“By the grace of Amun-Ra.” The words trembled. Magic surged. “By the power invested in me, by the sire Osiris, by the light, the dark, I have weighed your soul. You are encumbered. The Devourer accepts your eternal spirit as recompense.”
The words hooked in, and there was no escape. I wrenched the fetid black soul free of its earthly grip. The darkness barreled into me, over me, spilling through my physical body, and flowed deeper until the hunger in me rose and enclosed it all, embracing the dark.
The jackal collapsed.
I dropped and rocked on my knees, head buzzing, my thoughts strewn about, impossible to reorder. The demon’s final soul scream echoed into nothingness.
“Daquir.” Devour.
The word of power had barely pushed off my lips before the jackal’s earthly body burst into a puff of ash and embers. Gone for eternity. Not of this life or the next. The ultimate punishment.
Bast—in human form—kicked the door in, saw me on my knees, and sniffed at the air. She’d smell the ash and know exactly what had happened here.
“You all right?” she asked.
“Will be,” I ground out, still swimming through the fog in my head. “Go find her. If there’s one jackal, there’ll be others.”
She hesitated, and a smile touched my lips. I didn’t know she cared.
“Go.”
“You didn’t have to do this,” she said.
“I did.” I reached for the back of the couch and hauled myself onto unsteady legs. “Go, Bast. Call me when she’s safe.”
I watched her go and let out a sigh that sounded too much like a lover’s gasp. Alone, with the remnants of the spell and the fragments of a broken soul dancing through me, I lifted my gaze and smiled.
Chapter 8
I’d added Bast’s cell to my contacts and attributed the most fitting song to her ringtone I could find. So when The Cure’s “The Love Cats” trilled from my cell, I knew exactly who was calling. She told me she’d found Chuck and was taking her out for a bite to eat, hoping to get more information out of her.
I met the pair of them at one of those fancy bars that couldn’t decide if it was a restaurant or a watering hole. Nineteen-forties chandeliers hung from high ceilings, black and white prints adorned the walls, and servers darted between tables with sliders on slates. I figured it was Bast’s favorite haunt and ordered the only thing on the menu I could afford—a black coffee—and dumped a ton of sugar in it.
Chuck looked at me through narrowed, darting eyes, suspicion radiating off her. I’d seen that look in wild cats, the ones that scratched the hand trying to help them. She was too pale, and up close, I wondered if her sharp features had more to do with malnourishment than godly genes.
“You’re the guy from the apartment,” she said by way of hello.
“You’re welcome.”
“Chuck, this is Ace. He’s a friend,” Bast replied, giving me a furtive look that probably meant something, but I had no idea what.
“You going to eat that?” Chuck asked Bast, nodding at the goddess’s scraps.
I’d arrived late, and the two of them had almost finished their meals. Without a word, Bast switched plates with Chuck, who quickly began vacuuming up the remains.
“What was that thing?” Chuck asked me around a mouthful of burger bun.
I flicked a questioning gaze at Bast.
“Wild dog,” she replied on my behalf. “It escaped from the zoo.”
Chuck snorted. “Uh-huh, and I’m the pope’s daughter.”
She gulped half her lemonade in one go and looked right at me again, her gaze trawling over my face but avoiding my eyes. Clever girl.
Done with her visual interrogation, she slumped back in her seat and raked her ringed fingers through her short hair.
“Did you kill it?” she asked me.
Killed it, devoured it—same thing. “It’s gone.”
Chuck nodded appreciatively. “I’ve been running from those things for weeks, so why don’t you two cut the Good Samaritan act and tell me what’s really going on?”
“Bast?” I asked, handing the baton over before she could do the same to me.
Chuck twisted in her seat to look Bast over. The goddess had toned down her allure and hidden her cat-like eyes behind a small human illusion, but that didn’t detract from her unusually striking appearance or her casual, but lethal elegance.
“I’m going to ask you some questions,” Bast replied. “They may seem strange.”
