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

by McIlwraith, Anna

  Anubis looked up then. He cocked his great dog-head. Who?

  Telly’s brow smoothed out. The gears of fate began to pump with a more insistent beat.

  The roof was a deserted expanse of stone. A massive stone pylon rose into the black sky at the nearest right-hand corner. Clouds were a thick, silver-gray roof over the world, the moon like the far-off beam of a weak torch. Wind rushed like water over the sand-strewn surface, lifting Emma’s hair from her temples, cooling the tears on her face and making the skin of her cheeks tight.

  She felt paper-thin. The wind beat at her, humid and smelling of ozone. The second Kahotep had pushed her out onto the roof and closed the door, securing it with a huge hardwood bolt, the shielding magic that cloaked the great hall had sealed over and Fern’s mind was lost to her.

  She stood at the farthest edge and stared off into space — the black, fathomless space of the deep ravine the palace backed onto. Not a single light, not like in the other direction — in the other direction lay the village, and if only the gaps between this raised section of the roof, and the tops of the lesser buildings of the palace were not so wide, then perhaps she could have just jumped down and risked breaking an ankle or a kneecap on the way to the courtyards and the gates and the people. People who might help them. But as it stood, they were trapped on the roof of the main section of the palace, trapped there until the cavalry — or the enemy — came.

  “Step away from the edge, Emma,” Kahotep said gently. “They’ll come.”

  She turned. “Who will, Kahotep?” He blinked at her, chin trembling, slow rivulets of blood running out of the wounds that marked his face. Black-looking droplets clung to his jaw like jewels.

  “Who will come?” She demanded again. “Telly? Red Sun? Fern?” Her voice got louder with every word. “Will they all come together? Because if they don’t, if it’s just Red Sun, do you know what’s going to happen? Do you?”

  He lifted his hands as if to touch her and she shrieked, clapped both hands over her mouth. She backed away toward the center of the rooftop; her hands came away balled into fists and trembling.

  “There’s no room in their plans for anyone’s life but mine,” she snarled. “What happens to them all? What happens to you, Kahotep?”

  He bit his lip, as though he knew what he had to say was the wrong thing, but the only thing he could think of. “Whatever the price, we would all gladly pay it,” he said, voice small. “Else we would not be here.”

  Emma knew — and she knew she wasn’t worth it. “It’s not good enough!” Her voice hitched. “I’m not good enough! I’m sick of people risking their lives for mine, sick of…fuck.” She swiped at her eyes as Kahotep stared at her, helpless. “Sick of having all my responsibilities taken away from me and replaced with things I can’t live up to — I’m not a saint, not a superhero —” she dragged in a breath. “I’m not like you people.”

  Kahotep moved to her, stood in front of her, held her face in his hands and tilted it up so he could look into her wet eyes. “No,” he said. “You are none of those things. You are not like us. You are the caller of the blood.” His thumb stroked her cheekbone, and he gazed down at her with sad, dark eyes that had abandoned all their hopes and dreams, save one, and that one was not for him.

  She covered his hands with her own and stared up into his pretty, devastated features for a moment — mere seconds — but that was all it took for her to decide. Far away — she wasn’t sure if the sound was carried by a distant wind or if it lived inside her own head — she heard a low female voice chanting in an ancient tongue she should not understand.

  “Kahotep,” she said finally, feeling the world drop away as her options narrowed to one.

  “Yes,” he said, eyebrows arching slightly, gaze on her but somewhere else, as though he dreamed of better futures than this.

  She wrapped her fingers around his hands and drew them away from her face. “Make the pledge. Again.”

  A world away, in a temple made of stars, the jackal god Anubis and the walking god Telheshtevanne fell silent as the goddess Nephthys began to mumble in her sleep.

  Anubis made a sound of wonder deep in his throat. Telly tasted something on the back of his tongue, a scent like home, of skin like coconut milk and hair like hot chocolate and the scent of sun-dried cotton.

  Somehow he knew what she was going to do — it was in the spaces between the words that the sleeping goddess murmured — and something clenched inside his chest.

