I crossed the space between us in the space of a breath. My right hand seized the goddess by the neck and squeezed. The muscles in my arm bulged with the effort. My claws bit into her skin, spilling rivulets of golden god blood down her throat. Wherever her molten blood touched me, it scalded my flesh, but I ignored the damage. It would heal. With any luck, she wouldn’t.
The scent of sizzling meat filled my nostrils, and the distant realization that my hand was cooking as I held her in my grip was strangely irrelevant. As smoke curled from between my fingers, I hefted her into the air. A look of annoyance crossed her features as she tried to jab me in the side with her dagger. I caught her wrist with my free hand, jerking it in a twist that filled my ears with the delightful sound of shattering bone. The goddess shrieked and dropped the knife as fear flashed through her eyes. Finally. It was delicious.
“What have you done?” I said, my voice was so quiet and flat it should have scared me. It didn’t.
“You will release my son, wolf.” She spat and a gob of saliva spattered across my cheek. As it dribbled down my cheek, my face began to bubble and smoke. I ignored it. Pain did not matter. “You do not understand what his imprisonment portends for the future.”
“You killed Sekhmet,” I snarled, ignoring her worries about her son because, quite frankly, I didn’t care. Not even a little. “You will die for that.”
The goddess clucked like I was an insolent guardsman who knew nothing. “Foolish wolf, Sekhmet is a goddess. She can’t die from a mere flesh wound.” She struck me. The movement was too quick for me to even react. One moment she was talking to me, the next I was flying backward, her knee having broken every bone in my ribcage. It hurt, indescribably so.
I hit the sand a few meters away and bounced a couple times as my wolf tried to heal me. The taste of blood filled my mouth as I forced myself onto my hands and knees. Jagged bits of rib bone pulled themselves out of my lungs and other internal organs, slipping back together in a screaming cacophony of agony.
The goddess knelt down beside Sekhmet’s lifeless body and with a flick of her wrist, drove one pale as death hand through my girlfriend’s chest. She rummaged around inside like she was looking for something inside of a particularly full grocery bag before pulling her gore spattered arm free and holding it out to me, palm up. A golden heart beat in the center of her palm.
“See, her heart still beats. As long as it does, well, she can get back up.” The goddess shrugged and reached her free hand into a satchel the color of old, dried blood slung around her hip. I hadn’t even noticed it before, and as she flipped the lid open, a golden jar gleamed within. She removed the jar and placed it on the sand between us. It was covered with hieroglyphics I couldn’t decipher and seemed to glow in the light of the sun with ethereal energy.
“Stop,” I wheezed, trying to crawl toward her, but my arms buckled. I collapsed to the sand and though I tried to will myself forward, but my body was spent. I’d just defeated Apep, the veritable king of darkness a little while ago, had pulled out all the stops to do it. My body had nothing left, which was unfortunate because if it did, I’d tear this woman to pieces and dance on her remains. You know, if I could dance.
“No,” she replied. Her voice was a cross between annoyance and boredom. Then, staring directly into my eyes, she pulled the lid off the jar. Screams of agony filled the air as golden smoke poured from the vessel. Still making eye contact, she dropped Sekhmet’s heart into the shrieking jar and slammed the lid down. A flash of sapphire light exploded from the urn as the goddess’s bloodless, dead lips curled into a devious smile, revealing her bone white teeth.
“Canopic jars are wondrous things.” Her grin widened, sending chills running down my spine as she scooped up the jar and shoved it back into her satchel like it was a Tupperware filled with last night’s leftovers. “They can hold even a god at bay. You know, assuming you’ve torn out said god’s heart and placed it inside.” She nudged Sekhmet’s body with one toe. “It’s almost a pity to waste it like this, but then again, you were actually dumb enough to imprison my son, Horus, during the one moment in all of eternity when he must be free.” She shook her head. “If this was tomorrow, I wouldn’t have even cared… much.”
“I’ll kill you,” I growled, finally strong enough to pull myself to my feet. I took one wobbling step toward her, my jaw clamped together in concentration as the rain beat at my fur, matting it against my body.
