She crouched and ran her scaled hand over the surface of one of the eggs. Alysdair’s green light poured down the patches of smooth scales running the length of her spine. “You don’t remember, but I remember you, Nameless One, favored by Ammit. I once visited the Halls and watched you weigh the souls of the dead. I’ve never forgotten you.”
Something sharp and hungry flittered in her eyes. My ego wanted to believe it was admiration, so maybe I’d let it. Were her memories of me from before or after I’d taken to stealing souls and drinking them down like an alcoholic who’d fallen off the wagon? Probably best not to spoil her rose-tinted recollection. I could use her admiration to get answers, if admiration was truly the look in her reptilian eyes. Maybe she was just eyeing me up for a midnight snack.
I staggered to my feet and followed the path of her gaze to the sword in my hand.
“I could put this away,” I said, “but I need the light it’s casting.” And its sharp edges to ward off frisky crocs.
She chuckled a smooth and dark sound like molasses. “I will not eat you.” She clucked her tongue. “Your man bones would get stuck in my throat.”
“What’s your name?”
“Kiya. Your friend, Khuy, was my brother.”
I remembered Khuy and his fifteen siblings. Three were female, and I recalled exactly how my mother had barred them from the banks of the River of Souls. They’d been curious, all of them, but one more so than the others: the girl with golden-bronze skin and greenish-blue scales. I’d caught her sneaking to the riverside and threatened to eat her soul if she ever returned. She’d been smaller then, little more than a pest. Nobody swam the River of Souls—besides me, when Osiris wasn’t looking. I’d deliberately frightened the wits out of her. A few centuries on, we’d both aged, and Kiya in ways that made me grateful I hadn’t gutted her.
“How is Khuy?” I asked.
Her green-tinged lips turned down. “His soul flows with the river.”
Damn. Khuy and I had enjoyed a few good times before I went on the kind of bender that got me cursed and kicked out of the underworld. “I’m sorry to hear that.”
She peered at me from the corner of her eye, either consciously knowing to avoid my gaze or instinctively skirting the fringes of my intrusive glare. She’d seen me in the Hall and knew I could cut her down with a few words and the stroke of my sword, but I didn’t sense fear in her, just that same curiosity I’d seen in the small hatchling girl. She knew English and spoke it well. Was she passing for human these days? It had been a while since I’d spoken with anyone from my home. Hearing her talk, seeing her here—maybe she’d fill me in on everything I’d missed.
Later. Right now, I had a clutch of eggs to destroy.
A step was all it took for Kiya to whirl and block my approach. A hiss sounded from deep within her chest. “Come no closer, Soul Eater.”
The eggs couldn’t be hers. Even as a croc, she wasn’t substantial enough to produce such large offspring. But all river beasts were sensitive when it came to their hatchlings. My surrogate mother terrified the entire Egyptian pantheon, but that hadn’t stopped her from doting on her younglings—all except me.
“Step aside.”
“No.”
“I can make you.” We already knew my spellwords could grip her, and I had several at my disposal. Add to that my knack for compulsion and she really didn’t stand a chance.
She held her head slightly bowed, her chin dipped against her shoulder. The stance was respectful, and I might have believed it if I hadn’t grown up around beasts who knew exactly how to play the gods by sucking up to their monumental egos. I’d done the same often enough.
“These younglings are innocent,” Kiya hissed. “Would you prevent their souls from living again, Nameless One?”
Apparently, she hadn’t heard about my addiction to souls, and those little lives were ripe for the picking. I’d done worse. Much worse.
“Whose eggs are they?”
She cocked her head with a quick jerk and her double eyelids flicked, but she didn’t answer.
“Does Osiris know you’re cruising the sewers?”
Silence.
“At least tell me why you’re here. If these hatch, you can kiss this cozy little setup goodbye. Urban legends don’t live long. If a maintenance crew sees you, they’ll send teams down here with high-powered rifles and they won’t stop until you and those innocent younglings you’re protecting are all dead.”
Her eyes narrowed.
“Or worse, what if Osiris hears you’re squatting beneath his city? You don’t want him noticing you, Kiya, believe me.”
