Serpent's Game (The Soul Eater Book 5)

by Pippa Dacosta

  I swallowed, words trapped behind his command, but Osiris saw the fury in my eyes. He knew he’d added another nail to his coffin, knew that when the time came, I would be the one to reduce him to ash. How we both despised the other.

  “Bring me the boy and keep your friends safe.” He freed my neck and pushed off, quick to back away from Alysdair’s reach. A scarlet smudge bloomed low on his crisp white shirt. I wiped a hand down Alysdair’s blade, smearing the god’s blood into the sword’s glowing markings—feeding the song. Godkiller. Osiris’s reign was coming to an end. I would make sure of it, but not here, not yet. He was right. I wasn’t yet free of him. This wasn’t the place to strike. But it was coming, just like that storm in the back of my mind.

  Osiris’s lingering glare burned into the depths of my soul. He lifted his hand—giving me a moment’s warning to grab the Ducati’s handlebars—and clicked his fingers. Time—movement—noise—light. It all flooded back in. The Ducati wobbled and bucked, suddenly decelerating from over 150 mph. It fought to kick me off. Horns blared. I wrestled it back under control and searched for Osiris, but he was long gone. Taking the next exit ramp, I turned the bike back toward New York and the gathering storm clouds darkening the skies.

  “If I wasn’t in this damn chair, I’d knock ten shades out of you, I don’t care what kind of thing you are.” I’d earned the words from Cujo, but the venom behind them?

  “I’m… sorry?” I wasn’t entirely sure what I was apologizing for. He couldn’t know I’d been planning to leave permanently.

  Cujo growled, whirled his chair in his front doorway, and wheeled it up the hallway. But he did leave the door open. I hesitated, loitering on the doorstep.

  Walk away, the Ace Dante part of me whispered. Walk away and they’ll live. They can’t survive what’s coming. Somewhere inside, a TV chatted to itself. I smelled toast and eyed the family pictures on the hallway walls.

  Osiris hadn’t compelled me to come back and find the boy, but he might as well have. He’d threatened Cujo’s life. Like always, I didn’t have a choice. I had to stay. I had to find the boy. Of course, it was likely the boy Osiris had a sudden interest in was from the prophecy hanging over the god’s head. The boy will sunder the king. That meant this boy, if he was the prophesied kid, was valuable. Might even be a weapon against Osiris. I could use that. The boy could also potentially be Thoth, if the god had gotten his wish and been reincarnated. Whoever and wherever the boy was, I needed to get to him first. How hard could it be? I’d killed Thoth last year. At the worst, I was dealing with a magic-infused toddler.

  “I tried calling you…” Cujo was saying as I entered his kitchen. “The damn thing hit us as soon as we pulled up outside. Chantal was—”

  Wait. I stopped dead in my tracks. “A kurvord was here?”

  “Cat dealt with it. They’re both in the front room.” The way he said it, eyes averted… the anger when I arrived… it wasn’t just about the attack. Something was wrong.

  “Is your daughter all right?” I asked.

  Too long a moment passed. Without waiting, I headed straight for the front room and found Cat comforting Cujo’s daughter, Chantal. The young woman had her back to me. She hugged her legs close to her chest. Her shoulders trembled. I didn’t smell human blood, but plenty of sickly kurvord blood and fear. A whole lot of fear.

  Cat looked up and shook her head, indicating I should leave.

  Chantal had seen a kurvord. No excuse could cover something like that up. Government experiments? She was too sharp to fall for the normal escaped-zoo-animal bullshit.

  She’d been exposed to my world.

  I’d never wanted that for her or Cujo.

  Now she had a target on her back.

  I slunk out of the room and returned to the kitchen where Cujo was sipping on whiskey and staring through the far wall, making a point of not looking at me.

  “How much did she see?” I asked.

  “All of it. The damn thing tried to eat her face. If Cat hadn’t been there…”

  I heard the unspoken words. I hadn’t been there, and I should have been. Instead, I’d been on the Ducati, racing away as fast as I could. Cat had saved them while I’d been running away. I’d screwed up. What had I been thinking?

