by Jean Murray
He narrowed his eyes slightly before he pulled away, though his hands remained on the table close to her hips. She let out a heavy breath.
Lilly saw the hunger in his eyes. Hunger she had seen several times before when he stared at her. She squirmed under his gaze. With very little room to move, her hip brushed his arm. The fire in his eyes intensified with the slight contact. A stark contrast to the coldness of his skin.
Finally, she couldn’t take it. “Do you have to look at me that way?”
“What look would that be, Lilly?”
Another chill ran down her spine when he said her name. She lifted her chin. “The one that looks as if you are going to take a bite out of me. It’s very disconcerting. I’ve enough problems with revens trying to make me a meal.”
He blinked, then suddenly his eyes darkened. He leaned in closer so that his lips almost touched hers. “You mean this look.”
She inhaled sharply. Her heart clashed against her chest. “Yes.”
“And what if I wanted to take a little nibble?”
The words sent an instant rush of heat through her body, tingling in all the right places. She closed her eyes, and gripped the table. The wood creaked under the stress.
“Open your eyes,” he commanded.
She complied and found him staring into her soul. Her connection to him was so strong. Everything about him pulled her in. The more she struggled to stop it, the stronger it became.
Her body trembled, feeling the cold press of his lips against hers. Coldness spread over her face, cool and delicious. Like, an ice cold drink on a sweltering day, quenching an unknown thirst. His strong cold hands grasped tightly around her biceps and pulled her in tighter to his mouth. Her reluctance got lost somewhere in the taste of him. Desperation overcame her as he aggressively sought out her tongue with his own. A moan escaped her lips with the onslaught of pleasure. He answered her with a growl which resonated in his chest, spurring her to slip her hands under his tunic and up his tight muscular back.
The deep growl of arousal propelled to a deafening roar. He reared back and retreated several feet into the darkness.
She gasped. To stabilize herself, she gripped the table and leaned over to catch her breath. Her warm fingertips pressed against her burning lips.
“Whoa,” she muttered under her breath. She didn’t know what to do with herself. Stay? Go? Run? She just kissed an Egyptian god—the God of the Underworld, no less. Her body throbbed from a simple kiss.
Who was she kidding? There was nothing simple about it.
One thing Lilly did know, she burned him, and badly, considering the distance he backed away. She glanced over her shoulder to the location he disappeared. “I’m sorry.” She followed it with a deep breath, and looked down at the parchment she laid out. Lilly tried to distract herself from the warm burn of heat returning to her face.
“Lil,” Kit yelled.
She took another deep breath before turning to her sister. “Lil, hey.” Kit narrowed her eyes on her. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah, what’s up?” She leaned against the table casually. Her eyes darted to the dark corner. She knew he was watching, but didn’t enter the room. She hoped he was okay.
“Mother called.” Kit grabbed her arm and pulled her out of the room and up the steps. “We have a lead. We need to move.”
CHAPTER nine
Lilly grabbed her weapons belt and put it on. “You’re not going and that’s final,” she said to Kendra. “It’s too dangerous for you to travel at night.”
“You may need me.”
“No, we don’t.”
Kendra turned to her other sister. “Kit, help me here.”
“Lil is right. We can’t risk losing you.”
“We all go,” Asar’s voice boomed from a dark corner of the room.
“No,” Lilly said. “We can’t risk traveling with Kendra in the open. She is not immune to the revens.”
“You will do as I say. No further discussion.”
The room blackened. With the loss of equilibrium Lilly fell forward on her hands and knees onto a dirt floor. In the distance, Kit retched and Kendra whimpered. A cold, hard hand ripped Lilly from the floor. She blinked a few times, confused. “Where are we?”
“The key is here, I can feel it.”
Lilly looked in the direction of Asar’s low voice and saw his shape, nothing else. “Damn you,” she hissed.
