“Locusts,” she wheezed. “Biblical. Plague.”
A few locusts buzzed around the lights, each the size of my hand. A few we could handle, but a plague?
“What are you doing here?” The door behind me bowed against my back and shuddered against its hinges.
“Where you go, I follow. Didn’t have much choice, did I?”
“I called her,” Cujo admitted.
The gritty sound of fracturing glass filled the small room. Shukra parted the blinds. Her lips twisted together. “This is about to get very bad. We have to get Cujo and Chantal away from here.”
Like she cared? But something glimmered in her eyes, something I might not have noticed if I hadn’t been looking for it. Fear, but not for herself.
“Check the back window,” I told Chantal.
She spun and was heading toward the bathroom when the door I was holding back exploded inward, knocking me aside. A tornado of rustling wings flooded into the room. The sound was almost worse—a deafening roar. The locusts whipped and tore at my face, arms, and clothes. They snagged and scratched and burned. Everywhere. I couldn’t see to find Chantal or Cujo, but I could sense Shukra igniting her magical reserves. I didn’t doubt she could burn the swarm out of the air, but she’d take us out with them.
Cuts zipped open on my skin, hundreds of them, and from inside the howling storm, Chantal’s scream pierced the chaos.
Enough!
Shukra would burn them, but I could stop them. I’d controlled countless snakes by highlighting their souls and controlling each one in Duat. A motel outside Allentown wasn’t Duat, but I wasn’t Ace Dante either.
I opened my arms and steadied my stance against the onslaught of tugs, shoves, and razor-sharp cuts slicing at any exposed skin. I’d taken the soul of a killer hours before and the meager souls of the kurvord. That liquid dark stirred within, rising and reaching outward. Skin and bone—the mask I’d built—dissolved, and my humanity faded with it. The tiny glittering locust souls whipped around me in a frenzy of light, but I was the dark, and I had them all.
“Hurzd.”
The word thundered through them, rippling outward. It caught every tiny flickering light in its grip and held them rigid in the air. On and on the word sailed, freezing the swarm in its wake. Hundreds of thousands. Each one twitched and buzzed against my hold, but I had them all in my grasp. So many little souls. They’d add up to make a mighty feast.
“Go,” I told the others, pinpointing each of them by their pulsing light. Cujo and Chantal, their souls as bright as stars, and another that didn’t make any sense. A third soul, not as bright, but not dark either. It should have been as black as sin, black like mine, but it wasn’t.
“Go, go, go…” Shukra ordered, pushing Chantal through the suspended locust bodies and taking Cujo’s chair.
When I could no longer sense them nearby, I tightened my grip on the countless flickering lights. These locusts were nothing, each a speck of a soul, a fragment. Each one was so easily commanded. I could use them. I could send them after Osiris. I could churn up the world in their wake. I could bring more. But Osiris could sweep this wave aside with a click of his fingers. No, not yet. I wasn’t ready. Not ready.
I shifted my awareness, flexing my magical muscles, made sure my grip on each little body held firm, and hissed, “Daquir.”
Embers consumed them all. Their tiny bodies burned with a crackling fizzle. The smell of charred beetles filled the air. Ash fell lazily through the air like snow, inside and outside the motel. Funneling all my power back into Ace Dante, I walked through the ash, stirring clouds in my wake. People stood gawking in the parking lot. Some took pictures. I didn’t care that they were there or that they would upload this everywhere and I’d be seen.
I didn’t care about anything as I climbed onto the Ducati. People were waiting for me, relying on me to help them—Cujo, Chantal—but they meant nothing. They were nothing. They might as well have been ash and dust, the same as those insignificant bugs falling from the sky. I was made for bigger things, for darker things. I was made to consume the world— “Ace.”
The cat shifter stood in front of my bike, blond hair streaked with ash and her bottle-green eyes locked on me, accusing, knowing, assessing. I could rip her soul from her body where she stood, and she couldn’t stop me.
Crack.
Something inside shifted, giving way.
“You still in there?” Cat asked, hands spread at her sides, ready to leap.
Cat.
The mortal shifter woman who’d survived the Twelve Gates alongside me.
