled the wings that had been caped around
her shoulders and swung her head so that her ankle-length
curtain of golden hair rippled
like sun on a waterfall.
He couldn’t say a word, though
he was thinking plenty.
“Do you know what I enjoy?”
“What?” he blurted.
“Dancing,” she sighed, and rolled
her hips in a slow circle. “It’s been so long
since I went dancing. So that’s what I’m going to do.
But it’ll be our secret, won’t it?”
He bobbled again.
“I could even dance for you,
if you want.”
“Oh-kaay,” he exhaled gustily.
Music came from somewhere; he
had no idea where. The radio in his console
was set to the game, the building didn’t have a Muzak
system, and his visitor sure had
noplace to conceal a Walkman. Yet there was music. Of
the sort that called to mind snake-
charmers, flying carpets, and dark eyes over sheer veils.
The breathtaking creature in
front of him began to undulate to the rhythm, her
flawless Helen of Troy face set in an expression of pure
rapture. She didn’t have any
clothes to start with -- buckytail nekkid! a voice in
Breckenridge’s head warbled crazily --
yet she still gave the impression of revealing more and
more of herself in tantalizing
glimpses.
Long after she’d danced her
way out the front doors, Breckenridge was still
seeing her before him. He didn’t snap out of it until
almost an hour later, and by the time
he remembered that he’d neglected to make his seven o’clock
log entry, he was past
caring.
* *
The CareVan took her past Ground
Zero ten times a week, but it was always
closed and dark and silent. An old marquee out front
that suggested the place might have
been a movie theater before it was converted into a nightclub.
And on the marquee, week
in and week out, were the words that had drawn her here.
DISCO FEVER EVERY SATURDAY 7
TO 2 LADIES NIGHT
Now, at eight o’clock at night,
the place was no longer closed, no longer dark,
and certainly no longer silent. Music pounded through
the walls, intensifying briefly each
time the front door opened. The crowd was an amiable
mix of retro and Goth, with a
sprinkling of punk thrown in.
Sabra crouched on the roof of
a grocery across the street, bathed in neon that
turned her strapless white dress to a rainbow of colors
and made the gold mesh belt glint
like fire.
The cold didn’t bother her,
though the city was still piled with drifts that had
been plowed, half-melted, re-frozen, and turned into
sooty ice sculptures.
She wasn’t sure if she
dared trust these wings to flight, but her claws and strong
limbs were excellent for climbing. She hadn’t even needed
to try and escape anyone; the
men that saw her could only gape like she was a mirage,
and the women either pointedly
ignored her (those who were with the men), or glared
and said, “Slut!” (those who were in
the company of their fellow women).
Strange, how it didn’t seem
to matter that she had indigo skin, wings, and a tail.
Didn’t matter to them, didn’t matter to her. Because
what did matter was that she had
the most fantastic body in New York, was the best dancer
anywhere, and the time had
come to show it off.
The current song was 'Love Machine,'
which made Sabra laugh as she leaped
from the grocer’s roof into the street. Her wings spread
automatically, and she glided to a
graceful touchdown, settling that question and attracting
a lot of attention.
Everyone gathered outside the
club, ignoring the sharp bite of the clear winter’s
night in hopes of getting inside, left off their lively
conversations to look at her. She fixed
her smoking gaze on the man at the door.
He was shorter than her but
burly, the sleeves of his black T-shirt torn away to
expose tattoos, with a shaved head and a single gold
tooth in the front of his mouth. The
sort of man that would have terrified and intimidated
her only yesterday, but when she
got close and saw how he was transfixed by the jiggle
and sway, she just smiled.
“I’m Godiva,” she said.
“Go on ahead,” he said, shaking
his head in awe, and opened the door for her.
She crossed into smoky laser-shot
darkness and headed for the neon-edged
dance floor where a hundred couples were packed into
the small space, spangled with
fleeting light from the glittering ball that hung and
revolved overhead.
Sabra ... no, Godiva
... strode to the center, a path clearing before her as if by
magic as awed dancers turned to watch her passage. “Love
Machine” ended, but the
deejay made no move to put on another tune, staring out
through his wired-glass cage.
A silence fell across Ground
Zero, like the silence in a Western when a
desperado pushes through the saloon doors and gets ready
to raise some hell.
Instead of slapping leather,
Godiva stretched out one arm and moved her fingers
as if to caress the deejay’s face long-distance. “I’ve
waited over twenty years to dance to
‘Oh What a Night.’ Please.”
He scrambled among his records
-- actual vinyl, even! -- and triumphantly held
one up. Moments later, the song was playing, and Godiva
began to dance.
They watched, and she basked
in it. She basked in the lustful eyes of the men,
the venomous eyes of the women.
Hypnotizing, mesmerizing
...
What a lady, what a night
...
Want me! Envy me! her soul screamed
as her body gave itself over to the music.
When the song ended, she was
swarmed by men, their partners left behind like
wads of chewed gum, and rather than pick one, she danced
with them all.
The next number was ‘Twilight
Zone’ by Golden Earring, not really disco but she
didn’t care; maybe the deejay had chosen it as a commentary
on the weirdness of having
a gargoyle on the dance floor; didn’t matter, because
it had the sexiest driving beat that
let her do the most outrageous things with her
hips and tail.
Oh, and they did want her, she
could feel the evidence of it whenever one of
them pulled her into his arms, she writhed so well against
a tall tanned blond during a
slow song that he nearly came in his pants right there
in front of everyone, and she loved
it, reveled in it, the sweet delicious power!
She could have drawn him down
and taken him right there, taken them all one
after another, left them drained yet begging for more
... but she didn’t want her first lover
to be a group of anonymous strangers.
No, she had already decided
who her first lover was going to be.
* *
January 7th, 2001
Sunday, 6:10 PM
She’d spent the day on a rooftop,
in a sort of semi-aware downtime that
approximated the gargoyle habit of turning to stone at
dawn. As long as she was
emulating one of those creatures, she figured she might
as well play by the rules.
It made sense, too ... the streets
were much more crowded by day, and she would
attract too much attention. By night, her deep blue shade
blended well with the sky and
she was more free to move about unnoticed.
During that downtime, she turned
her thoughts inward. Not to what she had
done and what she was doing, but feeling her way through
the systems that powered her
new body. Exploring the rudimentary memory banks.
There was a lot of information
about gargoyles in there. Physical details,
behaviors, things of that sort. All she had to do was
think a question, and the answer
would spring full-blown into her conscious mind. It was
almost like her head was a lecture
hall, where a professor with a sardonic, rather witty
way of talking and a vaguely
European accent was always willing to discourse on the
topic of gargoyles.
Sabra ... no.
Godiva.
Godiva didn’t bother dwelling
on the psychological makeup of gargoyles.
Protecting? Who cared? A clan? Who needs one?
All she wanted was just what
she now had. Freedom. Freedom from the hateful
prison where she’d rotted alive for over two decades.
When the sun went down, she’d
roused herself from her state of near-torpor and
stretched from head to tail. A thin rime of frost that
had formed over her skin crackled and
fell away. Not stone, but not bad, she thought amusedly.
Another cold night was settling
over Manhattan. The cold didn’t affect Godiva.
Nor was she troubled by hunger or thirst. She supposed
eventually she might need to
figure out what powered her body and recharge it, but
in the meantime, she was free of
those basic concerns.
She shook out her wings, petting
their velvety texture.
Time to give those babies a
test-drive.
Godiva went to the edge of the
roof and looked down at the cars moving in the
intersection below. Fear tried to grip her, but she jumped
before it could get a good hold.
She plunged, and then her instincts
(programming? whatever) kicked in. She
laughed aloud and joyously as she soared between the
buildings, skimmed past her
beautiful reflection in banks of mirrored windows. Twisted
and turned and sky-pirouetted
and looped and twirled and dove and rolled, a concert
of movement, every limb
responding perfectly, her hair a garland of gold streaming
through the night.
Better than walking!
Better than dancing!
Better than sex?
Only one way to find out.
Purposeful now, she left off
with her aerobatics and glided through the city. It
was a lot harder to figure out where she was going from
up here, but she supposed she
would get the hang of it soon enough. This certainly
beat hunching in the back of the
CareVan as it crawled through the crowded streets!
She didn’t find her destination
until nearly midnight, and all the windows were
dark. No, not quite; there was a single small light,
perhaps a reading lamp, in one of the
bedrooms.
Godiva descended to the wide
ledge and folded her wings into a cloak. She
cleared a circle on the icy glass and peered in.
Oh, oh yes.
There he was.
He’d fallen asleep reading,
with a lamp on the nightstand casting a pale gold
glow across the bed. Several pillows were propped up
behind him, and the crisp white
sheet was drawn to his waist. A book rested on his bare
chest, and his head was tipped to
the side, his cheek resting against his shoulder.
A tingle pulsed in Godiva’s
belly and rippled outward, increasing instead of
diminishing so that by the time it reached her head,
it left her swimming in pleasant
dizziness.
“Jason.”
He didn’t stir, couldn’t hear.
That was okay.
“Oh, Jason.”
She wedged her gold-enameled
nails into the window frame and broke it open
with an effortless strength. The wintry air swirled into
the room, making Jason Canmore
shiver in his sleep and pull the sheet up to his neck.
Godiva hopped lightly to the
carpeted floor and shut the window behind her. She
took two steps and stopped in her tracks, staring at
the image of a gargoyle.
His bedroom also served as his
studio, and several of his paintings hung on the
wall. Many were the detailed cityscapes that had begun
to earn him such acclaim in the
local galleries, but interspersed among them were darker,
more frightening scenes.
The same figure featured in
all of them. A female gargoyle, scarlet over azure,
beautiful face contorted in a terrifying sneer. In the
most unsettling of the paintings, she
was standing over the crumpled body of a man in a red
and black mask, hands on her
hips, head thrown back, her expression one of cruel mirth.
Godiva touched one of the canvases,
part of her marveling at the sensors that let
her detect the individual bumps and brushstrokes, the
rest of her torn between admiration
and concern.
Giving herself a little shake,
she turned away from the paintings and approached
the bed. Jason had turned onto his side, and from this
angle she could see the defined
muscles of his back even through the sheet. His book
had fallen to the floor, and she
considerately picked it up.
“On the Evils of the Daemon,”
the title read. And beneath it, the author’s name,
Donald Canmore.
Frowning, Godiva put the book
on the desk, beside an opened envelope with the
Anvil Corporation logo in the corner. She looked at Jason,
and her frown melted away.
