Scorpion Trap Read online

  “Cujo’s gonna love this,” Shu chuckled.

  “You can’t tell him.”

  “Why not?”

  “Keep him out of it. We’ve had too many close calls already.”

  She shrugged. “It’s Cujo. He’s the only person I can share all my weird shit with besides you, and you are my weird shit.”

  “Shu, this isn’t a game. If Osiris or Isis learns there’s a mortal who knows as much as he does, they’ll kill him.” Isis’s tale of Senenmut’s death was fresh in my mind. If Cujo died over my mistakes, I couldn’t bear it. No more deaths. More than darkness. “Just don’t tell him. You shouldn’t even be screwing around with a mortal. It never ends well.” I’d screwed around with a few in my time. Loved a few too. I still remembered them and how their souls had tasted as they slipped all the way down.

  The next glass of vodka went down smoother.

  “That’s rich coming from you, golden eyes.”

  I winced. “Still gold?”

  “Yup. If your skin were a shade darker, you’d look a lot like Osiris. It’s disturbing.”

  “It should have worn off by now.”

  “That’s what you get for wallowing in Karnak’s magic.”

  I grunted a non-committal sound that could have been an agreement. Shu and I might be on sharing terms, but I wasn’t about to tell her that the power overload had come from Isis’s kiss. If I did, Cujo would hear about it, and then I’d have them both on my back.

  Drowning my thoughts in vodka had always worked, so I tried the same now.

  Shu watched the drinks line up and go down one after another and kept her comments to herself. But her permanently arched eyebrow peaked even higher as she asked, “Do you believe Isis? About her not knowing where the archaeologists are?”

  “She has them. Gods are predictable. Right now, I’m playing nice like an obedient little soul eater, but she’ll use those people as leverage the second I need a nudge. She can’t compel me like her husband can, so she needs another stick to beat me with. She’ll tell me where they are eventually. Until then, she’ll keep them alive.” I tipped my refilled glass. “That’s the game the gods play. She can’t help herself.”

  “So the Soul Eater is best of friends with the Goddess of Light, huh?”

  I smiled. Here I was talking with my centuries-old enemy over drinks. “Her guard is down, and I have her confidence. I can use that.”

  Shu picked up a cloth and started scrubbing down the bar top like she’d been manning this bar her whole life. “Just make sure she doesn’t burn you.”

  I smiled into my drink. Shu. Domesticated. I hadn’t expected that. “It’s sweet.”

  “What is?” she grumbled.

  “How much you care.”

  “About you?” She snorted. “If we weren’t cursed together, I’d steal a bus just to run you down and grind your lifeless carcass into the asphalt.”

  “Sure you would, Shu.” I set my drink down and pushed away from the bar, heading out toward the pool.

  “Where’s my tip?” she called.

  “Don’t mix spirits.”

  “What?”

  “I’ll be back by dawn.”

  “You better be, Acehole. What do I do if her Immortal Bitch-Highness comes looking for her pet?”

  “She knows where I am…”

  A quick dip in the pool and a few ancient words later, I was in Duat—home. Not New York home, but the home that burns human eyes, tries to drown you in curious sprites, and talks back when you say hello. I jogged across the plaza and headed straight for the vast columned portico over the Halls of Judgment, keeping my head up and my strides true. A few curious souls watched me pass. The last time I was home, I’d had my back whipped to shreds and my heart weighed against the Feather of Truth, and I’d pissed off Anubis and trapped the legendary Rekka into my service by way of a slave cuff. My relationship with Duat and its denizens was rocky, so say the least. These were not the best of times. They believed I’d consumed innocent souls (I had), that I’d killed Ammit the Great Devourer (I hadn’t), and that Thoth’s recent demise was by the tip of my blade (it was). The only place I felt relatively safe was with the ferryman, and only then because nobody dared attack him.

  He greeted me with his usual hollow-faced hooded cloak and linen-wrapped fingers. His boat whispered up to the small timber dock and rocked to a gentle stop.

