The Mother of All raised her hand, her fingers covering her mouth. “Oh, my dear, you are an amusing creature,” she said, following up with another achingly beautiful laugh. “Tell me, Katarina Dubois—as the most powerful being in your universe, why do you think it should be allowed to continue on?”
My lips parted, and I sucked in a breath to answer, but I found that I didn’t really know what to say. Which was why I was pretty damn grateful when the Mother of All raised her glittering hand, telling me to stop before I’d even started.
“You must understand,” she said, “from our perspective, your universe is completely out of control, and it only seems to be getting worse. Ma’at has been left out of balance for far too long. If we allow your universe, a festering wound in the web of all that is, to continue on its current path, it will, in time, infect this universe, the hub of all that is. And through this universe, all other universes will be infected.” She fell quiet for a moment, letting that sink in. “You, Katarina Dubois, are here to help us decide whether or not your universe can be saved . . . and whether or not it is even worthwhile to try. Is there a way for your universe to course correct, returning stability to Ma’at, or will it continue to spiral out of control, no matter what?”
Numbly, I shook my head. How was I supposed to know that? I’d done what I could to bring balance back to my universe, but despite my best efforts, the song of Ma’at hadn’t been doing so hot lately. Much as I hated to admit it, the Netjers kind of had a point. My universe was out of control.
“So, please, tell me,” the Mother of All continued, “how do you, the most powerful being in your universe, plan to fix it?” All humor from her giggle fit earlier was gone, and the intensity sparkling in her gemstone eyes froze any and all wise-ass retorts on my tongue.
I was left with nothing but the honest truth. “I don’t know,” I said. I considered telling her that even though I didn’t know how to save my universe, I knew someone who could—Isfet—but despite being weakened and weary, some deep-rooted instinct told me to keep my mouth shut about her.
“I see,” the Mother of All said. “Thank you for your honesty, my dear. Is there anything else you would like to tell us before we adjourn to discuss the matter privately?”
I pressed my lips together and shook my head.
“Very well,” she said. “Please return to your seat.”
I did, eagerly. I was surprised to find a tall glass bottle of fancy spring water on the table in front of my seat. Anapa must have slipped out at some point during the hours-long questioning and retrieved it from my universe. I hoped he’d brought some food while he was at it.
“Thank you,” I mouthed to him, reaching for the bottle. I was thirsty to the point of it being nearly all I could think about.
The Netjer to the right of the Mother of All stood. “This concludes the interrogation portion of the trial. Please—”
“Actually,” the Mother of All said, her voice quieter than the Netjer’s but its potency drowning out the Netjer’s voice.
The Netjer’s mouth hung open comically for a moment before she snapped it shut.
“There is one other I would like to hear from regarding this matter,” the Mother of All said. Her intense stare was focused on me, but it shifted slightly to my right. To Nik.
“Come forward,” she said, and her next word nearly stopped my heart. “Re.”
Chapter Thirteen
I forgot all about my thirst and the bottle of water on the table. I turned my head to look at the man sitting beside me so slowly that I could feel the individual muscles and tendons in my neck working. My lips parted, but I couldn’t come up with any words to say. I was too stunned.
The corners of his mouth lifted into a faint, hesitant smile that I thought was an attempt at an apology, and I watched, horrified, as the pale blue bled out of his irises, giving way to a moonstone iridescence. His tattoos faded away, the piercings in his lips and eyebrow vanished, and his facial features elongated a little but didn’t change all that much. He still looked eerily similar to Nik. Similar but off—how Nik might look if he were a Netjer—making this man’s resemblance to the man I was bonded to haunting.
My mind was in a state of shock, my thoughts stumbling around, bumping into one another, trying to make sense of everything. Failing to make sense of anything.
Nik was Re. Not Re possessing Nik. Nik the man—being—wasn’t Nik at all. At least, not my Nik. Did that mean that my Nik—the real Nik—was still back in my universe? Did that mean the man I’d been around for the past gods-knew-how-many hours—the man I’d cuddled with and confided in—had been Re all along?
