“Yours?” I thumbed toward the paintings like it was no big deal.
“This symbol?” she asked, ignoring my question while poking at the bloodless palm.
“Have you seen it before?”
“No.” She placed the arm on the table and leaned in close. “The jackal suggests an underworld origin, but the snake for a head? That’s new. Do you know it?”
“No.”
She’d known me long enough to recognize the half lie but didn’t push it.
“What are you going to do with this place when we move on?” I asked. And we would move on, probably soon if we couldn’t pay the rent on the business. Neither of us had roots anywhere. Nobody and no place Osiris could use against us. This apartment, the commitment—it wasn’t like Shu to make such an obvious mistake.
She sighed harshly. “I don’t know. Maybe I’ll sell it or rent it out. Do you want to know about my living arrangements or your witch’s arm?”
“You know it’s from a witch?”
“The background magic is fading, but it’s there.”
“Can you tell me if there’s any additional magic?”
“Besides the witch’s personal brand, I presume?” Turning the arm, she probed at the long, painted nails and noticed one had snapped off. “She fought.” Shu’s nostrils flared, and whatever she smelled was familiar enough to pique her interest. She moved down the forearm to the cut. “It’s very clean. Straight through. Takes a lot of strength to sever an arm without hacking at it.”
She’d know.
“You brought this straight here, to me?” she asked. “No detours?”
“Straight here, but my new friend Kenny might have shared it with his coven.”
Her sharp sorceress’s mind whirred behind her eyes. She straightened and leaned back against the counter. “I can see whose magic touched her. But first I’ll have to separate any additional touches and that might take a while.”
“How long?”
“A few hours if Mafdet has the few ingredients I need.”
“Can you trace the arm’s owner?”
“Yes. You think she’s alive?”
“We get paid either way.”
Shu’s blood-red lips curved up. “So you did agree to work for the witches?”
Shu didn’t know about the witches’ attempt to trap and bleed magic out of me. We’d tolerated each other for centuries, but I didn’t go around telling my enemies about my weaknesses. Shu was stuck as human, but that didn’t make her any less the demon sorceress she’d been when I condemned her soul. Time heals a lot of wounds, but not all, and revenge festers the longest.
“The client had a gun to Cujo’s head.” The mark had sealed the deal, but Shu didn’t need to know my interest in the symbol was personal.
Her smile tightened, verging on a scowl. “How did he know Cujo’s connected to you? Cujo’s careful to bury his tracks.”
“Witches,” I grunted. “As much as their magic is borrowed, sometimes they get lucky.” Like the time they got lucky with me. “I’ll leave the hand in your hands.”
“Funny,” she deadpanned.
Stepping around the chaos toward the door, I added, “Let me know what you find, and when I get back, I expect all five fingers to be intact.”
“Where are you going?”
“To take Osiris’s tablet back and ask why a bunch of priests went to all the trouble of stealing it last night.” And convince him to let me out of the deal to kill a god, I added silently.
“Priests?” I heard the frown in her voice but didn’t look back. “Are you sure? I didn’t think the gods still sought out worshippers at least not in the last few centuries.”
“You do your job.” I waved over my shoulder. “And I’ll do mine.” And we’ll meet somewhere in the middle, like always.
The rain had started up again, pattering against the steel steps and lifting dry dust smells off the street. I closed Shu’s apartment door and lingered on the top step, letting the cool drizzle streak down my face.
Shu’s apartment, this building… I didn’t know Shu had bought a property and I should have. Just because she hadn’t gotten up to any mischief in the last few centuries didn’t mean she wasn’t working on something. I needed to pay more attention to her. Complacency could turn even the most powerful into fools.
The back of my neck itched, senses prickling. The errant gaze was back.
I could head back to my office, pick up the tablet, and make my way to Osiris’s mansion. Whoever had taken a liking to me would either follow me or not. Or I could take a walk and see if they were brave enough to get close. Then we might have ourselves a discussion involving Alysdair. Since I’d prefer to watch paint dry than go to Osiris’s, a walk it was.
