“It’s done,” Shukra said. She had called me outside the building while the others rested. “Just the temple left to mark and then the fireworks begin.”
A softer breeze whispered across the sand blanketing the street. It felt like midnight, though with the red cloud cover, every passing hour felt like night and had for weeks. But still, in my bones, I felt there was a new day on the horizon.
“Did Cat help you?” I asked.
“Yes, but when I told her I was coming back here for you, she made herself scarce.” Shukra tucked her thumbs into her pants pockets and scanned the street with its hollowed-out buildings and abandoned cars. “The whole world is pissed at you,” she added.
I nodded. “In case you hadn’t noticed, that’s my specialty.”
“Seth has taken your temple and splashed his sand everywhere. There are priests crawling up the walls.” She shrugged. “Not literally. Not yet anyway.”
“Good. I need Seth at the epicenter.”
“The trap within a trap…”
“And I’m the bait.”
“You’re really doing this?”
“Yes, with your help… Do you remember the illusion spell you cast to make it look as though Isis killed Chuck?”
She breathed in and out through her nose slowly, making a point of not looking at me. “Possibly.”
“Could you do it again?”
“Maybe. With a whole lot of power to back it up.”
A few moments passed, and we fell into an easy quiet. It wouldn’t last. The storm was coming, and soon, none of us would be able to escape it. “Cujo tells me you’re going soft,” I finally said. “He said you’ll be wanting a puppy next. He wasn’t sure if he was ready for the commitment.”
She looked horrified, mouth agape, until I couldn’t hide my smile any longer, then her eyes narrowed to razor-like slits. “I’m only sorry I won’t be the one who gets to kill you.”
“If there was any sense of justice in the world, it would be you, Shukra.” I adjusted Alysdair’s weight against my back and caught the glitter of something hiding in the shadows inside an abandoned convenience store across the street. There were others. I’d seen them shift in the dark, felt their souls recoil from me even as their curiosity got the better of them and drew them near.
When one enormous black scorpion scuttled down the side of the storefront, Shukra tensed and readied her diesel-tainted power.
“Don’t,” I told her.
Another scorpion scuttled up from an underground parking lot. Another dropped from a streetlamp, legs rippling as it ventured closer. They had been in the shadows around the building for hours, waiting. Before long, a dozen had gathered on the street in front of us. Stingers twitched and pincers clicked.
“Cukkomd,” I whispered, infecting them all. They shuddered beneath my mental hold. “Vrusacs,” Protect. The scorpions hunkered down, as eager as puppies to obey. Enormous, man-killing, venomous puppies. “Su.” Go. They scurried off into the shadows surrounding the group’s camp.
“Now who’s going soft?” Shukra remarked.
“Bastet isn’t back, and I can’t stay here to keep them safe. We’ve got a world to save and gods to kill. You ready?”
“Always.”
I left Shukra with a disconcertingly calm Nile a block away from my temple. With every step that brought me closer to the old department store, I shook off more of what it meant to be Ace Dante, letting the dark creep back in and guard me like part of my armor. I swept sand from my path with a thought, aware I was already being watched. The closer I got to the temple, the more the old temptations tugged on my resolve. Seth’s power had wrapped itself around my building like a choking weed, but he hadn’t been on the throne long enough to sink his roots into the foundations. Deep inside the stone, the temple was still mine.
The robed priests made no move to stop me as I climbed the steps. Most I recognized. Most had fallen to their knees for me, easily switching sides. I couldn’t blame them for wanting to survive.
“This is my temple,” I said, raising my voice to address those spread across the entrance.
They glanced between themselves and let me pass. When I stepped foot inside, the chant kur Apophis followed. So easily swayed.