Puzzle pieces started to fall into place, bringing things I’d dismissed as unimportant to light. Nik’s behavior had been strange ever since entering this universe. Nik, the real Nik, was prone to moments of unexpected oddness, but his recent behavior went way beyond the norm. I’d chalked it up to the weird situation, but as it turned out, the cause was way more extreme than that—he wasn’t acting like Nik because he wasn’t Nik at all.
And then there was the headache; I’d thought it was my body reacting to severe hunger and dehydration, but I now recognized the pain in my skull as an early symptom of bonding withdrawals. Because Nik wasn’t here at all—he never had been—and I had no soul-deep connection to the being impersonating him. To Re.
Fear sprouted in my chest. The need to get back to my universe was more urgent than ever. If I remained here for too long, the withdrawals would kill me. And back home, they would kill Nik—the real Nik—too.
But why would Re do this? Why would he pretend to be Nik for so long? Why hadn’t he revealed who he really was as soon as we arrived in this universe? That was the whole point of the farce, after all—he’d been pretending to be Nik back in Rome just to get me here, right?
I felt a spike of white-hot anger and clenched my jaw, my fingers digging into my thighs painfully.
Was it a game for him? Had he enjoyed toying with me?
Re stood and lifted his hand like he was going to touch my shoulder. Another attempted apology.
I flinched away. The danger posed by this place was more palpable than ever . . . because of him.
For a moment, he stood there, eyes locked with mine, not touching me and not pulling away.
My stare was a challenge. Touch me. I dare you. I’ll rip your face off.
Re sighed and lowered his hand. “I wish you hadn’t told me,” he whispered so quietly I almost couldn’t hear what he said. He looked at me for a moment longer, then made his way around the table to stand before the High Council just as I had done. He clasped his hands behind his back, squared his shoulders, and held his head high.
My entire body went cold as I processed his words. He knew. About Isfet and my half-formed plan to get home to release her . . . about everything. Because I’d told him. Because he’d tricked me into thinking he was the one person I truly trusted. It had been a huge relief to get everything off my chest. But it had been a mistake—an unwitting one, but a mistake nonetheless—and I had a dreadful feeling that that moment of relief was about to be quickly overshadowed by an eternity of regret.
I glared at the back of his head, wishing my anger alone could sear a hole through his skull and boil his brain. Silently, I willed him to keep his mouth shut.
“You have spent some time with Katarina Dubois disguised as one she trusts,” the Mother of All said.
As she spoke, my glare shifted to her. She was the one behind this. She’d set the whole thing up. The Netjers on the High Council seemed just as shocked as I was about the Nik-is-Re revelation. Was it a power play? Was I just here as a pawn the Mother of All was using to make a point to the High Council—that she was better than them?
“Tell us, Re,” the Mother of All said, “to the best of your knowledge, has Katarina Dubois been forthright and honest with us?”
For seconds—eons—Re remained immobile and silent. Until finally, he nodded. “So far as I know,
everything she said was the truth.” He answered carefully, seeming to dance cleverly around the question.
Not cleverly enough.
“But was it the whole truth?” the Mother of All asked.
I held my breath and crossed the first two fingers of both hands. Re hadn’t exactly been forthcoming in his answer to her first question. Maybe he wasn’t a fully cooperative participant in this charade. Maybe he would withhold some of what I’d shared with him. He hadn’t really tried that hard to get any information out of me. If anything, he’d been cold and distant, almost like he’d wanted to push me away. Almost like he’d wanted me to keep my mouth shut.
And I’d gone and blabbed everything to him anyway. Gods, I was an idiot.
“No,” Re finally said, and my heart plummeted. “She did not tell you everything.”
I closed my eyes, chin trembling. “Shut up. Shut up. Shut up,” I mouthed, repeating the phrase over and over and over again.
“Katarina Dubois has been in contact with Isfet,” Re said.
