“There’s nothing here,” Pax said as they walked through the palace.
“You’re still seeing with your eyes,” Suja remarked. “If you relax and allow yourself to believe what your intuition already knows, you will be able to perceive the presence of my army.”
Pax tried to do as the woman recommended, but could just barely sense that anything living was in the castle. She did, however, sense Amara. “I haven’t practiced nearly enough,” she told Suja apologetically.
“I can teach you all you’ve missed and more,” Suja said. “You just have to open yourself to me and have faith. I know you don’t trust me yet, and that is wise. I am a stranger, and although I have always been on your side, I am a highborn Asura woman by birth.”
“You’re very understanding,” Pax said. “Thanks for being so candid.”
“I’m selfish in the end, my dear. As all living things must be. I only wish to gain your favor so you will assist me. I only strive to be honest so that I may retain your respect.”
“How can I assist you?” Pax asked. “I’ll do whatever I can.”
“Really, darling?” A smile transformed Suja’s features. “I am so pleased to hear you say that. All I want is for you to be my ally. All I want is for you to rule!”
“Rule what?” Pax asked.
“Earth of course,” Suja answered. “I rather like it here in Ishtar. I’m a solitary woman, and I enjoy warm places with little oxygen. But if you wish, I can give you Earth.”
“Sakra rules Earth,” Pax answered nervously.
“No, he observes Earth. He’s a pathetic shrimp who should never have been appointed Lord of Devas. Your lives are all little more than a soap opera to that self-righteous, so-called god.” Suja’s voice was bitter when she spoke of her husband. “Also, he’s getting fat.”
“Really? I thought he was a skinny little guy.”
“He was. But underneath those embroidered golden brocade robes, there is a definite potbelly starting to appear. I just can’t believe how flabby his arms are getting. I swear, Pax. He won’t even shapeshift into a body that doesn’t have man-boobs. It’s humiliating.”
“I’m… sorry,” Pax said slowly, a bit perplexed, “but what did Sakra do?”
“I would prefer not to discuss that. Let’s just say we had a final difference of opinions. He upset me so much that I couldn’t watch him blinking without wanting to disembowel him. So I left.” Suja reached up to finger Rose Kalgren’s sophisticated blonde bun. “But all that is behind me now. Will you help me overthrow him, and retake the highest temple of Earth?”
“I’m not sure I can,” Pax answered cautiously.
“With my training, you will be capable. Your father is Sakra’s prime bodyguard, and he won’t stop you.” Suja placed both hands on Pax’s shoulders. “It’s what you were meant to do, child. You were meant to rule!”
She’s insane, Pax realized. Do I try to placate her until I get Amara back and betray her later? That could be dangerous. Should I just tell her that I’m not the person she’s looking for? Even though she’s mad, I still admire her for some reason. I should be honest.
“Suja, I am not capable of overthrowing Sakra. Even if I could, I wouldn’t know how to rule as the god of gods. I’m just a human girl. I’m flattered that you see this great potential in me, but I’m not as strong as you think.”
The woman wearing Rose Kalgren’s body pulled away abruptly. Her hair became white again, and it lengthened until it touched the floor. She began levitating off the ground, until she was suspended in the center of the great hall. Her snowy hair had lengthened as she rose, and it was still sweeping the floor. “I expected that you would say that, Pax Burnson. Allow me to change your mind.”
Extending an arm, Suja used her finger to touch the corner of a geometrical shape which had not been previously visible. Pax watched in awe as a pyramid made of thick transparent glass became visible, suspended in the center of the room. There was a woman concealed within the glass, and Pax knew it was Amara.
“Let me present my bargaining chip,” Suja said with a gesture. “The helpless Kalgren girl.”
Pax sighed, allowing her shoulders to fall. “Seriously? You seemed so cool about five minutes ago.” She gestured at the glass pyramid. “This? This is just tacky second-rate villain stuff.”
Suja laughed, and the sound was still magical. Her hair began to glow and twist, rapidly braiding itself. Pax had to leap back to avoid being struck by the ropelike collection of strands. “If I am so second-rate, it will be easy to defeat me, fire deva. Here is your task: overpower the monster and liberate the princess.”
“This isn’t a game!” Pax yelled as she levitated off the ground. “This isn’t a homework assignment; my friend’s life is at stake. Release her. I will wreck you if you don’t let her go now.”
“There’s that confidence you were pretending not to have a mere minute ago!” Suja said triumphantly. “There’s that capacity for violence, that lust for vengeance and justice. Show me your true nature, little one.”
