There’d been other nights, other souls taken. Power devoured, on and on, night after night. I’d stalked New York rooftops and targeted those I’d judged as deserving obscurity.
Monster.
Some I’d fed to Alysdair. Others I’d made mine.
I was everything the gods feared, everything they despised, and everything they’d accused me of being. Liar. Thief. Monster. Everything Osiris had stopped when he cursed me to walk this earthly realm.
I’d killed dozens, and I’d kill again. This was who I was. This was my right. Soul Eater.
“More than darkness.” I heard Bastet’s smooth, purring whisper in my ear and snapped open my eyes.
Shukra was here. Mafdet too. They were talking about herbs and something else I didn’t care for. This was Mafdet’s store. Reality. The now.
I had Alysdair in my hands and was off the couch and striding from the store before anyone could stop me. Rain beat down, soaking into my hair and dripping down my neck. I didn’t care. I wanted to feel cold, feel reality all around me, filling my lungs and head. No matter how fast I walked, the memories chased me down. The girl…just an innocent girl.
“Ace!”
Shu. I couldn’t face her. She’d see it on my face, in my eyes. She’d know I’d killed them all.
“Hey, don’t walk away from me!” Closer now.
A car rumbled by, splashing through puddles. I kept on going, turning down a sidewalk that broke up alongside a fenced-off warehouse.
“You killed her,” Shu called out.
There wasn’t a question there, but I answered anyway. “Yes.”
Her heels beat against the sidewalk, coming faster, racing like my heart trying to pound its way out of my chest.
“How many?” she asked.
I’d lost count. Too many screams, too many memories. They all blurred into one. Was it any wonder I was crawling out of my skin with power? I flipped my collar up, ducked my head against the rain, and kept walking.
“Ace Dante, your shit is my shit! Stop right there!”
I stopped and stared ahead at the quiet intersection. Traffic signals quietly blinked in the mist.
“I killed the witches because I wanted to,” I said, raising my voice above the hissing rain. I could feel it. Remembering had unlocked it all, and the sense of rightness was back. This was how I should be, not shackled, not hiding, not Osiris’s toy. That wasn’t me. I was the Godkiller, and for the first time since the name had been uttered, I felt like I deserved it, like it belonged to me.
“More than darkness.” Whenever Bastet had said that to me, she’d been wrong.
Shu circled around to block my path. She looked at me, my head tipped down, collar up, rain pouring down my face.
“I knew you were devouring,” Shu said. “Your eyes. Your power leaking all over the office. And I don’t care about the witches, they had it coming, but I do ca—”
“She was young, the girlfriend of the witch who hired me. Julie Carter. That was her name. She worked in a health food store and watched Netflix.” My voice came out flat, but inside, a fragmented rage grated against the frustration. “I don’t remember her face, but I remember the terror in her screams. Her soul was light. The young have bright souls, even the bad ones. They’re resilient, but not against me, Shu. I’ll take anything. Even yours, given half the chance.”
“That right there is proof someone’s got to you. The Ace Dante I know wouldn’t touch my soul with a ten-foot barge pole.”
It would be easier to believe that. “No, this is me. This is all me. It’s just like before the curse.”
“I know you—”
Slick malice distorted my abrupt laugh. “You don’t know me. You were tied to me as punishment. You only knew me after I’d hunted you down and condemned you. I was your enemy. That’s all you knew when Osiris dragged you out of the damned and bound your soul to mine. I’ve always been your enemy, and that’s all you know today.”
“Five centuries and that’s what you still believe?”
“Five centuries is nothing. Before you and the curse, there were wars that saw thirty thousand men slaughtered, and I was right there, gorging on the dead. Before you, massacres had turned Waset’s streets into rivers of blood. And I was right there. Women, men, children—they all taste the same. If you truly knew me”—I threw my arms wide, flicking rain from my fingers—“you’d know this is exactly what I am.”
