by Jane Cousins
They nodded in unison.
Okay, she had to admit with the way they moved, mirroring each other, even blinking at the same time, it was kind of chilling, but she wasn’t going to give in to her fears. She’d faced down more bullies in the last eighteen months than she had in her entire life and she had emerged stronger from the experience. She just had to keep thinking of Sek and Mot as just two more bullies. Or maybe change the way they viewed her.
“Which is which?” She looked between them trying to pinpoint any minor differences.
Of course they responded at the same time, in the same monotone incongruent Texan drawl.
“Sek.”
“Mot.”
She blinked, processing… Sek was the one threatening Erik with a knife, Mot had been the one slapping her. Cara noted the vaguest outline of a burn along the underside of Mot’s jawline, yeah, there was a way to tell them apart. The faint burn kind of looked like someone had held a super-heated blade against Mot’s throat, effectively branding him.
Nice to know they could be hurt, but just how could she use that information?
She met Erik’s gaze, he didn’t look terrified to have a serrated blade held inches away from his eye, if anything he just looked angry. She wanted to tell him not to play the hero, but she had a feeling he wouldn’t listen to her. Damn, she wished he hadn’t been dragged into this mess.
“So which one of you am I directly descended from?” It was one of her better ideas, play the relative card, happy reunion, fake some tears, somehow get loose, untie Erik and escape.
Sek and Mot shook their heads simultaneously in the negative. Eerie, if they’d opened their mouths they could have doubled as those creepy clowns you find at carnivals, where you win a stuffed toy by shoving ping pong balls in their mouths.
“You are our sister…”
“…Ruh’s get.”
“Ruh?” Cara frowned, fighting the urge to rub her forehead, in all her reading on Apep and ancient Egypt she hadn’t come across any mention of the God of Chaos having a daughter.
Sek and Mot shrugged in duet, then both grinned.
“She didn’t make it past her nineteenth summer…”
“…so sad.”
“There was a flood…”
“…she was swept away.”
“Nothing could be done…”
“…Father was inconsolable.”
“Unreasonably so…”
“…we dealt with it.”
Cara studied the two of them, those evil triumphant grins. “You killed her didn’t you? Your own sister.”
This time they gave her a dual indifferent shrug.
Cara pulled her knees up to her chest wrapping her arms over her knees, rocking slowly in place. Great, so much for appealing to the family connection.
“Enough talk…” Mot growled.
“…to business.” Sek finished.
Cara bit back a sigh, honestly, such drama kings, with their hard scowls and ominous pronouncements. Okay, she’d bite…
Chapter Fourteen
“Business?” Cara shook her head, unimpressed. “You make it sound like some sort of transaction when what you really want is my blood, isn’t it?”
“Yes and…”
“…no.”
Cara rolled her eyes. “Cryptic much?” She decided it would be pushing her luck to add on the word assholes, but she hoped they could tell by her scathing tone that it was implied.
“Perhaps this will clear…”
“…things up for you.” The two brothers nodded in unison.
Cara let out a small gasp of surprise as everything beneath her suddenly shifted. Not an earthquake, the Golem had pulled back the lid of Apep’s sarcophagus a few feet, with her still on it. The rasp of stone grinding against stone echoing around the room.
Eek, it was one thing to be on top of a closed ancient coffin, it was a whole different thing to be front row centre only two feet from the corpse of your mummified dead relative.
She didn’t want to look. She certainly didn’t mean to look, but what else could she do, but look. The lid hadn’t been pulled back very far, just enough to expose the head and shoulders of the desiccated mummified remains kept within. Except… the remains weren’t desiccated at all.
Cara found herself leaning forward for a better look. She was no expert, however, she’d done nothing but research ancient Egypt and death rituals for the past few weeks and it didn’t take an archaeologist to recognise that the mummy in the coffin was for some, as yet unexplained reason, as fresh as… she was guessing the day Apep was laid to rest in it… fascinating. And creepy… definitely creepy. Especially given the bright red fresh stains around where the mummy’s mouth must be, the cloth glistening wetly.