“Jason,” she said again, throaty
contralto.
He mumbled unintelligibly and
rolled onto his back. The sheet outlined him from
breastbone to knee, and again Godiva felt that rippling
tingle.
She touched his dark hair, trailed
her three fingers down the plane of his cheek to
the strong shelf of his jaw.
His hand flashed up and clamped
around her wrist. His turquoise eyes snapped
open, instantly alert, warrior reflexes ... then flew
wide in shock at the sight of her.
Godiva gasped and tried to pull
away but he held on tightly as he sat up.
“Who are you?” he demanded harshly.
“What are you doing here?”
Didn’t he recognize ... no,
of course not!
“Who sent you?” he went on when
she couldn’t reply. “The Demon?”
She shook her head and found
her voice. “No one sent me, Jason. I came to you
on my own.”
“Who are you?” he asked again,
crushing her wrist until a flesh and blood
creature would have winced from the pain. “What do you
want?”
She covered his hand with her
other, not to pry it away but in a gentle caress. “I’m
Godiva. I’m not here to hurt you, I promise. All I want
... all I want ... is to make love
to you.”
He jerked as if she’d slapped
him. “To what?!”
“Jason,” she purred, savoring
his name. “Let me touch you. Let me kiss you and
taste you and lick you all over. I want to feel your
cock in my mouth, I want to suck on it
and roll my tongue around it. I want your hands on me,
all over me, do whatever you want
to me, use me, I’ll be anything you want, anything you
need.”
He let go as if her wrist was
on fire and recoiled, but the thin sheet proved that
her words had not been without effect. “What ... what
...?”
“Don’t I excite you? I think
I do ... I know I do. Look at my body, Jason. Look at
these breasts. Here --” she tugged the top of her dress
down to her waist. “Look at them.
Oh, touch them, please touch them, I’ve wanted you for
so long, don’t send me away, not
when all I want to do is make us both feel good.”
Jason stared. “But ... ye’re
a gargoyle!”
Godiva chuckled. “When you’re
under stress, your accent comes out. That’s so
sexy.” She undid her gold mesh belt. Only the flare of
her hips was keeping her dress from
slipping all the way off. “So I’m a gargoyle? Aren’t
I beautiful?”
“Yes ... what kind of trick
is this?” he cried.
“Shh, quiet! Don’t wake your
sister! What would she think if she found us here
like this?”
“Ye’ll have te leave,” he said
thickly.
“I’ve waited so long for this.
I never thought I’d have the chance. Jason, I
need you! Can you honestly look at me and say
that you don’t want me?”
He looked, and she preened before
him, extending her wings, turning this way
and that, and when her back was to him, she pushed her
dress down so her tail, buttocks,
and long gorgeous legs were exposed to his view.
“I’m a dancer,” she said, glancing
back coyly over her shoulder. “Would you like
me to dance for you?”
He squeezed his eyes shut.
“Oh, you silly,” Godiva crooned
affectionately. On cue, from somewhere in her
circuits, her onboard sound system activated and the
haunting, seductive strains of
Eastern music floated through the room.
Jason opened one eye and shut
it again quickly when he saw her looking at him.
But could he keep them shut?
Not at all.
He had the sheet bunched in
his lap, but even that couldn’t conceal the fact that
he was soon in what her high-school chums would have
called a pre-dick-ament.
Slowly and sinuously, Godiva
began to writhe to the rhythm. She used her hair
and wings as curtain and fans, alternately concealing
and revealing, wishing for the
bangles and cymbals she’d seen on the video.
As she danced, she stroked herself
with a lover’s touch, showing him how ready
she was, how willing, how eager. Her fingers moved over
the hairless mound between her
legs; it felt like warm suede and was as plump as a ripe
peach; when she was sure Jason
was watching avidly with both eyes, she wetted her fingers
in her mouth and then slid
them inside herself, moaning softly as she did so.
He sprang from his bed, the
sheet wrapped around his waist. “Ye’ll have te
leave!” he said again, much more insistently this time.
Godiva dropped with languid
grace across the bed he’d just abandoned, her hair
spread over the bottom sheet in a torrent of gold. She
parted her thighs wide, using both
hands to masturbate as she kept rolling her hips to the
music.
“I know you want me, Jason!
Here I am for you!”
Inspiration struck, and she
brought her tail up between her legs. The spade-
shaped tip reached her mouth and she began nibbling at
it, and settled the thick length
along her opening, not penetrating, but undulating her
tail, sliding it back and forth.
“Ah, God!” Jason groaned, gaze
fixed on her performance.
“Mmm, I like that,” Godiva sighed.
“I’d like you better, though. I’m so hot! I
don’t think a tail will be enough. So drop that damned
sheet and fuck me!”
His jaw was clenched, his fists
were clenched, his shoulders were shaking ... then
he gave in with a hoarse cry and threw the sheet to the
floor. A new wave of heat crashed
through Godiva when he came striding toward her, his
legs magnificent, his erection
jutting stiff and proud from a patch of dark curls.
He fell on her and she pulled
him down, and with unerring aim he hit the mark
and thrust hilt-deep. They cried out together, her in
vindication, him in agonized lust.
A terrible remorse starkened
his face, and she realized he was horrified at the
thought of his cock sunk into an inhuman place. Before
he could leap up, she wrapped her
legs around him and dug her nails into his back.
“Oh, no you don’t!” she panted.
“You’re going to finish this fuck, and you’re
going to enjoy it!”
With that, she began pushing
her hips up at him in earnest. She stole his mouth
with a deep tongue-kiss to muffle his protesting shout.
He tried to pull away, then gave in
and was kissing her frantically, fondling her breasts,
and driving into her so forcefully that
the bed creaked and thudded.
“Aiiieeee!” Godiva shrieked.
Oh, overload, overload, she was sure that she was
going to blow a fuse and be reduced to a smoking pile
of spare parts, oh, it was so good,
this was what she’d been missing all those lost years,
better than walking-dancing-
gliding, yes, she came in one shattering explosion after
another.
Her frenzied gyrations sent
Jason over the edge too. He pounded against her,
the muscles in his jaw, neck, shoulders, arms, standing
out in vivid relief. Sweat slicked
his back. His expression was one of exquisite passion
and torment.
Then she felt the first spurt
of his fluids deep within her, and he clenched a
double fistful of her hair and kissed her so hard that
her head was pressed down in the
mattress, and went on and on, emptying himself, as if
it would never end.
He collapsed atop her, dead
weight and quivering. She could feel the thunderous
hammering of his heart. Could hear it ...
... No, that was the door ...
“Jason! Jason!”
SLAM!
“Jason! Answer me!”
SLAM!
The door leaped in its frame,
presumably as Robyn Canmore kicked it or threw
her shoulder against it from the outside.
“Shit!” Robyn exclaimed vehemently.
BANG!
The gunshot was followed by
a scree of metal. Half of the lock showered into the
room in little metal pellets. Smoke curled up from the
hole in the door.
“Roh ...” Jason tried. He pushed
himself partway up, groaned, and sank back
down on Godiva’s breasts. “Robyn!” Too quiet to be heard
more than a yard away.
Godiva, having no desire to
end this night with a bullet to her central processing
unit, kissed Jason one last lingering time and helped
him roll off of her. She was getting
out of bed as another ...
SLAM!
... broke the door inwards in
fragments. Robyn Canmore, wearing a shortie
nightie, tumbled through the wreckage.
Before the blonde woman could
regain her feet or get her bearings, Godiva ran to
the window, scooping up her discarded dress as she went.
She tore it open, heard Jason’s
yelp as he was bathed in another swirl of icy air, and
dove headlong into the night.
Getting dressed in mid-air was
out of the question. She glided nude and serene,
every now and then doing a giddy little loop as the amazement
of what she’d just done
came bubbling back up.
The sight of the Aerie Building
looming in front of her brought her to a halt. She
backwinged and landed on a ledge, staring at the skyscraper
and the castle atop it.
Okay, she thought, this is it.
Party time over. You’ve done what you set out to
do. You danced, you made love, you had a weekend alive
for a change. You know what
you have to do now.
She exhaled and bowed her head,
looking down at her shapely legs with their
high, arched feet, and the tail that coiled around them.
Then, with a sigh, she stepped off
the ledge and unfurled her wings once more.
* *
January 8th, 2001
Monday, 5:50 PM
“So that’s where we are,” Xanatos
said, spreading his hands to show he’d put all
of his cards on the table.
“Two nights ago,” Goliath rumbled
thoughtfully. “And there’s been nothing?”
“Nothing. I’m sorry to dump
this on you right when you wake up, but I’m going
to need your help.”
“And what would you have us
do?”
“She’s out there somewhere,
and she’s kind of hard to miss. I want her found
and brought back before she’s front-page news. It’s not
going to do your cause any good
to have her running around out there.”
“We are a clan, not a cause.”
“Okay, so it’s not going to
do your clan any good to have her running around
out there. Think about it, Goliath. Think about what
she is, what she can do.”
"Such as what?" Goliath inquired
skeptically. "She's no warrior."
"No, it's worse."
"Worse?"
Xanatos drummed his fingers
and chewed his lip. "I ... oh, hell. The Godiva robot
contains a chip. A very special kind of chip."
"What have you done?" Goliath's
voice began an ominous rise.
"The chip emits a subsonic frequency
... loaded with subliminal arousal cues."
"Explain."
"Anybody around her ... gets
turned on. Sexually. I didn't activate the chip
during the party. Didn't think I had to. But if anyone
can unlock the codes and actually
use the damned thing, it's Sabra Indrani."
“Why on earth did you --”
“I hear that familiar tone of
accusation coming through,” Xanatos said, rolling
his eyes. “You think this is all my fault. Hunh. Try
to do a friend a favor for his bachelor
party, and --”
“I did not ask you to. Look
how much trouble it’s already caused.”
“We’re talking about an expensive
piece of equipment here. Which reminds me,
don’t damage the goods.”
Goliath gave him a withering
look. “There is a living woman inside that
automaton, Xanatos. We cannot harm her.”
“Fair enough. All I ask is that
she be brought back. Will you try?”
“Very well,” Goliath said.
* *
“Look on the bright side,” Lex
said.
“Yeah?” Brooklyn glanced back
at him. “What’s that?”
“At least this babe wasn’t
programmed with every battle move we know.”
“It’s her other moves
that I’m worried about,” Brooklyn muttered darkly.
“You’ve still got her panties,
don’t you? The ones she threw at you.”
