It could have been worse. Osiris could have been here. At least Isis couldn’t compel me like her husband, though she did have her own means of manipulation.
I considered coming back with Shukra, but if I left, Isis would know this performance had gotten under my skin.
Nothing about this mattered.
Nothing here meant anything.
Goddess of Light. Do. Not. Touch.
Soul Eater. Godkiller. Ace Dante. I had a job to do, and the bitch had buried me in a tomb. She was not getting to me.
I sauntered over to the sunken bath and tossed a scorpion carcass into the bubbles. Isis’s male attendant screamed in a note I didn’t think men were capable of and launched himself from the bath so fast that he slipped and collapsed in a spectacular mass of flailing limbs. The two women hadn’t seen what I’d thrown into the water, but they did when it bobbed to the surface, its curled black legs half hidden in bubbles and petals. One loosed a blood-curdling scream and scrambled back, while the other froze. Water and bubbles sloshed over the side of the bath, lapping at my sand-caked shoes.
I pinched my lips together, clasped my hands behind my back, and wished Shu were here to see the carnage one dead scorpion could inspire.
Through the theatrics, Isis waited, stone-still. When the screams and whimpers had died down, she reached out a bubble-covered hand and plucked the scorpion carcass out of the water, eying it as though intrigued.
“They come from mu moka. I’m immune.” Mostly, I silently added.
“Of course you are.” Isis tossed the damp, dead scorpion toward the whimpering man. He scuttled away, hand clutching his chest. If he thought a dead scorpion was terrifying, he didn’t understand the god whose shoulders he’d been massaging.
Isis clicked her fingers. “Leave.”
Her attendants collected some of their wits, climbed from the bath, and hurried out of the room, leaving bubbles, flower petals, and pools of water on the tiles.
Submerged up to her shoulders, Isis closed her eyes, the bubbles hiding most of her. I’d seen too much of her too many times, but only with Osiris in the room. Now that we were alone, I wished we weren’t.
None of this matters.
Soul Eater. Godkiller. She’s the Goddess of Light.
I crouched and dangled my arms over my knees, depositing plenty of sand and dirt all over her shiny floor. “You owe me a hat.”
Her gaze cut to me and fury burned in those fiery eyes. “Your presence offends me.”
My smile crawled into the corner of my mouth. “Oh, does it? How terrible for Your Highness.” She could pretend all she liked, but she’d had plenty of time to throw on a gown if she hadn’t wanted me to see her in the flesh. All it took was a click of her fingers. “Why did you bury me and Shu in that tomb?”
She glared ahead, determined not to meet my eyes. A delicate muscle fluttered in her perfect cheek. “The dig team was returning, and you had yet to retrieve the skull. You needed more time.”
Water sloshed around her upper arms, plastering her long hair to her skin. I dragged my wandering gaze upward and waited for her to ask about the skull. The seconds ticked on. Water dripped from the ornate tap. Oh, she wanted to ask, but she didn’t want me knowing how important this was to her. Never mind her dragging me halfway around the world for this anonymous skull.
“It was Senenmut’s tomb,” I said, breaking the silence.
Dark lashes flickered once, twice, three times. She already knew whose tomb it was.
“A minor noble,” she repeated from the flight over, but I wasn’t sure whether it was meant for me or to reinforce something in her mind.
Lies. “Hatshepsut’s lover.”
Her pert lips tightened. She was excellent at hiding her feelings, but not when I stared at her, unblinking, from two feet away. What was Isis’s interest in Hatshepsut and her lover, and why was the missing skull so important that she’d enlisted me to find it and not her husband? The skull was precious to her, for sure. Maybe something I could leverage against her to get out of the godly trap she’d maneuvered me into?
I dipped my filthy fingers in her bathwater. Dirt flaked off and dissolved, clouding her pristine water.
