Scorpion Trap

by Pippa Dacosta

  Isis watched her brother pass and climbed to her feet. “I released you! You cannot navigate this time without me. You need me, brother!”

  “I do not need to navigate anything. I take. I rule. And the people of this world will thank me. Those who do not will die, for I will be the God of All Things. I will be the Lord of Life.” His black laughter turned maniacal.

  Isis, Osiris, and Seth: Keeping insanity in the family since 3000 BC.

  I shared a glance with Isis, and from the fear in her golden eyes, I figured she’d only now just realized she’d freed another monster. Congratulations, Your Highness, I tried to convey by narrowing my eyes. You’ve heralded in the apocalypse.

  Seth spread his arms. Sand shifted, spiraled, and spilled from cracks until it washed and rolled around my feet, driven by his thirst for power. “My time has come!”

  Isis reached for him. “Not like this. You must wait, be patient, move slowly—”

  He struck her down with the back of his hand. A wave of sand swallowed her whole, stealing her away. When it receded, she was gone.

  Seth looked at me, eyes blazing as red as the Egyptian sun, daring me to try to stop him.

  I couldn’t let him leave this shrine. Isis had brought me here to release him, but that didn’t mean I had to let him go. I wasn’t Apophis—yet. I was still Ace Dante, and that surly New Yorker son of a bitch wasn’t ready to let the gods wreak havoc on this world and its people. I still had a job to do.

  What the hell. It wasn’t like I had anything left to live for. I shucked off the human suit and dissolved into a liquid cloud of burning ash, but Seth’s sand wouldn’t be swept aside as easily as mortal flesh and blood. The same terrible power I’d felt when I first entered Senenmut’s tomb swelled, filling the cavern, and collapsed over me, crushing in from all sides while pulling me apart. I grappled with my writhing magic, seeking the burning radiance of his crimson soul so I could do to him what I’d done to Isis and knock him down—but he was too much, and all the secrets I didn’t know the answers to had unraveled me. I couldn’t stop him. I wasn’t Apophis. I was just a soul eater with delusions of once being something else. Seth was a god who’d spent thousands of years plotting his freedom. He wanted this, and the weak thing I was couldn’t stand in his way.

  His power rolled me over, turning me inside out and scattering my ashes throughout the cavern. A sea of red sand poured out through the entrance, leaving me to pick up the pieces of myself. How could I make myself whole again without even understanding who or what that whole was anymore?

  Chapter 17

  Waves of sand crashed over the valley sides and flowed into the narrows as Seth’s thundering power funneled toward an unsuspecting Luxor glistening against the Nile’s banks. I knew the outcome; I’d seen it before. Rivers of blood, and cities crumbling.

  Not now. Can’t think about that now.

  I poured my ash and embers down the valley after the broiling mass of sand and wind, but even if I could catch him, I couldn’t stop him. He’d be in Luxor in minutes. Hundreds of thousands would die.

  All those souls… so sweet, so light…

  No.

  More than darkness.

  I could save some of them. I was still good, somewhere inside.

  A blur of white car burst from the broiling sands and hurtled toward me, skidding sideways at the last second. Shukra appeared over the car roof. “Get in!”

  I turned from ash to Ace and fell into the passenger seat as Shukra floored the gas pedal and worked the stick shift through sheer force of will. Wipers sloshed sand back and forth, barely clearing the windshield enough for us to see the road—if there was one. The car bounced and skidded, its engine growled, and metal groaned. Ahead, the night sky burned red.

  “Are we running or fighting?” Shu asked, chasing down the storm.

  “Fighting.” But the lashings of red pulled away. We wouldn’t make it in time.

  Shu downshifted and lurched the car forward. “Good.”

  I couldn’t stop Seth, not alone. Whatever I was, or had been, I wasn’t now. I had more power than a soul eater should have, but Seth had been stuck in a tomb for thousands of years, brewing his own magical strength and insanity. I’d need the likes of Osiris if I wanted a chance of stopping this, and Isis had vanished. There had to be another way. If not, Luxor would fall, and it wouldn’t end there.

  “You can apologize later. I brought souvenirs.” Keeping her eyes locked on the storm, Shu thumbed at the back seat.

