The Kat Dubois Chronicles: The Complete Series (Echo World Book 2)

by Lindsey Fairleigh

  “Then we take it down,” Mari said as she emerged from the bedroom. “Just like we did last time.” She’d changed from her high-heeled booties to combat boots. After watching her struggle through the soggy lawn earlier, I didn’t blame her.

  I took a step toward her. “We have to go now, while they think we’re doing exactly what we should be doing: ducking out . . . shaking them off our trail.” I looked from Mari to Mei and back. “This is the one—the only—chance we’re going to have to get the jump on them.” I rushed across the room to Mari, taking hold of her wrist and pulling her toward the kitchen. Toward Mei. “Teleport us,” I said, stopping in front of Mei. “Now.”

  Mei didn’t miss a beat. She gripped both of our shoulders and dragged us out of the here and now and into the nowhere and never.

  It was game time.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  I was right, damn it. Usually, being right was one of my favorite things. I loved being right; I reveled in my right-ness. But not this time. For once, I’d wanted nothing more than to be wrong. But right now, I couldn’t even do that right.

  A black, shimmering dome enclosed the whole Sealth family property, reaching all the way out to the point where the driveway met the edge of the road. I glared at the unbreakable barrier from the ground, that last jump having knocked me flat on my ass.

  “This is such bullshit,” I growled, slamming my fist down on the wet asphalt. I’d told Nik I hated him many times over our tenuous relationship, but I’d never truly meant it. Now I felt that hatred in my bones. Rage boiled within me, spilling over into a scream. I threw my head back and let it out.

  “While the histrionics are entertaining,” Mari said dryly, “they aren’t exactly helpful.”

  I closed my mouth and looked at her, chest heaving. I was exhausted. Even in his twisted mental state, driven by either madness or an overbearing god, Nik was stronger than me. Better than me. I couldn’t beat him, no matter how hard I tried.

  Mari stepped closer to me. “Come on,” she said, gripping my arm and hauling me up to my feet. “Only one thing to do now.” She pulled me to the edge of the dome and pressed my left palm against the smooth, rain-slick surface.

  When she released me, I let my hand slip off the barrier. “What’s the point, Mars?”

  She scoffed, her eyebrows raised. “The point is that it’s not over until it’s over, and I certainly can’t hear any fat lady singing right now.” She gestured to the barrier. “Now put your damn hand on there and let’s get on with this.” She smacked my arm. “Nobody likes a quitter.”

  A weak laugh escaped from my chest, surprising me. A moment later, I nodded and raised my left hand, pressing my palm against the impenetrable surface. “Alright,” I said, then took a deep breath. “I’m ready.” And considering how pissed off I was—how extremely over this whole day I was—I knew it wouldn’t take long to bring the barrier down. The otherworldly energies flowed through me, a torrent of magic just waiting to happen.

  “Hurry,” Mei whispered from behind us. “I just felt someone teleport in.”

  I gritted my teeth and closed my eyes. “Too late, bitches,” I hissed a fraction of a second before the dome fell.

  Mari and I high-fived, then launched into a dead sprint, heading up the driveway.

  “Mom,” Mari called back to Mei. “Come on!”

  Out of the corner of my eye, I watched Mari fall behind. I glanced over my shoulder to see what the holdup was. My body must’ve processed what I was seeing before my mind could, because my pace slowed. I’d made a complete one-eighty by the time my feet stopped moving.

  “Oh shit,” I breathed, my heart thudding against my sternum.

  Mari was jogging back down the driveway, unaware of the danger she was heading straight toward.

  Mei still stood on the road, her back to us as she faced a newcomer. The man she was staring at was neither Nik nor Heru. It wasn’t a man at all, not in the conventional sense. It was a Netjer. A god.

  It was the Visitor.

  “Kat!” Nik’s shout slapped me out of my stunned state, and I turned around to face him, horror-movie slow. He was standing at the top of the long driveway, Heru at his side and a dozen other warrior-minded Nejerets fanned out behind them. Nik was looking at me—they all were. They were so focused on me that they’d yet to notice the Visitor.