As though my touch had triggered her into motion, Isis rose from the bath and ascended the steps. No man could resist her, and though I wasn’t technically human, I was Ace Dante, and I watched her with hungry eyes. A symphony of water and light fell over her naked skin and spilled down curves both soft and hard. The kind of curves I needed to touch.
She didn’t bother with a gown and came straight for me, naked as the day the goddess Nut had created her from the stars. I stood and stared her down, because I—gods-be-damned—couldn’t back down, not now. She’d brought me here. She’d framed me as the Godkiller. She’d made me into her villain. Her beauty couldn’t touch me. I couldn’t let it.
“The skull wasn’t there?” she asked, stopping an inch too close, her dark eyes level with mine.
“No.” My heart pounded too heavy in my chest, heating my blood.
Her hardened glare cracked, her lashes lowered, and she looked away.
Do. Not. Touch.
Her pulse beat in her neck, as delicate as butterfly wings.
Don’t do it.
Bubbles trailed down her collarbone, gathering at the swell of her breast.
Don’t.
She lifted her eyes. So perfect. So bright and clean and light.
Off limits.
Osiris’s wife. The Goddess of the Sky, of Light, of Love.
She wants this. If I touch her, she’ll have another weapon to wield against me.
The tip of her tongue swept across her bottom lip. “Monster.”
I’d touched her in my dreams, tasted her too. I’d risen to the level of a god and worshipped her with my mouth. I wanted her, all men did, but I wanted her because of what—of who I was. The monster. The liar, the thief, the devil, the soul eater, the god killer. The part of me that hadn’t left the underworld, the part older than my memories could account for, the deeper, darker thing I became, the creature that had gorged on the souls of the innocent… It was so hungry for the light.
I laid my hand on her bare arm, kidding myself that I intended to hold her back. Dust and sand on my fingers turned to mud and smeared across her smooth skin.
“It is no surprise… one such as you…” She whispered the words too close to my lips, close enough to capture and swallow—to devour. “…desires one such as I.”
A loud cough from behind jolted me back. I freed Isis’s arm and took one—two hurried steps back, almost tripping over my feet.
“Ace Dante,” Shukra pronounced, making sure I heard the weight in her voice.
I swung a glance back at the demon sorceress. She stood rigid inside the bathroom door, arms folded, one eyebrow arched high, her blood-red lips skewed in a less-than-impressed sneer.
“Leave, sorceress,” Isis hissed, yanking my attention back to her. A dirty handprint marked her bare arm—a testimony to how close I’d gotten and how close she’d allowed me to get. Any closer and Osiris would’ve had grounds to separate my balls from my body.
“Oh, I will,” Shukra replied, “when I’ve gotten the Soul Eater back.”
Fear clamped an icy cage around my hot, racing heart. Too close. I turned and brushed by Shukra, briefly resting a grateful hand on her shoulder as I passed.
“You cannot avoid the inevitable, Mokarakk Oma.” Isis’s laughter trailed after me, plucking on the remaining strings of desire. Too close.
Shukra’s snarl shut off the goddess, and the suite door slammed shut on the rest.
Shukra didn’t speak. She walked with me to my room and guarded the door while I threw myself into a bitterly cold shower, washing off the dirt and dregs of poisonous desire for a goddess who’d get me killed.
I grabbed a tourist map from the display in the hotel foyer, then settled in one of the comfortable chairs near the entrance and spread the map open over a low ta
ble. Tourists came and went and chatter filled the large open space. That was exactly what I needed after my encounter with Isis: people and normalcy to ground me in being Ace Dante.
The map displayed all the ancient sites around Luxor. An aerial view of the Valley of the Queens and Valley of the Kings was printed on the back. The sites were situated on opposite sides of a solid limestone peak known as al-Qurn, which happened to resemble a pyramid. The original valley architects, the leaflet said, had planned to link the two valleys. Finding the rock too treacherous to dig through, they’d abandoned their plans, and today, the valleys remained unconnected. But I knew that history, especially Egyptian history, lied. The skull, the tomb, and the attempt to erase Senenmut from life and death hinted at something more. And Shu and I hadn’t been alone in that tomb. Whatever had grabbed me like a toy it could toss around was down there, hidden between the valleys. What if digging hadn’t stopped? What if another tomb was buried between the valleys?
