Witches' Bane (The Soul Eater Book 2) (3 page)

I
shoved
Cujo’s unlocked door open and stepped inside. The apartment never changed. Clean, functional. Cujo kept it that way, or his daughter, Chantal, did. It was a weekday, which meant Chantal was with her mother and I was free to wield Alysdair without the risk of spooking normal people. But there was no use getting sword-happy until I knew what I was dealing with. I kept the sword sheathed snugly against my back and quietly stalked down the hallway.

“… won’t help us.” The male sounded younger than he had on the phone, and his voice quivered, probably from a touch of fear.

“Shooting me won’t help either,” came Cujo’s gruff response. The anger was still there, more like indignation than fear. Few things frightened Cujo, and a kid with a gun wasn’t one of them.

“I don’t want to. I just… I don’t have anyone else to turn to. Nobody is listening to me. I don’t have a choice.”

“Nobody turns to the Nameless One unless they’re desperate.” I smiled at the gravitas in Cujo’s words. He was deliberately stoking the urban legend bullshit. The mystique surrounding the Nameless One meant the cops were more likely to dismiss reports of me and my sword.

“But he doesn’t like witches,” Cujo added.

“Why?” the kid asked, sounding younger by the second.

“A bunch tried to capture him once and syphon off his—”

I stepped into the living room, bringing an abrupt end to their chat. Cujo was sitting in his wheelchair facing me, his back to the window. He had a gun taped to the wall behind the drapes, but he hadn’t reached for it. Sitting across the table from him was the reason why. Even with his back turned to me I could tell the witch was in his early twenties—young for a witch. It usually took a few decades for their obsession to turn them into cantankerous zealots. This one was bouncing his knee and tapping his fingers on the table. Adrenaline and fear rattled his bones.

He saw Cujo’s attention drift and twisted in his seat to see me standing in the doorway. The coat, the sword—they had a reputation. The kid witch swung his little gun around and aimed it somewhere around my torso. His hand shook so much he’d probably miss, even at five feet away. The fact he preferred to threaten me with a gun and not magic told me a lot about this kid’s magical ability.

I lifted my hands and reached behind my neck, bringing my fingers closer to Alysdair’s grip. “That’s twice in twelve hours I’ve had a gun pointed at me. You’d think witches would be more creative.”

The kid’s darting eyes were still bouncing around me, taking it all in. The Nameless One. Soul Eater. And Godkiller, if he believed the rumors. Considering his damp hairline and wide eyes, he did.

“Put the gun down,” Cujo drawled. “Shooting the Nameless One will just piss him off.” One of Cujo’s eyebrows arched in a
Can you believe it?
expression.

“W-what …”

I noticed a plastic bag beside his chair and wondered if the smell of blood had lingered on me from Osiris’s gift basket or if it was coming from whatever was in that bag. “Lunch?”

“Huh?”

“What’s your name?”

He swallowed and hesitated, as if telling me his name might give me power. “Er… Kenny. My name’s Kenny.”

I lowered my hands. Kenny wouldn’t shoot Cujo or me. With a sigh, I stepped forward, plucked the gun from his hand, and showed him the safety. “You might wanna flick that over next time you threaten someone.”

He blinked too many times to count. I turned my back on him and peeled back the drapes, uncovering Cujo’s backup plan. “And don’t pick a cop to threaten.”

Cujo had called me out for amateur hour.

Kenny’s already pale face whitened to the color of milk. “He’s a cop? I just thought… when you wouldn’t take my calls and the coven said to avoid you, I… I checked out the last known site where you were spotted—” I scowled and he swallowed with a loud click. “There’s a website. You can log the Nameless One’s… your… er…your last known sighting.”

Cujo snorted like he’d never heard of it. He’d probably created the damn thing.

My scowl hardened.

“I found some fibers, did a little”—Kenny wiggled his fingers in the air—“and cast a spell to find your strongest connection. I didn’t know this guy is a cop.”

Kenny’s spell must have been weak to focus on a human connection. Otherwise, it would’ve picked up that my strongest connection was Shu. I would’ve liked to see Kenny break into Shu’s office and put a gun to her head. She probably would’ve used his skin for a new rug. His poor spell-casting abilities had saved him that fate.

Cujo smiled. “Strongest connection, huh? Love you too, Ace.”

“You do that often?” I asked the kid. “Go following spells into people’s homes and threatening them?”