Conversely, her heat vision silhouetted her sisters’ shapes in reddish yellow halos. She grabbed Kendra’s hand. “You stay in the middle or immediately behind Kit or me. Do you understand?”
Her sister gave a petrified nod. Kendra had an overwhelming fear of the dark, so Lilly understood why her entire body shook. She placed one of her small knives into her young sister’s palm.
“So much for gathering intel,” Kit growled, standing at the bottom of the stone steps deep inside an abandoned church.
Lilly recognized it as one of the places she and her sister had once exterminated an entire nest of revens. She turned to Asar. “Where’s the key?”
He simply stared at her with his vacant black eyes.
Grumbling, she ascended the steps with her katana leading the way. The first chamber lay empty of revens but had furniture, as if someone was living there. She glanced at Kit, who shrugged.
Kendra squealed. Lilly whipped her katana with precision toward the lunging reven. The next thrust pierced straight through the reven’s chest into the heart and out the back. With a quick quiver she withdrew the blade and tore up the heart muscle.
Lilly glared at Asar as the body dropped to the floor. He looked as if he couldn’t have cared less. Barely acknowledging her eye contact he pushed past her.
She made it to the other end of the room when a wave of dizziness swept over her, and a thousand voices whispered in her head. Depending on which way she turned, the pitch would rise and fall. Lilly jumped when Kit grabbed her arm.
“You okay?”
Lilly nodded and followed the whispers back across the room to a set of stairs heading in the opposite direction. The small voices were telling a story she couldn’t quite comprehend, but the need to understand overwhelmed her. Despite Kit’s protests, she rushed forward to the source and distanced herself from the rest of the group.
Lilly pulled up at the entrance of a small circular room. A woman with red hair and white gown stood with her back turned towards the door, humming a small tune which bounced softly off the stone walls. Two revens stood rigid against either wall, unaware of Lilly’s presence.
The whispers emanated from a small jar on the center of alter. Lilly stepped forward, shortening the distance between her and the woman. Despite her apparent beauty, the fetid smell of decay revealed the woman’s true identity. Lilly never thought she would get this close to the goddess. She pulled her blade high over her shoulder. In one smooth motion, she sliced horizontally.
A cold arm yanked her back, just as the tip missed the woman’s thin neck by a fraction. Asar’s black figure moved in between her and the goddess. He picked up the jar and opened its lid, making enough noise to make the goddess turn.
Lilly held her breath uncertain what to do. Did he not want her dead? He’d blown whatever chances they had of killing her.
She crouched slightly. Kit entered the doorway with Kendra.
The goddess froze and stared at the room full of unexpected guests. Her startled expression soon disappeared in favor of sinister sneer. The revens on the wall lurched forward, not toward Asar, but toward Kit and Kendra. Lilly executed four clean swipes and the bodies dropped to the ground.
The goddess screeched. “Nehebkau!”
Asar’s black eyes fixated on the pale redhead with red rimmed eyes and grey skin, reminiscent of a reven’s. “Where is the key?” he bellowed and threw down the jar.
“You will never find it, my love.”
He grabbed the goddess by the throat and slammed her up against the wall. “Where is it?”
The screams of revens echoed up the staircase in deafening roar. “We have company,” Kit yelled.
Lilly picked up the jar and handed it to Kendra. “Stay behind me. Down the steps, Kit. We’re getting out of here.”
She led the trio down the center of the church. At this moment she didn’t give a shit if the two gods followed. Her first concern—getting Kendra to safety. Lilly jumped down out of the church window followed by her two sisters. She kicked out the window of a car and hotwired it. “Get her out of here, Kit.”
“Not until you get in the car.”
“Go. I’ve got to go back.”
She ran off before her sister could protest any further, and cautiously navigated her way through the corridors, only encountering a few revens. Finally, after rounding the stairs, Lilly entered the small circular room she had left Asar and Kamen. The chamber lay empty with only the lingering smell of death.
CHAPTER ten
The burning in his side could only mean one thing.
