Witches' Bane (The Soul Eater Book 2) (9 page)

“You’re not real.” I’d hoped that saying it might dispel the apparition, but instead, he cast me a sideways smile and started a slow, purposeful walk around the room, admiring the scrolls as he passed them by. “I am your fear, your enemy, and the source of your soul-deep hatred. I guard that which you’re afraid to face.”

“This would be so much easier if you told me what I’m missing. What do these scrolls mean? How does any of this relate to my vendetta against witches?”

“I am not here to give you these answers.” He stopped several strides away from me, his armor almost blinding. “I’m here to prevent you from finding them.”

Great. Not only did I have to contend with Osiris in reality, but my imagination just had to concoct him kicking my ass in my subconscious too.

Osiris reached behind him and retrieved the khopesh. The blade had a hooked point, designed to rip away an opponents shield. I didn’t have a shield, didn’t have a sword either. All I had were my fists and my wits, which had been lacking lately.

“Is my imagination going to help me out with a weapon?” I called into the quiet, sidestepping Osiris as he began circling me.

I shook out my hands and rolled my shoulders. Maybe this was a good thing. I couldn’t die in my own head, could I? I curled my hands into fists, ready for his attack.

“You really want to do this?” I grinned. “Because I’ve been waiting five centuries, one month, two weeks, four days, and fifteen hours to kick the immortal shit out of you.”

Osiris charged, time slowed, and my heart pumped a too-fast beat. I knew he’d open his attack by swinging his sword left to right the way he always did in battle. I watched his stride, the slight tilt of his head, and the track of his gaze, and I shied right, swinging around and lifting myself out of the blade’s way at the very last second. He pulled up and tried to turn, but I sank my fingers down the back of his neck and yanked him off balance. My elation didn’t last. He pivoted, faster and stronger in this unreality, and clocked me in the jaw with a gauntleted left fist. Fireworks and heat exploded over the right side of my face, knocking the sense right out of me.

I staggered but still had hold of his back plate, and when he thrust his sword upward, I hooked his leg out from under him. We clattered to the floor in a messy scrap. Osiris slashed the sword through the air. The god was damn fast for a figment of my imagination. I thrust a hand up and locked my arm under his jaw, holding him back. His attack jolted to a stop. I punched up with a loose left fist. My knuckles struck home, jarring my arm. I hit him again, still holding his sword away from my neck, but my shoulder burned and was about to give out. Again, I hit him, this time delivering a few centuries’ worth of searing rage into the punch.

Blood splattered and smeared across his cheek. He glared down at me and laughed, and that’s when I knew I couldn’t win this. Not head-on. No weapons, no magic. He was holding all the cards and all the tricks. My subconscious wasn’t playing fair.

The sword trembled inches from my face, and Osiris pushed down, but behind him, way up high where light poured into the tower, a flicker caught my eye. The stairs. Whatever I needed, whatever the truth was, it was up there.

My arm gave way. I turned my head and twisted, expecting the worst. Osiris’s sword dug into my shoulder, peeling the flesh apart and sinking bone deep. Pain sparked to life and left a blessed numbness in its wake. Though none of this was real, it sure hurt like it was.

“The day the curse lifts, I’m coming for you!” I slammed my left forearm into the sword’s handle, driving it back into Osiris’s jaw, where it struck with a satisfying crunch. He grunted something archaic and then received a jab to the nose that cracked his face open like a nut, revealing the stark white bones of something very un-Osiris-like beneath.

I kicked out, shifting Osiris’s armored bodyweight to the left, and rolled right. Then I scrambled to my feet and bolted for the stairs. I made it up the first few steps just as the sword twanged off the wall behind me, close enough that I’d felt its passing whisper across my neck. Whatever that thing dressed up like Osiris was, it wasn’t going gentle on me. Only I would have a subconscious hell-bent on murdering me.

I took the steps three at a time, spiraling higher until the ground was a long way down, but the top of the tower still wasn’t in sight. What if I didn’t make it? What if I couldn’t beat this? I’d keep on killing, and it would get worse. It had before. I’d never known when to stop.

Osiris, with his broken face, appeared on a small landing in front of me. I skidded to a halt and watched his body collapse into a mound of writhing, scuttling scarabs.

And no fire in sight.

“Oh, c’mon! I can’t hate myself this much!” I tugged off my coat, tossed it over the stream of bugs, and then kept right on running.

Head down and arms pumping, I beat my boots against the steps, ignoring the dull throbbing pain in my shoulder.

