Hidden Blade (The Soul Eater Book 1) Read online

  Rosie’s smooth hand touched my arm, startling me back into the bar. She smiled like she was waiting for me to say something. I had no idea what. She was looking for company, but if she knew what I was she’d run, screaming.

  I tossed a few dollars on the bar and slipped off my stool. “I gotta get to work.”

  Sinking my hands into my jacket pockets, my fingers brushed a familiar gold band. I slipped the ring over my ring finger, pushed through the door, and ducked my head against the flurries of snow.

  I’d made the goddess wait long enough.

  Chapter 3

  Opening the door to the rented office space Shukra and I shared, I almost kicked a streak of black fur as it darted around my ankles and disappeared down the stairwell.

  “Shu! Keep the damn door closed!” I slammed the door to drive my point home. “I hate cats.”

  A headache was trying to hammer its way out of my skull through my eyeballs, my cheek was throbbing—probably from the tiny bits of glass I couldn’t pick out—and I was still sore over the new claw marks in my coat. The cherry on top of my fantastic night would be the goddess waiting behind my closed office door.

  “Ace,” Shu said as she strode down the hall, hips swaying hypnotically like a cobra in a pantsuit.

  I’d once condemned her to Hell. Her soul was the blackest I’d ever seen. She should have been devoured, and yet here she was, a blight on my life, striding toward me like she owned the goddamn place. Half owned it. My hatred for her burned as fiercely as it had on the day I’d weighed the light in her soul and found it lacking, and it was only matched by the vicious hatred she felt for me. We had that in common, at least.

  “You’re not gonna like it,” she said, pulling up outside my office door. Her lips cut blood-red lines through her golden complexion. She still carried the darker skin tone of the east, even after all this time. She wore her oil-black hair up in a ponytail so tight it pulled her cheekbones up with it. I hadn’t been lying about the woman with a tongue like a knife—or exaggerating. She had the kind of sultry good looks that lured men and women close so she could tear their hearts out and eat them while her victims died watching. Disgust and hatred had saved me that fate.

  “When have I ever liked anything you’ve said?” I told her and reached for the office door.

  “This one—”

  “I’ve got this.” I opened the door and my guts fell through the floor. My bravado, the thumping pain in my head, and the sickening sense that the world wasn’t done screwing with me all came to a screeching halt. Never had a second dragged on for so long an eternity.

  Goddess Bastet—Queen of Cats, Warrior Bitch, and my ex-wife—was sitting in my chair. She’d propped her boots, buckled up to the knee, on my desk and was plucking at her elaborately painted nails with my decorative letter opener. In her hands, that letter opener was a deadly weapon.

  “Get out of my chair,” I growled.

  “Technically, the chair is half mine.” She spoke slowly, leisurely, taking her time because she had immeasurable amounts of it.

  “Take the chair and get out.” I even stepped aside and held the door open for her like a gentleman.

  Shu stood down the hallway, glaring daggers. “She’s a client.”

  My headache was back and thumping down my neck. I should have stayed at Antonio’s.

  “Conflict of interest,” I blurted, scrambling for any excuse to be done with this day, my ex-wife, and Shu’s eternally pissed-off expression.

  “You were always interested in conflict before.” This came from the smooth lips of my ex-wife. She could sit there as calm and relaxed as she liked, but like any cat, she could go from tame to rabid if I glanced at her the wrong way.

  Closing my eyes, I pinched the bridge of my nose and counted to three—that was as far as I got before my chair creaked, drawing my eye back to Bast as she rose gracefully to her feet. She was tall and lean and had a powerful gait, like the top cat cruising her territory. That’s what had first caught my eye; after a few hundred years, I’d been looking for a challenge and found it in her.

  She wore some kind of belted waistcoat with an array of buckles and long fingerless gloves that ended at the elbow. Short black hair clung close to her cheeks, giving her a wild, foreboding flair, as though she’d sooner stab you as say hello. And yet her mouth was smooth, her lips soft, and her words like silk, and her touch…

  I told myself I was looking for weapons when I roamed my gaze up her thighs and over her hips. I knew every inch of her and how she used it all.

