by S. W. Clarke
“Do you see anything?” Frank asked.
Grunt squinted. “Not yet.”
I lifted the flame just a little higher, grim determination like a stone in my belly. This had to be the right scroll, and yet … and yet, I didn’t see anything—
Until I did. Like clearing condensation, words slowly spread across the paper, expanding outward from the flame’s center.
I stared down, my breath catching. The letters weren’t part of the English alphabet, or any language I’d seen before.
“Ho-ly hell,” Frank said. “It actually worked.”
I shot him a glance. “You doubted our plan?”
One thick eyebrow rose. “Even you doubted it.”
“What does it say?” I lifted my face to Grunt, who gingerly turned the scroll around to face him. “Can you read it?”
“I can,” he said with the absentmindedness of a person busy reading. “It’s the old common language.”
“The old common language?”
He didn’t even meet my eyes; his were too busy flicking across the page. “Yes, known to many species of non-humans. It has been around for centuries.”
“And?”
“And …” Grunt kept reading, his eyes narrowed. “This is it. The ritual is described here.”
I slapped the counter beside me, grinning. “Hear that, Frank? You didn’t sprain your ankle for nothing.”
Frank just stared at the writing, ignoring my joke. I got it—this scroll was a clue to help us defeat Lust. Which meant getting back Seleema.
“We’ll get her back. Her and Percy.” I took a seat on the counter, preparing my wristwatch to record every word. One of the perks of Erik’s World Army tech—it had a whole lot of handy features. “Grunt, what’s it say? Tell me everything.”
Grunt’s brow had furrowed, a line appearing above the bridge of his nose. His eyes kept moving. “Nothing good. It’s written by Envy, so that should give you a hint.”
“Envy?” Frank said. “Like … the Deadly Sin?”
“That’s right, Frank,” I said, cold anticipation running up and down my body. “The one and only.”
Back in Texas, Lust had mentioned her sister, Envy. I hadn’t thought much of it, but with the scroll before me and her writing laid across it, the reality of the Seven Deadly Sins roaming the world hit me as a very real thing.
Grunt let out a low growl as he studied the words. “This is darkness.”
“Read it.” I clicked the watch’s button. Now Erik would get the scoop …. wherever he was. But of course, there was a time for pining and a time for focusing. And this moment was all business. “Read every word.”
So he did.
“‘The vessel’s soul must be halved or removed entirely,’” Grunt read. “‘The body must remain living by the force of its vitality. Such vitality is rare in nature, and occurs only by a fluke once or twice in a thousand years.’”
Vitality. Ariadne was the daughter of the first vampire, which I imagined meant she’d won the genetic lottery when it came to vitality and longevity. She was, after all, still alive seven hundred years after Mariana had died.
She’d been an immortal before the gods left, and their leaving had severed the connection between the half of her soul that lived in the heavens and the half on Earth. Not a vampire, no bloodlust. Just a regular immortal human with standard DNA and a normal, non-hemoglobin diet.
A halved soul with a human’s vital body. According to the scroll, that made Ariadne a perfect vessel.
“‘What does the vessel provide to the inhabitant?’” Grunt read on. “‘I shall tell you of my own experience. I found a handsome young man in a comatose state in a village on the seaside in Scythia one century ago. He had been so for years, but his body remained so healthy the villagers regarded him as a miracle. When I encountered him, his body brimmed with such enviable muscle as though he’d spent every day of his life in heavy training. I recognized him immediately as something other than human—perhaps his mother had secretly encountered a demigod. But I digress. Upon touching this man, I knew exactly what had become of him. His soul had departed his body, but the corporeal form remained in a perfect state of life. And I knew only one thing: I desired that body. Not to be next to it, but to have it for my own.’”
Here, Grunt paused.
I sat forward. “What is it?”
His eyes met mine. “This next part explains the ritual.”
“So read it.”