  Four canopic jars rolled around on the seat. Four ancient canopic jars that, in the hands of a capable sorceress, might buy me some time.

  “You’re welcome.” Shu grinned.

  Not all was lost. Despite our differences, I had Shu, and we had the jars. “Get to Karnak.”

  “We’re not chasing the sandstorm that’s about to eat a city?”

  “No. We’re waking the dead.”

  Her grin stretched. “You can do that?”

  “Sure.”

  “You’re a damn liar, Ace Dante.” She laughed, taking too much pleasure in the insanity surrounding us.

  Shu jerked the car off the dirt track and onto a smooth road with a squeal of tires. In the distance, silent lightning cracked through the red desert storm.

  Karnak had been closed since Isis and I had rearranged some of the sphinxes. The famous night-time theatrical lighting was off, the stone sitting in darkness, but I didn’t need artificial light. I’d brought my own. After placing my hands on a section of wall depicting the pharaoh and gods laying the temple’s foundation stones, I pushed my power and words into the old stone. “Rarru…”

  Nothing happened.

  In Luxor, sirens wailed and Seth’s storm howled, but in Karnak, the silence was worse. I needed this to work. Without the old magic behind me, I didn’t stand a chance against Seth. This wasn’t the tiny Temple of Dendur that had spoken to me in New York’s museum, and Karnak wasn’t anything like the tombs that had both welcomed and repelled me. Karnak was vast, bigger than my power, bigger than Isis—had she been here—and firmly rooted in the past. But if the temple didn’t wake, it might as well just be a pile of stone.

  “That’s it?” Shu grumbled, hovering in my peripheral vision.

  “Not helping.” I had to think bigger. In the entrance into the hypostyle hall, the 134 columns towered toward the night sky, some seventy feet high. I ran my hands over the stone. The hieroglyphs burned at my touch and glowed to life, but that’s all the temple was prepared to give.

  “I can get more juice from a fake King Tut bust,” Shu unhelpfully remarked. “Let me use the jars.”

  “Not yet.” Planting both hands on the central round column, I leaned into the stone, closed my eyes, and whispered, “Rarru, Kormod. Woda, omd rakakbar. Rakakbar ka.” Stone buzzed beneath my hands. I kept my eyes closed and whispered the same words again, over and over, pushing my power deeper and deeper, giving it up to the old stone and its forgotten presence. Wake. C’mon… wake and help me. A small, distant power fluttered against mine, fragile as a dying bird in the palm of my hand. “Cukkomd…”

  An explosion on the opposite bank of the Nile rocked the air.

  “Ace…”

  “Hold on… I have it.”

  “Have it quicker.”

  “Cukkomd… Listen. Remember. Know me.” There was a time when the temple had sung and glowed with life and color. Its vast glory had spilled along the banks of the Nile for the whole world to see Egypt’s magic and might. That world was gone, and so was its magic, but some remained, buried deep in bedrock. Like the old gods, the temple slumbered, but its fluttering heart stirred and its thrumming background resonance grew louder. It was waking.

  I opened my eyes and stepped back. All round, light beat in waves up the columns and over the walls, filling every word, every scene. Stone groaned, and somewhere nearby, a reanimated sphinx let loose a roar.

  The stone beneath my boots shuddered. The temple breathed in, soaking up latent
power. Despite Karnak’s stirring awake, it wouldn’t be enough to stop Seth, but I wasn’t done.

  “The river… Bring the jars,” I called back to Shu, already heading outside the temple boundaries, down to the Nile’s marshy banks.

  The Nile sloshed lazily against its muddy shore. Its waters were slow-moving and deceptively calm compared to the storm raging four hundred meters away on the opposite bank.

  I held out my hand for Shu. She lifted her head and looked back at me as though I were offering her a ticking bomb.

  “I can’t do this alone,” I told her. “Whatever our differences, we have to stop him.”

  “What is this exactly?” She carefully set the canopic jars down at her feet and settled her hand in mine.

  I closed my fingers around hers and walked us into the water up to our knees. I’d killed her once today already. There was a chance I might again. “I’m not Osiris. I don’t have power over life or death, but there’s one place I can’t be denied.”

