by R. C. Murphy
Deryck hit the doorway of the main temple and stopped dead in his tracks. He pushed against the invisible barrier keeping him from Shayla. She was still too far away.
“Shayla, you have to stop,” he shouted to no avail. Deryck’s voice bounced off the magic barring his entry and echoed behind him down the hall.
“You can’t stop her, idiot.” Herryk stepped out of the shadows, shaking his head.
“I’ll find a way. She wasn’t meant to free you.”
“It doesn’t matter. Did you really think love was required to gain your freedom? Take what you want. Don’t be a pussy and ask for permission, from a human of all creatures.”
“Humans are the reason we exist, Herryk. Without them, there would be no gods to sire our kind.” Deryck leaned to the side to keep Shayla in view. She was still chanting, walking in a slow circle around the altar.
“That way of thinking is why you failed.” A grin spread over Herryk’s lips. “I wasn’t expecting an audience, but since you’re here, you can watch my father and I have a little fun with the human before she sacrifices herself.”
“You won’t touch her.”
The floor under their feet vibrated. Dust and bits of brick broke loose and rained down on Deryck’s head. He rammed his shoulder against the barrier. It didn’t budge. There was no give to it whatsoever. Herryk had never been this strong before.
Helplessly, Deryck watched Shayla make another pass around the table. The floor beneath her glowed golden red, like the first rays of sunshine over a mountaintop. In a few moments, it would be too late to stop her from summoning Marduk.
Once Shayla had begun the summoning ritual, she couldn’t stop. A cool wind swept through her body, dragging the words out of her throat. She tried to stop, tried to run from whatever purpose Harry needed her for. It was useless. She was stuck orbiting the golden table. The skull gave its best toothless grin each time she passed in front of it. The winds in the room blew her hair in front of her eyes, but did not hinder her from reading the spell.
She couldn’t hear anything or sense anyone, not even Harry. The power created a bubble around her, drowning out everything except her voice and the soft pit-pat of her blood hitting the mud bricks below. Her voice changed, became something more guttural, impossible to understand. She wasn’t speaking English anymore.
The light around the table grew, but the flames Harry summoned didn’t. Bright light poured out of the doorway on the skull’s forehead. The blood on the floor—her blood—glowed golden red, a trail of bloody footprints locked in a circle they’d never break free of. Blood dripped onto the toe of Shayla’s shoe and began to shimmer. She flicked it off with her next step and it joined the circle around the altar.
Thud. Thud. Thud.
Shayla jerked her head up from reading. At first, she thought the sound was her heart hammering in her chest. She laid a hand over her heart. It was beating hard, but not at the same rhythm. Her eyes landed on Harry—tall and lean with his back to her in the doorway they’d entered. His hands were fisted by his side. For an instant, she thought he’d whirl back to her, demanding she continue the ritual.
He didn’t. Harry’s attention was locked on something outside of the doorway. A shape moved in front of him, barely visible above the dark tangle of his curls. The torchlight reflected off whatever it was. She frowned. Maybe there was someone else necessary for the ritual. Or perhaps she’d been chanting a bunch of nonsense, and the father she was supposed to be summoning walked in the front door of the temple.
Well, that’s really fucking anticlimactic.
The figure stepped out from behind Harry. He was speaking, but she couldn’t hear a word he said. His fist raised and banged against something, glass maybe. It kept him out of the room. The thudding she’d heard before came again. A breeze of power followed after the thud. Something not man-made kept the man from the room. He stepped closer, face pressed against the invisible barrier. Golden eyes caught the firelight as they locked with hers.
Shayla gasped. “Deryck?”
Harry wheeled around. Green light flared in his eyes. “Why did you stop?”
Shayla took a step away from the menace etched across his face. Her hip hit hard against the altar. “Why is Deryck here?”
“How do you think I found you?”
