Witches' Bane (The Soul Eater Book 2) (4 page)

“Cat?!”

The
cat. The one who’d taken it upon herself to make my office her home. I’d know those eyes anywhere. She’d spent months glaring down at me from my top shelf. Only now, she was without a doubt a person, with all the correct female parts in all the equally correct places.

“My face is up here,” she said in a rich, smooth voice like well-aged bourbon.

Power trilled through me, the newly devoured soul buzzing in my veins. I should have lifted Alysdair and demanded to know everything about the shifter, but all I could do was laugh. My black office cat was a person, and the priests had tried to trap me. Me?! It was all pretty damn funny.

Cat
tut-tutted
at my hilarity and searched through the pockets of the dead priests. “Nothing. No ID. No wallets.” Her growl was all cat and curiously familiar. “Who were they and why did they attack you?”

I’d regained some composure, but the high still blurred through my thoughts, scattering what little common sense I had. I should have been asking her the same questions, but she was naked, and wet, and bloody, with glistening fingernails like razorblades. “You were a person, all this time?”

“Still am,” she said, her tone dry and deeply unimpressed.

A car horn blasted right outside the construction site, and all at once I remembered we were at risk of being discovered next to two dead bodies.

The first body had four deep gashes running from his groin to his gullet. She’d disemboweled him. Clearly, Cat had claws. I kept her in my peripheral vision as I plunged Alysdair into the body and let the sword devour the soul before it was lost. Resisting taking it for myself was harder than it should have been. I cursed Osiris for knocking me off the wagon months ago.

“
Daquir
,” I uttered. Embers burned up the body, and the breeze tossed around the ashes. The second body went up the same way. The third lay face down in the dirt. Not dead, but he might as well have been. I’d yanked out his soul while he was still alive. Something I hadn’t done in a long, long time. Something I’d once enjoyed in the underworld.

I plunged Alysdair into his heart. “
Daquir
.”

Cat was watching me. If she wanted an explanation, she wouldn’t get one because I didn’t have one. Devouring the souls of the dead was one thing. Devouring the souls of the living was exactly the sort of “accident” that had landed me cursed for all eternity.

We stared at each other the way we had many times since she’d arrived. She looked as unimpressed now as she had during the last three months. Her green eyes clashed with the blackness of her hair and milky white skin. Her mouth probably hid a dazzling smile, but I was getting nothing but a severe line of disapproval.

“Do you have a name?” I asked. “Or shall I continue calling you Cat?”

She turned her head away, apparently bored. Her personality hadn’t improved since turning into a person. She’d probably continue to shove stuff off my desk while I watched.

“They were following you since last night,” she said.

“So were you?”

Slowly, dangerously, that green-eyed gaze found mine again. “I’ve been watching you for three months.”

It sounded like, in her head, there might have been a “
peon”
tacked on to the end of that sentence. Could it be I’d met someone who hated me more than Shu?

“These priests? That was a binding spell they were using? Why were they trying to capture you?”

“They’re priests, so who knows? I probably pissed off their god. I have a knack for doing that.”

They probably wanted Osiris’s tablet back, but Cat wasn’t a cat and I was on my back foot, reeling from that revelation. I kept my eyes front and center on her smooth little nose because I couldn’t look at her eyes for long without digging into them, and I damn well couldn’t look at the rest of her if I wanted to string a coherent sentence together.

“You’re welcome, by the way, for the fire.” She turned her back and retraced my tracks in the mud, heading toward the gate. For a second, I wondered if she’d forgotten she was naked, but in the last step, the air popped, a light flashed too brightly, forcing me to look away, and she vanished. Scooping up my soaked coat, I followed, just a few steps behind, but by the time I was back on the street, there was no sign of Cat, on four legs or two.

I worked my hands into fists, trying to quell the high buzzing through me, and then flipped up my collar and headed back to my bike. I had to get the tablet back to Osiris and find out why these priests wanted it so badly. Then maybe I’d figure out what the hell was going on with me and why I’d so easily devoured a man’s soul
before
killing him.