“I get it!” Clearly, my subconscious and I were in agreement. I deserved this. Hell, I deserved a whole lot worse. Wasn’t that what everyone had been trying to tell me? Osiris, Isis, and even Shukra when she got the chance.
Monster
. The witches would agree.

With still no end in sight, I slowed on a landing and braced an arm against the wall to catch my breath.

More than darkness.
Those words were important, and maybe if I could remember when Bast had said them, I’d know why. I heard them now, trying to fight the good fight, but Bast didn’t know me. Shukra was the only being that had come close to knowing me, and even she was a long way off. These days, I wondered if I knew myself. Killing witches, devouring souls, turning Osiris’s staff into soulless undead—that had been the truth of me from before the curse tied me to this earth.

Was Osiris’s curse weakening?

At that thought, my heart rate kicked up its tempo. To be free again? Free of Osiris, free of Shukra, free of these earthly bindings? That was the dream, wasn’t it?

I flicked my gaze up to Isis as she descended the stairs. Her body was clad in ceremonial scales, the likes of which you wouldn’t find in the history books. Made of gold and precious gems, her armor glittered as she moved, her approach too compelling to ignore.

“I wondered when you’d show up.” At least the race up the stairs hid how my heart pounded and my blood flowed too fast through my veins.

“Did you miss me so?” she crooned, her smooth, musical words pouring into my ears like poison.

“It wouldn’t be my fucked-up dream without you.”

She circled around and stopped between me and the ledge. One quick shove and I’d solve a lot of problems. Of course, it wouldn’t be that easy. Just like the unreal Osiris, this Isis played by her own rules.

She was armed with twin bejeweled daggers strapped to her hips—not that she needed those blades. Her words had always cut deeper than any blade.

“This is all wrong,” she said, sweeping her gaze around the middle of the tower before settling her inquisitive eyes on me. “There are no answers for you here.”

“You would say that.”

“Did your demon sorceress tell you there were?” She didn’t need me to answer. This was all happening inside my head; she already knew all the answers.

“What does my warped subconscious have planned for me now? Most of my dreams with you involve some kind of BDSM, but your husband introduced me to his sword”—I gestured at my throbbing shoulder—“so I’ll take a rain check.”

“Why are you here?” she inquired.

“You know why.”

She waited, and the quiet stretched on. Like all gods, she’d wait forever. “Fine, I’ll play. I’m killing again, and I need to know why.”

Her eyes sparkled. “You didn’t need a reason before.”

“It was different then.”

“
You
were different?”

I pushed off the wall, feeling somewhat steadier now that I’d rested and didn’t have her husband or the scarabs on my tail. “Yes, I was. But time and the curse have changed me.”

“You’re afraid the curse is fading?” Lifting her head, she looked me in the eye.

I stopped close enough to see how the light scattered in her eyes, drawing me in.

A warm, familiar heat radiated through her armor, and I caught the sweet scent of cinnamon in the air. We’d been this close before, many times in my dreams but only a few times in the real world. An image flickered before my eyes: Isis this close, her dagger in my gut. But in a blink, the image was gone. It couldn’t be a memory; she’d never debase herself by attacking me in such a crude manner. So, what then?

“Why would I be afraid of freedom?” I brushed my fingers along her jawline, marveling at her glossy smoothness. Touching her like this in reality would’ve earned me a string of punishments, but this imaginary Isis was different. She leaned into my touch, seeking more.

“You don’t want to be the monster again. You like being Ace Dante. You like that my husband controls you. That’s why you stopped looking for a cure. The responsibility for you falls upon his shoulders, not yours. That is your freedom. Without the curse, Soul Eater, you’re a slave to your desires.” She caught my hand and held it still. My fingers rested close to her lips. “I killed Ammit”—she leaned in closer so that her next words brushed my lips—“so that you may rise from her ashes.”

She wasn’t real. This was a fantasy in my head. A lie, a dream, and nonsense.

I locked my left hand around her throat. “Where are my answers?” And squeezed.

“Are these answers not the ones you’re looking for?” She laughed a beautiful, tinkling sound, my grip having no effect on her.

I pulled her from the edge, switched places, and shoved her against the wall.

“Here’s how it’s going to be. I’m done with all this vagueness.” I took a step back, sensing the yawning nothingness behind me. “There are no answers up there, because there’s no end to this staircase.” Another step and my heel slipped off the edge. “Why am I killing again?”

Isis tilted her head. The laughter had faded from her eyes. She didn’t think I’d do it. “Because it is who you are.”

I already knew that. I knew it the second Shukra had told me the magic on the dead witch’s arm was mine.

