The tension was so thick you could cut it into slices and serve it on toast. Of all control freaks, Curran was the worst and he existed convinced that Kate was made of fragile glass. I understood it. I completely understood. He was in exactly the same place I had been a couple of hours before: watching someone you love dive headfirst into danger and not being able to do a damn thing about it. It was difficult to watch and harder to live through.
“There are hard battles and there is suicide,” Curran said.
“Agreed. I have a plan,” Kate said.
Curran raised his hands, inviting the miraculous plan to come forth.
“The volhv serves Chernobog, who presides over the dead and fallen in battle. This is his area of expertise.”
“I’d like to be in on this discussion,” Raphael said.
“Me, too,” I added.
“The shield belongs to a draugr,” Curran said. “It’s an undead, unkillable giant.”
“How unkillable?” I asked.
“We couldn’t kill it,” Kate said.
“Both of you at the same time?” Raphael asked.
She nodded.
Great.
“We won’t be trying to kill him,” Kate said. “He’s confined by wards, but once we take his shield and carry it past the ward line, the protective spells may fail. We can’t let him rampage around, because he eats people. That’s where the volhv comes in. Roman will have to rebind the draugr.”
“Can he even do this?” Curran asked.
“Well, we’ll have to ask him,” Kate said.
There was more planning and discussing and talking, and at the end of it, I was so tired, I couldn’t see straight. The draugr was really bad news. I said that we needed extra firepower, the kind that would work during magic.
“Galahad warheads,” I told them. Strictly speaking it wasn’t a warhead, but rather an arrowhead that fit into a custom crossbow and carried a magic charge that would take down an elephant or a giant, for whom it was invented in Wales. In my time with the Order I had managed to order two cases of them from the UK. I even had the new bow to go with them.
Shortly after that, Barabas dragged Raphael off to talk about some sort of important thing that couldn’t wait. Kate led me to a room that had a bed, and I collapsed into it, fur and all. The Pack bed was so soft. Like floating on a cloud.
Fatigue weighed me down. I closed my eyes, feeling the ache humming through my legs. Shouldn’t have sat down…yawn…straight after running…yawn. Should’ve walked it off…first…
I stood in the water. It splashed past my ankles, dark blue-green and warm. Soft mud squished beneath my feet. I made fists with my toes and watched a bright green cloud of powdery silt rise from the river’s bottom, swirling around my legs. Patches of reeds grew, stretching into the river, bending lightly in the wind, as though they were whispering gossip to each other. In the distance, across the vast expanse of water, the sun was setting or rising, a small ball of yellow hovering at the edge of low dark hills, the silver-nacre sky around it painted with pink and yellow.
I looked over my shoulder. A yellow shore greeted me, touched with patches of bright green grass, and beyond it palms stretched upward.
We were definitely not in Kansas anymore.
A slender bird walked past me on long legs. It had a curved neck and a long beak and I realized it was a heron.
A presence brushed against me, saturated with magic. I turned. A jackal the size of a rhino waded into the river downstream from me and lapped the water, watching me with golden eyes.
Right. I was standing in the Nile, watching Anapa, and this was not an ordinary dream. There were rules to this dream. No promises, no striking of bargains, in fact, no talking. Nobody yet had managed to get into a shitty bargain with a god by keeping their mouth shut.
“Beautiful, isn’t it?” The Jackal-Anapa raised his head and looked into the distance, at the sun. “Do you like the way it smells?”
It smelled verdant. It smelled like the moisture of the river mixing with the fragrance of dry grasses from the shore, and flowers, and fish, and rich mud. It smelled like the sort of place where life would flourish and hunting would be plentiful.
“It’s your father’s blood. It calls to you,” the Jackal said.
Bullshit. My father was an animal.
“Animals miss their home, too.”
Right. He was in my head. No thinking, then.