  I glanced over my shoulder to double-check that the Netjer was still there. Yep.

  “Please,” Nik said, and at the crunch of gravel under boots, I returned my attention to him. Well most of my attention. I stood there, torn between a shit-storm and a shit-tsunami.

  Nik made his way down the driveway, footsteps slow and hands upraised, I supposed in an attempt to appease my instinctive fight-or-flight response. “Stop fighting and just listen to me,” he said. “You can’t keep—”

  He paused, then shook his head and continued making slow progress down the driveway, his crunching footsteps deafening in the midnight air. “It’s over, Kitty Kat. You have to stop this mad crusade. You have to stop. For once in your life, just please, stop being so fucking stubborn.”

  My spine went rigid, and I stared at him, eyes burning and jaw clenched. “Just try and stop me.”

  Nik’s eyes narrowed, and he shook his head. “You don’t understand.”

  “Oh, I understand perfectly,” I said, reaching over my shoulder to grip the hilt of my sword. Of the sword he’d made. The At blade rang out as I drew it, the tone haunting and pure. To my ears, it screamed for justice. “You’re here to stop me—to kill Charlene.” I broke into a run. “I can’t let that happen.” I was twelve strides away. Ten.

  Vines of At shot out of Nik’s hands, but they disintegrated before they could reach me. He tried again, with anti-At this time.

  The same thing happened.

  I grinned. He couldn’t touch me. I was saturated in that electric, otherworldly energy. My whole body hummed with power, and the energy poured out of me, surrounding me like a magical shield. I’d never felt so powerful. So alive. It was like the universe was a part of me. Like it was inside of me, just as I had always been inside of it.

  I was three strides away from Nik. Nobody could stop me now. I would not fail Charlene.

  A glimmering longsword formed in Nik’s grasp, and he raised the blade just in time to block my first slashing strike. He grimaced under the force of my attack.

  And then he froze. Not in the fear sense, or even in shock. He became a literal statue, his chest unmoving despite the urgency of his breaths just a moment ago, his heart unbeating, his features as still as if they were carved from marble. It was like I’d come face to face with that solid At version of Nik I’d battled so hard in my mind less than an hour ago.

  “What the hell?” I backed away, stunned into inaction.

  Behind Nik, Heru and the other Nejerets might as well have been part of a painted-on backdrop for all the movements they were making. I spun around in search of Mari. She stood down at the bottom of the driveway, near the road. She had one foot upraised, frozen in mid-step as she ran back up the driveway, and she was leaning forward, her body hanging at an impossible angle. She should’ve been on the ground. But she wasn’t.

  It was as though time had stopped for everyone but me.

  “We must speak, Katarina Dubois.”

  I spun around, sword in hand, only to come face to face with the Visitor. Or, considering his considerable height, face to chest. Mercy’s blade stopped a couple inches from his neck, almost like he repelled her with a magnetic force.

  He studied me from beneath dark brows, his alien features placid. Nobody, not even a human, would ever mistake him as one of their own. His eyes were slanted at too drastic of an angle, his cheekbones were too sharp, and his eyes . . . they were an inferno of bronze and gold and hints of some color that was somehow darker than black. There was nothing human in his eyes.

  “Put that toy away,” he said, his voice cool to the point of being disinterested. “There is m
uch to discuss.” His bronze eyes bored into me, seeming to see into my very soul.

  Woodenly, I sheathed my sword. “What—” I blinked, momentarily breaking the spell of his stare, and glanced at Nik’s frozen form. “What did you do to them?”

  “To them?” the Visitor said, looking around, a hint of surprise giving his alien features their first dash of humanity. It was as though he was only now noticing the others. “Nothing.”

  “Riiiiight, because this is totally normal.”

  Much to my surprise, the Visitor laughed. “I have often thought sarcasm one of humanity’s greatest achievements.”

  “Sure . . .” I took a step back, putting some distance between us. “Whatever you say.”