“Is that…” Her mouth felt too dry, she swallowed hard. “Is that fresh blood?” Merda, if this was a horror movie the mummy would stir and sit up about now, thankfully though it remained inert, but she daren’t move her eyes away from it, just in case.
“Yes.” The brothers answered in stereo.
“Whose… whose blood is it?” She frowned as something else in the sarcophagus caught her eye, carefully she leaned forward ever so slightly to get a better look. If she fell in there, she very much doubted she’d be emerging with her sanity left intact.
Around the mummy’s throat was a thick cord of what looked like barbed wire, it was jet black and seemed to pulse with some kind of power, and it wasn’t just around the mummy’s neck, she glimpsed another similar band encasing the mummy’s upper body and it wasn’t metal she realised… it was living, like a thorny vine. “And what’s the vine for?” She tossed her head back to glare at Sek and Mot, for some reason no longer afraid of looking away from the mummy’s shockingly fresh remains, thanking God all those cloth bindings kept the reality of the corpse itself hidden from her gaze.
“As you can see…”
“…we don’t need your blood.” The two grinned.
“Why are you feeding… him? Whose blood is it?” Cara’s fingernails pressed hard into her palms.
Mot hitched his pants higher out of habit. “Where do you think all that blood you and Xander sent us went?”
“You didn’t think we drank it, did you?” Sek chuckled, as the twosome suddenly brayed loudly in synchronised laughter.
“It was for… Apep?” Cara forced herself to say his name.
They nodded.
“Keeps him fresh…”
“…keeps him juiced with power.”
Cara’s eyes widened as understanding dawned. “Oh, ick, you’re like vampires… feeding off your father.”
Sek and Mot frowned, duel thunderous looks.
“Not like vampires…”
“… blood-sucking freaking lowlifes.”
“Oh yeah, because siphoning power off the entombed corpse of your father is much more highbrow and respectable. That blood is fresh. Xander’s long dead and it’s not mine… whose… is… it?”
“Xander was vain, easy to convince to donate more than just blood to our cause.” Mot chewed his tobacco in unison with his brother.
Sek took up the story. “We found some infertile couples and nine months later we had a handful of viable squalling blood banks.”
Mot shrugged. “Babies that thankfully need to donate blood regularly as they have a genetic propensity to a very rare disease.”
Cara was incensed. “Bullshit. You lied to those poor babies’ parents just so you could get your hands on their blood, just like you had Xander lie to me all those years ago.”
Her anger was only met with a careless unified shrug of dismissal.
“So if you have all the blood you need, why the hell do you need me at all?” She looked around the room. “I don’t see a witch, so you can’t be planning your grand awakening ritual.”
“There are…”
“…two ways to awaken our father.”
“One, is the blood of the ancestor, combined with the blood of a witch…”
> “The other is to find the chaos focus…”
“…and convince them to let our father’s essence enter them.”
Cara frowned. “Chaos focus?”
“Every century or so in our bloodline…”
“…one is born with the power to rain down chaos.”
“And you think I’m this chaos focus?” Cara stared at them in dismay.
“Why do you think we’ve been hot on your trail for the past eighteen months…”
“… because we liked masquerading as insurance investigators?”
Cara gasped. “You’re the bloodhounds that blamed me for everything and told the police I was a wanted criminal.”
Sek and Mot grinned. “At least we got paid whilst we were looking for you.”
“But you never did manage to catch me.” Cara couldn’t help but rub that small fact in.
“A frustrating turn of events, as you are undeniably the chaos focus for this century…”
“...given the wide trail of destruction you left in your wake.”
Cara would have loved to deny it but the memory of fires, sinkholes and any number of other freaky phenomena assailed her… so maybe she was the chaos focus for this century. “Okay, you got me. Maybe I am the family freak for this century but what makes you think I’ll just willingly open up myself to Apep? Especially since I’m guessing if I do that I’m essentially signing the death knell on my own personality.”