The rain had driven most of the pedestrian traffic indoors. Those left shielded themselves with umbrellas. Nobody noticed Alysdair’s obvious handle sticking up from my coat collar. If anyone did, they’d likely dismiss it. This was modern New York, where anything went. These days, I didn’t even have to grow my hair out to hide the handle. Cops were more worried about abandoned backpacks and no-fly lists. Still, I didn’t want to invite trouble unless I had to.
I strode down Thirty-Fourth Street, passing hotel entrances flanked by neatly trimmed potted shrubs, and slowed alongside a row of high construction panels. Inside, heavy machinery sat idle in pools of murky water. I checked the street both ways and pulled at the gate, straining the padlock and chain. Certain no one was eyeing me, I stepped through the gap.
The clatter and burr of construction in other plots joined New York’s background noise, while the rain muffled the rest. I ran a hand through my hair and flicked water from my fingers. Let whoever was tailing me show themselves.
A rock was pitched over the fencing and landed with a thwump in a puddle. I got enough of a look at it to realize it was in fact a canopic jar before it exploded in a blast of furnace-like heat and blinding light. Small pebbles from inside the jar peppered my coat and buried themselves in the mud at my feet. Then those black pebbles started twitching and digging themselves to the surface.
Scarabs.
If I gave them a chance, they’d burrow through my clothes, into my skin, and drill deep, eating their way to my heart. Once there, they’d turn themselves, and my flesh, into stone.
I reached for Alysdair but stopped, knowing the sword wouldn’t do any good against hundreds of scarabs. What I needed was fire, not a blade.
A scarab scuttled over my boot. I kicked it off. Another moved by my shoulder. I shucked off my coat and flung it aside. The scarabs chittered loudly, their clicks and gristly chewing audible over the rain. I stomped on one and then another.
“Ace Dante.”
Three of the four priests I’d met last night were back. I pulled Alysdair free as a second jar shattered behind me and more scarabs swarmed toward me.
I thrust out a hand. “San!” Stop!
The scarabs did, all of them, frozen in the mud. But the short, sharp spell had left me exposed to something far worse.
The priests’ words rose up in unison. “Truka sros dvarr em sra imdarvurrd, I bemd aeui, bae raors, bae kuir, bae kemd.”
A binding spell designed specifically for trapping underworld monsters. Its coils wound around me, pulling tighter and holding me rigid. The spellword I’d thrown at the scarabs held, but it wouldn’t for much longer, and once my magic snapped and my spellword failed, those scarabs would overwhelm me.
I’d tried to prevent this. I’d warned the priests off. What was about to happen was their own doing.
The power buried deep inside me rose up. So much of it…too much. New York, the priests, the rain, the mud, the scarabs—it all fell away until it was just me and the soul-pounding pressure to devour. I fixed my gaze on a priest, the nervous one who’d done all the talking before, and let the words come: “Tra k-dae amcru-kak sra ksork, kosec amcru-kak esk kassrakamsk, omd kae kuir amcru-kak aeuirk.”
With the sound of the ages-old spe
ll falling from my lips, the pressure built.
The priest glared back, his words—the binding—tumbling over and over, but he wouldn’t win. He could have a hundred priests beside him and he wouldn’t win. You can’t beat the Soul Eater at his own game.
My words sounded in one long endless stream, burrowing deep into his soul, where I hooked in. He wasn’t entirely good, not this one. Had I weighed him, it would’ve been a close call. Had I followed the rules, the judgment would’ve been up to Ammit, but she was gone and I wasn’t my mother. I yanked, pulling back in body and mind, and tore both the light and the dark from him. He didn’t scream, didn’t make a sound. He just collapsed as though someone had pulled the plug. He wasn’t dead, just empty. Undead.
Down his soul went, sinking inside and filling me up with power, so much power. It throbbed through me, dark and heady. And I needed it. Gods, it felt good to be me again.
A blur of movement dashed so quickly it appeared to carve right through the second and third priests. Their lives were sundered before either could utter a scream. I reached for their souls, hungry for more, but a wave of fire poured around me. I recoiled, and the stop spellword ceased.
