I would often walk the riverbanks, running my hands through the miles and miles of wheat. I’d watched the children with baskets around their necks, singing as they scattered seeds. Occasionally, I’d join them and their families, never revealing who I was and keeping my power wrapped close. Though I had never belonged among them, I didn’t care, not then. I’d spend evenings admiring the sailboats, listening to the slosh of oars, and watching, admiring, and living a normal life through the wonder of normal people.
But those memories were distant, like dreams, stories, myths. Today, those long-dead people and their fevered worship meant nothing. The gods were gone, relegated to religious texts and the occasional website selling fake protection spells. Now the gods, once so feared and revered, were confined to academia or the awe-filled eyes of tourists filing through barren tombs and crumbled temples.
The man who I had been before, he was dust and dreams. Perhaps he always had been.
I pulled up suddenly as Osiris jogged down the greenhouse steps, dressed in a tux and holding a cell phone to his ear. The image clashed so acutely with my memories that I forgot about the curse and my blind hatred of him and saw him how he had once been: the greatest of gods, worshiped and admired by his people as well as his pantheon. Armies had marched in his name. He was the god of all things. Life and death had played out inside his hands—decay and rebirth.
“I know… I’ll be there. I don’t care when the cameras are rolling. I will be there when I am ready. They’ll wait.”
Where had it all gone so wrong?
He hung up the call and frowned at my presence. “What by Sekhmet did you say to my wife?”
“Only that which she asked of me,” I answered, avoiding the truth as best as I could, given his ability to extract answers out of me.
That didn’t appease him. I hadn’t really expected it to. “She’s in a foul mood and I have a gala I’m due to attend with her at my side. You have no idea what it’s like.”
I could imagine being married to Isis was a lot like sleeping in a bed of snakes: exhilarating, until it wasn’t.
“I’d like to visit my mother,” I said, veering the conversation away from Isis.
His smile was all perfect teeth. “Ah, yes, of course. I thought you might.” He half turned but hesitated, and then slowly, purposefully, he slid his gaze back to me. “There are some conditions.”
My heart sank.
“You should join us at the gala. We can talk more there.”
I forced what I hoped looked like a smile on my lips and not a sneer. “I’m not dressed for fine dining.”
“I’ll soon change that.” He turned, clicked his fingers, and said, “Come.”
I plodded after him, trailing behind the god like a slave on an invisible chain that I’d keenly felt for five interminably long centuries.
If the underworld was my home, a charity gala was my idea of hell. Smiling faces, fake laughs, chinking glasses, and every word a weapon wielded for social ambition. I did my best to smile back and muster through painful small talk while the space between my shoulder blades itched for Alysdair’s weight. I recognized a few faces from the orgy beneath Osiris’s house. Thankfully those faces didn’t recognize me all scrubbed up in a tux.
“Poison” blared from my cell phone, and probably for the first time in my life, I was grateful for Shu. Excusing myself from yet another conversation regarding politics, I stepped behind the table of canapés and hid away in a corner.
“Shu, kill me now,” I growled.
“Where are you?”
“In hell.”
She paused. “You’re not, are you?”
I sighed, tucked a hand in my pocket, and slumped against the wall. “They don’t have cell reception in the Hall of Judgment.”
She grumbled a curse. “Did you get anywhere with the Montgomery kid?”
“Cujo will let me know if he gets any leads.”
“Okay…”
“Why?”
“I think we might have a bigger problem than a scared kid.”
The way the last few days had been going, I couldn’t have been less surprised. “Are you going to keep it to yourself or share with the class?”
“Did you get a look at the spell they were casting?”
“Yeah, as accurate and deadly as they come.”
“Did you keep it?” She didn’t bother to hide the intrigue in her voice. Once a sorceress, always a sorceress.
“No, I didn’t keep it. I burned it so you couldn’t get your claws on it.” It hadn’t even crossed my mind to burn it to keep it from Shu, but I liked the idea, and her resulting hiss. I chuckled. “It was too potent. The kids didn’t need to know the language. The fact it was there, inside their circle, was enough to bring the demon through.”
