Sins of the Flesh

But his brother must have made one hell of a promise to Roxy, because he wouldn’t leave well enough alone. “You, uh…you think you’ve been hit by the thunderbolt?”


Straightening, Mal felt his lips shape a rueful smile. When Dagan had been slapped upside the head by his feelings for Roxy, he’d been on such unfamiliar ground that he’d actually asked Mal for advice, in a convoluted sort of way: he’d asked Mal if he’d ever read The Godfather, and if he’d ever been hit with the thunderbolt that had struck Michael Corleone when he saw the girl for the first time and couldn’t get her out of his head. Michael Corleone hadn’t had a reason. It just was. He couldn’t stop thinking about her. He had to have her.

That’s exactly what had happened to Dae. Then Alastor.

“You asked me that before,” Mal hedged, not certain he wanted to go there, to admit out loud how far Calli’d got under his skin. “Remember what my answer was?”

“Yeah. That you got hit like that every time you saw a nice rack or a sweet ass.”

Mal exhaled a sharp laugh. “That’s what I said.”

Then. But now he thought he might have been hit by that same fucking thunderbolt that had felled Dae the first time he saw Roxy Tam. Or Alastor the first time he saw Naphré Kurata. The thought was both disturbing and oddly appealing.

Problem was, Michael Corleone’s story hadn’t had such a great ending. He hadn’t been able to protect her—

Mal veered away from that thought. He couldn’t think about that. Part of Calliope’s lure was the fact that she could damn well take care of herself. She’d done so for a hell of a long time before he ever came along, and he was going to have to trust that she could continue to do so now.

It was his faith in her abilities that had allowed him to leave her alone while he joined Dae on this little jaunt into a null zone.

“Here,” Dagan said as he finally tore away the last of the vines and uncovered the door. Then he turned his hands palms up and asked, “You feeling something?”

Mal glanced at his hands. The skin appeared unmarked, but he felt as if the flesh of his palms and fingers were blistered to the bone. “I think the vines were warded.”

“Then how’d we manage to get through?”

“They were warded against supernatural power, not against good old sweat and labor,” Mal said.

One side of Dae’s mouth quirked in a half smile. “Well, wasn’t that our dumb luck?”

“Depends on what we find inside. I don’t know about you, but my hands feel as though I dipped them in acid. I wouldn’t call that luck unless we get some sort of reward.”

“True enough.” Dae gestured at the locked door. “Do your thing?”

Mal never went anywhere without at least a couple of picks. He pulled them out now and played around with the lock for what felt like hours. Hard to tell for sure, though. Time was relative. It did one thing Topworld. Something entirely different in each of the different territories of the Underworld. And who the hell knew how time was measured here in what amounted to a null zone.

The burn in his fingers made him clumsy. He shifted the pick on the right, and the lock gave.

Inside they found a cavernous space far bigger than it appeared from the outside. The walls were lined with shelves that seemed to go on forever, and the shelves were lined with jars. Canopic jars. They were used to store the organs of the dead. Some were limestone. Some were clay.

Dagan moved deeper into the building, while Mal studied the area near the door. Etched in the bricks and painted in bright colors was a depiction of the twelve gates of Osiris; they acted as a road map for resurrection of the dead. Some texts had as few as seven gates, some as many as twenty-one. But the end point was the same: the passage from the Underworld back to the world of man. The dead would live again.

After a few moments, Dagan called, “The jars back here have plain lids.” He walked toward Mal, paused to examine some jars, and said, “These are more recent. They all have carvings of human heads.”

Mal looked at the shelf to his left. The lids of these jars bore carvings of the heads of the four sons of Horus. Hapi—the baboon. Duamutef—the jackal. Qebehsenue—the falcon. Imseti—the human-headed god. The lungs, stomach, intestines and liver of the deceased were each held in a separate jar.

He reported his find to Dagan and said, “Looks like these are the most recent of the bunch.”

“So, if this is a null zone, not claimed as part of the territory of any Underworlder, why are these here?” he asked as Dagan stepped up beside him. “Good question.”