Organ Grind (The Lazarus Codex Book 2)

by E. A. Copen

  “Let me save you the trouble,” Seth said, sliding around the desk. “Seth Emits isn’t my real name. I am Imseti, son of Horus.” He placed a hand on his chest and made a bow.

  “Son of…” Beth put a hand over her mouth. “No way.”

  “Way. Now get behind me.” I positioned myself between Imseti and Beth, wishing I still had my staff. My options would be limited without it. “Osric, feel free to pull some shadow daggers out of your ass any time now.”

  Imseti stopped his advance and grinned. “Oh, that’s interesting. You think I’m going to kill you?”

  “Not if we kill you first.”

  I balanced on my toes, prepared to throw myself at the god in front of me if he tried anything. If I could just get close enough, I could grab his soul, and we could make our escape.

  He held his hands out in a non-threatening gesture, palms up as if he expected someone to place their hands in his. I waited for a weapon to appear, but nothing materialized. At least, nothing that I could see.

  I blinked, and in the space of that time, my vision grew cloudy. A new smell permeated the room, the sterile scent of medical equipment. Tendrils of cold wrapped around my ankles, creeping under my clothes to caress my skin. Breath tickled the back of my neck, and I whirled around to face whoever was behind me, ready for a fight.

  Only to find no one was there. The dim, sandstone cave was gone. I stood just inside a bright hospital room with a single bed. The blinds had been pulled up on the window, allowing the sun to provide most of the light. Outside, the sky was bright blue without a single cloud. The only sound in the room was the incessant beeping of a heart rate monitor as it tracked the patient’s pulse as a white line on a black screen.

  No.

  I didn’t need to look at the bed to know who was in it. I’d been here before, to this room, on this day and I knew what was coming. That didn’t make it any easier.

  My head moved against my will, my body caught in the replay cycle of memory. Breath hitched in my chest when the steady beeping picked up speed. The tiny body, hidden mostly under layers of blankets and sheets, jerked once and the monitor flatlined. The sound was less shrill than it always was on television, a simple low beep that held on a single note, marking the passing of the body to which it was attached.

  My feet felt heavy as they moved over the floor, one hand extended, reaching for the sheet covering her face. In reality, when Lydia’s pulse stopped, nurses pushed past me to work the code, as they called it. I was confined to the rear of the room where I couldn’t see them rip open her hospital gown to start chest compressions or put the plastic mask over her face to force oxygen into her little lungs.

  In the memory, no one came. I reached her bedside after what felt like minutes and paused. Did I really want to see her like this again? I’d only had a glimpse all those years ago before they pulled the sheet over her head and pronounced her dead at four thirty-six in the afternoon on a Sunday, and that glimpse had haunted my nightmares sever since. But I couldn’t stop my hands from reaching for the sheet covering her face.

  Something beat against the back of my mind, a voice that sounded suspiciously like my own, screaming for me to come back. This isn’t real. That isn’t how it happened. She’s not here. I knew that, and still, I couldn’t stop myself.

  With one swift move, I tugged the sheet away from Lydia’s head and found her face twisted in pain. Her eyes were rolled back in her head, bulging noticeably. Red-tinged drool leaked from the corner of her mouth from where she’d bitten her tongue as part of her last-ditch effort to draw one more breath. Her once vibrant, sun-kissed skin was ashen now, and her brown curls stuck to her sweat-dampened forehead.

  Dead. Lydia was dead again.

  Ice water pumped through my veins at the realization and my hands began to shake. No. She couldn’t be. I was almost there. I almost had answers! The doctors had told me it looked like she was making a recovery! This couldn’t be real.

  Lydia’s eyes rolled down looking cloudy. “Why?” she asked me. “Why didn’t you save me, Laz?”

  “I tried.” I blinked tears away and grabbed for her hands. They felt like frozen wax in mine. “I did everything I knew to do, Lydia.”

  But she didn’t listen. “You promised you’d save me. You could’ve given me the Kiss of Life.”

