"A fertilized egg," Aset said as gently as she could.
"It's not yours any longer," Eve said, her voice distant. "You'd never recognize it now that they've snatched it and-"
"My baby!"
"The potential Anti-Christ," Nzinga said cautiously as two queens rounded the table to keep Damali from leaping over it, "now that we're sure of who the intended surrogate will be. You must find her and destroy her quickly. If it embeds in her womb-you have to cut that out and torch it. The chairman may or may not be involved, given Lilith's treachery. But rest assured, he's the only one that can lead you to her, unless you can bait her out of hiding in search of the catalyst."
"My egg?" Damali shrieked, struggling against the hold of the Amazon and Joan. "Oh, I will find that whore, don't worry. I will never allow her to carry what's mine and Carlos's! Ever! I will go into council chambers myself and turn thrones over, looking for that bitch. Know that!" Damali yelled, pointing at Aset as the other queens let her go. She raked her fingers through her locks and began to pace, feeling trapped, caged, and in need of weapons. Tears of rage stung her nostrils, and she sucked in hard, refusing to allow them to fall. "Get me out of here. I've got work to do. Transport me back. Give me my blade. This conversation is over."
"It is the never knowing when or if this past transgression, one that is out of our hands, will rear its ugly head to confront you both. Your beloved is now a child of the Light, as are you, so you must learn to use your Light power a different way than merely by the sword."
"But I'm not still pregnant, am I? Tell me I wasn't carrying twins." Damali's voice had escalated beyond her ability to control it. She looked at Eve dead-on for an answer. She didn't want to hear this yang about patience and strategy. It was time to kick some ass.
"No," Aset said, sitting down heavily. "You will be bound up and healed. It is what fragments of life we were not able to collect back to the Sun that concerns us."
"Where do I go, what do I do?" Damali asked, willing herself not to shriek. "How do I get down there to smoke this bitch?"
"The Isis blades remain ours until you learn to find the power of Netcher within living things and to draw the essence of Light out of them... to bend the Light."
"How?" Damali cried, tears now streaming down her face as Queen Aset stood. "You can't take the Isis blades at a time like this, please. Give me another chance!"
"Do you understand how important it is for you to remain concealed? They cannot know where either of you are. The blades are a beacon. They can taste the sacred metals in the air when they hit the earth's surface. They're not even sure that Carlos is the male Neteru, and they haven't pinpointed him yet. He's vulnerable now, and until he reaches his Neteru apex, the kings of old must shield him. No. You must learn to fight with other skills and other tools," Aset said. Without waiting for Damali to answer, she held up her hand to stop Damali from speaking. "Ask Eve. We understand your pain, but you cannot go into this battle with your heart, only your intellect can prevail over this matter.Tell her, Eve . Explain how you held Cain to your br**sts, even while knowing what he was. Tell her, so she can understand and accept the ruling."
Eve hung her head and spoke in a low, calm voice. "Dear queen daughter, by rights, I am the first Neteru, the eldest of the council, the mother of all... but, due to the problem in Paradise, which I would not like to revisit, Aset rules. Her judgment and discipline were more profound, therefore, my title was stripped, albeit not my place in history or among the governing queens." She looked at Damali, her gaze unwavering as she spoke and her voice dropped to a near whisper. "This is very serious. We are so close to the Armageddon, and you two were supposed to be the new Neterus-one male, one female-to sway the balance."
"Tell her!" Aset shouted, making the lights within the table swirl across the top in small tornado-like eddies. "Did we not strip Cleopatra for taking her own life with an asp, when she could have sealed a deal and stemmed the invasion of Egypt by Rome? Suicide sent her to the Darkness, and we lost an important warrior. She allowed her intellect to be eclipsed by her heart. For what? A man? Damali cannot face Lilith like that!"
Damali opened and closed her mouth. Words failed her.
"You will travel to all the lands that your destiny requires; there is a shaman at each place that will find you," Aset said, her tone annoyed and brittle. "Thirteen places to bind yourself up, to collect the fragments of Carlos's scattered Light force. If we didn't have this problem, the process of readying the male Neteru would progress over seventy days, as it has always been. But you have perhaps seven days, at best, to do what must be done."
