Edge of Forever (The Soul Eater Book 6) Page 11

  “This is my temple,” I said, raising my voice to address those spread across the entrance.

  They glanced between themselves and let me pass. When I stepped foot inside, the chant kur Apophis followed. So easily swayed.

  Word of my arrival would reach Seth, if he hadn’t already sensed his sands shifting, but I was in no hurry to reach him. With every floor I walked through, I banished his touch, sweeping the sand away with little resistance. And with each stride, I let loose the twisted souls I’d brought with me from the Twelve Gates. Souls of the bad, souls of the unredeemable. All mine. They howled into the building. No more subterfuge. No more hiding the truth of me. Let the Dark consume it all…

  I discovered Seth in the throne room, sitting rigidly on his red glass and stone throne. He regarded me with a raised eyebrow, but hundreds of worshippers scurried out of my way, my name hissed across their lips in awe, hate, and admiration.

  These people were ants. I could crush each of them. All it would take was a word. I let them see that knowledge in my eyes and watched them fall to their knees.

  I stopped in front of the dais, freed Alysdair, and relaxed the sword at my side. Placing one foot on the bottom step, I leaned in. “Did you miss me?”

  His fingers twitched against the throne’s arm. I could imagine the sight I presented, cloaked in fragments of tainted souls. I didn’t need to tell him what he saw about me, what he heard baying through the corridors, was just the beginning of the worst storm this world had ever seen. He knew the legend of Apophis.

  “The one thing Osiris never did was kill me.” Since Seth was ignoring me, I addressed the bowed congregation. “He feared that should I die, I would rise again more powerful than before.” I lifted my hand and the dark souls swirling above let out a unified wail. “He was right.”

  Someone behind me lunged, so eager to save their new god. The fool had a black soul that was easily twisted. Without looking, I clicked my fingers. His body combusted, the sound of it like a gasp on a lover’s lips. A flash of embers heated my back. What was left of him rained over the steps. No one else would be foolish enough to try to tackle me. Kur Apophis, they whispered, voices trembling.

  Seth watched his hold on his worshippers slip. It was my name they chanted now. Their devotion sizzled through my veins, and their words buzzed in my thoughts—the seductive siren call of power. For Apophis. Lord of the Dark.

  “This world and all its souls are mine,” I told the pretender god. For all his efforts, and his raging storm, I was the one the people feared. When they laid their heads down to rest, they whispered my name. When they saw the storm on the horizon, it was my name they told their children to run in fear from. Seth was a tool. He always had been a tool. From the moment I’d tricked him into taking my place inside my prison, I’d used him. The final blow had taunted him enough to kill me. He had been right to doubt me. If it hadn’t been for Isis’s meddling, I never would have returned to Egypt to free him.

  Seth pushed to his feet and descended the steps, coming to a stop eye to eye with me. “You are a weak echo of your former self.”

  How pretty his words were, but fragile and inconsequential like butterflies.

  I had Alysdair in my hand. He stood so close I could swing the sword and end the god now, but this wasn’t about finishing Seth. Not yet. I needed to set my trap and lure in the gods. All of them. I needed to be everything I could be, everything I had been before. Devourer of the Wrong.

  A ripple of energy sailed through the building, lapping over Seth and me. The god flinched, but I’d been expecting it. Shukra had finished her spells. The walls were marked with the names of the gods and mine. The air throbbed with my power. The walls, and floor hummed kur Apophis. Beyond the city, people’s fear took the form of worship. In this world, in this time, I had never been more powerful.

  “An echo?” I swung Alysdair, intending to cut through the back of his neck, but Seth lifted his armored arm and deflected the edge of the blade. He stumbled down the steps. The moment his foot touched the floor, sand bubbled from between the gaps and surged around him in a protective cloak.

  People fled. I plucked out their souls one by one like picking grapes from the vine. More. I fed on their eternal lives. Stronger. The walls shook. Beneath my boots, hieroglyphs beat their power in time with my heart. And the chanting went on.

  “I am Apophis. I am darkness given form and thought. I am eternal, and you would dare to strike me down?”