  Shu’s grip tightened. She didn’t know what I was about to do. She had to trust me.

  “I’m sorry,” I told her.

  “What for?”

  “This.” I had her black soul in my grasp and her power wrapped up in mine in the time it took her to blink and see me not as Ace Dante, but as a barbed cloud of darkness. Using the great well of her power alongside my own, I spilled across the Nile water and spoke the words, “Ovam kur ka, kur I ok uk sra oer, sra aorsr, sra resrs, omd sra dord. Ovam, omd varcuka ka srruisr.”

  But instead of traveling to the realm of Duat, I brought the realm to me, opening the way through the Nile waters and calling all the wandering souls to my side. They came. How could they not? Old magic flooded the river here as it did back home. Karnak thrummed its presence the way the Halls of Judgment beckoned those on their final journey. It almost felt like home. The souls poured into this world in an eager squall of light, twitching and lunging for freedom.

  “Cukkomd…”

  With Shu’s power joined with mine, the jars anchoring me, and Karnak at my back, I speared into all the souls and their shifting shards of light and pulled them from the river into my wrappings of power, creating my own storm. Only this one blinded, and inside, I was its black beating heart.

  It didn’t take long for Seth to notice. Sand billowed as high as seven-story buildings. It sloshed like liquid through the streets and over smaller dwellings, but as the god’s power butted up against the riverbank, his sand diverted, bleeding left and right, away from the Nile. He was the Lord of the Desert. The Nile is life. It always has been and always will be. Seth’s dead desert sand had no place to cross. He flung more sand at the river, again and again, his fury building with each pathetic strike. The Nile flowed on, immovable and impenetrable, stubbornly denying the god access.

  I tightened my hold on the souls. They spun and twisted, rising higher and swirling harder until their combined light was as blinding as any god’s.

  Recognizing how he’d trapped himself across the water, Seth packed his power away inside his armored body and approached the Nile. “You summon the old world against me?!” The howling winds carried his words and the fury inside them cross the water.

  He watched the souls blaze under my thrall and squirm inside the storm, fascinated and disgusted by my abhorrent power.

  Typical god, distracted by shiny things.

  The reanimated temple sphinx slammed into his back. Their vast paws brought the god down to his knee. Another launched from his right and another from his left. He flung them off, but more bounded in. While I had him pinned down, I called on the magic of the old world, of Karnak, of the long-dead spirit of the destroyed city Waset and the spirits of Duat. I called to all the parts that had crooned and whispered to me since I’d arrived in Egypt and to the parts that belonged in that forgotten time, that forgotten life. I threw everything I was, the souls of the dead, and everything I could be at the desert god, drowning his desert sands in light and darkness, drowning him in the Nile’s waters and my power. Drowning him in chaos and rage as I tested the truth of me.

  Seth’s eyes blazed red until the light, the ash and embers, the shadows and souls, tore all his unprepared chaotic power away. I am not a forgiving god, his voice mocked until it faded into nothing and his sands dispersed in the howling winds, carrying him out into the desert, far away from Luxor.

  I dropped to my knees in the Nile’s lapping waters, still clinging to the countless souls. “Rasirm,” Return. It took everything I had left to force them back into the water. I spoke the words again, sealing them from this world. Barred by the ferryman, I couldn’t go home, so I’d brought home to me. I wondered if that had been the ferryman’s intention all along.

  Karnak’s power nudged at my back, or it might have been a sphinx. I couldn’t find the energy to lift my head and check which.

  “Kraav,” I muttered to the temple—sleep—wishing I could do the same. The old power spilled from my grip and wound down, curling tight inside itself until all that was left was the temple’s rhythmic heartbeat. Not gone, just resting. Waiting.

  Seth wouldn’t forget this. He’d come for me, and Osiris, and anyone who dared stand in his way, but not yet. He’d learned a lesson here—I was not what he remembered—and so had I.

  I dragged my wet, cold body from the Nile and dropped into the mud beside Shukra. She stared at Luxor, the red dawn reflected in her dark eyes. Her hair hung in a knotted, sand-filled mess, and where sand had burned her face, tiny cuts wept blood. Unspoken arguments and accusations hung between us and festered in old wounds, but she’d come through when I needed her. That had to be worth something?