Swallowing roughly, I opened my eyes.
The High Council exploded in a chorus of gasps and whispers. But their reaction was nothing compared to that of the Mother of All. She bristled, those diamond facets in her skin glinting as they shifted sharply, her glare moving from Re to me. Apparently, she really didn’t like Isfet.
I shrank back in my chair, repulsed by her palpable rage, sinking down a few inches.
It took the Mother of All a few seconds to calm herself. When she was finally able to speak again, she flattened her palms on the arms of her throne and stood. “I had such high hopes for you,” she said to me. “What a disappointment.”
I was overcome by a whirlwind of emotions, and it was a struggle to stop them from overtaking me. I was still outraged at Re for duping me—and at Anapa, too, because he’d been in on it. I was embarrassed and ashamed that I hadn’t seen through the ruse, that I hadn’t been able to tell the difference between this imposter and the man whose soul was bound to mine. I was lonely and frightened, all of these alien faces staring at me, these strangers hearing my story and deciding my fate. And now, seeing the disgust and what could only be called hatred in the Mother of All’s amethyst eyes, I drowned in a tidal wave of dread. My stomach turned to lead, my mouth to cotton.
What would happen to me now? Would I be sent home? Or would I be held here until the bonding withdrawals killed me?
More importantly, what would happen to my universe? Nothing good, that much was certain.
Desperation flooded me. I couldn’t just leave things like this. I had to try to make it better. I had to try . . .
Trembling with an influx of adrenaline, I stood, licked my lips, and cleared my throat. “Please,” I said, voice steadier than I felt. “I didn’t mean to—”
“Enough!” the Mother of All roared.
I froze, stunned by the hurricane of alien energy coming off of her in wave after wave. Even if I’d had access to my powers here, I wouldn’t have been a match for her. Not even close.
“Get out of my sight,” she said and flung out one glittering hand.
“No, wait, I—”
There was a flash of brilliant blue light, and then the courtroom was gone and I was sitting on my butt on the floor of my bedroom. Of my prison cell.
And for the first time since coming to this universe, I was truly alone.
Chapter Fourteen
“Damn it!” I shouted, scrambling to my feet and lunging at the empty wall where a door should have been. I slammed my fist against the wall, fully expecting the satisfaction of knuckles breaking through drywall. I was sorely disappointed.
When my knuckles hit the wall, the impact sent out the faintest ripple along the surface, and the force of the impact reverberated back through my hand, grinding my newly healed bones together painfully. Because the wall was made of Essence, like every other damned thing in this hellhole. I wasn’t really home. I was a prisoner, and my universe was likely doomed.
Fuming, I marched over to the standing mirror. If I couldn’t tear down a wall, at least I could break something big. I gripped either side of the mirror and flung it across the room, howling in anger.
The mirror crashed into the armoire with the sound of splintering wood, then fell onto the floor, glass-side down. The stupid fake mirror didn’t even have the decency to shatter, probably because it was made of Essence too. It was a construct, whatever that meant. It wasn’t real.
I glared at the mirror, offended by its very existence. And then something on the face of the armoire caught my attention. There was a very distinctive dent in the right door, and splinters of wood interlocked along the break like tiny, jagged teeth.
I moved closer, intrigued as faint little waves cascaded across the broken door, smoothing the faux wood out until the break was gone. The door of the armoire appeared to be undamaged once again. But it had been damaged. Maybe it wasn’t real wood, merely Essence made to act like real wood, but it had been damaged.
I frowned, brows knitting together. So why hadn’t the mirror broken, too?
Hands on my hips, I looked down at the mirror. The back of the frame wasn’t the original ashy oak as it had been when Anapa first sent me into my artfully disguised prison cell; it was an opaque, almost crystalline material. This mirror looked exactly like the real one in my bedroom, which Nik had transformed into At to protect it from ever breaking just moments after I etched Dom’s name into the wooden frame.