  More. As my momentum built, the storm that was me grew—not inside the temple, but outside where the streets funneled ash and the wind whipped it into a frenzy. Inside that storm, my remade lost souls howled and cried their anguish.

  Seth summoned a vicious sword out of the air. The sight of the curved blade in the god’s hands might have concerned me once, but no more. He brought it up to block another strike. The swords clashed. Alysdair thrummed alive in my hands. The Eye of Ra was hungry too.

  “Your storm…” Seth winced. “It will devour everything! There will be nothing left to reign over.”

  More power. This wasn’t enough. I needed to stir the bones of this dead city. I needed both worlds to notice me, to fear me, to come and see what the end of a world looked like, to try to stop Apophis.

  “Kneel,” I told Seth. “Kneel and worship the Dark.”

  He laughed as though such a thing were absurd. “You are not a thing to be worshipped.”

  “Times change. So do monsters.” I struck again. Seth parried. Again, Alysdair sang, moving too fast to see, but Seth blocked every strike. Sand spiraled around us, but so did the dark souls. He knew he couldn’t win, but the fool was as stubborn as his brother.

  “Kneel.” I pushed surplus power through the word.

  He gritted his teeth, resisting. “I. Will. Not. Kneel. To. You.”

  “Your defeat is inevitable.” When I swung this time, his parry fell short, and Alysdair sliced across his chest plate, scratching a deep line. “This world’s demise is inevitable.” I swung again, driving him back.

  He stumbled over a fallen worshipper and should have fallen, but my Dark swooped in and wrapped him in its embrace. He twitched, held aloft and cushioned by tendrils. I watched my regiment of broken souls pluck at the Lord of the Desert. Deeper they dug, sinking in through his ears and his mouth and flooding his eyes, turning them black. His skin contracted, stretching over ancient bones.

  “Kneel,” I whispered.

  Horror froze the cracks in his aging face. I had his immortality in my grasp. I could turn his eternal life into a nightmare of endless pain as all the years he had lived piled on and turned his bones to dust and his skin to parchment.

  I reached in with my left hand and curled my fingers around his neck. Papery thin skin crumbled. His neck would snap if I applied even the lightest pressure. Temptation plucked on my control.

  “Kneel and worship me, and I will end your agony.” My Dark withdrew, and I dropped him. He crumbled beneath the weight of age and decay, turning into a hunched creature made of little more than bone.

  He mumbled through cracked, bleeding lips, but it wasn’t the words I wanted to hear. All he had to do was accept me as a god among gods and this would end.

  His red hair whitened. His skin flaked. Bones jutted from under his skin.

  “Kneel. Accept me.”

  “I…” he rasped, the words barely more than dying breaths. “I dmaar su sra Lurd uk sra Dord.”

  I settled my hand on his bowed head. “All the rivers are ash.” Catching his jaw in my grip, I forced him forward and showed the submissive god to the few priests who remained.

  “The Lord of Red submits to me.” I lifted Alysdair, letting the sword sing.

  “Kur Apophis!” they boomed.

  I struck, diving into the god’s eternal soul. There was no resistance. Seth’s soul, made of threads of light and threads of red, knotted in on itself, tightening into a ball. All his power condensed into something that would fit in my palm, had I had on
e, but here I was smoke, and I wrapped around that soul and tightened my hold.

  Yes, this was me. This was right.

  The soul exploded in my embrace, bursting into fragments that glittered against my dark. I swallowed it down and smiled at the awe-filled faces watching. “Daquir.”

  Seth’s earthly remains, what was left of them, collapsed into a layer of ash.

  Part of me wanted this, had wanted it forever. I could control it now. I had to because it was about to get a thousand times worse.

  I plunged Alysdair down, thrust the blade into the glowing glyphs, and yelled, “Raraoka!”

  The sword instantly collapsed in on itself. Forged metal turned to liquid and sprang open, releasing a column of black from inside. It blasted high and shot through the floors above, breaching the roof. Souls. All the souls Alysdair had devoured in the name of the Soul Eater. Centuries of the bad, of the wrong, of the thieves, the liars, the monsters among humans. A few light souls flitted through the dark—the innocents Osiris had forced me to kill. They flicked like stars in the night sky, if the night sky were a raging funnel of all that was wrong with the world. And I was at its center.

