Serpent's Game (The Soul Eater Book 5) Read online

  The god-child didn’t radiate emotion like the others; he simply radiated the kind of power that could drop gods to their knees. Nile was Osiris’s son and my grandson. And there I was, believing I’d escaped all the family drama that plagued the pantheon. Instead, I was up to my neck in it.

  The seer scarpered, shoes splashing in the puddles. I didn’t dare turn, but Osiris didn’t need to. He lifted a hand, and click, he snapped his finger and thumb together. The sound of the seer collapsing told me all I needed to know.

  I winced as another part of my soul darkened. I’d lied. I’d had no intention of keeping him safe. I’d used him. He’d probably seen his death but hoped I could change it. Liar, thief, Godkiller. And it was about to get worse.

  “Hand over the kid,” I said, raising my voice over the sound of the wind hissing through the trees. “You can’t protect him.” That was aimed at Cat, and predictably, she sneered, baring her teeth and already killing me with her eyes. A slippery sense of guilt and betrayal wormed around my insides.

  “You on his side?” Chuck hurled the words, each one an accusation. “I thought you were good! Bastet said you were good. Guess I was wrong, and she paid with her life.”

  More guilt tightened around my rotten heart. I gritted my teeth and hardened myself against it. “You can’t defeat Osiris and me.”

  Osiris lifted a hand, stopping my defense. “This has all been a misunderstanding. I have no intention of hurting anyone here—if you hand over the boy.”

  “The boy has a name,” Nile replied, and now that they stood opposite each other, facing each other down, it was obvious whose son he was. They had the same smooth, cultured voice designed to command armies and inspire their people. Nile’s fingers jerked at his sides, and between us, the grass smoked. Embers danced in patterns in the earth, burning away to reveal markings like those in the train depot.

  The son will sunder a king.

  I stepped forward, into line with Osiris. “You’re powerful, Nile. You think you know what you’re doing, but you don’t. Listen to Osiris. Listen to your father.”

  “I have no father.” He dropped. It appeared to happen slowly, as though the kid were moving through water. He fell to one knee and reached out a hand, fingers splayed. When he slammed his palm into the earth, light burst through the markings already burned there. The weight of his power thundered over me. I turned away, fighting not to curl into a ball. The monumental strength and weight behind it reminded me of how things used to be before the sundering, when the gods could shape continents and control storms. This was not my power. It was the power of Life, Light, Rebirth, and the cycle of time.

  Nile was Osiris’s son more than he was my grandson. The God of Life and Rebirth simply parted the blazing curtain of light and reached for his son. Nile had no defense, at least none the kid knew of.

  The second Osiris’s grip landed on the boy’s arm, the orb of light collapsed, and in a blink, they both vanished.

  I had seconds to react.

  Cat and Chuck blinked back into the moment, eyes adjusting. I pulled my cell from my pocket and typed out: Isis: He has the boy. Wait for m—

  Cat’s kick launched my cell out of my hand, leaving my fingers burning. She followed up with a blinding left hook that almost tore my jaw off, and embedded her knee into my gut—all in the space of a second. When her right fist came in, I somehow caught it in my right hand, cushioning a blow designed to floor me. Her green eyes blazed. There was nothing in her gaze for me, just absolute focus on her target. Had I expected her to hesitate? She’d killed dozens and maimed more. Cat had never pretended to be something she wasn’t—unlike me.

  She pulled back, trying to free her fist. She would kill me. We both knew it.

  Sacrifices must be made.

  I kicked her weight-bearing leg out from under her. She rocked, caught my arm, and tried to pull me down with her. I twisted, freeing her fingers from my arm, and kneed her under the chin, whipping her head back with a crack. She went sprawling backward into the mud.

  “I don’t want to hurt you!”

  The rain started up again, falling in rods.

  Cat spat blood to the side and licked her lips clean. Then slowly, she climbed to her feet. “Then you will die.”

  “Don’t make this worse than it already is.” I pushed out a hand, urging her to stay back.

  “I am honor-bound to destroy you.”

  I couldn’t be here. I had to get back to New York. I didn’t have time for Cat’s vendetta. I could end it, wrap her up in smoke and darkness and tug on her soul, but if I did that, there was a chance I couldn’t stop myself from taking more, from drinking down her light.

