Sins of the Flesh

“No bloody clue.”


Thirteen body parts lay on the stone. Head, hands, feet, arms, thighs, lower legs, torso, pelvis. The only thing missing was Lokan’s heart.

Sutekh emerged from the tent that had been set a little apart from the others.

“Is that your father?” Calliope asked.

“Yeah,” Mal said. “Wearing Lokan’s face. He does that. Wears whatever appearance strikes his fancy that day. None of us know what he truly looks like.”

But it wasn’t merely fancy that had guided Sutekh’s choice today. His father had chosen to wear Lokan’s face to this meeting. A reminder to all those present that his son had been murdered. A statement that his memory lived on, burning in the hearts of Sutekh and his remaining sons.

Calliope turned and looked out at the wide expanse of crimson river. “The others are coming,” she said.

The boats drew nearer, carrying the other Underworlders to a meeting that would decide the fate of all.

A woman with night-black hair and a face that made a man sit up and take notice was in the first boat. She was dressed in a flowing, diaphanous white gown that clung to her curves.

“Aset,” Dagan said.

Calliope stared, and Mal could feel the tension and awe pulsing through her. Aset was her progenitor. In effect, her mother. She was the root of Calliope’s line. The first blood drinker. The first pranic feeder. She was the goddess, the mother, the giver of life. And Calliope had never seen her before.

Mal got it. He remembered the first time he’d met Sutekh.

Aset lifted her head and turned her face to Calliope, her expression shuttered. Then her gaze slid to Mal for a split second before she looked away. In that second, Mal felt as if the goddess had looked into his soul. Damned unsettling.

Directly behind Aset was a muscled man with the head of a falcon. Horus. Aset’s son, conceived when she brought her husband/brother Osiris back from the dead long enough to give her a child.

“She didn’t bring a guard,” Mal pointed out.

“Which means she’s either foolish, brave or knows something the rest of us don’t,” Alastor said.

“Like where our mates are?” Dagan asked, his voice hard, his fists clenched at his sides.

“It would make sense,” Mal said. “If Aset sent for Roxy and Naphré, that would explain the lack of any evidence of a fight. If their goddess called them, they would go.”

But none of them was in the boat.

“I want to bloody well kill someone,” Alastor said, his voice cold and brutal.

“Don’t we all,” Dae snarled.

Mal cut a glance at Calliope and marveled at his brothers’ control. He thought he’d be taking heads if she were the one who was missing.

Asmodeus came next, with a phalanx of female warriors in his wake. He didn’t even glance toward Aset, instead going straight to Sutekh and embracing him before leaning back to study his face. Lokan’s face.

“The loss of a son is a pain none should bear.” With those words, Asmodeus sealed his alliance to Sutekh.

“That explains what his grunts were doing at Kuznetsov’s condo,” Mal said softly, wanting only his brothers and Calliope to hear. “He probably wanted to make a gift of the High Reverend to Sutekh.”

“Either that, or his failure to secure Kuznetsov and figure out what the hell is going on made him decide better the devil he knew,” Dae replied. “A new alliance with Osiris would be risky for him.”

“And what that boils down to is that he’d switch allegiance in a blink,” Alastor said.

“Wouldn’t they all?” Calliope asked, her tone cool and even, betraying none of the turmoil that Mal knew she had to be feeling at being here, in the Underworld and seeing all these deities up close and personal.

Another boat arrived. Eight women stepped down, each garbed in robes of gray. As they moved forward, it was clear that their raiment was not cloth at all, but a writhing, living drape of all manner of spiders and centipedes, insects and maggots that moved and shifted. Their faces and bodies were completely obscured, as were their hands and feet. “The Shikome,” Alastor murmured and inclined his head in greeting as one paused briefly to nod first at him, then at Mal.

Another woman stepped down. She was perhaps five feet tall, very delicate, draped entirely in white. No part of her body was visible through the layers of cloth.

She moved with regal elegance and as she drew near, she dipped her head to Alastor, who made a courtly bow in return. When she came to Mal, she stopped and said, “They do indeed bloom at night, soul reaper.”

Her voice was gorgeous. A song. The sound of it made him smile, as it had the last time they’d met.

Then she turned her head toward Calliope, and when she spoke, the smile in her voice was unmistakable. “And I see you have found your own Ipomoea alba, Malthus Krayl.”