  The funnel abruptly ended. Alysdair clattered to the floor, hollow.

  Now the gods would come. Osiris would come. None could deny the name: Apophis.

  I was counting on it.

  Chapter 12

  An eternal storm, the likes of which had once only been found inside the Twelve Gates, raged through the abandoned Manhattan streets. From my vantage point on the department store roof, ash and embers swept and funneled between Midtown’s buildings like a tsunami of destruction. Had the city been populated, the storm would have devoured their souls at a rate of thousands per minute. The temptation to abandon my plan and push the storm farther had my fingers twitching and my might split.

  Beneath me, the department store temple hummed with power. It wasn’t a pyramid like the gods had once favored to help channel their power, but it didn’t need to be. There was a time, not so long ago, when the onslaught of power would have had me out of my mind, lusting for more. The power was manageable. For now. The bait had been laid. The end was in sight. I only had to hold on to my sanity for a few more hours. After that… Well, there would be nothing after that.

  “My Lord…?” The priest pulled his cloak in, snatching its trailing edges back from the wind, and bowed his head under my glare. “The Goddess Bastet asks for an invitation to enter your temple.”

  I nodded and took one last long look at the jagged horizon. I could devour it all, this world and the underworld and all the souls they contained. In the past, I had. If I did, I truly would be unstoppable. The End of All Things. That is not who I am.

  Bastet waited in the throne room. Wrapped in leathers and glistening with knives, she looked every bit as dangerous as her warrior reputation proclaimed.

  “Leave.” I gestured at the loitering priests, dispersing them. They wouldn’t go far.

  Bastet waited until we were alone, then slid her cat-eyed glare to me. “What is this? Apophis is not meant to be worshipped.”

  “So I keep telling everyone, but do they listen?” Running a finger down the arm of the throne, I collected a thin layer of ash and rubbed it from my fingertip.

  “Osiris is here.”

  “Outside?”

  “Close. Mafdet too…”

  Good, I thought. But Bastet’s tone held an edge to it. When I met her gaze, she started up the steps toward me.

  “Osiris speaks of saving the worlds from you.” She stopped close enough that the smell of meadows and summer drifted through my senses. “After what I’ve seen here, I am struggling to argue with him. You are… very powerful.”

  I carefully asked, “Do you trust me?”

  She peered into my eyes as though looking for my soul to test for its darkness. If she looked long enough, it would swallow her whole. “I did.” She trailed her fingertips down my chest plate and took up my hand. She brushed the ring still on my finger. “You have changed.”

  “Whatever Osiris told you, he’s right. I am all that the gods fear, and with good reason. I could take both worlds and swallow them down.” I pressed a hand to her cheek, remembering the warmth of her, and drew her close. “But I am more than darkness. The gods will come, and they’ll attempt to stop me. They will succeed.” A frown tightened her brow and darkened her eyes. “The reign of the gods is over,” I added. “To protect this world, we need to let it go.”

  Confusion muddied her expression, but not for long. When the weight of my words struck, she backed down a few steps and looked around her as though seeing the room anew. The glowing markings, the rampant power. This entire building was a lure. I was the bait. She lifted her eyes. “You would end us all?”

  “It has to be this way.”

  I couldn’t let her leave, and as she absorbed her fate, I wondered if I would have to fight her. Then, she stilled and composed herself. The fingers of her right hand clenched into a fist. She lifted her gaze once more. Determination burned there now. “Are you not content with this world? You must destroy the gods too? Where is the boy? I will take him from here and end this nonsense.”

  I had hoped she would be different. I had believed she would understand why I had to do this. But her next word proved my hope had been misplaced.

  “Cukkomd,” she whispered.

  Pain lanced up my arm and yanked a hold on my psyche. Before I could realign my thoughts into figuring out what was happening, she speared a compulsion home. “Summon the boy.”

