Serpent's Game (The Soul Eater Book 5)

by Pippa Dacosta

  There was no way I was explaining that to Cat, not without knowing exactly what lurked in my past. But I also couldn’t run forever. Shukra had said the memories weren’t coming back. Chuck might be the closest thing I had to finding out what had happened.

  “Is she home?” I asked.

  “Yes. She’s watching TV and eating snacks.”

  I opened the car door. “Stay here.”

  Cat was already out the car and heading for the front doors. Right, I’d forgotten she only listened to Bastet’s orders. Mine she took under advisement and then ignored.

  I didn’t want Cat anywhere near Chuck if the girl had revelations about my missing days.

  “Cat.” I jogged up beside her. “How about you scope the block for anything unusual?”

  She laughed in that deliciously rich way of hers and started toward the building. “Nice try.”

  I never could slip anything past her. She was here, and I wasn’t getting rid of her. I’d deal with the fallout—if there happened to be any.

  Since we weren’t creeping in through vents, I pressed the intercom for Chuck’s apartment.

  “Yah-huh?” A young female voice resonated through the tinny speaker.

  “Chuck, this is—”

  “Holy-shit-Ace-Dante!” The intercom cut off, and the main door buzzed.

  I shrugged. “I guess we’re welcome.”

  I opened the door and let Cat through first. The building smelled of freshly cut timber and paint. Everything gleamed, from the wooden floors to the chrome banister. We climbed the stairs to the second floor and saw Chuck’s door open as we approached. The girl from the picture stepped out. A t-shirt hung off one shoulder, and her cropped jeans were either stylishly distressed or she’d gotten some decent miles out of them. She raked her dark eyes over me, then Cat, then back to me. “Where the hell have you been?”

  Chapter 13

  The apartment was exactly how Cat had described: sparse and spotless like a show home. It didn’t fit with the ragged young woman glaring daggers at me. There was something inherently familiar about Chuck, something so obvious it was staring me in the face. According to Cujo, we’d met before, but no memories resurfaced, and all my silence accomplished was pissing the girl off even more.

  “I guess I should have known…” she scoffed.

  Cat raised an eyebrow at me. It was clear Chuck knew me. It was also clear I had some explaining to do—to both of them. Problem was, I had no idea what for.

  “I’m sorry?” I tried that on for size. It seemed like a good place to start.

  “You should be,” Chuck snapped. “You said it would be a few months!” She started pacing over the little square rug in front of her couch. “A few months and she’d come help me. Nobody came, Ace. I waited… God, I must be such an idiot.” Her fingers sank into her hair and closed into fists. “I shouldn’t have hoped. I know. I knew that. But you and her, you were so… different.”

  Me and who? I wanted to ask, but with Cat looming behind me, I had to choose my words carefully. “Chuck—”

  She stabbed a finger toward me. “No. You shoved me on a bus. After everything that happened, you couldn’t wait to get rid of me. You got what you wanted, huh? Are all your kind heartless? Is she heartless too?” She directed the last comment at Cat.

  Cat backed off. “I’ll go fix us some drinks. Kitchen’s this way…” Cat ambled out of the room, seeking shelter from the little woman with a big attitude.

  Chuck’s glare tracked Cat before settling back on me. Her hands were balled into fists, her lips pressed into a defiant line, but all that was bravado and anger. Tears pricked her fiery eyes.

  “You came too late…” she said, but her voice was quiet and defeated. “I waited and you came too late.”

  The strangest desire fell over me—an urge to hold her as though I cared that she was trying to hold herself together while falling apart. I shook off the protective urge but not before I’d moved closer.

  “Chuck, listen…” A faucet hissed in the kitchen. I kept my voice low. “Something happened before. When you and I did… whatever we did… was Bastet with us?”

  She looked up. Her eyes glistened and her bottom lip wobbled. “You never came.” Genuine pain pinched her features. Dark hair, penetrating eyes, sharp cheekbones, startlingly beautiful… I knew her. The memory was so close. If only I could pluck it out of the hole Shukra had left behind.

