Shadow Born

Negari had gone too far, committed himself to an experiment, become something that was greater than Enlil, and this was a world where none could be greater than he. He had not crossed a universe to become the second-best in his own Olympus. He was to be Zeus, the mightiest of the mighty, yet Negari dared to slap their leader in the face.

Igigi had been meant to be the servant class—never mind that Neekra was the result of Enlil’s night with one of those serfs.

“What is good for you, Father, is forbidden for me?” Neekra gasped, stretched against the wall, naked and helpless. She wouldn’t shrink, not even as vulnerable as she was now.

Enlil pressed against her. “You act as if I care what happens to you.”

Then Enlil showed Neekra exactly how much he “cared” about her, brutally, slowly grinding her cheek against the wall with his forearm as he drove into her again and again. All he was doing was stoking the fires of hatred, the hunger for revenge that would cross centuries unabated, growing only in depth of spite and disgust.

Soon, Neekra whispered into the ear of her younger self, something that did as little for the remembered image as if she’d given promises to a baby photo of herself.

The dream broke. A little bit of vision was still left in the dead eyes of Gamal, and she saw collapsed figures all about her. She’d gone to full armor in an effort to protect herself, her “piggyback brains” from being assaulted by the humans who caught on to how she’d reconfigured the man’s body to accommodate the telepathic organs, the biological computer that granted her the seemingly impossible powers necessary to shake the world.

No one around her was conscious. She tried to move, but all around her was crust; her flesh turned to ash with black, ugly sap crawling from cracks in her surface.

Don’t have long, she thought. Nehushtan will awaken the least injured with the least energy first, then tap into him.

Neekra stretched to reach for one of her spawn. Some must have been left alive.

And there were. She could feel two of them, staying deep in the rubble of crypts that had been struck by grenades and bullets. Those two hid, knowing that there would be others to come to her aid immediately. Neekra had programmed them that way, making certain she had a backup plan in case things went to crap.

They had gone beyond crap. The spark of life in the carcass she inhabited was fading fast, and as she did a mental inventory of herself, she saw the deterioration of the protein strings that made up her “telepathic antennae”—the webbing of natural materials that turned her into a living psychic transmitter, able to manipulate thought as well as cellular structure. The protein “biocomputers” also could create the telekinetic fields that gave her superhuman strength and durability far beyond even her father’s brute force at his prime.

She pushed out a blackened polyp of tar, separating cracked chunks of Gamal’s ashen corpse. Gamal had been one of the people she had been drawn to, three charismatic figures who would be attuned to her, to be her pawns. Neekra’s body was somewhere, operating on autopilot, chosen by Enlil to be the guardian of the tomb of Negari, her lover. Neekra was an excised intelligence, her lobotomized body an engine of destruction whose sole purpose was the death of anyone foolish enough to attempt a rescue of the Igigi who dared to ascend to unearned godhood.

Whether Neekra’s wandering ghost was an afterthought, or a callously calculated punishment, she knew she was a nomad. She was an infection, capable of only infesting one host at a time. To find that host, she was limited to a psyche that could handle the power of her mind and spirit; otherwise she would burn him out, but it still needed to be a mind that she could overpower.

Now, all she had for a body, for a means of travel, was the combination of two blobs of semisentient snot that she’d birthed from Gamal’s body. She could last in them for a while, but it was nothing like she could do with a host such as her last one.

She injected what little of herself was left into their cytoplasm, mixing with them, letting the two amorphous entities unite. They each had undamaged protein string centers—four, in fact—which she laced together into a matrix that could sustain her until she could recover.

With that, the blob carrying her consciousness stretched out pseudopods, latching on to imperfections on the ground, swinging itself along, making for the corkscrew that would lead her to the surface.

The light-sensitive sensory organs in the membranes of her host body cringed at the overabundance of sunlight, even though dawn wouldn’t break for another five minutes.

All she needed was to scurry to a thicket of thorns, burrow under the sand and wait.

Hiding was her only solace, at least until she could find someone, something.

And then it would be a game of catch-up.

Kane and Durga had been put on a trail now. They had been after her hiding place. There, they would subdue her body and then attempt to destroy it. But by battling her, they would loosen what bonds held Negari in place.

Doing that would free him, and if Neekra had caught up by then, she’d retrieve herself and awaken as she was meant to be.

She crawled under the graying, ever-lightening sky across the arid dirt toward the dry grasses of the tree line.

A scaled foot set down in her path.

It was Durga. He’d vowed to destroy her, and now she was vulnerable to him. The mega-cellular form she was trapped in couldn’t withstand the deadly venom he stored in his fangs. He had used enough to blind her previous avatar, but...

“Don’t cringe from me,” Durga spoke gently.

He knelt before her on the dirt and reached out, cupping her balloon-like form.

“You and I have a journey to complete,” he whispered, cooing to her as if she were a baby, scooping her up and cradling her in his arms.

“Come now, darling,” Durga said to her. “We have to find your tomb.”

Confused, weak, unable to communicate for the moment, she was wound in a blanket that prevented her from stabbing Durga’s skin with cilia, tiny little barbed stingers that could suck the blood from his flesh. The blanket protected her primitive visual stimulus organs, though, and concealed her from the burning heat of the sun.

She now rested in a bucket seat and heard the rattle then rumble of an engine firing to life. They had been in a jeep belonging to the Panthers of Mashona, the militia run by her old host, Gamal.