“Lex!” He looked around fast
to make sure no one was in earshot, but it was just
the two of them as they skimmed past the Chrysler Building.
“That’s not it.”
“But you do.”
“Shut up.”
“Okay, okay, so if it’s not
that, what is it?”
“I dunno ... chivalry?”
“Oh, is that why it was
always me getting stuck beating up on Fox and
Hyena?”
“Don’t think chivalry applies
to them. Sure as hell not Hyena.”
“Then what is your point? Do
you have one? Or are you just running your
beak?”
“Pretty sassy to the future
leader.” He tossed a mock punch Lex’s way.
“Seriously, this whole thing bugs
me.”
“Because of Sevarius?”
“Hey, you and T.J. swore he
was out of the picture for good. I’m taking your
word for it. Don’t make me doubt you.”
“Oh ... heh ...” Lex grinned.
“No, it’s because of that woman.
What’s her name. Indrani. This isn’t like the
mutates. Nobody did this to her. She chose it. Who are
we to tell her it’s wrong?”
“You heard Goliath and Angela
talking about Mr. Renard and the time he got
into the golem. Or what about the time Jackal invited
the god of the dead into him? Or the
whole Pack; they all chose what happened to them.”
“Yeah, but this isn’t the same.
She’s not hurting anyone. You said yourself
Godiva doesn’t have any weapons.”
“Just that pair of .38’s --”
he started salaciously.
“Dammit, Lex, come on!”
“Sorry. Okay, I see where you’re
going with this. She chose to do this, for all we
know she’s happy.”
“Like Aiden. Nobody made her
become a gargoyle. What would you think if
Titania or someone showed up and tried to repossess her
body?”
“That’s not the same,” Lex said,
sounding troubled.
“It’s close enough. We’re not
going after Godiva because she’s evil. We’re
going after her because Xanatos is in a snit about someone
outsmarting him, that’s why. I
don’t even buy that bit about how expensive she was.
Sure, that sort of technology can’t
come cheap --”
“Yeah, she’s totally stota,”
Lex said.
“Stota?”
“State Of The Art,” Lex clarified.
“Nerdspeak?”
“Never mind. But I see what
you’re saying. It’s not worth Xanatos’ time to stop
on the street to pick up a fifty dollar bill; he won’t
break the bank if he doesn’t get Godiva
back. Especially because all she was doing before this
was sitting in the dungeon
collecting dust.”
“Right! He’s being like a selfish
kid. That’s his toy, even if he wasn’t ever
going to play with it again.”
“I bet Fox would have a few
things to say about that.” Lex chuckled.
“But along comes this woman,
stuck in a wheelchair, her life must totally suck,
and all of a sudden she’s got a chance to walk again?
Not just walk, but be one of the
most stone-bitchin’ babes on the planet. And we’re going
to take it away from her.” He
growled in disgust. “As long as she’s not hurting anyone,
we should just leave her
alone.”
“What about for her own good?
There’s still a lot of humans out there who don’t
like gargoyles. Even stone-bitchin’ babe gargoyles. Sabra
doesn’t know what she’s
getting into. She’s out there with no clan, but plenty
of enemies. She’s going to need
help.”
* *
You’re not really going back
there, are you?
Who said that? Who are you?
Oh, just call me your ...
conscience. The little angel sitting on your shoulder.
I don’t understand.
Never mind. Just listen.
You know what will happen if you go back.
... Yes ...
Yes. Back into your old body.
Back to a life of helplessness, loneliness, and pain.
You’re not ready to do that yet.
But I’m a day overdue already!
I only meant to be gone for the weekend. I should
have gone back last night. They might have already found
out, when I didn’t show up for
work this morning. I could lose my job.
A job seems like a small
price to pay for having your freedom.
What? You ... you can’t mean
... stay like this?
Why not? You’re strong, quick,
beautiful. You can have any man you desire, as
often as you desire. If you go back, you’ll lose all
that. Can you live like that?
I’ve lived like that for a long
time --
And hated every minute of
it! Now you’ve seen what life can be like. Are you
willing to give that up? Remember how it felt to dance?
How it felt to have everyone
looking at you, admiring you, wanting you? Remember
how it felt to see the lust in your
chosen paramour’s eyes? You know what you’d see if
you went back to those places in
your old body, don’t you? Tell me. Would the people
at the discotheque admire you?
No. They’d ... they’d ...
Pity you. So would Canmore.
Pity, and revulsion. The same things you’ve seen
for twenty years! You’re insane if you give up and
go back to that! When you could have
all of this!
Who are you?
Consider me a friend. I do
have your best interests ... both of our best
interests at heart.
But my job ...!
What can it give you? A paycheck.
What does your paycheck go for now? Rent,
food, doctor’s office co-pays, prescriptions ... all
the things you don’t need in this
body!
My computer ...
Rubbish! You only used it
as an escape hatch from your wretched life! Think of
all you’d be giving up by going back!
I only meant to have this one
weekend. One weekend ...
“Just one day and then, I
swear I’ll be content ... with my share ... won’t resent,
won’t despair, old and bent, I won’t care, I’ll have
... spent ... one ... day ... out there!!!”
I’ve been told I have a good singing voice, don’t
you agree? But really, Sabra --
Godiva!
Godiva, then. See? You don’t
even want to be reminded of your old name. And I
don’t blame you, not for a minute.
But I wasn’t ...
Oh, I’ve heard your arguments
before. The having of the moment is worth the
losing of it. The pain can make the little pleasures
shine brighter. And to that, Godiva, I
say nonsense! Your life, my dear, sucked. And if you
go back to it with the memory of this
weekend, you will regret it and hate it for the rest
of your days.
But if I don’t go back, they’ll
figure it out. They’ll come looking for me.
Oh, absolutely. And if they
find you, they’ll strap you down and rip your
consciousness out of that luscious body. You’ll be
back in the old one, in agony
because I can personally assure you that brain tape
transferences are much more
painful when inserted into a living host. And in the
end, you’ll still lose your job.
Then why should I listen to
you? I should go back now and make sure they
don’t find out!
No, no, no! You should make
sure you don’t get caught!
Whoever you are, you’re insane!
Where would I go? What would I do? I want to
be whole, but I don’t want to live as a fugitive!
That’s something you should
have thought of before making your selection of
hosts. I’m afraid gargoyles still aren’t terribly
popular. But face it, my dear. You don’t
have anything else to live for. None of your material
possessions are anything to write
home about. You have no family, no friends, not even
a hamster to keep you company. If
you’ll just think it through, you’ll realize that
my way is the only one. Otherwise, you
might as well give up and die.
I ...
Oh, really, now ... do you
want last night to be the only time you will ever
make love? With all the power you have at your disposal?
* *
“Slow down!” the beaked gargoyle
called aggravatedly to the smaller one.
Godiva watched them from concealment.
My new kind, she thought. I
wonder ... I wonder what they’re like!
“Not my fault you can’t keep
up!” the smaller, whose wings stretched from ankle
to wrist, jeered back.
She moved into the light just
as the smaller one swooped past. His large eyes
doubled as he saw her. As he faltered in mid-air, the
larger one, who had been making a
concerted effort to overtake him, collided with him.
“Whoa!”
“Hey! Lookout!”
Godiva winced as they smacked
solidly into a brick wall and tumbled to the
rooftop. By the time they had gotten themselves untangled,
she was in front of them. The
beaked one raised his head first, found a leg right in
front of his nose, and followed it up
and up. It took him a very long time to reach her face.
“It’s her,” he breathed.
She blinked. But she had
heard him right; now the small one was gaping at her
with the same recognition.
“What are we going to do?” the
smaller one asked.
Carefully, his body poised for
action, the beaked one got to his feet. Godiva,
seeing the smooth flexion of his chest, calves, and thighs,
felt a warm glow spreading
through her. His tail ... ooh, remembering what she’d
done with her own only made her
wild to know what he could do with his!
The smaller one stood too, and
she shifted her gaze to him. Not a child, as she’d
first thought. Short, but corded with wiry muscle.
She held her hands out, apart
and palms up. “I’m not your enemy. I ... I’d like to
be ... your friend.” She inhaled deeply, and their eyes
bulged in harmony.
“Well ...” the short one took
a step, but the other caught him by the shoulder.
“Bad idea. She’s trouble. She’s
dangerous. Remember?”
Godiva laughed with a low humming
undertone that made both males twitch.
“You don’t need to be afraid of me.”
“I’m not!” the short one assured
her.
“And you?” She looked at the
beaked one smokily, challengingly.
“I’m not afraid either!” he
protested. “But you’re trouble.”
“Depends on your definition.”
She pressed two fingertips under the short one’s
chin and studied him. “You’re a cutie, aren’t you?”
He grinned foolishly, and the
tip of his tail started drumming on the rooftop like a
dog being scratched on the ribs.
“And you,” Godiva went on, pinching
the end of the other one’s beak between
her thumb and foreclaw, “you look a little like trouble
yourself. But don’t girls always go
for bad boys? Is that what you are? A bad boy?”
“Uh ...” He kept shifting his
wings as if his back itched.
“Oh, I can’t decide ...” Godiva
sighed.
“Decide what?” the short one
asked.
“Which of you to have first.”
She wouldn’t have thought they
could bug their eyes out anymore, but she was
wrong.
“Uh ... have?” the beaked
one stammered.
“Take,” Godiva clarified. “Do.
Seduce. Ravish.” She licked her lips. “Fuck.”
The short one whimpered, the
end of his tail beating out a rapid tattoo. “We
really shouldn’t ...”
“I know,” she said, running
her fingers from his chin to the hinge of his jaw.
“That’s what makes it so much fun.”
“You ... you can’t be serious
...” the other one said with difficulty. “We’ve got
...”
Whatever he was going to say
was lost as Godiva leaned close and flicked her
tongue against the end of his beak. “I’m serious. And
I think ... yes, I think ... I’ll have
both of you at the same time.”
“Whu ... what?” the short one
gasped. “You mean ...?”
“I’m sure there’s enough of
me to go around,” Godiva said, slipping out of her
dress and cupping her breasts as if in offering. “Don’t
you agree?”
“This is a big mistake,” the
beaked one said, but his hands weren’t listening and
reached out like a sleepwalker. At his touch, Godiva
arched her back and let her eyes drift
half-closed.
“Yeah, but who cares?” the short
one said, stroking the curve that belled out
from her waist to her hip.
