Unwrapped: An Urban Fantasy Adventure (Werewolves vs. Mummies Book 3) (20 page)

Isis rushed toward us, but as she did so, Apep batted her aside like she was a ragdoll. Her body rolled across the cloud strewn surface as Apep shrugged out of his coat and let it fall to the ground. He reached up and loosened his tie before glancing at me. “I’ve got this. Get the queen.”

I nodded and sprinted after Isis’s tumbling body, hoping to take her down before she recovered. If she was anything like the other gods had been, well, it’d be tough, but I was sure I could manage. Even if I didn’t have godly help on my side, I had something better. I just wasn’t quite sure what it was that was better yet, but something, surely. I was the Dunewalker after all.

My foot lashed out, catching the goddess in the ribs as she climbed to her feet. The sound of cracking bone filled my ears, and as I pivoted to drive my elbow into her back and slam her into the ground, she actually twisted in midair like an eel and seized me around the throat. Her fingers closed like a vice, cutting off my air supply, and as we toppled back to the ground, she slammed me onto my back.

Stars shot past my eyes as she reared back to smash her fist into my face. And silly me. I let her. The blow shattered the front teeth of my open mouth and drove into the back of my throat so hard I nearly gagged as I twisted and bit down, using the full force of my jaws and my remaining teeth on her delicate wrist.

I’m not quite sure how hard a werewolf can actually bite down, but I once had a friend who owned a German shepherd. Not wanting to keep her dog locked in the car, my friend left her dog tied to her bumper while she went inside the bank. I wasn’t quite sure how long she was inside, but when she returned, the dog had chewed through not only the tire, but the metal rim of her front passenger side too. My jaws were quite a bit stronger than a German shepherd’s were.

The sound of snapping bone filled my ears as my teeth severed Isis’s hand, spilling her golden god blood into my mouth. Power surged through me as it touched my tongue. The goddess wailed in agony, pulling back her bleeding stump of an arm. I bounded to my feet and tackled her to the ground. I pounded away at her face, and as it turned to putty beneath my onslaught, I saw Apep fly off through the distance.

His body slammed down onto the clouds a few yards from me, and the lightning in the sky above faded to the distant rumble of a well spent storm. The destroyer turned his gaze upon me and bared his teeth before raising one hand and gesturing for me to “bring it.”

“Come on, Thes.” He cracked his neck. “All out of tricks?”

“What happened to leaving me alive to tell the tale?” I asked, slowly getting to my feet. In all honesty, I was just trying to buy myself some time to recover. I had no plans on living through this battle. I was going to take him down even if it killed me. As the thought settled over me, I realized that he who cannot be named knew this as well. He had called it an inevitability. Turned out he was right.

“I’ve changed my mind.” He dropped back into a fighting stance which was a little weird. Isis twitched beneath me, and as I glanced down toward her, the destroyer rushed at me.

His fist came at me like a bullet train, and as I tried to dodge, Apep grabbed him from behind. The blow struck me anyway, though not with nearly as much force as it would have if the snake god hadn’t jerked him backward off his feet. As I was flung backward across the clouds, every bone in my left shoulder shattered into tiny fragments, the two of them fell to the ground grappling with each other.

I lay there for only a second, trying to will myself to move despite having been hit by a metaphysical bus, but it was long enough for Isis to get to her feet and stumble toward me, rage in her battered, bloody eyes.

“You took my hand,” she slurred through bleeding lips. “Now I’ll take something from you.”

“If it’s my job, you can have it,” I replied, pushing back the agony of my busted shoulder and getting to my feet. That one blow had caused so much damage, I knew my arm would be out of commission for a while. “Sure, you get to go back in time and see the world, but the whole getting beat up by deities thing is really starting to suck.”

Instead of replying, she ran at me, golden blood trailing from her stump of a hand as she drew back to beat me upside the head with it. As she did so, I stepped into her attack, shouldering her in the chest and knocking her back a step. Her breath whooshed out of her as our combined momentum crushed her ribcage.