“There’s more. There has to be. If it was all me, I wouldn’t hide from it. I’d embrace it. New York’s streets would be full of ash.”

“There’s more.” She lowered her chin and looked at me through soft, dark lashes. “You feel it. An influence. A guiding hand.”

“A curse?”

She smiled. “You fought so long to avoid the gods, and yet they use you like a pawn. You could be great again, Nameless One. Monster. Godkiller.”

“Which god is using me?” I felt the nothingness pushing at my back. Wavering on the edge, I lifted my hands for balance. A breeze that hadn’t been there before ruffled my shirt and breathed coolness against my back.

“You are bound by your word to kill him.” Isis lunged. Her palm struck me in the chest, rocking me backward. I reached out, snatching for her, but my hand sailed through air, and then I was falling. The wind rushed by, howling inside my head.

I had my answer.

Thoth was behind this.

The walls rushed by, the staircase spun, and then I hit the ground, punched through it, and snapped awake with a gasp—surrounded by anonymous faces and the bitter taste of stolen magic.

A strike to the head plunged me back into nothingness all over again.

W
hen you’re wrenched
out of a dream consisting of your own subconscious kicking your ass, it takes a while to believe your own eyes again. It didn’t help that I appeared to be back at the Met, sprawled on my side on the dais beside the
Temple of Dendur
. I’d woken up hungover in a few temples over the years, but the throbbing in my arm and head had nothing to do with alcohol and everything to do with my head screwing me over.

The faces I’d seen before I lost consciousness peered at me from the dais’s edges. Witches, all of them. Their collective gazes crawled over me like the scuttle of scarab legs.

I pushed up onto my arms and wavered. Shadows tipped and swayed. My arm buckled, dropping me onto my shoulder. Cold shivers rolled over my body, sweeping nausea through me. I had to get a grip. This was real, not a screwed-up pseudo-dream. The floor felt solid, the air smelled of old, dry stone—the temple—and there was something very wrong with me. I knew I should stand, but that seemed like too much effort. If I closed my eyes, I could pretend this was right after the Festival of Drunkenness, and maybe I could take a nap.

A smile touched my lips, even as my gut dry-heaved. I hadn’t eaten in a while, which was probably for the best. Otherwise the witches would be watching a whole other show.

“Murderer,” the whispers rose up. “Killer.”

I tried to get a good look at the witches, but their faces swam as their whispered curses dug in. They all looked the same in their brown hooded gowns, like a forest of stunted trees. That image brought on a dirty chuckle.

“Ace!” Shu’s shrill voice sailed over the whispering crowd. “Get up!”

That was easy for her to say. Didn’t she notice that the floor was moving?

Colored lines scrawled across the dais caught my eye. It took effort to focus on them, but I eventually got my arms under me again and pushed myself onto one knee. The lines formed a pattern, and that pattern encircled me, true as prison bars. That explained the weakness. The witches were finishing what their kind had started seven years ago. They were draining my magic right out of me. Panic rapped against my fuzzy thoughts.

While Shu and I were out cold on my office floor, Kenny the Witch must have brought his friends back for round two. Cat obviously hadn’t stuck around. Some guard cat she was. I lifted my head to the temple. The old magic was still potent here. The perfect place to trap a soul eater.

“This…” I paused, the slurred word rebounding in my head.
“This is all a…misunderstanding.”

At least that’s what I’d tried to say. It came out more like, “
Fish…ball…standing.
”

The witches scowled back at me. Tough crowd.

“Godsdammit, Ace. Get off your ass!” Shu, so helpful.

On my knees now, I lifted a finger, something very important on my lips, but whatever it was, it flitted away before I could get a grip on it.

The circle of witches shifted, and I caught sight of Shu. They’d strung her up on the back wall, behind the exhibits. She was human again, not the demon from my dream, and trapped in her own summoning circle, this one painted on the wall behind her. She’d fought. Blood splatters covered her smart clothing and dashed her wheat-pale face. But whatever she’d done to fight back, it hadn’t been enough. If she’d been out cold with me, the witches had probably gotten to her before she could utter a single spellword to stop them.

I turned my head and watched, oddly detached, as the summoning lines channeled what looked like oil toward a canopic jar. All I was made of wouldn’t fit in that one little jar. They’d need fifty, a hundred…more. These witches had no idea what they were dealing with. Whispers. Rumors. The Nameless One. Did they think I was a child’s fairy tale, someone to be trifled with?

A small chuckle bubbled free.