  The Kiss of Life. I’d known of it then, even considered using it in the few moments the nurses and doctors gave me alone with her body. Pouring my life into her body, sacrificing years of my own to give her a few more would’ve been a fair trade. Lydia was only eleven. She’d never had her first kiss, driven her first car, graduated from high school. She had no future in death, but I could’ve saved her.

  Only I didn’t. Not in time.

  The Kiss of Life was a lot of magic for a young necromancer to wield, and Pony had warned me against using the spell and upsetting the natural order of things. Some people were supposed to die because it was all part of some big plan. Balance held the magical world together, and if I upset that balance to save Lydia, even more people would die.

  More than that, I was afraid. What if I gave her too much of my life and damaged her? What if I damaged me? Did she even want me to save her? Fear paralyzed me until guilt haunted me, and by the time I tried to save her, it was already too late. Her soul had passed beyond where I could reach as a necromancer. I wondered: had I been the Pale Horseman when Lydia died, would I have been able to do more?

  None of that came out of my mouth as Lydia’s corpse begged for an answer. My words came out a strained whisper. “I’m sorry. I was afraid. I didn’t know.”

  “It’s your fault I’m dead.” Her bottom lip quivered. “Do you hear me? It’s your fault!” She screamed it the second time, sitting up.

  I stumbled backward into another line of corpses. The broken body of Captain Ross stood behind me. He lifted a twisted finger to point at me. “Your fault.”

  “No.” I shook my head. “I’m not responsible for you.”

  “Why didn’t you just go up to your room?” I whirled around to face Lexi. She staggered toward me from the shadows beyond Lydia’s hospital bed, her entire chest cavity caved in. With her jaw broken and half her face smashed flat, there was no way she’d actually spoken those words, but I’d heard them just the same.

  “You should’ve told us what was out there,” said one of the cops the shadowy gods had torn apart. He was pulling the upper half of his torso along the floor, dragging his insides behind him.

  “I didn’t know!” I turned again, scanning the line of cadavers drawing closer. They were crammed into the room shoulder to shoulder, blocking every avenue of escape. Not that I could see any escape. The hospital room had vanished, leaving me in a tiny circle of shrinking light. “I didn’t kill you!” I screamed at all of them.

  And I hadn’t, but I’d let them all die, and that was practically the same thing.

  The circle of corpses closed on me, shouting their accusations all at once. With no escape, all I could do was shrink down, cover my head, and wait for them to tear me apart.

  Chapter Eighteen

  I was vaguely aware of shadows moving over me and the wet sound of someone slicing into meat, but my vision remained black. My head ached with the need to get five more minutes of sleep. And I could if only whoever was making that damn racket would shut the hell up.

  “Lazarus!” a male voice choked out. It sounded familiar, but I couldn’t place it.

  And since when did I let men stay over?

  “Goddammit, Lazarus, open your damn eyes or so help me I’ll let these things eat you!”

  Eat me? My eyes snapped open just in time to see a black shape dart over me. Warm, thick fluid sprayed my face. I touched a tentative finger to it and pulled my hand away, watching a large, green droplets race down my arm. Blood, but it wasn’t mine. My blood wasn’t green.

  I sat up.

  The office was in chaos. Imseti’s desk had been overturned and broken in half. The lounge chair
sat on its side, one leg broken off. A flying alligator hovered in the middle of the room, dragging its tail over the carpet. It was at least as big as the one that had wrecked my car, if not bigger. Weren’t alligators supposed to be smaller? Or was that crocodiles?

  Opposite the flying gator was Osric with two more winged alligators on him. One had gotten a good taste of his right arm while the other had chomped down on his left foot. I couldn’t see where Beth had gone, but I assumed she’d be dead if I didn’t help Osric. If she wasn’t dead already.

  I looked around for a weapon. I could rip the room apart with magic if I wanted, but not without potentially hurting Osric too, so magic wasn’t the answer. But there was a lamp.

  I scrambled to my feet and stopped there because my head was swimming. It felt like I’d been dosed with something, but I hadn’t had anything to eat or drink since coming to the party.

