"Are you sure about this?", Maya muttered as they made their way over rooftops on a helicopter Maya was "borrowing."
"Yes. Beyond a shadow of a doubt, I have to get closer to her." His voice seemed... deeper, and it carried a strange resonance to it that distracted her. She shook her head to clear the cobwebs and pointed. "Thar she blows, as the saying goes." Up ahead, illuminated by the city lights, was Tal'shen. Her form was huge and amorphous, a gelatinous mesh of pieces of that seemed to belong to the menagerie of the deep sea. The skin was a murky grey that crackled with bolts of rainbow colored lightning and gigantic tentacles l
As the blade swung towards him, one of Paul's tentacles lashed out, slamming into Maya's temple with a sickeningly wet crack. Her head rocketed sideways and her body followed, slamming heavily into the wall. Shimmering hues of red trailed down as she slid to the floor. Paul gasped in shock, but now was no time to stop. He instinctively knew what to do before he heard Tal'shen howl.
RUN!
Looking over his shoulder, Paul realized he'd been held in a warehouse near the ocean. Escape was his only thought as he ran out the nearest exit and cringed. He'd been in the dark for so long the bright light outside hurt his eyes. He could hear the poundin
Paul's whole world was spinning. The Proxitol made it incredibly difficult for him to think clearly. Maya? Yes, her name was Maya. She had told him it would only be a few days, that the thing inside would dissolve. She'd been wrong, and she'd been surprised that she'd been wrong, not that it mattered. Resting his head against the cool porcelain of the toilet in the cell he called a room, Paul
could almost laugh about how this all seemed like some ridiculous dream. But the pain, the disorientation, and the feeling of...something inside...assured him it was anything but.
The growth had started spreading again, but it was different this tim