Some of the witches didn’t appreciate my laughter and looked at each other, probably wondering why the Nameless One wasn’t curled up in a pool of his own leaching magic.

I climbed to my feet, swayed, and got a good look at their faces under their hoods. Just normal folk twisted by their lust for forbidden magic. What they didn’t know, what they
couldn’t
know, was that my magic wasn’t like a god’s magic. Mine would eat them up from the soul out. I wouldn’t be around to witness it though. Without my magic, I was nothing but dust—dust like these witches would become if I could just collect myself enough to focus.

“Stop this,” was all I could growl out. I didn’t want to kill them, but give it a few more minutes, and I would want it. If it was anything like last time, I wouldn’t stop with this mob either. Why should I?

Shukra’s gaze hooked into mine.

What are you waiting for? Destroy them,
she snarled inside my head, her voice grating against my battered psyche.

I didn’t have the energy to answer her and broke away from her glare. Besides, she wouldn’t understand. Killing was an easy decision for Shu, but I didn’t
want
this.

If I let them live and they captured all of me in their jars, the damage my unfettered magic could do would be immeasurable—until Osiris cut them down like reeds on a riverbank. But Osiris wasn’t here. This was all on me.

“You killed our wives, husbands, children!” Kenny spoke up. I hadn’t noticed him in the crowd, but there he was, right at the front, hatred and scorn distorting his young face. “
You
are an abomination.”

I worked my jaw, carefully forming the words so they came out clear and precise and not the snarls the real me would have preferred. “And what do you think my magic will do to you, a power-hungry witch?”

“We’re taking it so it can never be used again.” He jutted his chin in defiance. He believed it—believed he could control the old magic, just like all the witches before him. They never learned.

“That’s sweet. Admirable, really. And how long do you think that’ll last before one of you gets curious, gets greedy, and takes a look-see inside the jar?” I turned a little, hands at my sides, feeling their summoning circle leaching the warmth from my bones and the free-flowing tingle of magic deeper inside.

“We won’t.”

“You will. You can’t help yourselves.” Moving closer to Kenny, I pinned him under my glare. “It whispers. It teases and taunts until you can’t deny it. You’re already thinking of it, wondering what it would be like to hold my magic in your bones.” I pointed at the canopic jar and the black veins pulsing my life into it. “That will destroy you. It’s not meant for this world.”

“Neither are you,” Kenny growled.

“I’m not denying that.” I stepped toward the edge of the dais, and the invisible bars of the summoning circle pushed back. If I reached out a hand, the circle would deliver a shock that would likely knock me on my ass. People and objects could get in, but monsters like me couldn’t get out—yet. I’d pushed through many summoning circles like this one before. I already had my senses probing for weaknesses in the frequency. There would be one. No witch trap could hold me for long.

“If I’m an abomination and you want my magic, what does that make you?” I asked Kenny and his crowd.

They were checking each other’s faces and murmuring among themselves. I was not weakening as quickly as I should have been. They knew I’d wiped out a coven seven years ago. But they had me, the elusive Nameless One, caged, didn’t they? There were forty of them and one of me. What could possibly go wrong?

I stepped back and circled my cage, admiring the neat, little swirls and hieroglyphs marking the floor. I could feel a small fracture in its design that wobbled the resonance. It was close. A few more minutes and I’d find it.

“He’s not dying,” someone muttered. “Why isn’t he dying?”

“Oh, I’m dying.” There. I knelt beside the edge of the circle where a crack in the floor had been refilled. This was the source of the dissonance and my exit. “Dying to meet you.”

I flashed the witches a smile, deliberately peeling back some of my apparent normalcy so they got a good look at the blackness flooding my eyes.

A few of the witches got spooked and hurried from the room. They’d be the lucky ones who got away. The rest were fair game.

I danced my fingertips along the crack and said, raising my voice, “I am leaving this cage, and when I do, I’ll hurt you. I didn’t want to kill your kind or destroy the coven all those years ago, but when you cage a wild animal, expect it to bite. When you cage a monster, you’d better expect a nightmare.”

That was all the warning I’d give them. I’d done my part. No more chances. I eased my fingers through the shield, sending visible ripples through its surface. The witches’ background chanting grew louder as panic skittered through the crowd. They should run, run far away and hope they never crossed my path again. But they weren’t running. How bad could I be?

Kenny fought his way to where I was easing open the barrier. He saw me peeling back the spellwork, and our gazes met. Murderous intentions lent his gaze an edge that might have cut, had I cared. But I was beyond caring. The temple around me, my magic unchained—it was almost like home. And at home, I was everything the gods and their denizens feared me to be.