  “I waited—”

  The front door clicked. I twisted and glimpsed a man’s outline before a rush of power slammed into my chest, stealing the air from my lungs.

  “Nile, no!” Chuck’s shriek was the last thing I heard before the world shifted. Walls blurred, and glass shattered. Gravity took hold, yanking me down and down and down toward the inevitable. The road rushed up. I hit it so damn hard I briefly blacked out. Ribs cracked. Pain tore down my spine. A car horn blasted. Too much noise. Too much pain… Tires screeched on wet asphalt. Instincts tried kicking me into ash and shadow, but I had enough control to know a man turning into smoke on a busy street in Allentown was more attention than I needed. I rolled away from the traffic noise and hoped it was enough.

  A blast of wind lashed me from above, trying to drive me into the sidewalk. Get up. I got an arm under me and heaved my broken body up. Embers fizzled around my fingers and up my arm, threatening to undo me.

  Cat landed on her feet—naturally—with a shock-absorbing bounce like she fell from windows every day. She snarled up at the man peering down from the broken window. I blinked through the haze of blood blurring my left eye and saw the same nobody kid who’d watched me consume a kurvord back in New York.

  “Hold still, unless you want glass as a permanent feature in your shoulder.”

  I grunted and adjusted the melting pack of peas against the back of my head. Everything hurt. Being thrown out of a window while you weren’t looking kinda had that effect. Cat poked and prodded me from behind. She shifted closer to get a better angle. The motel bed creaked and rocked. I’d heal in a few hours, making the glass even more difficult to remove. It had to be removed now.

  Nile—the Nobody Kid—had caught me unprepared. It wouldn’t happen again.

  “Now seems like the perfect time to tell me what’s really going on,” Cat suggested.

  “I told you—”

  She dug a claw into my wound, and pain darted down my arm. “Don’t lie to me, Ace Dante.” As she pulled back, she rubbed her chin against my neck to make up for the pain, I assumed. It worked.

  “That girl knew you.” Cat shifted again, tilting the mattress one way, then the other. Her knees brushed the outside of my thighs. Her closeness hadn’t gone unnoticed.

  “I might have omitted some things about the current situation.”

  “There’s a surprise,” she drawled.

  “It wasn’t deliberate.”

  “What’s genuinely sad is that you believe I didn’t notice.”

  Another claw dug in, eliciting a hiss. Glass plinked into the bowl on the bed, turning the water a deeper shade of pink.

  “Chuck knows me,” I explained, “but I don’t know her. Those memories were taken.”

  Cat’s hands stilled.

  I lowered the frozen peas and worked the stiffness out of my neck. The relentless throbbing was fading. “Shukra got inside my head and stole a few memories from my past.” Cat’s touch settled on my shoulder. With everything else happening—Osiris, Duat, Seth—my missing few days didn’t seem like much of a concern. I’d lost a few days and knowledge of a girl. I’d also misplaced a few thousand years as the monster Apophis. I knew which one scared me more.

  “How?” Cat asked. “That kind of spell can’t be easy? It would have taken time and preparation.”

  “She said I asked her to. It took me a while to believe her. She’s come a long way since Osiris cursed her to me. She’s not lying.” And I also had a history of hiding my memories from myself.

  “Why would you do that?” She sat cross-legge
d beside me. Now I couldn’t get away with staring out the window and had to look at the mild concern on her face. No accusations. By Sekhmet, I didn’t deserve this woman.

  “The only reason I’d remove a bunch of memories would be to protect someone or something from me.” There was another reason, one I didn’t want to think about or even consider. It was the reason I feared most. I might remove my memories if something terrible happened—something so bad I didn’t want to remember it. That alone wouldn’t have been enough, but coupled with wanting to protect someone? Definitely. I’d do it. Ace Dante would do it.

  “And that girl is a part of those missing memories?”

  “I think the girl’s child was in danger, probably from me. If it’s the prophesied child—the one Thoth kept preaching about right up until I killed him—then there’s a chance I erased any contact I had with his mother, Chuck, to stop myself from hunting him down.”

  “Seems extreme. Also seems like the kid might be useful, so why would you want to hurt him?”