“Demons.”
“What?”
“I saw an interview with the Montgomery mother. Her son looked sick before he vanished. The press is trying to blame it on drugs. You know what they’re like. They love a good socialite drug drama.”
A second demon? It was possible. The demon—or demons—had possessed their hosts before I arrived. I could have missed one, especially if it had buried itself so deep its host hadn’t been aware of it. “Damn it.”
“It’s been over twenty-four hours. It would have turned him by now. Get your ass on this with a bit more urgency.”
“I can’t. I’m having canapés with Osiris.” I deliberately omitted the part where women were dying and I needed to get to the underworld to find out why, just to get a rise out of Shu.
“For fuck’s sake.”
It worked.
A compulsion speared into me, yanking my head up, and there was Osiris, eyes fixed on me from across the room.
“Wherever the demon is, it’s laying low,” I said. “I gotta go. I’ll get on it when I get back from Amy’s. You deal with it.”
“What? Amy’s. Why—”
“I gotta go.”
“You bastard. You better come back.”
“I will.”
“It’s my ass on the line too—”
I hung up the cell, already moving at a brisk pace through the throng of people toward the smiling mayor. I would be back. I had to come back. Bast, the dying women, Chuck, and now the loose demon—they were loose ends, all of them. I couldn’t leave them hanging.
“Ace, sit,” Osiris ordered.
I pulled out the chair beside him and sat like a good puppet.
“Who was on the call?” he asked.
“Shukra.”
One of Osiris’s dark eyebrows jerked higher. “You two getting along?”
“Does a viper get along with a scorpion?”
“Which are you?”
I frowned, wishing I’d kept quiet. “Scorpion, obviously. Can we get to the conditions you mentioned?”
His laugh grated like nails on a chalk board. “So eager to get away. Why don’t you enjoy the company and the wine?”
I’d have preferred to spend the evening with a demon, and considering what had happened the last time I’d shared a glass of red with Osiris, I really didn’t want to relive those memories or the experience.
“The conditions?” I asked, doing my best to look innocent to anyone who happened to be glancing at the mayor. He drew the eyes of many. Me sitting next to him was already damaging what reputation I had in my small world of clients.
“Yes…” He breathed in deeply through his nose and leaned a little closer while his gaze roamed the sea of happy, sparkly rich people. “I’m convinced my wife is having an affair.”
My memory flashed to the image of his wife’s hand on my cock. Guilty, guilty, guilty, my heart thudded. I shifted in my seat and cleared my throat. “Oh?”
An older gentleman arrived and rained compliments down on the mayor. How delightful it was to have such a proactive young mayor running the city. He’d had his doubts, in the beginning, but Ozzy had turned the city around.
I squirmed as Osiris smiled, accep
ted the compliments with grace, and shook the gentleman’s hand.
While they talked, I wondered what Osiris considered an affair. They’d both been screwing the unfortunate girl when I’d seen them together yesterday. Where did the god draw the line? More to the point, what the hell would he ask of me? I couldn’t investigate Isis. She’d tie me up in knots. I knew my limitations. Getting between Isis and Osiris was tantamount to suicide.
The gushing praise faded and the gentleman went away, ruddy cheeked and happy. Osiris chuckled and tasted his wine. “So easily pleased.”
“Isis,” I said, determined not to spend the night dancing to Osiris’s tune.
His smile faded. He spied his wife weaving through the crowd like a snake through the grass. Her green evening gown flowed over her body like emerald liquid. She’d pinned her hair up, twisted it into knots, and planted jewels inside the design. Whichever way she turned, people stopped her, their eyes alight with adoration. She was stunning and made a man forget his thoughts, his vows, his honor. She could have anyone.
She turned her head, sensing Osiris’s gaze on her, and shared a private smile with her husband. She ignored me, thankfully.
