Ten in the morning, back in my office, I struck Cujo’s name off every document I could find, including my friends list (it’s a short list).
If my association with the cop got back to Osiris, the god would have a new stick to beat me with. Cujo had done enough. He didn’t deserve to be dragged under the tires of my chaotic life.
Cat hadn’t returned to the office. I couldn’t blame her. She’d witnessed a no-name mercenary kill a god. I was radioactive in terms of trouble. I’d get as far away from me as possible too.
Shu didn’t have that option. All white fur coat and with an expression so severe it was almost demon, she stormed into my office and dropped a lidded basket onto my desk, rattling the vodka bottle and empty glass I’d been eyeing for the last thirty minutes.
“Delivery,” she announced.
Considering the contents of the last gift basket I’d received, I raised an eyebrow at Shu.
“No magic signature. Delivered by courier. Weighs a ton.”
I sucked in a breath through my teeth and leaned back in my chair. “I have five emails from various clients offering vast sums of cash to meet and discuss special contracts.”
Shu’s eyes lit up. Money was the only thing that motivated her more than spare body parts. “The office, the business, what are you still doing here?”
Down the hall, her phone rang.
She kicked the door closed and stood at my desk, hands on her hips. “Well? Urban legends don’t pay the bills. Get back to work.”
The emails were from a string of minor gods, some more powerful than others. Some knew me personally, but most didn’t. They knew the new name: Godkiller. “I’m not an assassin.”
“They don’t know that, and you’ve racked up one hell of a kill count in the last few weeks.”
“That’s not an assassin, that’s a psychopath. I only killed Thoth a few hours ago, and already half the minor pantheon are lining up, asking me to sort out their disagreements so they don’t have to.”
“A god died today. That doesn’t happen. The ripple would’ve passed through the pantheon, and they all would’ve felt it, including those in slumber. You gonna cry over it, or take advantage?”
I winced and closed my eyes. Not Ra. Please, by all things sacred, say I haven’t woken Amun-Ra or summoned him back from wherever he’s been hiding for five thousand years.
“How do they know it’s me?” I opened my eyes, and nothing had changed. I was still the sucker holding the murder weapon and the killer who’d left a trail of dead witches behind me.
Shu looked at me, then at the basket, then back at me. “Godkiller. You earned the name months ago, with Ammit—” At my glare, she cut herself off. “It happened. Deal with it. Open the basket. I want to see what goodies Osiris sent.”
“You did destroy the contents of the last basket?”
“What? Of course. Open it.”
“The witch’s arm?”
“I have most of it on ice at home.” She shooed my questions away. “The basket.”
Shoving out of my chair, I joined Shu on the other side of the desk and cracked the basket’s lid open, expecting something to crawl out. When nothing did, I flipped the lid back and frowned at what looked like a small golden bust of Isis. I would’ve preferred severed body parts.
Shu made a sound of disgust. “Useless.”
Scooping a hand beneath it, I tried to lift the bust, but I needed both hands to cradle it. The weight alone told me the bust was made of solid gold—a fortune’s worth.
“There’s a note,” Shu said.
I threw the bust at her. She caught it with an oomph, and those money-hungry eyes of hers lit up. “It’s real?”
While she muttered to herself and turned the bust over in her hands, I plucked up the folded note. The paper was handmade, mottled and thick, and probably cost more than the monthly rent on my apartment. Unfolding it lifted a faint feminine scent into the air, and my instincts tightened. This gift wasn’t from Osiris.
Isis had added her own artistic flare to the words she’d written, giving them perfect balance.
“I ded mus duibs aeui, Sudderrar.”
I never doubted you, Godkiller.
“Isis,” was all I could say as the implications tumbled around me, just like that house of cards. The private meetings with Thoth and the setup back home that had earned me a name I didn’t want. Had I helped Isis put into motion a prophecy that would end with her husband dead? All of this—the tablet, killing Thoth—had been Isis’s work? A whispered word in Osiris’s ear, a mention at the right moment, a suggestion.