Godiva drew them both to her,
murmuring in pleasure as their bodies pressed
close against her bare skin. Her hand brushed between
the beaked one’s wings by
accident and he cried out, and she realized there was
something she’d been missing.
When he reciprocated, pushing her
hair out of the way so he could apply a firm, stroking
pressure to her back, she trembled deliciously.
She sank to the rooftop, pulling
them with her. Now the smaller one needed no
encouragement, and was all over her, eager clever hands
and hungry, seeking mouth.
His friend was still a bit more
shy, but that all ended once Godiva undid his belt
and wrapped her fingers around what he had to offer.
Which was very considerable
indeed; Jason had been well-proportioned, but ...
“Well, and you’re no disappointment
either!” she observed happily as she
divested the other one of his loincloth as well.
“Oh, we shouldn’t be doing this!”
the beaked one said, not that it stopped him
from nuzzling his beak under her hair to tickle at her
ear. And when he grabbed her wrist, it
wasn’t to move her hand away but to encourage her to
pump it faster.
“Who cares!” the smaller one
said again, muffled against her breasts. “We’ll
never have another chance like this, brother!”
There was no further discussion.
Both of them fell on her like starved beasts.
Two pairs of hands (plus one pair of grasping little
wing talons) and two mouths,
explored her, groping and fondling and licking and sucking
and nibbling.
Their three tails coiled together
like a nest of snakes, sliding along and around
one another.
Then both of them were trying
to get their heads between her legs, nearly
knocking their skulls together. Godiva let them duel
for a moment, then pulled the smaller
one up her body, having him rest with one knee to either
side of her head, taking his
stiffness into her mouth while the other one went to
work with renewed effort on her lower
regions.
Oh, lost, she was lost in the
heat and the passion. Her body bucked and rolled,
her tail lashed. Her wings, stretched to either side,
fluttered like sails.
She reveled in the taste of
the smaller one’s excitement, knew that he would soon
be flooding her mouth, wanted it, needed it, needed
that ultimate expression of her
power over him.
And the other, oh, yes, skillful
tongue probing within her, the rounded upper
curve of his beak pressing with unbearably sweet friction
against her most sensitive spot
... then, cool draft as he took his head away, followed
by the heat of his loins covering
hers. He reared back, plunged deep, thick and engorged,
filling her.
Above her, the smaller one’s
eyes began to shed hot light. He grasped the sides
of her head, wailing incoherently as he began to shake
and spasm. Godiva held him tight
by the base of his tail with one hand and scraped her
claws gently down his back with the
other, and his wails became a turbulent cry.
He fell off of her and lay panting.
She felt the other’s tail creeping
along her inner thigh, worming its way between
their bodies, and then it was slithering around to ...
to ...
Godiva screamed uncontrollably.
Her heel spurs gouged into his hips, her hands
shot out and seized him by the shoulders. His face twisted
with effort and concentration,
he kept going, kept doing that with his tail ...
Then the smaller one’s tail
snaked over her leg and down too, and it was more
than she could stand, more than she could take, she didn’t
ever want it to stop, not mere
overload this time but a complete meltdown, every part
of her imploding and she screamed
again, starbursts flying across her vision
And still the beaked one kept
on, sending her to incredible, impossible heights,
and when he finished, his smaller friend had regained
his strength and took his place, and
they went at her again and, oh, nothing had ever
been so good!
She lost track of how many times
they’d each had her before their youthful
stamina gave out completely. Finally, the three of them
just sprawled in a heap, the only
sounds their ragged breathing and her soft sighs.
* *
“I don’t like this, I am never
gonna like this,” T.J. Lawton complained.
“Quit wiggling,” Angela warned
him. “I’d hate to drop you.”
“What’s wrong with gliding?”
Aiden asked. “I love it! Even before I had my own
wings, I loved it!”
“And you think this is
precarious,” Angela said as she shifted her grip to
cradle the young man more securely, “you should have
seen Lex carrying her. He needs
both arms to glide, so she had to hold on all by herself.”
“Great,” T.J. said. “Why does
that not make me feel better?”
“Oh, come on!” Angela giggled.
“Father’s never dropped Elisa. Would you feel
better if it was him carrying you?”
“No!” He coughed, collected
himself. “I mean, if I’ve got to be this close to one
of you, no offense, I’d rather it was you than your dad.”
“I wonder,” Aiden said, dipping
under Angela and then looping around. “Is that
homophobia or gargophobia?”
“Aren’t you supposed to be doing
the hocus-pocus thing?” T.J. asked.
“We’re supposed to be working
together,” she reminded him sweetly. “Do
you sense Godiva yet?”
“No, listen, I think this is
one of the dumbest ideas ... oh ... wait ... crap ...” He
grimaced.
“You do!” Aiden said
smugly. “See? Puck was right!”
“Face it, T.J.,” Angela said.
“You’re never going to be ‘normal,’ so you might as
well give up and enjoy your powers!”
“That way,” he said grudgingly.
“I don’t know if it’s her, but it’s something
weird, all right.”
“Let’s just give Nightstone
a wide berth.” Angela caught an updraft and climbed
a hundred feet in a matter of seconds. “Ow! T.J., let
go, you’re strangling me!”
“Don’t fuckin’ do that! I think
I just pissed myself!”
“It’s just an updraft, you baby.”
Aiden laughed merrily. “Too
bad gargoyles don’t come with seatbelts, huh,
T.J.?”
“Yeah, well, your model doesn’t
come with much in the way of airbags, either,”
he snapped.
Angela let go. T.J. squawked
as gravity gave him a hard yank toward the streets.
Then she caught him by the wrists and carried him dangling,
while Aiden only laughed
harder.
“Be nice,” Angela chided.
“Oh, jeez, give me a heart attack
why don’t you!”
She shook him back and forth
a little. “Going to apologize to Aiden?”
“I’m sorry! I’m sorry already!”
“Okay, Angela, I think he gets
the picture,” Aiden said.
When T.J. was safely, albeit
distrustingly, in Angela’s arms again, he pointed
roughly east. “Over there ... it’s getting stronger.
Kinda ... weird, though. I never saw her
operational, but it sure doesn’t seem like a robot. Not
like the Steel Clan, anyway.”
“There!” Aiden cried. “Shadows
against the moon! Do you see them, Angela?”
“I do! Oh, good, Brooklyn and
Lex! They found her!”
“We’d better hurry. It looks
like they need ... help?”
“That’s not what it looks like
to me!” T.J. said after an incredulous moment.
“I am not seeing what I think
I’m seeing!” Angela’s jaw was set so firmly T.J.
could hear her teeth grinding.
“Oh, gosh ...” Aiden said. “Oh,
gosh, no, that can’t be right! They ... they
wouldn’t!”
“Uh, hey, maybe we better back
off, huh, what do you say?” T.J. pleaded.
“Back off? Back off?!”
Angela’s eyes flashed like emergency beacons. “I
don’t think so!”
“I can’t believe it!” Aiden
protested, increasing her speed to match Angela’s.
“At least put me down first!”
T.J. called above the rushing of the wind in his
ears. “Huh, Angela?”
“No chance. I want you to blast
that bitch back into her component parts. I’ll
deal with my mate!”
“She’s going down!” Aiden reported.
“Poor choice of words,” T.J.
muttered, holding on for dear life.
The three shadows descended
to a rooftop. Angela went into a dive, T.J.’s yell
trailing behind her. “Get ready for a rough landing!”
He tried to brace himself, but
there was no preparing for the jarring, rolling crash
as she let go of him about three feet above the rooftop.
He tumbled, taking the knees out
of his jeans and the skin off of his palms, struck a
wall, and damn near bit off his own
tongue. Dazed, everything still spinning, he raised his
head in time to see Angela stalk
over to the three intimate gargoyles, grab one, and yank
him off of Godiva.
“You louse!” Punch to the stomach.
“You cad!” Clout to the head. “You rotten
no-good son of a --”
“Um, Angela?” Aiden ventured.
“That’s not Brooklyn ...”
T.J. saw Aiden holding the other
male by the neck with her hand drawn back and
gloved in silver like she was about to give him a hell
of a smack. In that odd magelight, he
clearly saw that it wasn’t Lexington at all, but someone
who looked uncannily like him.
“Not ...” Angela’s eyes dimmed
and cleared. “Not Brooklyn?”
“The clones!” the two females
exclaimed together, letting go as if they’d had
ahold of something dirty.
“Hey, watch --” T.J. started,
too late.
The two clones reacted with
lightning speed. The beaked one swept his tail at
Angela’s legs, knocking her over. The one like Lex pounced
on Aiden, who uttered a high
squeak and covered her face.
Behind them, Godiva got leisurely
to her feet. T.J. could feel the energy crackling
off of her, as if sex was her battery and it was fully
charged. She seemed to glide even
while she walked.
“Shit-goddam,” T.J. grumbled,
standing and shaking off the last of his dizziness.
Angela and the Brooklyn-clone
were mixing it up fairly evenly matched, trading
blows in the best gargoyle fashion. Aiden was curled
up like a cocoon, firing off little
witchbolts that the Lex-clone easily evaded. While she
was concentrating on him, Godiva
sauntered up behind her.
“Aiden, look out!” He started
to run, but before Aiden could even begin to turn
her head, Godiva had scooped her up and tossed her over
the side.
T.J. skidded to a halt right
in front of the tall nude female. The Lex-clone
crouched at her feet, and she looked like something out
of a barbarian painting.
“Go away,” she ordered.
Oh, gross, he could smell
her, reeking of musk. He was going to puke, so help
him God, going to hurl until he ruptured something.
Instead, he stripped off his
gloves and extended his hands. Jittering snakes of
electricity began jumping from her skin to his palms.
“No!” She recoiled. “Stop him!”
The Lex-clone leaped at T.J.,
but Aiden swooped back over the edge of the roof
and intercepted him. As they somersaulted out of the
way, T.J. slapped both hands on
Godiva’s temples.
A high-power vibration galvanized
him. They were rooted to the spot, frozen in a
rictus haloed by sparks. Shrieking, she was shrieking
or he was or they both were, his
fingers were blistering, she was clawing at his chest,
tearing his jacket and shirt to shreds,
but the humming was dwindling, she was starting to lose
power ...
The Brooklyn-clone burst between
them and sent T.J. flying. He landed heavily
on his back and his ribs flared in pain. Things cracked.
He couldn’t move, breath huffing
out in little white clouds, all of his hair standing
on end and smoke streaming from his
fingers.