I stepped through the attack, drawing Khufu’s khopesh as I did so since it’d been relatively effective thus far on freeing deities from the influence of he who cannot be named. My blow came around in an arc as she threw her good arm up to block. The flat of my blade hit her upward moving elbow with an ear splitting crack and shattered into a million shards of broken, splintered metal. My hand kept going, the hilt of the weapon still traveling through the air. I felt the power in the khopesh evaporate as it smacked weakly into the goddess’s abdomen.

Isis ignored my attack and kicked me in the chest, shattering my own ribs as I hit the ground a few feet away. The hilt of the lifeless khopesh slipped from my hand, landing on the clouds next to me with an empty thud as a horrible feeling settled in my gut that was entirely divorced from the pain of my immediate injuries. That weapon had been the anchor keeping Khufu on this world, and while I knew the mummy had been turning to stone, there was always a chance I could have saved him. But with the weapon shattered, and all its mystical energy leaking into the ether, he would revert to a lifeless corpse. And it was all my fault. How could I be so stupid?

Tears filled my eyes as the goddess grabbed me by the throat and hauled me to attention like I weighed less than nothing.

“Now that I’ve taken something important from you, it’s time for you to learn to die,” she said, and her words slipped around my senses like a noose, cutting off everything and leaving me unable to do more than hang there as she began dragging me toward the edge of the clouds. “It’s too bad you’re not better dressed. Usually people want to look nice when they meet their maker. Oh well.” And with that, she released me, and I fell backward off the heavens for the second time that day.

The only difference was this time I grabbed onto Isis with my good arm and brought her along for the ride. She stumbled forward, slipping off the edge along with me, and we plummeted through the air.

“It’s too bad you can’t fly,” I cried as I held onto the struggling goddess with all my might. “You’ll just have to hit the earth along with me. I wonder, can your godly durability survive a fall like that?”

Instead of responding, she kneed me in the face, breaking my nose and snapping my head backward. My hand slipped off of her wrist, and as it did so, Isis started to transform. Sapphire light spilled from her body as she turned into a massive white bird. She struggled, flapping one broken wing in an attempt to right herself as I grabbed hold of one slender bird leg and hung on for dear life.

She juked and jived, spinning around in midair and making my stomach leap into my throat, but I kept a firm grip on her avian leg. We were so high above the earth, I couldn’t even see the ground, and that realization made me so scared, I gripped her even tighter. Even if I could hang on forever, I had no way to defend myself, and my strength ebbed with every moment.

Isis slashed at me with the claws on her one free leg, trying to tear me open, and I bit down on her ankle, sinking my terrible werewolf teeth into her thin birdy leg. Fluid that tasted strangely of chicken filled my mouth, and I swallowed as her shriek splintered my hearing and left an aching ring in its wake. With each gulp of her godly blood, my strength returned. Like magic, my left shoulder started working, the bones writhing back into place inside me and welding themselves back together.

I reached out with my left hand and buried my claws in her underside, ripping the goddess’s underbelly open. She squawked loud enough to shatter my eardrums and tried to fling me away once more. Only this time her efforts were weaker than her previous ones had been. As blood and thicker bits spilled from her insides, we started to plummet to earth, and I realized with horrible certainty, that by splitting her open, I had made it impossible for us to keep aloft.

As we fell in a lopsided death spiral that became more and more severe with each passing second, Isis reverted back into her human form. She folded herself like an accordion, drawing her legs to her chest and pulling me within reach of her arms. She smashed her fist into the top of my skull. My vision fragmented down the center and everything went blurry as my teeth broke, tearing free of her leg.

She hit me again, and even though I felt the important bits of my skull crack, I wrapped both of my arms around her waist and never let go.

Chapter 22

We hit the ground. I died. Seriously. My body was reduced to a pile of sloppy mush in the bottom of a crater in the desert. Isis didn’t fare much better, but because she was a goddess, she seemed to retain cohesion.

It was a little weird to watch her pull herself back together, especially because I was little more than a ghost floating next to what remained of my body. It was a little weird to be dead, especially because even up until the very last moment, I’d sort of expected to live through it.