She felt lightheaded. Shayla looked around Harry to Deryck. He had a strange look on his face. She couldn’t tell whom it was directed at, but he wasn’t happy to be there. Neither was she. How involved was Deryck in everything that’d happened since she left her house? Her life, once she’d reclaimed it, had been nice, boring, ordinary. As exciting as it got was one of Faye’s girl’s nights in on days she decided porn was better than a romantic comedy. Shayla had a desk job specifically to keep her level of weirdness to a minimum. There was no room in her life for magic, gorgeous men, and psychopaths with father issues.
Shayla crumpled the paper with the ritual on it and dropped it onto the ground. “I’m done with this, all of it. Whatever you two have planned, find someone else who’s supposedly slept with a god.”
“You stupid little human,” Harry snarled. “You will do your job.” He closed in on her.
Shayla shrank back against the table. Pain raced through right wrist. She screamed at the tight grip pulling her sideways over the altar. An arm—tanned, muscled, with a heavy dusting of black hair over it—reached out of the forehead of the skull. On the wrist was a wide metal cuff bracelet. It had a large round piece in the middle bearing a vaguely floral shape made from precious stones. Blinding light hid the rest of the body it belonged to. Around the bright light, red mist swirled slowly.
The grip on her wrist tightened. Bones ground together, making her scream again. “Finish the summoning, female.” A male’s voice, low and gravelly, said from the light.
Deryck’s heart dropped to the ground. Shayla’s second scream echoed in his head, taunting him and his inability to rush in and save her. The side of his fists ached; the left opened a cut under his little finger. Blood smeared over the barrier. He rammed into it with his shoulder. There was still no give to the magic separating him from wringing his fellow incubi’s neck.
Herryk stood in front of him, a smug look plastered on his face. He looked over his shoulder, his smile widening. “If she’s not careful, the old man is liable to drag her in.”
Pressing himself flat against the barrier, Deryck forced himself to look past the man he wanted to kill. Shayla stood at the front of the golden table. She looked so small from this distance. Her body jerked backward, but didn’t go very far. She was slowly inching toward the swirling mass hovering over the table. Firelight glinted off of something near her wrist. He planted his forehead against the barrier and focused on the silver reflection. It was a bracelet. Under it was an arm—Marduk’s arm.
“Stop him. He’ll ruin your plans if she goes into the God’s Lands with him.” Deryck slapped his hand against the invisible wall.
Humans were not capable of comprehending the vastness of their universe. Their view of things had to be restricted, cut down to the essentials. One glimpse of the paradise the gods lived in and they died immediately. Too late into human evolution they’d discovered this. Countless prophets, who were brought to witness the glory of the gods they worshipped, perished. Their souls were lost to salvation. They wander the earth, multitudes of frightened souls with no recollection of who they were or memory of their death. He saw them occasionally when he walked the streets of Shayla’s hometown, the ancients who’d once lived in the land now covered in asphalt and choked with gas. The souls witnessed the death of their world through the centuries. It had to be agony in its purest form. If the soul couldn’t cope, it turned into a creature hell-bent on torturing the living. Their happiness is sacrificed to the malice buried deep within the spirit. Eventually a specialist, a demi-god born of a god of death, is forced to venture into the human realm and wrangle these wraiths.
He shuddered to think of Shayla suffering
such a fate.
Herryk turned his back on Deryck. His voice cut across the dark room—another spell. The paper Shayla had thrown rose from the floor. It un-crumpled and floated in front of her at eye level. “Read, Shayla. You do not want to know what will happen if I allow him to drag you through that hole.”
Allowed? Yeah right. Deryck kept his opinion of Herryk’s perceived power over his sire to himself. Marduk would do whatever he wanted with no regard to his son’s wishes. The gods didn’t care what happened to their seed once it was spent, unless they were subject of prophecy. It never ended well for demi-gods who’d been dragged into the games the gods played in order to one-up each other.
Shayla read again. Her words were slow, stumbling over each other. Deryck needed to get her out of there. First, he’d have to distract Herryk long enough for him to drop the spell keeping him out in the hall.
“Blood magic, Herryk? Is your sire aware of your failure to wield proper magic?”