  I shook the cobwebs out as best I could and grabbed for one of the two lamps in my vision. It took another two tries before I managed to grab hold of the cool metal of the lamp and jerk the plug free. The light in the room dimmed even further, casting more shadows.

  The move attracted the attention of the only gator in the room not currently snacking on the Shadow Knight. It hissed at me and flew toward my face. Or rather, it flew closer and split into two gators in my vision, only one of which was probably real.

  “Fore!” I shouted and swung the lamp as hard as I could.

  A satisfying crack let me know I’d guessed right when swinging for the closer gator and the monster smacked against the far wall. Before it could recover, I ran to try and beat the winged alligators off Osric. Two hits to the back made the one on his foot let go and spin on me. I tried to hit it again, but lost my balance and fell flat on my ass.

  Osric spat something in a language I didn’t know that sounded like every curse known to man rolled into one and drew back a fist. He landed one good punch to the other gator’s snout, and it fell away, but he wasn’t going to be fast enough to save me. The alligator I’d pulled off his foot charged at me, mouth open.

  And its jaw promptly snapped shut when a size six-and-a-half black high heel stomped into its snout. Beth screamed and kicked the gator with her other foot so hard her shoe flew off. When she lost her shoe, she bent down, paying no mind to the alligator trying to get at her, and took off her other shoe, continuing to beat the gator’s head with it until the creature shrank away, leaving a smear of green blood behind. Her head snapped up, heel raised, cheeks bright red and her chest heaving with anger.

  I flinched when her wild eyes fell on me. Gone was the mild-mannered anthropologist. With one look, I was sure some kind of demon had taken her place. One hot as hell demon.

  The alligator I’d tossed into the wall dove from above and got the heel of Beth’s shoe straight to the eye. The heel caught as she tried to pull it free, so she resorted to punching and kicking the unmoving gator carcass to try and get her shoe back.

  “Girlfriend?” Osric asked stepping up beside me, wrapping a makeshift bandage around the bite on his arm.

  I shook my head. “Ex.”

  The Shadow Knight gave me a concerned look. “Remind me not to piss her off.”

  Since Beth had beaten the first gator to death with her shoe and injured the other enough that all it could do was lie bleeding on the floor, that left only one for Osric and me to deal with. I gestured to the last mobile gator with a jerk of my head. “Mind if I…?”

  “Be my guest.” Osric gestured forward.

  After checking one more time to make sure Beth was out of the way—she was still trying to get her shoe free from the dead alligator’s skull—I slammed the palm of my hand to the floor and unleashed an arc of magic that tore open the floor. The fissure widened under the alligator until gravity did the rest. It tried to get airborne, but something had damaged its wing, and it couldn’t get enough momentum before the magic slammed into it, knocking it down. Once the gator had fallen into the fissure, I ran forward and started shoving furniture in after it, just to make sure.

  Osric walked by me as I started hurling pillows into the small, seemingly bottomless canyon I’d made, and paused to raise his eyebrow at me. I gave him an exhausted, sweaty grin and he walked on, rolling his eyes and shaking his head. He didn’t stop until he was standing over the last gator, the one bleeding from its mouth. It tried to snap at him, but Osric simply grabbed it by the jaws, gave a twist, and suddenly the alligator’s head was on the wrong way.

  I shuddered. Pretty strong for a scrawny little guy who fought with daggers most of the time.

  Beth stormed over to the fissure in the floor. I put a hand up to keep her from taking another step. In her blind rage, I was worried she might dive in after the damn gator. “Breathe, Beth. They’re dead.”

  She looked at me, rage still in her gaze for a moment, before closing her eyes and letting out a slow breath. When she opened them again, they no longer held the anger that had been there a moment ago.

  “What the hell was all that?” I asked, turning to Osric. “One minute we’re bracing for assault and the next I’m being confronted by corpses that want to rip me apart. The next, I’m here fighting those winged gator…things.”

  “Corpses?” Osric let the alligator fall with a grunt. “I saw no corpses. Only fire. It was everywhere. You were on fire. Hell, I was on fire.”

  Fire? What I’d seen had been unsettling, but there had definitely not been any fire. I looked at Beth. “What did you see?”