“She’s fucking Thoth,” Osiris said, his voice cutting deep into my thoughts. He hadn’t spoken aloud, and even now he smiled back at his wife.
I spluttered. “The lawyer?”
“How many Thoths do you know?” Osiris drawled.
Thoth was perfectly suited to a life of litigation and numbers. I’d never seen him wearing anything other than a charcoal gray suit, and I’d only seen him crack a smile once. He was as rigid and unyielding as stone. The thought of him and Isis together? That just didn’t seem likely. Maybe he was an animal in the bedroom. We all had our hidden talents.
“She’s been…distant,” Osiris confided, watching the crowd swallow Isis. “We’ve had our challenges.”
I could imagine. Seven thousand years as husband and wife would take its toll. Then there was the fact that they were also brother and sister. Relationships didn’t get more complicated than that.
“Isis is”—he swallowed—“insatiable, and I too may have been distracted as of late.” Osiris shifted in his chair and poured the dregs from a bottle of champagne into his glass. “She’s been meeting with him in secret.”
He lifted the glass and continued watching the crowd, avoiding looking directly at me.
“Do you have proof of the affair?”
“That’s what I need you for.”
Great, someone shoot me now. Marital grievances were bad enough without adding all-powerful deities to the drama. To make matters worse, Thoth was Amun-Ra’s son. As gods went, Thoth could rip me a new one in a blink. I’d stayed below the radar of most godly goings-on, but getting between Osiris, Isis, and Thoth? There wasn’t any way I was coming out of that fire unburned.
“What sort of proof?” I asked, thoughts churning.
“All of it. If Thoth is touching my wife, I want every detail, every word, so I can make him eat his treachery.”
Treachery wouldn’t be the only thing Osiris would force Thoth to eat. If he could confine Thoth to the underworld, Osiris would have significant power over him. A clash between titans like that would ripple through the entire pantheon, and such an upheaval hadn’t happened since the end of the old world. A civilization had fallen then. There was no telling what might fall this time—and I’d be right in the middle of it.
I needed a drink. I waved a server over and took a glass of wine. Osiris hadn’t compelled me to work for him. He could, so why wasn’t he?
“There’s more, isn’t there?” I asked.
Osiris blinked and looked at me as though he were surprised. “Of course. Once you have proof, you will kill Thoth.”
I choked on my wine, spilling much of it over my fingers and onto my lap. He’s insane.
I laughed, flicked the wine from my fingers, and dabbed at my pants with a napkin. He had to be joking. I couldn’t kill Thoth. If I were capable of killing gods, I’d have killed Osiris long ago.
Osiris wasn’t smiling and an icy shiver trickled down my back. He’d told me to kill Thoth. His words should have compelled me, but I didn’t feel any different. I didn’t feel the urge to pick up Alysdair and go god hunting.
Had his compulsion failed? “You’d have a better chance at killing Thoth than me. I’m just a mercenary without a name.”
“I cannot strike a direct blow at Thoth. Such an act would start a political collapse. I have no wish to destabilize everything I’ve worked so hard to construct. This realm and our place in it, it is all about to change. I cannot risk millennia of planning because my wife is screwing another.”
I absorbed that information and carefully packed it away for later consideration. “I can’t kill a god, Osiris.”
Godkiller was not a title I’d survive.
Osiris pursed his lips. His long fingers teased the rim of his glass. “I cannot compel you to do this. Thoth’s power rivals mine and no compulsion would stand the weight of a task such as this one. But I will lift a condition of your curse. You’ll be free to return home whenever you wish. Your mother can rest well in the afterlife knowing she has seen you. I am aware of some pertinent confessions she’d like to share with you before her slumber.”
Kill Thoth and this realm would no longer be a prison.