I knew her. Fiercely protective. Unerringly ruthless. I cared about what she thought. I cared about her. I blinked and saw her wince. She’d seen the dark in my eyes and a hint of the truth. And she was looking at me as though considering sinking her claws into my chest and yanking out my heart before I could do the same to her soul.
Over the motel parking lot, ash had settled in a gray quilt over every car, tree, and bush and covered the lot deep enough to swallow the shocked people up to their knees. Not sand, as I thought I’d seen. Ash. My ash.
“Get on,” I told Cat.
She tilted her head and considered me, and what had sounded like an order. Then she hopped on the back and closed her arms around my waist.
“You’re still with me?” she asked, her lips close to my ear.
“Yes.”
I couldn’t tell her why I needed her close—that if she hadn’t shown up when she did I might have blasted out of there and never returned, that the look in her eyes as she’d peered into mine had reminded me of the monster I could so easily be.
“Your soul is light,” I said and then started the Ducati’s throaty engine, stopping her from asking questions. Hers wasn’t the only soul that had been redeemed.
I needed to find Shukra.
Chapter 8
Chantal’s mom’s house was a large clapboard colonial that creaked and sighed around me as I wandered down the hallway. It sat on a huge plot, draped in vast, slouching trees that looked older than me.
After a restless night at another motel—this one free of pests—Cujo had arrived on the doorstep of the family home, offering to take his family out for breakfast (with Cat as a discreet bodyguard). Mrs. Cujo Jones had agreed, and so here Shu and I were trespassing, looking for any magic-touched trinkets that could explain Chantal’s dreams and her extreme allure to kurvords and locusts.
The girl, Chuck, and Osiris’s “boy” would have to wait. Chantal’s life came first.
Shukra stepped into the hallway behind me and sucked in a hiss through her teeth. “There’s something here. Tastes like a curse.” She wore snake-skin knee-high boots, black leggings, and a black leather biker jacket with fur lining. It wouldn’t have surprised me if the leather had been parted from the flesh of something ancient and endangered.
I paused and stretched my awareness through the house. Nothing felt out of place, and I didn’t find any touch of magic. “You sure?”
“As sure as you’re the son of a lizard who’s too stupid to recognize who his friends are.”
I turned and bore the full weight of Shukra’s pissed-off presence. “We need to talk.”
She glared daggers back at me. “I’ve said everything I need to say. You’re too much of a stubborn dumbass to listen.”
I opened my mouth to argue but paused. This wasn’t the time or place. I pointed a finger at her instead. “You and me. Later.”
She narrowed her eyes and veered off down the hallway, then jogged up the stairs. “Cujo wanted to launch a rescue, yah know…” she called down. “I told him you could rot for all eternity in whatever hellhole Osiris put you in.”
So much for Cujo telling me he and Shukra had considered launching a rescue attempt. “Have you been spying on Cujo for Osiris too?” I called, following her path up the stairs but leaving enough distance between us should I need to defend myself from a verbal or physical lashing.
Shukra didn�
��t answer right away. “Did you take lessons on how to be a bastard? Or does it come naturally?” My words had hit a nerve. Good.
“How else could Osiris know I care about Cujo and his family enough for him to use them as leverage?” I asked, running my hand along the banister.
Shukra poked her head out from a bedroom doorway. “Maybe you let his name slip while you were banging Isis’s brains out?”
“I didn’t sleep with Isis.” Our bickering wasn’t getting us anywhere. “Was I screwing around with her? Yes, but as a means to an end.”
“Uh-huh. And was that the end of your cock by any chance?” She leaned against the bedroom door frame and crossed her arms.
I met Shu eye to eye and was instantly reminded of the blinding souls I’d witnessed back at the motel, hers included. Even now, a glimpse confirmed it. Her soul was light. She’d pulled off a miracle and didn’t even know it. Somehow, she’d stopped being a condemned demon to become a pure soul, one worthy of its journey through the Twelve Gates and resurrection if she wished it.
Demons couldn’t have bright souls. I wasn’t even sure if she was demon anymore. Was she… human?
I should tell her.
