Soul Merchant (Isabella Hush Series Book 5)

by Thea Atkinson

  Because he was aiming right where Kerri and the ferryman were resting on the bed.

  Too late, the blade came down on the neck of one of the snakes. Black ooze sprayed everywhere. The white sheet looked splattered by a Pollack painting frenzy. The snake's red eyes went black. Smoke curled up in a stinking plume.

  "Oh my God," I said. I scrambled from the bed, still working at keeping my knees from buckling. "Stop, stop."

  I grabbed his wrist to keep him from swinging again.

  "Sweet baby Jesus," I said. "I hope. Oh God I hope..."

  I didn't have the thought finished before the still-whole snake slithered to the edge of the bed. I might have blinked or something because in the next second, Kerri was sitting there, naked as a newborn, and looking as comfortable in her nudity as Eve must have.

  I sank down on the chair without really feeling my butt hit the seat. I was aware that my breathing was ragged and I clutched my diaphragm to help stop the hyperventilating.

  Kerri looked spent. Her eyes were red-rimmed. She was thinner.

  But she was glowing.

  And none of this had to be normal for Mr. Smith.

  "Um," I started to say and he held up his hand.

  "Don't bother," he said. "I know what's going on."

  It took a moment to formulate a response to that, and it was pathetic.

  "You do?"

  He nodded as he wriggled up to a sitting position and shook the cords that strung from his arm.

  "I do." He nodded silently at Kerri who grinned back.

  Strange. Very strange. I jerked my chin at the snake that still lay on his bed, the head neatly dissected. The black spatter was already turning grey.

  "You know what's happening," I said carefully as I eyed him. Something else was afoot and it was clear in the wary way he looked at the goddess. "Really?"

  "I know what is going on," he said. "But I'm not sure I know who."

  Right. The naked woman sitting on his bed. I hung over my knees, letting the last of the faint flood back down to my toes.

  "Kerri," I said, taking a deep, bracing breath. "This is my landlord, Mr. Smith."

  Her silver eyebrow lifted ever so slowly. "Is that what he calls himself these days?"

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  I NOTED SHE HELD HIS gaze with the steady stare of someone who is expecting an argument, but his kept flitting to the blade he'd dropped onto the bed and wouldn't roam anywhere near Kerri's face.

  "You know him?" I said to her as a means to fill the awful tension that filled the air.

  "Oh, that I do."

  She stood and stretched very leisurely, reaching one hand toward the ceiling and slightly bent. She arched gracefully back so that her ribs rose and the muscles in her belly looked like they were rolling over small pebbles in a river.

  "Do you want to enlighten your poor tenant, Djedi, or shall I?" she said to Mr. Smith.

  His jaw jutted out stubbornly and Kerri, her fingers tugging some sort of silky black fabric out of thin air, canted her head at him in an obvious dare as the silk slipped down onto her fingers. It almost looked like she wanted him to refuse, but he sighed and slumped in his hospital gown.

  "I'm Djedi," he said, turning his gaze to mine.

  "Like in Star Wars?" I was doing my best to keep my focus but it was all so fantastic enough that the only thing I could think of was the sci-fi flick.

  "Close enough," he said, smoothing his hospital gown over his legs and running his gaze over the bed.

  I found myself wondering how he was able to pull his gaze from the goddess' nude body because I was mesmerized by it, and the way that silk fabric was even then wrapping itself around her in a body-hugging tunic dress that stopped mid-thigh. Her nipples stood out above the swell of her breasts, perfect globes without a bit of sag.

  My hands were creeping up toward my own, almost instinctively wanting to check their perkiness in comparison, and I had to force them into my armpits as I hugged myself.

  "Djedi was a magician," Kerri filled in.

  "Was." I said, not posing a question, just repeating the significance of the verb. It indicated he no longer practiced.

  She smoothed down the dress around her hips and stole a look at me as she did so. "Yes, was. When he was mortal, that is."