"Handle your business, baby," Nzinga said, wiping her hands down her face with fatigue. "Stay strong, and stay in the Light."
"Exactly," Aset said with a nod. "Once the male Neteru is gathered and his power has returned on the side of Light, your healing will also be complete. Until he heals, you cannot fully heal. Until he wields the power, you cannot wield the Isis blades. Youmarried him while he was a vampire, and now your power is one." Aset leaned across the table. "You allowed him to take you as awife , child. That is how they were able to claw away what they should havenever even seen or known existed. Some things are beyond our control. What about this do you not understand?"
"There was no ceremony," Damali sputtered, her gaze going from Aset to the others for support. "We never did a dark ritual, we never-"
"In the desert of Australia, on hallowed ground-'flesh of my flesh,' he said, as you willingly allowed him to take your throat, shared his blood, and deconstructed into nothingness with his cells fusing with yours at the vampire vanishing point!"
Aset slammed the table so hard that light sparks flew from it. "After you gave him a heartbeat from your own heart within my Amazon sister's territory! After you loved him without censure in a priest's compound. The keepers of the seal-the Aboriginal shaman-said you loved him with the intent of drawing his life force and seed into you on twenty-thousand-year-old prayer lines!" Aset picked up the small Isis dagger and rammed it into the table. "You had his ring, a blue-ice section of his heart, a white gown, shaman priests all around in spirit as witnesses, and the stars aghast. Oh, yes, there were priests there. It is done. You are his wife in spirit! The rest is an earthly formality, at this point."
Damali covered her mouth, her eyes so wide that she felt the sides burn as though they'd split. "Oh, my God..."
"Correct," Aset said, snatching the blade from the table and flinging it toward Nzinga. "And she wonders why I am beyond words."
"Therefore," Aset said, her voice returning to its previous even calm, "for your own safety, you will not bear the marker, Neteru, until you have restored your own power by your own hand. You will be hidden in plain sight. This way you will also learn from experience to never give it away to anyone, will know its true value, and will guard it the way it should always be guarded. Because he is crippled, you are also crippled, by your untimely decision. It is out of my hands." She looked at Damali with a mixture of pity and annoyance. "You bore fangs for him, my daughter. Even that I cannot make excuses for."
"I bore them, too, for a while," Eve murmured, looking at Damali with pity. "When I came back from the tree..." Eve's voice trailed off with a sad smile. "At least you have the Neteru council as your buffer. I had to stand before a husband and the Most High. That was in the Old Testament days, before the time of mercy. The conversation went very differently, I assure you-so take heart. This is not as bad as it could have been."
Nzinga nodded. "They have not taken this well in the Upper Realms... it will be the second time before a pivotal war, and the only thing that may redeem you is that unlike Eve, when she temporarily lost her mind," Nzinga said, casting a compassionate glance toward the elder queen, "you have a number of good demon kills to your honor. Significant ones, so cling to that as your hope and shield. He also has this as his shield, as well as his protection of many good men and women-like you also have. We will lobby hard, my queen daughter... but in the interim, you must help your own case."
"It is not my goal to punish her," Aset said, now seeming so tired that she could barely speak. "It is my goal to teach her and it is my fervent prayer that we can at some point return her title and blades. But she must do this on her own."
Shame burned Damali's cheeks, and she could not answer the charges as Aset stood and moved away from the table. Instead she focused on acceptance and whatever she had to do to regain favor. "I will make this right. But what lands, where am I to battle what? And there were fourteen missing parts of Ausar, not thirteen. Oh, Queen Mother Aset, please do not walk away with riddles that could take a lifetime to figure out!"
"Only you can find and heal the missing life force within the fourteenth section of him, which can only be healed once his mind is healed and his spirit is healed, and your body is healed and your focus is as pure as a beam of light. If you ever want to conceive with him again while he's flesh and blood, you must incorporate patience and gentleness... wisdom and strength, or you can suffer my fate and simply have an obelisk carved in his memory."
With that Aset turned and began walking and vanished into the violet pyramid that opened, her lions crossing behind her in a lazy, but guarded retreat.