Word of my arrival would reach Seth, if he hadn’t already sensed his sands shifting, but I was in no hurry to reach him. With every floor I walked through, I banished his touch, sweeping the sand away with little resistance. And with each stride, I let loose the twisted souls I’d brought with me from the Twelve Gates. Souls of the bad, souls of the unredeemable. All mine. They howled into the building. No more subterfuge. No more hiding the truth of me. Let the Dark consume it all…
I discovered Seth in the throne room, sitting rigidly on his red glass and stone throne. He regarded me with a raised eyebrow, but hundreds of worshippers scurried out of my way, my name hissed across their lips in awe, hate, and admiration.
These people were ants. I could crush each of them. All it would take was a word. I let them see that knowledge in my eyes and watched them fall to their knees.
I stopped in front of the dais, freed Alysdair, and relaxed the sword at my side. Placing one foot on the bottom step, I leaned in. “Did you miss me?”
His fingers twitched against the throne’s arm. I could imagine the sight I presented, cloaked in fragments of tainted souls. I didn’t need to tell him what he saw about me, what he heard baying through the corridors, was just the beginning of the worst storm this world had ever seen. He knew the legend of Apophis.
“The one thing Osiris never did was kill me.” Since Seth was ignoring me, I addressed the bowed congregation. “He feared that should I die, I would rise again more powerful than before.” I lifted my hand and the dark souls swirling above let out a unified wail. “He was right.”
Someone behind me lunged, so eager to save their new god. The fool had a black soul that was easily twisted. Without looking, I clicked my fingers. His body combusted, the sound of it like a gasp on a lover’s lips. A flash of embers heated my back. What was left of him rained over the steps. No one else would be foolish enough to try to tackle me. Kur Apophis, they whispered, voices trembling.
Seth watched his hold on his worshippers slip. It was my name they chanted now. Their devotion sizzled through my veins, and their words buzzed in my thoughts—the seductive siren call of power. For Apophis. Lord of the Dark.
“This world and all its souls are mine,” I told the pretender god. For all his efforts, and his raging storm, I was the one the people feared. When they laid their heads down to rest, they whispered my name. When they saw the storm on the horizon, it was my name they told their children to run in fear from. Seth was a tool. He always had been a tool. From the moment I’d tricked him into taking my place inside my prison, I’d used him. The final blow had taunted him enough to kill me. He had been right to doubt me. If it hadn’t been for Isis’s meddling, I never would have returned to Egypt to free him.
Seth pushed to his feet and descended the steps, coming to a stop eye to eye with me. “You are a weak echo of your former self.”
How pretty his words were, but fragile and inconsequential like butterflies.
I had Alysdair in my hand. He stood so close I could swing the sword and end the god now, but this wasn’t about finishing Seth. Not yet. I needed to set my trap and lure in the gods. All of them. I needed to be everything I could be, everything I had been before. Devourer of the Wrong.
A ripple of energy sailed through the building, lapping over Seth and me. The god flinched, but I’d been expecting it. Shukra had finished her spells. The walls were marked with the names of the gods and mine. The air throbbed with my power. The walls, and floor hummed kur Apophis. Beyond the city, people’s fear took the form of worship. In this world, in this time, I had never been more powerful.
“An echo?” I swung Alysdair, intending to cut through the back of his neck, but Seth lifted his armored arm and deflected the edge of the blade. He stumbled down the steps. The moment his foot touched the floor, sand bubbled from between the gaps and surged around him in a protective cloak.
People fled. I plucked out their souls one by one like picking grapes from the vine. More. I fed on their eternal lives. Stronger. The walls shook. Beneath my boots, hieroglyphs beat their power in time with my heart. And the chanting went on.
“I am Apophis. I am darkness given form and thought. I am eternal, and you would dare to strike me down?”
More. As my momentum built, the storm that was me grew—not inside the temple, but outside where the streets funneled ash and the wind whipped it into a frenzy. Inside that storm, my remade lost souls howled and cried their anguish.
Seth summoned a vicious sword out of the air. The sight of the curved blade in the god’s hands might have concerned me once, but no more. He brought it up to block another strike. The swords clashed. Alysdair thrummed alive in my hands. The Eye of Ra was hungry too.