Clearly Osiris believed I was capable, even if I didn’t. That information alone was worth keeping close to my chest. In order to get back to the underworld, help Bast, her women, and Chuck, and see my mother again before she passed on, I had to agree to kill a god. If I succeeded, and that was a monumental if, I’d reduce the curse strangling my soul, but I’d also have the knowledge that Osiris had ordered me to kill a god—knowledge I could use against Osiris. Knowledge powerful enough to keep my daughter safe should any god come looking?
This was a dangerous proposition, one I wasn’t entirely sure I could survive.
“I agree,” I said and then gulped down the last of my wine in one shot. “Lift the realm lock now.”
Osiris’s dark eyes flashed with warning, and something else, something like mischief. I already regretted my decision, but I couldn’t see any other way out of this. He’d never allow me to say no.
“It will be done.”
Osiris stood. Several people glanced our way over their wine glasses. They couldn’t help themselves. The entire room was probably halfway in love with him. Given a few more hours, he could have them all enthralled and probably lining up to join him below his house.
“Come,” he said, paying his rapt audience no mind.
Isis’s intense glare was the last thing I saw in the crowd before I followed her husband out of the room.
Chapter 10
Osiris uttered the spellword, hurzd, blocking the men’s restroom door from any unwanted intruders, and wasted no time starting the curse reversal. He rinsed his hands, and while his fingers dripped water, he placed both palms on my cheeks. “Close your eyes.”
I did, with relief.
“Bruud uk kema, kur sros vrecr aeui roqa baam birdam,” His eternal power flexed in the room, swelling outward, and then snapped back with a pressurized pop. “Koae muv reka.”
I didn’t feel any different when it was done. As was the way with magic, you generally didn’t notice it until it was too late. “How do I know it’ll work?”
Osiris simply smiled, dug into his tuxedo’s pocket, and handed over two battered bronze coins. “Give the ferryman my regards.”
He turned to leave.
I closed my hand around the warm coins. “When I do this…”
He paused at the door, his back to me. We both knew I wasn’t talking about the trip back home, but the deal I’d struck. Godkiller.
“I’ll have your protection from the pantheon?”
His shoulders straightened into a solid line. “You already do.”
The door clicked closed behind him, leaving me standing alone beneath the buzzing fluor
escent lights. My reflection frowned back at me, concern and doubt etched into my face. “Yeah, I know. What else was I supposed to do?”
No time like the present. Filling one of the sinks to the brim, I shrugged off my borrowed jacket, rolled up the shirtsleeves, and plunged both hands into the water.
“Ovam kur ka, kur I ok uk sra oer, sra aorsr, sra resrs, omd sra dord. Ovam omd varcuka ka srruisr.” Open for me, for I am of the air, the earth, the light, and the dark. Open and welcome me through.
The lights flickered, and that was the only sign I’d get. Opening a door to the underworld wasn’t all that dramatic. No flaming doorways or blinding light. Old magic knew how to hide.
My amber-glittered eyes glowed a little too brightly in the mirror. I reached out my fingers and dabbed at the glass. Ripples shivered across the surface.
Five hundred years was a long time to walk this earth. A long time in which much could have changed back home. I hadn’t left on the best of terms.
I gripped the sink’s edge and peered into my reflection. I had changed. I hadn’t had much choice in that, but I was ready to go home. Wasn’t I?
Draining the water, I climbed onto the counter and pushed through the mirror.
For the longest moment, the crossing between realms felt like being submerged in warm water. The weight pushed in, not just against my skin and clothes, but into my mind. For a few seconds, it felt like I was drowning. There was no right way up, no sky, no ground, no sound, and no taste—until I opened my eyes and took my first breath. And there it was, the plaza. I hesitated, grounding myself.
Massive pillars held aloft a vast portico over the entrance to the Hall of Judgment, and all around pointed temples stretched into the distant, never-ending glare. The air smelled sweet, like honey, and the breeze was soft, warm, familiar, and welcoming.
Duat. Home sweet home. It had been too long.
Power buzzed beneath my skin, coming alive in my realm, and lent me a radiance I didn’t deserve. I’d spent so long in the dark that this world and its brilliance scorched.
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