I didn’t want to hurt her, nor did I want to destroy the eggs, but New York wasn’t ready for the likes of her, and if those eggs hatched into monstrous, magic-infused Nile crocodiles that would need a whole lot more than rats to feed on, it would be my ass on the line when the city was thrown into mass panic.
She opened her mouth to answer, but a ground-trembling growl shook the chamber, sprinkling mortar dust from the brickwork above. That was no subway train.
Kiya bolted and dove off the edge of the platform. I dove after her and surfaced near the mouth of a run-off drain.
“Wait,” I spluttered, unsuccessfully treading water as Alysdair weighed me down.
She hauled herself over the lip of the pool. I snagged her ankle. She yanked it free and kicked back. Her heel clocked me in the jaw. My teeth slammed together, narrowly missing my tongue. Pain rang through my skull, rattling my nerves. I shot my hand out and snatched her foot. Managing to get a grip, I yanked. She fell to her knee and kicked back, but I had her. While she clawed her way forward, I pulled, dragging myself into the mouth of the tunnel behind her.
“Don’t make this harder … than it already is,” I panted.
Her scales shimmered over her body and the flesh beneath my grip shifted, shaking me off.
In the next blink, she was running.
“Hurzd!” I threw the spellword and locked her rigid. “Gods-dammit. I can’t let you run free down here.”
By the time I climbed to my feet and trudged through the three-foot-deep waters to stand in front of her, her entire body was trembling, her scales hissing together. It didn’t take a genius to figure out she was furious.
“I’m warning you, Soul Eater,” she said, forcing the words through clenched teeth. “It’s been a long time. I am not who you think I am.”
I stepped close enough to feel the heat rising off her body. “Neither am I.”
“Go,” she warned, low and quiet. “If he finds you, I’ll lose—”
Power spilled into the tunnel behind her, as thick and cool as a sudden rush of water. A god’s power. I sucked in a breath and held it, folding my magical signature tight around me and tucking any telltale signs of my existence away, but as I did, I released the spell holding Kiya still.
Her cool, soft hand touched my cheek. “I thought it would be different.”
What would be? Maybe another place and another time, I’d find out, but not here and not with a god’s presence bearing down on us.
“You shouldn’t be here. This isn’t your world.”
Kiya stood firm, like she had with the eggs. “Nor is it yours, Soul Eater.”
She was right. This wasn’t my world, but someone had to protect people from the old gods, and I was the only sucker stupid enough to try.
“Go home.” I pushed a compulsion through the words, delivering it with a punch of power. I’d already burned through most of my magic, so the compulsion was little more than a suggestion, but she’d felt it.
Kiya’s eyes widened. She hadn’t believed I’d force her. Maybe her childish memories had painted me in a good light, but now she’d met the man she’d seen weigh souls in the Hall of Judgment, and like meeting your favorite rock star only to discover he’s a monumental asshole, she saw a fraction of the monster I really was.
A crocodile the size of an MPV struck from behind her. I saw it happen—one second ticking so slowly into
the next as its jaws thrust into the tunnel, dropping open and rotating. Teeth the size of my forearm clamped around Kiya’s tiny body—and then she was gone, plucked right out of the tunnel as a wave of water flushed in, scooping me up like a damn doll in a washing machine. Even if I could have gasped a breath to loose a spellword, tossed around the torrent, I had no direction and no target. Up was down, and over and over I rolled. My lungs burned for air and my heart thudded hot and hard inside my chest. Alysdair was gone. I clawed at the occasional blur of bricks, but the flood barreled on. My shoulder, hip, and back cracked against the walls. The dark surge of unconsciousness pushed in from all sides, drowning me in a new threat, and then the sudden fire of pain cut up my right side, yanking me back into consciousness, just as I fell and snagged onto something.
Water poured over me from above while I dangled in the air over a black river. Stars twinkled in the distance—no, not stars. I blinked. The city skyline. Then whatever my coat had snagged on gave a metallic groan and I fell, slapping into the surface of the Hudson hard enough for it to burn.