“Run,” I breathed the word so it was barely more than a whisper, but Kenny heard. As soon as he turned, disappearing among the witches, I wrenched up their pitiful barrier and dropped the pretense of being anything other than the Soul Eater
.
I sloughed off my humanity and let the blackness in my soul rise up, fill me out, and wrap me in magic. To them, I was a storm of night and dust.

The witches’ screams fluttered around me, mingling with the tickling, little spells they flung my way. Their efforts were pitiful.

They should have left me well alone when they had the chance. Now the genie was out of the bottle.

Scooping up the canopic jar, I flung it hard against a temple column. Black threads exploded from inside. Those threads rose up, curling and knotting, and then speared into me—through me. The souls I’d devoured centuries before howled and wailed. So much power. All the souls, the lives I’d stolen, they filled me out and made me whole. In the shadow of the temple, the truth of me was revealed.
Home
, my soul crooned.

I turned and eyed the fleeing crowd.

I’d start with these witches. I’d drink them down, but I had no intention of stopping there. A whole city of souls slumbered outside these walls, and this time, Osiris wasn’t here to stop me. I wasn’t sure Osiris
could
stop me.

“Tra k-dae amcru-kak sra ksork, kosec amcru-kak esk kassrakamsk, omd kae kuir amcru-kak aeuirk.”

The spell fell from my lips. I could feel their lives—bigger and brighter than what each person could account for. The little mortals and their precious, immortal souls. They were all mine.

“Ace!” My name, flung at me through the chaos.

The crowd parted, and in that fraction of a moment, I saw Shukra freed from her summoning circle. Cat stood beside the sorceress. They regarded me as though readying for battle.

“You are Ace Dante,” Shukra yelled. “You have a name.”

She strode forward through the people. Her black hair whipped loosely and wildly around her face, and her eyes glowed bruised purple, stirred by magic.

“You are not this creature.” She spoke with ferocious passion, throwing her words like knives. They struck through my madness and sank in deep.

The people, their souls, each of them glowing bright in the dark—I would’ve killed them all. I wanted to. She was right. This wasn’t me. I did have a name, and I needed to be the man, not the monster.

The skin on my fingers shifted and settled like desert sands revealing something terrible and hidden and forgotten by time. I wasn’t too far gone. I could get myself back. I just needed to hold on to my name: Ace Dante, the cursed one. I liked it this way. I needed the control so I could live the life I’d carved out for myself.

“Ace?”

Shukra was close. I lifted my head, but it wasn’t a human woman in a suit I saw in my mind. She was demon, her fingers clawed, her snout bristling with teeth. She’d tried to trick me by appearing human. I knew her. I’d hunted her down and condemned her soul. She was my enemy.

Too late I realised the memory of her as demon was in my head. Power burst through my body, exploding what was left of my human act and turning me into darkness threaded with burning sand.

Shukra launched a spell. I’d tasted its like before. It struck me, sinking its barbs in, but it wasn’t enough. I lunged at the sorceress—and immediately rebounded. A barrier rippled between us. I circled her, flowing through the air like water. The witches were forgotten. Everything was forgotten, but not the sorceress. Shukra should have been condemned. This time, I’d destroy her soul for all eternity. I’d held the power of judgment in my hands, and her condemned soul was mine to take.

She spun in her protective cage, keeping her eyes locked on where mine glowed in the storm of shadow and dust. I could taste her fear and feel her poisoned soul recoil.

“Ace, this is who you were, not who you are. What did you see in the tower?”

The tower? A memory sliced through my thoughts: an obelisk reaching high into a lightning-filled sky. Not real, but real enough. Shukra had been there. I’d fought Osiris and Isis… Thoth. Thoth was behind this. The god’s touch—no more than a tiny golden thread—slithered away from the spark of recognition.

Shukra was right. I wasn’t the Godkiller. I was Ace Dante: cursed, but free because of it. I leaned on vodka and helped those who’d crossed the gods. Ace Dante—that man was me.

“Remember who you are.
Rakakbar
.”
Remember
.

Shukra wasn’t my enemy. She hadn’t been for centuries.

I stopped circling Shu’s cage and reformed, pulling myself into a being, turning from the dark and the sand into a figure and a form. A man, not a monster. I looked at my hands, now solid and real.

A pale hand touched my arm, and I looked up to see Cat with something like concern on her face. Concern and fear.

Shukra stepped through her shielding spell so that it crumbled away. Fear shone in her eyes, and the same fear writhed in me. That had been close. Too close.