The scarabs? I braced, expecting them to scurry out of the flames, but nothing emerged from the fire, and as quickly as the flames had come, they were gone again, fizzling out in the muddy puddles, having wiped away all evidence of the scarabs, but not the bodies.
And not the woman with the close-cropped black hair standing over me, hand planted on her hip, and an eyebrow arched over familiar cat-green eyes.
“Cat?!”
The cat. The one who’d taken it upon herself to make my office her home. I’d know those eyes anywhere. She’d spent months glaring down at me from my top shelf. Only now, she was without a doubt a person, with all the correct female parts in all the equally correct places.
“My face is up here,” she said in a rich, smooth voice like well-aged bourbon.
Power trilled through me, the newly devoured soul buzzing in my veins. I should have lifted Alysdair and demanded to know everything about the shifter, but all I could do was laugh. My black office cat was a person, and the priests had tried to trap me. Me?! It was all pretty damn funny.
Cat tut-tutted at my hilarity and searched through the pockets of the dead priests. “Nothing. No ID. No wallets.” Her growl was all cat and curiously familiar. “Who were they and why did they attack you?”
I’d regained some composure, but the high still blurred through my thoughts, scattering what little common sense I had. I should have been asking her the same questions, but she was naked, and wet, and bloody, with glistening fingernails like razorblades. “You were a person, all this time?”
“Still am,” she said, her tone dry and deeply unimpressed.
A car horn blasted right outside the construction site, and all at once I remembered we were at risk of being discovered next to two dead bodies.
The first body had four deep gashes running from his groin to his gullet. She’d disemboweled him. Clearly, Cat had claws. I kept her in my peripheral vision as I plunged Alysdair into the body and let the sword devour the soul before it was lost. Resisting taking it for myself was harder than it should have been. I cursed Osiris for knocking me off the wagon months ago.
“Daquir,” I uttered. Embers burned up the body, and the breeze tossed around the ashes. The second body went up the same way. The third lay face down in the dirt. Not dead, but he might as well have been. I’d yanked out his soul while he was still alive. Something I hadn’t done in a long, long time. Something I’d once enjoyed in the underworld.
I plunged Alysdair into his heart. “Daquir.”
Cat was watching me. If she wanted an explanation, she wouldn’t get one because I didn’t have one. Devouring the souls of the dead was one thing. Devouring the souls of the living was exactly the sort of “accident” that had landed me cursed for all eternity.
We stared at each other the way we had many times since she’d arrived. She looked as unimpressed now as she had during the last three months. Her green eyes clashed with the blackness of her hair and milky white skin. Her mouth probably hid a dazzling smile, but I was getting nothing but a severe line of disapproval.
“Do you have a name?” I asked. “Or shall I continue calling you Cat?”
She turned her head away, apparently bored. Her personality hadn’t improved since turning into a person. She’d probably continue to shove stuff off my desk while I watched.
“They were following you since last night,” she said.
“So were you?”
Slowly, dangerously, that green-eyed gaze found mine again. “I’ve been watching you for three months.”
It sounded like, in her head, there might have been a “peon” tacked on to the end of that sentence. Could it be I’d met someone who hated me more than Shu?
“These priests? That was a binding spell they were using? Why were they trying to capture you?”
“They’re priests, so who knows? I probably pissed off their god. I have a knack for doing that.”
They probably wanted Osiris’s tablet back, but Cat wasn’t a cat and I was on my back foot, reeling from that revelation. I kept my eyes front and center on her smooth little nose because I couldn’t look at her eyes for long without digging into them, and I damn well couldn’t look at the rest of her if I wanted to string a coherent sentence together.
“You’re welcome, by the way, for the fire.” She turned her back and retraced my tracks in the mud, heading toward the gate. For a second, I wondered if she’d forgotten she was naked, but in the last step, the air popped, a light flashed too brightly, forcing me to look away, and she vanished. Scooping up my soaked coat, I followed, just a few steps behind, but by the time I was back on the street, there was no sign of Cat, on four legs or two.