  I took a step backwards. "You're kidding me," I said. There was no way this old fart, fighting with his zoning committee, was an immortal anything. I mean, why would he bother?

  "Djedi was Rameses's magician in the time of the exodus," Kerri explained, as she plucked the velvet bag from the chair and passed it to Djedi. "And before that, magician to the great Khufu? Am I right?"

  Mr. Smith looked miserable when he answered.

  "I was never his magician. I didn't belong to anyone."

  "And still he kept you." Kerri said, not unkindly. She took a moment to nudge the decapitated snake in his direction.

  "You're not thinking of putting this thing back together, are you?"

  He recoiled as the headless snake came in contact with his arm.

  "Damned thing," he exclaimed. "Near lost myself to a damned vampire because of it." He shuddered. "I hope I got her head with that blow."

  He swung his feet over the other side of the bed and caught in the cords and wires that connected him to the equipment at his bedside. His irritated glance at the IV told me if we didn't get him unhooked pretty soon, he was going to rip the thing out on his own.

  "Here," I said, grasping for the IV and looping it backward over his shoulder. "Just hang on. I'll call the nurse."

  He pushed my hand away. "I don't need a nurse. And you don't need the questions she's gonna ask if she comes in here and sees...you two."

  He shot a look at Kerri who pointed at the snake as though he'd forgotten it entirely in his concern for what the nurse might see.

  "I know, I know," he said. "Give a guy a break."

  He sighed heavily, grabbed the head of the ferryman, and popped it into the drawer by his table. The body, he lifted and placed in the bag that he snatched from Kerri.

  "Shame to put something so vile in a kibisis," he muttered, and then stuffed that too in the drawer. "If I hadn't been there, that thing would have taken everything you are, Isabella, and it wouldn't have cared how hard Lucifer played with you when it delivered you into his realm."

  I shuddered at the words because there was a ring of truth in it that I knew from experience. Lucifer played hard with those in his menagerie and he had nothing but an eternity of time to fill. It didn't matter who had wanted to shove my soul aside and slip inside the space it had left, all of it was bad.

  I edged away from both immortals and the ferryman serpent that, even if it was hidden, was far too close for comfort.

  "Promise you aren't putting that thing back together," Kerri said. "I don't much care one way or the other, but I don't fancy rescuing our poor mortal Isabella again if it means me tapping into Hell's energy." She gave me a pointed look. "No offense, Isabella."

  I shrugged. "None taken."

  Mr. Smith struggled to his feet amid the tubes, and sheets that were now crisply white again, with no sign of the viscous black fluid that had bled from the ferryman at its decapitation.

  "You have no worries about me regenerating that vile thing," he said. "What I did for Khufu was a small trick and nothing more. I don't do that sort of magic anymore."

  My confusion must have been apparent because Kerri made a point of catching my eye.

  "He was known for that trick back in the day," she said. "Thought it was funny to scare the kids so they'd leave his goat herd alone. It backfired. Word got out that a hundred-and-ten year-old commoner could bring a man back to life."

  Djedi skirted the bed, clamping the back of his gown closed with one hand so that he could bend over to look beneath the bed.

  "I was fifty," he snapped as he did so. His voice came out muffled as he peered under the mattress. "Kids think anyone over thirty is ancient."

  She chuckl
ed. "To be honest, anyone over thirty was ancient."

  She rounded the bed next to him and sidestepped where he was busy swiping his arm back and forth along the floor beneath the shadows of the mattress. She pulled at the knob on the drawer while he checked over his shoulder, following her movements with his eye.

  The drawer wasn't deep and when it was pulled open, I could make out the velvet bag and the dull black of the ferryman's head from where I stood at the foot of the bed.

  Kerri plucked the serpent's head from the drawer with finger and thumb and held it aloft over her other hand for a moment, drawing a shape in the air before dropping it onto her open palm.

  She gave the window a lingering glance and it squeaked open an inch, letting the curtains billow in.

  When she waved her fingers over the small head in her hand, it crumbled to a grey powder.