Pax cracked her neck and rolled her shoulders to loosen them. “In ten seconds I want you to remember that you asked for it.” Tossing her head back, Pax reached deep inside herself and allowed the flames of Ruby Form to consume and transform her body. She formed a precise and economical plan of attack. She would rush at the glass pyramid and shatter it, retrieving Amara. Then she would unleash a stream of blue-hot flames from her hand which would temporarily blind Suja, allowing her to teleport away and escape. She had no hopes of actually killing the Asura woman, but if she could get home, she believed that the woman would not follow. Suja would not risk facing Raymond and Vincent.
“Let her try,” Suja spoke softly to a being which Pax could not see. With the woman’s obvious madness, Pax doubted that anything was even there, and continued to release her latent goddess. How’s this for dormant, Father? Her thoughts were filled with arrogance and anger.
When Pax felt fully charged with adrenaline and the natural firepower of her prana, she extended her fist and charged the pyramid. She unleashed an earsplitting battle cry as she imagined her clenched hand having the density and mass of a small star. She channeled all the power she could grasp and all the energy she could access into the two inches across her knuckles before she smashed her hand into the bottom of the glass pyramid. Pax expected the material to crumble beneath her blow, but she was shocked when she instead struck a rock-solid, unyielding wall. The force of her own strike traveled through her own arm, and Pax screamed in excruciating pain as the limb fell limply against her side. She had shattered her own bones.
Pax clutched her dead arm in disbelief as tears clouded her eyes. She tried to move her bloody fingers, but they lay disabled against her thigh. “Damnation!” Pax whispered as she stared at the unaffected pyramid. There was a new spot of blood on the bottom of the structure, but there was otherwise not even the tiniest of cracks in the material. She turned to Suja, panting heavily in pain. “You’re using magick to fortify the glass,” she said weakly. “I should have known.”
Suja clucked her tongue. “Glass? It’s not glass, child. That was a miscalculation on your part.”
“What is it?” Pax said, massaging her arm and trying to regain feeling in the immobilized limb. She was still in denial of the fact that the arm was gone. Her stomach contorted in knots. “That stuff can’t be… diamond?”
“Honey,” Suja said with a laugh. “You should see the look on your face. You really did believe that the Asura queen, wife of Lord Sakra for a thousand years, was a second-rate, tacky villain. If I had other invincible friends to join me for fine beverages, we would surely be laughing about this until all the planets had circled the sun.”
“It’s diamond,” Pax said, staring at the transparent material encasing Amara. She saw that her blow had caused at least some vibration in the structure, and Amara was stirring awake. “For Sakra’s sake. You trapped her in a diamond pyramid.”
“No,” Suja said, laughing even louder. “It’s not an element found on Earth. You don’t have a name for it, but we call it fjuyen. It’s harvested from the center of a white dwarf star, and it’s far harder than diamond, my dear. Who’s tacky now?”
Amara was no longer unconscious, and was beating her hands futilely against the insides of the fjuyen pyramid. “Pax!” she screamed, but her voice was muffled. She pressed her face close to the translucent walls to peer through the material. Paxie! Where am I?
You don’t want to know, Pax answered. As she gritted her teeth against the blinding pain in her arm, she realized that she had been defeated. At least for the time being. “Okay, Suja. You win and I’m yours. Just please have mercy on Amara and send her home to Earth. Then I’ll do whatever you command.”
“I have a better idea,” Suja said. “I’m going to punish you for a little while. Just so you learn the price of calling me names and underestimating me. Obake! Seize her.”
Pax screamed when she felt claws dig into her good arm, and into her waist. Although she could not see the beings surrounding her, she remembered the familiar feel of the claws from the demons in her dream. She felt her body slammed roughly against the black metal walls of the palace. She heard the sound of cackling as the invisible demons raked their claws all over her body.
What the hell is happening, Pax? Amara’s voice shrieked into her brain. Pax closed her eyes and swallowed, unable to respond.
“Now, now, boys,” Suja said disapprovingly. “A little hospitality for the young lady?”
The claws stopped roaming abruptly, but Pax remained firmly clamped against the wall at her neck and waist. “Just let Amara go,” Pax pleaded. “Then you can let a giant invisible octopus rape me for all I care.”
Suja giggled in delight. “Oh, darling, don’t tempt me. I have plenty of room in my home for new pets.” The white haired woman floated toward the fjuyen pyramid and placed a hand on the surface. “Triangles are extremely strong shapes. I find them stunning, really. You know, since I left my husband—I have created one beautiful thing each day. What have you done since your deva betrayed you, Pax Burnson? What have you done except rot?”
Pax could not answer. She drew her eyebrows together, and could only think of Para.
“Exactly. You have done nothing. Your merger with Amara, you consider that significant? Ha! So you created a woman. A goddess more powerful than yourself—but she has a weakness. She can only live for thirty minutes at a time.” Suja smiled. “You should know this, Pax. A being is the sum of all their weakness and strengths. It’s like a ledger calculating net worth: your debts are subtracted from your assets. If your weakness is greater than your strength, you are the sum of both qualities. You have deceived yourself into thinking Para is greater than you are—that was a mistake.”
