Scorpion Trap
Soul Eater #4
Pippa DaCosta
‘Scorpion Trap’
#4 Soul Eater
Pippa DaCosta
Urban Fantasy & Science Fiction Author
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Copyright © 2017 Pippa DaCosta.
June 2017. US Edition. All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictions, and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Edited for US readers in US English.
Version 1.
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www.pippadacosta.com
Contents
Summary
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Serpent’s Game, Soul Eater #5 - Excerpt
A note from Pippa on research
Also by Pippa DaCosta
About the Author
Summary
“Given a choice, I’d prefer never to return to Egypt. Isis doesn’t do choices.”
The old world is dead. Legend tells us the gods are myths. But some remain, like a noose around Ace Dante’s neck. And none are more dangerous than Isis. She demands the Soul Eater return to the land time forgot, break into a newly discovered tomb, and retrieve the skull from the sarcophagus inside. If Ace does this one thing, Isis will reveal the secrets he desperately seeks.
Ace knows there’s a catch, there always is, but the truth is far worse than even he can imagine.
As Isis’s true intentions unravel, so does Ace’s past, leaving him no choice at all.
History is wrong.
The past is a lie.
And for the Soul Eater, the truth found in Egypt is far more terrifying than any god.
Chapter 1
The McDonald’s tucked away behind the lingerie in Macy’s was the last place I’d expected Shu to frequent, but there she was, carving through the unsuspecting crowd, her distinctive oil-black hair pulled into a scorpion-like ponytail, her stilettos stabbing into the sticky floor. She looked like the type of woman who would walk over cold corpses each morning to get her chai tea latte fix.
It wasn’t that I didn’t trust her. Lately, we’d been getting along fine, or as fine as a demon sorceress and soul eater could. That was the problem. In five hundred years, give or take a few decades, we’d never gotten along. She hated me. I hated her. Enemies cursed together for eternity. That made sense. What didn’t make sense was her giving up a chance at redemption. Hell, had we been BFFs, she should have damn well taken Anubis’s offer. She hadn’t, and that was why I’d been tailing her for the past couple of weeks.
I sauntered into the line of folks waiting to collect their bagged orders and pretended to check my phone while keeping Shu in the corner of my eye. She’d stopped at a table by the window. Four twenty-somethings, two guys and two girls, abruptly quit chatting over hamburgers and looked up. Shu addressed them with a jerk of her chin. Tension crackled off her rapt crowd. I wondered if a brawl might be about to kick off when one of them wordlessly dusted off his hands and scooped a bag off the floor.
A family of five blocked my line of sight, forcing me to ditch the line and skirt the crowd for a better view. By the time I took up a spot near a stack of trays, Shu and the guy were exchanging packages. Cash would land in Shu’s hands, and in his hands, I’d likely find a minor talisman or a small handwritten scroll and a bottle of sand, for effect. These four, in their pencil skirts and pressed shirts, would be in the market for career-boosting spells. Harmless, just like the spells for the last two buyers I shook down.
The deal concluded, and Shu left the young professionals and strode toward the exit. All four in the group watched her go until she’d almost slipped back into Macy’s lingerie. I pushed away from the wall and was about to resume my stalking, when the buyer picked up a McDonald’s napkin, hastily scrawled something on the paper, and with a flick of his fingers, lit it on fire. The napkin vanished in a blink—turned to ash. None of the diners noticed. Nobody but me.
I eased back against the tray rack. That little flourish of magic had just earned Shu’s buyer a place on my watch list. Another sorcerer? Maybe Shu hadn’t sold him a harmless spell after all.
The four professionals packed away their phones, shrugged on their jackets, and hitched up their bags, back to smiles and small talk. I trailed them through the lingerie displays and stuck with the buyer when they each split up without a goodbye between them. He sauntered through the kitchenware aisle, his swagger down to an art, and boarded the escalator heading down. A few shoppers behind, I leaned on the rail and got a good look between the spine of escalators that made up Macy’s middle and fed shoppers in and out of ten floors of all-you-can-buy retail.
Mr. Swagger hit Floor 6, sprang from the escalator like a horse from its stall, veered back on himself, and shoved his way down the adjacent escalator. He stopped long enough to glance up, right at me, and toss me a salute. Then he was off again, shoving shoppers out of his path like bowling pins.
Why do they always have to run?
All pretense of stealth gone, I shoved past angsty shoppers, ignoring their bleats of alarm, and bolted after the cocky bastard. Some days, it would be so much easier to be the monster who stripped souls from bodies like peas from their pods. You’d be surprised how much easier it is to get around when you’re made of sand and smoke. Couldn’t do that in Macy’s, though. Wasn’t worth the godly fallout.
The cocky bastard had a decent head start, but I had the benefit of carving through his wake of surprised civilians. I was on him in seconds, my grip locked on the lapels of his expensive jacket so I could hang him up against a wall beside a stack of folded Levis and expressionless mannequins.