  I swallowed the scratchy knot in my throat and lingered in the doorway, giving the man his space. After a few minutes passed and it became clear Cujo wouldn’t talk, I said, thinking aloud, “It doesn’t make any sense. Why was the kurvord here? They were sent after me…”

  “You and me, Ace. We go back.” His Adam’s apple bobbed. “After the accident, I thought… I thought it was over for me. All I had was Chantal. She kept me alive. I told her I was chasing after a perp when the car hit me. I didn’t want her knowing… But that thing that attacked us, the kurvord… it went straight for her and all I could think about was the last thing you said.” He looked at me. The fight had faded from his red-rimmed eyes. The man who’d almost shot me looked as though he’d aged ten years in hours. “You’re right. We have no idea what we’re dealing with. That’s why we need you here. Not just me, but the rest of New York. I know I’ve only seen a fraction of the fuckery the gods are capable of, but I know without you, it would be much worse.”

  What if I’m part of the problem?

  Cat shoved by me, grabbed a glass from the counter, and rinsed it out under the faucet. She eyed me with one eyebrow raised and then drank down a glass of water like it was air. She set the glass down, looked at her bloodied hand with a frown, and began licking kurvord blood from her fingers.

  “She’s okay,” Cat said between licks. She brushed the back of her hand across her forehead and resumed licking. “But she knows what she saw. She needs to have the talk.”

  They both looked to me, expectation filling their silence. The decision about who’d deliver the bad news had been made. “I don’t think I’m the—”

  Cat’s sights narrowed. Cujo glowered. I wasn’t winning this one.

  “She doesn’t trust me.” During the years I’d worked with Cujo, I’d deliberately stayed out of Chantal’s way. As far as she knew, I was one of her dad’s weird younger friends who conveniently disappeared once she showed up. The guy her father called in on unusual cases. She’d been a tiny thing when I first met her. These days, she was fully grown, quick-witted, and as formidable as her father.

  “Now you get to tell her why her instincts about you are right,” Cujo drawled, implying a whole lot.

  “I never wanted any of this. These mistakes are exactly why I’ve kept you in the dark.”

  “She could have died!” he snapped, but all that anger couldn’t hide the watery glisten in his eyes. “Just… just talk to her, will you? Do that for me.”

  Ugly guilt knotted up my guts. It was too late to save Cujo and his family. They were in too deep and probably had been since Thoth used Cujo to pressure me into killing him. Osiris would continue to use Cujo and his family as a stick to beat me with. The only way out was for me to ready them for what was coming.

  I caught Cat’s eye but couldn’t read her face. That stoic indifference screamed that she knew I’d run. Having her think the worst made my insides want to curl up.

  “Okay,” I said. I owed it to Cujo.

  Confusion muddied Chantal’s face as she looked up and saw me enter the front room. At somewhere around twenty years old, she had her father’s dark, assessing eyes and a knack for accurately reading people in a single glance. She looked at me, startled, but that surprise morphed into suspicion in less than a second. Why was her dad’s weird friend here? She checked the door, probably wondering whether to call him in.

  “Cu—Nick sent me in here…”

  Tears had streaked her make-up down her cheeks. I was certain the shriveled chunks caught in her short dark hair were bits of kurvord, courtesy of Cat. She chewed on her lip and hugged her legs tighter, but she had me locked in her sights. “Who are you?”

  She didn’t mean, You’re a stranger, what are
you doing here? She meant, Now things are beginning to slot into place and there’s a reason I don’t like you.

  I gave her the talk, the same one I’d given a handful of people over the years about the gods and how they, and their power, scattered after the sundering. I told her about the underworld, eternal souls, and the whole other world outside of this one populated by creatures, demons, and magic. She took it well.

  “I’m gonna be sick.” She sprang off the couch, and I heard her shoes hammer up the stairs and a door slam.

  Cat poked her head into the room.

  “Give her a minute,” I said. Hunched over in a chair, I bowed forward and dragged my hands down my face to reset my expression and my thoughts. I’d just changed Chantal’s life. There was no going back to not knowing. That ignorance was gone. She’d forever hate me for it, but she wouldn’t be alone in that thought.

  “And you?” Cat asked.