Three months. Cat had been sitting on my top shelf, watching me, for three whole months. Why?

On the ride back to the office, I tried to recall all the things she might have seen or heard. Nothing out of the ordinary came to mind, or at least nothing beyond the out of the ordinary things Shu and I usually encountered. A few wayward spirits, a summoning gone wrong, black-market spells changing hands. We’d had a spate of missing pets, but they’d turned out to be snacks for one of the many alligators roaming the sewers. I’d been meaning to talk with Osiris about those. Maybe I’d bring it up when I handed his tablet over and told him I wasn’t killing Thoth.

I opened my office door and found Cat sitting on the edge of my desk, naked, again. I didn’t know how she’d gotten back so fast, and at the sight of her, I lost the ability to ask.

“You’re very distracting.” I closed the door, hoping we didn’t get any unexpected clients dropping by, and strode to the tablet resting where I’d left it on the shelf. It occurred to me, as I tucked the tablet under my arm, that she’d seen more of me in the last three months than anyone else. We’d had many one-sided conversations where I’d discuss a case, or blow off some steam, or drink my way to the bottom of a bottle while she peered down at me from her shelf.

“Where’s Bastet?” she finally asked in that long, drawn-out drawl of hers.

“How should I know?” I spared her a glance, making sure I kept my gaze from wandering into unknown territory. She had a look about her that deemed me unworthy. “You’re one of hers?”

Cat, predictably, didn’t answer, but she did bounce her bare foot off the floor and drum her pointed fingernails against the desk. If she were Bastet’s, that likely meant she’d learned to disembowel more than priests. Bastet trained warriors, not pussycats.

“I’ve been trying to reach her…” I continued, skirting around my desk and working hard at ignoring Cat’s lack of clothing.

“I know. I saw your emails.”

“You snooped through my emails?”

She twisted at the waist, moving the way a snake might uncoil. Her slow, measured breaths lifted her breasts. Her face, though, that might as well have been carved from stone for all the expression it showed. “I know everything about you, Ace Dante.”

I highly doubted that. Leaning back against my filing cabinet—I couldn’t sit in my chair while she was sprawled two feet away at eye level—I scratched at my nose. “That porn was research.”

Her pink lips didn’t even twitch. Cat was hardcore.

“Three months ago, my queen came to your office. I came with her.”

I thought back and remembered Bast leaning against my desk, telling me about her missing women, but as I fought to recall more, the memory shied away. One thing was for certain: my ex-wife had been alone.

“People ignore cats,” Cat explained. “Though I do recall you almost shut the door on my tail.”

Ah, the nuisance cat I’d almost kicked right before meeting Bast.
That
had been her.

Cat hopped off the desk and cruised around my office, looking around as though this was the first time she’d really seen it on two legs instead of four.

“Bastet asked for your help. You refused. She left.” She poked at a plastic potted plant and watched it shift sideways, almost—but not quite—pushing it off the edge. “As far as I can ascertain, you were the last person to see her.”

Gods disappearing was nothing new. Cat gods were forever wandering off, returning on their own terms years or decades later. Besides, Bastet could look after herself. She didn’t need me hunting her down, and I’d argue she didn’t need Cat on her tail either, but I quite liked my guts on the inside.

“Three months isn’t long. She’s probably—”

“The murders stopped,” Cat interrupted and continued her tour of my office.

The light from the window behind me trailed over her figure, smoothing over her hips and waist. Training had honed this woman into a weapon. She walked like one, choosing every step, every glance, for maximum distraction. At least there wasn’t anywhere she could conceal a weapon, not counting her claws.

“But she did not return.”

She came to a stop in front of me. At my height, she looked me clean in the eye, knowing full well what would happen if she let her gaze linger too long. Cat was no Bastet fangirl. She knew who and what I was. She’d spent three months in my office, watching, listening,
spying
. And here she was, revealed in all her glory. If she so much as flicked her nails in my direction, I’d have my hand around her throat and Alysdair pressed against her heart in seconds.