  Kahotep blinked. His eyes went wide. He backed away from her and she let him go, but her gaze stayed nailed to his, and he couldn’t look away.

  “Why?” That one word held a lifetime of doubt and hopelessness. Disbelief.

  “Because I can’t just wait for Khai to find us. I can’t wait around while they die for me. I have to do the one thing that I can do, because I have to do something.”

  He shook his head once, hair flying like a sheet in the strengthening wind. “You don’t mean it. You don’t know what you’re saying.” He looked frightened, face young, eyes so old. “You did not want this, remember? You didn’t want this and you’ll want it even less when your friends come through that door and —”

  “If they were coming they’d be here already and that means they’re dying and we have to do something!” Tears welled in her eyes, spilled down her face in hot, embarrassing tracks. “This is what I’m meant to do. This is what we’re here for. And if this does what it’s supposed to do, then the result is power, Kahotep. I don’t know what kind of power but right now I don’t care — and I don’t want Khai to have it, I want you to have it.”

  She realized she was breathing hard, chest heaving, and then she realized Kahotep was doing the same.

  “What about the ritual?”

  Emma’s mind locked for a moment, and then she realized what he meant. Seshua. Her powers.

  “I don’t know,” she said, going numb from the feet up. “This might not even work. It might work and bind my powers to you forever, I just don’t know. Right now it doesn’t matter, not to me.”

  Kahotep stared at her. “If it…if the pledge doubles for what the ritual awakening is supposed to do, Emma…I would be good to you.” Tears spilled down his face, turning it to a running red ruin.

  “I know,” she said thickly. “And I to you. Now do it, Kahotep, just do it already.”

  He panted lightly, eyes gone wide and wild as though he didn’t know what to do now that the opportunity was finally here, after the hell of thinking himself condemned to Khai’s mercy, after the guilty relief of knowing that he wouldn’t have to offer up a piece of his soul in exchange for the lifeblood of his people, wouldn’t have to betray the greatest love he had ever known.

  Emma saw it all flash through his chocolate-brown eyes in the seconds before he spoke.

  “I would be willing sacrifice to your altar,” he began, and the floor seemed to drop out from beneath her. The words rang like bells, discordant chimes, reverberating in her ears and her blood.

  “My body is proof of the pledge.” His voice shook. “Do you accept?”

  She stared up at him. Her body sang for his, a magnetic pull. She opened her mouth, fighting to breathe, and images flashed through her mind at the speed of light —

  Telly’s glinting gray eyes,

  Fern’s black hair on his brow,

  the arrogant set of Seshua’s mouth

  the morning light on Anton’s bare, dusky chest —

  and the shimmer of scales on Alexi’s cheek. The fire of his solid, unrelenting gaze.

  “My body is vessel for the blood,” she said, the words wrenching themselves from the deepest, oldest, blackest layer of her spirit, the layer that rested against the place between worlds, the layer one was never supposed to touch. “And,” she said, feeling drunk, feeling the words string out of her like honey, “I accept.”

  The sky cracked like the bone of some giant god. Emma’s gut clenched. Rain splashed the hot stones of the palace roof in
a sudden, torrential flood, and the magic of the pledge broke a dam inside her body and her blood turned to scalding liquid need.

  Kahotep came at her through the sheeting rain. She gasped, tasting mineral-thick water and blinking it out of her eyes, and then his arms were around her and his skin on hers wrenched a scream from somewhere lower than her throat. She would have kept screaming if he hadn’t sealed her mouth with his own. He gasped, stole her breath. Tears and rain beat down on their heads, flattening their hair, ran his blood down their faces and when Emma broke away it was on her lips, in her mouth, on the back of her tongue, the taste of it singing like fine crystal in her veins — singing a song only she could hear, with words that had never in the unfathomable stretch of creation been spoken — a song just for her. And suddenly, she knew what to do.

