Witches' Bane (The Soul Eater Book 2) (7 page)

Shu turned and marched back up the sidewalk.

I looked down at my wet hands. The rain dripping from my fingers might as well have been blood. Accept my nature or fight it? Those were my choices. I’d been fighting for a long time, but if I hated anything, it was proving the gods right.

I followed Shu with Isis’s whispers of “
Monster”
in one ear and Bast’s words of
“More than darkness”
in the other.

N
ight had blanketed
the office building by the time we returned. Cat was AWOL, and I was glad for it. My relapse had to stay between Shu and me. If word got out that I was feasting on New Yorkers, the pantheon would bay for blood, and Osiris would be forced to act—again.

I hung up my coat and shrugged Alysdair off. My hand lingered on the sword’s grip. Julie Carter’s scream sliced through my thoughts all over again like I was back in her apartment, tearing her innocent soul from her body. I’d felt the sword bite and shudder as I plunged it into her chest, same as another time, another place, with another woman. My memories wavered, voices spilling forth. “
More than darkness
,” Bastet had told me not so long ago… I couldn’t recall when.

Nothing made sense. How many people had I slain, and why hadn’t I remembered any of it? I knew what I was, what I’d been in the past. My hatred for witches ran deep, as did my hatred for Osiris, so why would I hide from my sins? If this was all me, why hadn’t I dropped the Ace Dante act altogether? Too many questions and too few answers. A dull ache radiated through my skull and down the back of my neck. I set down the sword and rubbed the muscles, chasing the pain.

“Here.” Shu dumped a glass on my desk, poured the vodka, and slid it my way.

Light from the hallway crept across the floor, illuminating Shu from behind. She’d discarded her coat and rolled up her sleeves. Her wet hair clung to her face in places, but she didn’t appear to care. She had a determined line to her lips and an intense motivation in her eyes. I’d seen that look many times, usually right before someone got their asses handed to them.

Her scowl, when she met my gaze, left no room for bullshit.

I dropped into the chair behind my desk, craned my fingers over the glass, and watched the vodka swirl inside.

“I’ve been thinking,” Shu said.

“Dangerous.”

“Have you blacked out in public?”

“Not to my knowledge.”

“Just at night then, when you’re alone?”

“It would seem so.”

“Don’t you think that’s suspicious? If this was all you, why would you forget it the next day?”

I looked up. Clearly, her thinking was in line with mine.

“I know what you are. I saw all of you when you captured me, weighed me, and condemned me. If this was all you, you wouldn’t forget. You’d relish the memory. You got off on the power, the control. If this was all you, you’d be out on the street, cutting down commuters like a biblical plague. You have enough juice dripping from your veins for it, but you’re here, with me, drinking vodka.” She raised her glass in a brief salute, proving her point. “Someone has their claws in you, but not all the way.”

I wet my lips with vodka, let the alcohol bite, and then took a drink.

Shu leaned against my desk, scrutinizing me, waiting for my explanation. I didn’t have one.

“This has all the hallmarks of a curse,” she said.

“It does, except…” I kicked my boots up onto the desk. “I can’t be cursed.” I tipped my glass at Shu. “Osiris got there first. His influence covers my soul like wrappings on a mummy.”

“I want to do a spell that will go deep into you and your power to look for threads that shouldn’t be there.” Uncertainty flashed in her eyes. “Will you let me?”

My heart, shriveled as it was, beat a little faster. “Oh, sure, let a demon sorceress into the deep, dark recesses of a soul eater? What could possibly go wrong?”

“I promise not to do any damage,” she added with a wholly inappropriate grin.

The damage didn’t worry me. I devoured, and, apparently, I did it in my sleep too. If she got too close, went too deep, I’d likely do the same to her. She was the most skilled sorceress I’d ever hunted, but her magic came from her soul, and if she got too close, that’s exactly what I’d rip out of her, putrid and black as it was. These days, I wasn’t a fussy eater.

“Is this like the tracking spell you did on the girl’s arm?” I asked, keeping my thoughts to myself and my gaze lost in my drink.

“More like what Mafdet attempted, but this time, you’ll be active instead of a passenger in your own mind, and I’ll be coming along for the ride. You wouldn’t trust my results, so you’ll have to see for yourself, but—”

“There’s always a but.” More vodka went down, burning all the way and getting into those hard to reach places.

