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.
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.
The Cerberus adventurers and their companions had discovered Thurpa’s clone nature. He looked absolutely normal, but during Durga’s struggle against Neekra, Thurpa suffered the same pain from physical injuries and psychic trauma. When the young man gripped Nehushtan, the ancient walking staff of kings and prophets, its healing power transmitted through him to Durga.
Even now, Kane could see the numb shock on the young man’s features, realizing that any memories since before the day he met Kane and the others had been a lie, a fabrication implanted by a renegade prince whose rampage slew even his mother, the old matron of Garuda. Thurpa had thought that he could return home, but he’d never set his own eyes upon it. Rather, they had been echoes of another’s mind; most likely, it was Durga’s.
“How are you feeling?” Kane asked him.
“Like
