the Bloodstone gave her the ability to do superhuman things, like resist powerful psychosomatic drugs intentionally slipped into her drink by psychopathic blue-haired trust-fund girls. How it gave her new desires she hadn’t ever put together for herself. Take-over-the-world-type stuff. She felt, with it, that she could fly. Perhaps I will…
And time flew by too. Normally she would have been impatient. But the Bloodstone lent to her a different perspective; it was larger. She could see more of the historical picture with it, see that everything happened again and again in cycles of evil; that she only need wait for the next one. It would be along just as surely as the next bus to the end of the world. And that made her less jittery. So when the time became ripe she was ready.
But on the threshold of the total surrender of her will, she hesitated. Destiny loomed over her in the form of pure doom; there was no hope save for her last free decision: Is this what I really want?
“Hush my dear,” the Bloodstone cooed, “and savor the taste…”
It does taste good….
Under the carnal influences of the Bloodstone, she sprang from her seat and bolted from the plane. No one saw her; the pilots were indoors filing their flight plan and checking the weather. The ground crew was busy elsewhere. The gang of three, those troublemakers, those molesters, those kidnapping liars, would be back soon, so she took off at a dead sprint.
But she wasn’t really Kim, was she? No, not anymore. Now I’m better than Kim. I’m Kim as I should have been. And I will evolve into something truly magnificent. Something immortal. Kim told herself that her root motivation wasn’t jealousy; that she didn’t really just want to be like Airel, to have what she had, to be beautiful, to live forever, to have Michael for her own. But it was all lies. Fighting fire with fire, she told herself lies that countermanded the previous lies. In fact, the truth was, everything was a lie.
None of it mattered.
She would be beautiful.
Untouchable.
She was beginning to wheeze, to pant, to convulse as its—her—legs pumped up and down over the dead moonscape of lava rock. She was spewing forth more evidence of the presence of the Bloodstone: gooey black tar oozed from her nostrils and a fume of that vapor poured out from her mouth in puffs.
For an instant one of the legs failed to pump properly, stumbling over an irregularity in the field of rocks. Down she went. There was no pain; only the Bloodstone’s manufacture of an all-consuming elation that dwarfed all other indicators of pain or reality. There was blood on the hands now though.
Slipping the straps from each shoulder one at a time, it took the pink backpack off and reattached it to the front, running her arms through the straps again so that this time the bag rested on her chest.
A ripple appeared on her back as razor sharp wingtip talons skillfully pierced the skin and the fabric of the dress, protruding slowly like a plant growing out of fertile ground and then unfurling like the petals of a diabolical flower. At first green, the wings quickly changed to brown, matching the lava rock landscape that was spread roundabout.
“Tengu deserved his end,” the Bloodstone—Nwaba now—thought. “Now it is my turn…” Swiftly the wings descended, and the hybrid creature shot into the sky as if launched from a catapult. The wings of something, anything, that could fly; the face of a human. “Well…as far as is reasonable,” Nwaba said to himself. After all, this chameleon had never quite been fully anything.
Nwaba flew, his wings protruding from the spine of the one named Kim, toward the peak of Green Mountain. He could detect the stench of one of his oldest foes. Kreios. He might know Nwaba better under younger names. Only if Kreios had truly been paying attention would he know him as Nwaba. “We shall see, Kreios. And we shall see you soon.”
The one named Kim spread its arms wide in menace as the wings shot her swiftly through the air, pink backpack first, toward the place where Kreios had last stood upon the earth. That place with that accursed symbol, the cross.
CHAPTER XIV
Cape Point, South Africa, present day
DREIOS DECIDED TO MAKE landfall in an isolated spot. Cape Point provided that in spades.
An isthmus that projected from the continent, it was the south-westernmost point of Africa, and it divided the Atlantic ocean from the