“Isis doesn’t care who killed her people and we’re out of options.” I raided more of the minibar and ripped the cap off something that tasted halfway between perfume and poison. “Do it,” I repeated, reigning in the desire to compel. My compulsions never stuck to Shu anyway.
“We can still walk away.”
I whirled on her and laughed. I’d never thought of Shu as naïve, but here she was, telling me we could walk away from the gods. “There’s no walking away from this. The only way out is by finding the skull first and destroying it. If Isis gets it, if she tasks anyone else with finding it, she’ll release whatever’s caged in that hill, and all signs point to it being very, very bad for the rest of us. So do the spell and find the skull.”
“It’ll take a few hours. I’ll need to source some items in the souk…” She trailed off, noticing how I was staring right through her.
My thoughts had wandered back to how the ferryman had barred me from the river. He’d spoken of secrets and things he couldn’t say. Osiris knew what was in my mother’s box, a box warded against me and made to look like a useless trinket in my hands. Isis knew who I was. Thoth had told me something had been taken from me, and I could feel it, an absence that couldn’t be filled. Isis was using me as a pawn against her husband. Thoth had used me to kill himself. And Osiris used me to get his rocks off whenever he damn well felt like it.
I was done being used.
“Ace?”
“That’s not my name.” I kicked the minibar closed and set the little bottle down on the sideboard before I threw it across the room. I spread my hands, watching my fingers part. The man in me wasn’t real. Had he ever been? I had power. I could wake a temple, rouse a horde of snakes, control minds with words—minds like Anubis’s. I wasn’t a plaything for the gods. I wasn’t a man. I wasn’t even sure I was a soul eater. Cat had been right. I was good at pretending, so good that even I didn’t know what I was hiding. “Liar, thief…” I muttered.
“Monster…”
Isis stood in the doorway, wearing a white gown intricately embossed with golden thread. Her hair, decorated with gems, had been braided and pinned into an elaborate snakelike coil. She could have walked into ancient Waset looking no more and no less like the goddess who ruled over all.
I locked eyes with Shu, now caught between me and Isis. “Do the spell,” I told her.
She nodded once, but her gaze held all the warnings. “Don’t die, you son of a lizard,” she grumbled before striding from the room, her head held high as she passed the goddess.
Isis didn’t spare Shukra a glance and continued to gaze at me, unblinking, until long after the sorceress had left. I waited. She had all the time in the world. She could come to me. She wanted something—probably to know if I’d had any luck with Hatshepsut—but she wouldn’t ask because that would give me power. So she drifted around the room, eyeing the scrolls spread across the floor, and stopped by the bed, where I’d discarded the incomplete snake-headed jackal scroll. If she recognized its contents, there was nothing to show for it on her face.
“I suppose you’ve never wondered why Osiris would bind your soul to such a foul creature as the demon sorceress? You did, after all, deserve the punishment, monster. But why Shukra?”
“Hatshepsut didn’t know where the skull was,” I said, hoping to steer her attention away from Shu.
“He does nothing without reason,” she replied, ignoring me.
“Shukra was my enemy. I hunted her down—”
Isis regarded me side-on. Her lips lifted at the corner. “Was?”
The last thing I needed was Isis realizing I might care if something happened to Shu. “I tolerate her. What choice do I have? It doesn’t matter now—”
“Choice. Yes. Choice really is an illusion, yours especially.” Isis trailed her fingertips over the scroll, raking her nails along the papyrus. “How much choice do you really have with the sorceress manipulating your thoughts?”
I stayed quiet, opting to watch and read her despite every instinct urging me ask what she meant. It was all a game. Everything. Lies and twisted truths. If I remembered that, she couldn’t touch me.
“Her stinking touch is on you. It’s subtle. She was careful to hide it, but she has manipulated you and perhaps continues to do so.”
I laughed softly. This was ridiculous. Shukra couldn’t touch me. She’d tried many times over the centuries. We’d fought, again and again, with magic and weapons, physically and mentally, but she’d always lost.
“She keeps secrets from you,” Isis continued.