She held out her hand and my heart turned to lead. On top of her palm was a box etched with all manner of markings and hieroglyphs. Ammit’s box. My box. The box they’d found me with the day I washed up on the banks of the River of Souls. The box I’d discovered right after witnessing Ammit’s death. The box I’d given to Mafdet to try to open.
Now, the lid was open.
“Has the same symbol as those scrolls you freaked out over in Egypt,” Shukra said, missing nothing. “The snake-headed jackal.”
My name. Apophis.
I blinked at the box.
How had it gotten here? Mafdet was missing. Her store had been trashed. And here was the box in the bedroom of my friend’s daughter.
Shukra jolted the box toward me and laughed as I jumped back. She clicked the lid closed and said with a shrug, “Whatever power it held is long gone. There’s some residue left, which is what I was picking up. It’s just a pretty little box.”
The box was a relic from another world, another time, another me. I reached out and gingerly picked it up, expecting it to bite, but felt nothing. Less than nothing. The box occupied a power-hole deliberately designed to keep me from looking too closely. “If Chantal opened this, that might explain her dreams and why the kurvords are drawn to her. They’re old magic like… this.”
“Are you going to tell me why this symbol has you pissing your pants?”
Tell Shukra she was bound to the biggest Egyptian monster in the entire history of monsters? That wasn’t a conversation for here in Cujo’s house. “Do you care about Cujo?” I asked to throw her off the scent.
Shukra’s lips parted, and her face lost all its wicked humor. She blinked as though I’d slapped her. She knew I’d only ask that if I thought it was possible. “W-what? You know… you know I’m not capable of that. Stop being a dick and distracting me with nonsense. Tell me everything you know about this box or I’ll set your Ducati on fire. Don’t think I won’t.”
She did care. Because her soul was light, it meant she was capable of genuine friendship and more. I never thought I’d see the day when Shukra was good.
And Shukra was good.
The status quo was in flux.
Why did I feel as though the card castle that was my life was one more card away from collapsing?
“Yes,” I said. “I’ll tell you everything.”
Allentown had a few olde time bars left, the type getting torn down or rebranded as coffee houses. We found one tucked down one of the oldest streets, complete with clapboard cladding on the outside and timber floors on the inside. I sat with Shu at a table, Apophis’s box between us. The bar only had a few windows at the front, so despite it being midday, the back was cloaked in shadows.
“All right.” I breathed in, checked Shukra’s slightly bored expression, and said, “I’m Apophis.”
She blinked. Her expression shifted, but not toward a smirk or to hint at a laugh. She clicked her teeth together and leaned back in the booth. Seconds passed, maybe a minute. The bartender wiped his bar top, and a few midday drinkers mumbled among themselves. I wondered if Shukra would say anything at all or just leave me hanging forever. Then she finally looked at me and nodded. “That makes a disturbing amount of sense.”
“And I was the one who released Seth.”
She eye-rolled and sighed. “Anything else you’d like to share?”
I couldn’t tell her about her soul, not yet. Soon, in a minute, I would. “Osiris tried to bury me in a sarcophagus. He compelled me to lie inside and close the lid. It took me weeks to break his compulsion and escape, but once I did… I believed everything Isis and Seth had told me. I am Apophis. I don’t have the memories, but they’re there, and it won’t be long before it all comes back. I can… Sometimes I think differently, like I’m looking through another person’s eyes. I hid the truth of who I am in this body, and instead of slumbering like the other gods, I watched and learned how to live in the new world.”
“That’s… that’s clever. Are you sure it’s your doing?” Her lips quirked at the corner.
I told her how Ammit had feared me—the nameless boy she’d found by the river.
“Osiris believes it. He’s always known or suspected… Isis figured it out on her own.” I was on my fifth or sixth glass of vodka, and the alcohol hadn’t even touched the chilling cold seeping through my veins. I poured another shot from the bottle. “The Twelve Gates tried to show me. I walked right out of there virtually unscathed because that terrible place is mine. I brought Anubis to heel. I control the beasts of the underworld. Snakes, scorpions, they all answer to me. Souls fear me.”
And they weren’t the only ones. Shukra hid it well, but an uncertain waver of reverence flickered in her eyes.