  She stalked forward. I staggered back.

  “Don’t,” I warned. “You know you can’t defeat me.”

  “I see exactly what you are. There was always something about you, Ace. Something I couldn’t see past. But I see you now. It was all lies. All of it. You are a monster inside, and you were pretending to be good.”

  “Yes. Yes, I was.”

  Her steps faltered.

  Something slammed into my back and clamped on. Skinny arms and legs wrapped around my arms and waist. I whirled, trying to shake Chuck off. Her blunt teeth sank through my shirt into my shoulder.

  And I was done playing games. I do not have time for this!

  A second was all it took to turn Ace Dante into a pillar of smoke and ash. The girl—my daughter—dropped face first into the mud, and Cat came at me in a whirl of claws, but she sailed right through the dark. I laughed, letting them hear the truth of me—the monster who would consume all the light in the world if he could. Chuck scrambled backward, horror in her eyes. She wondered if this creature was her fate, but the shifter sheathed her claws and straightened. She stared into the eye of the storm, into me. I let her get a good look. Yes, this was the truth. This was what I’d always been and always would be. It had all been lies, but that didn’t mean it had been worthless.

  “What are you?” Cat asked.

  “The End of All Things.” My voice sounded like sand hissing over stone, and I welcomed it. I could taste their fear, see it, feel it. They were only beginning to realize the truth. This was the beginning of the end—my end and theirs.

  “I am lies,” I told them and watched them pull back in fear. “I am all the dark in the world, given form and thought. I am the first monster, and I will be the last thing you see before this world ends.”

  I left them there and drifted into the fog, wondering if the embers trailing in my wake were the last parts of my manufactured life falling away.

  Chapter 16

  After retrieving my cell, I raced the Ducati back to New York. The city embraced me as though I’d never left, meaning it dumped an endless stream of rain down my neck as I tucked the Ducati in between SUVs, slowed my progress with traffic, and tried to take me out with a few kamikaze taxi drivers. I reached the long sweeping driveway that led to Osiris’s suburban mansion just before dusk and rolled the bike into some bushes to hide it. He’d be expecting my arrival, but that didn’t mean I needed to broadcast it by roaring up to the front door. At this stage in the game, I couldn’t afford to screw up.

  With Alysdair’s unwieldy shape crudely slung over my shoulder, I stalked through the trees lining the gardens and slipped quietly into the gods’ vast greenhouse. Hot, moist air clung to my tongue, slipped down my throat, and sank into my lungs. The last time I was inside the glass house, Osiris had accused me of desiring his wife and thrown me against the wall. Not much had changed—only me.

  Anticipation pulsed through my fingers, and Alysdair hummed gently close to my ear. Pushing the damp broad leaves aside, I walked briskly along the meandering path toward the back door into the mansion. I had my foot on the first step leading into the house when Isis slunk into sight. She lingered in the doorway, a delicate hand resting on the door frame as those ageless eyes absorbed my ragged appearance. It had been a rough few days. Naturally, she looked as though
the hands of an expert artist had sculpted her from bronze. Her dress, a simple white cotton gown, pinched below her breasts, clinging and moving like spider silk. Her gaze settled on Alysdair’s crude strap and then rode the blade’s vicious curves. Recognition blazed in her eyes. The Eye of Ra! Her smile grew along with her confidence. She’d been standing in her husband’s shadow a long time, and here I was, her monster, about to deliver her the reign she desperately sought.

  She drew in a small breath, pushed away from the door, and descended the top few steps, stopping a few above me so that I was forced to look up at her.

  She lifted her hand and trailed a single fingernail down my cheek and along my jaw. The resulting shudder wasn’t entirely uncomfortable.

  “When I am Queen of all Things, will you stand with me?” she asked, her smile curious.

  My own smile crawled across my lips, but my smiles weren’t like hers. I’d been a liar all my life. It was too late for me to change my nature.

  I caught her hand. “I’ve always worked alone.” And gently pushed her back. “Where’s your husband and the boy?”