“I know Shukra’s secrets.” Even as I said it, old doubts reared their heads. Shukra had always been a formidable opponent, a demon with a soul so black I’d personally hunted it down. I should have devoured her—destroyed her—but Osiris had taken control of her fate, and mine. At first, she’d raged against the curse and against me. When that hadn’t worked, she’d schemed and plotted. After centuries, we’d fallen into a mutual hatred. And now… What were we now? What if Isis was right? Could I have missed something? Could Shukra have wormed her way into my thoughts? No… No, not without my knowing. It wasn’t possible.
Isis had made her way around the scrolls to me, stopping outside my reach. “Your life is misaligned. You feel it.”
I should look her in the eye and show her she can’t break me. But I couldn’t. She’d see my doubt and know she had something to use against me. I hadn’t expected this. I was broken. I’d been broken for a long time, but I lived like that because Isis was right. I didn’t have a choice. But Shukra was Shukra. She didn’t need to manipulate me. These days, she told me to my face if she wanted to fight over something.
“My poor, confused monster. How terrible it must be not to know what is real and what is a lie spun to bind you.”
“What do you want from me?” I stared at the wall, careful to keep the goddess in the corner of my eye.
She sidestepped to stand in front of me, forcing my focus on her. The moment I did, I noticed all the subtle facets of her face. The way golden flecks lined her lips and darkened her skin, and how the dark, sweeping lines around her eyes deepened her gaze.
“We have a common enemy, you and I. He abuses you and makes you grovel at his feet. You despise him, perhaps as much as I do. Deny it.”
My hatred for Osiris was likely the worse kept secret in Duat. Hate was too weak a word for it. What I felt for him came from a darker place. I couldn’t deny it.
Isis’s smooth hand settled against the roughness of my cheek. “What would you do to see his reign brought to an end? What can I offer you to help me destroy my husband?”
I caught her hand in mine to push her back, but that didn’t happen. Instead, I held her hand in mine, even though it burned like hot iron.
“With my husband gone, your curse will lift. The sorceress will no longer be tied to your soul. You will be free of this human charade, free to claim your rightful place. You will be a king, a god.”
With my free hand, I eased my fingers around the delicate curve of her neck and rested my thumb over the soft pulse. She let me draw her closer. “My rightful place as Devourer alongside Anubis in the weighing chambers?” I asked, searching her golden eyes for lies.
Her lips ticked. “Oh… no, my dear monster. That is not who you are.”
I clamped my hand closed around her neck, choking off her air, and watched her lips part in a silent O.
Yes, this was what I was made for.
Defying gods—breaking gods. I yanked her close. She brought her nails down and dug them into my cheek, dribbling blood. I knocked her hand away and turned her, pinning her against the sideboard. She could have fought me, could have struck me down— but the game continued, this time by my rules. Her pretty eyes widened. Her fingers dug into my grip.
“You will tell me who I am,” I sneered, swallowing the bubbling rage before it pushed me too far. “Tell me what you know. No more secrets. I ask the questions and you answer them. You will not lie
to me. Answer me, and I will help destroy Osiris alongside you.”
Her smile held a vicious edge, one that excited my hungry, maddening need to claw free of Osiris’s shackles. She couldn’t know that the thought of being free, of not being Ace Dante, of becoming the thing I was before, was more terrifying than anything she could threaten me with—terrifying but right. I didn’t want to be free. Not yet. I wasn’t ready. I was still Ace Dante. What I wanted was the truth and the power to choose my fate.
I loosened my grip. Isis slammed her hand into my chest, and for a silent, blinding second, the world ended, my heart stopped, and an empty nothingness took hold of my body—until I slammed into a wall and almost went through it. The floor smacked me in the face, and the ground seemed like a fine place to rest up until my body stopped throbbing in pain.