Still as I watched Isis pull herself back together like she was that liquid metal terminator repairing himself after being doused with liquid nitrogen and shattered across the floor, a strange sense of calm settled over me. I was done. There was nothing else I could do. Part of me rankled at that, but most of me was suddenly very tired and very happy to be done with everything. I was a mortal after all and had been meddling not just in the affairs of a dragon, but in the affairs with gods. Being able to stop doing that was like a huge weight being lifted from my shoulders.

Yes, I was a little disappointed that I wouldn’t be able to rescue Sekhmet or return Connor’s soul to him, but as I tried to think about it, the place where my emotions were just shut off, replaced by a weird sense of finality. I was done after all, there was no use worrying about them anymore. Besides, I was pretty sure things would work themselves out, and even if they didn’t, what was I going to do about it? I was dead.

What was left of me couldn’t even really be called a corpse because, as I said before, it was mostly just a crimson splotch strewn across the sand. That was the problem with falling from heaven, I supposed. There had been a point when the air resistance had actually burned a great deal of my flesh from my bones, but with Isis’s body to block most of it and my werewolf healing, I’d survived that more or less.

That said, there had been a point where my werewolf metabolism caused my body to start devouring itself to keep going. My muscle mass and bones had melted away before my eyes as my body reappropriated every available nutrient to keep me alive. Even though death seemed inevitable, I’d hung on to the vain hope I could take Isis along with me. I had forced Isis beneath me, using her as a shield so she couldn’t transform and fly away. Since she was a goddess, she had fared much better in our fall from heaven, but hey, I never said it was a good plan, did I?

We’d struck the sand hard enough to melt the sand into glass and shatter the bedrock beneath. What remained of my scrawny arms and legs had splintered under the force of the impact. My body slammed into Isis a millisecond later with enough force to push my teeth back through my skull. My bones pulverized, and the gooey bits inside me burst from my flesh like I was a bag filled with red paint. Isis fared no better, but then again, she was a goddess.

I wasn’t quite sure how long I floated there, watching her put herself back together in a way that all the king’s men and all the king’s horses would surely envy. Me? I was definitely going the route of Humpty Dumpty. There was a tug at my spirit, an unearthly pull trying to guide me away from this spot, but I couldn’t look away for the goddess even though it grew more insistent by the second. I wasn’t quite ready to leave. I couldn’t quite understand why, but something about this end felt… unfinished.

Wasn’t I supposed to be special? They had called me the Dunewalker, but what if I wasn’t? What if I was just some poor schlub who had gotten in way over his furry werewolf head? I mean, hadn’t Geb told me that if I didn’t do my job, someone would take my place? At least I think it was Geb. I’d encountered so many Egyptian deities, they were all starting to run together now.

The scenery was starting to fade away now. Bright light the likes of which I couldn’t explain filled my vision, and like a silly little moth, I felt myself drawn inexplicably toward it. I floated forward, and as I moved closer to the light, a strange sense of peace fell over me. I was done, and that was okay.

“No.”

The word stopped me. The light was so close I could feel on my ghostly skin like the first kiss of morning sun. I moved back toward it, ignoring the voice calling to me.

“No you don’t, Thes.”

“Why?” I said or think I said. It was weird because I didn’t actually have a mouth.

“You don’t get to leave yet.”

“But I stopped Isis.” The words left me before I could stop them. The light was so very close. I reached out and my blob of a hand touched its shimmering silver surface with the barest fingertip. Peace settled over me. I wasn’t sure what the speaker wanted, but quite honestly, I didn’t care. If this was what only the barest touch felt like, what would it feel like if I embraced the light? I wanted to find out. I was tired of fighting.

“That isn’t enough.” A hand gripped my shoulder, searing my soul like napalm and ripping away my peace. A scream tore from the entirety of my being as I was dragged away from the light. I fought and twisted, trying to get back to the light as it faded away from me. The music in my ears grew faint enough to be replaced by the empty hum of the Egyptian desert.

A female face appeared in my field of vision, so magnificent in its splendor, it almost made up for what I’d lost, almost took away the ache inside me. Her hair was like freshly brushed gold and her eyes like a perfect ocean, endless and inviting. She reached out to me with one milk white hand and touched my chin, and as she did so, my face became strangely substantial.