  The Visitor’s laughter didn’t so much fade or die down as shut off. “I did nothing to them, Katarina Dubois, because I have no interest in them. The fate of this universe is not in their hands.”

  I took another backward step, eyeing him warily.

  “It’s in yours.”

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  “Nope,” I said, turning my back to him—or to it, or whatever Netjers considered themselves, gender-wise—and stalking past statue-Nik and up the driveway toward statue-Heru and the others. A heaping, stinking, steaming bag of nope.

  Of course, the one upside to this apparent time freeze was that I seemed to be the only person besides the Visitor who was able to move around in this out-of-time moment. Which meant nobody would even be able to try to stop me when I transformed Charlene into a Nejeret. It was a not-insubstantial silver lining.

  The Visitor appeared out of thin air in front of me, tendrils of multicolored smoke wafting off of him.

  “Gah!” I exclaimed, leaping backwards and reaching over my shoulder to grip the hilt of my sword.

  The Visitor stood before me, hands clasped behind his back and expression mild. He wasn’t the least bit concerned about being attacked by me or by Mercy.

  “Can’t you just move around like the rest of us?” I grumbled, sheathing my half-drawn sword and releasing the hilt.

  The Visitor tilted his head to the side, just the faintest line appearing between his eyebrows. “Why would I do such a thing when I am not one of you?”

  I huffed out a breath. He had a point, but I wasn’t about to admit that to him. “What do you want from me?” Not to hurt me, that was obvious. Otherwise, with the kind of power this guy could throw around with barely a thought, I’d already be dead.

  I narrowed my eyes and placed my hands on my hips. “And who are you, anyway?” I held up a finger in empty warning. “And ‘a visitor’ won’t cut it this time, bud.” I might not have a bachelor’s degree in anything, but I had a PhD in bravado.

  The Netjer stood up a little straighter. “I am called Anapa, but I believe the people of this universe know me by another name.”

  “Anubis,” I said, the syllables barely voiced. Sure, I didn’t have any formal education in the human world beyond high school, but I was well versed in my people’s history, a convoluted and tumultuous past inextricably interwoven into Egypt’s antiquity.

  I stared at the Netjer—Anapa—for a long moment, eyes rounded with horror.

  According to ancient Egyptian mythology, Anubis was most commonly known as the original god of the dead. He’d initially been portrayed as a jackal dutifully protecting the physical remains of the dead, but he’d later gained the body of a man, a form that helped him usher souls into the afterlife and oversee the weighing-of-the-heart ceremony in some limbo between this realm and the next.

  During the ceremony, the deceased’s heart, otherwise called an ib, a perceived part of the soul, was weighed on a scale against the feather of ma-at—of universal harmony, justice, and balance. If the heart was found to be lighter than the feather, if it didn’t disrupt the universal balance, then the soul would move on to Aaru, the ancient’s version of paradise. But if the soul proved to be too heavy, if it threw off the scales of justice the tiniest amount, it would be eaten by Ammut, a goddess often depicted as part hippo, part lion, and part crocodile, whose name literally translates to “soul-eater.” Chomp chomp chomp . . . then nothingness, forever. That soul ends.

  I frowned, thinking that sounded a lot like what happened to human souls, only they were never actually given a chance to prove their worth against the feather of ma’at. They simply ceased to be.

  “Good, you are familiar with the mythology,” Anapa said. “That may make this easier.”

  “The mythology?” I gaped at him. “You mean it’s true?”

  “It is allegorical, a mere representation of the truth, created by Re and told to the humans to help them understand their place in the grander scheme of this universe.” Anapa took a step toward me. “Now come, Katarina Dubois. As I told you earlier, we must speak, but we cannot do it here.”

  “What do you mean?” I sputtered. “What could you possibly need to talk to me ab—”

  But his hand was on my shoulder, and the words were sucked into oblivion the moment the world disappeared.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  After a brief flash of brilliant darkness, I expected to be anywhere else besides where I’d been before. And I expected to be on my hands and knees, dry-heaving the seconds away as I waited for the dizzying vertigo I’d come to expect from teleporting to pass.