  "I told you," he said, as she blew the small pile out the open window. "I wasn't going to do anything with it. Last thing I want is to feel that vile presence again."

  She pursed her lips. "And now you can't," she said and turned to me. "Never trust a necromancer. Not even this necromancer."

  He didn't protest. Just crossed his arms over his chest. The flaps of his gown fell forward, caught in the breeze from the open window. He spun on his heel and headed to the small closet, uncaring of the way his backside was aimed at the door to his room and the nurses' station beyond.

  It reminded me that if they saw him standing there, they'd be rushing in to check on the miraculous recovery. We really should get a move on.

  Kerri must have sensed the shift and clapped her hands together.

  "Now," she said to me. "I think it's time you got back home." She scanned me head to heel. "You look better. How do you feel? No strange presence crowding you from the inside out? No whiffs of brimstone when you move too fast?" She had a strange expression, like she expected me to lie.

  I shrugged.

  "Good enough for me," she said. "No humans harmed in the episode."

  "Thanks, Kerri," I said, I wasn't sure how I was supposed to feel, all things considered, but she seemed pretty satisfied. "I owe you one."

  She put a finger to her lips. "Never, and I mean this, Isabella. Never say you owe someone. You don't know when they'll call in those chips."

  "Right," I said, recalling the sidhe lord who had sent me to hell because he thought I owed him. "Can I take that comment back?"

  She laughed. "I won't ask for much," she said. "But it might be quite a few years from now before I need something from a spunky pickpocket."

  She looked directly at Mr. Smith. "You give her the details. Someone has entered my shop and I'm not sure everything there is as secure as I left it." She narrowed her gaze at me but said no more.

  Mr. Smith nodded and started stripping off his gown. Kerri was gone like a shadow, and I got an eye full of old man butt as he bent over to pull on his pants that he'd pulled from the closet. I turned around discreetly, mentally trying to rid myself of the image of a very large liver spot and several red pimples.

  "What details was she talking about?" I said.

  "You got a bond on you?" he said from behind me.

  "I don't know what that is."

  When his voice came again, it was muffled as though his mouth was covered with something.

  "A bond. Something connecting your soul to Hell by magic."

  "Oh," I said. "That. Yeah."

  I didn't want to explain the connection when I barely understood it myself, but it was the reason Maddox had installed the portal in my basement. Why he gave me a job. Why he was watching over me. "There's this stone, you see..." I started to say and gave up. How did I describe what Maddox was when I didn't even understand it?

  I felt his hand on my shoulder and turned around. He was free of the tubing and fully dressed in his sweater and old man slacks. His slippers were in his hand.

  "I don't care," he said. "Really. It's your business. But some vampire chick wanted out real bad. She used that connection to ride the ferryman. Picked the wrong goddammed person to try to wrestle with. That much I can tell you."

  I didn't have to think long or hard to figure out who he meant. "Isme," I said. "She's got..."

  He held up his slippers. "Don't care about that either. She took a nice trip back across the river and she'll be paying dear by the time she gets there. All I want to know is if the bond is open. You know, if it's something she—or someone else—can use to try to connect to again."

  "I don't know how it works."

  "I'm thinking if I was a conduit to a world where the prince of it liked to hold a fly's wings to the fire, that I'd want to know how it works, but that's your business," he said, shaking his head.

  He stooped to pull one slipper on and then the other, then made a small whooping sound as though he'd just remembered something that delighted him and surprised him at the same time.

  He whirled around and leapt for the bed with an agility I didn't expect for a man his age.

  I realized what had him so delighted when he burrowed beneath the sheets and pulled out the Set blade.

  He chuckled with glee. "She forgot the blade," he said almost to himself. "Not quite worth the price of admission, but I can find a use for it I'm sure."

  I wasn't sure I liked the sound of that, but I was happy enough to have things done and over that I was willing to ignore the crawling of my spine as he inspected it.

  "It's the real deal," he murmured. "Forged by Set himself and used it cut the balls off his own brother." He looked at me over the blade and the grin he shot me was almost macabre. "See the hieroglyphs?"