  She brought her hands up and took fistfuls of the bead necklace that covered Kahotep’s upper half, and ripped, sending beads showering and clattering to the ground like fat droplets of water, exposing his smooth mocha-colored chest and the dark slash that laid the muscle of his pectoral bare. Kahotep’s hands slid around to her waist and he pulled her tank top off in one swift movement, rain soaking her bra in mere seconds, running down her spine and sides. She linked her hands behind his neck and leaned into him, catching his gaze, the hard bulge of his arousal wedged against her stomach.

  “Kahotep,” she said breathlessly.

  He groaned, staring down at her with eyes that were gold encircled by huge bands of chocolate, eyes that fought to stay focused. “Emma?” He ground the word out between clenched teeth.

  “Open the call.”

  His hands moved down and his fingers dug into her buttocks, squeezing handfuls of flesh and wet denim. He lifted her as though she weighed nothing, catching her with the cradle of his hips, pinning himself against the mound of her groin.

  She cried out and seized a fistful of soaking hair. “Kahotep!”

  He sobbed, body quaking around her. “Yes,” he gasped. She felt his arms stiffen to steel, could see the tendons stand out in his neck as he reached for control, and then the magic of the call washed over them both and Emma’s skin turned to freezing fire. Her breath burned in her lungs. Everywhere Kahotep’s skin touched hers she felt the brush of his beast like a thousand needles, razor-sharp and made of satin, rushing across the surface of her body in waves that pulsed to the ragged sound of his breath.

  Yes, said something old inside of Emma, something that had waited eons for her to call it up.

  “Emma, please, when -?” Kahotep’s voice was a scrap of sound, but it echoed like a sonic boom through the waves of prickling power that the call had opened, and in it Emma could feel the tide of his body desperate for release — and the scream of his heart as it broke.

  She clenched his waist between her thighs, swept his half-fall of hair away from his throat, swallowed against the sickening thud of her own pulse. “Your body is proof of the pledge,” she said, in a voice that wasn’t her own. “But your blood is the pledge itself. My body is vessel for the blood. I am the caller of the blood.”

  There was a roaring in her ears that might have been her heartbeat or his, she couldn’t tell. Her lips moved without her brain to guide them, whispering quickly before the magic bore down and swept her away. “Your body is proof of the pledge,” she whispered again, “but your blood is the pledge itself. I think you can keep your body, and your heart — I think it belongs to someone else.”

  His knees buckled and he hit the wet stones, crying out, relief pouring from his skin in a bloom of power that smelled of incense and was ice on Emma’s nerve endings. He sucked in a huge breath, hands sliding to the small of her back, and she could feel him tensing to pull away from her. But there was still something she needed.

  Before he could move, before she backed out, she tightened her grip on his hair and wrenched his head to the side, braced with her stomach and struck, biting into the muscle of his throat. Kahotep screamed and clutched at her. Her blunt teeth closed with enough force to sprain the tendons in her neck, and hot blood jumped onto her tongue. She swallowed.

  The magic had what it wanted. But it wasn’t over.

  On an altar carved of primordial darkness, the goddess Nephthys sat up and opened her eyes, and the light that splintered the cavern of stars was blinding diamond-blue. Anubis cried out. Telly just watched, the figure of the goddess thrown in black relief against all that starlight, black streamers of hair flung into the air by the force of her power.

  She wakes!

  Telly held out a hand to the jackal god. I don’t think so. Not yet.

  The eyes of the goddess were open, but her spirit was searching for something else — called to it.

  36

  Emma pulled away, blinking water from her eyes, mouth thick with the taste of living copper, throat tight with the effort of not retching.

  Kahotep said something she didn’t understand, could barely hear for the howling storm, the roaring in her ears, the voices in her head, a song like the sound of the world falling apart. She crawled out of his lap, starlight bursting behind her eyes, limbs shaking, and tried to suck enough air in through her nose without triggering her gag reflex.

  She couldn’t breathe. The world swam and spun around her in sheets of water and explosions of light. Somewhere inside her head a woman who was not a woman was telling her things she didn’t know what to do with.