“But it’s not…” she said more softly. The rain had plastered loose strands of her dark hair to her pale face, washing away some of her hardness. “I know evil. I ran with demons that would make your hardened soul whine like a bitch.” Coming closer, she lifted her chin. “I’ve seen what evil does when it shreds the wandering souls. I’ve heard the endless screams of the sacrificed innocents. Maybe you reveled in that once, but the man you are today, this Ace Dante, he’s sticking it to the gods and proving them wrong.”
Her words meant nothing, they were just words, but the way she said them, and how she stood shivering in the rain, her fur coat soaked through, and how the fire of defiance burned brightly in her eyes, she believed.
“Ace Dante is a lie,” I replied, but Shu’s testimony had dulled the heady mix of rage and fear.
“It’s late,” she said. “I’m going back to the office to raid your vodka stash. Be a coward and walk away if you like. Go on and prove all the bastards right. Or come have a drink with me, and we’ll figure it out.”
I wanted to argue, to walk away from Mafdet, the business, New York, but I wouldn’t get far. I couldn’t walk away from Shu. She would follow. She didn’t have a choice in that.
Shu turned and marched back up the sidewalk.
I looked down at my wet hands. The rain dripping from my fingers might as well have been blood. Accept my nature or fight it? Those were my choices. I’d been fighting for a long time, but if I hated anything, it was proving the gods right.
I followed Shu with Isis’s whispers of “Monster” in one ear and Bast’s words of “More than darkness” in the other.
Chapter 8
Night had blanketed the office building by the time we returned. Cat was AWOL, and I was glad for it. My relapse had to stay between Shu and me. If word got out that I was feasting on New Yorkers, the pantheon would bay for blood, and Osiris would be forced to act—again.
I hung up my coat and shrugged Alysdair off. My hand lingered on the sword’s grip. Julie Carter’s scream sliced through my thoughts all over again like I was back in her apartment, tearing her innocent soul from her body. I’d felt the sword bite and shudder as I plunged it into her chest, same as another time, another place, with another woman. My memories wavered, voices spilling forth. “More than darkness,” Bastet had told me not so long ago… I couldn’t recall when.
Nothing made sense. How many people had I slain, and why hadn’t I remembered any of it? I knew what I was, what I’d been in the past. My hatred for witches ran deep, as did my hatred for Osiris, so why would I hide from my sins? If this was all me, why hadn’t I dropped the Ace Dante act altogether? Too many questions and too few answers. A dull ache radiated through my skull and down the back of my neck. I set down the sword and rubbed the muscles, chasing the pain.
“Here.” Shu dumped a glass on my desk, poured the vodka, and slid it my way.
Light from the hallway crept across the floor, illuminating Shu from behind. She’d discarded her coat and rolled up her sleeves. Her wet hair clung to her face in places, but she didn’t appear to care. She had a determined line to her lips and an intense motivation in her eyes. I’d seen that look many times, usually right before someone got their asses handed to them.
Her scowl, when she met my gaze, left no room for bullshit.
I dropped into the chair behind my desk, craned my fingers over the glass, and watched the vodka swirl inside.
“I’ve been thinking,” Shu said.
“Dangerous.”
“Have you blacked out in public?”
“Just at night then, when you’re alone?”
“It would seem so.”
“Don’t you think that’s suspicious? If this was all you, why would you forget it the next day?”
I looked up. Clearly, her thinking was in line with mine.
“I know what you are. I saw all of you when you captured me, weighed me, and condemned me. If this was all you, you wouldn’t forget. You’d relish the memory. You got off on the power, the control. If this was all you, you’d be out on the street, cutting down commuters like a biblical plague. You have enough juice dripping from your veins for it, but you’re here, with me, drinking vodka.” She raised her glass in a brief salute, proving her point. “Someone has their claws in you, but not all the way.”
I wet my lips with vodka, let the alcohol bite, and then took a drink.
Shu leaned against my desk, scrutinizing me, waiting for my explanation. I didn’t have one.