  She studied me and Alysdair, and if I wasn’t mistaken, a touch of awe glistened in the goddess’s jewel-like eyes. “You owe me. Without my intervention, you would still be a bumbling fool firmly locked under my husband’s thumb. I want your allegiance when the time comes.”

  She meant she wanted a guarantee I’d stand with her when Seth decided to make his world a better place by removing his siblings from it. Maybe as Ace Dante I would have agreed to side with Isis to save my ass, but with each passing minute, I was less the man and more the monster.

  “Where’s the boy?” I asked again. Her sibling rivalries were beneath me.

  She noted how I’d ignored her question, but the tightness in her mouth and the indignant jerk of her chin told me she would try again. “In the basement.” I was pushing past her when she caught my arm and pulled me up short. “The same room as your sarcophagus… You do remember where that is?”

  A reminder of my weakness, or so she thought. But escaping that sarcophagus had revealed who I was and what I needed to do.

  I shrugged off her touch, took a few steps toward the open doorway, and paused. “Oh, there is one other thing you can do for me, Isis.”

  Her gaze remained inquisitive, even as time dug its claws in and ground to an almost complete halt. I didn’t have the power to stop time. I hadn’t even been sure, until this moment, that what followed would work. I reached over my left shoulder. My fingers curled around Alysdair’s handle.

  “You can die.”

  Between one beat and the next, I freed the sword and thrust the blade through Isis breast, into her heart. Too close, too confident, too Isis, she hadn’t expected it. The sword sang as it sank through the goddess’s ribs, plunging into more than flesh and blood, driving deep into her eternal soul. Power bolted down the sword like a lightning strike, but all it did was heat Alysdair and crackle up my arm. She couldn’t hurt me, not anymore. I caught Isis by the neck with my left hand and pulled her close enough to kiss. She fell into my hold, her lips parted in silent shock and her wide eyes brilliant with light.

  “This is for the time you stabbed me in the chest and tried to steal my daughter, for all the times you had me kill innocents, for the vile things you’ve had me do, and for those bright souls you made me devour over the years. For the countless people you’ve killed or trapped in your games through the millennia. But mostly, Goddess of Light,” I hissed, “this is for Cujo.” Her lashes fluttered, and some of the light faded from her eyes. Alysdair glowed hotter, sang louder, and came alive in my grip.

  “Tra k-dae amcru-kak sra ksork, kosec amcru-kak esk kassrakamsk, omd kae kuir amcru-kak aeuirk.” The sky encloses the stars, magic encloses its settlements, and my soul encloses yours. These were soul eater words, old words, older than the man I’d thought I was, older than time—Apophis’s words. They dragged the light out of Isis, and Alysdair, now the Eye of Ra, drank the goddess down-down-down. A deeply sensual shudder ran through me and at the end, the dregs of pleasure sparked the beginnings of the old power slumbering in my veins. “You could have used your light for good. Instead, you used it for you.”

  “A god cannot change,” she whispered.

  I growled back at her. “Watch me.”

  Shoving her back, the sword gasped free of her chest, spilling dark blood down her white cotton dress. Isis staggered, lost her footing on the steps, and fell. I watched her tumble to the floor and lie broken on the path. Her foot twitched. Her dull eyes gazed into nothing.

  Another piece of me slotted into place, building a picture of the monster I’d been and obscuring the image of Ace Dante. Godkiller.

  Alysdair’s hungry magic hummed its song. Isis’s blood soaked into the glowing markings, leaving the mirror-finish surface spotless.

  “Daquir.” The spellword had never tasted so good. Embers ate at Isis’s earthly body. Too soon her beauty decayed and crumbled to dust.

  I slung Alysdair over my shoulder, briefly touched the slave cuff on my wrist, and stepped into the house.

  I prowled through Osiris’s house, my thoughts curiously silent. For what I was about to do… I’d be hated for as long as history remembered me. In the future, if there was one, gods and people alike would point to my name and shudder. And so they should. This had always been coming, hadn’t it? As Shu had said, we couldn’t change our nature. It was always in me to be the villain.

