The Black Madonna (The Mystique Trilogy) (32 page)

‘Maybe you should come,’ I said, suddenly regretting that I’d underestimated my husband’s understanding. I should have spoken with him before agreeing that he should be ousted from the mission.

‘I don’t need to come,’ he told me. ‘I trust you. It’s him I don’t trust.’ His dark eyes turned to Killian, who smiled serenely back at him.

‘You dislike me because you suspect I am in love with your wife and daughter—and you’d be right on both counts,’ Killian said, much to everyone else’s dismay, especially my own. ‘These two women rescued my soul from a lifetime of torment—how could I not adore them? They were once my wife and daughter too.’

‘You remember,’ I gasped, for in twenty years Killian had never mentioned regaining his memory of our past life together.

‘I thought he knew,’ Arcturus said, further relieved of his unfounded suspicions about us. I shook my head.

‘Clearly these angels were only loaned to me in order to lead me to my full potential,’ Killian went on. ‘My only connection to them now is my indebtedness for their self-sacrifice and assistance.’ He smiled broadly. ‘Truth be known, being apart from you nearly drove Mia—and therefore me—insane.’

Everyone made sentimental noises as I bashfully admitted that I had been a bit obsessive about getting back, and the rest of the crew emerged into the corridor to see what all the fuss was about.

My husband so wanted to hold on to his suspicions about Killian, but in Killian’s actual presence he found it impossible to dislike him.

‘Well, don’t think this changes anything,’ he said sternly. ‘You still tried to seduce our daughter.’

Killian chuckled. ‘Our father would like to point out that you have seduced many of his daughters during your lifetimes, Arcturus, but he does not hold it against you.’

The entire crew collapsed into laughter, and even Arcturus cracked a smile.

‘Well…I’d have asked their fathers if I’d known them,’ he said, making a feeble attempt to defend himself.

‘Sure you would have,’ Thana mocked.

‘I’m certain my father would have appreciated you asking for permission to seduce me,’ Solarian said, delighted by the premise.

Talori was leaning on Solarian, so amused she could barely hold herself up. ‘Not to mention our poor husbands,’ she choked. Her face morphed Arcturus’s for a second, which looked ridiculous on her frame. ‘You don’t mind if I just borrow your wife’s body for a few hours, surely?’ Talori said in his voice, raising another round of laughter at his expense.

‘Will you just go!’ Arcturus urged our party, wanting the embarrassment to end.

And, in a daze of merriment, we left for the depths of the Underworld.

The defunct sleep therein
in incorruptible forms,
they wake not to see their brethren,
they recognise no longer their father and mother,
their hearts feel naught towards their wives and children. This is the dwelling of the god All-Dead.
Each trembles to pray to him,
for he hears not.
Nobody can praise him,
for he regards not those who adore him.
Neither does he notice any offering brought to him.
This god is Karmic Decree.

T
AMAR
D
EVERE
—KALI

There was no cold on Earth like the cold in hell, for here even my will had frozen solid. My reality was a potpourri of my personal demons, a neverending string of nightmares woven carefully together by my foe. At a higher level of consciousness I knew my captors were altering my perception of reality, but the implants were every bit as vivid as memory. Whenever I attempted to seek comfort in my memories and dreams, they immediately turned dark and sordid.

My parents became two people who despised each other and me
most of all. I experienced every kind of abuse at their hands and grew to hate them, myself, the world and everyone in it.

My prince never came for me. Having taken human form, he’d been seduced by the pleasures of the physical world and had forgotten all about his love for me and our mission. Every time I thought of Mathu, I saw him in luxurious surrounds, lavishing his affection upon a multitude of other women. He would turn to look in my direction and laugh at my humiliation and disappointment.

Then there was Killian. Like a spark of hope in this world of utter darkness, I had a vision of him coming to save me. It wasn’t clear how he had got past the Nefilim to come to my aid, but we were alone in hell and he was intimately close to me.

‘I know you want me,’ he whispered, and his moist breath upon my neck sent warm shivers through my freezing soul.

‘Yes,’ I replied. ‘I am yours.’

NO!