  The ring. The damn wedding ring—the slave cuff had its claws in me. I reached for it, tried to get my trembling fingers around it to yank it off—

  “Cukkomd. Summon the boy.”

  Agony tore down my back, dropping me to my knees. The more I denied her, the more her words felt as though they were stripping skin from my bones.

  “Bastet… you know me… better… than this.”

  “The stubborn, confused, valiant man I knew died the moment you stabbed Alysdair through my heart.”

  “A compulsion… from Osiris!”

  “You agreed to it, or it would have been impossible. Summon the boy. This ends now.”

  “No.” That it had come to this was proof. Time had corrupted the gods beyond redemption. There are no good gods. I had hoped Bastet was different. I’d loved her once, as Ace Dante, and now, as Apophis, those human feelings still clung on. She was good, her soul was a bright star, but she couldn’t see past her survival. If Nile came, she would kill him to stop me.

  “I believed you were different,” she accused, breathing hard as my defiance tested her power.

  “And I you.”

  “You will be stopped, and the worlds will return to normal under our guidance, as it has always been.”

  “Under… Osiris’s guidance?”

  “This power… I cannot trust you.” She recoiled. “You would destroy the gods and take both worlds.”

  “I thought you knew me.” I pressed my hand against the dais and spread my fingers. Bastet’s compulsion clawed at the inside of my skull, shredding pieces of my mind. Outside, the ash storm surged closer. If she pushed me too far, I would break. Why couldn’t she see the truth?

  “Anubis, Osiris—”

  I laughed, cutting her off. How naïve. I had been to believe Bastet was the one god who had changed, who was different from the rest. The one good god left.

  A blur in the corner of my vision was all the warning I received. Bastet wasn’t as lucky. She jerked. Her mouth opened in a silent, stunned gasp. The tips of four jambiya daggers burst from her hip.

  I blinked, clearing my vision. No, not daggers. Claws.

  “It is you who must be stopped.” Cat’s cool, calm voice sliced through the pain in my head and swept it away.

  I yanked off the ring and threw it down the steps. It bounced, rolled, and settled in a splash of bright blood at Bastet’s feet.

  Bastet twisted and backhanded Cat
off her feet. “What is this betrayal, Catalina!?” She pressed a hand to her side. It came away wet with blood.

  Cat shook off the strike and climbed to her feet. “You are all too blinded by your pasts to see what Ace is trying to do.”

  “And you underestimate the power of Apophis.” Bastet flicked blood from her fingers, more annoyed than wounded. She had probably already healed. “I had hoped, as Ace, Apophis would overcome the darkness, but clearly he has not.”

  Cat’s growl chilled my blood. “You asked him to be more than darkness, and he is, but now you can’t or won’t see how he’s changed? You don’t want to believe, because if you do, you know it’ll be the end of you.” She flexed her claws and lifted her chin. “You are my queen and I love you, but you are also a product of the old world. Don’t you see this will keep happening? History will repeat itself and people will suffer for as long as the gods are alive. Ace—Apophis is stopping you. Not for himself, but for the good of the innocent souls caught up in your wars. If you can’t or won’t see that, then you must be stopped.” Cat waited, claws at the ready, stance poised to attack.

  But Bastet hesitated. From anyone else, those words would have been dismissed, but Cat had always been more than a scout or foot soldier. She was probably the only person Bastet would hear out.

  “Stop. Both of you. All of this is too late. Osiris wants to see me trapped, my power drained, so that he may be worshipped as the savior. What do you think will happen then, Bastet? When have you ever known Osiris to be a benevolent god?”

  Ash whispered in beneath closed doors, and on those whispers came Osiris’s name. He was close.

  A distant jackal’s howl echoed through the room, followed by another. Anubis. The gods were coming. It was time.

  I sent out a mental call to the Recka. Be ready. I heard its cry travel through the city and my temple. Come to me.

  Bastet flinched and turned on the spot, noticing how a cushion of ash had settled across the floor. She lifted her gaze to the throbbing markings on the wall. My name, but also a sense of crackling power that wasn’t mine. It built slowly, creeping in around the edges as though hoping to go unnoticed. Osiris’s trap was closing in.