He swallowed, his enormous Adam’s apple bobbing. I didn’t know what had gotten into him—until he spoke. “‘I had a sense for how I might possess this man. It took the whole of my stamina, but I managed to transfer my essence into him in the span of an hour.’”
“Transfer,” Frank said. “That’s a specific word.”
Grunt’s face lifted. “That’s because Envy was wrong. The young man’s soul hadn’t left him.”
“And how do you know that?” I asked slowly.
His eyes practically glowed in the darkness. “She describes reaching into his throat and ripping it out through his mouth.”
“When you say ‘ripped’ … ” Frank began.
“I mean she pulled his soul right from the center of him,” Grunt said. “She tore it from his body.”
All at once, I had a vision of Lust doing the same to Ariadne. I saw, for a moment, the ghastly, vivid fingers reaching into Ariadne’s lovely open mouth and proceeding down, down, distending her throat so that the poor girl gagged as Lust reached straight toward her heart.
And then, with a violent jerk, her soul came away in Lust’s hand, ghostlike and ethereal.
“It won’t happen,” I said to Mariana in my head. That had been her vision—her imagination. The longer she and I shared one body, the more I’d begun to see into her mind’s eye.
Especially now that we were working together.
“I won’t let it happen,” I repeated to her. “We’ll save her.”
Inside me, Mariana’s anticipatory grief welled up like an overfull glass. “I know.”
All the same, I got it: when your child’s life was in danger, you imagined the worst. I had done so a thousand times with Percy, and Mariana had probably been beholden to my worried visions.
“Then what did she do?” I said to Grunt.
“It says she sapped away all her strength to enter him,” Grunt said. “And once she did, the young man remained comatose for another week as Envy regained her powers.”
“And then?”
Grunt breathed in through his nostrils. “And then she became known to humans as Ghengis Khan.”
Frank sat forward. “What? That can’t be right. He wasn’t immortal.”
Grunt’s eyes shifted to Frank. “After everything you’ve learned since the gods left, are you certain of that?”
“Khan died,” I said.
“Actually,” Grunt said, “I would imagine Envy grew bored of inhabiting him after so much slaughter. Maybe she had found someone else to covet. He didn’t die of natural causes—she simply slithered out of his body after decades.”
“Ah, slithered.” I set the lighter down next to me. “Well if that doesn’t describe how evil moves, I don’t know what does. Anything else on that scroll, Grunt?”
“One last thing.” He read slowly. “‘For a sin, inhabiting a human vessel is akin to harnessing the sun. For only in a truly vital human body are a sin’s powers magnified a hundredfold.’”
A hundredfold. That was precisely what Lust meant to do with Ariadne: to inhabit her like the vessel she saw her as, to magnify her own powers and enspell the world.
“But why,” I said, “does she have to do it in the middle of Times Square on New Year’s Eve?”
That was a question we’d asked ourselves before, to no good answer. But the scroll we’d poached tonight seemed like it held the clues we needed to reach the right answers.
Grunt rolled up the scroll. “To have an audience.”
“She could get a bigger
audience at a football stadium,” I said.
“I’ve gotta tell Jen Brovavick.” Frank pulled his phone out of his pocket and began texting. “She might have some insight.”
“Tell your ex I’m keeping the invisibility cloak safe and sound,” I said. I didn’t want any angry librarians coming after me; I suspected they were the worst sort of mad.
“I don’t know, Tara,” Grunt said. “But I suspect she picked Times Square for a reason.”
“Yeah, she did.” I tapped my fingers on the counter. I could feel Mariana dwelling on the subject, too. “Let’s go home. Some food will do us good.”
I drove us back to the apartment and parked along the street. The three of us came out of the RV still in our tuxedos. I yanked off my bowtie as I stepped onto the sidewalk of the pretty neighborhood where Frank, Grunt and I had been staying for the past month.
We were a motley trio, and I felt sure the downstairs neighbors would never forgive us for bringing an ogre to live above them. But in a weird way, Frank and Grunt had become like my roommates.