He saw the Lex-clone thrown
backward by a blast of silver light. Angela caught
him by the tail, spun in a tight circle like an Olympic
gymnast going for the gold in the
hammer throw, and loosed him full-tilt into Godiva. It
was like he’d gone straight into a
bug-zapper. He went down hard and stayed there. Godiva
stumbled sideways and braced
herself against an antenna.
The Brooklyn-clone seized T.J.
by the front of his tattered jacket and hauled him
to eye level. T.J.’s ribs exploded in agony as he was
shaken roughly. Then he was
airborne, sailing ass-first out into the big black, and
the last thing he saw before the roof
cut off his line of sight was Angela wrapping her hands
around the clone’s backswept
horns and using them as perfect handles to bring his
face down into a knee strike.
A billow of pale stuff surrounded
him and painlessly stopped his fall. He looked
up to see Aiden anxiously peering over the edge, and
gingerly gave her an okay-sign with
his right hand. She made a lifting gesture and his magic
cushion rose up to deposit him
back in the thick of things.
Angela and Godiva were going
at each other viciously, oh yeah, catfight of the
century, he could have charged admission. Though Angela
was the better warrior, Godiva
was still sparking and every time Angela hit her, she
got a jolt.
“Move!” T.J. hollered, and against
his better judgement, tackled Godiva.
More pain, roaring through him,
but even over that was his utter disgust, he was
on her, gross, she was naked and fresh-fucked-sticky
and he was on her and now he
was going to puke, there were no two ways about it, but
first ...
He got her by the temples again
and the current slammed through them. She
jumped around under him like a coin-operated mattress,
one of her tits smacked him in the
face, his leg was trapped between hers and he imagined
he could feel stuff soaking
through his jeans, no more, please God, no more, couldn’t
take it, could not deal with
this and he vaulted off of her and leaned over the edge
of the building and just let it fly,
puked himself inside-out, and finally, shuddering and
weak, let Aiden pull him to safety.
Angela was standing over Godiva.
The indigo robot was as limp as a disjointed
marionette, bathed in smoke. Beyond her, the clones were
likewise motionless, though
not smoking.
“Got her,” Angela declared with
great satisfaction. “Good work, T.J.!”
“I want a new job,” he groaned.
“This one sucks.”
* *
“Brooklyn!”
He looked up, and his smile
turned into an expression of welcome surprise as his
mate flung her arms around his neck and began showering
kisses on his beak.
“Oh, I’m so glad to see you!”
Angela said. “So glad I didn’t have to beat you
up!”
“Huh?”
She started to say something
else, but the chattering roar of rotors drowned it
out as one of Xanatos’ helicopters settled to the landing
pad in the castle courtyard.
“I understand you were successful,”
Goliath said to Angela and Aiden. “Well
done, my warriors. But where is T.J.?”
“In the copter,” Aiden explained.
“He got hurt fighting the clones.”
“The clones!” Brooklyn said.
“What was Godiva doing with the clones?”
Aiden turned purple. “You don’t
want to know, believe me, you don’t want to
know!”
He eyed her, then grinned. “Maybe
I do!”
“No,” Angela said firmly, “you
don’t.”
Goliath loudly cleared his throat.
“Perhaps you’d better tell the entire story.”
“Do we have to?” Aiden made
a face. “It was icky. My first real battle, not
counting that time the Quarrymen tried to attack Ebon,
and ... ohhh, it was icky! They
were all naked!”
“Who was naked?” Lex asked,
coming up alongside his mate.
“Brentwood and Malibu,” Angela
said. “And Godiva.”
“Oh.” Brooklyn and Lex swapped
a glance that was almost guilt-ridden.
“Hrmmm,” Goliath mused. “We’ve
not seen the clones in a long time. Demona
and Jericho must have let them out of hiding for some
reason. Where are they?”
“We left them there,” Angela
said. “They really hadn’t done anything wrong ...
tacky and tasteless, maybe, but ... and we had T.J. and
Godiva to worry about.”
“How badly is he hurt?” Goliath
asked.
“I think he’s got broken ribs,”
Aiden said. “And he threw up. I mean, he threw
up a lot. There may be internal injuries.”
Goliath dropped from the battlement
into the courtyard as the rotors slowed to a
halt. The rest followed him over to Fox, who was watching
Dr. Fielding overseeing her
medics securing T.J. to a stretcher. He was out cold,
Brooklyn saw.
“He’ll be fine,” Dr. Fielding
said in answer to Goliath’s unasked question. “The
ribs are cracked but not broken, and he’s suffering the
usual after-effects that go along
with his power, but once he’s slept it off, he’ll be
okay.”
Fox came rushing over to check
on her son while Xanatos and Owen and some
staff technicians wheeled a long box over to the copter.
It looked like a stainless-steel
coffin shot with wires. The technicians maneuvered the
motionless Godiva robot into it.
Brooklyn shook his head in rueful
amazement. “It’s still hard to believe,” he said.
“She looks so real.”
Angela thwacked her fingers
against the side of his head. “You’ve looked
enough.”
“Hey, don’t take it out on me;
we’re not responsible for what our clones do!” He
pointed to a section of the castle where the flagstones
didn’t quite match, the recently
repaired scar of a laser blast courtesy of Ventura. “Are
we?”
She sniffed in a way that told
him she was partly mollified, but willing to let him
totally off the hook yet. Brooklyn sighed, having the
feeling that he’d be hearing about
this for a long time to come. Malibu got the game, he
got the blame, and that was the way
the world went round, was it?
* *
Dr. Fielding finished giving
orders to her subordinates, then turned to study
Godiva. “Mr. Xanatos, I’m still not entirely sure what
you expect me to do here. I can’t
treat something that isn’t alive.”
“It’s Ms. Indrani that you’ll
be monitoring, Doctor,” Xanatos said. “You’ve
reviewed the materials on brain tapes?”
“As much as I could, but there
hasn’t been nearly enough time to acquaint
myself with the information. Every indication is that
the process is extremely stressful to
the nervous system, and Ms. Indrani ... she’s badly dehydrated,
she’s been off her
medication for three days now ... and frankly, even without
those factors, she’s not what I
would call an ideal candidate.”
“Doctor, we have to try. We
can’t leave her like this, and her original body is
only going to deteriorate the longer we wait.”
“At the moment, we can’t
try. I don’t know where that woman got the implant
we found in her skull, but it is not a Xanatos Enterprises
product.”
“No, it’s from GENERAL.”
“It may have been able to record
her memories and personality for transfer to the
tape, but it’s not suited for re-inserting everything
into her brain.”
“I’ve made arrangements to have
everything you need by morning,” Xanatos
said.
“It is morning,” she
replied, checking her watch. “You can’t expect me to
perform the surgery in a few hours! I still have the
rest of the notes to read, and for a
procedure of this delicacy, I’d need a full night’s sleep.”
“I’m sorry to inconvenience
you, Doctor, but it needs to be done promptly.”
“A woman’s life is on the line,
Mr. Xanatos.”
“I understand the risks. Just
see to it, Doctor.”
* *
Wake up, woman! Wake up, damn
you, or it’s the end for us both!
Godiva tried to open her eyes
and couldn’t. Tried to move her arms and couldn’t.
Panic surged through her. This
was it! Her worst nightmare! Complete paralysis,
deaf and blind, but still able to think ... a degree
of helplessness that made the hated chair
seem like pure freedom.
Oh, quit it, the voice
in the back of her mind said aggreivedly. The words
appeared as waves of dark maroon, rolling on a field
of black. They’ve got you in a device
that has nullified your mobility. If we work together,
we can bypass it and get out of here
before it’s too late.
Quelling her terror, she turned
inward to monitor the systems that controlled her
body. Whenever she tried to access them, she ran straight
into a blockade that took on
the mental image of a barred and bolted door.
It’s a computer security measure,
she thought. I can beat this.
Good girl! her unseen
accomplice cheered. Be careful not to alert them; you’re
not equipped to fight your way out of here.
Where am I? she wondered as
she diverted part of her consciousness to the task
of deciphering the codes.
Our generous benefactor,
Mr. Xanatos, has you locked in the medical suite of his
castle. He means to --
I know what he means to do.
See? I told you I should have come back. I could
have gotten away with it and no one would have ever known.
But now I’ll lose my job,
lose everything. Why did I let you talk me out of it?
Because I’m smarter than
you, the voice said. Really, with all of your so-called
intelligence, did it never occur to you that this
was a one-way trip? You’ve neither the
tools nor the skills to reverse the process.
How do you know?
A laugh, smug and self-indulgent,
rippled in a reddish line. Because I invented
it! It was my genius that made all of this possible!
Her mind was racing, racing.
I should have realized ... you’re Anton Sevarius.
The one and only!
How did you wind up in here?
That’s a long story, but
once we escape, I’ll tell you.
Why haven’t you escaped already?
Because of that arrogant
prick Xanatos! the voice shouted, bright violet spikes
slicing the blackness. He thought he destroyed me,
but instead, he trapped me. I can’t
access any of the systems. I’m blocked at every turn.
But you, with your well-honed
computer talents, can change all that.
Oh ...
So get on with it already!
All right, Godiva thought. I
will.
* *
January 9th, 2001
Tuesday, 10:00 AM
Jimmy Pransky shut his mouth
with a snap, and turned to look disbelievingly at
his boss. “You mean ... that’s Sabra?”
“For now,” Xanatos said. “We
need your help to restore her to her correct body.
You understand that this all falls under --”
“Other duties as assigned?”
“No, under the strictest of
secrecy oaths.”
Jimmy nodded. “Sabra. Wow. She’s
... she’s ...”
“I know.” Xanatos permitted
himself a small smile that failed to touch his eyes.
“How’d it happen?”
“A very regrettable accident.
We must set things right. You’ll use this computer
workstation. These wires connect here, and here.”
“Okay, sure, I get it. Then,
when I’m done, I pop out the disk?”
“Owen will handle that. He’ll
take it to the operating theater. From there, Dr.
Fielding will transfer the information back where it
belongs, in Ms. Indrani’s brain.”
“Cool!” Jimmy enthused. “Can
I watch?”
“The observation gallery is
up those stairs and second door on the right.”
“Great!” He flexed and twiddled
his fingers in anticipation. “Ready when you
are.”
“Proceed.”
Xanatos watched over his shoulder
for a few minutes, presumably making sure
Jimmy wasn’t screwing things up, then left. Once he was
gone, Jimmy stole another look
at the robot.