“My father knows what he needs to. Why waste my power when this will suffice?”
Deryck shook his head. “You know nothing of your own people. We had a vast library to read from, to learn about them. I think I’ll stay right here and see what Marduk has to say about his offspring using mundane magic.”
“The vessel is human, how else was I to summon the bastard?” Herryk turned to Deryck and arched a dark brow.
“You know full well she is more than human. You are too weak to create your own chant for her to speak.”
“It doesn’t matter, she is nearly done. She’s served her purpose. You Egyptians,” he spit on the floor, as though speaking Deryck’s nationality offended him, and your elaborate ceremonies. “You waste time making yourselves and your gods too important.”
“Not me. I’m a discard, unimportant in the vast scheme of things. You are, too. No pantheon wants to claim a horde of half-breeds. We are weak. Our powers a drop in the ocean compared to our sires.”
“I will prove otherwise. You will be the first to witness the power I’ve gathered.”
Deryck patted the barrier. It felt softer under his fingertips. He forced himself not to react to the weakening. “This is the most power you will ever wield, Herryk. It isn’t that impressive.”
“You can’t do it,” Herryk snapped.
“How would you know?”
Shayla cried out in pain. Deryck sidestepped away from Herryk to watch her. Marduk was free up to the elbow of his left arm. He still held her by the wrist. Pain broke Shayla’s voice as she tried to continue reading.
The power that’d swept Shayla and aided her in reading the first half of the summoning had abandoned her. Its winds curled around her legs, flared her skirt out so far she knew the men across the room got a glimpse at her black old-lady panties, but it didn’t course through her body as before. It mocked her after the arrival of the man in the portal. His arm was free of the portal up to his shoulder. The muscles below his bronze skin were so well-defined, she knew the anatomy of the muscles in his upper arms. The sleeve of his shirt covered little of his thick upper arm, a vibrant teal silk with gold and purple embroidery around the cuff done in the same flower or sunburst pattern as his bracelet. The god’s jewelry and wardrobe were in stark contrast to the strength he used to hold her in place.
As though he’d read her mind, he shook her. Tears filled her eyes, tears of pain and fear. Her throat closed. She took a breath; it came and went in tiny hiccups. Was this really her sole purpose in life, to be abused by men far more powerful than they appeared? She’d fought so hard to free herself of Cyrus’s memory, only to have it dragged back and shoved in her face. To them she was nothing but a baby carriage with a heartbeat. And soon I won’t even have that.
Shayla tried to pull herself together. Tears and snot ran down her face. She swiped at the snot with the back of her hand, wiping it off on her dress. It didn’t matter, if she survived, she’d burn everything she was wearing.
“Leave it to my bastard to find a half-wit to summon me.” The god’s voice rumbled through the portal, shaking the skull and dagger on the table.
“I’m—I’m not stupid. I’m scared.” She sounded it, too. Her voice was weaker than a mouse’s squeak.
The god dragged her closer. Out of the corner of her eye, she noticed the paper with the spell followed, remaining at eye level. He pulled her down so her face was inches from the swirling mass above the table. It smelled like raw meat and pennies left in a bowl for too long.
“You have nothing to fear unless you fail to continue reading.” His eyes flashed bright green in the portal.
Shayla gasped and stumbled back as far as he’d allow. She sought out the spell and read, taking care to pronounce each word carefully.
“She takes orders well, Deryck,” Harry said across the room. “Now I know why you picked her from the others.”
A muffled sound followed. Shayla couldn’t figure out what it was until she stole a glace across the room. Deryck stood closer in the doorway. His mouth moved, but she couldn’t make out the words. He’s probably lapping up the compliments from Harry.
She gave a disgusted snort. It was so like her to think someone would, could actually care for her. Cyrus proved to her again and again she was good for one thing—pleasing him. Harry wanted to use her. What did Deryck want? A place in Harry’s New World Order side-by-side with his god of a father—Marduk, she assumed from the name she’d read over and over again in the summoning spell—so they could subjugate the world and create more of whatever the hell they were? She knew the two across the room were somehow different from Marduk, but not why or how.