“Whoa, buddy,” he stammered. “Whoa, whoa—Okay, okay, easy—”
“What were the hand theatrics back there?” I demanded.
“Hey, you’re out of line.” Cocky Bastard raised his voice, and despite having my face in his, he wasn’t nearly as afraid as he should have been.
Shoppers stopped and gawked. Someone pulled a phone from their pocket. I didn’t have the sword or coat on me, but that didn’t mean I wanted my face all over the internet. Store security wouldn’t be far behind either.
I dropped the cocky bastard onto his feet and squeezed his shoulder. “Ah, c’mon, Steve. I was just screwing with you, man.”
He grinned back at me and shrugged his jacket into place, so damn sure I wouldn’t start something in public.
Fingers digging into his shoulder, I leaned in and whispered, “Cukkomd.” The spellword poured in through his ear, straight to the part of his human brain that was hard-wired to answer the old words. My friend Cocky Steve was now putty in my hands. “Don’t talk. Follow me.”
I threw my arm around Steve’s loose shoulders, tossed a smile to the folks now grumbling and moving on, disappointed they hadn’t gotten their Macy’s brawl, and guided my new friend toward the restrooms.
/> We had company in the men’s washrooms. Steve stood dull-eyed and dopey beside me as I waited for the stalls to vacate, using the good old-fashioned eyes-on glare to get the guys hustling.
Alone with Steve, I said, “Hurzd” to hold the main door closed. I glanced around the polished tiled walls. No cameras.
“So, here’s how it’s going to be, Steve. Mind if I call you Steve?”
He shook his head, looking somewhat startled. He was probably wondering why he wasn’t fighting me and why all of this was playing out without his participation.
“Yeah, compulsion, it blows. Trust me, I know. But you ran, so that makes you a suspicious target. Then there’s the little deal you did with the sorceress back there.” His dopey eyes widened. “Yeah, her. All that usually wouldn’t be enough for me to throw the command whammy on you, but unfortunately, the trick you did with the napkin… That’s what caught my eye. So…” I leaned against the sink next to him. “Tell me all about that spell you cast when the sorceress turned her back.”
His jaw worked, pale lips puckering. He tried to hold the words back, but while I had a grip on his mind and body, he wasn’t winning this one.
“Minor spell. Tracking.” He struggled, trembling. Poor bastard.
“You’re tracking the sorceress?” I asked, needing confirmation.
He nodded.
“Why?”
“To find the Soul Eater.” And there we go… the truth shall out.
“What soul eater?” I tested, feigning ignorance. It wasn’t that hard.
“Sebek-kuh says there’s one in the city. The sorceress is known to work with it.”
It? Ouch. “What does this Sebek-kuh want with the Soul Eater?”
“I don’t know.”
“Is that the truth?”
“Yes.”
“Are you lying? You wouldn’t lie to me, would you, Steve?”
“No. No… Why… What… I don’t know why I’m here. I shouldn’t be talking to you. He’s waiting.”
“Who’s waiting? Sebek-kuh?”
He nodded.
“You’re meeting him?”
“Yes. I was supposed to cast the spell and go straight back to him.”
I smiled and slapped nervous-wreck Steve on the back. “Well, let’s not keep Mister Sebek-kuh waiting.”
My new friend, Steve, worked administration for Macy’s, giving him personnel access throughout the building. He kindly agreed to take me on a tour of the basement where Mister Sebek-kuh was due to meet him in delivery bay 32B. Refrigerated trailer units idled in their bays. Macy’s back-end staff pushed wrapped and stacked trolleys from inside the trailers, making enough noise and commotion to distract them from Steve and me as we strolled by.
I told Steve to carry on as though I wasn’t there, and he did exactly that, swaggering up to Bay 32, where a guy in a gray hoodie and matching pants waited.
Using some stacked yogurts as cover, I gave Sebek-kuh a casual once-over. He stood hunched over, his shoulders pulled in, his back bowed. From a distance, he looked frail, as though a strong gust of wind might blow him over. I wasn’t buying it.
“Did you mark her?” Sebek-kuh asked, his voice a papery wheeze. I barely caught the words over the din of delivery vehicles.
“Yes.”
“She didn’t see?”
“No.” Steve’s shoulder twitched. My compulsion still had its hooks in him, but the cocky bastard was putting up a fight and trying to shove my control off him like someone trying to wipe off cobwebs. He had some skill, this one. Given enough time, he might even work free of me, but Steve wasn’t my problem.
Sebek-kuh was laughing. At least I thought that was the rasping sound he was making. “Good, good,” he exhaled.
I couldn’t get a good look beneath the hood, but I’d seen enough possessed people over the decades to recognize a demon when I saw one, especially one that had spent too long hiding inside its host, rotting him from the inside out. I could smell the taint of its soul, like a cloud of diesel smoke.
“You have done as I asked. Now for your reward…” Sebek-kuh extended a pale, gnarled hand. His twiglike fingers clutched something that gave off the same foul sensation as his being.
I stepped out from behind the yogurts. “Get behind me.”