  “Maybe I was afraid Osiris would compel me? I don’t know. But the kid is dangerous. He’s potentially a god in an earth-born body. You’d think that would make him weak, but my guess is it makes him powerful. And if it is Thoth’s soul, then that would make the kid a direct descendent of Ra. If the prophecy isn’t bullshit, he has the potential to become incredibly powerful. A power that could be used against Osiris. Isis believes it. She wants the kid too.”

  “To save Osiris?”

  “To destroy him.”

  Cat let that sink in for a few moments. She brushed the back of her hand across her forehead and sighed. “Just when I think I’m getting a handle on your world, I realize how little I really know. How do you… How have you lived like this for so long?”

  “By keeping my head down. But that plan went to hell around the time I met Chuck.” And Bastet walked back into my life. I kept that last part to myself, but it was the truth. Everything had started coming undone at the same time.

  “Isis and Osiris each asked you to find the boy?”

  “Asked, demanded, threatened. Take your pick.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Get to him before they do. I have a few ideas, and I think we can assume we’ve found the right kid. The guy who threw me out a window from eight feet away wasn’t delivering pizza.”

  “Him? He’s what? Fifteen? I thought we were looking for a baby? How is that even…” She rubbed her forehead again. “I need a glass of milk.”

  I let a small smile thaw some of the tension. “Did you think the gods would let a little thing like natural aging get in their way?”

  She tried on a tiny smile. “I’m finding I have a lot to learn…” She left the tail end open as though I could fill it.

  Cat picked at a bit of fluff on her pants. “Chuck was angry with you. You promised her something and let her down.”

  “Yeah, I noticed.”

  “If she’s the girl from your past, you need to speak with her again. She has all your answers.”

  “To do that, I need to get her away from Nile.” I tossed the slushy bag of peas on the floor and set the bowl of pink water down beside it. Twisting, I met Cat’s inquisitive gaze. “Guess I’d better be well rested and healed. Am I all patched up?”

  “You’ll live.” Her lips twitched. Not a smile, but close. She lifted her gaze, searching my face. Her attention settled on my lips and the wry smile I’d planted there. “We have work to do.”

  I eased my hand across her cheek, delighting in how she leaned into the touch, and brushed a thumb against the corner of her mouth where her rare smiles sometimes played. “It can wait.”

  One moment, Cat was still and reserved, and the next she pounced. She kissed like she meant to attack. There was nothing gentle or soft or questioning about Cat’s affections. She wanted, she took. Like now, her mouth on mine, her knee nudging my thighs apart so she could climb onto my lap and devour me. And by Sekhmet, I wanted her to.

  “You’re a bad influence, Ace Dante,” she hissed, trailing her hot mouth along my jaw.

  She had no idea how right she was.

  Getting involved with Cat hadn’t been part of the plan, and I didn’t care. Soon, I wouldn’t care about anything. Was enjoying a little light before the darkness too much to ask?

  Chuck’s apartment was empty. The front door hung open, and in the bedrooms, empty drawers gaped.

  “Kres,” I swore, remembering Chuck’s whisper, You never came. I’d let the young girl down, apparently for a second time.

  “Look for clues. They can’t have gone far,” I told Cat, though she was already scanning desktops and the trash for a hint as to where Nile and Chuck had gone.

  There had to be something. I checked behind drapes and in kitchen cupboards. Nothing. They’d cleared out in a hurry. Had my presence spooked them?

  “Ace?”

  The query in Cat’s voice called me back into the living room. Cat held up a crumpled photo, dug out of the trashcan. She held it out. The landscape print had been taken through the frame of a filthy bus window, but the figures standing close to each other were easy enough to make out. Me and Bastet. In the picture, she looked the same as when she’d walked into my office and asked for help.

  “Ring any bells?” Cat asked, failing at hiding her suspicious tone, if she’d even tried.

  “I…” I scratched around in my head for the memories but came up empty. I wasn’t even sure the guy was me. Could it have been a ka—doppelgänger? “I don’t remember that.”

  “Why would this girl have a picture of you and Bastet?” Suspicion was shutting her down. Even her body language had hardened. I’d known this was coming, hadn’t I?