Was Isis trying to kill her husband?
Thoth had once told me Isis’s love for Osiris was eternal, and Thoth couldn’t lie. But love wasn’t always white picket fences and kids playing in the yard. Love could be a darker, more potent force. And Isis was right up there on the crazy scale. After a few millennia of loving her husband and brother, maybe Isis had decided their love wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.
“Oh gods.” I wandered back around my desk and sloshed vodka into my glass, spilling much of it over my planner and blurring the week’s scheduled work.
“Isis sent this?” Shu asked from somewhere far, far away, in the part of my mind that had existed before the hammer dropped.
I was an accessory to the future murder of Osiris, and I’d killed Thoth. I had motive, history, and means. It was all on me. And Isis had stood in the background, smiling that small, private smile of hers every time I looked her way. The only reason she had yet to pin all this on me was because of Osiris. But once he was out of the way, I’d take the fall and she’d reign supreme.
“Fuck.” I threw back the vodka, greeted the burn, and poured another round. “Melt it down.”
“It’s worth more as it is. It looks new, which goes against its authenticity, but—”
“Melt it down, sell it, and give the money away. Send it to a charity anonymously. There’s a woman’s shelter in Queens—” I waved a hand, searching for the name. “I can’t remember, but send it there. I don’t want it here. I don’t want it connected to us or anywhere near me, or this office—or you.”
“Are you insane? This is worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, and you want me to give it away?”
More vodka. The second glass went down as smoothly as the first, numbing my throat all the way. A few more of those and the rest of me would be numb too.
“Ace, we need this money or you can kiss this business goodbye. Do you want to start again somewhere else? Because that’s what we’ll have to do.”
I laughed. The sudden sound surprised me as much as it did Shu.
“The way things are going, we won’t be around long enough to care.” Lifting the third glass—or was it the fourth?—to my lips, I paused and held Shu’s disgruntled glare. “Do it. Nothing of Isis’s is to stay within a mile’s radius of this building. Don’t cross me on this, Shu. Make it happen.”
“This is my life too,” she snapped, then whirled and slammed my office door behind her hard enough to crack the glass.
I was leaning back on Osiris’s steps, or, more precisely, I was sprawled out on his steps. He wasn’t home, so I’d decided to park myself in the way until he returned, but now the vodka bottle I’d brought along for company was empty and the sun was stretching fingers of light through the trees holding New York back, hinting that somewhere else would be a better place to sober up.
I was spectacularly and in every possible way drunk, but that was okay. It made what I was about to do a little easier.
I’d set Alysdair down on the steps, in plain sight beside me. I didn’t want Osiris to go biblical on me the second he saw the sword. Not that he would, but I wasn’t exactly thinking clearly, and the sword and me had some making up to do. A little distance wouldn’t hurt.
After too long alone with my thoughts, a black Tesla crept silently up the driveway, the sound of the tires on gravel louder than the electric whine of the car. Osiris stepped out. One f
ine, dark eyebrow rose at my inebriated state. He could judge; that was, after all, what he was good at.
He noticed the bottle and then slid his appraising gaze to the sword. “Bad day at the office?”
I couldn’t tell him about Isis for all the reasons, but mostly because I didn’t have a shred of evidence, and without it, he wouldn’t listen. If I flung accusations at him, it wouldn’t get me anywhere, and Isis would tie me up in knots and stab me in the heart before I could dig up dirt on her. I’d find something on her, but not yet. Whichever way I looked at it, I was stuck between Isis and Osiris, but at least now I knew Isis’s game.
But this visit wasn’t about her, or Thoth, or the prophecy. It was about me.
“I did it,” I slurred.
Osiris wore simple black pants and a black shirt with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows. It was the most casual I’d seen him in weeks. A god who held the power of death and rebirth in his hands shouldn’t look like everyone else. There should be a law against gods appearing as anything besides their true form in public. Then we’d see how long he stayed in office. At the very least, the gods should look like me. I carried the years on me in ways people didn’t notice at first. I looked young, until you got to know me. Then the persona frayed at the edges and faded the colors.