“It’s not vital, but ideally, you’d need someone here, someone you trust to keep you anchored, because you don’t trust me.”

That narrowed it down to an amount of people I could count on the thumb of one hand.

“What does my trusted person have to do?” I asked, failing to keep the suspicion from my tone.

“Nothing. Just be here so you’re not alone. Someone you can come back to if you get lost in your head.”

That sounded comforting. “And they won’t get hurt?”

“No. It’s strictly babysitting. I can do it without…”

Time was running out. I needed this done so I could focus on surviving Thoth. “Cujo’s the only person I trust this side of the underworld.”

Shu smiled a little, secret smile and poured herself a drink. “Call him. Let’s get this done so I can go back to snarling at you through the door.”

“You do that?”

“A better question would be: when don’t I?”

I eyed the phone on my desk. It was late, but Cujo would come. It’d take him forty minutes to call a cab and make his way over. Forty minutes to tell Shu that all this was probably pointless because I’d bargained our lives away when I agreed to kill Thoth.

I picked up the phone and dialed Cujo’s cell. When he didn’t answer, I left a brief message for him to call back and hung up. “There’s something else.”

She pulled the guest chair over and draped herself into it. I’d seen her relax like that once—right before whipping up a spell that turned a man’s insides into soup.

She waited for me to elaborate. This was going to hurt.

“I agreed to kill Thoth for Osiris.”

She blinked once. Twice. And pursed her lips. The silence grew thick and so cloying I could taste it. It tasted like burning asphalt, like restrained magic. Hers.

She smiled, but it wasn’t a pleasant smile. More like the type of smile you’d see on a crocodile. Her cool, calm response was the frosted layer over a lake of pain, and the floodgates were about to open. Her stillness, the level rise and fall of her chest, said she was holding back. “And when did you agree to this?”

“Three months ago,” I said. “Osiris wants it done in three days—two now. He’s pissed at me, more than usual. I may have…brought that on myself.”

She looked at me with a wholly unsettling calmness. Were she a person, I would’ve said she was about to snap, pull out a gun, and aerate my body. But this was Shu. She had imagination.

“Apparently, I ate the souls of his staff and set his house on fire, and he knows I’ve had impure thoughts about his wife.”

Shu’s top lip twitched. “You wanna bang Isis? Since when?”

I needed more vodka. “Since…since she somehow got inside my head. She hit on me months ago. I refused, which, by the way, I should get some points for. I thought I got away unscathed, but now I’m not so sure.”

“Did she touch you?”

“She cupped my balls.” I shifted a little in my chair and cleared my throat, prompting Shu to arch an eyebrow. “Does that count?”

“Are you trying to get yourself killed?” She sloshed a lot more vodka into her glass. “I thought you were crazy, but not batshit crazy. Making deals to kill gods and trying to bed the Goddess of Light? Anyone would think you had a god complex.”

“I’m not a god.”

“What’s a god but a magically endowed epic asshole with a pedigree?”

“I don’t have the pedigree. Besides, soul eaters aren’t gods. We’re the monsters the gods try to kick under their Persian rugs.”

She rolled her eyes. “You can’t kill Thoth, and you can’t fuck Isis.”

I reached across the desk, took the bottle back, and refilled my glass. “That’s what I told Ozzy. He threw me against a wall.”

Shu breathed in, held the breath, and then looked around my office, probably imagining all the ways she could tear into me. “Three months? Right around the time Bastet was here?”

“Yeah, I guess,” I replied, wondering what Bastet had to do with any of this. “Osiris lifted part of the curse, allowing me to walk freely in the underworld.”

“I wondered how you’d managed that,” she murmured, thinking.

“In exchange, I have to kill Thoth.”

“Why does Osiris want Thoth dead?”

“Thoth and Isis have been meeting in secret. I’m not entirely sure Osiris trusts his wife.”

“Yah think?” Shu’s eyes widened. “Were they screwing?”

“I spoke to Thoth when the cops hauled me in. He and Isis have been meeting in secret—that part’s true—but whatever they’re talking about is important enough to keep from Osiris. Maybe Thoth’s her psychiatrist, or maybe they share book recommendations? How the hell should I know? I warned him Ozzy would retaliate.”

“You
warned
him?”

“I didn’t come right out and say it, but I may have hinted at it. I owed him for getting me off those trespassing charges.”

“Are
you
fucking Isis?”