  We’d defeated the dark for another night, and day was breaking. Seth was gone for now. The skull was back where it belonged. I’d done a good thing, hadn’t I? Or had I just played a part in releasing a god worse than Osiris on the world? I’d willingly walked into that shrine, upholding the end of a bargain I didn’t remember making. I was sure that didn’t put me anywhere near good, and possibly on the side of bad.

  The sun climbed into the sky. The Nile flowed on. Crickets started up their morning chorus.

  “I try to make a difference, but I get this feeling I’m just making it worse.” I spoke softly, mostly to myself, but Shu breathed in and shifted, cocking her head to the side.

  “There should be a law against stupid people like you,” she replied. “It’s not the result of your actions, Acehole. It’s the intent behind them. Even I know that.”

  I smiled, but that smile soon died. Were good intentions enough? Too many truths clawed and stabbed at my thoughts. Too many memories, old and new, fake and real, fought for my attention. Soon… I’d deal with them soon, but until then, I pushed it all aside and sat in silence beside Shukra, watching the sun rise and wondering if it was too late to return to being Ace Dante—or if I even wanted to, given how much of a lie the man was.

  “Do you think anyone noticed”—I waved in the general direction of Luxor and the carnage the city must be waking to—“all that?”

  “You mean did anyone notice when a bunch of archaeologists tried to trap a goddess because of some thousand-year-old unrequited love story? A goddess who subsequently slaughtered said archaeologists and then took her unhinged pet soul eater on a rampage through the Valley of the Kings, releasing the Usurper on the world before said goddess conveniently vanished in time to dump the blame on that dumbass soul eater? Did anyone notice the storm of souls as bright as the sun in the middle of the night? Did anyone notice that monumental fuck up?”

  I scratched my chin and ran a hand through my hair, dislodging sand. “Yeah, that.”

  Shu snorted, climbed to her feet, scooped up the canopic jars, and stalked back toward the waiting car, skirting around one of the wayward motionless sphinxes that had frozen in her path.

  “Next time we come to Egypt,” she called back, “leave me in the locket.”

  Chapter 18

  The weekly planner spread acro
ss my office desk brimmed with appointments. Shu’s red, green, and yellow scrawls graded each appointment in urgency. Whichever way I looked at it, I’d be busy for the next few weeks. Down the hall, her phone rang. She picked it up in seconds. Another appointment probably. I’d never been so popular, and now I wished nobody knew my name so I could slink off and start fresh in another city, with another name and another life.

  I swirled vodka in a glass and stared at the planner. I might as well have been staring at a foreign language for all the sense the planner made. This office, this life, why was I still here?

  I set my drink down, lifted my hand, and dissolved my fingers into ash, keeping the outline of fingers and a thumb, but turning human skin into something very non-human.

  How long had the past me—the thing I didn’t want to believe—been in that shrine, sitting alone on that stone throne, surrounded by the dark? If Isis was right and I’d bargained with Seth to escape so he might take my place when Ra, Isis, and the rest of them cornered him, it must have been thousands of years.

  Destroying or hiding those memories made a twisted kind of sense. I’d reinvented myself into something else, the Nameless One, birthed from the River with only a sword and box at my side. I’d resurrected a new me and made it so damn good that even I didn’t know the truth. I couldn’t argue with the efficiency of that. It had worked—until Isis figured it out and started chipping away at my apparently evil master plan.

  Alysdair leaned against the wall, blade sheathed. Since Thoth had cursed the weapon to tempt me into killing him, I’d been at odds with the sword, but something else was shying me away from it. The sword knew me. It was from the old time, the old me. Was it any wonder it spoke to me every time I wielded it? It knew everything about me. And I wasn’t ready for that truth.

  I wasn’t ready for any of this. To be Ace Dante, the dog the gods all kicked as something to do, the guy who tried to believe he was good by saving one, maybe two people a month. How many souls did I have to save to redeem the blackest of them all, mine? The Godkiller, maneuvered into the role of enemy by Isis, and the embodiment of evil that was Apophis.