“Or you can release my son, and I trade you this.” She jiggled her satchel at me like it wasn’t filled with the heart of my girlfriend. “Sounds good, eh?”
With those words she was just gone. There was no wisp of smoke, no flash of lightning. One moment she was grinning at me like a lunatic. The next she had vanished off the goddamned planet, leaving me standing broken and beaten over the body of my girlfriend.
I trudged toward Sekhmet even though I didn’t know what I hoped to accomplish. I knelt down, clutching her corpse to my body as golden ichor spilled from her wounds. There wasn’t much coming out of her now. Most of her blood had already soaked into the sand around her body. Still, as I held her close to me, the last remaining traces of warmth faded from her body.
Khufu found me like that, still clutching her cold corpse against me. I wasn’t sure how long it had been, but it must have been a while because it’d stopped raining. He put one large mitt of a hand on my shoulder and shook me gently. I turned my eyes toward him. Everything felt bleak, numb, and empty.
“What happened, Thes?” Khufu asked, concern filling his normally jovial voice to near bursting.
“I don’t know,” I replied, chewing on my lips. I was back in human form. I’d reverted and hadn’t even noticed. That’d been happening a lot more lately. Part of me wondered if it was because I was starting to be comfortable with both my inner werewolf and my humanity. The other part of me worried that was true. If it was, it meant I was becoming way too used to being in wolfman form. The last guy who had gotten that familiar with his wolfish nature wound up going insane and living in the woods, chasing down wild deer to eat.
“You don’t know how this happened?” he asked, raising one large, bushy eyebrow at me. “That seems unlikely.”
“A goddess who looked like death came and cut off her head. Then she stole Sekhmet’s heart and put it in a bag before vanishing.” My voice came out in a hoarse whisper.
“Do you know which goddess?” he asked, kneeling down next to me and slowly unwrapping me from around the corpse of Sekhmet. I let him. I knew I shouldn’t have, but I did, though I couldn’t tell you why.
“Whichever one is the mother of Horus. She was pretty pissed her son was captured.” As I said the words, his eyes went as wide as dinner plates.
“You can’t be serious,” he said, swallowing hard enough to make the lump in his throat bob like a fishing lure.
“As serious as a heart attack,” I replied, though I hadn’t been intending to make a joke. I shut my eyes and counted in my head in an effort to keep from screaming. The goddess had been right. Sekhmet would recover from this as unreal as it seemed. I just needed to get all her pieces back in the same place. To do that, I had to release Horus. No big deal. My allies had captured the falcon god. They’d damn well release him too.
“So, Isis has shown herself,” Khufu whispered, and as he said the name, the sky above us crackled and the wind howled. “Did she say anything else?”
“Not really, mostly that we’re dumbasses for imprisoning her idiot son today of all days.” I got slowly to my feet, still drenched in gore and stared at the mummy king. “Now, what’s say you call your best buds and get Horus released.”
“Okay,” Khufu said, brushing himself off even though his metallic armor looked pristine. “Let’s go see if we can talk some sense into them.”
“It’s either that, or I rip them in half and free him anyway,” I growled, and the wolf within me looked up from its place among the tall grasses of my mind and eyed me curiously.
&n
bsp; “Yeah, I figured you were going to say that.” Khufu sighed before bending down and pressing his thumb against Sekhmet’s body. Emerald light flashed from beneath it as gilded fire leapt across her form. Even her head burst into flames, and it was several meters away.
“What are you doing?” I screamed, leaping toward him as he lifted his hand and presented it to me, palm up. A glittering, golden pendant in the shape of a snarling lion sat upon his calloused flesh.
“We can’t very well leave her body lying around in the desert, can we?” He pressed the pendant into my grip. “There are lots of things that would love to find a perfectly good body, especially one fit to hold a god, and let me tell you right now, you wouldn’t like any of them, even if they weren’t inhabiting the body of your girlfriend.”
My fingers closed around the pendant in my hand, and from within it, I felt the faintest spark of life. I swallowed. I would save her or die trying.
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All Wrapped Up: An Urban Fantasy Adventure (Werewolves vs. Mummies Book 2) Page 17