“No. I mean…this witch thing is a hobby. It’s my girl who got me into it. She’s awesome. She has all these achievement awards from the coven. She does way more—”

I tossed Kenny’s gun to Cujo, cutting off Harry Potter, and moved to the window to check the street outside. I wasn’t expecting trouble, not with the kid’s poor planning, but it didn’t hurt to keep an eye out. As Cujo had so kindly spilled, I’d crossed paths with witches before.

A cat dashed across the street and disappeared behind a row of parked cars. A suited and booted guy marched up the sidewalk, staring at his cellphone while furiously tapping out a message with his thumb. Nothing unusual jumped out at me, but a slippery uncertainty gnawed away at my insides. The sensation pulled at my thoughts, like a kid tugging on a pant leg, as though I’d forgotten something vital and at any second, it would come rushing back and knock me on my ass.

“So, Kenny the Witch,” I said. “You have me here. Now what?”

Kenny ran his trembling fingers through his short blond hair and rubbed at his forehead. “My girlfriend. She’s missing.”

I crossed my arms and glared across the room at him. “Not my problem.”

“There are others—”

“I’ve heard.”

“We asked for help—”

“I refused.”

“But we—”

“I have a long memory. If you don’t know what happened, ask someone who does. You shouldn’t be here. You shouldn’t have threatened a friend of mine. You’re lucky I’m not carving tiny pieces off you to take back to my pet sorceress.”

Kenny looked ready to lose his breakfast. He opened his mouth—to beg, to make excuses, I didn’t know and didn’t care. Cujo could have dealt with him without dragging me all the way out here.

“Ace…” Cujo grumbled. “Ask what’s in the bag.”

Kenny didn’t wait. He snatched the bag off the floor and clutched it to his chest. “I know I shouldn’t be here.” His wide eyes flicked between Cujo and me. “I know that, but… well, like I said, I don’t have a choice.”

He flipped the bag over and looked away.

A human arm flopped onto the tabletop. Long, decorated nails and small, thin fingers. Female. The cut was clean, below the elbow. A chopping blow, no sawing. Someone or something would have to be abnormally strong to cleave an arm off in one go. Or maybe the witch had caught her arm in industrial machinery. What did the rest of her look like?

“That’s something you don’t see every day,” Cujo quipped and then winced as he remembered Kenny.

I approached the table, leaned in, and drew the stiff fingers back. There, on the palm, a single hieroglyph was carved into the flesh depicting the body of a jackal with the head of a snake. I’d seen it before, only once, on the box I found in my mother’s chamber right after she’d died. “What is that?”

Kenny shifted from foot to foot. “We don’t know. None of us know. I even looked it up online, and I—”

I had him by the throat and against the wall before either of us realized I’d moved.

“Ace,” Cujo snapped.

I glared at Kenny the Witch, dug deep into his eyes, and found that naive soul of his: bright, light, and clean—ripe for the picking.

Wait
.

I didn’t want his soul… oh, but I did. How long had it been? Not long enough, but still, power clawed at me, eager to be free and grab hold of young, stupid Kenny and devour him whole. I could sink Alysdair into his gut and let the sword have him, but where was the fun in that? I wanted to take and own this foolish witch for being the parasite he was, for stealing magic that didn’t belong to him, for all the damn witches and their insolence.

I tore my gaze away and tossed the witch against the table. He stumbled, almost upending the table, and fell to a knee. Tiny threads of his soul lingered within reach. If I wanted to, I could pull and I’d have him. I growled a warning at him, at myself, at everything.

Damn witches.

Kenny spluttered and wheezed, and when I could look at him without wanting to tear his soul out, I watched Cujo wheel over to help him up.

Pinpricks of restlessness touched my nerves. What
by Sekhmet
was going on with me?

I should leave the witches to their own damn problems, but that mark, that symbol… it was connected to me by way of Ammit’s little box, the one warded against me, and there it was again, on a witch’s severed arm. What did it mean?

“Who’s your girlfriend?” I asked, looking again at the curled hand and the mark. Flakes of blood had fallen onto Cujo’s clean, white table.

“Julie Carter. She works in a health food store on Thirty-Fifth and—”

“A witch?” I snarled, hearing the acid in my voice and not caring.