The blade Kepi thrust into his ribs had been poisoned with snake venom. It could render any god powerless in minutes. He could not dematerialize in his weakened state.
Asar strained against the bindings holding him tight against the stone altar. Normally, he could have easily overpowered a goddess like Kepi, but without his soul, she had gotten the upper hand. Even Kamen lay immobilized by nails driven through his arms, shoulders, thighs and feet.
Asar focused on the red eyed goddess who leaned over him. She caressed the side of his face. “Whatever happened to us? I thought you loved me.”
“You betrayed me,” Asar growled.
“You refused me entry into the afterlife. You did not even have the decency to condemn me to walk this god forsaken world. No, you imprisoned me to live my days in darkness, confined to my tomb. Surely, you could have found it in your dead heart to forgive me.” The sharp points of her claws ripped through the skin on his face. “You are keeping strange company these days. A Nehebkau?”
“She is nothing more than a slave.”
“A very beautiful slave, I might add. Too bad she ran at the first sign of trouble.”
He had foolishly thought Lilly would be different than the other woman poisoning his life. Despite the bellow of betrayal sounding in his head, he pressed his lips tightly together. He would not show his weakness to Kepi.
The goddess had taken more than his son and the key to the Underworld. She had stolen his heart, literally. Cut it out with her bare hands. She robbed him of his very soul, the one sacred thing he was created to judge. What better revenge could the goddess have than leave the God of the Underworld without his soul?
Unlike humans, he existed without his life source, but he could not judge others without it. It weighed on him like a scarlet letter. With his soul and key, the goddess resurrected her reven army. He could not let Lilly execute Kepi. His heart lay inside her chest. If Lilly severed the heart, his soul, a fate worse than death would fall upon this world and the afterlife.
He did not want to admit to himself Lilly’s touch alone removed the curse of emptiness. As painful as it was, he felt alive in her presence. He could have completely absorbed the life energy she emitted so strongly, but he would not damn her to a fate similar to his own.
“You have nothing to say? No last words?” the goddess asked, raking her hand up the length of his linen covered thigh to rest on his scrotum. The thin material provided little protection.
He cringed at the unwanted touch of the goddess. A touch that, long ago, brought him sadistic pleasure, now just filled him with disgust and loathing. “Get your hands off me, odjit.”
She clamped her hand around him. He roared and arched up off the alter.
“We will finish this now. It is time to finally take what is left of your putrid body and feed it to my revens. Only then will you understand what it is like to be denied paradise. Your brother and son will soon see the same fate.”
Kepi raised the blade to eviscerate his abdomen. Asar chanted a small prayer to the Mother Goddess. A tumble of silver flashed in the corner of his eye seconds before the goddess’ head split open and was thrown back into the pack of revens.
A spray of blonde hair and black boots followed. With her feet straddling him on the alter, Lilly cut his bindings on his wrists and legs. In a quick movement, she leapt to Kamen’s side and pulled the stakes from his body.
The goddess staggered to her feet, and removed the blade imbedded into the side of her skull. Letting out a blood curdling screech, she faced Lilly, who had placed herself immediately in front of Asar.
Lilly twisted the katana in her hand with precision. “You want a fight, bitch? Bring it on.”
The goddess shrank back into the flood of revens in a hasty retreat. The undead pushed forward. Lilly swung her sword through the first row of rotting flesh. Body parts showered to the floor.
“Where are you going?” Lilly shouted. “I’m not done with you.”
Asar rolled off the altar onto his unsteady feet. The venom burned. Dead or not, it hurt like hell. Despite his own severe injuries, Kamen pushed back the horde of revens, but it wouldn’t last long.
“Lilly.”
Her green eyes flashed over her shoulder as she continued her killing rampage. Backing slowly toward him, she pressed her athletic frame against him.
Asar reached out and wrapped his arm around her waist. “Stay close to me,” he whispered in her ear. “Walk forward slowly.”
