The Jackal Prince (Caller of the Blood - Book 2)

by McIlwraith, Anna

  There was movement among the ranks of the reanimated jackals, and then they were pushed forward: Red Sun, dragged unconscious into the open, flesh hanging off his face in strips like something out of a bad zombie movie, leather jacket gone, bare barrel chest sheeted with blood; Felani, small and naked and caked with dirt and something thick and dark, chin high and eyes on fire; Andres, barely walking, a patch of scalp and hair torn away from his temple; and Alexi, unrecognizable, eyes wide-set and wholly reptilian, nose flattened, jaw twisted and hanging at an impossible angle as though frozen in a silent scream of animal fury. His shirt was gone, and something that looked like a spear poked out of his right pectoral, a thick fall of blood and gore laying a track down his torso. As Emma watched, Alexi’s throat worked, and his jaw hitched — he was swallowing. His shoulders heaved. His yellow eyes were dull.

  Khai made an amused sound. “You see, Emma,” he purred, “Once we seized your special friend here, everyone seemed curiously cooperative. Reluctant to fight. I wonder why that is.”

  Emma tore her eyes from her friends — where were the others? -— and met Khai’s eyes. Something inside her burst, some membrane made of magic, and Kahotep began to flow into her — his boiling, incandescent rage, the terrifying calm that rode it. Silken razorblades flying through her bloodstream — her body connected to his through spirit, and his body calling to his warriors, jackals who should have been his to command. His blood — through hers — called to them.

  Emma spoke, and her voice was his; they spoke together as one. “We’ll kill you.”

  The others didn’t make it, Fern breathed in her mind, mental voice small, touch feather-light — too tired even to balk at what he found when he reached for her mind. And Telly never showed up.

  Khai’s face split in a maniac grin. “Kill me?” He laughed, and his drowning black eyes oozed darkness. “Oh, I don’t think you will.” His voice was the gurgle of eyeless things that wait in the dark beneath beds, crawling between Emma’s ears. The legions of crumbling jackal warriors shifted restlessly; Tarik watched his king with beetle-black eyes. “No,” said Khai, “I don’t think you will be doing much of anything to me, not while I hold the life of your beloved in my hands.”

  Emma felt something icy and foreign brush her mind, and forced herself not to look at Alexi. Kahotep stiffened with surprise; he felt the touch too.

  Not yet, she pleaded, willing the serpent priest to understand. It can’t all be lost, not yet. She had to believe that. Kahotep believed it.

  “Now,” said Khai in his gelatinous voice, stalking slowly toward Emma and Kahotep. “I will give you a choice. You can either choose to die here, and all your friends along with you, or —” He laughed and fixed Emma with a look that made her feel dirty, reminded her that she’d lost her tank top and her bra was soaked through. “Or you can give yourself to me.”

  Emma blinked. Kahotep’s mind raged against hers, a flat, blind negation. Khai came closer.

  “Oh, I know you’ve made the pledge,” he hissed. “But I want the real goods, caller of the blood.” His tongue flicked out, the golden points of his pupils dancing like sprites. “I want you beneath me. I want you to submit to me. I want to own you, little one.” Khai grinned again, cocked his head. “Yes or no?”

  Emma breathed in, tasted the scent of rotting flesh. Never. She met his eyes and prepared to lie for her life, for all their lives.

  “NO!” Fern tore away from Tarik and flew a few paces on legs that should never have worked before Tarik was on him. The sound of Tarik’s fist colliding with the side of Fern’s head was like meat and bone thrown at a brick wall. Emma screamed and Kahotep held her back. Tarik straddled Fern and grabbed him by the hair, but still Fern struggled, long limbs thrashing, hands and arms turning dark with the coming of the change.

  “Tarik,” said Khai calmly. “I think it’s time to put him out before he changes and gets himself into trouble. Show Emma just what we’re capable of if she doesn’t feel like cooperating.”

  Tarik didn’t even look up, just nodded. Kahotep’s arms turned to steel around Emma’s body; she strained, breathless, mind warring blindly with his, but there was never time to stop it. Tarik reached out and put both hands on Fern’s head, pushed his face to the ground, ignoring Fern’s flailing limbs and pinning him with what Emma knew had to be formidable strength — and then power flared out from Tarik, slick and tasting of something chemical like gasoline. Fern went limp.