  I leaned toward it politely, noting that the markings reminded me of chicken scratching’s, but not wanting to get too close.

  "What does it say?"

  "It says if I tell you, I'll have to kill you." He chuckled.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  I KNEW HE WAS JOKING, but I didn't find anything funny in the idea of death. "I'll pass," I told him.

  "Just as well," he said. "Because then that non-man of yours would make me resurrect you, and I don't do that sort of costly magic for nobody no more. What's mine is mine, even if it's just my own damn power."

  He patted down his sweater as though it had pockets, then finding none, stuffed the blade into the back waistband of his polyester slacks, gangster style.

  "Now," he said. "Let's crack on."

  Crack on we did. He signed himself out, dismissing the nurses' protests that they should do more tests. We hailed a cab, which he ordered to stop at his house because he was an old man and shouldn't walk so far after such an ordeal. I noted he had no trouble carting the box and blade up his sidewalk to his house. He even rearranged a few bags of dirty diapers before disappearing beneath his porch awning and reappeared in front of his front door.

  I stood in the street, watching him open his door without unbalancing a single thing, and I wondered if Kerri had indeed forgotten the blade at all. It seemed a bit too coincidental for me to find an ancient Egyptian blade filled with black magic in her shop to bring to revive a man who had himself been an ancient one. And she didn't seem the sort to forget things with power the way one might forget a purse or a scarf.

  I sighed and told myself it didn't matter. I was whole again. I was home. The light was on over my stoop and I didn't need to do anything at that moment but sleep.

  I stumbled into my apartment without bothering to turn on the hall light. It was light enough still to see just fine without it. I didn't see the cat anywhere and it was just as well. I had a mind to throw her outside and let her face the elements for the afternoon after the stunt she'd pulled with the snakes.

  Not that I could blame her, really. A snake was a snake. It had no place inside and she had probably just been defending her territory. Still. Things could have gone terribly wrong.

  I tossed my cell phone on the hall table and stretched. I noted there was message bubble on the screen but I was too tired to answer it. All I
wanted was a few days rest, a shower, and then gobs and gobs of ice cream.

  I tripped over the cat at my bedroom door. She hissed at me, of course, the arrogant thing.

  "You best find a safe place to hide for a few hours," I told her as I scooped her belly with my instep and tossed her a few feet into the kitchen. She landed neatly, facing me, her back arched high. I feigned jumping at her and she hissed louder then bolted past me for the stairs.

  I fell onto my bed without pulling off a single item of clothing. I pulled the edge of the comforter over my legs and let exhaustion take me.

  I dreamed of wide-open spaces. Voids, really. They were black and gaping and they called to me with a hoarse voice that sounded like frogs croaking. Something from the darkness reached out and shook me by the shoulder. I shook it off. It shook me again.

  "Isabella," it said, in a gruff voice this time.

  I rolled over, brushing the hand off my ribcage that I felt trying to coax me awake...

  "Go away," I said.

  I knew who it was. The same person who sent me a text, who seemed to think his portal in my basement gave him every right to barge into my bedroom.

  "Wake up," he said.

  "The hell I will," I said, without opening my eyes.

  "You didn't answer my text," he said.

  "Was it a dick pic?"

  "You know it wasn't."

  I lifted one finger before letting my whole arm drop behind me on the pillow. "Therein lies the secret to my response."

  It wasn't, not really, but it was a point of honor by now for me to egg him on, knowing he would never do it. His delicate celibacy would never let him. Safe, I thought, to ride his nerves until he couldn't take it anymore. I chuckled to myself.

  His palm moved over my eyes and when I thought he'd try to coax me gently awake; he peeled my eyelids open with his thumb.

  It took a moment for my eyes to adjust to the bright light so I couldn't quite make out his face, but I knew it was Maddox. The smell of him was unmistakable. In fact, the woodsmoke aroma made me want to curl right back up, which I did. I rolled over to face the wall and brought my knees up.