I knelt beside the mirror, sliding my fingertips under the edge. The front of the frame was smooth but covered in deep grooves. I could tell just by touching the grooves that they made up letters, and I knew exactly what they spelled out, because I was the one who had carved them.
“What the hell?”
I lifted the mirror by the edge so I could see its face and rested it against the base of the armoire.
“Huh,” I said, sitting back on my heels. I was totally baffled by what I was seeing.
This most definitely wasn’t the same mirror that had been in here earlier. That mirror had been made to look like it was a creation of wood and glass. But this mirror—it was made entirely of At. Genuine At. I could feel it, resonating with the threads of At marbling my soul.
I reached out with my right hand, tracing the grooves spelling out Dom’s name. This wasn’t just a replica of the mirror that was in my bedroom. This was the mirror from my bedroom. It pulsed with potential, the magic I’d imbued it with humming subtly. The charm was still there, even if rendered inert.
Anapa must have brought it here while I was being questioned by the High Council. So, what—he’d gone on a water-and-magical-mirror run? Odd combination. But why bring me the mirror at all? It wasn’t like it would do me any good here. Without my powers to charge it, I couldn’t reach Dom through the mirror. Without my powers, I couldn’t do much of anything.
I touched the right pocket of my leather coat, feeling the outline of the deck of tarot cards stowed within.
He’d brought me the cards, too. Why? Had he brought them because he knew something I didn’t? Had he brought me these things because there was actually a way for me to use them?
Hope surged within my chest, and my gaze slid down to the mirror’s silvery surface. Maybe I wasn’t as powerless as I’d thought.
But Dom didn’t suddenly appear there. That surge of hope wilted and died, crushed by my half-brother’s absence.
But I wasn’t ready to throw in the towel yet. Oh, no. I’d only just begun.
Eyes narrowed and focus razor-sharp, I scooted back a foot or two, making a fairly large space on the carpet between my knees and the mirror. I pulled the deck of cards out of my coat pocket and untied the little string holding the velvet bag shut. I dumped the cards out of my hand and closed my eyes, placing my other hand over the top card.
“Come on . . .” I squeezed my eyes shut, searching for some spark of that familiar, primal energy. “Come on . . .”
Just like with the mir
ror, I could feel the potential for the magic. My sheut reached out, a dowsing rod seeking the energy it needed to make the magic work. I could feel the threads of At and anti-At within my soul coiling up in anticipation.
But there was no answer from the universe—no influx of electric energy. Because I wasn’t in the right universe. So far as my sheut was concerned, the required form of energy didn’t exist in this place. I was too far away.
I blew out a breath, arms drooping to rest on my thighs. My fingertips tapped on the top of the tarot deck, and I stared at the wall behind the armoire, thoughts whirling, like the faux drywall might hold the answers I sought. How could I bridge the gap between this universe and mine? The universes were connected—the Mother of All had told me so herself. And Anapa must have brought me these things—these magical things—for a reason. Which made me think there had to be a way.
An idea struck me all of a sudden. My finger stilled, poised above the cards. Maybe these walls did hold the answer.
I set down the deck of tarot cards and stood, making my way around the mirror and armoire, one hand upraised. I pressed my hand against the wall until my palm was flush with the faintly textured surface.
Nik—or rather Re—had told me that Essence was this universe’s version of At and anti-At, the base substance making up all things here. Maybe my sheut was the source of my original magic—but it was the veins of At and anti-At permanently embedded into my soul that made me so powerful. Those veins allowed me to tap into the most primal forces in my universe, giving me abilities akin to those of a Netjer.
If I could just tap into the Essence like I did the At and anti-At, I thought there was a chance that I could bridge that unbroachable chasm separating me from my universe. Separating me from my power.
I couldn’t sense the Essence like I could the At and anti-At, but I wasn’t about to let that reality stop me from trying. I pulled my hand away from the wall and looked at my palm. The Eye of Horus inked into my skin shimmered, moonstone with onyx striations.
Kat Dubois Chronicles Page 83