“Only in my head.” I swished vodka around my mouth, letting it burn my taste buds, and swallowed deep.

Shu pinched the bridge of her nose and sighed. “So, let me get this straight. You set fire to Osiris’s house and told him that not only are you
not
going to kill Thoth, thereby breaking your word, but you also want to fuck his wife?”

“That about sums it up.”

“I should never let you leave this office alone. After this, you answer the phone and I do the jobs.” Shu threw back her drink in one go, and with a hiss, she added, “We’re doomed. If Osiris doesn’t kill you, Thoth will, and I’ll get an extended vacation where I’ll have my guts torn out.”

“That was my conclusion too.”

She was taking it well. No spells, no throwing things.

She tapped her fingernails against her glass. “I may as well call Anubis and book an eternity of torture.” Her glare narrowed. “
Could
you kill Thoth?”

I spluttered my drink. “I could try and get my ass handed to me. He’s Ra’s son. He could throw a word and boil my blood. What am I going to hit him with? My bad attitude?”

“You
are
gorged with power.” She leaned forward, looking deeper into my eyes, searching for that dark inside of me, the kind I kept buried deep. “There won’t be a better time to test out that new name,
Godkiller
.”

“I didn’t kill Ammit,” I shot back on reflex. I was getting the feeling she didn’t believe me. “I don’t know if I can kill a god, and trying seems like a great way to die.”

“Okay, so we have two days to come up with a solution. I need you coherent, not running off on some personal vendetta to kill all witches. You need to let me do the spell so I can figure out what’s fuelling your witch-killing spree.”

She still hadn’t launched into a vicious tirade, which was almost worse. I’d expected her to be angry, but her calm clarity was more unsettling.

“Ace Dante! Open up. I know what you did.” Kenny the Witch pounded on the door. “Open this door or I’ll—”

Shu jumped to her feet and yanked the door open. “Huff and puff, witch?”

Kenny barged past my business partner and stabbed a finger into my face. “I know what you did. Where is she?”

There were many answers to that question, some more painful than others.

Behind the witch, Shu lifted her hand, cupping nothing but air. Her lips moved and her magic stirred. Sprites of energy crackled at the tips of her fingernails. I gave my head a slight shake—a near indiscernible
no
—and her lips stopped moving, but her eyes shone with the emergence of power, as did the witch’s glare.

Kenny hadn’t looked like much at Cujo’s, just a wide-eyed kid without a clue, but desperation rimmed those wide eyes with rage, and what little juice he had fizzled in a thin aura around him. He might have stolen his magic, but it could still pack a punch.

Shu cocked her head, waiting for my signal. Kenny had no idea of the danger he was in just by showing Shu his back.

I carefully set my drink down, planted my boots on the floor, and slowly got to my feet. There was no easy way to tell him that I’d killed his girlfriend. I was guilty. I remembered her scream, the confusion and fear in her eyes, and I remembered how I’d cut her down as though she was of no consequence. Thanks to Mafdet, the memory was clear as day.

Should I tell him straight, like a slap to the face, or let him down gently? Dressing it up with pretty explanations wouldn’t help Kenny. I’d never been very good at the gentle approach anyway. “For what I did, you have every right to be angry.”

Kenny pulled back and straightened, as though surprised. “The coven says you made eight of us disappear a few years back.” Before I could reply, he begged, “P-please, I don’t care about that. Just…just tell me you found her?”

“I have—”

“Ace,” Shu interrupted, drawing my eye. She shook her head.
Don’t tell him,
her dark eyes said. But I had to. Not knowing, waiting for her to return, his hope false and brittle, was worse. I couldn’t look him in the eye and lie.

“Julie Carter is dead,” I said. “I stabbed her through the heart and stole her soul. Nothing of her spirit remains in this realm or the next. She’s gone, in the truest sense of the word.”

I’ve seen men crumble before my eyes, watched their faces fall and their fears widen their eyes, and I’ve heard men wail as grief tore out their hearts. Kenny did none of those things. He took a step back and looked me over, or as much of me as he could see behind the desk. Another step back almost brought him into contact with Shu. He muttered something guttural under his breath, and the next thing I knew, my back hit the wall and I fell to my feet, facing a man with murder in his eyes as magic boiled the air around him.

Kenny flung out his right fist, his instincts pulling on the man to fight with his fists, not magic. I saw the punch coming and could have avoided it, could have hit back, could have stopped him with a single word.