“Strange? Like a wild dog chasing me down the street? And that wasn’t the only thing after me. I saw a cat. A big one. I swear it. I only caught a glimpse when I climbed the ladder, but it was real.”
Silence descended over our table. I played with my spoon.
“I’m not nuts,” Chuck added. “I know what I saw.”
“You’re pregnant—” Bast began.
“So? Everyone at that shelter is.” She crossed her arms and glared at the goddess, daring an ageless Egyptian deity to judge her.
I hid my smile by tasting my sweet coffee.
“Who’s the father?” Bast asked calmly.
Chuck shrugged. Her gaze flicked back to me and then down at her empty plate. She wouldn’t answer anything, and I couldn’t blame her. She didn’t know us. She’d survived on the streets by her wits alone, and that meant not trusting anyone. I knew what that felt like. It was difficult to let people in after guarding yourself against them for what felt like forever. That was one of the reasons I’d only had the one friend in the last few decades.
“We’re here to help,” I said.
“Great. Got any cash? That’ll help.”
“What are you going to spend it on?” I asked.
“Louis Vuitton handbags and getting my nails done like Goth lady here. What do you think I’m going to spend it on?”
“Drugs?”
She clamped her mouth shut and folded her arms across her chest. “I don’t do that no more. I’m clean.”
“I know what addiction is,” I said, avoiding Bast’s pertinent look. “Tough to beat on your own.”
“Well, I don’t got nobody, so just give me the money and you can go back to your cozy little life knowing you did your good deed for the day.”
“The dogs will come again,” Bast butted in, sounding like a portent of doom. Goddesses and their drama.
Chuck bounced her teenage glare between us. “You won’t tell me what’s really going on here, so what’s left to talk about?”
Bast shared another beseeching look with me but our wordless conversations clearly weren’t helping.
“Chuck,” Bast said, her voice tipping toward authoritative. “There may be other women like you. Women in trouble.”
“More escaped dingoes, huh?”
I almost corrected her, but now both women were looking at me with varying degrees of contempt. Bast needed my help explaining, which, so far, I’d failed at, and Chuck knew it was all BS.
“I’m not telling you anything until you tell me the truth. You two talk it out. I’m going to the rest room.” Chuck shuffled from the booth and strode to the back of the bar with the long-legged, powerful stride of a caged tiger. Chuck had more of her mother in her than looks alone. That was an uncomfortable thought. She clearly didn’t know about shape-shifting, but she would learn fast if she developed that curious gift from her mother.
I grinned. “She’s got sass.”
Bast rolled her eyes at me. “It’s all posturing. She’s scared.” She tapped her painted nails on the tabletop. “I need to find out where she’s been, who she’s been talking to, and who her friends are. There must be something.”
“Good luck with that.”
“You could help.”
“She won’t talk to us.”
“We could tell her—”
“No,” I cut her off. “You were right. The less contact we have with her, the more chance she has at having normal a life. If you mention gods, she’ll think you’re nuts, but she won’t
forget it. Then she’ll start digging and connect the dots, and the picture she’ll draw will come back to bite her. Happens every time. People can’t help but poke at the unknown, and then it pokes back and gets them killed.” Or crippled for life, I finished mentally, thinking of Cujo and the many others whose paths I’d crossed over the years.
“And if she has the magic?” Bast whispered. “What then? We’re just going to let her flounder like an unclaimed godling?”
I winced and glared at my black coffee. Looking at Chuck was too much like looking in a mirror, but she could still escape her fate.
“She’ll make a mistake,” Bast said. “Osiris will notice—or worse, Seth will. They’ll kill her.”
“If she’s lucky,” I mumbled.
Bast’s dark brows shot up and I regretted the words. Sure enough, Bast read the weight in them. She knew about my curse, but not all of it. Not the details. Seth ek em sra dasoerk. The devil is in the details.
Bast rested an arm on the table, leaning in and making damn sure I had to look at her. “You didn’t have to devour that demon.”
“Yes, I did.”