I’d bet my paycheck—small as it was—that the skull had been a diversion, and Isis was after whatever was buried between the valleys.
Shukra dumped a tumbler of vodka on the table in front of me and slumped into the chair beside mine. She sipped some kind of elaborate multicolored monstrosity of a drink through a straw. Legs crossed, she bounced her sandal, waiting for the explanation that wasn’t coming.
I probably should’ve apologized, or thanked her, but doing either meant I had to admit I was an ass who didn’t have the situation with Isis under control.
“Do we need to have the talk?” she asked.
Vodka in hand, I leaned back. “Nothing happened.”
Her foot stopped its bouncing. “You forget, I’ve swallowed your lies for centuries.”
I winced and waved her off, repeating, for emphasis, “Nothing happened.”
“Denial is a river in Egypt.”
“Ha. Ha.”
“If you keep telling yourself nothing happened, maybe it’ll come true.”
The vodka tasted crisp and clean and it went all the way down and warmed my cold soul. “This thing…” I began. Shu raised her brow. “…with Isis.”
“There’s a thing?”
“She’s trying to maneuver me—”
“I noticed.”
I leaned forward and lowered the volume of our conversation way down. “I can’t come at her head-on. I won’t win. I need to come at her from another angle, one she won’t see.”
“Uh-huh. From behind?” Laughter glittered in her eyes.
I didn’t dignify that comment with a reply. “She believes she knows how to get to me. She doesn’t.”
“Ace…” Shu leaned in, mirroring my posture. “She’s the Goddess of Light. No other goddess comes close to what she’s capable of. If she wanted to, she’d snuff you out”—she clicked her fingers—“like that. You think Osiris would care? Oh, boohoo, his wife took away his favorite toy. He’ll find another schmuck to dance for him. Normally, I wouldn’t care, but we all know what happens to me if you get dead. So, do everyone a favor and keep it in your pants, or I will cut it off.”
She could try. “If Isis could kill me, she would have centuries ago. The prophecy, her plot to kill Osiris—she needs me to pin the blame on.” Then there was the mystery of Isis’s note and knowing what I am. Shu didn’t need to know about that.
“She doesn’t want to kill you. Remember what happened to Thoth? All they did was talk, and Osiris wanted the God of Law dead. What I interrupted last night? What do you think Ozzy will do if he found out you had your hands all over his naked wife?”
“He won’t find out.”
Shukra shook her head, fell back into her chair, and looked around at the people coming and going. “There are worse things than death.”
Her words held a wistful tone, the same tone as when she’d said that time didn’t change everything. She had changed. Not so long ago, figuring out what was going on in her head would have been easier. These days, she was complicated, as was our relationship.
She was right. But I had it under control. “Did you call Cujo?”
“Yeah. There aren’t any leads on Mafdet or the burglary at her store and no sign of Cat,” she said, intently scanning the tourists, probably for weak spots. Her foot was bouncing again, and she tapped her fingernails on the arm of the chair. “This place… there’s old magic here, both close and far away. It’s making my skin itch.”
I’d been feeling the same since we’d touched down in Egypt. “Luxor stands where the great city of Waset once stood.”
Shu stopped her fidgeting. I wasn’t sure about her true age, but she knew of Waset—the city where gods and people had roamed freely, a paradise until the river ran red with blood and the people and buildings turned to sand.
I winced at the memory of buildings toppling, or an image, or whatever it was I’d seen during my unscheduled trip through the Twelve Gates. A world sundered, its people destroyed, Waset’s forty-thousand souls… I thought I’d seen New York fall, but what I’d witnessed in the Gates bit at my mind like shards of glass. Those memories didn’t want to be remembered, and I wasn’t dragging them to the surface without a damn good reason. I already knew I wouldn’t like what lurked there.