“This has all the hallmarks of a curse,” she said.
“It does, except…” I kicked my boots up onto the desk. “I can’t be cursed.” I tipped my glass at Shu. “Osiris got there first. His influence covers my soul like wrappings on a mummy.”
“I want to do a spell that will go deep into you and your power to look for threads that shouldn’t be there.” Uncertainty flashed in her eyes. “Will you let me?”
My heart, shriveled as it was, beat a little faster. “Oh, sure, let a demon sorceress into the deep, dark recesses of a soul eater? What could possibly go wrong?”
“I promise not to do any damage,” she added with a wholly inappropriate grin.
The damage didn’t worry me. I devoured, and, apparently, I did it in my sleep too. If she got too close, went too deep, I’d likely do the same to her. She was the most skilled sorceress I’d ever hunted, but her magic came from her soul, and if she got too close, that’s exactly what I’d rip out of her, putrid and black as it was. These days, I wasn’t a fussy eater.
“Is this like the tracking spell you did on the girl’s arm?” I asked, keeping my thoughts to myself and my gaze lost in my drink.
“More like what Mafdet attempted, but this time, you’ll be active instead of a passenger in your own mind, and I’ll be coming along for the ride. You wouldn’t trust my results, so you’ll have to see for yourself, but—”
“There’s always a but.” More vodka went down, burning all the way and getting into those hard to reach places.
“It’s not vital, but ideally, you’d need someone here, someone you trust to keep you anchored, because you don’t trust me.”
That narrowed it down to an amount of people I could count on the thumb of one hand.
“What does my trusted person have to do?” I asked, failing to keep the suspicion from my tone.
“Nothing. Just be here so you’re not alone. Someone you can come back to if you get lost in your head.”
That sounded comforting. “And they won’t get hurt?”
“No. It’s strictly babysitting. I can do it without…”
Time was running out. I needed this done so I could focus on surviving Thoth. “Cujo’s the only person I trust this side of the underworld.”
Shu smiled a little, secret smile and poured herself a drink. “Call him. Let’s get this done so I can go back to snarling at you through the door.”
“You do that?”
“A better question would be: when don’t I?”
I eyed the phone on my desk. It was late, but Cujo would come. It’d take him forty minutes to call a cab and make his way over. Forty minutes to tell Shu that all this was probably pointless because I’d bargained our lives away when I agreed to kill Thoth.
I picked up the phone and dialed Cujo’s cell. When he didn’t answer, I left a brief message for him to call back and hung up. “There’s something else.”
She pulled the guest chair over and draped herself into it. I’d seen her relax like that once—right before whipping up a spell that turned a man’s insides into soup.
She waited for me to elaborate. This was going to hurt.
“I agreed to kill Thoth for Osiris.”
She blinked once. Twice. And pursed her lips. The silence grew thick and so cloying I could taste it. It tasted like burning asphalt, like restrained magic. Hers.
She smiled, but it wasn’t a pleasant smile. More like the type of smile you’d see on a crocodile. Her cool, calm response was the frosted layer over a lake of pain, and the floodgates were about to open. Her stillness, the level rise and fall of her chest, said she was holding back. “And when did you agree to this?”
“Three months ago,” I said. “Osiris wants it done in three days—two now. He’s pissed at me, more than usual. I may have…brought that on myself.”
She looked at me with a wholly unsettling calmness. Were she a person, I would’ve said she was about to snap, pull out a gun, and aerate my body. But this was Shu. She had imagination.
“Apparently, I ate the souls of his staff and set his house on fire, and he knows I’ve had impure thoughts about his wife.”
Shu’s top lip twitched. “You wanna bang Isis? Since when?”
I needed more vodka. “Since…since she somehow got inside my head. She hit on me months ago. I refused, which, by the way, I should get some points for. I thought I got away unscathed, but now I’m not so sure.”
“Did she touch you?”