And it wasn’t totally unpleasant.
Around us, the streetlamps illuminated the night with understated candor, and I almost wished this was where I actually lived. Me, Percy … and maybe Erik.
Maybe ...
But, as I came up the steps of the brownstone, reality hit: I could never afford a place like this. It was only by the good graces of Frank’s friends that they were allowing us to stay while they vacationed somewhere warm.
Upstairs, we all changed in our separate bedrooms. When I passed by the open door of Frank’s bedroom, he was sitting on the edge of the bed, hunched over, staring at a piece of red cloth in his hands. Sometimes at night he’d bring it out when things were quiet around the apartment and he thought no one was looking. I’d never questioned it; this always felt like a private moment. One I shouldn’t intrude on.
But before I moved away, Frank sensed me. His eyes lifted, met mine, and his were red-rimmed. Tears shone on his cheeks.
“Well,” he said, “this is embarrassing.”
I paused in the doorway. “Frank, even if you were choking the chicken with the door open, I wouldn’t judge. We do what we have to do in times like these.”
He snorted, shook his head. His eyes returned to the cloth. “I know this isn’t the first time you’ve seen me staring at this thing.”
I began to move away. “I’ll give you your space.”
“Wait.” When I came back into view, he sighed. “Do you know what this is?”
I shook my head.
He lifted it, and the whole thing came unspooled. It was a knitted scarf. “It’s Seleema’s. I made it for her the first winter we started dating. Do you know she’d never owned a scarf?”
“Somehow I can believe it.” I took a few steps into the room. “You’re handy with some needles, Frank.”
He wiped at his eyes. “I’m not supposed to cry over scarves. It’s probably unhealthy.”
I raised a finger. “Before you wallow in your embarrassment, I’ve got something to show you.” I went into my own bedroom, and when I returned, I extended a mason jar toward Frank. “I have definitely cried over the contents of this jar more than once in the past two months.”
Frank squinted as he accepted it, staring through the glass. “Is that …”
“It’s Percy’s eggshell.” I dropped onto the bed next to him, our sides touching. “Yes, I saved it. Yes, sometimes I just stare at it. Or smell it.”
Frank set his fingers on the lid. “May I?”
I shrugged. “Go ahead.”
He opened the jar and gazed into it, not daring to even touch the shell. I appreciated that, and it was why I’d let him open it in the first place—Frank implicitly understood boundaries. “It’s beautiful.”
I smiled. “Before he hatched, I carried that egg around for months. I slept curled around it. I ate with it next to me. In a weird way, I almost didn’t want to hatch it.”
Frank glanced at me. “I think I understand why. You were fifteen, right?”
“Yeah. I was a little thief. Took that egg from a circus display where people paid a buck to stare at it.” I swallowed. “I think it would have stayed on display until the end of time.”
Frank put the lid back on the jar with slow care. “If Seleema were here, she would tell you that you have a brave soul. I agree with her.”
When he handed the jar back to me, I took it with both hands. Gazed down at it. “GoneGods, I don’t know where I would be now if I hadn’t hatched that egg.”
Later that evening, I emerged from a shower to find Frank cooking up something fragrant in the kitchen. He always did the cooking, and I always leaned against the doorway and gave him compliments to butter him up.
He didn’t mind. Neither did I.
Tonight I folded my arms as I watched him cook, half my mind in the present and half on the burning question—Why Times Square? “What’re you making?”
“Paninis.” He glanced over his shoulder with the smallest smile.
“Ah, your specialty.” I came forward, sat at the kitchen table. “Hey, Frank.”
He didn’t turn around from the stove. “Yeah?”
“How do you feel about volunteering? For a good cause, of course.”
A suspiciousness entered his eyes as he looked back at me. “I think it’s a fine thing to do.”
“Good.” I gestured between him and me. “Because we’re signing up for a big event.”
He pointed his spatula at me. “Don’t play coy. I know what event you mean.”
“And you’ll do it?”