  Except, when light returned to the world—or, rather, when I returned to the world—I was still standing on the gravel driveway, perfectly steady and not the least bit nauseated. I glanced at Nik and beyond him to Heru, then turned to peer down the driveway at Mari and Mei, hardly more than shadows in the midnight darkness. They were all still there.

  And they were all still frozen, exactly as they’d been before.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I spotted someone new standing directly behind me. I did a hop-twist, landing with my feet shoulder-width apart and my toes facing the newcomer.

  Facing me.

  “What the hell?” I straightened from my crouched, ready-to-strike position and stared, stunned by the sight of this statue-still version of myself standing just a few feet away. I stepped closer to her—to me—and reached out a hand, intending to make sure I wasn’t hallucinating.

  Anapa caught my arm before I could make contact, his long, pale fingers more than encircling my wrist.

  Startled, I looked at him. For a moment, I’d forgotten he was there.

  “If you touch your physical form, your ba will be reintegrated within it, and without the element of surprise, it will be much more difficult for me to separate the two again,” he said matter-of-factly.

  “Oh, um . . .” I twisted my wrist, pulling it free from his grasp, then took a step backward. “Alright.” I cleared my throat, corralling some of my gumption. I had a million questions, but I wasn’t sure I was ready for the potentially disturbing answers. I opted to go with the safer, familiar option. “You wanted to talk . . . so talk.”

  “Not here,” Anapa said as he waved his hand in a slow circle. Like he was a master artist wielding a paintbrush, the woods beyond him seemed to melt, twisting with the motion of his hand into a swirling oil painting. The midnight greens and browns gave way to a burst of vibrant colors, first starting as a brilliant pinprick at the center of the swirling mass, then expanding outward until it reached a diameter of six or seven feet.

  “Come,” Anapa said, his arm stilling. “We will speak in Duat; I believe the fresh perspective will clarify much for you.”

  My mouth fell open. “You’re saying that that thing is what—some kind of a portal to another dimension?”

  Once again, Anapa clasped his hands behind his back. He turned to the side, studying his creation. “Yes, that is an accurate way to describe it.”

  “And that dimension is Duat,” I said.

  Duat was the ancient Egyptian underworld. The land of the dead. The in-between, where Re’s mythical counterpart was said to have taken the sun every night. The place where souls went when their bodies died, where the
stories said they had to fight all manner of creatures and demons to find their way to the Hall of Two Truths to have their heart—their soul—weighed against the feather of ma’at.

  I pointed to the portal, mesmerized by its rich luminescence. “That is Duat,” I repeated, voice husky from the rapid onset of massive dry throat. I licked my lips and swallowed roughly, though neither seemed to do any good. “And you want to take me in there? Why?” I shook my head. “Why me?”

  Anapa’s gaze returned to my face, and he studied me just as he had his portal to another freaking dimension. Trust me, I’m not that interesting. “I have been watching you since we met the other day.”

  My eyes widened. “That was you . . . in the woods,” I said breathily.

  Anapa gave a single, sage nod. “Indeed. I sensed something different about you on our first encounter, though I could not—how do the people of this world say it—put my finger in it.”

  “On it,” I corrected automatically, struggling to subdue a no doubt hysterical giggle.

  Anapa shrugged. “I am still not certain why you are so different from the others of your kind, but this latest confrontation with Nekure has confirmed my suspicions. For whatever reason, you have a unique connection to ma’at . . . to this universe’s ib, its very heart and soul.”

  I stared at him, utterly speechless. Universes didn’t have souls. They were just places, like planets or houses, so there was no way I could have any kind of a connection to any universe’s soul. He wasn’t making any sense.

  “This universe is sick,” Anapa said. “It is losing its form, the barriers separating it from all other universes weakening. It cannot survive like this much longer.”

  I glanced at Nik, wondering if that explained his supposed reconnection to Re. If it did—and I’d doubted him to the extreme—then I owed him the most epic apology known to man. With plenty of groveling thrown in for good measure.