Monster - A. Lee Martinez [100]
Lotus was unaccustomed to pain, having not experienced it in several millennia. But the stone’s protection was gone, and the scratching, biting, hissing feline climbing up her leg took her completely by surprise. Shrieking, she released the stone and whirled, beating at Monster as he sank his fangs into her rump.
The tower of flame disappeared and the sea of tar instantly cooled into an uneven black plain. Judy and the stone burned brighter.
Lotus finally succeeded in detaching the Monster, who was a cat in mind and body now. He hissed and spat, arching his back and raising his hackles. She pointed at him, blasting a stream of fire. It disintegrated before reaching him.
She tried again, but nothing happened. A chill breeze swept over her, and Lotus shivered.
Judy held the stone under her arm.
“That’s mine!” shouted Lotus. “How dare you!”
She charged like a slathering beast. Judy made a small gesture. Barely a flick of the wrist. The tar liquefied under Lotus and sucked her under. She was up to her waist before it turned solid again.
Lotus leaned forward and continued to claw at the air with her hands.
“You can’t have it! You can’t control it! Give it to me before the power drives you mad and you ruin everything!”
Purring, Monster rubbed against Judy’s leg.
“It’s over,” said Judy to Lotus. “Can’t you see that?”
“No! It’s never over! There is a way to things, a natural order! The stone and I are one. We always have been.”
“Not anymore.”
Lotus went limp. She struggled to hold herself together, but she was a parasite without a host. She raised a trembling arm as she stared with burning eyes at the stone. Then the fire fizzled and Lotus disappeared, back to the formless nothingness from which she had been spawned.
Judy felt the universe all around her. A surge of revitalizing power flooded into it as everything that Lotus had been holding on to returned to the stone. There wasn’t much time. Only a few seconds before the alignment would fail and Judy’s perfect communion with the stone would end.
She willed the destruction gone, and the neighborhood was restored. There was no flash, no divine thunder. It was just fixed.
Monster mewed at her feet. Judy scratched him on the head, and she willed him to become whatever he wanted. Human or cat—it was his choice.
Naked, scarlet, and furless, he squatted beside her. He stood and didn’t bother to cover himself. He was just happy to be human again.
“Did we win?”
“We won,” she replied. “Though it isn’t quite over.”
She held the stone before her. Even without the perfect attunement, she would become the most powerful being in the universe if she held on to it. She felt the stone object to this arrangement, but it couldn’t stop her. Nothing could. This power was hers now, and it would take at least another billion years before the stone could try to take it away. And even that wasn’t guaranteed to work.
It was only fair. Her life had been a mess because of what the stone had made her into. She didn’t need to hold the power forever. Just a few years to make up for the annoyances she’d suffered in the name of the greater good. Wasn’t she owed at least a decade of near omnipotence? Maybe two. Was a century really that big a deal in the grand scale of time? She could give it back after she’d indulged herself for a millennium or two, and everything would work out fine in the end.
The stone filled Judy’s mind with a billion years’ worth of memories, of the long, long life of the last creature to covet its power above all else. The power the stone offered wasn’t really good for anything. It could transform every person into a cat, move planets, create universes.