“Do you know why others fear you? They call you beastkin, they try to kill you? It is because of this. Of beastly memories you carry in your blood. The Firsts, the pack leaders of your kind, were made in much the same way as you. When primitive man prayed, he prayed for strength. His life was ruled by forces beyond his control: lightning, rain, wind, sun, and things with teeth that sought to eat him in the night. So the primitive man resorted to begging. He prayed to the predators, to those stronger than he, and sometimes, very, very rarely, his prayers were answered and a boon was granted. The Firsts, they are a perfect mix of human and animal. You are not, and thus you do not have the Firsts’ strength or control, but you share in their memories. You see the world through your mother’s eyes and through your father’s.”
“I see it through my own eyes.” Drat. Shouldn’t have said anything. I clamped my mouth shut.
The Jackal chuckled.
The sun had set behind the hills. Dusk claimed the river. Gloom wove its way through the palms. Faint tendrils of steam escaped the river, still warmer than bathwater.
“I want your body,” Anapa said.
“That’s flattering, but no.” I couldn’t help it, it just burst out.
“Not in a sexual way, you foolish child. The body I wear in the world is a part of my bloodline. But he is weak. Its magic reserves are meager. Make no mistake, if Apep is resurrected, the assistance I can offer you will be limited at best. Your body is strong. Your blood is rooted in the same place as mine. We’re both a mix of beast and man. You’re a more suitable host than any of the other shapeshifters I have encountered.”
“I’m a hyena. You’re a jackal.”
“I will make do,” Anapa said.
“And what happens to me?”
“You will merge with me.”
“You’re lying.” I knew it. I felt it in my gut.
The Jackal lapped the river. “Perhaps.”
“Why would I throw my life away?”
“Because I am a god and I asked for it.”
“You are not my god.”
The Jackal sighed. “That is the trouble with this age. There was a time when thousands would slit their own throats for my sake.”
“No. There was never that time.”
The Jackal bared his teeth. “What do you know, whelp?”
“I know human nature. We might sacrifice a few, because we are stupid and hardwired for group survival. But we would never die in the thousands because a god wished it. Those kinds of numbers require material gains, like power, wealth, territory.”
The Jackal stared at me. “Give me your body.”
“No.”
“There may come a time when you will say yes.”
“Don’t hold your breath.”
The Jackal laughed softly. “Look over there.”
I glanced up and saw a man. He stood in the river, nude, with the waters lapping at his thighs. The last rays of the setting sun colored his side, throwing orange highlights on his skin, tracing every contour of the etched muscle. He looked so…perfect. Except his face was a blur.
“Who is it?”
The man’s body arched up, his back bending back at an unnatural angle, the ridges of the stomach muscles stretching and his face came into focus. Raphael.
A figure rose above him, an eight-foot-tall man with the head of a jackal. He raised his hand, a golden staff in it, and passed it over the body. The skin over the Raphael’s chest and abdomen split.
I gasped. No!
Blood fountained, coloring the waters of the Nile. Raphael’s muscles opened like bloody petals. Anubis held his hand with outstretched fingers and a human heart, steaming hot and drenched in blood, tore itself out of my mate’s chest and landed in the god’s clawed fingers.
My own heart skipped a beat.
Anubis waded through the water toward me, the heart still beating. I tried to back away, but my feet sank into soft mud.
The god bent over me and offered me the heart. It was terrible. Dread pulsed from it in waves. Dread, sorrow, and guilt. It was choking me.
“Take it.”
“You bastard! I’ll tear you apart!”
Anubis raised the heart, holding the bloody organ just inches from my face and let it go. It hung in the air, terrible, bleeding drop by drop into the Nile.
The river faded. When I awoke, the faint rays of the sunrise, weak and transparent, sifted into the room through my window. I had slept for barely an hour.
I smelled a familiar scent and turned my head. At the other end of the room, near the wall, wrapped in a blanket, with his pillow resting on the floor, lay Raphael. He was back in his human form, and his dark hair fanned across the pillow, his profile perfect against the pale fabric.
He must’ve let me have the bed, because in our beast forms both of us wouldn’t have fit on it.