Blackhearted Betrayal (17 page)

The shade didn’t wait for her acquiescence before trying to flee. I say
trying
because, hey, I had wings, and she didn’t. The shade snarled when I knocked into her from above and sent her to her knees. I landed and cocked an eyebrow. “Going somewhere?”

Her snarl turned to an angry hiss reminiscent of Durra’s, and her faded eyes temporarily glowed brighter green. My left eyebrow shot up to join the other.
Holy hells. What is one of
Bast’s
children doing in Duat?
Anubis and Bast hated each other with
way
more than a passion—the primary motivation for the racial hatred between the shape-shifting Warhounds and Bastai, AKA Cats. Also the biggest reason the wedding between Harper (a Cat) and Scott’s cousin/Elliana’s brother Penn
had caused such a fervent uproar among the Belly’s arcane elite.

Where did you
think
the stereotypical image of cats hating dogs came from?

I pasted a saccharine smile on my face and stroked each serpent twined around my waist. “We’ve already proven your manifestations can be killed here. Shall we find out how toxic Amphisbaena venom proves as well?”

“Do as you will, Fury. My lord rewards loyalty as highly as he punishes betrayal.” Her face contorted into an even uglier expression, and she spat at my feet. “Which your bastard lover will soon discover.”

That had me giving a hiss of my own and stomping down on her abdomen, harder than intended because of the whole Nemesis thing.
Really.
“Oops, my foot slipped. The same way my beauties are about to slip poison into your veins.” They obligingly went all cobraesque with their hoods and spat venom onto her cheek. She squealed and wiped it off—only to wind up with the acidic substance eating away at her hand
and
face.
Idiot.
I might have felt sorry for her under other circumstances.

“Aw, does that hurt? It’s only gonna get worse here in a minute.”

Durra stepped up beside me and glanced down with disdain. “I suggest you tell us what we want to hear to save yourself agony, Cat. Who knows how long your manifestation will survive as the venom destroys it from the inside out?”

Raised voices and stones skittering down from above hinted that our companions had finally found a safe path down the ravine and would soon join us. “Funny you mention my hot-as-hell boyfriend since that’s who’s about to join in the fun. I bet he’ll find the idea of
your
treacherous ass calling
him
a traitor hilarious. At least
he
is following divine law rather than throwing in with an immortal thug. When the Triad catches up to your boss, you’ll be in for worse than anything
I
can do to you. Sure hope Jackal-Faced paid you more than thirty silver pieces to go all Judas on Bast. Come to think of it, the Triad will probably just give you to
her
as punishment.”

Durra chuckled in a distinctly menacing manner. “What do you want to wager she condemns her to eternally having her tongue sliced out so she can choke on catnip?”

I had to give Durra points for style. Not only had she given a nod to my recent serial-killer case, she’d managed to break through the Cat spirit’s defiance.
Nothing
disrespected—or terrified—a Cat more than the reverse of the coup-counting they had pulled on Hounds for millennia in ancient Egypt (and sometimes beyond).

My lips curved upward when I leaned forward, and she pushed as far from me as possible without moving from her sprawled position. “You’re between a rock and a hard place here, Kitty Cat. You know I’m a Nemesis, so know this also: I don’t care whatever line of horseshit Anubis has fed you or what rewards he promised to entice you into switching teams. The Triad is onto him and has set loose
several
Nemeses after his ass. He’s going down hard, and the only question I have for you is: Are you
really
willing to do down with him?
He
can’t die, but
you
can be killed over and over and over again until the immortals tire of playing with you and destroy your soul entirely.” The only threat even harsher than the coup-counting thing. “Or …”

She leaped upon my words as the lifeline they represented. “Or?”

“
Or
you tell us what we need to know, and I personally assure that you face Ma’at’s Feather
before
the Triad or Bast can step in—meaning your soul moves on rather than being endlessly tormented.”

“W-will you swear to that as a Fury?”

“As a Fury and by my position as Nemesis.
If
you repent and help us now.”

With a typically feline display of self-interest, she nodded. “What do you want to know?”

“Is Anubis amassing an army to conduct war against the Triad?”

She licked her lips. “N-no.”

“You don’t sound so sure of yourself. That makes me less inclined to believe you. You do
not
want me to think you are lying to us.”

“I’m not!” she rushed to reassure me. “It’s just—
yes
, he is amassing an army; but no, not to wage war against the Triad.”

“Then for what purpose?”

Another hesitation. “I’m not entirely sure.”

Durra let out an incredulous sound.

“Truly,
I do not know
. He only discusses such things with the Khenti-priests and his lover.”

That had my eyes and mouth widening. Ancient Egyptian mythology spoke of Anubis being married to the goddess Anput; but—like the original Nemesis—she had never been a true separate being, more a feminine aspect taken on by Anubis occasionally over the millennia. Fury gossip held that Anubis contented himself with one-night stands with lesser immortals and arcanes rather than forming a more permanent union. The buzz said he considered himself too good to do more than screw around with anything less than a greater
immortal; the Catch-22 was that none of
them
would be willing to marry a lesser god …

My breath whooshed out explosively.
Jeez. Us. That could explain why he’s pulling this power play
now.
Whichever Deity he’s fooling around with won’t take it to the next figurative level unless he makes it to the next
literal
level.
For a moment, I just shook my head. Would someone
really
go to all this trouble—cause
this
much pain and betrayal (not to mention death and civil war)—over a simple
love affair
? Then I thought of the lengths Scott and I had been willing to go to for each other over the past few years, up to and including him forsaking his personal god at my request. That thought led to memories of what Victor’s crazy ass had done because of green-eyed envy when Harper loved a Hound more than a fellow Cat and the fact he’d been willing to drug me with magical GHB when he transferred his obsession with his ex onto me. My headshake turned to a grim nod. Oh yeah, people did crazy shit for love—or facsimiles thereof—all the time, immortals as often as others. We
were
made in our Creators’ images.