Only Sek smiled and it was all the more chilling as Mot’s face remained perfectly blank. “Let’s skip the whole discussion of why you should do this for us and go right to my favourite moment… the blood and coercion portion of the evening.”
Mot nodded. “It really is his favourite.”
Cara stiffened as Sek moved his wickedly sharp blade to rest against Erik’s exposed throat. She bit back the small terrified whimper that threatened to escape. All through her chat with Sek and Mot, Erik had remained stoically still, like a statue, but now with his head pulled back Cara could clearly see a pulse throbbing in the side of his throat. She couldn’t just sit here and watch Sek hurt Erik.
“Remember the wrought iron sign, Angel.” Erik grit out, tilting his head back as far as possible, trying to prevent hunks of his hair from being pulled out by the roots.
Cara read a lot, giving into the demands of terrorists did not guarantee the hostages freedom, there was nothing to stop Sek killing Erik once she agreed because then he would be just a superfluous witness.
“The screwdriver…” Erik kept talking. “The iron pot plant… the lightning bolt… the glass window.”
Wait… Cara’s eyes shot to Erik, what was he saying? All those accidents he mentioned had been because of her, was he blaming her? Nice time to bring it up if he was. Merda, it wasn’t like he’d been badly hurt or anything… or even scratched for that matter. Every time she thought she’d be calling for an ambulance he’d shrugged off her concerns as an overreaction.
Her eyes widened as her brain fired and made several connections. He… hadn’t… been… scratched. Okay, she didn’t know what sort of magic Erik Valhalla had, but she prayed that he was hinting that he was impervious to damage.
Dropping her stiff shoulders she shrugged, eyeing Sek and his knife. “Go ahead… let’s see what you’ve got.”
Sek’s dark bottomless eyes widened for a split second, he clearly hadn’t been expecting that response.
Pulling the knife away from Erik’s throat, Sek pondered over where to start. It made no sense to commence at the throat when you were aiming to build up the terror factor, stupid humans had a tendency to bleed out if you played with them too roughly so he needed to start slow, and build up to the finale. Hmm, so many options, an eye or an ear maybe. Enough blood and gore and Cara would soon be begging him to let her take on Apep… he just hoped that she was made of sterner stuff than the previous chaos focuses they had managed to track down over the past three thousand or so years and made this same mandatory offer to.
There was nothing more annoying than spending decades finding the right relative only for them to be so frightened or out of control that they bought the temple down on their own heads or caused the nearby dormant volcano to unexpectedly erupt… yes, nothing more annoying.
Grrr, it made Sek grind his teeth to think about the number of long lost relatives that had slipped through their fingers because like magnets they couldn’t resist the pull of a major chaos event. The Great London Fire came to mind, that earthquake in California, that rather spectacular asteroid crash in 1908 in the wilds of Russia. Honestly, sometimes it felt like Ruh’s progeny died tiresomely just to inconvenience their plan of awakening Apep.
This one, though, this little librarian was turning out to be made of surprisingly sterner stuff. Reminding him rather strongly of Ruh. Fuck, he had hated his sister. To this day, thousands of years later he couldn’t understand why his father had so favoured the girl when he had three strapping sons causing mayhem and bloodshed everywhere they went in his name.
A pang of lost shot through him, he missed his brother Bal, thank the dark skies the witch that had killed him was dead, she deserved no better fate.
“Last chance little girl. I find sometimes when they start screaming… really… really loud, that I sometimes can’t hear so good…?” He glanced towards Cara, who though pale met his gaze with a steady glare. He couldn’t help but smile, sometimes he loved his work, most days really, when he and Mot were out there causing pain and misery. “So…” He mused out loud. “…where to start carving? How about the wing?”