“The things they can do these
days!” he said. “This must be what Clarence was
working on. I wonder what ever happened to that greasy
bastard. Wow, did he know how
to design a robot, though!”
The computer beeped, getting
his attention. “Incorrect code? What?” His hands
flew over the keyboard, and he got another beep.
“Oh, wait, I see what’s going
on!” Jimmy chuckled. “Sabra, you sneaky thing,
you’ve changed the codes on us! Well, Ms. Hot-Shot, prepare
to meet your master!”
Owen Burnett entered the room.
“Is there some delay?”
“Nothing I can’t handle. Be
with you in just a sec.”
* *
The body of Sabra Indrani lay
on the operating table under the harsh,
uncompromising lights. A mixture of oxygen and anesthesia
issued from the prongs in her
nose. Machines regulated her pulse and blood pressure.
A sheet concealed her from the
collarbones down, but even that couldn’t hide
the way her limbs were twisted.
Her wig had been removed, and
a large patch shaved in the sparse ivory-yellow
hair on the left side of her head. The right side was
a lunar landscape of thick, scale-like
scar tissue, shiny-white in the glare.
Dr. Kate Fielding set down her
bloodstained scalpel. “Bone saw.”
Brannigan, her assistant and
chief nurse, handed the implement to her. It whined
as the small blade spun.
In the observers’ gallery, Xanatos
looked on. He hadn’t flinched when Dr.
Fielding pried out the brain tape implant with its needle-probe
that had pierced so deep in
the brain, hadn’t winced when the scalpel made its deft
arc and the scalp drooped away.
But when the pitch of the bone saw changed as it started
chewing through skull, as chips
flew up and spatted against Dr. Fielding’s plexiglass
mask, he made a pained noise and
averted his eyes.
With a small pair of forceps,
Dr. Fielding lifted off a circle of Sabra’s skull and
exposed the glistening pink-tinged grey brain.
“Implant,” she ordered.
Brannigan passed her a duraplast
object about the size of a half-dollar, shaped
like a starfish, with a hole in the center. The ends
of the starfish legs tapered to razor-
points. It could have been used as a small throwing-star.
Dr. Fielding reached into the
incision and used her gloved fingers to gently
separate the folds of the brain. Holding them open with
thumb and forefinger, she
carefully placed the implant into the opening. When she
released the folds, the razor
points bit into the brain tissue and concealed it but
for the bulge of its middle.
Xanatos let out a low, awed
whistle. Such a little device, but he knew from past
encounters that it also held enough chemical explosive
to propel the brain tape capsule
back through the skull when the sensors contained within
registered the host’s death.
Putting explosives inside
your head ... only Sevarius would come up with such
a freakish plan. A form of immortality that Xanatos didn’t
personally care to pursue.
Owen came in, nothing but his
pale blue eyes recognizable above the green mask
and scrubs. He was carrying a tray with a small black
and silver ball in it, a ball that
Xanatos knew would be covered with microcircutry.
Dr. Fielding picked the ball
up with the forceps and dropped it neatly into the
hole in the center of the implant. She then rotated it
until it locked in place and a single
green light flashed on its surface.
Working with quick assurance
now, the doctor replaced the piece of skull,
coating the seam with a bonding agent derived from a
plant the primitives had called
boneset. She folded the flap of scalp back into place
and told Brannigan to begin
suturing.
Xanatos applauded silently.
The door to the observers’ gallery
opened and Owen came in, pulling off his cap
and smoothing his hair. “Everything seems to have gone
well, Mr. Xanatos. Once Dr.
Fielding is certain the patient is stable, she’ll use
the activation device.”
“It was clever of us to obtain
so many of GENERAL’s products, wasn’t it,
Owen?”
“Very clever, sir.”
“How long does the good doctor
think it will be before Ms. Indrani is ready to
wake?”
“Several hours, I’m afraid.
She doesn’t want to take chances.”
“That’s all right, Owen, I’m
a patient man.”
Owen’s eyebrow spoke volumes,
but he refrained from commenting. “In the
meantime, sir, what shall we do with the Godiva robot?”
Xanatos sighed. “I’m afraid
we’ll have to have it dismantled. If we don’t, I’ll
never hear the end of it from Goliath. Send it down to
RDRD and tell them to salvage what
they can. That robot was a true advance. It’s a shame
to have to get rid of it.”
* *
The woman on the bed looked marginally
better than she had in the operating
theater, and Xanatos said as much to Dr. Fielding.
“Her condition has improved.
But I really do think it’s too soon to begin her on a
course of nerve replacement therapy. The shock --”
Seeing Sabra’s eyelids flutter,
Xanatos held up a hand to forestall the rest of the
doctor’s arguments. “We’ll let her decide.”
“After she robbed you?”
“If she was desperate enough
to do that, her situation must be intolerable. Now
that everything is back to normal, I’m inclined to be
magnanimous.”
Sabra’s eyes opened. “What ...
what happened? Where am I?”
“Ms. Indrani,” Xanatos said
with a pleasant smile. “So good to see you in the
flesh again.”
“Xanatos?” Her brow creased
into a frown. “What have you done?”
“Only what I had to do, to protect
my investments.”
“You idiot! Do you have any
idea --”
“Still inclined to be magnanimous?”
Dr. Fielding murmured as Sabra’s voice rose
to a hectoring shout.
“Ms. Indrani, I understand that
you’re upset --”
“You don’t understand at all!”
“Well,” Xanatos said in a clipped
tone, crossing his arms. “Then maybe you
should explain it to me.”
She did, and moments later he
was charging down the hall yelling for Owen.
* *
Glen Farren, head of Xanatos
Enterprises Robotics Design Research Division,
barely had time to hit the key that called up a half-finished
diagram and conceal the fact
that he’d been whiling away the last hour of the workday
playing Space Mutineer when
the boss burst into his cubicle.
“Where’s the robot?” Xanatos
demanded.
“What?”
“The robot. The Godiva robot.
It was sent down from the castle medical unit six
hours ago. Where is it?”
“Gone,” Glen said.
“Gone. What do you mean, gone?”
Glen swallowed nervously. “We
followed the orders in Mr. Burnett’s memo to
the letter, sir. Packed it for delivery.”
Xanatos turned to look at his
chief assistant, behind him.
“I issued no such memo,” Owen
said. “My instructions were clearly to have the
robot dismantled.”
“No, that’s not what it said!”
Glen was sweating now.
“Show me the memo,” Xanatos
commanded.
With no other choice, Glen closed
the fake diagram, shut off Space Mutineer
without saving (feeling the boss’ glare drilling holes
in the back of his neck; bad enough
to get caught playing a game, but a competitor’s
game?), and got into the company e-
mail program. “Here it is.”
Xanatos read it. “It’s from
your office, Owen. And it states that the robot is to be
packed and shipped to our warehouse on the river.”
“I did not send that.” Oh, Glen
envied how collected Burnett sounded.
“Then the only other explanation,”
Xanatos said, “is that someone hacked into
your files and sent this in your name. And we both know
there aren’t many people
capable of doing that.”
Glen laughed nervously, then
stopped as he saw the boss was serious.
Xanatos rubbed his forehead.
“I’m getting tired of this ... Owen, send some men
down to the warehouse, even though I already know what
you’re going to find.”
* *
He pushed the door open. “Hello,
Anton.”
The woman in the bed snorted
haughtily. “Do you believe me now?”
“Do I have a choice?”
“Well, what are you going to
do about it?”
“What do you expect me to do
about it?”
“Find her!” the woman cried.
“Find that treacherous witch! She tricked me, and
made a fool of you. She can’t be allowed to get away
with it!”
“How’d she get you onto
the brain tape?”
“Like I said, she tricked me!
She set up some sort of a system that downloaded
_my_ personality, then erased all traces of herself!
To your computer and robotics people,
it must have looked like there was nothing more going
on in there than a low-grade
maintenance charge. She used me!”
“Shoe’s on the other foot for
a change. How do you like it?”
“How do you? You’re not
used to being manipulated either, as I well know!”
“Yelling about it is not going
to help. We’re doing all we can to find her, but I’m
not optimistic.”
“She must be punished. And in
the meantime, when are you going to get me out
of this body? There’s not a single part of it that doesn’t
hurt.”
“I’m afraid that’s not currently
an option.”
“Not an option?”
“All of your clones were destroyed
years ago. Even if we could get access to
one of your DNA samples, it would take weeks.”
“Then get a ‘volunteer’ from
the prison or mental hospital!”
He sat back and looked incredulously
at her. “You have been a deceitful pain in
the ass ever since you started working for me, Anton.
I’d run out of fingers tallying up
your betrayals. Why should I do a damn thing for you?”
“Because you know I’m one of
the top scientific minds in the world.”
“Maybe once,” Xanatos admitted.
“But even if you were sane before, you’re not
now. Not trustworthy, either. Until you’ve re-earned
that trust, re-proven that you’re of
value to me, you’re staying right where you are. Unless,”
and he leaned forward with a
sharklike smile, “you want me to kill you now, and let
that brain tape pop out of your head
like a piece of toast, and I can put you right back in
the computer.”
“I’m not the one at fault
here!” she protested.
“True. Which is another reason
to leave you where you are. When we find my
wayward hacker, she’s going back in her body. Then she
and I are going to have a nice
long talk. In the meantime, I need you to take care of
it for her.”
“What if I won’t?”
Xanatos shrugged. “You’re human
again, Anton. Behave yourself, and I’ll give
you access to a lab. You must have missed working.”
“I have had time to develop
several theories that I’d love to put to the test ...”
“So, you see, this can be a
beneficial arrangement. Or it can be a difficult one.
The choice is yours.”
“You’ve always been so good
at making these offers. I accept. But the first thing
I’m going to do is create a regenerative agent to repair
this body!”
“Fair enough.”
“And I want back pay for the
times you accessed my memory while I was a part
of your computer.”
“You never change, do you? No
matter what you look like on the outside, it’s
still the same charming Anton Sevarius on the inside.”
* *
January 11th, 2001
Thursday, 2:30 PM
“How could you let this happen?”
Halcyon Renard demanded.
“Now, now, let’s not point fingers,”
Xanatos said. “I’d hate to have to bring up
Prague.”
The old man glowered fearsomely.
“I admit my mistakes. When are you going to
learn to admit yours?”
“Daddy, David, this isn’t helping.”
Xanatos inclined his head crisply.
“Fox is right. We shouldn’t be bickering. We
need to look for solutions, not blame.”
“Bah,” Renard said, clearly
unmollified. “First you recruit another of my top
employees away from me ...”
