I wasn’t ready to face Seth. In Egypt, he’d been fresh out of the prison—what had been my prison—and I’d been pumped up on old magic. I hadn’t come close to defeating him. I’d surprised him. I wouldn’t be able to play that card again.
New York’s night wrapped around me as I strode down the sidewalk. The autumn air held a wintery bite. The remaining leaves on the trees lining the back streets had curled inward, desperately clinging on and ignoring the inevitable. I knew that feeling.
I couldn’t decide if Cat’s arrival was a welcome relief or a distraction. I knew what I had to do: walk away from Cujo, from New York, and Ace Dante until I discovered the truth or it discovered me. Seth would come. I wasn’t ready, but I’d need to be. I couldn’t be Apophis and Ace. Cat had walked straight into the blast zone. As tough as she was, she was mortal, and Seth was… a force of nature. When Seth and Osiris clashed, I’d have to pick a side. I couldn’t have the luxury of friends, not if I wanted them to survive.
“I don’t know you,” a young male voice said. I’d almost walked right by him, but his voice had pulled me up short. He leaned against the railing of a fancier house on the street, hands tucked into his pants pockets. With a face made for wisecracks in class and a sideways smile perfect for charming teenage girls, he couldn’t be older than eighteen. But those eyes—a violent purple—weren’t high school appropriate. “But I think I should know you.”
I eased some of my power outward, scenting the air for magic, but tasted none. “If you’re waiting for the bus, you’ll be here all night. They stop running this route at eleven.”
“I think I was waiting for you. It’s difficult to know…” He lifted his hand and looked at it as though surprised to find it attached to his arm.
“Who are you?” I asked.
“Right now?” He gestured at himself. “I’m nobody.”
The stubborn, selfish part of me that had clocked off around the time I’d devoured the jewel thief wanted to walk away from this kid, but seeing as the night had already caught me by surprise, ignoring him would be a mistake.
“All right, Nobody. Since you’ve been hanging out on street corners, have you seen anything unusual—besides yourself?”
“Like?”
“Like a big ol’ long-necked jungle cat?”
“Like that one?” He pointed behind me.
The kurvord’s club-ended tail would have taken my head clean off my shoulders had I not turned and ghosted sideways—part man, part ash cloud. The kurvord stood at twice my height, and that scrunched-up cat face rippled all over in a pissed-off snarl. I reached behind me to grab Alysdair. My fingers grasped air. Right. I’d left in a hurry and forgotten the sword.
The creature reared back, lifting its massive front paws off the sidewalk, and lined up for a head-butt.
“I figure you can’t talk?” I asked it.
I’d recently learned that the Recka was self-aware, so talking to a kurvord was worth a shot, but the kurvord’s lips rippled and a growl rumbled up its long throat. Making friends wasn’t on its agenda, and this little meet-cute would go viral if I didn’t shut it down. I could plunge into its soul and rip it out, but I had an audience and the thought of revealing what I was to Nobody Kid twisted something unfamiliar inside.
So dancing it was.
The kurvord’s massive head swung in for a right hook. I shied away and landed a loose right fist in the creature’s serpentine neck. Thick muscle rippled. It whipped around, lifted its head, and let out a very un-New York jungle cat yowl.
“You have incoming…” Nobody Kid remarked from behind. He was right. A car had pulled up. The driver’s door opened, and a guy climbed out, snapping photos with his cell. Give it a few seconds and the pictures would be all over the internet. Usually, it would be irritating, but Osiris would deal with it. Since any attention would alert Osiris to the fact I wasn’t tucked away in a stone coffin under his house, the last thing I needed was publicity. The kurvord had suddenly become the second biggest threat on the street.
I bolted for the driver. In the seconds it took for him to notice he was the star of his own video, I’d cleared half the distance in a run. The remaining few meters I cleared as a swirl of ash.