“She cupped my balls.” I shifted a little in my chair and cleared my throat, prompting Shu to arch an eyebrow. “Does that count?”
“Are you trying to get yourself killed?” She sloshed a lot more vodka into her glass. “I thought you were crazy, but not batshit crazy. Making deals to kill gods and trying to bed the Goddess of Light? Anyone would think you had a god complex.”
“I’m not a god.”
“What’s a god but a magically endowed epic asshole with a pedigree?”
“I don’t have the pedigree. Besides, soul eaters aren’t gods. We’re the monsters the gods try to kick under their Persian rugs.”
She rolled her eyes. “You can’t kill Thoth, and you can’t fuck Isis.”
I reached across the desk, took the bottle back, and refilled my glass. “That’s what I told Ozzy. He threw me against a wall.”
Shu breathed in, held the breath, and then looked around my office, probably imagining all the ways she could tear into me. “Three months? Right around the time Bastet was here?”
“Yeah, I guess,” I replied, wondering what Bastet had to do with any of this. “Osiris lifted part of the curse, allowing me to walk freely in the underworld.”
“I wondered how you’d managed that,” she murmured, thinking.
“In exchange, I have to kill Thoth.”
“Why does Osiris want Thoth dead?”
“Thoth and Isis have been meeting in secret. I’m not entirely sure Osiris trusts his wife.”
“Yah think?” Shu’s eyes widened. “Were they screwing?”
“I spoke to Thoth when the cops hauled me in. He and Isis have been meeting in secret—that part’s true—but whatever they’re talking about is important enough to keep from Osiris. Maybe Thoth’s her psychiatrist, or maybe they share book recommendations? How the hell should I know? I warned him Ozzy would retaliate.”
“You warned him?”
“I didn’t come right out and say it, but I may have hinted at it. I owed him for getting me off those trespassing charges.”
“Are you fucking Isis?”
“Only in my head.” I swished vodka around my mouth, letting it burn my taste buds, and swallowed deep.
Shu pinched the bridge of her nose and sighed. “So, let me get this straight. You set fire to Osiris’s house and told him that not only are you not going to kill Thoth, thereby breaking your word, but you also want to fuck his wife?”
“That about sums it up.”
“I should never let you leave this office alone. After this, you answer t
he phone and I do the jobs.” Shu threw back her drink in one go, and with a hiss, she added, “We’re doomed. If Osiris doesn’t kill you, Thoth will, and I’ll get an extended vacation where I’ll have my guts torn out.”
“That was my conclusion too.”
She was taking it well. No spells, no throwing things.
She tapped her fingernails against her glass. “I may as well call Anubis and book an eternity of torture.” Her glare narrowed. “Could you kill Thoth?”
I spluttered my drink. “I could try and get my ass handed to me. He’s Ra’s son. He could throw a word and boil my blood. What am I going to hit him with? My bad attitude?”
“You are gorged with power.” She leaned forward, looking deeper into my eyes, searching for that dark inside of me, the kind I kept buried deep. “There won’t be a better time to test out that new name, Godkiller.”
“I didn’t kill Ammit,” I shot back on reflex. I was getting the feeling she didn’t believe me. “I don’t know if I can kill a god, and trying seems like a great way to die.”
“Okay, so we have two days to come up with a solution. I need you coherent, not running off on some personal vendetta to kill all witches. You need to let me do the spell so I can figure out what’s fuelling your witch-killing spree.”
She still hadn’t launched into a vicious tirade, which was almost worse. I’d expected her to be angry, but her calm clarity was more unsettling.
“Ace Dante! Open up. I know what you did.” Kenny the Witch pounded on the door. “Open this door or I’ll—”
Shu jumped to her feet and yanked the door open. “Huff and puff, witch?”
Kenny barged past my business partner and stabbed a finger into my face. “I know what you did. Where is she?”
There were many answers to that question, some more painful than others.
Witches' Bane (The Soul Eater Book 2) Page 8