“And the debt is fulfilled.” He tucked a hand into his pants pocket. “But that’s not why you’re here?”
I looked him in the eye. Your wife wasn’t fucking Thoth. What she’s doing…it’s worse. I couldn’t say the words, and even if I did, what would it get me? Dead, probably.
“Do you have anything to drink?” I lifted the empty vodka bottle. “This one had a hole in it.”
He gestured for me to follow him up the steps, which I just about managed to climb without falling on my ass, and then I stumbled back down to grab Alysdair. No guards. I’d noticed that when I arrived earlier and wandered the rooms. The house was as perfect as always, without even the slightest whiff of ash to indicate the place had been reduced to charcoal just yesterday.
“Did you know I was the one who burned your house?” I asked, trailing down the hall behind Osiris. “I didn’t technically start the fire. One of the staff must—”
“Yes, but when we last spoke, it was clear you didn’t.”
“I was influenced. It’s over now. Done with. Kemekred.” Finished.
He didn’t turn, so I didn’t have to look him in the eye while I danced around the truth. Hopefully, that would be the first and last time it was mentioned.
Osiris’s library would’ve given archaeologists and historians hard-ons for weeks. He kept his most prized items locked inside glass cabinets, but the floor-to-ceiling shelves held some of the world’s most precious books. Clearly, they’d survived the fire, like everything else. Must be handy to be able to click your fingers and make anything inconvenient go away. Yet here I was, a major inconvenience, still walking and talking. Thoth’s words came back to me, questioning why Osiris protected me. I’d always assumed it was more for entertainment than anything else, but Thoth had also asked what I was. Hadn’t he known? Didn’t we all know? I was the bad guy in the gods’ ancient myths.
Osiris opened a concealed cupboard and removed a crystal decanter with something so dark and rich inside it painted the glass. It looked a lot like blood, but since we weren’t at the “drinking the blood of our victim” stage of the conversation yet, I figured it was probably bourbon.
Pouring a glass for himself, he handed me mine after I’d rested Alysdair against the dark leather couch. I took a generous drink and welcomed the renewed heat. If I could stay in a permanent state of drunkenness, I might get away with what I was about to ask.
He sampled his bourbon and leaned against a desk the size of most folks’ cars. “Did he say anything?”
My addled brain misfired a few replies before catching up. “Thoth? No. He… I had Shukra, we fought, it was…” The right words were failing me, mostly because they were lies, but I could do lies, especially when I was looking into my glass and not at Osiris. “It was quick.”
“His soul?”
“Too hot for me.” I smiled at that. It wasn’t often I met a soul strong enough to repel me. “It’ll be in the River.” Another lie.
I couldn’t tell whether Osiris had bought it; the room was shifting too much. In all likelihood, he couldn’t get a read off me while I was deliriously drunk—at least that was the plan.
I parked my ass on the couch, surprised to find it a lot closer than I’d estimated. I’d suffer for this, if I survived, but I’d lived through a few lifetimes’ worth of suffering. All I had to do was get through this without mentioning Isis. If I mentioned Isis, this little gentlemanly drink would turn violent. He already suspected me of wanting to get his wife in the sack, and given the state I was in, I might just say something to piss him off.
“How well do you know your wife?” And there it was, the complete opposite of my plan, right out there and sounding a lot like I’d spoken it. I eyed the bourbon, laying the blame in its depths.
“Continents have shifted in the time Isis and I have been together. How well do you know how to breathe?”
“Breathing is pretty automatic. Is that what your relationship is? I mean, after a few thousand years, it’s gotta be difficult to keep things interesting in the bedroom, am I right?”
Disdain flashed in his eyes. I really needed to stop talking.
“You continue to believe she was behind your mother’s death?”