“Yeah, but we’re not grand witches or anything. I mean she’s better than me. We just practice on weekends. We were going to watch Netflix, but when I got to her place…it was trashed. And I found that. I freaked out. I mean, the mark, I knew it was magic related, but the coven, they were already busy with other missing cases. They said they’d look into it, but she could be out there somewhere, and nobody is doing any—”

“When was this?”

“Last night.” Kenny swayed on his feet and rubbed at his neck. “They said not to contact you, but witches have been going missing for weeks and nobody is doing anything!”

I shoved the arm back into its bag and scooped it off the table. “Kenny, congratulations. You’ve succeeded where the others have failed. I charge ninety bucks an hour, and the minimum charge is four hours. The full list of fees is on the website. I don’t want any other witches involved. I’m keeping the arm. I’ll be in touch.”

As I strode through the door, I heard Kenny ask Cujo, “Is he always like this?”

“Only on good days.”

S
hu wasn’t back
at the office. I called her cell, but she didn’t answer. Not one to be so easily dissuaded, I checked the Find Friend app and rode my Ducati through a rain shower to where the app had pinned her location. People streamed back and forth from a diner on West Thirty-Fourth Street, a block from Madison Square Garden and right in the heart of tourist central. After a quick recce, it was clear Shu wasn’t inside, but I hadn’t really expected her to be. I wasn’t entirely sure what she did outside of work, but I had my suspicions. Hence keeping tabs on her spell-purchasing activities at Mafdet’s Curiosities store.

The app blinked her location as inside the building.

I parked the bike against the brownstone walls and eyed a set of rickety steel-frame stairs snaking up the back of the building. Shu moved apartments regularly. I had no idea if this was her home or someone else’s that she happened to be visiting in the middle of a workday. Maybe she was on a job? Or was it personal?

I tried calling her cell again and started up the stairs.

A gaze skittered down my back, pulling me to a stop. A glance over my shoulder revealed plenty of people power walking back and forth along the sidewalk, but none were looking up. Few New Yorkers bothered looking up. They focused on their destinations and marched to it. Still, something
had
hooked into my senses.

At the top of the steps Shu answered the door before I could knock, and shot me a scowl jagged enough to cut. Her jacket was gone, but otherwise, she looked the same as she had earlier that morning.

“What are you doing?” she asked, raking her gaze from my head to my boots and back again.

“Working. You?”

“Lunch.” She scanned my face, looking for what, I wasn’t sure.

“Were you expecting company?” I asked.

“No. Why?”

I shrugged off the gaze on my back and lifted the arm in its bag. “I brought you a gift.”

In the soft light, I could just make out the bloody fingers clinging to the plastic. Shu couldn’t miss the ripe smell of decay wafting from inside the plastic.

“I need you to take a look at it.”

“Of course you do.” She moved aside, letting me pass.

I stepped over the threshold, expecting to feel the magical tickle of a shielding spell or something to protect whatever she got up to here, but I felt nothing. No wards, no protection spells. If there were any, they were so deep I couldn’t detect them.

Her apartment was a mess and appeared either half finished or half gutted. Some walls were plastered, while others weren’t walls so much as frames you could step through. Split-levels and trailing cables made walking treacherous, and above, the ceiling was long gone, exposing the original steel beams that led up to the trusses. I was fairly certain her place wasn’t up to code.

Ahead of me, Shu stepped through the chaos with practiced precision, weaving through doorways with no doors into a room without walls, and stopped at a long steel table that appeared to be a stand-in for a kitchen countertop. She swept her a whole array of bowls, jugs, colored jars and plastic containers aside and turned to me, waiting.

I stepped around extension cables, empty paint cans, and used paint trays. “Renovations?”

“The owner bailed halfway through fixing it up. I bought it cheap.”

“You own this place?” She must have needed it for spellwork. Why else would an ex-demon sorceress need to buy an apartment? Maybe something about its geographical location made it a power hotspot? I’d look up the address back at the office. A sorceress would have a reason for purchasing a dilapidated old building.

“Did it come with the diner round the front?”

“Yeah, but that’s managed separately.”

“Osiris’s balls, how much did this place cost?”

Her glower sizzled. “You have your things. I have mine. Now give me the damn arm.” She held out her hand.

I dug into the bag and handed over the arm. “You actually own this place? Your name’s on the deed?” My gaze snagged on an easel leaning against a wall in another room across what might have once been a hallway. Seven or eight painted canvasses also rested against the wall. The one at the front, facing out, was a striking oil portrait marked with bold slashes of color against deeper, darker strokes. I didn’t recognize the subject and wasn’t sure whether it was human or god or something else entirely.