  Silence settled over the house along with dusk. Black windows and thick shadows closed in. There were no doubts in my mind, no uncertainties to eat away at my confidence. Those weaknesses were human. They were Ace Dante’s faults. The creature I was becoming had no faults, no weaknesses. He did not care.

  It didn’t take long for me to locate Nile. The same deep throbbing energy simultaneously called and repelled. The power of life, of rebirth, and of resurrection. Osiris’s power. A snarl rippled across my lips as I retraced my steps from weeks earlier when I’d crawled out from inside the sarcophagus.

  The room wasn’t huge. It wasn’t much at all. Just four walls with no windows, but at its center sat a slab of limestone. Atop my closed sarcophagus lay Nile. He strained against the shackles holding his wrists and ankles.

  Osiris wasn’t present, but he wouldn’t be far.

  Nile let his head fall to the side. Tears had dried in streaks. He saw me and blinked, not believing. For all the power he radiated, he was still so very young. He’d be missing Chuck.

  I pressed a hand to his chest and felt the steady beat of his human heart. “I can get you out of here. I can stop Osiris. I can help you go home to your mother, Nile. But you must come with me.”

  His gold-flecked eyes searched my face for the truth. “You killed Bastet.”

  “I held the sword, but I did not kill her. Osiris compelled me to take her life. There was nothing I…” My voice fractured. “I tried to save Chuck. As punishment, Osiris had me kill Bastet. I never would have hurt her willingly. I loved and admired Bastet.”

  He absorbed the words, tasting them for lies. “Your words are true…”

  “Will you come with me?”

  “Lies surround you like the night. How is it you can lie and speak the truth as one?”

  “I will explain it all. But first, let me help you.”

  “I don’t have much of a choice.” He nodded and lifted his wrist. “You’ll need a key.”

  Once, I would have. I closed my hand around the shackles. “Daquir.” They turned to ash. The other three fell away just as easily, and Nile climbed from the sarcophagus, rubbing his wrists. He eyed the ash and then me, looking for the truth. “You stood beside Osiris.”

  “My allegiances shift.” I flashed him a smile, albeit a shallow one. “You’ll soon learn I’m not like the other gods.”

  “Because you are not a god.” Osiris stood in the doorway, his face the picture of measured calm. With his shirt sleeves rolled up and his hair mussed, he looked
disturbingly human. The act was for Nile’s benefit.

  “What kind of father chains their boy to a coffin?” I asked Osiris. The dig didn’t have any effect. This wasn’t personal to him. This was about Osiris saving his own hide.

  “Nile is too powerful to be allowed to roam free,” he said, confirming my thoughts.

  Nile shifted beside me, tension tuning him tight. I lowered my right hand and blocked the kid before he could make a suicidal lunge for Osiris.

  “Nile is also standing right here, you asshole,” he said instead.

  Clearly, Nile had inherited his mother’s vocabulary. I was beginning to like the kid.

  “You would leave with the nightmare Apophis?” Osiris inquired in that oh-so-polite voice of his. “It is said Neith, the first goddess, spat him into being in the primordial waters where he dwelled, consuming the world’s filth. Later, he sought to consume more, but as a creature of the dark, he could not consume the light, so he devoured all that is evil and wrong, but his hunger changed him, turned him insane, until he rose and tried to consume both day and night. No single god could stop him, and the more he gorged on all that is wrong, the more powerful he became. Ra stepped in, but even the might of Amun Ra could not stop Apophis. Thus began their eternal battle for the day. Is Apophis the kind of creature you wish to trust, Nile?”

  “What the gods were,” I interrupted, “and what they are today are two very different things.”

  Fury radiated off Nile, and his considerable power lopped around the small confines of the room. “You raped my mother. Your wife tried to stab her and would have if it hadn’t been for Ace. You compelled Ace to kill Bastet. From where I’m standing, you, Osiris, are no better than the monster you claim Ace to be.”

  Yes, I was definitely beginning to like Nile.

  “But here you are, alive and well,” Osiris said. “Do you think Ace Dante, as he was then, had the power to stop Isis with a mere illusion? He did not save you. He merely got in the way. Without me, you would not exist. I created you, Nile. This young man you are today is of my design, of my seed. You are a new god in a mortal body with an old soul. You are unique in this world.”