The pure synchronicity of it all was wonderfully eerie. Oddly, and yet perfectly, without discussion or previous coordination, each woman had selected a sundress that complemented a chakra point. Every man was in white shorts or sweatpants with a T-shirt of a complementary hue, laidback and chilling. The color thing was deep. She couldn't have planned it consciously if she had tried--and her team daggcme sure wouldn't have gone for it if she had. They never dressed that way as a group.
The norm was combat fatigues, jeans, or leather, with Tims, not flip-flops and shower shoes. Not potentially about to go to war. But the group was so fluid, so relaxed that it blew her mind. Given all that they'd been through and what they possibly faced as the sun dropped, they were cooler than she'd ever seen them going into a battle.
Every woman looked radiant and every color gave off a vibration; Marlene and Nefertiti had taught her that. She could see it dancing in each woman's aura and then commingling into her husband's auric field. The sound of each color gave off a definitive pitch, a barely audible harmonic that was soothing.
Later, when she and her Guardian sisters would finally stand at the yacht's rails to begin the pyramid meditation, all of their color vibrational choices would matter.
She had on a strapless, white, flowing gauze shift--which made sense for her to be the crown chakra as the team's female Neteru. Heather had chosen a pretty violet wrap, and as the stoneworker third eye for the group, and therefore the one most closely aligned with the submerged stone structure, it was logical for her to have been drawn to the hue of the third eye. Lovely Tara, the group's voice of reason, had gravitated to her Native American turquoise, which was also the hue of the throat chakra.
Damali picked at one of the platters she'd set" down earlier on the large glass and white wrought-iron deck table, straining not to shake her head at the simplistic perfection of the Divine hand at work.
Quiet Jasmine had chosen a jade-green slip of a dress that framed her long, jet-black hair and gorgeous Asian eyes. It made sense for this delicate soul to have chosen the color of the heart chakra--the bridge between worlds. Her blond sister-in-law, Krissy, had picked a lively, canary-yellow dress, and her constant upset at the injustices of the world and her cry for equity made that solar plexus chakra color naturally hers. Audacious Juanita, a streetwise Latina sister from the 'hood like her, had picked a fiery orange, off-the-shoulder tie-wrap, whose hue was all about the gut hunch. But she would have never guessed in a million years that innocent Val would have chosen the deep reddish fuchsia, spaghetti-strap mini she'd picked. That color was so powerful. . . primal, and Val was. . . Damali allowed the thought to dissipate. Yonnie was a definite influence, so, yeah, it made perfect sense.
Damali glanced at Carlos, not even needing to say it. He shrugged and answered her message as they picked up plates and utensils.
Did you know'? Did you pick the colors and sizes with specific Guardian sisters in mind?
No . . . just pulled in things based on estimated size. At the time, I was rushing, wasn't picking out styles and colors, D. C'mon, now, baby. Did I mess up? Tell me you aren't trying to be the fashion police during the Armageddon--they all look nice to me, and you're stunning, baby . . . what?
Damali kissed his cheek as he set a huge mound of brown rice on each of their plates.
No, you didn't mess up, she mentally shot to him, laughing. Everything is-so perfect that it's freaking me out.
Oh. His mental murmur contained a caress. Glad I did something right.
He smiled; she smiled, not looking at the others for a private moment as they continued dishing up their plates of food.
You did more than something right. She allowed her sidelong glance to catch his and trap it for a moment like a caress.
He brushed her mouth as they found a space on an empty sofa and sat down. "Eat," he said quietly, his knee skimming her thigh.
There was nothing else to say, the companionable silence said it all.
"Where are you, where are you, my troublesome Neterus?" Lilith muttered, staring at the slowly rotating globe that hovered in her empty chambers. "Plagues haven't driven you out-- demons haven't flushed you out to help your beloved humans," she added with a sneer, and then flung her goblet of blood at the transparent image.
She released a shriek of fury and balled her talons into a fist. "Your deaths haven't registered, the deaths of your beloved Covenant haven't even brought you out--not even the destruction of your Guardian team hideouts or hostage attempts! Damn you, where are you? We've covered the lands far and wide, every place on the globe, even the Arctic, sending the undead to feast on the living."