“Doesn’t matter what I believe.”
“If those accusations came from anyone else, Soul Eater, I’d have their tongue.”
Oh, I didn’t doubt that, but I did wonder what had earned me special treatment.
“Admit it. You like having me around. Like a dumb-as-shit dog that keeps coming back after a beating, hoping its master might pat it on the head instead of kick it in the gut?”
His fine eyebrows pinched together. “I can’t decide whether you’re more disturbing like this or mildly entertaining.”
“Both?”
“You could be many things. A great many of them dangerous.” He paused, probably waiting for me to process that information. “Why are you here?”
“I need a favor.”
That earned me a surprised expression. In five hundred years, I don’t think I’d ever asked him for anything. Oh, I’d begged, pleaded, dropped to my knees, and worse, but asked? That was new.
“Would it help if I said please?”
He looked down his nose at me, dark eyes puzzling out my angle. There wasn’t one, but gods can’t help feeling around for loopholes and misdirection. Suddenly, feeling like the walls were closing in, I got to my feet and walked an almost straight line to the nearest display case. The artifact inside was a simple clay cup. The tickle and hum of magic authenticated it, but it didn’t look like much. Maybe the cup was just a cup, or maybe it would kill whoever drank from it, or maybe it would imbue its owner with riches. All of these cabinets held similar curiosities left over from a civilization that had once ruled the worlds.
“What’s the favor?”
“I’ve been…” Bad, sir. Please don’t punish me. I smiled and tried again, this time meeting his gaze. “The last few months, I’ve been devouring.”
“The witches.”
“Yes. Any I could find, and they went down better than this.” I waggled the glass. Kenny’s girl’s screams echoed through parts of my mind I couldn’t shut off.
“And?” He sighed. I was boring him. What did he care about dead witches, or me for that matter?
“I came here to ask you to bring them back.”
Nothing. No surprise on his face. No sign he’d even heard me.
“You are the God of Resurrection and Rebirth and all things living. You can do this.”
He carefully set his drink down on the desk and loosely clasped his hands in front of him as though he were about to address a class of imbeciles. Attendees: one.
&
nbsp; “You’re a Soul Eater. Anything you devour is destroyed. You are the very opposite of life and everything I represent. In Duat, you’re feared because you are the end, blackness in a world of color. A god I may be, but not even Ra himself could resurrect the souls you’ve consumed.”
Monster, Isis’s voice whispered through my mind. “Yes, thank you for reminding me of my great and abhorrent power, but what about the sword?”
He looked at Alysdair resting where I’d left it against the couch and hesitated. “Why?”
“The sword is different. It absorbs souls. I don’t know if it destroys them or—”
“Why bother bringing them back? You must know the price will be great.”
For centuries, I’d been Osiris’s pet soul eater. There wasn’t anything he hadn’t already inflicted on me. Torture, mental and physical—I’d endured it all. But I knew one thing: he didn’t want me dead. So, the cost would be high, but I’d pay it and live, like always. Human lives were worth more than my suffering.
“Because it feels like something I should do, like I made a promise to someone …but I don’t remember when or where. Someone wants me to be good, and I can do this. I can ask you and maybe scrape some of the blackness off my soul in the process…”
“You killed them. Move on.”
So easy for him to dismiss the lives of men and women he didn’t know. How many had he seen die over the millennia? How many had he killed?
“I can’t move on. I… I’m trying to be different.” More than darkness. I closed my eyes and listened, waiting to hear more of Bast’s whispers…but it didn’t come.
I know, Bast. I’m trying.
After this was done, I’d find her. Whatever it took, I’d go to her, straighten out the lies, and face my fears.
When I opened my eyes, Osiris had moved to admire Alysdair.
“Ammit’s, before you?” he asked.
“I assume so. I don’t remember a time without it. She always spoke of the sword as though it was a great burden, but also an honor. I suspect it’s older than I am.”
Witches' Bane (The Soul Eater Book 2) Page 13