  Kahotep touched her arm and she gasped, regretted it, and swallowed noisily past the stuff that coated her lips and tongue. His hands found her face and turned her to look at him.

  “Do you feel it?” His eyes were saucers and his hair was heavy and slick and he had the world’s biggest hickey on the side of his neck, complete with a perfect imprint of her small teeth in his flesh and a messy smear of blood that washed down his chest as the rain hit it. More welled in the deep, blunt holes her teeth had made, crooked squares of crushed skin and muscle surrounded by red and purple bruises. It was not like the movies. She panted a little harder.

  “Feel what?” She clapped a hand over her mouth; she would not throw up.

  “Power,” Kahotep whispered in an awed, breathless voice. He laughed. “Like golden, shining ropes, weaving my essence into yours. Ka, Emma.” He murmured something else in ancient Egyptian, hands moving from her face to her neck, eyes dancing. He pulled her to him and stood and she couldn’t get enough air to tell him she wasn’t capable of walking yet. It felt like her nerves were being pulled out of her body, impossibly long strings of agony dragged tighter and tighter against the flimsy cage of her skin.

  “Power?” It felt like she was being torn apart, like she would drown in the rain under the weight of whatever they’d done. “Kahotep, how are we supposed to — how is this —” Her knees buckled and he caught her. How is this supposed to save us?

  From somewhere behind them came the scream of stone and hardwood being splintered into shreds.

  Kahotep looked up and growled. Emma turned in his arms and watched as jackal warriors poured out of the stairwell, claws and spears and swords cutting the air, sheeting rain hitting them — and where the rain hit warriors who were no longer alive, but had been dead thousands of years, it sluiced loose shreds of skin and hair and rotted clothing.

  She screamed, grief ripping its way out of her. Dead, they had to be — the jaguars, the maidens, Telly, Fern —

  EMMA! His voice in her mind, rushing through her body like sunlight.

  Kahotep began to stalk backwards, dragging Emma with him.

  “FERN!” How did they take you alive — she began, and then the sea of warriors dead and alive parted, and her heart fell into her feet.

  “Caller of the blood,” Khai-Khaldun called out in a voice that whispered of insects and echoed with death. “I believe I have something of yours.” He stepped aside and Tarik came forward, one fist in Fern’s hair.

  Fern’s legs dragged at wrong angles and one eye bulged black with no white in the red mess of his face — the ot
her eye was swollen shut, a purple and black balloon of bruises. Tarik saw Emma’s face and laughed.

  She barely heard. Her mind dove for Fern’s and met resistance. No, he sent. You don’t want to know. I’ll heal, Emma, I’ll heal if we live.

  She sobbed. Kahotep’s arms tightened around her and she smelled incense before the heat of his power enveloped her, rushing out from his skin and past hers in a blast of magic that wanted Khai’s blood. A hideous, mewling, collective scream went up from the reanimated jackals — the warriors that were still alive and capable of fighting cringed back, frozen in their tracks by the touch of Kahotep’s magic, the touch of the true heir to the throne.

  For a moment Emma felt the fingers of his power like they were her own — felt them reach out like strings of impossible light, touch the dead warriors, recoil from the seething black thing that animated them and then gather itself to strike them all down — and then Khai spat something harsh in ancient Egyptian and Kahotep froze. His body hummed against hers, breath fast in her ear.

  She had understood one word in the guttural tongue Khai had used — Nathifa.

  “Yes,” Khai hissed. “That’s right.” He came forward, out of the shadow of the pylon that housed the exit from the stairwell. The rain hit his smooth tattooed scalp and ran down his forehead to drip from his eyebrows, and it made him look like he was melting. His eyes were pits of black light, shadows that bled like molasses down his cheeks, twin points of gold burning at their centers. He spread his arms wide, gesturing for Tarik to bring Fern forward, and Emma saw that the jackal king’s fingers were talons and his hands were black, and creeping tendrils of living decay climbed his forearms.

  “We have them all, Kahotep. Your battle priestess, Emma’s familiar — even,” he stepped aside — “The proud warriors who would have protected her.”