“Tell me where to drive, my sweet,” Durga whispered. Except it wasn’t a whisper. He was contacting her with his thoughts.

Neekra thought back to the pain and fire of the staff within her torso, a reminder of another era when the ancient artifact was used to send her to flight. When Suleiman Kahani battled the thing within the crypt after it had slain the slavers.

Neekra recognized what her father had wrought from her and recognized landmarks about her. Her battle with Kane had been the final key to remembering where she and her lover had been interred. Neekra, at Durga’s mercy, passed on that information.

She prayed that she would not regret this decision.

Chapter 1 (#u85dc7373-1470-5f8e-a915-d3c86686c641)

Kane made certain that there was nothing left down below in the necropolis. For the past two days, his friends had been prisoners down there, captives of the two beings he searched for traces of. An apocalyptic battle with one of them had ensued after her erstwhile companion seemed to turn on her, warning Kane about his plan about destroying their alliance and the avatar of their ally.

The her was Neekra, a bodiless entity who had taken possession of a militia warlord by the name of Gamal. Neekra’s power was such that she was able to turn a tall, muscular, powerful man into a crimson-skinned goddess full of voluptuous curves and able to give “birth” to amorphous spawn. Those things she created had been the basis for vampire mythology, semiliquid entities that inserted themselves into corpses, wearing their carcasses like suits of meat. Neekra, or her issue, had been around the world, creating a universe of mythologies surrounding the walking dead, but here, in Africa, was where she “lived.” When Kane came to Africa, summoned by an artifact that had been ancient in the time of Atlantis and was attributed to King Solomon of the Bible, Neekra sought him out and psychically attacked him and the one Kane learned later was her ally.

Neekra’s psychic imprisonment of Kane was a testing of the waters. Kane shuddered at the thought that instead of the warlord Gamal, it could have been him, his physique telekinetically sculpted, organs reattributed and external appearance mutilated until he became the same rust-red feminine goddess who sought domination of the necropolis.

Neekra’s host was nearly invulnerable, ignoring grenade blasts and bursts of full-automatic gunfire directly into her face. Yet she wanted Kane and others to hunt for her prison, the place where she’d been interred for dozens of centuries, mind and flesh amputated from each other.

Gamal’s body had only been destroyed by the combination of the venom that was innate to a race of pan-terrestrial humanoids called the Nagah and the burning energies within the staff once wielded by Solomon and Moses. Neekra’s host was reduced to ash, tar-like blood turning the collapsed mound into what Kane’s dear friend Grant called “a greasy smear.”

Kane poked and prodded at that smear. Although no sign of animation was left within the ugly concoction, Kane felt no relief. He had encountered another goddess who had survived the destruction of her body, taking root to reincarnate in the bodies of three young women. Neekra’s thousands of years of existence had influenced stories of night terror around the globe, so the death of one body wouldn’t stop her. They’d put her down, but still someone else was looking for that body, that tomb she sought.

That someone else, the same man who wanted out of the alliance, was Prince Durga, exiled regent of the underground Nagah city-state of Garuda in India. Durga, like all Nagah, was a humanoid, an upgrade of humanity created by an ancient alien entity named Enki, a member of a race called the Annunaki, who had been involved with another superhuman species, the Tu’atha de Danaan, in manipulating humanity and its rise to power on Earth. The Nagah had been human, with additions of cobra DNA, skillfully crafted by the benevolent Annunaki, to create a benign, hidden race.

The Nagah survived skydark in their underground city of Garuda, but not without some losses. The small nation-state finally, after centuries, made its presence known to Kane and the other explorers of Cerberus. What could have become a wonderful alliance turned to tragic ashes as Durga chose that moment to make his bid for sole leadership of the pan-terrestrial society. Allying with gods and men, Durga launched a civil war, and had not Durga greedily varied from his plan and sought out superhuman power for its own sake, he might have succeeded. As it was, Kane and his allies ended that war, but not without loss of innocent life in addition to the destruction of human and Nagah co-conspirators.

Kane had thought that Durga was dead, killed in a fuel-air explosion, but the same technology that made the prince into a living force of nature spared him, just barely. As he plotted revenge against his former bride, now the matron queen of the Nagah, he traveled across the Indian Ocean to Africa, seeking a cure for his crippled condition, as well as means to renewed power. Part of that power was discovered in an army of cloned beasts, with physical might to rival a bull-gorilla, bat-like wings and a taste for human flesh. Those hybrid mutants were known as the Kongamato, but Durga’s control of the animals was usurped by a warlord of the dreaded Panthers of Mashona, an outlaw militia who ruled the lands to the west of Harare and Zambia, the same Gamal who “donated” his body to the she-devil Neekra.

Durga hadn’t only relied upon the Kongamato, apparently. When Kane assailed the necropolis, he encountered a cadre of cloned Nagah, their physiques further upgraded with Igigi/Nephilim DNA to turn them into his shock troopers. Durga possessed a dozen of those clones, at least when he was alongside Neekra.

A lone figure stepped onto the dirt next to Kane.

“Grant said it was time to go. The place is wired and ready to blow,” the young man said.

The six-foot, perfectly muscled Nagah clones that Durga utilized weren’t the only creations the prince made. Physically, the young man, Thurpa, looked to be eighteen or nineteen, at least as far as Kane could see through his cobra-like features. Chronologically, though, Thurpa must have been less than a year old.