  “I don’t know.” It sounded pathetic.

  “C’mon, seriously? She threw it in the trash. Doesn’t that tell you something?”

  It told me who the “her” Chuck had been referring to was. Me and Bast. Bastet was involved with my missing days. I’d wondered, but the picture and Chuck’s words confirmed it. More than ever, I needed to talk to that girl.

  “When was that taken?” Cat asked.

  I folded it in half and tucked it into my back pocket. “Once we find Chuck, you can ask her.”

  “She’s connected to you and Bastet.” Cat’s eyes flashed. There was nothing friendly in them now. She’d been—was Bastet’s finest warrior. She knew all the leads pointed back to me, and here was the evidence staring her in the face. Bastet hadn’t left my office all those months ago. She’d stayed, and Cat’s prime suspect, me, conveniently had amnesia. Right. Even I didn’t believe my own bullshit.

  I headed for the door, shaping an expressionless mask and guarding the horrible sense of regret with every step. “Looks that way.”

  Godkiller.

  I didn’t want to think about it, but the facts were getting more and more difficult to deny. Bastet was missing. She’d been missing all this time. I was the last person to see her.

  By the time I rode the Ducati back into downtown and parked once more outside Starbucks, I’d been over the obvious time and time again in my head. Bastet had come to me for help. Fact. Shortly after, she’d disappeared and I’d had Shukra erase my memories. Fact. Bastet’s soul wasn’t in the River, but there were other fates awaiting wandering souls. She could have been lost in the Twelve Gates. And then there was the obvious: me. I’d consumed Ammit’s soul. It had been an accident, but it had happened. I’d almost consumed Isis’s soul back in Egypt and again outside Cujo’s. I could devour a god’s soul. I was a Godkiller. What if I’d done the unthinkable?

  More than darkness. Those words meant something. They’d haunted me for months, appearing in my dreams and between one moment and the next.

  Cat arrived at Starbucks, and I tossed Chuck’s file down on a table and ordered coffees. The cat shifter spread the file on the table and looked over every single sheet with a fine-toothed comb. There was no doubt in my mind that Cat would discover the truth. The fact
she couldn’t look me in the eye suggested she was already halfway to thinking the same as me.

  Godkiller.

  I’d gained that name around the time Bastet disappeared, hadn’t I?

  I couldn’t believe it. Bastet. Queen of Cats, Warriors, and Women. She was a formidable goddess. Righteous. Honorable. One of the few divine beings with light souls. The years I’d spent with her had been some of the best in my long life. I’d left her to protect her from me. There was no way in this world or the next that I would willingly hurt Bastet, but I’d been known to make huge mistakes.

  “Ace Dante…” the barista called out.

  What was one goddess’s soul against the thousands I’d consumed over the years, against the true might of a monster like Apophis?

  “Dante?” the barista called again.

  “Here.” The name summoned me out of my darkening thoughts. I collected the coffees and set them down at the table. Cat didn’t look up from the papers.

  I watched her scan each document. Her quick fingers danced over the papers, tracing each line back and forth. Her touch was methodical, but that same gentle touch could kill in an instant.

  She would kill to avenge Bastet.

  This—whatever it was between us—couldn’t compete with Cat’s devotion to her queen and her goddess. She loved Bastet. I was just the lying bastard who’d get in her way. That feeling sat uneasily and kept me quiet. Once the truth was out there, would I be deflecting Cat’s claws?

  “Are you going to sit there and brood over your fate or try to make it right?” When she looked up, Cat’s trademark fierceness burned in her eyes, but not hatred like I’d expected.

  “What if I hurt her and had the memories wiped to hide it?”

  She winced, the words cutting where few knives could. She took a moment to control whatever she wanted to say first and gently shook her head. “I don’t think that’s what happened. Whatever did happen, we need to know for sure. Let’s find the girl and this god-child before more damage is done. Here…” She slid a note across the table. I immediately recognized Shukra’s spider-walk handwriting. She’d been working on tracking down Chuck alongside Cujo—probably right after she realized she’d erased something important from my past.