I picked up my vodka and downed it in one gulp. “How do you feel about scaring the wits out of a few archaeologists?”
Shu’s eyes lit up at the prospect of wanton violence. “Do I get to keep any souvenirs?”
Chapter 7
The dig team had erected a tent over the tomb’s collapsed entrance. Workers passed buckets of rocks down a human line and dumped the debris in a pile farther from the tourist path.
By the time Shu and I arrived, long shadows hung over the site. The heat of the day lingered in the rocks, but the air was free of dust, swept clean by a fresh Nile breeze. I imagined I smelled the spices and flowers from the fields and heard children playing near the water’s edge. Watch for crocodiles, I’d tell them, steering the beasts away with a look.
Shu clapped me on the back. “Stop daydreaming, Acehole.”
She strode toward the tent, pushed inside, and announced in fluent Arabic her name and status with the Ministry of Antiquities. Raised voices drowned out the rest, but Shu’s whip-crack reply demanded to see their paperwork, immediately. While she kept the archaeology students busy, I drifted around the dig site, trying to blend in.
“May I help you?”
I turned toward the source of the stiff English accent and squinted against the sun behind the man’s broad shoulders. Sweat stained his white shirt a dour gray beneath his arms. A big guy, capable of throwing his weight around, but the voice was prim and proper. London private school, I figured, from an era when politicians and nobles bunked together.
“Senenmut,” I said.
“Excuse me?”
“Your tomb. It’s Senenmut’s.”
“Well, that’s an interesting theory, Mister…”
I held out my hand. “Dante. Ace Dante.”
He gave a little chortle and took my hand in his, nearly taking it off at the wrist. “American! You’d have to be with a name like that.”
I laughed along, secretly wondering if he’d find the name Mokarakk Oma as hilarious. He stepped out of the sun’s glare and looked at me side-on, puzzling out how I’d so confidently guessed what he’d probably spent months trying to prove. His features were naturally bunched together, giving his face a pinched look, but the glee in his small, bright eyes loosened what would otherwise have been a dour expression.
“Doctor Wheeler.” A young woman bumbled up to us, swiping a stray lock of dark hair out of her face and smearing sand across her russet-brown cheek. “I’m sorry to interrupt, Doctor. I—” She noticed me and stumbled over her feet and her words. “There’s a… someone here. From the Ministry of Antiquities. She wants papers. Our license is all up to date, but she’s rather… insistent.”
She side-eyed me the way she might watch a scorpion.
Wheeler ch
ortled again. “Oh, a minor misunderstanding, I’m sure. Won’t you excuse me, Mister Dante? I just have to…” He was already stalking off, surprisingly agile despite the rocks.
Since he hadn’t told me to get off his dig site, I tagged along and ducked inside the tent where Shukra was barking orders at the interns.
“I’m sorry, you are…?” Wheeler asked Shu, his smile instantly diffusing the tension in the tent.
“Shukra Afroudakis,” Shu announced, using one of her many aliases and just a touch of sorceress’s suggestive push to endear her to the locals. She looked about as Greek as I looked Irish, but nobody was about to argue with her while she sounded the part. “Ministry of Antiquities.” Shu gave him a smile that could melt iron and offered him her hand.
Wheeler took the dainty hand capable of tearing human hearts from chests and brought it to his lips. “I’m charmed, Miss Afroudakis.”
“Missis,” Shu corrected, disturbingly coy.
“And what a crime that is. I assure you, Missis Afroudakis, all our papers are in order. We’re on a legitimate expedition, funded by UCL London. If you would perhaps call your minister, I’m sure we could have this all sorted in a jiffy.”
Shu plucked her hand free. “Well, as much as I would love to let you continue working here, I do need to see some identification.”
“Of course, of course…” Wheeler waved at the woman who’d alerted him to Shu’s presence, and she hurried off to retrieve the relevant documents, I assumed.
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