  And his mind went dark.

  Tarik stood up and walked away from Fern’s crumpled body.

  “Fern?” Emma’s voice was very small. He was still, not even the whisper of a shallow breath filling his lungs, expanding his ribcage. He looked young and rumpled and broken. Fern?

  “He’s not dead,” Khai said casually. “Just seems that way, doesn’t it?” He laughed again, thick and mocking and triumphant.

  Tarik came to stand by his master’s side. “He’s not much to look at, is he?” The king’s vizier sniffed, palmed rain from his forehead and flicked it away. “His mind was weak. Not like the serpent priest.” Tarik’s eyes glinted, and then darkened when Emma didn’t react — but behind Tarik, Alexi’s head came up, and his sulfurous yellow eyes swam with growing awareness.

  The jackal king made an appreciative noise, but Emma didn’t hear, couldn’t care — the world was falling away under the crushing weight of the knowledge that something vital had just been torn out of her.

  Emma, Kahotep’s thoughts echoed wordlessly in her mind, in her blood, in the marrow of her bones. He’s not dead.

  She wasn’t listening. She heard, and she understood, but there was a wound in the fabric of her soul, in the meat and the blood and the shining light of it, and it had Fern’s shape. He belonged there — living, breathing, spirit wedged against hers. It was so much worse than the shielding spell, so much worse than not being able to touch his mind. He lay before her eyes, like something soft and fragile, and he was gone, and it didn’t matter what she knew or what any of them said, because her heart could feel the lack of him and something she didn’t have the power to stop was screaming inside her — and the voice that answered it spoke a language she didn’t understand, spoke with the cold breath of stars.

  “Wake him up.” Her voice was darker than her body was capable of making it.

  Khai chuckled. “I don’t think —”

  “Wake him up.”

  She heard the clack of Khai’s teeth, the rustle of the dead jackals shifting their feet. “Give yourself to me.”

  She looked at the jackal king, and a cold, whistling emptiness sang in the space behind her eyes. “Wake. Him. Up.”

  Khai’s nostrils flared. His bleeding black eyes narrowed. He started toward her with rot-black outstretched talons and an army of dead jackals following him — the rest merely watched, eyes wide with horror, bodies paralyzed by Kahotep’s hold on them. But Tarik moved to flank his master.

  “I’ve had enough of this,” Khai hissed.

  Emma stepped away from Kahotep. “So have I.”

  And then her control snapped, and she screamed, and magic rushed to fill the space where her sanity used to be — power slammed into her and she reached for it, drinking it down, dragging it into the emptiness inside — power like black lakes, oceans of darkness, rivers of midnight poured into her veins and remade with the raging fury of her Will. She had all the time in the world to watch, through a shimmering haze of magic, Khai’s face change — eyes like pits of hellfire, face a mask of evil, dawning realization transforming his features as he opened his mouth and roared something unintelligible at her.

  Except, she understood — understood the words because Kahotep understood them — understood the meaning because the black force filling up her body understood it. Khai lifted his arms and insects poured out of his mouth, and the words continued to come, a curse, an invocation, a mantra older than the pyramids. Khai called out to the power of the dead in the name of Anubis, drawing it down from the space betwe
en the worlds.

  But the dark inside of Emma reared up and said no, and the night was suddenly alive with the flaring sizzle of shriveling insects, and Khai’s mouth snapped shut.

  He staggered. Then he straightened, slowly, meeting Emma’s gaze with eyes that were no longer weeping pits of blackness but haggard and golden and full of jagged hatred.

  He opened his mouth and snarled at her, and as though it were the final signal his army charged toward her. She felt the breath leave Kahotep’s body as though his lungs were her own; then he let go of his hold on the rest of the jackals. They leapt to attack and suddenly Khai and Tarik were fighting off their own soldiers.

