James Axler - Pantheon Of Vengeance

Smooth metallic fingertips grazed tenderly down the scar tissue that made up the left side of young Diana’s face. The goddess-queen’s touch was cool and soothing to her numbed skin.

“Then what, milady?” Diana asked.

“Airy has shown me what he showed you,” Hera said. Her emerald eyes shimmered, as if pebbles had been tossed into green ponds. “We are facing a demon from my past. I will brief you all, but the creature you discovered was not born in the vats of Tartarus.”

“From where, then, my queen?” Diana asked.

Hera looked out of the slowly closing hangar doors, her silvery skin burning bright in the reflected sunset bleeding over the distant line of hills. “The creature was sent from my old home, Cobaltville. My baron had sent me, seeking an advantage over his fellow barons. Now he no longer needs that advantage.”

The hangar doors clamped shut, and Hera’s chrome flesh no longer shone bright. The shadows of the hangar were reflected in black hollows and voids on her mirrored skin. It seemed as if a light had been doused.

“The New Olympians must now face a real god, my child,” Hera said with a sigh.

Diana followed her queen, forcefully propelling her wheelchair to match the goddess’s long strides.

“Anything…for…you, dear Domi,” Mohandas Lakesh Singh mocked himself in a pitched, nasal tone. He would have said it softer, smoother had he not been forced to grunt from the effort it took his 250-year-old body to crawl over the boulder-strewed hillside in the Bitterroot Mountains. Born before the nukecaust in 2001, Lakesh had maintained his lifespan initially through cryogenic stasis. The gifts of new, blue eyes and the more important vital organs were due to his involvement in the Totality Concept, a supersecret program of scientific research that enabled the revival of nine godlike beings to dominate the more manageable, surviving human populace.

Lakesh’s brilliance made him irreplaceable in constructing the technology behind the matter-transfer system that linked the many redoubts spanning the apocalypse-ravaged globe. He had been so important that the old barons kept him as young and healthy as their science could allow. Those medical efforts paled in comparison, though, to Sam’s nano technology. Sam’s mere touch had transferred an armada of microscopic nanites to Lakesh, and the miniature rebuilders had repaired the ravages of age on a molecular level. He currently appeared to be in his mid-to-late-forties.

Lakesh was pushing his physical limits on this odd little hike led by Domi, who moved with pantherlike surefootedness ahead of him. Originally a child of the Outlands, Domi had survived the sexual servitude of Guana Teague in the hellish underworld of Cobaltville known as the Tartarus Pits. Though she was often described as an albino, with porcelain-white skin, hair the color of bone and pink eyes, she was scarcely as frail and as delicate as the albinos that Lakesh had known of in the twentieth century.

Feral, not fragile, was the term most often associated with Domi, from her lapses into simple, broken English when under stress to her fury in battle when it came to defending those she cared for. When Domi became his devoted lover, Lakesh was at first concerned that he was merely the man she had chosen because the original object of her affection, Grant, had developed a relationship with Shizuka, the leader of the Tigers of Heaven. Lakesh had feared that he was either her rebound from rejection, or just a means to make Grant jealous.

That wasn’t the case. Their mutual affection was real and strong. Domi remained fiercely loyal friends with Grant, the man who had stood up for her to the cruel Guana Teague, but Lakesh could see that the love the two felt for each other was not sexual at all. Grant had become the surrogate big brother that Domi had always wanted, and the little albino had filled the same surrogate sibling role for the former Magistrate.

Domi looked back to the exhausted Lakesh. Her face broke into an impish grin. “Need a rest?”

At just a hair over five feet, Domi looked as if she had been carved out of ivory. Her muscles were tight and firm, and if she were older than twenty-five years, her smooth, unlined face and near perfect physical conditioning didn’t betray it. She wore cutoff jean shorts and one of Lakesh’s khaki safari shirts, which billowed down from her shoulders like a tent. She tied off the tails under her breasts, leaving her toned stomach exposed. Aside from her scant clothing, she also had a small gun belt with her equally small Detonics Combat Master and a waist-level quiver for the lightweight crossbow slung across her slender shoulders.

“Not at all,” Lakesh lied, restraining his desire to gulp down air like a landed fish. “Though, Domi dearest, it would have just been easier to tell me where you like to go hunting.”

Domi raised a white-blond eyebrow. She then looked at the small sheath of quarrels bouncing against her upper thigh. “Oh. This.”

“I understand the feral needs—” Lakesh began, but before he could finish, she bounded down off the boulder she stood on and planted a kiss on his lips.

“You are smart about a lot of things,” she replied. “But my trips aren’t just about getting fresh squirrel meat.”

Lakesh felt his cheeks redden. “Then what is this about?”

“Some really neat things,” Domi answered cryptically. “It’s not far now.”

Lakesh mopped his brow, then took a swig of water from his canteen. “Mystery soon to be solved.”

“Making fun of the way I used to talk?” Domi asked, but her smile and tone belied any challenge in her words.

“No, just out of breath.” Lakesh sighed.

She gave him a soft pat on the cheek, then tapped his stomach with the back of her hand. “This is the other reason. You need some exercise.”

Lakesh blew out a breath that fluttered through his lips in a rude response to Domi’s implication. That only made the albino girl grin even more widely, and she gave his abdomen a playful pinch.

“Come on,” Domi said, taking his hand in hers. They moved a little more slowly now, letting Lakesh regain his wind as they followed a narrow trail that wound to the mouth of a cave.

“Welcome to my version of an archive,” Domi announced.

Lakesh’s eyes tried to adapt to the dimmer illumination inside the cavern when a growl filled the air. The Cerberus scientist whirled at the sound, wishing he’d brought a firearm for himself when a small gray bolt of fur lunged at him.

“Moe! No!” Domi shouted. She intercepted the flying little fur ball inches from Lakesh’s face. “Bad Moe! That’s the man you’re named after. Be nice.”

She held up a small creature with the familiar bandit mask of a raccoon in front of Lakesh’s face. A pointed, little brown nose wrinkled. “Sniff him. He’s friendly. He’s our friend.”

Lakesh’s eyes finally adjusted and he could see the little gray-and-black creature, far less menacing in appearance than in growl. Blue eyes met blue eyes as Moe touched noses with Lakesh. A moment later, a tiny pink tongue began lapping at Lakesh’s cheeks.

“Hold him for a moment,” Domi said, handing the animal to Lakesh. The raccoon continued to sniff and nuzzle Lakesh as the albino girl walked to where she’d stored a small battery-operated lantern. She clicked it on, and Lakesh looked around the cave, seeing plastic storage shelves and containers, each laden with all forms of odd knickknacks and faded though once garish periodicals and paperbacks. Moe crawled up onto Lakesh’s shoulders, but aside from the odd feeling of tiny hands in his graying hair and the softness of fur on his nape, the little beast hadn’t so much as scratched him.