  “Me, what?” I lifted my head and blinked fast, clearing the dregs of exhaustion.

  Cat sat on the edge of the nearby table. “How are you?”

  I frowned at her, wanting to deny anything was wrong but also knowing I was coming apart at the seams and wondering if she saw that too.

  “This has nothing to do with me,” I denied and then winced at the echo of Osiris in those words and the lie behind them. It had everything to do with me. Kurvords wouldn’t just attack Cujo and his family. There had to be a connection, and I was the huge neon arrow sign proclaiming: Ancient Asshole Right Here.

  “We need to talk,” Cat said in her usual dead-flat, no-bullshit tone. She’d gone off in search of Bastet, her queen, and chased the leads right back to me. Meanwhile, I’d taken a trip to Egypt, helped free Seth, and possibly set into motion an impending war. Not to mention the epic revelation that I was a lie. We had a lot of catching up to do.

  “Yeah… we do.”

  “Not here.”

  I nodded. “There’s a reason the kurvords are attacking. We need to find out what that reason is.”

  Steps sounded on the stairs and a few moments later the door opened and Chantal reappeared. She pressed her pale lips together and sucked in a deep breath, but held it instead of speaking whatever was on her mind. Her eyes darted between Cat and me. “I saw them in my dreams first,” she blurted.

  “Go on…” I coaxed, noting Cat’s stillness in the corner of my eye.

  Chantal sighed and brushed her hair back with a trembling hand. “I think it’s going to get much worse.”

  Chapter 6

  “When did the dreams start?” I asked Chantal. She had perched herself on the couch and started chewing on her nails, a habit Cujo had tried to stop back when the girl was half my height.

  “Maybe… three weeks ago. I didn’t think anything of it, but then every night, it was the same thing over and over…” Her gaze softened when it landed on her father, but whenever it roamed back to me, her eyes hardened and she pulled back, instincts doing their job.

  “Tell me,” I urged.

  Chantal checked Cujo. He had wheeled himself to the window—his favorite spot. He nodded for her to continue and added, “Ace is an ass, but he’s the only one who can help in these situations. You can trust him.”

  I resisted touching the slave cuff hidden beneath my shirt. I wasn’t sure I could trust myself, but we didn’t have a choice. I was the best chance we had against whatever had gotten inside Chantal’s head.

  Cat left the room and headed upstairs, probably to find the best place to observe the street and watch for approaching kurvords.

  Chantal clasped her hands together in one firm fist and rested it in her lap. She’d showered off all the dirt and blood and dressed in loose sweat pants and a black t-shirt, reminding me how fragile she was beneath all the young adult sass.

  “It’s all a mess of images. They don’t make any sense, not really. It’s kinda silly…” She chuckled and waited for us to laugh along. Neither Cujo nor I did. What she hadn’t yet realized, but probably would in the next few days, was that the silly dreams were likely real, and they had teeth.

  We waited, giving her time to collect her thoughts. Outside, rain pattered against the window, darkening the room.

  “There’s a tower in a desert,” she began, quietly. “It goes on forever.”

  “What does? The tower or the desert?”

  She blinked at me. “Both. They don’t have an end. The tower is made of black glass. I keep trying to see through it, but all I see is me and I’m… I’m different. There’s something wrong with me. It’s not me looking back. But before I can figure out what it is, the tower moves. It’s like… like it’s alive, and the sand is too. They don’t just move, they breathe, and somehow I have to get away from them. So I run.” She hugged her arms around her body. “I run and these creatures come after me. It starts with those kurvord things, but they’re slow. I leave them behind. Then the snakes come. There are so many… and things that look like dragons but their heads are all weird, like bird heads… and snakes.” Her voice wavered. “There are a lot of snakes…” She wrung her hands together. “The sand tries to swallow me, and the glass tower… it turns into smoke that burns. That and the sand try pulling me under, and when they do, I’m drowning, but I’m not alone. There are lights, so many lights. At first I think I’m seeing the city from the top of the Empire State Building—Mom took me up there a few years back—but then the lights move, and the sand and smoke covers them until there’s nothing left.”

