Pure Destiny (PureDark Ones #12) - Aja James Page 0,38
impact jolted Ishtar backwards by an infinitesimal degree. But it slowed her forward momentum enough that when she swiped out a gigantic paw towards Dalair’s feet as they left the ledge, she missed by centimeters.
Gabriel and Inanna were too late as well. By the time they leapt onto the wall, Dalair and Benji were already airborne, several feet away from the edge, their bodies arching backward in this strange suspension of time.
But Sophia had been close enough.
Without thinking, without fear, she threw herself off the wall along with them.
In that frozen, elongated moment of time, she stretched her arms toward them, the two rays of Light in her universe. She wrapped her arms around both of them and shut her eyes—
As time started again and they plummeted toward the unforgiving concrete below.
Chapter Seven
Her Creature was coming along nicely.
As in, his body hadn’t given up the ghost yet. Despite how her instruments and chemicals broke him down particle by particle in the process of remaking him into her ultimate creation: an earth-bound dragon.
As she’d learned through trial and error, there was more than one way to go about it. In the Creature’s case, she had to apply some brute force to make all the pieces fit.
Over the past excruciatingly long days—long for Lilith because while she was patient, she simply couldn’t wait for the outcome of this particular experiment, and excruciating for him because…well, a thousand needles inserting over and over into one’s blood vessels, tissues, organs, and bones probably hurt rather keenly without anesthesia—they’d had some fits and starts. There were a few near-death experiences where she had to resuscitate him and drag him back into the living.
Thank the gods for modern human medicine. This would have ended in abject failure had she still been working with tools from the ancient world, magic notwithstanding.
To the Creature’s credit, he seemed to want to live as much as she wanted him to survive. Despite the endless, immeasurable pain he endured, his body and mind didn’t give up. Any normal being might have sought the numbness of oblivion rather than continue to suffer like he did, but no.
He wanted to reach the ultimate state. And his will was inconceivably strong. He simply refused to die.
They were past the most difficult part now. Lilith finally found a human DNA strain that his body didn’t reject. She really should have thought of this before; probably might have saved him countless hours of torture.
But, oh well, no harm done. He survived. A little suffering was good for the soul.
In the first batch she tried DNA from the store she’d accumulated over centuries of cultivating orphanages around the world. Human children who resulted from parents that had special ingredients blended together.
When that didn’t work, she tried DNA from humans who’d interacted with him in the past. Sophia and Olivia, to be specific.
When Medusa had tasked the Creature to abduct Sophia years ago, he’d taken a sample of her blood then. But it didn’t work. His body rejected her human ingredients. Whatever their connection was to each other, it wasn’t physical.
Lilith thought next that Olivia’s genetic materials might do the trick. After all, she was the only human he’d been physically attracted to, across the millennia that she’d observed him. If she hadn’t personally witnessed the first time they’d met, she wouldn’t have believed it. The Creature, for all his flagrant sexual charms, and countless exploits in service of Medusa’s schemes, did not seem to like sex at all.
Lilith had been visiting him in one of his previous nightclubs in a secret part of lower Manhattan. In her Pure One form, Wan’er’s form, though it was merely a shell to house her fox spirit, she was still able to provide the Pure blood he needed to keep his ravaged mess of a body functioning.
It was almost pitch black in the club, save the weak beams from laser lights that revealed the sea of undulating bodies in flashes of ghoulish, careless, drugged-up orgy, moving mindlessly to the thumping beat of electronic instruments and synthesized techno grunge.
Back then, and for all of his existence until very recently, he never knew who she really was. He only knew Medusa as his Mistress.
He thought Lilith was merely another tool in Medusa’s arsenal, just like him. Perhaps he considered her beneath him, even, since Medusa sent her to him to feed his Pure blood needs. She was his food, a source of information, a mad scientist in Medusa’s labs. Nothing more.