He leaned on her for support. The heat of her body immediately burned his skin, but he willingly endured the pain.
They had bigger concerns.
With Kamen protecting them from the rear, the revens parted as Lilly stepped forward with her weapon at the ready. Each step seemed excruciatingly slow and methodical. Over a thousand undead swarmed around them. Sweat rolled down the sides of her face and her chest heaved against him. They exited out the main vestibule of the church, down the aisle and out the large wooden doors in the front. Kamen secured the metal lock and released his control. The doors of the church bowed against weight of over a thousand zombies.
Lilly gripped the railing on the steps. “We need to find transportation. Those doors won’t hold for long.”
Asar could not support his own body weight and leaned heavily against her. He groaned when she moved down the steps and yanked open a van door.
“Daylight is coming,” Kamen stated, starring at the horizon. “We need to get him inside somewhere.”
She shifted her shoulder. He fell with a loud thump into the back of the van. With his eyes half hooded, he knew his death neared.
No measure of life would save him now.
CHAPTER eleven
Lilly ripped away the plastic covering of the steering column to reveal the ignition wiring. The revens hit with such force the van rocked up on two wheels and threatened to tip them over. Forced to drop the wires, she placed her hands out to stop from being thrown across the seat.
“Damn it.” She quickly grabbed the two wires and struck them together. “Start. Come on, baby.”
The choke of the engine spewed black smoke out the back tailpipe. Unable to open the locked doors, the revens pounded on the glass. She pulled the gearshift into drive and slammed her foot on the gas. The driver’s side window burst sending glass flying across her and the front seat.
“Fuck, me.” She arched back, slammed her head into the head rest and narrowly dodged a reven launching itself through her window. Without the slightest hesitation, she slammed the butt of her blade into its face. In the side mirror, she saw the body roll onto the sidewalk only to get up and resume its pursuit.
The van lurched forward plowing down the revens and bouncing over the dead bodies pulled under the vehicle. She yanked the steering wheel sharp to the right and turned onto Fifth Avenue. The entrance to the Empire State Building flashed briefly in her peripheral vision.
She flipped out her phone and called in the airstrike to the old abandoned church. The assa
ult helo shook the van as it rocketed overhead. The blast wave blew out the back windows of the van showering small fractures of glass through the entire vehicle.
Lilly looked over her shoulder. “Where?”
Kamen moved to passenger seat and directed her to a sewer entrance. She slammed on the brakes, and jumped into the back of the van. Asar’s black skin turned a sickly grey color. The acid from her stomach crawled up the back of her throat.
“What’s wrong with him?”
His own wounds already healed, Kamen lifted Asar over his shoulder and pushed past Lilly. “He needs anti-venom.”
“Anti-venom?” Following with her blade in hand, she looked at the ashy color of Kamen’s skin. He seemed far less affected by the poison. “What about you?”
He simply answered her with a hard malicious glare. It took several more minutes to find the makeshift dwelling Asar had established. Lilly followed down the dark tunnel a few steps behind Kamen. She couldn’t tell if Asar was alive or dead. There was no movement, not even a twitch.
Kamen motioned with his head, directing her into another chamber. He gently laid Asar down onto mattress in the dingy cramped space.
“Take care of him. Now!”
Lilly slowly approached the god. His large body consumed the small double mattress tucked in the corner. She unclipped her weapons belt and put it up against the wall. Her eyes focused on a gaping wound on his side. Leaning forward, she inhaled. The scent of the venom burned her nostrils.
The anti-venom pulsed through her veins, a protective chemical balance during the conversion to a Nehebkau. With a small knife from her discarded belt, she sliced open her palm. She clenched and unclenched her hand to start the flow of blood.
“Hold him still,” she directed Kamen. With Kamen’s enormous body holding Asar in position, she dripped the blood into the opening. Small puffs of smoke drifted out of the wound. Asar came alive, growling and thrashing under Kamen’s grip.