My higher self screamed out to me to resist the filth I was being fed. I had to wonder why Ill was going to such lengths to make Killian look good to me, but then my body was racked by agony and the thought fell from my mind. I was losing myself, and I feared for my sanity. No one heard my cries for help, no one came, no one knew I was here or that this place even existed! Except for him, the Lord of all Ill.

We went back a long way, Ill and I, for in my lifetime as Kali I had done some secret genetic work at his request; so top-secret that only he and I knew about it. Ill would have had a complete riot on his hands had the Dracon known he was working on creating a female of their species; and had succeeded, way back before the first Dracon uprising.

With the brief memory, pain shot through my body again—a warning. The memory vanished, to be replaced by the belief that all the Dracon females I had created as Kali had been destroyed after my death.

I dared not allow my mind to think at all, in case every part of me was stolen in this way. In this cold darkness I had lost all sense of time, for every second was an eternity of yearning to be anywhere but here. And the longer I was here, the less I felt, the less I cared, the less I mourned and craved the life and identity that was slowly being torn from me.

Within this station lie
links to extraterrestrial days gone by,
for during mankind’s predestined birth,
malign beings disturbed evolution on Earth.

Xerthaneus guards the porthole
to Gaia’s uncertain future,
moulded by the intent of
all who live upon her.

If the ice melts from this place,
antiquity shall surface,
buried to date.
And we shall know the consequences
of leaving destiny to fate,
and understand all that is extraterrestrial
too late.

M
IA
D
EVERE
—MERIDAN

Passing from the highly intellectual indigo frequency of the Enoch pyramid porthole passage in New Mexico, down through the spectrum to the vibrant, erotic red frequency of the Xerthaneus pyramid passage at the South Pole, proved to be quite a rush and rather arousing.
Castor, Killian, Dexter and I were deposited on top of the glowing red surface of the Signet One porthole, all a little flushed by the experience.

‘Word of warning,’ Dexter announced as he headed straight for the holographic work station, ‘the frequency of this Signet station is akin to your base chakra, so it’s likely to stimulate a few primal urges.’

‘You don’t say,’ commented Castor, trying to ignore the sultry vibrations of the ice palace, which was awash in the red light of the glowing Signet porthole.

Here I was, with three gorgeous men, submersed in primal urges, and I hadn’t made love to my husband in twenty years! I decided to attempt to distract everyone with a science question. ‘How do you know that the consciousness of the planet is low enough at this time to link this porthole to our dark future in Irkalla rather than our bright future in the Ranna?’

‘By this point in 2003, the US has invaded Iraq, which triggers a steep incline in suicide bombings. There has been an outbreak of the SARS disease and the hottest heatwave on record has swept through the UK and France—it all adds up to a lot of angry, greedy, unhappy people,’ Dexter replied. ‘Even once we get this grid up and running, I fear it may be too little too late. Humanity isn’t waking up fast enough, and the Nefilim have dammed the grid in so many places that frankly I despair at the task of clearing them all.’

‘You sure know how to kill the mood,’ Killian said, to the amusement of all. ‘Holy mother of the universe!’ he exclaimed as he noticed a large object frozen in the ice beyond the walls of the chamber. He stepped back to get a broader view. ‘Is that a—’

‘Spaceship? Yes, it is,’ Dexter said. ‘And so is that, and that,’ pointing to others held in the ice around the station. ‘They belonged to the Nefilim but were frozen here during the last Ice Age. They’ve been working on defrosting them ever since.’

‘Global warming,’ Killian realised. ‘The Nefilim do everything to promote it through their Illuminati operations.’

‘My station was located here for the very purpose of keeping an eye on this lot,’ Dexter explained, returning to us after he’d programmed our request into the porthole.

‘There’s something I don’t understand,’ I told him. ‘Each porthole has a guardian council, but does the guardian spirit of this station, Xerthaneus, reside in the Underworld of the Nefilim or the Otherworld of the Anu?’

‘Both actually,’ he replied.

‘But how is that possible?’ It took me a moment to figure out that one of the Nefilim must have been a double agent—an enlightened Anu posing as one of the fallen in order to protect the stargate that provided a back door into the realm of eternal darkness.

‘We all have little secrets from our past,’ Dexter said, and grinned at me.

