Sins of the Flesh

He moved his fingers in a slick, smooth glide. He closed his lips around her nipple and gave a hard, suctioning pull as he surged into her.

With a scream, she shattered. Her insides clenched tight, holding him inside her, clutching him as he throbbed and came with her on a last deep thrust. He shuddered, his body a long, tense line, his head arched back as he pulsed his release.

She wrapped her arms around his shoulders and her legs around his hips, and she held him to her in a way she had never held another, her face dropped into the curve of his shoulder, his body a perfect shield over hers.

And she thought, This is what it was supposed to be. All along, this is what it was supposed to be.



The Underworld, the Territory of Osiris

FEAR UNFURLED LIKE A white curl off the top of an incense stick, rising inside Pyotr Kuznetsov. He walked through a swamp, the air heavy, his feet sinking into sludge. The water was dark with the mud that dredged up from the riverbed.

All around him were trees. Tall. Thick trunked. Limbs reaching to a sky he could not see. He shivered. The air was cold.

No…hot.

He wasn’t able to differentiate, and on some level he thought that was a terrible thing. But uppermost in his mind was the urgent need to press on, so he did, forcing his feet through the sucking bog.

Sweat trickled from under his arms, down along the swell of his ribs and down his back, along his spine to the base. Cold sweat. He shivered even as he labored.

He stopped to drag his forearm across his brow, then he closed his eyes and wiped the sweat from there as well.

And when he opened them once more, he was somewhere else entirely.

A church. The pews were polished to a high gleam, the scent of orange peel heavy in the air. Before him rose the glorious colors of massive stained-glass windows. A giant yellow sun surrounded by glass of variegated shades of blue and in front of that a—

He fell to his knees with a gasp, his reality shifting with vertigo-inducing speed. The church of his childhood disappeared in a blink. He was left in utter blackness with only lines of small red lights breaking the gloom on either side.

No. Not lights.

Eyes. Dozens of sets of eyes. They glowed like hot coals. Like the fires of hell.

Surging to his feet, he looked to each side then behind him and in front, terror rising up to fill his throat and sit bitter on his tongue. Which way to go? The eyes to his left appeared to multiply and move closer.

He didn’t wait to be certain. He ran.

Panting, ill, he kept moving, not daring to stop, not daring to look over his shoulder to see how close they came. He didn’t know what they were. He didn’t want to know what they were.

They stalked him as he had stalked others.

Images flashed through his thoughts. The men he had killed, members of his own temple, men who had threatened to leave the group and take what limited knowledge they had of Abasi Abubakar’s plan with them. Fools. They had not known enough to make that a worthwhile threat, but he had killed them anyway. Because betrayal could never be allowed.

He had killed women. Weak-blooded descendants of Daughters of Aset who had failed to claim their heritage and let their power grow thinner and thinner with each generation.

Their blood had mattered. The blood of Aset. He had bags of it, flash frozen and stored away safe.

Too, he had been part of the murder of Lokan Krayl. The blood of Sutekh had flowed from Sutekh’s son.

Of all the murders, only the last could not be laid solely on his head. He had not killed Lokan Krayl alone because he did not possess such power.

But no matter how hard he tried, he could not recall who had stolen the soul reaper’s life. When he struggled to remember, a smooth, obsidian wall slipped into place in his thoughts and stopped him from going further.

And he needed to remember. Despite the terror that clawed at him, he was lucid enough to understand that his very life depended on his remembering the identity of the killer…betraying the identity of the killer when he was asked.

He would be asked. He knew it as he knew his own name.

Stumbling, he fell, his hands coming forward to save himself, slamming into what he quickly realized were stairs. Lifting his head, he saw that he was at the foot of a wide stone staircase. And at the top—

“What do you see?” The voice, wonderful and terrible, was inside his mind, and he was helpless to do anything but answer.

“I see a massive stone pillar…”

“Go on.” Not a request. An order.

“There are hieroglyphics etched in the stone, and near the top, an ankh. On each side are stone arms and suspended from the ends are—” Chains. Three chains holding up massive gold plates.

“What do you see?”

“I see a scale.” Cold terror slithered down Pyotr’s spine.

His breath hitched and for a long moment, he thought he would never breathe again. And then he did, each inhalation rasping down his throat, each exhalation almost more effort than he could bear, as though his airways were closing, clogged by his fear.