  “Shu,” I cleared my throat, “give us a minute.”

  Shu was already halfway down the hall when she called back, “Anything gets broken, it comes out of your paycheck.”

  I closed the door and pressed my back against it. Bast had taken up a spot leaning against my desk. She’d set the letter opener down beside her, still within reach. I didn’t actually think she’d go to all the trouble of hiring me only to stab me, but jilted women did crazy things. Jilted goddesses were damn right psychotic.

  She blinked bottle-green, cat-like eyes and clasped her hands loosely in front of her.

  “Do I talk first,” I asked, “or should we wait for the tension to kill me?”

  “Someone is killing my blessed. I want you to find out who.”

  “Someone is killing cats?”

  “No.” Her eyes narrowed. “Were you even paying attention when we were married?”

  All gods had obsessions, little quirks to get them through millennia of endless boredom. Her thing was cats. I’d once woken in her bed surrounded by hundreds of felines—or maybe it had been thirty. Thirty cats sure felt like a hundred when they were watching you sleep. She was a cat—a big-ass jungle cat with claws like janbiya daggers who liked to pretend she was a person, or maybe it was the other way around. The lines had blurred. A lot had blurred in twenty years. I couldn’t be expected to remember everything a goddess chose to bless.

  What the hell else could be blessed by Bastet? Warriors, swords, ninjas? “I have no idea.”

  “Pregnant women.”

  “Right. That. Of course. Pregnant women.”

  Her mouth curled at one side, tucking into her cheek. “You haven’t changed.”

  I had, just not recently. “Shu will look into it.”

  “No.”

  “Bast.”

  She lifted her head at my tone and fixed those penetrating green eyes on mine. I hesitated, my argument stalling. If I spent too long looking into her eyes, I’d see into her soul. I’d been down that road before. I no more wanted to see the truth than she wanted me to see it. Breaking the visual connection before the magic could take hold, I sauntered around my desk and dropped into my chair.

  “My schedule is packed. I really don’t have the time.”

  “I saw. You must be keeping Antonio busy.”

  She had been rooting through my desk. I made a mental note to yell at Shu later, not that she could have stopped a goddess from helping herself to my office, but I could still lay into my business partner. It would make me feel better.

  “Bast, you and me…we’ve been there.” I rummaged around my top drawer, trying to look busy. She might get the point and leave. “Let’s not get tangled up again. Shu is better suited to—”

  “Shukra is a condemned soul tied to you because Osiris has a twisted sense of humor.” Bast planted her hands on my desktop and leaned in, driving her glare down on me. “I will not entrust the lives of my blessed to a foul being who should have been devoured centuries ago.”

  I couldn’t argue with her words, or with the venom in them, but working with Bast on something like this? I already knew where it was headed. We’d end up fighting, which was never a pretty sight, the guilt would pile on, and there might even be some sex in there somewhere—angry sex, the toxic kind.

  “You’re wearing our wedding band?”

  I looked at my hand, surprised to find the incriminating evidence right there on my finger. “I…er…�
��

  Damn, she was scrutinizing me again with those cat eyes.

  “You left me, remember?” Bast said.

  I remembered precisely how her knee had found my balls.

  “You want the ring back?” I gave the ring a twist, but it wasn’t budging.

  “No, I want your help.” She straightened and seemed to grow three inches. When she spoke, her voice carried a compulsion—a decent one too and heavy enough to scratch at my mind. “Women in Queens are dying. Women blessed by me, in my territory. My chosen. This is personal, and I don’t trust anyone else to do what needs to be done.”

  Trust. We’d trusted each other once. Funny how that worked. Gods didn’t trust easily, and especially not other gods.

  Her compulsion slid right off. She probably wasn’t aware she’d cast it, seeing as trying to compel me to do anything was a waste of magic. The fact she had made that mistake told me how much this meant to her. She wouldn’t have returned unless this was important. Her last words to me had been along the lines of, “If I see you again in a thousand years, it’ll be too soon.”

  Twenty years was a blink to her. Maybe if I took the job and we stayed out of each other’s way, I could get this done. Business was slow. The gods and their minions were unusually quiet. I needed the cash, needed this job, just not the baggage that came with it.