“Something happened to my queen,” she said with gravitas. “I will not rest until I discover what.”

My gaze tunneled deep, and she still didn’t look away. “Then go do that. I’m not stopping you.”

I pitied the poor bastard who ever got on her wrong side. She’d probably bite his head off and leave it on the neighbor’s doorstep.

“I do not trust you, Ace Dante. Nameless One. Liar. Soul Thief.
Godkiller
.”

For someone with no name, I’d sure collected a few. I caught a flash of brightness inside her and quickly averted my gaze. She’d been about to let me see her soul—she had nothing to hide—but given the unease and restlessness crawling beneath my skin, I didn’t want to risk looking and
wanting
.

“Then don’t.” I shoved by her, tablet still tucked under my arm.

Suddenly, going to see Osiris seemed like a grand idea. I’d already devoured one soul today, I didn’t need another, but with the way my unhinged thoughts were headed, Cat’s brightness had plucked at my hunger pangs.

“I’m taking this back to its owner. Follow me, if you like. Just know that Osiris is a twisted fuck, and if he sees you with me, he’ll screw with us both.” I opened the door and felt her breath tickle the back of my neck. I only had to half-turn my head to catch her looming over my shoulder. “What are you doing?”

“Coming with you.”

“You may want to put some clothes on.”

She stepped back, and in one sudden, blinding flash, she vanished. Or so I’d thought until the black cat whipped between my ankles, out the door, and disappeared down the stairs. I scowled after it.

“I could stuff you in a sack and throw you in the Hudson!” It was an empty threat—mostly.

Cat wasn’t beside my bike, and I wasn’t about to wait for her. Hopefully she’d changed her mind about visiting Osiris. Cat had already seen enough of my life. I didn’t particularly relish the thought of her witnessing the god yank on my strings for her.

I fired up the Ducati and carved through New York’s glistening streets, my thoughts filled with the events of the past few hours: attacking priests, a severed arm, missing witches, and now a shifter spy. No doubt about it, New York was getting crowded. It used to be that Shu and I were lucky to see anything magic related in a month, but in the last few years, the frequency of “events” had increased. Instincts warned me change was in the air, but gods and change didn’t happen overnight. Whatever was coming, we’d have time to prepare… I hoped.

As I skidded the bike to a halt outside Osiris’s mansion, Cat was already on site, standing naked at the foot of the steps. Bathed in liquid firelight, she watched the flames gush from the house.

“What the—”

“It was like this when I got here,” Cat reported as if a blazing inferno was an everyday sight.

The fire roared, driven by an isolated, magic-infused wind. No sirens wailed. Nobody rushed in to help. Osiris had staff, security guards, cleaners, but the grounds were deserted.

“There are people in there.”

As much as I would’ve loved to see his house burn, I couldn’t stand by if there was even the slightest chance that people were trapped inside.

Abandoning the bike and the tablet, I pulled my damp coat up, shielding my face from the waves of heat, and dashed up the steps, toward the roaring inferno.

S
moke funneled into my lungs
, burning me from the inside out. I hunkered down, keeping low, and breathed through my sleeve. Heat and noxious gasses stung my eyes. If the fire hadn’t killed the staff, the smoke would. Nobody could survive this.

A security guard appeared out of the swirling grey in front of me. Tears streamed from his eyes and sweat glistened over his blistered face, but he looked at me as though I was the surprise. I recognized him. He’d been on Osiris’s staff for years. What the hell was he doing wandering around the smoke-filled entrance hall?

“Hold on.” He pushed out a palm, blocking my path. “You can’t just walk in, Mister Dante.”

“Get out of here!” Smoke clogged my throat. I coughed and brought my arm up to filter the air.

“Come right on over and we’ll search you, just like always.”