“When was the last time you devoured? Not the sword, you?”
“This morning, actually.” And I was still coming down from that one.
She recoiled the way I had known she would and lifted her lip in a disgusted snarl. “If Osiris learns—”
“Osiris—” I stopped myself, aware I’d raised my voice along with my heart rate. “Bast, back off. I’m dealing with it.”
“‘Dealing with it’?” She snorted a judgmental laugh. “I was right. You haven’t changed at all.”
I wanted to lay into her, to tell her how Osiris knew I was devouring souls because he was the one who’d broken my abstinence, but what good would it do? She wouldn’t believe me, and even if she did, there was nothing she could do. But she’d try and get herself tangled up in my mess. It would be easier for everyone if we all continued to believe what we wanted to. Liar. Thief.
“Let’s address the Sphinx in the room, shall we?” I said.
She side-eyed me.
“The jackals. Few gods have dominion over them.”
“Ammit traditionally controls them,” she confirmed.
“Can you think of any reason why she’d want to attack your blessed?”
“None. I’ve never crossed Ammit.” She shivered. “No sane god would.”
A sane god? Somehow I kept from laughing. “If it isn’t her, she’ll know more. Osiris told me my mother wants to take her slumber. He said he’d sanction my return to the underworld.”
Bast considered my words in silence. The sounds of people talking and laughing continued on around us, wrapping us in normalcy. I often forgot I wasn’t part of their world, not even after all the years I’d walked among them. I would never belong, even though I’d done my damnedest to fit in once I’d stopped pining for home.
“You’re going back?” Bast asked.
“I have to.” I’d have been lying if I said the thought of going home didn’t fill me with dread, as well as a deep, illicit thrill.
“How long has it been?” The compassion on her face and the regret in her eyes almost broke me down and had me telling her everything.
I remembered the white feather settling, the scales tipping, my heart falling, and the sounds of my own spell, spoken by Osiris, wrapping around me, through me, and binding my soul. The accusing eyes, the howls and screams from those I’d condemned—I remembered it all like it was yesterday. “Five hundred years, give or take a few.”
Bast reached across the table and closed her warm, smooth hand around mine. Gooseflesh lifted the fine hairs on my arms and up my neck. I’d have liked to pull her in, close my arms around her, and hide. It had always worked before.
“You’ll be okay.”
My lips twitched in a mockery of a smile that didn’t last. I pulled my hand from hers. “I always am.”
I told Bast to look out for Chuck, which I didn’t need to say but seemed like a decent enough goodbye, and left her alone at the table. Her gaze rode my back until I left the bar, but guilt clung to me, weighing me down with every step.
Chapter 9
Heat beat at me when I stepped from the mansion into the greenhouse—a vast indoor tropical garden easily the size of the main house. Exotic butterflies flitted around, fans gently circulated the air, and occasionally the drip-drip of water tapped on large leaves.
I yanked off my coat and undid a few shirt buttons. The heat wasn’t my only problem; I’d devoured two souls in less than twenty-four hours. One dark and heavy, the other light and clean. Loosely translated, the immense magical high was twisting into a crippling comedown. And here I was about to have a voluntary talk with Osiris. I’d have preferred to wait a few days until the aftereffects had stabilized, but a few days could have meant the slaughter of more of Bast’s women. I had enough darkness in my putrid soul without adding that.
“Nameless One…” Isis’s slippery voice curled through the jungle foliage and brought me to an abrupt stop on the winding path.
“By Isis, all that has been, that is, or shall be; no mortal man hath ever unveiled.” The proper greeting fell off my tongue as flat and empty as the countless times I’d said it before and would again.
She emerged from behind the large leaves of a tropical fern, trailing her fingers along its edges and lifting her traditionally kohl-accented eyes to mine in a way that had a small skitter of nerves shortening my breath.
“There are no mortal men here. Would you like to unveil me?”