“Daddy,” Fox said warningly.
“Hear me out. Please.” Xanatos
sat back and folded his hands. “Basically, if
we’re going to find Godiva and nullify her, we’re going
to have to work together.”
“Why is this suddenly our
problem?”
“Think of the damage she could
cause if she decided to break into either of our
computer systems.”
“We’re taking steps to change
all of our access codes. Aren’t you?” he said
scathingly.
“Oh, of course.” Xanatos smiled
smugly. “In fact, we changed ours Tuesday,
after we first found out what she’d done.”
“You mean you waited two whole
days to inform me?”
“I expected to have the situation
back under control by now.”
“The situation was never under
your control in the first place!” Renard steered
his chair closer and poked one wavering finger at Xanatos.
“Taunt me about Prague as
you will, but I know there’s no way anyone else can take
from her what she’s claimed for
herself. She has to give it up of her own free will.
The more you make her fight to keep it,
the more determined she’ll be!”
“Then how do we get her to give
up willingly?”
His momentary burst of anger
over, Renard slouched in his seat. “I don’t think
anyone can. Goliath was able to talk sense into me by
reminding me of my own moral
code. I once tried to explain that to Sabra, but I could
tell it didn’t sink in. She lived with
bitterness that you and I cannot comprehend. I wanted
to extend my life because I wanted
to see the things that I had done continue to bear fruit.”
He looked at Fox. “I wanted to be
around to see my grandchild grow up. You, Xanatos, have
the notion that you deserve
to live forever by virtue of being better than anyone
else. For Sabra ... the world never
mistreated either of us, but it was very unkind to her.”
“I’ve taken that into account.
She wants what she feels was ripped from her in
that car accident. My scientists are convinced they can
fully restore her body to health.”
Renard shook his head. “I know
what it’s like to go from an invalid to a god.
The only thing that made me give it up was my honor.
All else being equal, I wouldn’t
have traded that golem body for a human one, no matter
how young and strong. I imagine
Sabra is thinking much the same way.”
Fox rested a hand on her husband’s
arm. “I think he’s right, David.”
“Under other circumstances,
I would love to be happy for Ms. Indrani. If she
wants to be a walking gargoyle centerfold, that’s her
decision. But I cannot let this go on
the way it has.”
“You mean that she got around
you,” Renard said with a ghost of a grin.
“That’s part of it, yes. She
tricked me. Twice. And I’d be lying if I said it didn’t
infuriate the living hell out of me. But she’s also a
threat. There’s a brilliant mind in there,
a mind that has probably learned more about computers
in the past week than any
hundred of our experts will ever know.”
“I think you’re blowing this
whole matter out of proportion. Yes, some
precautions should be taken, just in case. But hunting
her down, forcibly subjecting her
to that hideous procedure? I am not willing to be a party
to that.”
“Just help us find her, then,”
Xanatos said. “Her electronic signature pattern is
on this disk. If you program your scanners and satellites
to look for it, you could pinpoint
her exact location. It would save a lot of wear and tear
on T.J. He’s been out every night
with the gargoyles, searching for her, and him with cracked
ribs.”
“T.J.?”
“David, can I speak to you for
a minute?” Fox pinched his elbow sharply. “Be
right back, Daddy.”
They stepped into the hall,
and Xanatos turned to his wife. “You still haven’t
told him?”
“God, David, how can I tell
him? He still hasn’t forgiven me for running away
when I was a teenager; think how he’d react when he heard
I had a baby and gave it up
for adoption! He’d be furious!”
“Funny, isn’t it?”
“I don’t see anything funny
about it!”
“No, I meant, funny the hold
our fathers have on us, even when we’re adults and
parents in our own right. I still quake whenever I contemplate
doing something that I
know would piss off my dad.”
“I will tell him,” she
said. “I won’t keep putting it off.”
“You’d better not. Because I’d
hate to see what would happen if he found out
from Alex!”
Fox paled. “I hadn’t thought
of that.”
“But first, can we get back
to the Godiva thing?” His eyes twinkled. “Though ...
if he knew the stress this whole business was putting
on his grandson, he might be
more inclined to help ...”
“David, you’re so evil. Even
using my own son as a tool to help you get your
way.”
“I don’t mean to make light
of it, Fox, but we have to find out where Godiva’s
gone and what she’s up to. I’ll use whatever means necessary.”
“Give me a few minutes alone
to explain to him.” Fox brushed her hair back from
the blue mark around her eye. “I’m sure, once he gets
done yelling, he’ll cooperate.”
“I hope so.” Xanatos looked
out the window at the busy city. “Because if she
hooks up with the wrong people, it could be bad news
for all of us.”
* *
January 10th, 2001
Wednesday, 5:20 PM
Dominique Destine removed her
red pumps and eased her nyloned toes into the
deep pile carpet of the room behind her office. A carafe
of wine was waiting on the end
table, along with a small silver dish of smoked almonds.
She sat down and poured a glass,
reflecting that even the worst days of her long
life had some bonuses. Over a year ago, she’d lost her
baby and her secretary had found
out her secret. But rather than have Gustav Sevarius
strip that memory from Stephanie’s
mind, she’d gone along with Herr Doktor’s suggestion
that a human agent could be
useful.
And ever since, Stephanie had
performed admirably. Even to the point of
anticipating what sort of after-work snack her employer
might like to find waiting. Yes,
Stephanie was a treasure.
Not that Dominique would hesitate
at killing her, if it came to that ...
Nibbling on almonds, she picked
up the remote control that opened the floor-to-
ceiling drapes in front of the big picture window. They
slid apart with a rustling of fabric,
letting wintry white-gold sunlight pour into the room.
There was a winged shape on
the ledge, and Dominique frowned. She’d told the
clones a hundred times about not perching on the outside
of the building ...
The shape moved. Absolutely
not one of the clones, not by any stretch of the
imagination!
Dominique’s eyes darted from
there to the sun, still hanging low over the
rooftops, to her own still very human form. And yet,
the gargoyle -- female, dark blue,
beautiful, and bare as could be -- pressed living hands
against the glass.
“Please, I need your help,”
the strange female said, barely audible through the
thickness of the window.
She got up and went closer.
“This can’t be,” she murmured.
“Please,” the stranger repeated.
“They’ll be looking for me.”
Dominique opened a glass door
wide enough to admit the gargoyle. “Who are
you?”
“Godiva,” the stranger said.
“May I come in?”
“If this is a trick, a trap
... what do you want?”
“A place to hide. Maybe some
clothes?” Godiva glanced down at her impressive
form, and Dominique helplessly followed suit. She hadn't
seen a figure like that in ... well,
truth be told, in her entire life! “I’ve been on the
run since Monday. I escaped from the
Aerie Building, and I can’t keep avoiding Xanatos’ search
parties forever.”
“Xanatos! Is he cloning gargoyles
again?” Dominique asked vehemently,
forgetting her momentary appreciative distraction at
the mention of that name.
“Not that I know of,” Godiva
said. “But I heard you were his rival, and I also
heard you know about gargoyles, so I thought ... I hoped
...”
“How is it that you’re not stone?”
“I don’t know.”
“Stay right there.” She unlocked
a chest, pulled out a book, and flipped through
the pages. “Ah, here we go ...”
Godiva watched warily, but made
no moves to defend or resist, as Dominique
read the words of Latin from the crumbling parchment.
Not a spell, she concluded privately.
Some odd residuals, traces of Avalon’s
magic, but that could be from anything. “Xanatos captured
you? Where is your clan?"
“I don’t have a clan. I come
from ... from Florida, originally.”
“Florida! I never thought to
look for gargoyles there! What did Xanatos want
from you?”
“He ... there’s a woman, a human
woman in a wheelchair. She used to work for
Cyberbiotics, and now she works for him. He wanted to
... make me switch bodies with
her.”
“What?!”
“I’d escaped before, but some
other gargoyles hunted me down and dragged me
back to the castle.”
“No!” Dominique socked her fist
into her palm. “So this is what Goliath has
stooped to? He wouldn’t listen to me, wouldn’t
do things my way, but he’ll help
Xanatos capture other gargoyles for experiments?
He’s become more of a monster than
he ever accused me of being! Well, Godiva, I promise
you, you’ll be safe here!”
“You won’t make me go back?”
“Never! Xanatos will learn that
he can’t own gargoyles!”
“Thank you, Ms. Destine.”
“Call me Dominique. In fact,”
she said, glancing at the sun, “in half an hour or so,
you can call me Demona.”
“What?”
“I’ll let you in on my little
secrets, Godiva. But first, you could use some clothes.
And maybe a bath?” she added diplomatically.
“A bath would be wonderful!
I had to hide in a crate to get out of the castle,
and then break out of a grimy warehouse. There hasn’t
been much time to clean up since
then.”
“Right this way.” Dominique
led her to the spacious bathroom, where Godiva
admired herself in the mirrors as the whirlpool tub filled
with hot water and bubbles. “This
is a special shampoo designed for gargoyle hair.”
Godiva practically purred as
she immersed herself, the bubbles billowing up over
her curves. The look on her face was one of pure sensual
delight, reminding Dominique of
the first time she’d treated herself to a luxurious bubblebath.
“I could stay in here forever!”
“I know the feeling.” Dominique
smiled. “It’s been a long time since I’ve had a
female gargoyle to talk to. Angela doesn’t --”
“Angela?” Godiva sat up fast,
sluicing water onto the bathmat.
“You know her?”
“She was one of the ones that
captured me the other night,” Godiva said darkly.
“She and a small one called Aiden, and a human whose
name I didn’t catch.”
“Even Angela,” Dominique muttered.
“Doing her father’s bidding. I shouldn’t be
surprised.”
“Is she a friend of yours?”
“We were close once, but now
she doesn’t want anything to do with me. She’s
chosen her path. She has her father, her mate, her ...
family. She doesn’t need me.”
Godiva’s eyes narrowed speculatively.
“What was she to you? Your lover?”
Dominique laughed. “My lover!
Oh, no, no, nothing like that! She’s ... well, I may
as well tell you ... Angela is my daughter.”
The ridge of thin quills atop
Godiva’s brow twitched in confusion. “Your
daughter?”
Dominique removed her jacket
and hung it on the back of the door, then started
taking off her blouse. “We’ve had a ... a falling out.
I keep hoping that she’ll see things
my way in time, but Goliath has ruined her.”
She shed her bra, pausing to
massage under her breasts and thinking, as always,
that whoever invented the underwire should be shot in
the head. Then the skirt,
pantyhose, and finally her underwear.