  “Mokarakk Oma, kicr rok cromsad.” Nameless One, much has changed. His voice didn’t come from a mouth—as far as I knew, he didn’t have one. It trickled into my ear, speaking to more than my physical being, speaking to my soul.

  I held out two dimes for passage across the River, but the ferryman didn’t move to take them. He’d never refused before. I stilled, knocked off my stride. The ferryman had never refused anyone.

  “They’re good.” I laughed, injecting confidence into the words to hide my fear.

  “Kraa vokkosa.” Free passage.

  I looked at him side-on. Where was the catch? “Take them.”

  “Much has changed. You have changed. Come.”

  When the ferryman says get in the boat, you get in the damn boat without arguing. The skiff rocked as my weight unsettled it, and then we were silently drifting forward into the fog’s cool embrace. But free passage? I’d never heard of such a thing. Even Osiris paid his way.

  “There is unrest around your name,” the ferryman said.

  I stayed quiet and gazed into the dark water, waiting for the faces to float to the surface. In Duat, there was always unrest around my many names.

  “The balance is upset. Many ripples, you cause.”

  None of this was news. “Anubis is going to pin his next drama on me, huh? Let him.”

  “You are not as you should be and not as you appear to be. Inpu seeks answers.”

  Inpu was Anubis’s old name, and the ferryman was using it to remind me whose fur I’d rubbed the wrong way. “He’s not the only one.” Everyone wanted answers. They could get in line behind me.

  The ferryman’s shoulders shifted. He turned and maneuvered himself around so he sat in front of me. He was still all cloak and nothing under the hood, but now all that nothingness was aimed at me. My skin itched under the weight of his attention. He rarely faced his passengers, preferring to remain indifferent and aloof.

  The boat sailed on without him at the helm, and the quiet clung on.

  “Cracks are appearing,” he said, his whispered words no more substantial than the fog touching my face. “Sands are shifting. The souls feel it, as do you.”

  I’d known it since returning too late to save Ammit from the jackals. I’d been out of practice back then, but with my recent visit and the things I’d witnessed in the Gates? Bossing Anubis around, commanding legions of snakes—none of that was normal, or as normal as life in Duat could get.

  “You own the Rekka,” he added.

  And there was that. “That was an accident. I had the slave cuff. I didn’t expect it to—”

  He lifted his hand, silencing me. “You have never lied to me. Do not start now. You challenged the God of the Damned in the weighing chamber. You command the Rekka. You defy all who seek to strike you down. And you survived the Twelve Gates. All this while you are shackled by Osiris. Do not speak of accidents. I know you.”

  Silenced, I worked my jaw around the denials. It was all a collection of accidents, wasn’t it? I hadn’t orchestrated any of it. All I was trying to do was survive the gods. Or was there more to it? More I wasn’t seeing? “I’m beginning to wonder if anyone knows me, including me.”

  “When your mother found you as a child in the River, she came to me and asked what you were. I could not answer her.”

  “I know that.” The infamous Nameless One. Ammit’s charge. The orphaned upstart.

  “You misunderstand. I could not answer. Your life, your presence here, it is a wrongness. You do not belong.”

  Duat had been my home longer than I’d been Ace Dante. And now that was also a lie?
“Then where do I belong, ferryman? Tell me, because the gods either won’t, can’t, or don’t know, and I’m tired of looking to them for answers.” I searched the swirling black inside his hood, seeking a scrap of tangible presence to latch on to, but all I got was a sense that something slippery and surreal was looking back at me. “If you know something, tell me.”

  He waited. Water lapped against the boat’s hull in time with the steady beat of my heart. If he had answers, now was the time to tell me. Inside, in the old part of me, my instincts squirmed to get away from the ferryman’s glare.

  “The River gave you up all those years ago because you did not belong. You have changed.”

  These weren’t answers; they were more riddles. The ferryman couldn’t help me, but I hadn’t expected him to. This trip wasn’t about me.

  “Kurrae,” I told him. Sorry.

  His hood shifted as he realized what I was about to do. He reached out, but it was already too late. I dived over the edge into the water.

