Deathstalker 07 - Deathstalker Return

other shuddering, as the need to run or scream or vomit hit them in a deep atavistic layer of the mind. The uber-espers were monsters, in every way.
    The first to arrive were the Spider Harps: two withered humunculi with opened skulls, their fruiting brains expelled in a great connecting web of pink and gray brain tissues. They'd somehow brought part of their own lair with them—a great expanse of gauzy brain webbing stretched away much farther from their corner of the cavern than should have been possible. The Spider Harps had physically joined two different locations, by the power of their will. They sat still and silent in their chairs, their sunken faces dead and empty, save for their dark malevolent eyes. They held hands, the joined flesh fused together long ago.
    The Shatter Freak was the next to arrive. His physical existence had been shattered and scattered across time and space by some old psionic trauma. His patchwork body was composed of different parts from different times, from past and present and future, somehow combined in one constantly shifting construct. The details of his torso, limbs, and extremities were always changing; appearing and disappearing, growing and shrinking as they quickly replaced each other. His various parts clung together as though for comfort, somehow functioning as a whole, as young, old, and in-between pieces passed briefly through the present. The Shatter Freak's face flickered and twisted as features dropped in and out, from child to ancient, with only the eyes remaining constant, full of rage and pain, sorrow and horror.
    Part of him was always dying, and always being born.
    Emma Steel frowned, as she realized she was understanding things about the uber-espers that she
    couldn't have known. It seemed Diana Vertue had left a reservoir of information behind in her head, to be triggered as necessary. Emma didn't feel at all comfortable about that, but since it made her job easier she just shrugged mentally and went along with it. She concentrated on the monsters below, while in the back of her head someone else's voice whispered to her of things she needed to know.
    In order for the Shatter Freak's mind to function at all, he had to hold it firmly in the present, concentrating on the now. Memory and planning were both difficult for him, but sometimes future happenings stuck in his head for a moment, making him an oracle of sorts. He was the most powerful telepath ever, and only his fractioned consciousness kept him from accessing and dominating all other minds in his proximity. No one could keep any secrets from him, not even his fellow monsters, but they trusted him because they all knew he couldn't retain any knowledge for long.
    Blue Hellfire looked very much like the Ice Queen of children's stories: tall and slender, she was wrapped in diaphanous silks, revealing blue-white flesh beneath. Her short, spiky hair was packed with ice, and hoarfrost made whorled patterns on her corpse-pale face. She looked like she'd been buried in the permafrost for centuries and only recently dug up. She was always cold—icy cold—and most especially also in her emotions, because everything that touched her burned. Just her presence was enough to set the world on fire. She left a series of burning footsteps behind her as she strode slowly across the stone floor, and none of the other uber-espers could allow her to get too close. She was the source of the genetic material that the Empress Lionstone's scientists had used to create the Stevie Blue clones. Blue Hellfire had hoped the research might uncover a way for her to control her own fires, but she had become far too powerful for science to tame. Her face was utterly blank, with no discernable identity or character of her own, and features so androgynous as to be almost generic. She could have been any age, or anyone. She could burn down a city with just a thought or an emotion, but mostly she didn't care. Sometimes she made people have sex with her, just to watch them burn to death in her arms.
    Screaming Silence was gargantuan: a woman of such vast size and substance that she seemed always to take up more than her fair share of space. Easily eight feet tall and almost half as wide, her body was grossly distorted, burying her human characteristics under huge rolls of fat. She was always hungry, in all ways, her various appetites never satisfied no matter how much she indulged them. Her wide face was gaudy with slapped on colors, her