  “You have to help, Ace.” The softness in her voice did me in, and I was about to agree, when she added, “For our daughter.”

  “What?”

  “I didn’t tell you because—”

  “Wait.”

  She waited. I opened my mouth, stalled, and closed my mouth.

  “What?” I could hear my heart pounding right alongside the throbbing in my head. Daughter? “Back up a second.”

  “She’s nineteen—and pregnant.”

  A crazy little laugh slipped free. No. No way. Not in a thousand years would I believe this shit. “Really? You’re running with that cliché? I was going to say yes, but now…now…tell the sucker he has a kid and he’ll do anything?” I grinned, the laughter working its way to the surface again. “No thanks.”

  “I’m not lying.”

  I clamped my jaw so hard my teeth ached. A daughter. It was a lie. It had to be.

  “You know what? I’ll let the lies slide. If what you’re saying is true and women in Queens are dying, I’ll look into it. Email me all the information you have.” I was done with her and this conversation. I just wanted her out of my office so I could raid the vodka in my bottom drawer. “But don’t lie to me, Bast. Okay? Not you. Don’t.”

  I weighted the last word with my own compulsion, enough so she’d feel it and know I wasn’t screwing around.

  She pulled a photo from her pocket and slammed it down on my desk like it was a smoking gun. “She has your eyes.”

  Then she stormed out, slamming the door behind her with all the dramatic flare that goddesses possessed.

  Twisting off the cap of the vodka bottle, I didn’t bother with a glass and gulped down a few generous mouthfuls. And then I wished I hadn’t as it burned my throat and threatened to come back up again.

  The picture was sitting near the far edge of my desk, within reach, if I wanted to believe. I glared at it, my heart trying to hammer itself into something colder and harder. After twenty years, she’d decided to come back into my life, sit in my chair, and tell me I had a daughter. There should have been a law against women like her. Goddesses didn’t abide by laws, only those of their own making, and even then they were more like guidelines.

  I launched out of my seat, reached across the desk, snatched up the picture, and dumped it in the trash. There, that was dealt with. No picture. No guilt.

  Bast and me, we’d had fun, until the lies started—my lies. Until I’d made the mistake of reading her soul.

  My door rattled and flung open.

  “I’m not in the mood,” I groaned.

  Shukra leaned against the doorframe and examined her nails. She’d stay that way until I acknowledged her. Hours, if necessary, just to win.

  “Fine. What?”

  “You’re popular today. Ozzy called.”

  “He called?” First Bast, now Osiris? “On a phone?”

  “No, via a séance.” She rolled her eyes. “He wants to see you.”

  The vodka in my gut churned. “Now?”

  She hesitated, a wicked smile crawling onto her lips. “Tomorrow morning. Ten a.m. sharp, Acehole.”

  And with that, she left, but her tinkling laughter sailed all the way up the hallway.

  I side-eyed the vodka bottle. “Just you an’ me.”

  I scooped it up and lifted it to my lips.

  Chapter 4

  “You look like my dog.”

  I squinted one eye at Nick “Cujo” Jones. He didn’t have a dog.

  “After it died,” he added with a snort and then wheeled his wheelchair down his hall.

  I followed, my head stuffed with cotton and my gut as fragile as a sacrificial virgin.

  “I didn’t think you folks got hangovers?” Cujo said from farther down the hall, inside his kitchen.

  I wasn’t hungover—hangovers were for lightweights. What I was feeling was more like halfway dead. Any further and I’d be back in the underworld.

  “Takes some doing.” My voice sounded as dry and broken as my insides.

  Cujo’s ground-floor apartment smelled of incense and marijuana. The incense was for deterring unwanted spirits, and the marijuana, that was for medicinal purposes—probably. I walked by dusty, decades-old framed photos of younger Cujo all buttoned up in his NYPD uniform, his cap tucked under his arm, and his smile fresh and bright. He’d been on the job for a few years before he had the misfortune of wandering into the crossfire between two bickering gods. He’d lived, but he would never walk again. After seeing enough of the impossible, he’d decided to start digging into the supernatural while he recovered, and a year later, he came to me, cash in his pocket and hungry for revenge. I’d declined, telling him he was better off forgetting it, but he hadn’t forgotten. He’d tried to hire me countless times since, and somewhere along the line, I’d started asking him for favors. Fifteen years on, he had yet to cash in his favors, but he would.