I looked again at the guard, who was eyeing me as though I was the biggest problem he had right now, and then to where he was motioning. His companion stood behind a security podium as flames lapped up around him and ate at the wall. A section of the ceiling fell behind me and smashed against the floor.

“Are you all insane?” Sweat crawled down my face and neck. “For Sekhmet’s sake, get out! Before this whole place comes down.”

“You’ll have to leave the sword with us,” the guard grumbled like I was the idiot.

This was ridiculous. I cracked a fast right hook across the guard’s face. Then I snatched his arm before he could tumble back and shoved him toward the doors where Cat’s frame blocked the light. She caught hold of him and vanished from sight.

The remaining guard tackled me side-on, whipping me off my feet and slamming me face first into the hall floor. My chin smacked against the soot-covered tiles, snapping my teeth together and igniting a dull ache through my skull.

A knee sank into my back. He obviously didn’t see the fire raging a few feet in front of us and riding up the stairs. The roaring, cracking, snarling sounds of the blaze destroying everything in its path was also lost on him.

I didn’t see the section of ceiling fall, but I felt the hot, jagged debris pummel my arms and head.

“I thought we’d gotten over this, Mister Dante.” The guard grunted and yanked me upright onto my feet. “You can’t bring edged weapons into this house. You know the rules.”

Orange flames snaked up his arm and his shoulder and licked at his hair and ear. He didn’t notice. There was no way he could
not
notice. Something had hold of the staff, either blinding them to the danger or simply leaving them without a care. A curse or an enchantment? Someone out there was pissed off enough at Osiris to spell his staff and risk the god’s wrath? They’d better be looking for suicide by god, because Osiris wouldn’t let this go.

“Listen…you’re not in your right mind,” I wheezed. “You can’t see it, but you really need to—”

Cat cracked a bronze statue of Isis over the guard’s head and caught him under his arms as he collapsed into her. She dragged him through the smoldering debris and out the door.

I followed and broke free from the smoke, spluttering ash from my tongue. Where the hell was Osiris? He could stop all this with a click of his fingers.

Cat had dragged the two unconscious men to safety and was starting back up the steps. “Call the fire department.”

“No.” I turned and glared into the broiling smoke. “Osiris can fix this.”

“We should leave.”

“You can go.” I pulled up my singed coat once more and ducked back inside. Heat pushed down from all sides, and the smoke billowed so thick and black I could barely see more than a few feet ahead, but I knew the layout of this house and dashed into the back hall, toward the study.

“This is insane!” Cat hissed. She followed close behind, weaving around smoking debris and bubbling walls.

I stopped by the bookcase and pulled the spine of a large, leather-bound book titled,
Tra Sudk omd Sraer Sokak
-
The Gods and Their Games,
opening up the hidden passageway. Cool, clean air beckoned from below.

“You shouldn’t be here,” I told Cat.

Black smudges marred her body and a few grazes wept blood, but she wasn’t the type to let a little smoke inhalation stop her. She looked me over as though I’d offended her cat-honor. “You’re my only lead as to my queen’s whereabouts. I need you alive, not buried under tons of debris. I’m coming with you.” Her glare had set as hard as concrete. Arguing would just waste time.

I jogged down the stairs, Cat’s almost-silent footfalls keeping up behind me, and entered the underground portion of the house that few people saw or
remembered
seeing. The air was clean here. No smoke, no heat. Just plush couches and flowing white drapes.

“Osiris!” I bellowed, striding through a curtained doorway into a hall.

“Is this wise?” Cat asked. A quiver of concern undermined her words. That was the first sign of fear I’d picked up from her. And she should be afraid.

We passed through one of several entertainment chambers. Usually, I’d find it filled with people, most out of their mind—
godstruck
—and lost in the throes of ecstasy in some form or another, but today, the chamber was empty.

“Maybe he isn’t here,” Cat suggested.

“He’s here,” I growled, sweeping through thin, near-transparent drapes into another hall. The halls, chambers, and antechambers switched left and right like a damn maze. The god was here. I knew it. I could
feel
it.