Isis used her bare foot to kick me over. She smiled down at me, her dark skin fractured by sharp, jagged fragments of light. She kept right on smiling until I brought my knee up and kicked her leg out from under her. She fell to her knees and braced an arm against the floor, bringing her furious face too close. And then, alarmingly, she laughed. I’d expected rage, not hilarity, and before I could react, Alysdair’s cold steel pressed against my neck, freezing me rigid. The goddess straddled my legs, pinning me firmly between her thighs.
“You have much to learn, monster. I think I will enjoy opening your eyes.” She leaned down low, making sure I couldn’t look anywhere else but at her. She could drown me in Light as she had at Karnak, but the look in her eyes was far from malice.
“Careful,” I warned. “Wallow too long in the filth with the river beasts and you’ll start to like it, Your Highness.”
Alysdair bit into my flesh and the goddess’s lips brushed mine in that tantalizing way that demanded I give chase. If I did chase that temptation, I’d fall deeper into her trap. Maybe it would be worth it, the reckless part of me urged.
“I will reveal all to you soon. In return, you will help me destroy Osiris.” Delight shone in her brilliant golden eyes. “Agree, and you will not lose your head.” She shifted her weight over my hips, drawing a hiss from me. “And other more sensitive parts.”
Kill Osiris. I’d have agreed to do it for free, but the curse, and the man it made me, complicated things. Ace Dante. I wasn’t ready to give that up, curse or not. Liar, thief… I smiled up at the Goddess of Light and lowered a hand to her thigh, testing her resistance. There was none. “I agree,” I lied.
Chapter 14
When Shu and I were pulled aside at Luxor airport’s local flight check-in, I assumed it was for a security frisk until a smartly dressed male flight attendant led us down an empty passageway and into the luxury fuselage of a private jet. His smile was a little lopsided as though he’d forgotten how to smile.
He offered his hand, saying, “Compliments of Isis.”
That explained the glassy, dilated eyes.
Shu shot me a raised eyebrow, but neither of us was about to turn down a free flight, especially since flying private lowered the chances of security paying us attention on the return trip, with a human skull in our possession. It also conveniently kept my name off any flight lists—lists Osiris potentially had access to should he decide to track down his AWOL pet soul eater.
“How convenient,” Shu remarked, dropping into a large armchair and kicking her feet up on the chair opposite her. “Isis knows the skull is in Cairo?”
Shu had worked her magic and guestimated the skull was in Cairo, probably in the Egyptian museum. We’d know more once we arrived, but it was a lead, and a good one. Her spells were rarely wrong.
I sank into an equally large reclining seat. “I told her we were investigating a lead.”
Shu gave me a long, withering look, the kind that said she wasn’t impressed.
“If I hadn’t, she’d be here riding shotgun. Is that what you’d prefer?”
“Me? No. What about you? You’re getting awfully close to the Goddess of Light for someone she calls monster.”
I slipped my sunglasses on and sank low in the seat, determined to catch some sleep before we landed. “I’m handling Isis.”
“Mm…”
I’d expected a quip about the handling part, but none came back. I glanced over. Shu was staring out the window at the runway rushing by beneath us.
I drifted in and out of sleep, reliving all the things I’d witnessed in the Gates, and some things I hadn’t… Some burned with the memory of the Goddess of Light’s lips on mine and how her brilliance had scorched in the most exquisitely painful ways.
Shu kicked me awake as the wheels screeched against the runway. We were escorted out of the airport to a waiting white Mercedes. Shu couldn’t have been less impressed if Isis had arranged for two camels.
“If she knows where it is, why isn’t she here?” Shu grumbled as she climbed into the air-conditioned car.
I slammed the door closed behind us, and we were whisked away from the airport. “Because she believes I’ll get the skull for her like a good little man-puppet.”
“Are you her man-puppet?”
I scowled at the question, disappointed it had come from Shu. “Your faith in me is inspiring,” I drawled, tired of the bickering, the heat, the dust, and this godforsaken trip to Egypt.
“With Thoth’s curse, you had an excuse for being a dick. But these last few days, you’ve been acting more like Osiris than Ace Dante.”
She didn’t… “I know you did not just compare me to Osiris, because if you did, I—”
“You’ll what? Throw down in this car in traffic? Do it, Soul Eater. It wouldn’t be the stupidest thing you’ve done lately.”