Durra’s gaze focused on my face as these realizations struck in rapid succession. She gave a questioning tilt of her head. I nodded toward the shade and mouthed
Later
.

I glanced back to the Cat and assumed a carefully blank expression. She had actually let slip something bigger than she knew, not that I had to tell
her
that. “So basically you can’t give me any useful information I didn’t already know, certainly nothing worth sticking my neck as a Nemesis out for.”

Desperation lit her shade’s eyes a slightly more brilliant sheen a second time. “No, that’s not true! I can give you plenty! Anubis has—he’s got two Fury shades
working for him. Surely
that
is something you didn’t already know.”

Surprise twinged inside but not so much that I showed it on the outside. Having already spotted Stacia on the Underworld prowl and knowing that he had living Furies working for him in the Palladium, it wasn’t a particularly big shock to discover he had another already dead sister on his side as well.

The Cat shook her head and corrected herself. “He
had
two Fury shades working for him, but …rumor has it one of them was the first he chose to reward with New Life. She hasn’t been seen in Duat in several weeks.”

Durra asked the obvious before I could. “New Life?”

The shade met our skeptical expressions with very nearly a smirk. “Yes. Those who serve our lord most faithfully are promised a way to …circumvent Ma’at’s Feather in order to live again.”

Whoa. That was just crazy talk.
Every
individual’s soul had to face some sort of divine balancing act—Ma’at’s Feather, St. Peter’s Book, judgment by once-mortal King Minos for many of the ancient Greek persuasion—before they could either move on to some iteration of heaven
or
be sent back to earth to try again and get it right. By
get it right
, I mean become a better person or, in the worst cases, suffer some of the same torment their last incarnation brought upon others to reap a little karmic payback intended to teach the soul humility for yet another incarnation. Hell as the fire-and-brimstone types thought of it was reserved only for the worst-of-the-worst souls who never learned a damned thing after umpteen chances to become less …well, evil was a simplistic way to put it, but yes. Some souls were made of pure evil when you got right down to
it. Even then, though, if they
finally
had some sort of epiphany while suffering through damnation, that torment could be ended if they
truly
repented and asked for another go at this crazy thing called life.

So, long story short, what this all boiled down to was the fact that there was a set routine to things that didn’t vary, even from mythos to mythos. Souls couldn’t be reborn without being weighed. Anubis couldn’t conduct that balancing act himself, and even if he could, he was a
Death
Lord, not a Creator. He couldn’t just
give
someone a new bod …

Suddenly a horrible thought clicked inside my mind. An Anubian (blech) Fury rumored to have received New Life in the precisely right time frame added to the fact that Anubis could
not
manufacture new bodies in the earthly realm added to the knowledge that something had gone horribly wrong with my grandmother when she awakened from her coma could really only suggest one logical conclusion.

New Life
didn’t mean reincarnation in the traditional sense. It meant that, somehow, Anubis had discovered the means to do the unthinkable: help shades loyal to him steal the bodies of others. Nan wasn’t just being manipulated magically. She was suffering through her own
Invasion of a Body Snatcher
.
But, if that really is true, how does the whole thing work? Is she trapped inside her own body at the mercy of the invading spirit or has she been displaced entirely? And if she has, where is her spirit now? Can she be safely restored—or is she now as good as dead?

This time I couldn’t keep emotion off my face or out of my voice. “Son of a
bitch
!” I growled just in time for everyone else—led by Scott—to scramble into the
clearing. Seeing my lover’s face had me thinking about his blackhearted, Jackal-Faced god having the
balls
to screw around with something so sacrosanct as other people’s souls, and
that
had me cursing again for good measure.
“Son of a bitch!”

SCOTT AND MAC, NOT SURPRISINGLY, ZEROED
in on me right away and took up places between the unknown shade and me, a case of the train having already left the station, but it wasn’t worth pointing that out to them. No matter how liberal, that overprotective gene lurks inside lovers and brothers the arcane world over. Everyone else fanned out behind Durra and me, but nobody said a word. Apparently they’d heard enough of the interrogation while approaching not to want to jeopardize my authority with the Kitty Cat.

I folded my arms across my chest. “Well, I think you can safely assume the Triad is going to put an end to whatever New Life old Jackal-Faced is promising his faithful servants.” Both the Cat and Scott clenched their teeth and fists, something that had me clenching my own. When Scott finally got me alone after this was all
over, would we even still
have
a relationship to salvage? “I, on the other hand,
always
keep my promises. If you stay out of my way while I carry out my duties, I will invoke Ma’at on your behalf as promised. If, however, I discover you have betrayed me in any way …”

She swallowed with a visible shudder. “I—understand.” Her face took on a determined expression. “My decision is made, and you were right to remind me of my duty to the Triad of immortals. I don’t know how
he
ever convinced me otherwise.”

Pretty words, but I sure couldn’t take them at face value. Nothing guaranteed she wouldn’t tear off as soon as my back was turned and go straight to Anubis to rat us out, which naturally led to the dilemma of what I should do with her in the meantime. If I killed her like the other shades, that would just give her the chance to double-cross us that much sooner when she rematerialized wherever it was Anubian shades materialized. If I
didn’t
, though, she might very well follow us with the sole purpose of summoning Anubis directly to our ultimate destination: the Hall of Two Truths. Which meant I needed an option number three …