The Jackal Prince (Caller of the Blood - Book 2)

by McIlwraith, Anna

  “It’s all over.” His wild eyes found Emma. “He knows.” He spat something unintelligible in ancient Egyptian and shoved hair out of his face — revealing claw marks, bright and wet, the muscle of his face exposed in meaty strips.

  “What do you mean?” Emma shot a wide-eyed look at Fern, caught the expressions on the faces of the guards and of Alexi and Red Sun, and moved to go to Kahotep. “He knows we’re not going ahead with the pledge?” She made it two steps before Fern’s hands clamped around her bare arms, palms burning against her skin with the electric thrum of terror.

  “Worse,” said Kahotep — and then Emma saw past him into the hall beyond, to the prone shapes of the jackal guards that had been posted at their door. “He knows you haven’t been claimed.” Kahotep’s face was stricken, and his gaze went from Emma to Red Sun, whose thick face was thunderous. “We have to get her out of here.”

  Red Sun nodded, one fist clenching at his side. “Get us to the roof, prince.”

  Kahotep was already out the door into the passageway.

  “What about Telly?” Emma jerked her arm out of Fern’s grip. “What about the others?”

  Alexi followed Kahotep and crouched at the side of a jackal guard, stripping the weapons from the unconscious man. “Telly can take care of himself,” he said without looking at her. “You know that.”

  “But —”

  He’s right, sent Fern, crowding her body with his own, forcing her to look into his eyes. We have to get to safety, Emma, now.

  She glared up at him. “We can’t leave them behind.”

  “Yes we can,” said Red Sun. He moved in close, towering over both she and Fern, the heat of his body like a wall — driving her toward the door. “We don’t have a choice. It’s time to run, Emma, while we still have a chance.”

  She stared up into his warm brown eyes, and breathed in his heady, masculine scent and hated him. But she shoved past him and headed for the hallway, Felani and Mata crowding close to her.

  “I do not want to leave my sisters behind either,” said Felani. Her small face was almost charcoal-gray with tension from holding back the change, voice hard. “But we do them no good if we stay behind to be caught. It is not them the jackal king is after, it’s you.”

  Emma had nothing to say to that; blindly she stepped into the passageway with Felani’s steadying hand on her elbow.

  They stopped when they saw Kahotep’s rigid stance, the way he stared down the hallway in the direction of the main receiving hall — the direction of the exit.

  “Kahotep.” Alexi’s voice was a dangerous whisper. He drew the stolen sword at his hip, cold coming off him in waves, eyes glowing like jack-O’-lanterns.

  Kahotep turned as the staccato march of footsteps finally carried down the passageway. “They’re coming.”

  They ran, Kahotep leading them further into the labyrinth of the palace toward the temple that housed the stairway to the roof — and mere yards behind them, Khai-Khaldun turned onto the main hallway, with Tarik and two dozen jackal guards at his back.

  Telly burst into the chamber and found it empty. Tarissa and Rish followed, changed, flashing into their slender human bodies, nostrils flaring for the scent of their sisters. Guillermo rushed past Telly and found the remains of the slain jackals at the chamber door; one was still alive but unconscious and apt to stay that way, but the other was dead. Kahotep’s scent was on them, but other scents permeated the hall.

  “Kahotep’s been out here,” Guillermo called, “And in the chamber, but none of the other jackal’s I can smell went in with him. He killed these guards.” Guillermo noted the missing weapons. “I think Kahotep came to warn them and they fled — but whoever was chasing them has a head start.” He strode back into the chamber, looking at Telly expectantly. “Do you hear me? That’s Khai-Khaldun’s scent out there.”

  Telly just stared at him. The maidens moved away; they felt what Guillermo did not, not yet — the air-pressure changing, a thick static charge that crackled out from the walking god and coiled the atmosphere of the room like a steel cord. Then the edge of it ran along Guillermo’s skin, and it burned.

  He backed out into the hallway as Telly moved toward him. Telly’s face began to change; his bones creaked, growing long, skin stretching translucent and luminous over them. His eyes, slanted, bled to white and glowed like mist. His hair bristled as though it were alive.