  Beth glanced between us, her cheeks coloring. “Never mind what I saw. It wasn’t real. But I have a hypothesis. If that was Imseti, the real Imseti, then it’s possible he was able to harness our own fear and use it against us.”

  Osric started to cross his arms but paused when it hurt. “Explain.”

  “Well…” She chewed on her lower lip a minute before continuing. “He introduced himself as the son of Horus, right? Well, according to myth, there are four sons of Horus, each one responsible for guarding organs that are removed during the mummification process. The organs are removed and placed in canopic jars. The Ancient Egyptians believed the mummified person would need them when they reached the afterlife.”

  “Four sons of Horus?” I rubbed my chin. That didn’t match up with what I’d seen so far. There had been three shadowy gods at the morgue, not four. “What parts do they guard exactly?”

  “Can this wait until after we’re in a secure location?” Osric said. “These people clearly don’t mean to honor your payment, Laz. We’ll likely have to fight our way out, and I don’t think those flying alligators were an endgame. They were here just to wear us down for the real challenge waiting outside this door.”

  He meant the army of cat shifter guards between us and the exit. The exit we didn’t know how to find.

  “Do you even know how to get out of this place?” I asked him.

  Beth nodded. “It’s not like we can stop anyone and ask for directions.”

  Osric and I exchanged glances. Not that either of us would ever ask for directions anywhere, ever. Men didn’t ask for directions. That was definitely one stereotype that held true.

  He sighed. “I can try to draw a mental map if I count my steps backward.”

  I blinked. “You can do that?”

  “I’m the Knight of Shadow,” he said, his tone bored. “Shadow is my element. This place is full of shadows. I only need to commune with the shadows to tap their memory. It’ll only take a few minutes.”

  Communing with the shadows sounded like a bad idea most of the time, but I guess in that case it was warranted since the shadows seemed to be on his side.

  Without another word, Osric walked to the darkest corner of the room and vanished into one of the shadows. I thought at first he’d walked through the wall until I activated my Soul Vision and saw his green-black soul standing in the center of a swirling, black mist. The mist twisted as if it were alive, aware I was watching it. And unhappy about it. I closed down my Vi
sion and decided the time was better spent questioning Beth on what she knew.

  “Tell me about these four sons of Horus,” I said, turning my back to Osric and his shadow party.

  Her face brightened. She seemed relieved to have something familiar to talk about, and I couldn’t blame her. Everything that was happening had to be a lot to take in.

  “Imseti was said to be the most human of the four,” she started. “Probably because his jar contained the liver and the Ancient Egyptians believed the liver to be the seat of all human emotion.”

  I frowned. “His jar?”

  “Yes, each of the four canopic jars usually had one of the four sons’ heads on it as a sort of stopper. Imseti’s head was the human head.”

  I glanced around the room, which was now a wreck. The décor suddenly made a lot more sense. Imseti’s office had been set up like a shrink’s, which is exactly where you might go if your emotions were out of whack. The herb shop thing made sense too since herbs were medicinal. People had been using them to treat mental disorders since the dawn of time. Seemed Imseti was masquerading as a quack psychiatrist of sorts. Or at least, he wanted people to think he was.

  Beth paced away from the fissure. “Duamutef’s jar contained the stomach. He was usually depicted as a jackal, and Hapi was always a baboon.”

  “Baboon?” Son of a bitch. The baboon guy at the front of the auction had to be Hapi, which meant he must’ve been taunting me the day he showed up outside the morgue. That guy had a sick and twisted sense of humor, one I’d be happy to rip straight out of him.

  “Right, a hamadryas baboon specifically.” She glanced at the corner and wrung her hands. “And the last of the four sons of Horus was Qebehsenuef who protected the intestines.”

  Now that was a name I knew I’d heard before. Beth’s boss, Seb Feneque, had called himself by that name when I pressed him for an answer. “Seb Feneque…” I said the name aloud, working through whatever it was tugging at the edge of my awareness.

  Beth spun around, frowning. “What?”

  “What’s your boss’ middle initial?”