  Kahotep’s arms encircled her, and she didn’t fight. Instead she gathered up the power raging through her and thrust it down the conduit forged by the pledge. Blinding yellow lights exploded behind her eyes; fire rushed through her in a searing flood, and Kahotep’s spirit absorbed it, all of it in one huge, sucking back-draft. She heard him gasp.

  His voice was music full of sunshine in her mind. Only the dark can call the light, he said, and the words pulsated with warmth and wonder and knowing.

  But Emma was cold. Colder than the stars. And somebody owed her their life.

  Telly felt the world tilt. Nephthys stopped chanting. Anubis said her name, and she turned her dark face up to him, awareness glittering in the blinding light of her eyes.

  “Only the dark can call the light,” she said, and her voice was the deafening crack of thunder, the sound of the fabric of time torn apart, the sound of destruction. She was the goddess of battle and death. Her consort was the guide of the dead, the opener of the way — but she was death itself. She was the destination. She was the darkness between the worlds, the void — and the void in the caller of the blood called to her.

  Nephthys stood, turned to Telly, and the stars collapsed around him. He sailed through the darkness between dimensions…

  …and materialized on the rooftop, naked and blinking, the siren-song of Emma’s marked hand calling to him — and then he saw her through the surging ranks of dead jackals. For an endless moment his eternal heart stopped.

  Kahotep held her, but only just, power lifting her feet from the ground. She was a stormy thing of fury, an unrecognizable demon with the face a girl — screaming to tear the sky down, outstretched arms turning long and black with shadows. Her eyes were drowning orbs of darkness, hair whipping around her head in living wet tendrils, lifted by a wind that belonged to another world — a world made of stars, where the goddess of darkness reached out to the only thing that could save her consort and her people, a mortal girl with a broken heart and a destiny written in the deepest mists of time.

  Then Telly glimpsed Fern’s beaten form through the chaos. He looked back at Emma — transformed by rage and magic — and he understood.

  What he didn’t understand — not yet — was why Kahotep was a blazing, man-shaped column of fiery light, power shining out of him in a blinding aura, his body transformed into a golden corona — framing Emma’s flickering darkness, like a total eclipse of the sun.

  37

  Dead warriors surged forward, and Emma caught a glimpse of Khai through the bodies — and then Tarik’s whirling form, sword slashing through the night.

  She darted away from Kahotep without a second thought, slamming into the first warrior with her right hand outstretched. The jackal blew into thousands of stinking pieces, the mark on her hand glowing red-hot and calling to Telly — and then she looked up and saw him. His eyes went wide and white. He opened his mouth as if to call to her, but then Kahotep was in front of her, his body blazing like a torch — dark skin glowing the color of honey, surrounded by an aura that jumped and spiked like a forest-fire. He flung out an arm with talons for fingers and felled a rank of warriors and turned to her, hair flying in dark streamers against the golden light radiating hotly out of him. Looking into his eyes was like looking into the sun.

  Get back! His voice boomed in her mind, the sound of a bomb going off underwater, thick and far-away, and she ignored it because there was a screaming black hole inside her and it wanted Khai dead — Tarik dead — every single last one of them dead and it would not stop until nothing stood between her and what rightfully belonged to her.

  Emma DON’T! Kahotep swept her back from the charging warriors, lifted his head, and his blinding eyes found Khai. He is mine, do you hear me? This is the way it must be. Kahotep opened his mouth — jaws lengthening, white light filling the gold — and roared a deafening challenge at his uncle. The sound cut through the wails and screams of undead warriors as they rushed Kahotep and were cut to ribbons of rotting hide and crumbling bone, their scattered parts flopping and crawling through water and mud.

  Khai turned, frantically searching, and tore a sword from one of his warriors. When he turned back to meet Kahotep, his face was mottling with the change, the muscles of his neck standing out like ropes, lips stretching away from torn gums and sharp teeth. He lifted his face to the pouring sky and howled, and then he charged.

  Kahotep broke away from Emma at a run. She whirled to meet the coming warriors, eyes searching for Fern’s body. She thought she heard Red Sun’s voice, his bull’s roar rising above the screams and shrieking wind, but then a primal animal howl drowned it out, and an entire rank of warriors fell like cards, twitching and screaming, Telly standing ankle-deep in the bodies with white light slashing out from his eyes and lightning crackling in his blazing halo of hair.