Across the room, Harry and Deryck were wrapped up in an animated conversation. Neither man noticed she’d stopped reading, and Marduk hadn’t felt the need to threaten her again. She jerked her free hand through her hair, pushing her sweat-soaked bangs off her forehead. Everything bad that’d happened to her recently began when Deryck showed up at the coffee shop. How did they find her? Deryck must have been searching for a woman who’d been knocked up by a god. Joke’s on them. I never gave birth to a god’s offspring. Cy had taken care of that problem. Shayla ran a hand over her lower stomach. She’d rather die than go through the pain he put her through again. If any of the men present thought to use her to make another half-breed, they’d have a hell of a fight on their hands. She’d go through with their ritual, but she would never subject herself to a forced pregnancy.
Deryck’s shoulder hit the glass-like barrier between him and Harry. The sound rattled around the room, jarring her from the woe-is-me streak she’d been caught in. Shayla sucked in a shaky breath.
“You’re nothing compared to me,” Harry roared. She’d missed something while considering what would happen to her.
Harry spit out a curse. Deryck stumbled through the doorway, his shoes kicking up shards of broken bricks. His stopped suddenly when Harry’s fist met his jaw.
The first part of Deryck’s plan worked wonderfully—he made it through Herryk’s spell and into the massive temple beyond. The second part of his plan, well, he couldn’t remember it through the throbbing from his brain bouncing around inside his skull. He rubbed his jaw where Herryk’s fist landed a solid blow. It already began swelling and muffled his hearing.
Herryk took another swing at Deryck’s head, his fist coming hard and fast toward his temple. Cursing, Deryck ducked and twisted under Herryk’s arm. Staying low, he jogged out of punching range. Another hit like the first and he’d need to call a time-out on his rescue plans to let the promised concussion heal. Sure, their kind was hard to kill, but even then, pain registered and major wounds made it impossible to function until they healed. He stole a glance at Shayla. There was no time for him to grab a ten-minute nap and heal.
“You are too much your father, Deryck. He ran anytime danger came his way, allowing heathens to push him further and further south. What is he, the god of Antarctica now?” Herryk lunged, grabbing hold of his arm and dragging him into an undercut
punch to the gut.
The air in Deryck’s lungs took flight. He dragged in a breath, pulled Herryk closer, and head-butted him. His forehead connected with Herryk’s cheekbone. Herryk dropped his hold and kicked Deryck back with a foot to his hip.
Deryck gave a winded laugh. His head throbbed. “Insulting my sire will get you nowhere. You are the only one crippled by where they came from.”
Herryk sank down into a fighting stance, his feet spread hip-width apart, and fists at chest level. “When she frees me, I will write my own origin. No one will be able to claim they created me. I am my own pantheon.”
“The last man to make that claim was banished from the God’s Lands.”
“He is no god.”
Green light spilled out of Herryk’s eyes. He whispered harsh, quick words. Deryck closed in on him, fists swinging to connect with his jaw. Herryk blocked every blow, whispering his spell. The light in his eyes spread, illuminating the room around them. Shadows jumped at Deryck, their phantom claws caught his shirt, ripping it. They tried to tear at his flesh, but the power animating them was weak, distracted. If Herryk finished his spell, Deryck would be in trouble.
He closed in on Herryk again. Deryck caught the other man with a kick to the ribs. Herryk lost his breath for a moment. The shadows backed off, lingering at the border of light flooding from Herryk’s eyes. He righted himself and snarled the spell again.
“Shut up, Herryk.”
Deryck snapped out his right hand, half expecting it to be blocked again. Herryk missed the block. The side of Deryck’s hand chopped against his windpipe at full force. The light in Herryk’s eyes died. He crumpled to his knees, wheezing.
Realizing his window of opportunity, Deryck left Herryk on the ground and raced across the temple. He knocked into Shayla harder than anticipated. Her wrist broke free of Marduk’s grasp. Blood welled in a row of scratches over her pale flesh.