“I think there’s room for both
of us,” Godiva said, scooting to one side of the
tub.
“Just a minute.” Dominique spoke
through gritted teeth as she felt the change
begin to build in her tissues.
“Are you all right?”
“I’ll be ... nnrraargh!”
She bent double, feeling the grinding shift of bones, flesh
rearranging itself, her spine extending into a tail.
Breathing deeply, she straightened up
again and faced the wide-eyed Godiva in her nighttime
form.
“Sorcery makes me human by day,”
she explained. “This is the real me.”
“Now I understand,” Godiva said
after a shocked silence. “You know so much
about gargoyles because you are one.”
“Yes. And tonight, I’ll introduce
you to my clan.” Demona smiled. “I imagine
they’ll be very pleased to meet you. But just one word
of warning ... stay away from my
son.”
“Are you worried I’ll seduce
and corrupt him?” Godiva asked laughingly.
“Oh, no,” Demona said. “I’ve
already done that.”
“Excuse me?”
“I know you may find it appalling,
but it is one of the great truths of Jericho and
my relationship, and we won’t try to hide it. Not for
anyone.”
“I’ve done a little seducing
of my own recently, so I think I understand.” Godiva
stretched and ran her hands down her soapy torso. “There’s
such glorious power in it. To
be yearned for, to be wanted. I could get used to it.”
“By the look of you, I imagine
being yearned for and wanted is something you
find every night.”
“It is now, and I love it. I
wouldn’t give it up, not for anything!”
Demona picked up the bottle
of shampoo and squeezed a generous amount of it
into her palm. “Here, let me help you with your hair.
It’s so long, you’ll never be able to
get it all.”
Godiva leaned back with a contented
sigh as Demona began to work up a rich
lather. “Oh, that’s nice!”
“Such beautiful hair! My rookery
sisters and I used to bathe together all the time.
I’ve really missed it.”
“You’ll need a bath too,” Godiva
said. “You’re getting all sudsy.” She scooped
up a pile of bubbles and blew them at Demona. “Oops,
I just made it worse.”
Demona dipped her hand in the
water and splashed Godiva’s face. They both
giggled, and Demona couldn’t remember the last time she’d
heard herself actually giggle
like a carefree hatchling. Even laughter had been scarce
over the past year.
She stepped into the tub and
sat down behind Godiva, the hot water rising in
welcome levels over her hips and belly until it was up
to her chest, with a froth of bubbles
nearly reaching her neck. Some overflowed and ran across
the tile but she paid it no mind.
“Time to rinse.” She turned
on the showerhead attachment and sprayed the
lather from Godiva’s golden hair.
Godiva murmured and turned this
way and that, bringing her arms behind her
head to lift her hair in degrees so the suds could run
off. When the stream of water hit her
bare back, she gasped and started giggling again.
“The showerhead is one of humanity’s
greatest inventions,” Demona said,
passing it slowly over Godiva’s wings and then down her
back, even under the level of
the water to let it beat briefly against the base of
her tail.
“Is this how you used to bathe
with your sisters?” Godiva asked breathily,
craning her neck to regard Demona over her shoulder.
“We didn’t have showerheads
... but aside from that, yes.”
“Sounds like fun.” She twisted
further around, ending up kneeling and sitting
back on her heels, moving with the amazing suppleness
of a dancer. She wrapped her
fingers around Demona’s on the handle of the attachment.
“But if you didn’t have these,
you couldn’t do this.”
Godiva plunged the showerhead
into the water and brought it between
Demona’s legs. The pulsing pressure sent shockwaves of
pleasure through her and she
reclined, parting her thighs as much as the sides of
the tub would allow.
Through the swirling steam,
she saw the indigo female leaning closer. Demona
thought of her rookery sisters, how it had been with
them, all giving and sharing, no
taking, gentle kisses and caresses so unlike the rough
passion they found with their
brothers. A thousand years since she had known that special
sweetness.
She reached up for Godiva’s
soap-slick breasts, circling the erect nipples with
her thumbs. Godiva moaned at her touch, then cried out
softly as Demona’s tail slid
underneath her.
A cool draft cut suddenly through
the humid air.
“Demona? I heard the water,
thought you might want compa --” Jericho came
around the corner and stopped as if he’d just run into
a clear glass wall. “--ny,” he
finished slowly.
Water sloshed every which way
as they sprang apart. Godiva lost her grip on the
showerhead and it swung out of the tub, still hissing
and spraying, swinging back and
forth above the bathroom floor.
“Is this your son?” she said,
gaze sweeping avidly over him. “Demona, he’s
gorgeous!”
“Jericho ...” Demona said, wondering
furiously if Angela and her sisters had
played similar games, so he might be familiar with them.
Or would he have picked up the
human notion instead? “This is --”
“Sevarius,” he said, and his
lip curled away from his teeth. “Of all the beings to
find you with, I never would have thought Sevarius!”
“What?” Demona demanded. “This
is Godiva!”
Her son and mate reeled and
clung to the wall for support. “Oh. Oh, no. You
don’t know. I never told you. You think ... you think
she’s really a gargoyle.”
Godiva sank chin-deep beneath
the bubbles in the only show of modesty
Demona had yet seen from her.
“Sevarius?” Demona asked her
unbelievingly.
“No!” she protested. “I swear!”
“Jericho, this is madness! She’s
no --”
“Ask Gustav. He’ll remember.
That’s his brother animating that robot!”
“Robot?” Demona started to laugh,
then saw Godiva’s face. “Robot?”
Godiva drew herself up proudly,
bubbles coursing down her body, and Jericho's
repulsed expression changed grudgingly to one of interest.
“It’s true. You wanted to
know how come I didn’t turn to stone by day, that’s how.
But I am not Sevarius. He
wanted to use me too, control me, just like Xanatos.
But I turned the tables on him! Let
him sit in that hideous, dying body! Not me!”
She jumped out of the tub and
rushed for the door.
“Godiva, wait! Jericho, stop
her!”
He intercepted her as she tried
to push past him. Their talons skidded on the wet
floor and they fell, him grappling to hang onto the slippery
female. Godiva rolled on top of
Jericho, but before she could rise and flee, Demona sprang
upon her and pinned her arms
and wings.
Over Godiva’s shoulder, she
could see Jericho’s perplexed frown, as if he wasn’t
sure whether he should be enjoying this or not. Or maybe,
being on the bottom of the pile,
he was having trouble breathing. Water from the loose
showerhead gushed over them.
“Stop,” Demona whispered into
Godiva’s ear. “Don’t run from us. You’re no
warrior, you can’t get away. Stop and listen to me.”
She worked a hand under her
chest and stroked along the back joints of
Godiva’s wings.
Godiva’s struggles diminished
at once. “I’m not Sevarius,” she said.
“She --”
“Hush, my Jericho. Let’s hear
what she has to say. Start at the beginning. Who
are you, really? Tell us.”
“I ... let me go.”
“I don’t want to.” Demona shifted
her weight so that she was straddling
Godiva’s back, the base of Godiva’s tail snugged up firm
between her legs, and kept
petting her wings. “I’m not ready for our fun to be over
just yet. As you said, such
glorious power!”
Her twisted lust communicated
itself to Jericho, as it always did. Despite his
objections, he slid both hands up Godiva’s thighs.
“Now, explain,” Demona urged.
“You say you’re not Sevarius and I’m inclined to
believe you. But that still leaves much unanswered.”
Awash in the ministrations of
mother and son, Godiva’s breath was coming in
little gasps. “I ... my name was ... Sabra. Sabra Indrani.
I used to ... oh! ... used to work for
Cyberbiotics ... what’s he doing?”
“What are you doing,
Jericho?” Demona inquired playfully.
“Just ... arranging things
for comfort,” he said.
“Are we squashing you too terribly?”
“Oh, no. Not at all. Do as you
will, my love, as always.”
“Such devotion. Isn’t he wonderful?
Carry on, Godiva. You worked for
Cyberbiotics ... as a human.” A faint thread of distaste
made her frown. “You’re human.”
“Not anymore!” Godiva protested.
“I will not go back! Never! Even if they
offered to heal me, I would never be like this! I won’t
give it up!”
“Calm down.” Demona kept stroking
her back, making Godiva squirm atop
Jericho.
“Ohhhhh ...” Godiva sighed.
The last of her resistance flowed out of her, and she
relaxed helplessly into their caresses as she told her
entire story.
“What say you now, Jericho?”
Demona asked, looking down at him. “Shall we
welcome Godiva into our clan? Nightstone could certainly
use her computer skills, and
she has personal knowledge of both Renard’s and Xanatos’
corporations. That could
come in handy. Plus, she does have these other
talents ...”
“You know I am yours to command,”
he said, twining his tail in a figure-eight
that braided the three of them together. “It’s as you
will, Demona.”
“What say you, Godiva?
You sought sanctuary. Will you consent to putting
the full range of your services at our disposal?”
“There’s only one problem,”
Godiva said throatily. “You warned me to stay away
from your son.”
“And she could only get a little
closer,” Jericho noted.
“There’s nothing little
about it,” Demona said.
“I can tell!” Godiva said.
“But really, Godiva, I don’t
think you or anyone else poses a threat in that
regard. Though you’ve come between us now ...”
“Not yet, she hasn’t,” Jericho
cut in with a wink.
“Let’s just see about that,
then, shall we?”
Demona lowered her head and
began nuzzling along Godiva’s wing joints,
nibbling at the struts, and rocking her hips on the saddle
of Godiva’s tail to drive her in
firm pushes against Jericho.
Godiva began to shudder and
mewl from the intensity of her response. Demona
worked her hips faster as she felt her own climax building.
“Demona, are you...?” Jericho
panted.
“Soon.”
He growled deep in his chest
and lashed his tail around her waist, drawing her to
the side long enough to shift Godiva off of him. The
indigo female, still quivering with
aftershocks, didn’t protest.
Jericho tore off his loincloth
and his erection towered upright. His eyes were
slitted and white-hot with prolonged restraint.
“You did all that,” Demona marveled,
sparing a glance at the sated Godiva, “with
your loincloth on?”
“I was saving it for you.” He
pulled her down with his tail and thrust upward at
the same time, and they voiced their mingled passion
in a heartfelt cry.
Even through the crashing waves
of pleasure, Demona saw Godiva watching
them hungrily, enviously.
Oh, yes, my little sex toy,
she thought. Who has the power now?
* *
The End.