Cara watched as Sek swiped the sharp serrated blade forward with a rather showy sweeping gesture. The blade making a whistling sound as it sliced through the air. She wanted to close her eyes but Erik deserved more than that, so she forced herself to watch as the knife connected with the flesh of his upper arm, sending white sparks flying upwards as the shriek of metal striking metal caused everyone but the sand creature to flinch.
“What the…” Sek stared down in astonishment at the blade. Several of the serrated points had been torn away. He glared at Erik’s arm, not a scratch on the man, though his t-shirt sleeve had been sliced in half.
“What was that?” Mot leaned over to get a better view.
Sek didn’t stop to answer, yes his blade was damaged and he had no idea why, but it was still sharp enough for what he had in mind.
Cara watched on in confusion, she had seen sparks and there had been that strange metallic sound but thankfully no blood. She wanted to sag forward in relief, Erik was unhurt… for the moment, watching in horror as Sek’s face flooded with vicious intent, his hand jerking forward and back at rapid speed, stabbing at Erik’s upper body gleefully. It should have been horrible, but every time the blade made contact with Erik’s body it made a ringing clang whilst Erik continued to kneel impervious and unharmed, except for his poor shredded t-shirt.
“What…”
“…the...?”
Sek, panting hard, held aloft the chipped, bent and practically mangled knife. Mot crouched over to get a better view, the brothers frowning in unison. Sek’s hand was shaking with anger and the amount of force he’d expended pounding the knife into Erik. It had felt like he’d been punching into a brick wall with his bare fists.
Fuck, he hated these magic types. You never knew what kind of tricks they had up their sleeve.
He and Mot shared a glance, having the same thought. If they couldn’t use the long haired muscle bound freak to coerce the librarian into willingly let Apep’s essence use her body as a vessel, then their plan was currently circling the crapper and someone had just pressed flush.
“Fuck…” Sek hurled the useless knife away, sending it skidding across the polished cement floor. It was a careless, caught up in the moment, angry reaction. He should have considered the consequences as the knife shot across the floor and out through the large main doors of the Egyptian wing, disrupting the infrared beam as it sailed past.
Five seconds
later their walkie talkies beeped.
Mot, glaring at his brother, hauled his out and started talking into it as he walked off towards the exit.
“We have to go have a discussion with our supervisor.” Sek stared down into Erik’s eyes, his expression grim. “Just so you know, you get up… it…” Sek flicked his eyes in the direction of the sand monster. “Will rip her head off. Same goes for you…” He now glared at Cara. “You get down from there and it will…” He paused for a moment assessing what threat he could use considering the lack of damage he’d managed to impart so far on Erik. Suddenly Sek’s dark eyes gleamed and that shit-eating grin once more split his face. “You move missy and we’ll find out how much sand your boyfriend here can swallow.”
Shit, Erik dropped his head, his skull ached from where Sek had spent the last twenty minutes or so trying to pull large chunks of his hair out by the roots. He turned his head, watching Sek hustle off in the same direction that Mot had taken.
“You okay?”
They both asked the question at the same time, instinctively recoiling as it reminded them of their captors.
“Let’s not do that ever again.” Erik flinched.
“Agreed.” Cara wrinkled her nose in distaste. “I’m fine except for some bruises and the fact that I’m nose to almost nose with an unnervingly lifelike mummy.”
“Don’t forget the sand monster at your back. It’s like an old black and white horror film.” Erik rubbed his bound hands over his scalp, never taking his eyes off the creature standing only a foot or so behind Cara, unmoving, but at the same time its outer layer of sand rippling, flowing and swirling.
“All that’s missing is the wolfman and we’d have a trifecta of bad guys to deal with.” Cara glanced back, shuddered and shifted her gaze forward once more. She’d much rather look at a dishevelled Erik, who despite his shredded t-shirt somehow still managed to look ruggedly handsome. “Are you really alright? The knife, it didn’t cut you?” Cara frowned studying his upper body, not a cut, not a bruise, not a scratch. “How did you manage it? Magic? How does it work?”