  Lightning forked down from the sky, cutting through the darkness, frying jackals where they stood.

  Emma glimpsed Alexi behind Telly, fighting his way through the jackals, but they continued to pour out of the stairwell, boiling up like a foul unstoppable flood. Then suddenly something black burst through the crush of reanimated bodies, something huge and rippling like velvet — a jaguar with paws the size of frying pans and eyes the pure bottomless blue of jungle lagoons. The jaguar king razed a path through the reanimated jackals, two smaller golden jaguars moving up to flank him; his massive head turned from side to side, scanning until storm-blue eyes stopped on her.

  Then she caught sight of Tarik, and the rest of the world went away.

  She went for him. Her fist — her whole forearm, mottled black — flew through a long-muzzled skull as warriors fell into her path, stinging heat slashed at her arm, her shoulder, her thigh, but she didn’t care, couldn’t feel it, never paused to question the shadow boiling up inside, the solid weight of the power of the goddess, the power of her fury.

  Jackals disintegrated like twisted paper dolls as she tore through them. Claws raked her side and she barely felt them. Tarik saw her; hesitation flickered in his dark eyes for a moment, and then he saw his chance to tilt the odds in his favor, and he turned away from his king and charged her.

  Out of the corner of her eye, Emma saw Khai bring his sword up; something shining, blazing like a sun and shaped like Kahotep, slammed into him, and she felt the blade go through Kahotep’s side, felt Khai’s claws rake across Kahotep’s face, felt the sickening pressure as one talon scraped across the bone of Kahotep’s upper cheekbone and popped through the jelly of his eye — but the screams weren’t his, they were Khai’s.

  Dark, fierce joy shot through her. Kahotep’s triumphant roar came out of her mouth. Tarik hit her like a truck and rode her backwards, punching the air out of her lungs, wet stone grazing a layer of skin off her back — but the pain was nothing compared to the white-hot agony of Tarik’s sword cleaving a path through the meaty resistance of her ribcage.

  She heard a jaguar scream like its heart was being torn out. Lightning slammed to the stones inches from her face. She blinked up into the rain, unable to breathe, could only watch as Tarik reared above her. There was blood running down his chest in watery dribbles and his eyes were wide. His gaze flicked down her body and then his head came up, looking at something Emma couldn’t see, but she could hear and feel the thunderous footfalls coming toward them across the expan
se of the rooftop and she knew they were coming for him. There wasn’t much time.

  “Tarik.” Her voice was a harsh thread of sound. He looked down at her and she saw his thoughts in his eyes: hold her as a hostage or kill her outright?

  She gathered her strength, power crackling through her veins, pumping through her traumatized body — Kahotep’s power, the power of the goddess, the power of the walking god called through his mark — even the tickling edge of the jaguar king’s magic. She knew what to do with it, all of it.

  “You’re going to tell me how to get Fern back,” she whispered, “And you’re going to give me what I came here for.”

  Then she slapped her right hand to his cheek, and called to the force that lived beneath his skin, the force that brought the beast. The change.

  Shapechanging energy sprang from him to her — the musk of fur and the feel of long legs pounding sandy ground, the taste of blood and wind and monsoon, the pulse of the change beating to the time of his heart, soaring above the beast, waiting to bring it forth — all of it swirling up to meet her. So easy, the essence of his life-force like freezing thread in her hands, spooling off the loom of his body as though there were no end to it. But she knew there was.

  Tarik squealed and tried to scramble away from her and she dug her fingers into his face and held on. He dragged her forward and the sword wobbled, sliding, finally sloshing out of her body and clattering to the stone rooftop in a shower of her blood. The pain was so immense that it swallowed the world for a second and she was suspended in black and white lights, but the steady shriek and pulse of Tarik’s energy drew her back and her eyes popped open and she found herself sprawled across him, hands pressed to his chest, bare skin slippery with blood and rain. She hooked her fingers into claws and steadied herself with fingernails in Tarik’s thrumming flesh, pushed herself up and braced.

  Something in her upper torso moved — something internal — and her next breath was liquid and crimson.