  White light came off his skin and dissolved his clothes as he passed Guillermo. “Follow me,” he said, his voice a deep triple-echo. And then he disappeared in the light of the change, the giant red fox streaking away up the hall, the scents of Khai and of Emma leading him.

  Emma clutched Fern’s hand hard enough to bruise and wrenched her bad shoulder as they took a hard right and swerved to keep their balance. She was breathing harsh already from the sprint up the long corridor, and every breath she hauled in just reminded her that she was the slowest, that her small legs and lungs were the reason they could hear the march of feet like thunder advancing up the hall behind them. She choked back a sob and forced strength, speed, adrenalin into limbs made of terrified jelly.

  “Closer!” one of the maidens called out. Emma heard shouts farther behind; without thinking she turned to look over her shoulder and stumbled. At once strong arms snaked around her and wrenched her from Fern’s grip, and then her feet were off the floor. Horne had handfuls of Emma’s clothing, fingers digging unceremoniously into thigh and armpit.

  “No!” she screamed against Horne’s chest but didn’t fight him, didn’t dare. He hauled her into his arms and sped ahead, following Kahotep through an archway to the left and into a huge vaulted hall twice the size of any they’d seen yet. Six gigantic pillars stood like a small forest taking up one half of the chamber to the left, and a few small torches threw pools of yellow light and turned the shadows to inky black.

  Alexi fanned out to the side and turned in the direction they’d come. “Where?” he said to no-one.

  “The far wall,” Kahotep called out as he ran.

  “Fern!” Emma clawed her way up Horne’s shoulder and looked back in time to see Red Sun grab Fern’s arm and pull, his thick head down like a bull’s as he charged after her and Horne, with Andres and Manny, Felani and Mata close behind him. Fear drew Fern’s face tight and skeletal. He met her eyes; she reached for him with her mind and they merged, and his mind screamed with hers as she watched Khai-Khaldun come through the archway to the great hall with Tarik and the jackal warriors behind him.

  Kahotep reached the far wall at a run and slammed his open palms into the rectangular stone door. It cracked and buckled as it opened. Dust on his hands, Kahotep turned and stared across the huge expanse of hall at his uncle, eyes wide and bleeding to gold, the scent of heat and incense rolling off him.

  Jackal warriors poured through the archway behind Khai, who stood with his head cocked and his eyes glittering like jewels. Tarik drew abreast of him, sword in hand. The jackals bristled with weapons, eyes bright with the fever of battle. They outnumbered Emma’s people by at least two to one. Emma seemed to have all the time in the world to watch as the jaguars and the maidens turned mid-stride to face the coming warriors, as Fern and Red Sun slowed and looked over their shoulders, to watch as the warriors brought their weapons up and crouched for the attack — to watch as Khai lifted his arms and roared something that sounded unholy in ancient Egyptian. And then the very stones beneath them all began to shake, and time caught up with Emma.

  Horne threw her at Kahotep; they clutched each other for support. “Get her the fuck out of here!” Horne turned, drawing his stolen weapon. “Go, now!”

  But Kahotep was staring across the hall, and his hands on Emma shook. Horne left them.

  “Kahotep, what —” She looked away from him as she said it and saw chunks of stone and masonry begin to rain down on her friends. Fern put his hands over his head and his eyes found her through clouds of falling dust. He started away from Red, toward her, dodging pieces of cei
ling plaster, dirt and stone particles billowing outward as though the walls were falling apart. And then something the size of a man lurched out of the shadows and shambled into him.

  Emma’s mind went white with terror. Fern’s mind shoved hasty reassurance at her as he thrashed and batted against the thing attached to him, even as more of them stumbled out of the shadows — out of the walls, which were falling apart, being broken apart by things tearing free in showers of plaster and paint and clay.

  Get out, I’ll follow, you have to get — shock registered as he recognized what it was he was fighting. For a moment Emma couldn’t believe what she saw in his mind, but then the rest of them swarmed into the light. She heard Red Sun bellow something wordless, saw his huge shape wading through nightmares to get to Fern, and then hands were on Emma’s arms and she was dragged backwards.