I crawled up the muddy bank several miles downriver. Shukra stood on the nearby pier, a hand on her hip and her spotless snow-white fur coat aglow in New York’s nighttime lights. She’d pulled her mass of smooth black hair into a plait that had more in common with a scorpion’s tail than a hairstyle. Shu could find me anywhere, and I her, thanks to the curse that bound us together. All we had to do was follow the path of least resistance.
She watched me drag myself through the mud until I got close enough to see the crooked smile on her lips.
“I quit.” I spat mud to the side. “Tomorrow, after I get my sword back.”
“I thought stupid was more of a calling and less of a career choice.”
Rolling onto my back, I showed her my middle finger. “Sobek’s back.”
“The god you snitched on?”
“You know about that, huh?”
She made a dismissive pfft noise. “I had a bet with the demon Shezmu that Sobek would devour the Soul Eater. I lost. He was insufferable for weeks. ”
“Sorry to disappoint.”
“It’s okay. I ate his tongue.”
She wasn’t lying. Shu’s soul was a rotten, fetid thing. She was damned from the DNA up. Osiris had thought it amusing to bind us together: Soul Eater and a demon sorceress—eternal enemies. Ha-ha. Five hundred years later, he was still laughing. Shu and I had learned to live with each other, only because we didn’t have a choice.
The sounds of a nearby grumbling ferry engine and the distant beat of helicopter rotors soaked into the quiet, reminding me I’d been swimming in New York’s shit for the past few hours. I turned my head. Shukra was still there. Her unimpressed scowl wasn’t getting any lighter.
“It gets worse.”
She sighed. “With you, Ace, it always does.”
Shu admired the unrolled print of New York’s sewer overflow system spread across my desk as I tucked a three-thousand-year-old iron dagger into my belt. The blade was one of two, cast from meteorite iron. The other sat in a museum, alongside the boy-king Tutankhamun’s funerary hoard. The pair never rusted, and the only nick in my blade came from the time I’d tried to stab Osiris with it. Besides Alysdair, it was the only weapon potentially capable of ruining Sobek’s day. It wouldn’t kill him, but it would slow him down.
“You sure it’s him?” Shu asked, running her fingertips over the spaghetti map of tunnels, drains, and underground reservoirs.
“I got a good taste of his magic and nature doesn’t make crocs that big.” I moved up beside her. Sobek had enough juice that I knew roughly where to find him, but that didn’t make the thought of going back down into the sewers any more appealing. “It’s him, all right. But I don’t know why he’s collecting eggs beneath a city of eight million people.”
“He’s a god.” She shrugged. The gods had been known to level civilizations for no other reason than because they could. “The girl? How is she caught up in this?”
If Kiya was still alive, that meant Sobek needed her. “Not sure, but she seemed genuine.”
“You knew her?”
It was my turn to shrug. I hadn’t told Shu I’d recognized Kiya, but she must have caught something in my tone. “It was a long time ago. The world and our place in it have changed since then.”
Shu was weighing her next words on the tip of her tongue, which meant I wouldn’t like what came next.
“What?” I asked.
“Don’t let her crocodile smiles draw you in.”
I scooped up my tumbler of vodka and smiled into the drink. “I didn’t know you cared.”
Her lip curled in her typical thin, bloodless version of a smile. “I don’t want to dirty my boots coming after you.”
That was more like it.
I swirled vodka around my mouth, burning off the foul taste of mud and something like diesel, and swallowed. I’d have liked to chase it down with a few more glasses, purely to keep the cold at bay once I went back beneath the streets, but I needed my wits, dull as they were.
“I grew up with river beasts.” I set the empty glass down and scooped up my coat from the back of my chair, where I’d hung it to dry. “They taught me all I need to know about lying.”
A dank garbage smell wafted from the leather. I’d showered, but the rich smell of decay clung to me. I’d better get used to it. None of this shit would go away until I’d dealt with it.
“And Osiris?” Shu inquired in that oh-so-careful tone of hers, the one she used when she was treading carefully but failing miserably at it.
I hesitated, shrugging my coat on. The last thing I needed was another psychotic god involved. Osiris could dress himself in all the trappings of modern life he wanted, play the mayor, and fool the world, but that didn’t change who and what he was beneath the human act.