Did she paint those?
No, Shu didn’t paint. That was absurd. Maybe she’d stolen them or someone had traded them as payment on something I probably didn’t want to know about but should.

“Yours?” I thumbed toward the paintings like it was no big deal.

“This symbol?” she asked, ignoring my question while poking at the bloodless palm.

“Have you seen it before?”

“No.” She placed the arm on the table and leaned in close. “The jackal suggests an underworld origin, but the snake for a head? That’s new. Do you know it?”

“No.”

She’d known me long enough to recognize the half lie but didn’t push it.

“What are you going to do with this place when we move on?” I asked. And we would move on, probably soon if we couldn’t pay the rent on the business. Neither of us had roots anywhere. Nobody and no place Osiris could use against us. This apartment, the commitment—it wasn’t like Shu to make such an obvious mistake.

She sighed harshly. “I don’t know. Maybe I’ll sell it or rent it out. Do you want to know about my living arrangements or your witch’s arm?”

“You know it’s from a witch?”

“The background magic is fading, but it’s there.”

“Can you tell me if there’s any additional magic?”

“Besides the witch’s personal brand, I presume?” Turning the arm, she probed at the long, painted nails and noticed one had snapped off. “She fought.” Shu’s nostrils flared, and whatever she smelled was familiar enough to pique her interest. She moved down the forearm to the cut. “It’s very clean. Straight through. Takes a lot of strength to sever an arm without hacking at it.”

She’d know.

“You brought this straight here, to me?” she asked. “No detours?”

“Straight here, but my new friend Kenny might have shared it with his coven.”

Her sharp sorceress’s mind whirred behind her eyes. She straightened and leaned back against the counter. “I can see whose magic touched her. But first I’ll have to separate any additional touches and that might take a while.”

“How long?”

“A few hours if Mafdet has the few ingredients I need.”

“Can you trace the arm’s owner?”

“Yes. You think she’s alive?”

“We get paid either way.”

Shu’s blood-red lips curved up. “So you did agree to work for the witches?”

Shu didn’t know about the witches’ attempt to trap and bleed magic out of me. We’d tolerated each other for centuries, but I didn’t go around telling my enemies about my weaknesses. Shu was stuck as human, but that didn’t make her any less the demon sorceress she’d been when I condemned her soul. Time heals a lot of wounds, but not all, and revenge festers the longest.

“The client had a gun to Cujo’s head.” The mark had sealed the deal, but Shu didn’t need to know my interest in the symbol was personal.

Her smile tightened, verging on a scowl. “How did he know Cujo’s connected to you? Cujo’s careful to bury his tracks.”

“Witches,” I grunted. “As much as their magic is borrowed, sometimes they get lucky.”
Like the time they got lucky with me.
“I’ll leave the hand in your hands.”

“Funny,” she deadpanned.

Stepping around the chaos toward the door, I added, “Let me know what you find, and when I get back, I expect all five fingers to be intact.”

“Where are you going?”

“To take Osiris’s tablet back and ask why a bunch of priests went to all the trouble of stealing it last night.”
And convince him to let me out of the deal to kill a god,
I added silently.

“Priests?” I heard the frown in her voice but didn’t look back. “Are you sure? I didn’t think the gods still sought out worshippers at least not in the last few centuries.”

“You do your job.” I waved over my shoulder. “And I’ll do mine.”
And we’ll meet somewhere in the middle, like always.

The rain had started up again, pattering against the steel steps and lifting dry dust smells off the street. I closed Shu’s apartment door and lingered on the top step, letting the cool drizzle streak down my face.

Shu’s apartment, this building… I didn’t know Shu had bought a property and I should have. Just because she hadn’t gotten up to any mischief in the last few centuries didn’t mean she wasn’t working on something. I needed to pay more attention to her. Complacency could turn even the most powerful into fools.

The back of my neck itched, senses prickling. The errant gaze was back.

I could head back to my office, pick up the tablet, and make my way to Osiris’s mansion. Whoever had taken a liking to me would either follow me or not. Or I could take a walk and see if they were brave enough to get close. Then we might have ourselves a discussion involving Alysdair. Since I’d prefer to watch paint dry than go to Osiris’s, a walk it was.