The sound of Amara’s muffled screams were heard as the clear pyramid began to fill with a neon green substance. The blonde woman struggled and thrashed her arms wildly before the green substance had completely covered her from head to toe. Pax tried to see what was happening, but only knew that her friend was in great distress.
They’re worms! Get them off, please! Oh my god, they’re eating my skin! Pax was powerless as the thousands of tiny green worms crawled all over Amara’s pink designer dress. The insects twisted themselves right through the fabric and burrowed down into her flesh. Several seconds passed while Amara violently scratched at herself and suffered from spasms which caused her body to bang against the insides of the pyramid. She released several bloodcurdling screams. Ash, she mentally moaned. Where are you? Help me, Ash.
Pax frowned when she heard her friend call for her uncle. She knew Amara was buckling under the stress of the situation. The blonde woman was too delicate for this type of trauma, and Pax was filled with guilt for putting her in harm’s way
“Do you see these little diggers, Pax? They are sucking her energy as fast as she can gather it. They are depleting her life force. In effect, I have turned her into my own little deva-battery.” Suja smiled. “If only Mrs. Rose Kalgren knew that the solution to renewable green energy was not in one of her laboratory creations, but in her own daughter’s blood.”
“Why are you doing this?” Pax asked with a frown. “What do you need her energy for?”
“I don’t really need it, but it sure is fun to watch those worms wiggle into her body. Look at how she squirms! Those adorable green critters are latching themselves onto her blood cells and transforming pure prana into electricity I suppose I could use her energy to power the planet, but there’s nothing on the planet that needs power.. I just hate to waste good electricity, don’t you?”
Suja twitched her finger, causing a narrow wire to extend from the pyramid to Pax’s neck. The dark-haired woman’s eyes widened as electricity traveled along the wire and began to prickle her skin. At first it was a prickle, but then she found her limbs involuntary quivering. Then her head violently jerked against the wall behind her, and she lost all control of her senses. There was only pain. Pax became vaguely aware of foam leaving her mouth and dribbling down her chin.
“You’re a deva,” Suja said, as she turned her back and swept away from the room. “You can handle a few hours of being tortured by your own friend’s life force. Amara’s energy isn’t strong enough to kill you, but it should sting a little. It should sting at least as much as it wounded me when you called me second-rate. Obake guards! See that she does not escape. If she tries, you have my permission to rough her up as much as you like. I’m going to take a nice long bubble bath. I might even catch up on some reading. Bye, Pax.” Suja waved and was about to leave, when Pax screamed.
“Wait!” Pax shouted at the top of her lungs. The Asura woman turned back, startled that Pax was even able to form a coherent word. Pax moaned, and ripping her good arm away from its invisible restrains, she wiped the foam from her chin. She struggled to straighten her posture and stared directly at her captor. “I’m not second-rate either,” Pax whispered.
“Oh?” Suja asked. “I would love a demonstration.”
Pax began to laugh. At first it was a small chuckle, but it soon became a hysterical roar. The electricity was still feeding into her neck, but the force of the glowing red aura around her caused the wire to tremble.
“Obake! Restrain her!” Suja shouted to her guards.
In her hysteria, Pax could suddenly see the silhouettes of the guards around her. She saw their claws reaching for her skin and let out a piecing scream, causing the wire around her neck to break and the guards to be flung away. She looked out across the room, and suddenly realized that there were hundreds of other Obake guards standing at attention and ready to attack her. She glared at Suja, holding her good arm out defensively to keep the guards at bay with her prana.
“I’m sorry for whatever Sakra did to you. Your palace is amazing and when I arrived here, I thought you were wonderful. But now, after what you’ve done to Amara? You’re not going to get away with this. You’re going to suffer,” Pax promised. “Your power is great, and your reach is immense, but you made one grave mistake. When you reached for me, you overextended yourself.”
“What a moving speech,” Suja responded, clapping gracefully. “I guess we’ll just have to see if you can actually follow through with all those grandiose and pompous claims.”
“I can.”
Pax glanced up at the fjuyen pyramid, and made a split-second decision. She knew she wouldn’t be able to rescue Amara on her own. Not without her arm, and with her body close to the point of collapse. With a desperate internal plea for strength, she pressed her good hand against her solar plexus. Please, she thought as she tried to initiate the transference, please. She exerted more and more energy, pushing herself harder until there was unbearable pain in her body. Pax waited for her technique to commence for what felt like an eternity. It was really just a fraction of a second. Even that delay was far too long in such a situation, and Pax was relieved by the sensation of weightlessness as her body began to dematerialize. She had been able to generate just enough energy to teleport away.