  The last thing she saw before Kahotep wrestled her into the stairwell was an army of shambling, crumbling, desiccated jackals that walked like men and snapped with black mouths and reached with skeletal claws for her friends.

  Telly smelled dust and sweat and centuries-old death, and he ran harder. Debris billowed out of an opening in the wall to the left, mere paces ahead; screams and the roar of falling stone filled the passageway. Khai’s scent like a sickening thread drew Telly forward. Three steps away, two, one; he took the turn at a flying run and his eyes fixed on Khai’s form through the haze of dust and torchlight. His vision took it all in, but at the front of his mind he saw nothing but the line of the jackal king’s profile, felt nothing but the stone flying by beneath his feet, knew nothing but that Khai’s throat would be in his long jaws in seconds. It would all end here and Emma would be safe. He leapt, haunches launching him explosively into the air; he sailed…

  …and the solid world collapsed around him, as he plunged through the darkness between dimensions.

  His roar was the sound of a black hole being born: silent and completely catastrophic.

  His body hit something unyielding and bones broke, but fury was a seething red heat consuming his insides and he could feel nothing else. He knew where he was — or if not where, then what kind of place he had been summoned to — and he knew without needing to try that he could not leave. Those were the rules. He tried anyway, and failed — like pushing at the thickest membrane, the membrane between the worlds. The problem, really, was that no such membrane existed except in the minds of the beings that traversed such places, because such places did not sit alongside the solid world, nor atop it, nor beneath it, but within it. Every place was one and the same — the inverse of itself — and the membrane merely the thought that held one here or there. It was not his thought that brought him here, and so he remained.

  He was healed by the time he stood — human-shaped, or close to it — and blinked into the dark. He took a breath, discovered there was no air and that he didn’t need it, and so thought instead —

  WHO DARES TO RIP ME FROM THE MORTAL REALM? The voice of his thoughts boomed like a nuclear fallout, and the invisible walls of the darkness shook.

  Stars winked into existence above and below Telly. They spread like living carpet, stretching to indeterminable points in all directions, billions of dizzying lights in diamond-white and the far-away flickering red and orange and blue of planetary bodies.

  Telly’s eyes adjusted and saw what the starlight defined; the edge of a round wall, hundreds of yards across and curving around to his right and left, a line etched in darkness, in the absence of the glittering light. Other shapes filled the space as though blinked into being by Telly’s eyes: pillars, three in a row to each side of him, and one ahead. Seven pillars, and at the foot of the seventh an altar, a thick rectangular absence of light.

  I called, said a voice like rocks falling, the spaces between the words like whistling air, and the blackness at the foot of the seventh pillar stirred. The shape of something man-height, with pointed dog-ears and a long snout, stood up. It turned its head in Telly’s direction. Can you help her? Starlight began to gather around the negative space of the figure, outlining it, throwing a hazy back-lit glow over the contours of its body — making it three-dimensional.

  Who? Telly moved forward, rage cooling inside him, as certain things started making sense.

  The jackal-headed figure turned, profile lit by diamond-light, its inky face angled to gaze down without eyes at the altar, and the coalescing shape that lay upon it.

  She slumbers, said the god Anubis, and I cannot wake her.

  Telly was remembering the temple — the statue of the goddess — Emma’s prone form beneath it. Who? he said again.

  The jackal-headed deity reached out a slim hand made of midnight and laid it on the invisible face of the prone figure. His voice was molasses when he spoke her name. Nephthys.

  Things fell into place, the ancient and well-worn gears of fate chiming like bells in Telly’s mind. Well, he said to Anubis, remembering a set of hieroglyphics that Emma should not have been able to read, Your goddess has been talking in her sleep.

  35

  Emma flung out a fist and missed as Kahotep twisted her in his arms, dodging her blows, dragging her flailing body up the worn stone stairs. Here we are again, some hysterical shrieking voice in her brain cried, beating up on the jackal prince in a dank stairwell. But this time the prince was determined and she was getting nowhere. His slender face was set and his strength was all his own and they were climbing higher and higher and farther away from them all.