“
Osiris
!”

There was a chance he didn’t know his staff were burning alive above him. Or perhaps he did know but was somehow incapacitated? A little skitter of adrenaline quickened my heart. As unlikely as it was that Osiris was trapped, or worse, I could hope. I’d let him squirm. Him and his bitch wife.

I followed the pull of magic and shoved through a pair of double doors into the main bedchamber, finding the ancient pair sprawled on their vast four-poster bed, Isis riding her husband’s cock, her back arched and her hands knotted in her liquid-smooth black hair. I was already striding toward them with a sneer on my lips before it occurred to me that they might not care about what was happening above. That thought twisted the adrenaline into rage.

“Your house is on fire.”

“Oh, yes, we know!” Isis laughed, hips rocking. “Isn’t it wonderful?”

“Wonderful? No, it’s not wonderful.”

Osiris had his hands on his wife’s thighs, his fingers denting her muscles. His devotion-wide eyes drank down the sight of her. If he knew I was there, he didn’t show it.

“Your people—” I began.

“Are fools,” Osiris hissed through his teeth, not taking his eyes off his wife.

She fell forward, pinned his hands under hers, and kissed him long and hard.

None of this should have surprised me, but somehow, it did, and it boiled the rage inside. I knew they were insane, I knew I’d lost my argument before I even began, and I knew I should walk away before the pair of them got their claws into me, but those guards would have died as surely as the rest of his staff must have. “Those people are in your employ. The least you can do—”

Isis reared up and turned her head.

“Are you ordering us, Soul Eater?” she asked in that oh-so-innocent way of hers, but the sweetness in her voice was barbed like razorblades in candy.

She roamed her hand up Osiris’s chest, spreading her fingers wide, her rhythm intoxicating, but her gaze had settled on me, almost as though she knew my dreams—my nightmares were filled with scenes just like this one, only in my dreams, it wasn’t her husband she was screwing.

“No, I…” I broke eye contact, afraid she’d hear my heartbeat kicking up or see the heat in my glare, and found Cat watching the gods, her lips parted, pupils wide, nipples erect.

“Cat.”

She didn’t answer.

I clicked my fingers at her. “Cat!”

She jerked and looked at me like I’d slapped her.

“Get out of here!”

She was mortal, and Osiris—the fucking God of Fertility—wasn’t holding back. Any longer down here and she’d be
godstruck
by them both and I’d have to fight her to keep her from starting a threesome—or worse. Any second now, this would turn ugly.

“No, stay…” Isis purred. “I adore cats. Join us.”

I didn’t look her way—she’d entrap me with that gaze of hers all over again—and snapped at Cat, “Go!”

If the gods reacted badly to me sending away a potential new toy, they could react badly with me. I didn’t break as easily as mortals.

Cat blinked, and fear flooded into her gaze. She dashed from the room, leaving me alone with my nightmares. At least she wouldn’t be here to see what might happen next. I discreetly stepped back, got away with it, and tried another step.

“Stay.” Osiris slowly turned his head. “Watch.”

The command fell over me, heavy like wooden stocks locking me down.

Isis’s laugh coiled around my body and thoughts. I couldn’t look away, couldn’t close my eyes longer than a blink, couldn’t move. I could, however, grit my teeth and consider all the places I’d like to stab Alysdair into them. The sword was snug against my back. So close…yet it might as well have been a cardboard cutout for all the good it did me here.

Osiris flipped Isis over, spread her legs, and drove himself inside her. His wife groaned and shifted her ass. I gave up fighting the warring urges and accepted I was stuck here. The worst of it was that part of me
wanted
to be here. That part wanted to be right where Osiris was, pounding into Isis, and Isis’s side-eyed glare told me she knew it.
Monster
, she’d called me before, but I couldn’t recall when. And I heard it again as my own need grew hot and hard.

Osiris began speaking the old language, smoother than most, uttering words of union, of life, of celebration and love. And all I could think about was screwing his wife into the bed and making her cry my name.