“Daquir…” I hissed, the word insubstantial, and turned his phone to sand. The remains filtered through his fingers as he stumbled back against his car, mouth guppying. My reflection of ash and flame, fire and rage, burned in his wide eyes. I jolted back into solid form, but ash still drifted from my fingers and my lips as I spoke. “Cukkomd… Get back in your car, turn around, drive home.” Part ash, part man, I poured the words into his ear, feeding them straight to that primal part of him attuned to obedience. “You didn’t see—”
A leg or tail or some part of the kurvord caught me at the ankles and took out my legs, introducing my face to asphalt. My partly compelled friend didn’t so much as blink as the creature planted one fat paw on my back and crushed my ribs into the road. Pain from the bullet wound blasted again.
“It’s not looking good,” Nobody Kid coolly remarked from the fringes of the fight.
“O-kay,” I ground out. “I tried playing… nice.”
Two souls in the space of a few hours. Both dark. I was walking a fine line, but I knew that line well, and it tasted so damn good. I locked eyes with the beast and dove inside. In less than a second, I had a grip on its essence. The kurvord’s slippery animal soul provided a tasty morsel.
Its soulless body dropped. “Daquir.” And burned up.
All I needed now was the main course.
Slumped against his car door, the driver hadn’t moved. Primal terror had gripped him, rooting him to the spot. His mind couldn’t comprehend the monster it saw. Somewhere inside me, I smiled at his fear, tasted it, and reveled in it. There was a time when thousands like him had knelt before me, the rank smell of fear thick in the air like a fog.
A dark stain spread down the guy’s right leg.
“There are more,” Nobody Kid said, drawing my attention to him. His eyes glowed more purple than before. “That is if Ace Dante cares?”
He knew my name?
More kurvords?
Cat and Cujo.
The sound of glass breaking and raining down on the sidewalk called my mind back from the past, back from the memories, to my apartment window. A gunshot rang out—then another. Muzzle flashes burst inside, illuminating Cat with her claws in another kurvord.
Abandoning the driver, I funneled all my mass and magic through the broken apartment window to find the kurvord down, its insides introduced to its outsides by way of Cat’s glistening claws. Cujo swung his gun toward me, yanking me up short in the middle of the room.
His trigger finger twitched. “What in the hell!”
Cat stopped cutting pieces of kurvord and rocked back on her heels. “Cujo, stop!”
He still had the gun on me, eyes hard with determination. The only reason he hadn’t fired was because he couldn’t be sure a bullet would hurt the thing in front of him. It took an age to sculpt Ace Dante again and piece myself back into the body of a man. By then, the damage had been done. Cujo’s expression said he had never really known me. Sure, I was the guy of unknown age and origin who occasionally had spooky eyes and said weird shit. But he hadn’t understood—until now.
“Cujo…?” Cat slowly straightened. Blood dripped from her hands. “It’s Ace.”
It?
I couldn’t stand to see the betrayal on his face a second longer or hear Cat call me a thing. I turned—let him shoot me in the back if he wanted—and righted the chair. My apartment was a mess. Holes in walls, blood splatters, broken windows. As modest as it was, these four walls and three little rooms had been Ace Dante’s home for years. I should have felt something to see it destroyed. I should have cared. I reached around inside for some feeling, for a glimmer of emotion, but came up with nothing.
“It’s okay,” Cat reassured him. “He’s on our side.”
Am I?
“You can’t stay here.” My words were direct, stoic, and completely flat. “Someone’s sending kurvords after me. You need to leave.” I turned and found them both watching me. Cujo had lowered the gun, but it was still nestled in his lap. The look in his eyes told me he wanted to shoot. He had good instincts.
He lifted his chin and glared back. “I told you, good people don’t abandon their friends.” He tried a smile on, but it slid right off. His fingers twitched toward the gun.
Damn him. I pointed at the dead creature, its blood oozing across the floor. “You lived because Cat was here. More will come, and it’ll get worse. Much worse. And it won’t stop there. This… This is nothing. I’m… This is… Take the fucking hint, Cujo. Leave.”
“Ace—” Cat warned, somehow understanding yet firm enough to scold.