“Osiris can’t kill me because if he sends me home, I’ll be on my ground, in my territory, with an army of souls I could potentially use as weapons. He cursed me to keep me away from Duat, my seat of power, and the truth. And it worked. All I knew was Ace Dante’s life—until Isis started meddling.”
“But if you’re… Apophis.” She whispered the name, almost afraid to have it touch her lips. “How can Osiris compel you?”
“Because, until now, I was just Ace Dante. But I’m changing, and his hold on me is slipping. The curse that binds you and me together, making me susceptible to his compulsions, is coming undone.” So am I, I added silently.
Shukra lowered her gaze to the box. “Our curse is breaking down?”
“Yes.” In all the centuries we’d spent stuck with each other, never straying too far, always trying to undermine the other, it hadn’t occurred to me that it all would end the second Osiris’s curse broke. She would no longer be a pain in my ass, and I’d no longer be the thorn in her side. Shukra would be free of me and I of her.
Unease stirred the alcohol sitting in my gut. I wasn’t sure how I felt about that and pushed it aside for later study.
“All this time I’ve been bound to the biggest badass in the entire Egyptian pantheon,” she murmured, “and I thought you were just an alcoholic PI.”
She chuckled, and so did I, but it didn’t last. Our laughter died almost as quickly as my smile. I tapped the slave cuff on my wrist. “This… is necessary. To escape that sarcophagus, I needed to believe, and I did, but it weakened the part of me that thinks I’m Ace Dante. Earlier, when I burned all those locusts, I almost lost myself to the temptation. I created the Nameless One as a mask to hide behind. But the mask is breaking, Shukra. This man I am, he’s an illusion. Inside, I’m a thousand times worse than Ace Dante on a bad day. I’m all that’s wrong with the worlds. Apophis was never worshipped. He was feared. He’s not so much a god as a…” Monster. I couldn’t say it, but Shukra heard it anyway. “I’m the creature Amun Ra defeated every night so the sun might rise again and bring with it
the Light. Like Ra, I’ve been in hiding. But unlike Ra, I’m starting to wake up.” What if the apocalypse wasn’t an event, but a man?
I swallowed more vodka, but it wasn’t enough. The bottle wouldn’t be enough. Ten bottles. To see the truth, to hear it spill from my lips and see the reflection of dread in Shukra’s eyes… it all became startlingly real. When it was just me, with the truth inside my head and nobody else’s, I could pretend I’d made all this shit up. And Isis was insane, so I could write her off just as easily. But now Shukra knew, and the way she looked at the box and me, putting all the pieces of our past together… the power I shouldn’t have and my control over spellwords. This was real. I was Apophis. And I’d been Apophis for thousands of years. Ace Dante didn’t stand a chance against a god’s true psyche.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered, and the weight of emotion in those words almost broke me open. Shukra was sorry for me. Panic chipped at my nerves. It wasn’t over yet. I was still Ace Dante.
“Me too.” I picked up the box and turned it over in my hands. “I need to make a choice and soon. Seth is coming. Osiris’s reign is over. Isis is against him. The pantheon is scattered and weak. I can’t avoid my part. To survive, I have to be Apophis.” I eyed the snake-headed jackal—my name.
“You can’t fight your nature. You are what you are.”
Oh, she was wrong about that.
“But we can change.” I smiled at the demon sorceress sitting opposite me. Her dark eyes had seen countless horrors. She’d instigated most. “It’s ironic, you and me sitting here. For so long, I believed I was the good guy and you were the epitome of everything I fought against. Now…?” She tilted her head, scrutinizing me, probably trying to see where I was going with this. “Your soul is light,” I told her softly, carefully, like handling glass. “I saw it back at the motel when you helped Cujo and Chantal. It’s still grubby around the edges, but you’re good, Shu. You’re all good.”
I wasn’t sure how she’d react. I could rely on her to be Shukra and come at everything like she meant to destroy it or assimilate it, but this was different. I could only imagine it was like telling a dying man he’d been cured or freeing someone just before they climbed up the gallows steps.
Serpent's Game (The Soul Eater Book 5) Page 6