“Leave him out of it. With any luck, he’ll never know.”
An opportunity like this to settle an old score, Osiris would drag it out and make a spectacle out of it. There wasn’t any need to get him involved. I’d go back into the sewers, destroy the eggs, and convince Kiya and Sobek to go home. By nightfall, I’d be kicking back with vodka on the rocks.
Shu tapped the map, indicating a nature reserve nestled between three cemeteries on the Brooklyn-Queens border. “This is the site of the old Ridgewood reservoir. It’s nothing but trees and marshland now. You sure you want me there?”
“You remember the report of the missing jogger and the dozens of stolen pets from that neighborhood? There’s no way Sobek is living in the sewers, but he isn’t wandering the streets either, or we’d know about it. He wouldn’t know subtlety if it kissed him on the lips. He’s been imprisoned for centuries. He’ll want to be topside, but he’ll be hiding. Ridgewood isn’t far from where you found me. It’s perfect croc territory.”
“You don’t really think he’s eating pets?“ She saw my hard expression and nodded. “I might start liking him.”
That earned her a glower. “At least it isn’t children—yet. I want you there with Plan B. If I’m wrong, you can fish my body out of the Hudson and tell me you told me so.”
Shu’s eyes brightened at the thought of my carcass. “My money’s on Sobek.”
“Thank you for the vote of confidence.”
Shu didn’t care what happened to me. All she cared about was that I lived through it. My fate was her fate.
“You ready to show Sobek whose city this is?” I asked.
Mischief ringed her dark eyes with a hint of green. “You mean, show Sobek how Osiris owns New York and you’re the god’s little bitch?”
That was one way of putting it. “Exactly.”
“All right then.” She purred a guttural, back-of-the-throat noise that no human could make. “I haven’t maimed anything worthy in at least two weeks.”
The trip back into the sewers was just as unpleasant as the first, but at least I knew a prehistoric asshole was lying in wait. What other surprises could th
ere possibly be?
The flow of water had risen above my thighs, and a bitter chill snatched at my breath, but after fifteen minutes, a blessed numbness crept in. Rain had rolled in over New York earlier that evening and showed no signs of letting up. That was a problem—these tunnels were designed to flood—but one I couldn’t do anything about. All I had to do was get in, do the job, and get out. Fast and dirty. With any luck, the runoff wouldn’t gather momentum for another few hours. By then, all this would be over.
I’d uttered a spell to light the way, but its constant hum nibbled at my concentration with needle teeth. Occasionally, when the sewer opened up, the spell weakened, briefly contracting as the darkness pushed in. Retracing my steps into the bowels of the nest should have been straightforward, but each turn and intersection looked like the one before.
I was beginning to doubt my navigational skills when a lick and fizzle of magic signaled I was close. I waded toward a duct opening and found myself back in the plunge-pool nest chamber, the air warm, wet, and ripe with magic. Perfect for incubation.
Egg casings lay shattered and strewn across the platform, their hatchling surprises gone. The chamber waters took on a whole new sinister edge. Eggs that size meant each youngling had to be half my size and strong enough to take fatal chunks out of me.
Standing in the mouth of the duct, I regarded the black, sloshing waters, and my heart thudded in my throat. Wrestling crocodiles was not in my skillset.
A shift in the air touched my cheek. My hand shot to my dagger, but the point pressing into my lower back froze my hand at my side.
Alysdair. I’d know the feel of that soul-sucking sword anywhere.
A low, deadly hiss sounded. “An interesting weapon, Soul Eater,” Kiya mused, her words fluttering against my neck. “How does it work?”
“Generally, you stick the pointy end into people you don’t like.” I must have walked right by her camouflaged in two feet of water. Damn, she was good.
“You know to what I refer. This is an enchanted sword. I feel its pull.”
I wasn’t about to tell her how Alysdair ate souls, especially when she had the tip stuck in my back. The sword wasn’t fussy. It would swallow me down like anyone else, but not without the spell. Without the words, it was just a sword with attitude.
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