  “Must have been a rough job?” Cujo asked in that gruff, no-bullshit tone of his. He’d filled out since his recruit photos. His dark hair was peppered with gray, and the years had weathered his face, drawing deep lines around his eyes and mouth. Age ate at some people, whittling them away, but not Cujo. The years had honed him into a hard-ass.

  “Demons and dead bodies I can deal with. It’s the ex-wife who did me in.”

  “Ah.” He whirled his chair next to the kitchen table and leaned back. “What you got for me?”

  I handed over the picture Bast had left with me, the one I’d dumped in the trash and then fished out again before passing out at my desk. “Nineteen. Pregnant. Lives in Queens.”

  Cujo took the picture, ran his critical gaze over it, and scratched at his whiskered chin. When he looked up, he clearly had a question on his lips.

  “Don’t say it,” I suggested.

  He shrugged. “Uh-huh. It’s probably the light.”

  “No, really. Don’t.”

  He tilted the photo side-on. “Maybe it’s the camera angle or a lens flare caught in her eyes, made them glow a little?”

  To keep my mind busy and my thoughts off the girl’s uncanny likeness, I searched Cujo’s cupboard, found a glass, and filled it from the faucet. All the while, Cujo’s gaze rode my back like a devil on my shoulder.

  “I need to know if she is nineteen and if she’s showing any signs of—”

  “Magic, hoodoo, spooky shit?” Cujo had a knack for reducing the terrifying into a joke. He took it all, the truth about the gods and their many beasts, in his stride.

  “Just do some digging. See what you can find out about her.”

  “Right-oh,” he said with too much enthusiasm.

  I gulped down
the water, waited to see if it would reappear anytime soon, and then turned to face Cujo’s crafted expression of innocence. “Keep this quiet. If anyone discovers—”

  “That you couldn’t keep it in your pants?”

  “Bastard.” A grin broke out across my lips.

  Cujo arched an eyebrow. “Are there any more little Aces running around out there you want me to look for while I’m at it?”

  “Gods, I hope not. One is enough.”

  “Nobody ever teach you about protection in the underworld?”

  I spluttered a laugh. Where I came from, traditional laws of nature did not apply. “It’s more complicated than that.”

  He leaned back in his chair, wrestling his smile under control. “It’s been a while, but I seem to remember the whole process was pretty straightforward.”

  “My ex-wife is a cat in her spare time. Insert Tab A into Slot B doesn’t cut it when you’re screwing gods.”

  He let loose his chuckle. “I should have known. Nothing is ever simple around you.” He looked again at the picture. “Pretty. Must be her mother’s influence.”

  “Ha, ha.”

  “What god did she annoy to get lumped with you as her dad?”

  “Possible dad,” I corrected and cringed. “What, you don’t think I’m parent material?”

  “Oh, sure.” He crossed his arms over his chest, but that glint in his eye told me he wasn’t done. “It’s not like I’m constantly keeping your ugly mug off police records. Then there’s the weird shit that follows you. Put it this way: I wouldn’t want Chantal within five square miles of you.”

  There was no chance of that. Chantal, Cujo’s teenage daughter, looked at me like she’d seen my soul, knew exactly what I was made of, and was distinctly unimpressed. Most people had attuned survival instincts that kept them out of my path. But Chantal wasn’t most people, and confrontation was her middle name. The first time we’d met, she’d asked me if I used my looks to manipulate and warned me that if I tried any of that shit with her, she’d set Cujo on me. I couldn’t blame her. As far as she knew, I was in my late twenties, early thirties and an inexplicable “family friend.” The type of “friend” her father wouldn’t talk about. She didn’t trust my vagueness. Never had. Never would. At least her instincts were accurate there. Outside of the Egyptian pantheon, Chantal was right up there on my “avoid at all costs” list.