  The Great River swallowed me down the way it used to, wrapping me up in its cool embrace. I dove deeper and kicked hard, seeking out the dark and ignoring the burn in my lungs. The ferryman could pluck me out at any moment, but I was gambling that he wouldn’t. Not yet. He’d always allowed me time in the River as a boy.

  Vague faces loomed, curious at first, but when they remembered who—what I was, they dissolved, part of them remembering how to be afraid. Deeper I pushed until the pressure in my chest threatened to tear me open.

  Surrounded by darkness and figures made of glistening webs of light, I leveled out and spread my arms. I relaxed the hold on my physical self and let the real me spread outward. All I had to do was let go of being human. My human heart thudded harder, and my human lungs burned. The more I clung to my false life, the more my thoughts swam and my body protested. It had been a long time since I’d swum freely in the River, but I hadn’t forgotten. I just needed to remember what I was. I wasn’t about to die. That wasn’t how this worked. Water slipped through my lips, over my tongue, and down my throat. My body bucked around the invasion, and instincts screamed at me to launch toward the surface. And then, as easily as flicking a switch, the water turned to air, my body into shadow. The pain vanished and the ethereal realm of souls opened. The River had let me in.

  “Hatshepsut…” I whispered, reaching farther and freeing more of the power I kept contained.

  You’re not a soul eater, but you’re very good at pretending to be.

  For a moment, the memory of Cat’s voice jarred with this time and place, almost yanking me back into my Ace Dante skin. She’d almost drowned here when the souls tried to take her, but she’d survived. She was still alive. Wasn’t she? I ignored the doubt, ignored everything I didn’t understand, and focused on my task.

  “Hatshepsut…” I cast the name outward.

  Souls drifted in schools, glimmering in the corners of my vision, not wanting me to single them out, but curious enough to drift closer.

  I repeated Hatshepsut’s name, pushing power into the summons and sending it out into the endless nothing. I wouldn’t be able to hunt down the correct soul without spending years in the River, and time was not on my side. My only chance was the soul coming to me.

  The truth has been taken from you. Thoth’s words, but his soul wasn’t here either, just the memory of him inside my head, chipping away at the human parts of me.

  “Mokarakk Oma.” A glimmer of light separated from the others. It twitched and danced, spinning like a sun catcher. “I kaa aeui. Yui ora sra Daquirar muv?” “I see you. You are the Great Devourer now?” Like the ferryman’s voice, the soul’s grew inside my thoughts.

  “I’m not here to further your journey. Do you remember your life as Hatshepsut?”

  “Fragments.”

  “Senenmut, do you remember him?”

  “Yes,” the voice hissed.

  “Osiris had him killed?” I tested, circling my shadows around the light.

  “I searched, but Senenmut is not here?”

  “No.”

  “I had hoped…”

  “Hatshepsut, Senenmut was killed. We found his body, but his skull was removed before his entombment. Do you remember who removed it?”

  “Yes… He created wonderful things for her. He loved me and I him, but she was too much. She took him from me and turned him into a slave. I saved him… but he is not here.”

  “The skull?” I had to keep the soul focused. If its attention drifted, I might never get it back.

  “The skull is a lock or a key or just a skull?”

  “Yes, the key. Do you know where it is?”

  “My priests took it and sent it far from me, from her. It must never be returned to the body, never combined with night and day.”

  I was losing it. “Why?”

  “The shrine between the valleys is a cage. It must not be opened.”

  A cage. Not a prison or a tomb, but a cage. Creatures and beasts are caged. It could mean nothing, could just be a poorly chosen word, but I filed it away for later. “Where did they send the skull?”

  “Do not open it, Mokarakk Oma.” The soul pulsated and spun faster. “You must not. The cage cracks, even now. I feel it. How can you not?”