“Your storm…” Seth winced. “It will devour everything! There will be nothing left to reign over.”
More power. This wasn’t enough. I needed to stir the bones of this dead city. I needed both worlds to notice me, to fear me, to come and see what the end of a world looked like, to try to stop Apophis.
“Kneel,” I told Seth. “Kneel and worship the Dark.”
He laughed as though such a thing were absurd. “You are not a thing to be worshipped.”
“Times change. So do monsters.” I struck again. Seth parried. Again, Alysdair sang, moving too fast to see, but Seth blocked every strike. Sand spiraled around us, but so did the dark souls. He knew he couldn’t win, but the fool was as stubborn as his brother.
“Kneel.” I pushed surplus power through the word.
He gritted his teeth, resisting. “I. Will. Not. Kneel. To. You.”
“Your defeat is inevitable.” When I swung this time, his parry fell short, and Alysdair sliced across his chest plate, scratching a deep line. “This world’s demise is inevitable.” I swung again, driving him back.
He stumbled over a fallen worshipper and should have fallen, but my Dark swooped in and wrapped him in its embrace. He twitched, held aloft and cushioned by tendrils. I watched my regiment of broken souls pluck at the Lord of the Desert. Deeper they dug, sinking in through his ears and his mouth and flooding his eyes, turning them black. His skin contracted, stretching over ancient bones.
“Kneel,” I whispered.
Horror froze the cracks in his aging face. I had his immortality in my grasp. I could turn his eternal life into a nightmare of endless pain as all the years he had lived piled on and turned his bones to dust and his skin to parchment.
I reached in with my left hand and curled my fingers around his neck. Papery thin skin crumbled. His neck would snap if I applied even the lightest pressure. Temptation plucked on my control.
“Kneel and worship me, and I will end your agony.” My Dark withdrew, and I dropped him. He crumbled beneath the weight of age and decay, turning into a hunched creature made of little more than bone.
He mumbled through cracked, bleeding lips, but it wasn’t the words I wanted to hear. All he had to do was accept me as a god among gods and this would end.
His red hair whitened. His skin flaked. Bones jutted from under his skin.
“Kneel. Accept me.”
“I…” he rasped, the words barely more than dying breaths. “I dmaar su sra Lurd uk sra Dord.”
I settled my hand on his bowed head. “All the rivers are ash.” Catching his jaw in my grip, I forced him forward and showed the submissive god to the few priests who remained.
“The Lord of Red submits to me.” I lifted Alysdair, letting the sword sing.
“Kur Apophis!” they boomed.
I struck, diving into the god’s eternal soul. There was no resistance. Seth’s soul, made of threads of light and threads of red, knotted in on itself, tightening into a ball. All his power condensed into something that would fit in my palm, had I had one, but here I was smoke, and I wrapped around that soul and tightened my hold.
Yes, this was me. This was right.
The soul exploded in my embrace, bursting into fragments that glittered against my dark. I swallowed it down and smiled at the awe-filled faces watching. “Daquir.”
Seth’s earthly remains, what was left of them, collapsed into a layer of ash.
Part of me wanted this, had wanted it forever. I could control it now. I had to because it was about to get a thousand times worse.
I plunged Alysdair down, thrust the blade into the glowing glyphs, and yelled, “Raraoka!”
The sword instantly collapsed in on itself. Forged metal turned to liquid and sprang open, releasing a column of black from inside. It blasted high and shot through the floors above, breaching the roof. Souls. All the souls Alysdair had devoured in the name of the Soul Eater. Centuries of the bad, of the wrong, of the thieves, the liars, the monsters among humans. A few light souls flitted through the dark—the innocents Osiris had forced me to kill. They flicked like stars in the night sky, if the night sky were a raging funnel of all that was wrong with the world. And I was at its center.
The funnel abruptly ended. Alysdair clattered to the floor, hollow.
Now the gods would come. Osiris would come. None could deny the name: Apophis.
I was counting on it.