  Emma, go with him, I’ll be there as soon as I can — please trust me.

  A sob wrenched itself from Emma’s throat and she stumbled up a step, Kahotep’s hands tightening on her. Fern, just get —

  His focus cut away from her — some half-formed thought swirled like a shape underwater and was gone, and then so was the touch of his mind.

  “Please!” Was that her voice, raw and ragged and heartbroken, echoing off the close walls of the stairwell? A world away and receding were the sounds of a battle her friends couldn’t win, not against an army of relentless dead monsters and the necromancer king who’d called them up. How long could the jaguars hold out? How long until Telly reached them? How many people might Alexi keep alive for her? All her hopes resting on a god who cared for nothing but her, and a priest who cared for no-one but himself.

  They were fucked. The least she could hope for was that Red Sun might have the presence of mind to rescue Fern before he fought his way to the roof to rescue her, or else it would all be for nothing — and if not, what then?

  Could she live without him by some miracle of magic — and would she want to?

  The answer came, spoken in the dry, quiet voice that her mind reserved for things that were especially hard to hear, and Emma went cold inside. She stopped fighting Kahotep and let him carry her the rest of the way.

  In the great hall, Fern and Red Sun both battled their way to the stairwell amid a chaos of flying dust and decayed bodies and jackal warriors, but there were simply too many, and the dead could not die twice. Mummified half-jackal corpses reassembled themselves beneath the onslaught of fists and swords and jaguar claws. Khai waded through, his goal the same as Fern and Red Sun, and out of the dust came Alexi.

  They clashed, one massive blow of swords that sent steel shattering into a thousand raining pieces, and then Khai’s claws came for Alexi’s throat and Alexi’s throat swelled as his jaws unhinged and he screamed out a blast of suffocating magic that floored every living and breathing jackal within spitting distance. Others staggered away, clutching their chests, trying to fight free of the serpent priest’s deadly aura, but dead men don’t breathe, and the reanimated corpses shambled on.

  Khai stood paralyzed for a breathless moment, arrogant face frozen, golden eyes bulging — blood dripping black in the torchlight from his hands and forearms, dozens of wounds from his disintegrated sword. Then his eyes turned black, and he opened his mouth and laughed, and insects poured out of him in a glittering, rotten, never-ending flood.
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  Telly approached the altar where the goddess Nephthys slept. A sound like beetles scuttling nearby brought his head up. Anubis sighed, and it sounded like a death rattle.

  He draws again, breathed the god absently.

  What? Who draws, and what does he draw? Fear tickled the back of Telly’s throat, cold and sickening and unfamiliar.

  Anubis shook his head. The usurper. The necromancer. Takes what is not his to take, but without her, I cannot prevent it. The god sighed again, and on the end of it was the faintest throaty trickle of a growl. This began with him. He killed the mortal queen Raziya, crushed the will of the boy; we were already too far faded to do anything about it, our Will receding to the stars from which we come, the stars that made us, the stars we created. But then he slaughtered the mortal children of my beloved, the priestesses who called themselves by Her name. She gave up for grief. The jackal god’s voice cracked, like the distant crump of an avalanche descending. I do not think she meant to leave me — perhaps she thought I could bring her back.

  Telly crouched by the altar. Anubis laid a hand on the chest of his goddess, and his starlit glow lit her edges like the tiniest lamp. She was darkness just as he was, and if he was cold as the color of the stars, then hers was the frozen aura of the most far-flung planet from Earth’s sun.

  Telly remembered a goddess more ancient than the Olmecs standing around a fire in a world like this one, telling him that she had wakened.

  There’s nothing I can do for you, he said gently to Anubis. I don’t know how to help. When gods sleep, they can only wake on their own. Telly sighed, frowning into the impenetrable star-strung dark. Anubis, god of the underworld, let me out of here. I can’t save your consort, but I can still save the one who could save us all.