She hadn’t called me Soul Eater in a few months, maybe even years. Acehole, Ace, dumbass, sure, but I thought we’d moved on from Soul Eater and demon sorceress. I glared out the tinted window, wishing it were New York’s streets we were passing through and not the dust-caked streets of Cairo. “Let’s just get this over with.”
I hadn’t forgotten Isis’s “concerns” regarding Shu’s touch on me, although I’d pushed it to the back of my mind. Unfortunately, the back of my mind already harbored similar doubts, so now I had myself a full-blown conspiracy theory with Shu at its center. Was she capable of manipulating me? Yes. Could she have gotten to me without my knowing? There were ways. She was a competent sorceress—the best that I knew of. We’d spent longer as enemies than some civilizations had lasted. But I’d been watching her movements and tracking her buying activities. The type of spell she’d need to throw at me to not only manipulate me but make me forget? That required forethought and planning, and many of Mafdet’s ingredients. I would have known. I would have stopped her long before she could have gotten to me.
The Egyptian Museum in Cairo was still recovering from a recent government coup, during which the museum had been raided. Through luck more than security, most of the priceless ancient artifacts had been left intact, but the worldwide attention had decimated tourism and morale. Shu and I passed through a brief security scan and entered the humid interior. If the museum had air conditioning, it wasn’t working. Despite two-story high ornate arches and vast pillars, the number of exhibits rammed against the walls pulled the space in, making it feel cramped. A thin layer of dust covered the glass displays and hung like glitter in the sun-streaked air.
I fell back and let Shu wander ahead as she zeroed in on her spell’s target—the skull, I hoped.
History clamored—look and remember—along the hallways. Artifacts from a dead world cried out, trapped behind glass. Their background magic and faint songs plucked on my nerves like a constant drip-drip-drip I couldn’t stop and wanted nothing more than to escape. This was why I hadn’t come back to Egypt. The history was too real, too dead, too close… like the things I’d seen in the Twelve Gates.
I didn’t remember stopping at Tutankhamen’s display, but there I was, alone and staring at the boy-pharaoh’s golden treasures through a thin layer of filthy glass. A memory tugged on my
thoughts—an irritating itch buried too deep for me to reach. I’d known the boy-king. I’d spent time with him, helped him end the worship of the imposter-god Atun—a jackass priest who had tried to build himself a following. He had met a timely end. Tutankhamen had returned the land to the true faith of Amun Ra and avoided war by doing so.
I drifted to another display. The dagger inside had an iron blade made from meteorite that never rusted. A gift to the boy-king from the gods, the people had said. Tutankhamen had given me its twin as thanks. But his reign, over three thousand years ago, was long before my time. I knew that. I’d always known that. So how was it possible that I remembered the many festivals when the gods had reveled freely with the people, and walking the Nile-fed wheat fields at night, and more, so much more? I remembered too much. In the Twelve Gates, I’d seen everything. I’d believed the visions were dreams because they couldn’t be memories. They couldn’t be my fears. Cities fallen, buildings crumbling to dust, bodies turned to ash, and the Nile red with blood.
“Ace.”
Shu’s hand on my shoulder shocked me back into the present.
“It’s back here,” she said, turning away. We headed toward a door marked “Staff Only.” “There’s no one around…”
The skull. Right. We were here to stop Isis, or whoever had attacked her people, from getting their hands on the skull and freeing the power between the valleys. I shrugged off the past and its claws. I could wrestle with those memories again later, in a bottle of vodka. Until then, I had a job to do.
We slipped unnoticed into what looked more like a storage room than a research area. Boxes had been stacked high in corners, marked with thick, sweeping Arabic writing. I smelled dried wood and baked papyrus.
“It’s close. Somewhere here…” Shu pulled one of the boxes down and rummaged through bits of bone and broken pottery. I grabbed a box and started digging. Get the skull and get out of here, away from the chittering voices of the past worming their way into my thoughts.
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