James Axler - Planet Hate

The city was eerily quiet, not a single sign of movement across its vast entirety. Then, as Brigid reached the bottom of the staircase, a small figure came charging through the street in front of her, appearing from behind one of the black stone buildings, her short legs pumping as she hurried to greet the stranger. The girl was human in appearance and not yet three years old, wearing an indigo-colored one-piece suit and carrying a rag doll with red hair and a dress that matched the child’s clothing exactly. The girl had snow-blond hair hanging loosely to past her shoulders, and her large blue eyes were wide with excitement. Behind the little girl, another figure strode at a more languid pace, shorter than a man with grayish-pink skin and a bulbous, hairless head. Two huge, upslanting eyes dominated his scrunched-up face, black watery pools like the bottom of two wells lost in shadow. Beneath these, twin nares lay flat where a man’s nose would protrude, and a small slit of mouth held the faintest expression of pleasure, the corners turned up infinitesimally.

“Briggly,” the little girl said, laughing as she ran up to the woman in the black leather armor.

Brigid knelt on the floor, stretching her arms wide to clasp the girl and pull her toward her.

“Welcome, Brigid Baptiste,” the gray-skinned creature acknowledged from behind the little girl.

It was all so easy.

Chapter 5

“Just when you think it’s done it starts again,” Grant growled as he took a seat in Shizuka’s winter retreat. He was a large man, so large in fact that he made the seat he sat in look comical, like something out of a cartoon. Dressed in a skintight shadow suit, Grant was a well-built man with broad shoulders and skin like polished ebony. He still wore his long duster over the shadow suit, black Kevlar that looked like leather, and his dark eyes betrayed his exhaustion. His jaw was dark with the start of a beard beneath the drooping lines of his mustache, his hair close-cropped to his skull. “Damn snake-faces keep popping up every time we try to move.”

Shizuka looked at him, gracing him with the slightest of smiles as the other people in the room made themselves comfortable. They had had all of two minutes to get reacquainted once Grant and his team had arrived via the quantum window opened by the interphaser, and the hulking ex-Mag made little secret of his irritation. There were seven other people in the room besides Grant and Shizuka, including four guards standing equidistant from each other in the corners of the large reception room.

Located on a remote part of the coast overlooking the Pacific Ocean, the building was of classic Japanese design, reaching two stories aboveground with a pleasing curve to the roof like a folded ribbon. A simple wooden balcony surrounded the winter retreat, and several more guards from Shizuka’s loyal Tigers of Heaven patrolled along the balcony, keeping watch for any approach.

“Tiger Isle has had a few castaways turn up on her shores over the past three weeks,” Shizuka explained, referring to the Pacific island home of her Tigers of Heaven. “Missionaries, they initially claimed to be lost, the victims of shipwrecks and the like. We offered them hospitality, but each one eventually revealed himself to harbor a hidden agenda to convert my people.”

Shizuka was a beautiful woman, petite of frame—seemingly more so when sitting in front of Grant across the low table that rested in the precise center of the room. Dressed in a simple silk kimono, its wide sleeves swinging several inches below her wrists as she gestured, Shizuka had flawless golden skin accented with peach and milk. She had full-petaled lips beneath a stub nose and her dark eyes showed the delicate almond lilt of her Asian ancestry. Despite her small stature, Shizuka was a fearsome warrior, a full-blooded samurai who ruled her people with firmness tempered with mercy. She was also Grant’s lover.

“One of these missionaries tried to push a stone into the face of my majordomo,” she continued in her trilling, singsong voice. “It was most strange.”

“They worship a rock creature,” Kane stated by way of explanation, his voice betraying his irritation. “Big fucker name of Ullikummis, yet another member of the endless Annunaki royal family.”

Shizuka nodded once in acknowledgment. Like Grant, Kane wore a shadow suit, which he had chosen to augment with a battered old leather jacket of a worn brown color, its slick surface scuffed and bearing a patch across one elbow. The jacket was still dusted with the soil of the little village between the cliffs where he and his companions had been ambushed by the worshippers of Ullikummis. He also wore his favored black boots—also scuffed—one of the last survivors of his Magistrate days, and dark pants held up by a belt with a large buckle of dull, gunmetal finish.

Kane stood by one of the windows, his broad shoulders leaning back against the frame, his legs crossed at the ankles. Over six feet tall, Kane looked imposing when he stood to his full height, his steel-gray eyes boring into you like a laser beam beneath his dark brows. With his long and rangy arms and legs, there was something of the wolf to Kane’s physical appearance. There was something of the wolf in his nature, too, both a natural pack leader and a loner as the need arose.

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