I worked my hands into fists, trying to quell the high buzzing through me, and then flipped up my collar and headed back to my bike. I had to get the tablet back to Osiris and find out why these priests wanted it so badly. Then maybe I’d figure out what the hell was going on with me and why I’d so easily devoured a man’s soul before killing him.
Three months. Cat had been sitting on my top shelf, watching me, for three whole months. Why?
On the ride back to the office, I tried to recall all the things she might have seen or heard. Nothing out of the ordinary came to mind, or at least nothing beyond the out of the ordinary things Shu and I usually encountered. A few wayward spirits, a summoning gone wrong, black-market spells changing hands. We’d had a spate of missing pets, but they’d turned out to be snacks for one of the many alligators roaming the sewers. I’d been meaning to talk with Osiris about those. Maybe I’d bring it up when I handed his tablet over and told him I wasn’t killing Thoth.
I opened my office door and found Cat sitting on the edge of my desk, naked, again. I didn’t know how she’d gotten back so fast, and at the sight of her, I lost the ability to ask.
“You’re very distracting.” I closed the door, hoping we didn’t get any unexpected clients dropping by, and strode to the tablet resting where I’d left it on the shelf. It occurred to me, as I tucked the tablet under my arm, that she’d seen more of me in the last three months than anyone else. We’d had many one-sided conversations where I’d discuss a case, or blow off some steam, or drink my way to the bottom of a bottle while she peered down at me from her shelf.
“Where’s Bastet?” she finally asked in that long, drawn-out drawl of hers.
“How should I know?” I spared her a glance, making sure I kept my gaze from wandering into unknown territory. She had a look about her that deemed me unworthy. “You’re one of hers?”
Cat, predictably, didn’t answer, but she did bounce her bare foot off the floor and drum her pointed fingernails against the desk. If she were Bastet’s, that likely meant she’d learned to disembowel more than priests. Bastet trained warriors, not pussycats.
“I’ve been tryi
ng to reach her…” I continued, skirting around my desk and working hard at ignoring Cat’s lack of clothing.
“I know. I saw your emails.”
“You snooped through my emails?”
She twisted at the waist, moving the way a snake might uncoil. Her slow, measured breaths lifted her breasts. Her face, though, that might as well have been carved from stone for all the expression it showed. “I know everything about you, Ace Dante.”
I highly doubted that. Leaning back against my filing cabinet—I couldn’t sit in my chair while she was sprawled two feet away at eye level—I scratched at my nose. “That porn was research.”
Her pink lips didn’t even twitch. Cat was hardcore.
“Three months ago, my queen came to your office. I came with her.”
I thought back and remembered Bast leaning against my desk, telling me about her missing women, but as I fought to recall more, the memory shied away. One thing was for certain: my ex-wife had been alone.
“People ignore cats,” Cat explained. “Though I do recall you almost shut the door on my tail.”
Ah, the nuisance cat I’d almost kicked right before meeting Bast. That had been her.
Cat hopped off the desk and cruised around my office, looking around as though this was the first time she’d really seen it on two legs instead of four.
“Bastet asked for your help. You refused. She left.” She poked at a plastic potted plant and watched it shift sideways, almost—but not quite—pushing it off the edge. “As far as I can ascertain, you were the last person to see her.”
Gods disappearing was nothing new. Cat gods were forever wandering off, returning on their own terms years or decades later. Besides, Bastet could look after herself. She didn’t need me hunting her down, and I’d argue she didn’t need Cat on her tail either, but I quite liked my guts on the inside.
“Three months isn’t long. She’s probably—”
“The murders stopped,” Cat interrupted and continued her tour of my office.
The light from the window behind me trailed over her figure, smoothing over her hips and waist. Training had honed this woman into a weapon. She walked like one, choosing every step, every glance, for maximum distraction. At least there wasn’t anywhere she could conceal a weapon, not counting her claws.
Witches' Bane (The Soul Eater Book 2) Page 4