  Smoke that burns. Sand and smoke. Lights—souls. Her nightmares sounded a lot like my home.

  I didn’t look at Cujo, but he’d be thinking of the funnel of embers and ashes he’d seen pour into my apartment and the smoke I’d stepped out of. The thing I was and how it corresponded with his daughter’s account.

  “Is the sand red?” I asked, already knowing the answer.

  Chantal blinked, surprised. “Yes.”

  Had Chantal already been part of my world when she started dreaming about red sand, burning smoke, and the kurvords, maybe I could have written it off as coincidence. But to have those dreams thrust upon her when, as of an hour ago, she’d had no idea such things existed? That wasn’t a coincidence. Something was screwing with her.

  “You said the dreams started a few weeks ago. Did anything unusual happen? Anything that might have triggered them?”

  She shook her head, the tips of her dark hair slipping over her shoulders. “Nothing. They started around Labor Day weekend, I guess.”

  Around that time, I’d broken free of the sarcophagus and showed up on Cujo’s doorstep demanding he help put a slave cuff on my wrist. Was that a coincidence or had my imminent breakdown triggered Chantal’s dreams? If so, how and why? Where was the connection?

  “Were you in New York when the dreams started?” I asked.

  “No, at home with Mom.”

  Chantal lived with her mother a few hours’ drive south west of the city. The fact she hadn’t been in the city or close to me when her dreams began implied there wasn’t a connection, but the content of the dreams was too familiar to be a fluke.

  “We need to take you home to your mom. There might be something there that’ll explain the dreams and the kurvords.” And it got her out of the city, where there were fewer bystanders liable to take pictures of ancient Egyptian beasts rampaging through the streets. Fewer temptations.

  I glanced at Cujo for his okay and received a tight nod.

  “Gather your things,” he told his daughter. “We’ll leave in an hour.”

  Chantal left the room, and a few moments later, I heard her voice mingle with Cat’s Boston twang upstairs.

  The silence downstairs dragged on.

  “I’m not pissed at you…” Cujo finally said. “Well, that ain’t true. I am. But it’s more that what happened scared the shit out of me.”

  “I get it.”

  “Do you?”

  I got to my feet, needing to move before Cujo’s glare burned right through me. “Beli
eve it or not, I care what happens to you and her.”

  “Where were you?” he quietly asked.

  “Osiris.”

  Cujo’s eyes widened, and inside, he’d be berating himself. He knew I couldn’t defy the god. He’d think I’d had no choice but to answer Osiris’s call, but he’d be wrong. I’d had a choice, and I’d chosen to leave him. A better man would have told him right there and then that I’d left, but I let him think Osiris had summoned me. He had enough emotional shit to deal with without me adding to the pile.

  I rubbed at the cuff on my arm and leaned against the table. “He asked me to find a boy.” I watched my old friend’s face for a sign he knew about the boy before I came right out and asked him, but nothing showed. “I reckon it’s the kid from the prophecy. Ozzy said you had a lead?”

  Cujo started. “Osiris, the God of Life, expressly said my name?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, shit. That’s why I can’t sleep at night. The bastard knows me now.”

  “He threatened me like we always knew he would.”

  Cujo groaned. “Do it or we die?” I nodded. “Well, shit,” he repeated. “That ancient relic of a bastard.”

  The threat on Cujo’s life had been coming for a long time. I should have left months ago, years maybe, but I hadn’t. These were the consequences. I clenched my hand into a fist and squeezed until my knuckles ached. I would deal with Osiris. “I have to find the kid before anyone else does. Do you know what lead he’s talking about?”

  Cujo’s grizzled face tightened into a scowl. “Might do.” He wheeled out of the room, down the hall, and back into the kitchen. He riffled through a bunch of papers and yanked out a slip of paper from the pile. “Here. Some disturbances near Allentown. I’ve been looking into them since I came back from Chantal’s mom’s place a few weeks back. Saw some weird shit on the local news. Our kind of weird shit. Wild animal attacks, strange sightings, people going missing, freakish weather.”

  The print out listed locations, dates, and a brief description of the incidents just as he’d listed them. Definitely our kind of weird shit, as Shu would have said.