Lilith raked her talons across her scalp, parting her jet-black hair and leaving trails of blood. Ignoring the injury that sealed immediately, she began to pace. The puzzle was an enigma. They'd opened the bowels of Hell to have them mirror reflect the psyche of the human population. Plagues tortured people like the phantoms of Level One, succubae and incubi possessed the unwitting and made them commit heinous acts of violence against humanity and the earth like that of Level Two.
Her Level Two poltergeists were running rampant, terrorizing any soul they could find. Serpentlike Amanthra demons, and all of the wetland demonic forces from huge spiders and pests to rodents and maggot infestations, were running amok-- Levels Three and Four had gone topside. Her most cherished were-creatures from Level Five, everything from werewolves to massive were-cats and anything in between, had been belched to the surface to infect and take over humans . . . and her vampires from Level Six . . .
Lilith just closed her eyes. Fallen Nuit had demonstrated such mastery with his subliminal attack on mankind through the airwaves of Council Group Entertainment, and then had created so many gorgeous, powerful entities of the night. His master vampires were going to be the stuff of legends, rivaled only by Vlad's armies and Sebastian's necromancy. Her council-women had been treacherously flawless--poisons and feeding frenzies, jealousies and greed. All of Hell was topside, and now manifesting in the entire human population based on the sins of the individual and the world. Only those destined for the Rapture would escape ... so why hadn't the Neterus surfaced?
She opened her talons to accept a new goblet of blood and retracted her huge bat wings, folding them into her shoulders as she retracted her spaded tail. Fury without direction was getting her nowhere. Her husband, the Dark Lord, would not accept excuses at this time in the empire. Lilith placed a forefinger to her crimson-stained lips, studying landmasses.
"Where in the world are you, my sweets?" Then suddenly she smiled as a hunch clawed at her mind. She chuckled and walked around the globe several times. "Nooo . . . oh, tell me that it isn't that easy! If you're not on land, then you have to be on the high seas!" Lilith threw her head back and cackled loudly. "I cannot believe the Light allowed you to take such a perfectly insane risk! They must really be getting desperate."
Frank Weinstein turned away from his stricken wife. Stella just stared out into the nothingness of the mountains, refusing to accept food or water from the Guardians, and he knew that if she could have, she would have refused to breathe.
War robbed humankind of its humanity and lifted the veil of innocence from the eyes of children . . . and adults. It was a monster in and of itself that was no respecter of age or gender. His wife was alive but her spirit had been shattered. Their son, Daniel, was most likely dead, and the potential of hope, a reason to keep going, would lie with him in some unmarked grave . . . or on the streets, his body savaged by rats and starving dogs.
It was this reality that, more than anything, kept his Stella frozen in a dark abyss of terror. They held guns--people who had lived a life of nonviolence, oblivious to the horrors of global atrocities. Yet, this was what their parents and grandparents had warned of, this was what Rabbi had given his life for ... a devil was a devil, evil was evil. Did it matter if it was embodied in a human shell or in its hideous supernatural form? The truth was an avenging angel, which declared that no one, no people, could allow it to happen again, anywhere, to anyone.
But what was real, what was a mind fractured into hallucinations? So-called rebels had saved their lives and secreted them away into the mountains; their trusted government had hunted them down and tried to round them up. Everything black was white and white was black. He was now an outlaw; his honorable son had given his life without even a decent burial. Synagogues, temples, churches, mosques, had all been burned to the ground. People were eating one another! He'd seen demons eat a man alive in the tunnel . . . a holy man. And now he had a gun? To do what with--turn it on himself and his wife, if their Spartan sanctuary was overrun?
Frank Weinstein covered his face with his palms, completely unable to process the events of the last twenty-four hours. He wept silently, thickly, beginning to rock. "Come back to me, Stella," he whispered into his damp hands. "There's no one left to understand who we were but you."
A concrete beam had knocked her out but had saved her life. It had blocked her body from the other falling debris that would have surely killed her, and then, according to the baby, it had kept a monster from eating her alive.