“What is wrong with you people? Do you want to die?” I’d crossed the room and braced my arms on either side of Cujo’s chair in seconds. He glared right back, staring deep into my soul eater eyes. His soul was bright and light and good. I’d always known it, but now I witnessed the good in this man whose life had been changed by the gods’ meddling. If he stayed, if he persisted, he would die. “You have no idea what you’re dealing with. You’ve seen Osiris click his fingers and make a few things disappear, seen the aftermath of what he’s done to me, but that’s just a hint of the truth. Osiris is nothing. When the gods wake, civilizations will fall. Millions will die.” I heard Isis’s whispers. What if the apocalypse is not an event, but a man? “I told you to leave. You ignored me. Next time, there won’t be a choice. Don’t make me compel you, Nick Cujo Jones.”
“You son of a bitch—” Cujo snarled.
“Okay,” Cat snapped. “Fine. We’re going.” She waited for Cujo’s nod, gripped his wheelchair handles, and wheeled him out, leaving me standing in the debris of Ace Dante’s life.
Five minutes after they’d left, I reduced the dead kurvord to ash, scooped up my coat, Alysdair, and the Ducati’s key and left the apartment, not bothering to lock the door behind me. By daybreak, I’d be long gone and Ace Dante would be nothing but a memory.
Chapter 5
The streets were clear and the roads open as though fate had decided I was doing the right thing. I dropped to a low gear on the Ducati and screamed the bike out of Manhattan and through the Lincoln Tunnel onto R80. Rarely dropping below a hundred, I made it far enough outside the city to notice the buildings shrinking and the greenery blooming between the gaps. I speeded along the highway, head down, the bike consuming the miles in blinks, heart racing, mind running even faster. That’s when everything stopped.
Not just my bike—suddenly frozen to the asphalt—or the wind, or the noise of cars and engines. The entire world stopped as though an artist’s static rendition had replaced reality.
I sat up on the bike, not needing to put my foot down to balance it. It just hung, suspended in time.
“What the…?”
Silence.
Was time frozen or just my place in it? I twisted in the seat and peered into the distance in every direction. This couldn’t be real. I’d never seen anything like this.
I straightened, and my sights landed on a figure striding down the highway toward me. Osiris. His suit jacket flared without the aid of the wind. He walked by motionless cars, their occupants trapped between seconds. At this distance, I couldn’t make out his expression, but I knew it would be a calculated mask.
What he was doing—stopping our place in time—took monumental power. The kind of power I hadn’t believed him capable of since the sundering. My heart stuttered with a touch of fear.
I chanced a glance up. Birds hung as unmoving black dots against the motionless clouds.
I see what this is…
I planted my boots on either side of the bike and slid a hand down to where I’d stowed Alysdair. I’d vowed to kill him as he’d closed the sarcophagus lid on me, and I’d meant it. This display was a reminder that Osiris was one of the most powerful gods in the pantheon, and it was my own personal warning.
“Did you think I would allow you to leave my city?” He stopped a few strides from the front of the Ducati, hands loose at his sides, stance relaxed, but his eyes glowed golden and the taste of his power turned the air brittle, close to shattering. He had control of everything, of life, of the passage of time, of the movement of the earth beneath his feet.
“What do you want?”
His gaze dropped to my hand beside the sword and flicked back to my glare. “To ask you to stay.”
“Ask me?” My liquid laugh poured over the silent highway. “Why don’t you compel me?”
His dark eyes narrowed, telling me everything.
He couldn’t. With all this power, he had the world in his hands, but his grip on me was slipping. My leash had frayed. I’d weakened his curse in Egypt and broken his compulsion to escape his sarcophagus. After five hundred years, Osiris was losing control of me. My ragged, weary heart leaped, and I smiled at the bastard’s schooled expression.
“Seth will destroy everything I’ve worked for,” he said. Those golden eyes remained cool and his voice sounded true, but I wondered if beneath all that, he was a god barely hanging on.
“And you,” I reminded with a smirk. “Let’s not forget the part where he destroys you.”
A muscle twitched in his jaw. “He is unhinged.”