The rain had driven most of the pedestrian traffic indoors. Those left shielded themselves with umbrellas. Nobody noticed Alysdair’s obvious handle sticking up from my coat collar. If anyone did, they’d likely dismiss it. This was modern New York, where anything went. These days, I didn’t even have to grow my hair out to hide the handle. Cops were more worried about abandoned backpacks and no-fly lists. Still, I didn’t want to invite trouble unless I had to.

I strode down Thirty-Fourth
Street, passing hotel entrances flanked by neatly trimmed potted shrubs, and slowed alongside a row of high construction panels. Inside, heavy machinery sat idle in pools of murky water. I checked the street both ways and pulled at the gate, straining the padlock and chain. Certain no one was eyeing me, I stepped through the gap.

The clatter and burr of construction in other plots joined New York’s background noise, while the rain muffled the rest. I ran a hand through my hair and flicked water from my fingers. Let whoever was tailing me show themselves.

A rock was pitched over the fencing and landed with a
thwump
in a puddle. I got enough of a look at it to realize it was in fact a canopic jar before it exploded in a blast of furnace-like heat and blinding light. Small pebbles from inside the jar peppered my coat and buried themselves in the mud at my feet. Then those black pebbles started twitching and digging themselves to the surface.

Scarabs.

If I gave them a chance, they’d burrow through my clothes, into my skin, and drill deep, eating their way to my heart. Once there, they’d turn themselves, and my flesh, into stone.

I reached for Alysdair but stopped, knowing the sword wouldn’t do any good against hundreds of scarabs. What I needed was fire, not a blade.

A scarab scuttled over my boot. I kicked it off. Another moved by my shoulder. I shucked off my coat and flung it aside. The scarabs chittered loudly, their clicks and gristly chewing audible over the rain. I stomped on one and then another.

“Ace Dante.”

Three of the four priests I’d met last night were back. I pulled Alysdair free as a second jar shattered behind me and more scarabs swarmed toward me.

I thrust out a hand.
“San!” Stop!

The scarabs did, all of them, frozen in the mud. But the short, sharp spell had left me exposed to something far worse.

The priests’ words rose up in unison.
“Truka sros dvarr em sra imdarvurrd, I bemd aeui, bae raors, bae kuir, bae kemd.”

A binding spell designed specifically for trapping underworld monsters. Its coils wound around me, pulling tighter and holding me rigid. The spellword I’d thrown at the scarabs held, but it wouldn’t for much longer, and once my magic snapped and my spellword failed, those scarabs would overwhelm me.

I’d tried to prevent this. I’d warned the priests off. What was about to happen was their own doing.

The power buried deep inside me rose up. So much of it…too much. New York, the priests, the rain, the mud, the scarabs—it all fell away until it was just me and the soul-pounding pressure to
devour
. I fixed my gaze on a priest, the nervous one who’d done all the talking before, and let the words come: “
Tra k-dae amcru-kak sra ksork, kosec amcru-kak esk kassrakamsk, omd kae kuir amcru-kak aeuirk.”

With the sound of the ages-old spell falling from my lips, the pressure built.

The priest glared back, his words—the binding—tumbling over and over, but he wouldn’t win. He could have a hundred priests beside him and he wouldn’t win. You can’t beat the Soul Eater at his own game.

My words sounded in one long endless stream, burrowing deep into his soul, where I hooked in. He wasn’t entirely good, not this one. Had I weighed him, it would’ve been a close call. Had I followed the rules, the judgment would’ve been up to Ammit, but she was gone and I wasn’t my mother. I yanked, pulling back in body and mind, and tore both the light and the dark from him. He didn’t scream, didn’t make a sound. He just collapsed as though someone had pulled the plug. He wasn’t dead, just empty.
Undead
.

Down his soul went, sinking inside and filling me up with power, so much power. It throbbed through me, dark and heady. And I
needed
it. Gods, it felt good to be me again.

A blur of movement dashed so quickly it appeared to carve right through the second and third priests. Their lives were sundered before either could utter a scream. I reached for their souls, hungry for more, but a wave of fire poured around me. I recoiled, and the
stop
spellword ceased.

The scarabs? I braced, expecting them to scurry out of the flames, but nothing emerged from the fire, and as quickly as the flames had come, they were gone again, fizzling out in the muddy puddles, having wiped away all evidence of the scarabs, but not the bodies.

And not the woman with the close-cropped black hair standing over me, hand planted on her hip, and an eyebrow arched over familiar cat-green eyes.