Red liquid light broke the surface of the crystalline porthole beneath our feet and we dropped into the depths of darkest density.

We landed in the middle of a beautiful garden thriving inside a huge dark tower, which was constructed from massive stone blocks not employed since the most ancient of times. High overhead, the porthole was set into the ceiling the tower and beamed infrared light down upon the flourishing plants.

‘Not exactly what I’d expected Irkalla to look like,’ Castor commented, then spotted a beautiful Anu woman waiting to welcome us. Her blue aura was radiant amid the red light of our surroundings. ‘Hello,’ he said, charmed by her beauty.

‘With eyes like bluest cornflowers and hair as white as snow, she was tall, slender and elegant, and a wonder to behold,’ Dexter quoted before embracing her. ‘Ereshkigal…I did not expect you to meet us.’

She returned his fond embrace. ‘Heracles, it seems an age since I saw your friendly face.’

‘It has been an age if that’s the name I was using last time we met,’ he joked. ‘It’s Dexter these days.’

‘This is not Ereshkigal!’ Killian exclaimed, then watched, shocked, as she morphed into the ugly Nefilim demon he knew, and then into Co-co Yamamoto. ‘You’re the double agent?’ he cried. ‘You killed my friend!’

‘I took her life in the short term in order to protect the chance of saving her soul in the long term. Would you have done differently?’
she asked him. ‘I’ll bet you have done the same yourself and turned a blind eye to injustice for the sake of the larger plan.’

I knew for a fact this was true.

‘I, like you, have learned to separate the best of me from the worst,’ Ereshkigal went on, ‘in order to alternate between the worlds of light and shadow, and maintain my sanity and my cover.’

Killian was suddenly seeing Ereshkigal in a whole new light. ‘I would never have guessed you were really on my side,’ he said.

‘I would never have imagined that anyone could beat the Montauk mind-control program,’ she said in return, grinning broadly. ‘That’s very impressive for a human.’

I hated to interrupt the reunion but I was concerned. ‘Is Tamar all right?’ I asked. ‘Where is she?’

‘Follow me.’ Ereshkigal led us through the garden towards the high stone outer wall of the tower. ‘Ill has put her in the Hell of Eternal Sleep and Darkness.’

‘That’s a drug-induced brainwashing program.’ Killian was concerned, having undergone such torture himself. ‘Where is Mathu?’

‘I have been unable to siphon that information out of Erragal yet, but I will,’ she assured him.

‘It must be difficult hiding who you really are from the man you love,’ Killian said sympathetically.

She laughed. ‘I hold no love for Erragal, beyond hoping to save his soul like the others’. My Underworld was once a beautiful place…before I was forced into marrying Erragal and surrendering my realms to him. Now all that is left is this garden, one tiny oasis of light in a realm of utter darkness. I despise how Erragal, Ill, Namtar and the rest of them have corrupted my elementals and turned them into destroyers instead of creators! But not all my elementals have been turned; there are still a goodly number that are loyal to me and protect this place from discovery.’

At the wall of the tower, Ereshkigal joined her hands in the prayer position, her middle fingertips touching the stone. Her hands passed through the solid barrier and parted it as if it were a curtain of silk.

‘I was going to ask how you had managed to keep this place secret for all time,’ I said quietly as we followed her into a dark stone walkway.

‘No need to whisper yet,’ she replied. ‘We are still in my secured zone.’

Ereshkigal allowed the wall to close and the corridor fell into utter darkness, until Dexter cracked a glowstick. Our hostess moved across to the opposing stone wall, which she opened for us in the same manner as the first. This time we stepped into an entire labyrinth of dark halls.

‘This is my labyrinth, which leads absolutely nowhere,’ she said, and patted the wall that had closed behind us. ‘Only I have the ability to move through these walls and find my way without getting lost. It is the one part of my kingdom that Erragal never claimed, simply because he doesn’t know it exists.’

I was surprised to see that she had retained her tall, angelic Anu form. ‘Isn’t it dangerous for you to wear your true form here?’ I asked.

‘Of course,’ she said. ‘But if I am seen in your company, I’d rather my kin believe I am an invader rather than reveal myself as their trusted ally.’