Sweat tickled the back of my neck. I could blame it on the fire raging above or on Osiris’s power, but it was neither. This was all me. When my magic rose, summoned by the play of the two most gloriously ancient beings ever to walk both worlds, it was all I could do to hold everything back.

Higher and higher they pushed to the sounds of their ragged panting and the relentless slap of skin on skin until they climaxed together. Osiris’s hand locked into his wife’s hair, and her nails sank into his thigh. I mentally clung to the threads of my own cresting pleasure, the power pushing to be free. I wouldn’t lose control, wouldn’t give Osiris or Isis the satisfaction. They could make me watch, but that was all. They couldn’t make me enjoy it…

Cool, slick sweat rolled down my face.

Isis’s lazy, sex-sodden gaze rode down my length, eliciting a shudder. I thought I’d won, but I hadn’t. Her smile told me so.

Osiris rocked onto his heels, throwing his head back. His entire body shone—not with sweat, but with the glisten of power and life.

Why
, I wanted to ask. Why make me watch? What did it matter to him? When would his games end? I wasn’t sure I could endure another five hundred years under his control.

Isis rolled onto her side, dragged her long fingers up her thigh, collecting the wetness, and then brought it to her lips and licked. I swallowed hard and wished I hadn’t when her eyes brightened.

“I have your tablet.” My voice came out much clearer than I’d expected. At least I sounded like this was all in a day’s work.

“Send the cat in.” Isis propped her head on her hand and looked me in the eye. “I want to play.”

“Go get her yourself,” I snarled. If Cat was foolish enough to still be here, she’d have to manage Isis on her own.

Osiris climbed from the bed and beckoned, “Come.”

“I believe he already did.” Isis’s smile ticked, but she stayed sprawled on the bed, looking like an all-you-can-eat goddess buffet. With this high racing through my veins, if she moved from the bed and came anywhere near me, I’d probably do something suicidal and get myself strung up. As long as she stayed right where she was, I was safe.

“Did you enjoy watching,
Monster
?”

“People are dying above us, and you’re fucking each other’s brains out. No, I didn’t enjoy it.”

Her smile crawled higher, and her jewel-like eyes widened. “Liar.”

Osiris gathered a plain cotton gown from the back of a chair and threw it over his shoulders, apparently oblivious to Isis’s game.

“Husband, are you going to allow the Soul Eater to speak to me in that manner?” Isis’s sweet-as-honey voice, the same voice that had begged me for more in my dreams, rose.

My heart rate spiked again. Sekhmet’s ass, my head was a mess. If Osiris knew the thoughts I’d had, I might as well say farewell to my life in New York, because I wouldn’t see the city again, not for a few centuries.

“Fight your own battles, my dear,” Osiris replied. “You always do.” He nodded as he passed by, indicating I should follow.

I trailed behind him, relieved to be walking away from Isis relatively unscathed. We passed through chamber after chamber and up a flight of stairs until we’d somehow doubled back and emerged in the vast greenhouse. A few strides in and Osiris stopped inside a clearing among high palms and verdant undergrowth. A tea set had been laid out on a waiting table. I hadn’t seen any staff, and wondered if he conjured the tea. There were no signs of smoke or fire here, nothing to indicate anything was amiss. And Osiris still didn’t seem to care or even remember that I’d barged into his sex session.

He poured himself some tea from an embellished silver jug and offered me a cup. I nodded, wondering if it was hot enough to throw in his face and scald him. I could think it, just not do it.

Pulling a chair out from the iron bistro set, Osiris sat and breathed in deeply through his nose. “These scents evoke memories of the great river after the rains.”

The small clearing sat among giant ferns and papyrus grass, hidden from the house, from everything remotely modern. Many people assume ancient Egypt was a desert like they see in brochures today. It wasn’t. Fed by the river Nile and Osiris’s fertile magic, the land was rich and fertile with life. Some had called it paradise.