It took effort not to laugh at that too. “Oh, peaches, if you think I’ll save your ass, then you really have the wrong idea about our special relationship.”
Another twitch. “This isn’t about me.”
“This is all about you. What are those scrolls for? The ones you had Shukra distribute?”
His glare wavered. He didn’t like any mention of those scrolls because they cut too close to his plans—plans he didn’t want me knowing about.
“You compelled me to kill innocents. The vile things you made me do over the years… the things you made Shukra do. I know you had her distribute the scrolls and that those scrolls are potent. They’re powerful. I’ve seen one—burned it in fact after some kids got hold of it. How many innocent people have you killed in the name of your grand plan?” Anger ignited inside my chest, burning too hot and fast. If I let it go, I’d try to kill him. But that would only earn me another trip to the stone coffin. His grip was slipping, but he still had a hold of me. I wasn’t yet free of the curse, but if I played it right, I would be soon. “You compelled me to climb into a sarcophagus.” Anger boiled. It scorched my throat and nipped at the edges of my sanity. “You buried me alive.”
As calm as the ocean on a summer day, he said, “Everything has its purpose.”
I had to look away and swallow the rage. My teeth chattered as I pushed it all down. “Sure it does,” I hissed. “The purpose of propping up your master plan—”
“There’s a boy,” he interrupted, continuing as though I wasn’t a hair’s breadth away from grabbing Alysdair and plunging it through his chest. “A child.”
“How’s your wife?” I asked, laughter cracking inside my mind. I settled my hands on the bike’s gas tank between my legs—still within reach of Alysdair but showing him I didn’t need to reach for the sword. How I was capable of a civilized conversation. “Still sucking you off at the click of your fingers? She does have the most wonderful mouth, despite the poisonous tongue.”
The highway, its frozen cars, the sky—it all recoiled an inch as Osiris’s power flexed and bowed, almost breaking. Nothing changed on his face, just the same ol’ friendly city mayor addressing his devoted people. “The boy must be found.”
Nothing of our silent battle sounded in his voice, but then he’d had millennia to school himself. He couldn’t hide the savage truth of him—not from me. Osiris was a dead god walking, literally. Seth had killed him before, and he would again—unless I got there first.
“You know what I am…” I drawled. “How does it make you feel to know I’ve had my hands all over the Goddess of Light? My tongue too.
”
I was about to discover if a god could spontaneously combust, because as unruffled as he appeared on the outside, his power reared up in a cresting wave ready to break over the highway. The world shimmered, hidden behind the heat of his building rage. I wanted to know how far I could push him before he snapped. I needed to know how much control he had left. Before Egypt, he would have stopped me long before this point. The fact he hadn’t told me everything.
I leaned forward. “How does it feel to know you’re fucking my used goods?”
“SERAMCA.” The power word and compulsion he shoved behind it slammed through my head, wrenching out half my psyche. Screams poured in. My hands flew to my head as the fire I’d kept contained burned up the inside of my skull. He had me by the neck in the next moment, but I also had Alysdair jammed between us and pressed against his ribs. He flinched, and my smile grew. Oh, the pain went on, the burning bubbled and churned, but that compulsion was for Ace Dante, and I was no longer just a man.
Osiris’s eyes blazed molten gold inches from mine. Thousands of years of power buried inside that illusion of a man crowded in. The liquid passage of time poured in too, and a pressure almost too intense to withstand crushed my mind. Ace Dante would have withered and dropped to his knees. I did not.
“You will find the boy and bring him to me. Your police officer, Nick Jones, has a lead. Follow it.” Osiris pulled me close by the neck, drilling his glare into mine. I smelled the metallic scent of blood: his. Alysdair’s hungry song hummed in my ear. “Follow the lead, bring the boy to me, and if you so much as mention fucking my wife again, I will slaughter Nick Jones, his estranged wife, and his daughter, and I’ll compel you to strike the killing blows, Mokarakk Oma. I still hold the shackles around your soul. You are not free of me yet.”
Serpent's Game (The Soul Eater Book 5) Page 3