He sighed. “Not like I have a choice.”
“Sure you do.”
“Really?” He turned around. “You’re saying you don’t need me to play the Good Guy Accountant and answer all your regular-person questions about how to volunteer like a regular person?”
I raised a finger. “Ah, but there’s the thing: I do need you, Frank. I don’t deny that. But that doesn’t mean you don’t still have the choice.”
He shook his head, his face somewhere between a smirk and a grimace. When he turned back around, he flipped a panini. “As long as it doesn’t involve more running.”
I leaned back. “It’s a New Year’s Eve party. Everyone will be too drunk to run.”
That wasn’t true. Both Frank and I knew it. Chances were that party would involve a whole lot of running—especially on my part. And I really wished I had a particular corporal to back me up.
A beep sounded at my wrist. I lifted it to find my World Army watch Erik had given me had gone completely dead. I tapped the watchface. “Huh.”
“What is it?” Frank said.
“The watch just … died.”
Frank glanced around. “Or was it deactivated?”
A good question. Before I could ponder it, a knock came at the front door.
Frank and I met eyes. Nobody but his friends knew we were staying here, and we preferred it that way.
I stood. “I’ll go see.”
Chapter 3
As I approached the front door, the knock came again. Three hard raps in a perfect, synchronous rhythm—knock-knock-knock.
I took soft steps over the hardwood floor right up to the door. When I set my eye to the peephole, a distorted view of a familiar face greeted me.
“I can see you at the door, Tara.”
I jerked my head back, cheeks flushing. “Now if that isn’t stalker-like, I don’t know what is.”
“Are you going to open it?”
I undid the chain and the bolt, my stomach cinching in anticipation. It had been more than a month.
When I opened the door a foot, I stood in the opening with my hip against the frame. “Hello, Corporal. For a stalker you’ve got a real average-joe knock, you know that?”
Erik’s eyes flitted over me, settled on my face. I was as struck by his handsomeness in this moment as I had been the first time I’d met him. No—this was a different kind of st
ruck. This was seeing a person in a whole new way, now that you knew a thing or two about them and you found you wanted to know more.
I knew he was brave. I knew he’d saved my life more than once. And I knew he was loyal.
Right now, he wasn’t just handsome—he was magnetic.
The left side of his mouth quirked. “ ‘Average-joe knock?’ ”
“Yeah.” I reached out, grabbed the edge of his jacket and yanked him into the apartment. He came without resistance. “The kind of knock people do in children’s books. Three raps on the door.”
Once inside, I pushed the front door shut. I didn’t know why Erik had decided to come, but I knew I had to keep our presence minimal in the world at large. Sin had already sent one of her bodyguards after us—a powerful fallen angel named Marut—and her followers had only grown in number since then.
Who knew who she’d send next? Hercules? Orion? The entire ensemble of zodiacs?
And tonight, we’d just stolen a precious scroll from an exceedingly powerful Other. We needed to lay low.
Inside the apartment, Erik stood in the entryway while I surveyed him from toes to head. His eyes moved like lightning bugs over my face, flitting to my lips most often.
He wanted to kiss me.
And yet we both stood two feet apart in a kind of awkward non-dance. He’d been gone long enough for neither one of us to feel comfortable jumping the other on sight.
“Well,” I said to break the silence, “this is unexpected. Want a drink?”
He looked like he wanted to say—or do—more, but he only said, “Sure.”
As I entered the kitchen, Frank turned to me. “Did I hear Erik?”
“You did.”
Frank, spatula still in hand, left me alone in the kitchen. I heard the sounds of him greeting Erik, the two hugging and patting each other’s backs.
Meanwhile, I grabbed the first bottle I saw out of the fridge—a half-drunk container of sake. Never mind it was past midnight.
I was distracted. On multiple fronts.
When I brought the drink back out and handed it to Erik, he didn’t say anything. He just accepted it. And then he got right down to business. “Tara, I got your message about the scroll.”