There’s no right way to answer a goddess—ever. Whatever I said next would be the wrong thing. If I said yes, she’d have me flailed for lusting after her divine body. If I declined, she’d be offended and would probably make me spend the next six months telling her how I did, in fact, lust after every inch of her. And that was if she was feeling generous.
Fucking gods.
“I’m here for Osiris.”
“Mm…” She pulled the leaf with her and then let it fall away as she approached. “I didn’t know you preferred the male form?”
Well, that was one way of escaping her word trap. But as she came forward, her slip of a gown parted up her thigh, revealing a trail of studded gems, and by Sekhmet, I made the mistake of imagining how I might follow that trail with my fingers and mouth. I clamped my teeth together and steered my thoughts away from dangerous territory, only to have them land on her lips and how she might taste beneath my tongue.
Those soft lips lifted at a corner.
“No, it is not men you prefer,” she said, stopping too close to me. Her fingertips touched my thigh and then her nails raked higher. “No need for words, Nameless One.” She found what she was looking for and pressed in, eliciting a sharp inhale from me. “I have my answer right here.”
“Stop.” I hadn’t meant to add the compulsion—it was pointless, of course—and all it did was widen the pupils of her eyes, as though she got off on my pathetic effort to control an eternal being like her.
“We could fuck right here, against this tree. I’d bend for you.” With her alarmingly hot hand still resting on my arousal, she used her free hand to pluck at my shirt buttons. “You despise my husband. Wouldn’t this be a fine way to hurt him?”
Oh, it would. She was painting a very fine image, one that I struggled to sweep from my thoughts, which had currently funneled right to where her hand was resting. Screwing Isis appealed to the part of me that had never truly left the underworld, the being I’d been before, a creature of power and want, worthy of fear and worship. That part of me had no trouble imagining how the Goddess of Light would taste, or how she’d feel bent over with my hands on her hips as I pounded into her. But it wouldn’t last. She’d tell Osiris a patchwork of lies, and as perilous and exhilarating as screwing the goddess Isis would be, it wouldn’t be worth the centuries of fallout her husband would rain down on me.
“I know what you’re thinking,” she whisper
ed. Her breath fluttered across my lips. “But what else could he possibly do to you that he hasn’t already done?”
I caught her hand, the one cupping my cock. “Stop.”
This time I pushed more weight behind the word. I’d devoured two souls in a few hours. Surplus magic was something I had in swathes.
Her beautiful eyes widened in alarm. I released her hand and watched her briefly war with the compulsion. It lasted a grand total of two seconds before it broke.
With a gasp, she stepped back. “How dare you!”
“You seem to have forgotten where I came from, Your Highness. I’m glad I could help you with that unfortunate mistake.”
Color flushed her cheeks and fury flashed as hard and fast as lightning in her eyes. I didn’t think for one second I’d escaped her wrath, but to see her taste some of her own poison brightened my day immeasurably.
If my soul wasn’t already cursed, my actions would have earned one. I smiled and meant it. “Please inform your husband I’m here.”
She left, striding down the path and out of sight. I waited until I was sure she was gone before slumping against the tree and gulping down several shuddering breaths. One god down, one to go.
Needing to set my mind on something other than my neglected cock, I roamed the garden, walking the winding paths beneath heavy palm fronds and around deep-throated exotic flowers.
Outside, snow patted lightly at the glass. With its heat and damp, earthy richness, I understood why the couple might like the gardens. The greenhouse smelled like the old world after the rains, when the Nile would flood, bringing much needed sustenance to the riverbanks. The people would revel in the sudden flourish of color and life, in celebrations of rebirth and festivals of plenty, giving thanks to the all-powerful gods for their generosity. Those had been joyous days and nights, but all that had changed when the gods grew bored and turned inward, allowing the worst of them to rise. Seth. The rains had stopped. The floods had failed. Crops had wilted under the relentless sun. And while the gods warred and bickered, Seth had cast his shadow over the land, the people had faded into dust, and the desert sand had devoured what had once been the greatest civilization on Earth.
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