Steve obeyed and scooted around me, twitching and mumbling. I’d have to release him soon or risk permanent damage.
“I hear you’re looking for the Soul Eater?”
Sebek-kuh lifted his face. Fluorescent lights pooled in his sunken eyes and glistened off his pearly white teeth behind tight, desiccated lips. He resembled something an archaeologist might dig up, and beneath the oily taint of his soul, he smelled of baked clay and hot stone.
“Soul Eater?” His lips pulled up at their corners, cracking his cheeks.
“In the flesh, which is more than I can say for you.” I stopped a few feet in front of him. He had the wall at his back and on his left. His only exit, if he decided to bolt, was to my left, alongside the trucks. He only looked like he was one breath away from death. “All you had to do was pick up the phone. These days, every god and their enemies have me on their friends list.”
“You would listen…?”
I screwed up my nose and pretended to think on it, noticing the camera blinking down at me from the corner. “Listen to a demon? No.”
I didn’t have Alysdair—I really needed to start the whole coat-and-sword gig again—so the unfortunate demon would be checking out the old-fashioned way, Soul Eater style. He still had eyes, even if they were weeping pus. Not long ago, I might have shied away from devouring a soul like his. These days, I wasn’t as fussy. He shouldn’t have been in my city.
“I came for you… Mokarakk Oma. For the Dark One who walks with you.”
The Dark One was Shu, obviously. And I was done listening to lying demons. I checked the camera again. Whether knowingly or by accident, Sebek-kuh stood beneath it, likely in its blind spot.
“I need your help, Mokarakk Oma. I need—”
A blade of light erupted from his foul guts, jolting the demon’s hijacked body as though he’d been shocked with ten thousand volts. What little blood left in him oozed from the wound. The blade jerked, stuck in his ribs, and then cut clean through, opening the body from gut to gullet. The body collapsed in on itself and slumped in a heap of awkward body parts and leaking fluids.
Isis blinked at me innocently. “Were you in the middle of something?” She twisted her wrist, vanishing the blade, and planted her hand on her hip. Wearing a conservative green pantsuit and cream jacket, she’d toned down the goddess routine, but she still carried a luminous glow that would have any nearby human swooning in her presence.
“Holy shit,” Steve gasped.
Isis flicked a finger at my temporary friend. “Rephrase.”
“I—I… My god. It’s true. You’re, y-you—”
“So dull.” She rolled her eyes and clicked her fingers. Steve was gone. Vanished, just like the blade. I didn’t have the heart to ask where he’d gone, but I suspected Steve might wake up with no memory of the last twenty-four hours—if he was lucky. If he wasn’t lucky, he might not wake up at all.
“Isis,” I said carefully. The camera blinked in the corner, but I suspected her natural brilliance was blinding its lens.
“You didn’t get my note?”
“Note?” I asked even more carefully. I had gotten her note asking for my help and mentioning something along the lines of how she knew “who I was.” I burned her note right after reading it. That had been two weeks ago.
She stepped over Sebek-kuh’s crumpled and rapidly decaying body, bringing her almost nose to nose with me. I wasn’t backing down, even as my heart thudded hard and heavy and every instinct demanded I drop to a knee and bow my head. The sounds of the real world faded beneath the spell her beauty wove. I wasn’t immune to her, and wishing I were didn’t change a damn thing. Power throbbed around her in a warm, tempting caress. She was the Goddess of Li
ght, of the Sky, Queen of Gods. Compared to her, I was a cockroach she could crush under her heel.
Paper crumpled in my hand. I frowned down at it, preferring to look there than into her eyes where I’d fall into that scorpion trap. “What’s this?”
“Tickets. The flight to London Heathrow leaves at ten p.m. From there, you will take a connecting flight to Cairo. If you don’t, I will tell my husband how you have, on numerous occasions, attempted to seduce me.”
I tried to swallow but found my mouth dry and throat tight. “I’m not going back to Egypt.”
“Oh dear, it appears as though you believe you have a choice. Silly, delusional Soul Eater.”
I stuffed the tickets back in her hand, giving her the smallest shove. It was all I could do, but it gave me enough momentum to turn. “I’m not going. Tell Osiris you were hot in the sack, but I’ve had better.”
She wouldn’t do it. No way. If she were going to play the Osiris card, she’d have used it by now.
“Oh? My darling husband?”
I spun. She’d manifested a phone and was holding it against her ear. “There’s something I must tell you—”
One stride in her direction and she showed me the lock screen. She hadn’t made the call, but my hammering heart and the cold swear down my back had me rethinking my decision. “You’re insane.”
“Blasphemy.”
“Blasphemy? Peaches, I’m just warming up. I don’t care if you’re the goddess of the fucking past, present, and future. I’m not going back to that godsforsaken city. Find some other schmuck.”
“Ace Dante…” There was power in the way she said my name—not my real name, but the manufactured one, the superficial mask—as though she could tear it all away and reveal the truth of me beneath. “You have questions. You saw impossible things in the Twelve Gates—”
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