  “I want to stop it from being opened—”

  “No. This is her doing. You were sent by her!” The soul blazed too brightly, raging against the dark. I’d caught the soul in my hand before I was even aware I’d moved. It jerked and bucked, but my wrappings of shadow and ash entombed it. I could crush it. I wanted to. Crush it, make it mine, feed off its brilliance and all the others here. A river of souls, a river of power. All mine to steal, to take, to consume—

  The world and my place in it slid backward at a pace too fast for me to see. I lost my grip on the soul as the waters rushed by, tearing at the threads of my true self until I wrapped them all back up, folding the dark of me into something resembling a human again.

  The ferryman unceremoniously dumped me on the dockside. The spooky bastard loomed over me. “You never learn.”

  On my hands and knees, I spluttered up lungfuls of water. That was good. Being a solid flesh and blood human was definitely good. For a second there, I’d almost forgotten… “Kae sromdk.” My thanks.

  The ferryman’s brittle linen-wrapped fingers caught my jaw and lifted my head. He didn’t need eyes to see through me. Whatever he truly was slammed through my heart and my head. He knew I’d have consumed Hatshepsut and the entire River if he’d left me down there. I wondered if he might kill me now. He could. He should. Few got to swim in the River. Even fewer got away with wanting to drink the River dry from under him.

  He bowed low, bringing his empty hood so close I could smell the old world on him—papyrus dust and hot reeds. “You will not return.”

  His words cut deep, tearing out any response I might have had. He was barring me from the River?

  “Don’t turn me away.” I didn’t care that it sounded like begging—it was.

  This was my home.

  He was my friend, the only constant in my life that I could rely on. The only one who’d ever listened to the boy with nowhere else to go and no one to turn to. The boy the River had given up. A soul eater among river beasts. Nameless. Pushed aside. Sneered at. Until I rose above them all and started taking the fates of others into my hands.

  “Please.”

  “Leave and do not return until you are who you are meant to be.” He lifted his head. “You, Mokarakk Oma, are no longer granted passage. Your privileges have been revoked.”

  He let go, and a few moments later, I heard the boat push off the dock. By the time I looked up, the fog had swallowed my oldest friend, and I was alone.

  Chapter 13

  “You can trace physical matter, right? Use a spell to find Senenmut’s skull?” I asked Shu after striding into my hotel room and finding her sitting crossed-legged on the floor, surrounded by Sesha’s scrolls. She wore her hair down and tossed about her should
ers in the kind of carefree slumber-party look that, had I not been reeling from the ferryman’s decree, would have disarmed me.

  There were questions in her dark eyes, but after centuries cursed together, she sensed when not to push her luck, and right now I was brimming with a heady mix of shame and indignant disgust. The ferryman had barred me from my home. Not just Duat, but my actual temple home. Who in the Twelve Gates did he think he was? With Ammit gone, I was supposed to rule those halls, and he’d tossed me out like trash?

  “Sure. If you let me take a sample of Senenmut’s body.”

  I crossed the room, bit down my seething rage, and raided the minibar. A tiny bottle of local wine wouldn’t be enough to dull my anger, but it was a start. I tore off the cap and turned to Shu, still watching me from her position on the floor. “Are we going to pretend you didn’t take something from that tomb?”

  The wine was barely more than a gulp that evaporated the second it touched the heat in my gut. I needed more. I needed all of it.

  “I may have taken… a few things,” she replied, tiptoeing around the enraged elephant in the room.

  She’d returned to the tomb the morning I was supposed to go back there with her and found the archaeologists gone, and there was no way Shu would have walked away from an unguarded treasure trove of mummy parts without pocketing a few souvenirs. I knew my sorceress well.

  “It was just a finger. Maybe one or two fingers…” She swallowed. “Some toes.”

  “You didn’t think to suggest taking something to locate the skull?”

  “If you recall, we were attacked by scorpions.” She straightened slowly, deliberately, like she was in the same room as a wild animal pacing behind its bars. She was right to. “You would have gotten your panties in a twist.”

  “Do it.”

  “It’s not that simple. If someone magically inclined has it—the person who set those scorpions and killed Isis’s people, for example—they’ll know I’m looking. We’ll lose any element of surprise and walk straight into another trap.”