Blackhearted Betrayal (24 page)

“Imseti?” He nodded. Inner tension released, but only slightly. This
could
be a trick. “Why didn’t you just take over
Jeserit’s
body?”

“Because helping her break through the block that prevented her from completing that divination nearly killed her as it was. You need her to guide you to your destination so I daren’t risk killing her myself.”

Fair enough; and that explained the silver explosion of magic when she finally succeeded in her divination spell. “Why did you feel the need to risk contacting me at all? And—wait. You said you have
several
followers still here.” My pulse quickened, and I couldn’t hold back the surge of hope that flooded me. “Does that mean Mijai and the others are still alive?”

Compassion lit in those eerie eyes staring out at me from Charlie’s face, which gave me my answer before he spoke. “They
were
living when I crossed over into this part of Duat after Ala and the priests you sent to her contacted me; but I underestimated Anubis. He used my link with Mijai to lure me through that portal, then killed all three of them before …”

His voice trailed off, and compassion was replaced by revulsion and—terror. Seeing terror on the (borrowed) face of a deity who could
not
be killed had anxiety
twisting my own insides into knots. Goose bumps pricked my flesh when my subconscious mind put the pieces together and my conscious picked up on it.

“Before—before he forced you out of your body and transmuted into it?”

“You have it half-right.” He clenched his—Charlie’s—fists, and bitterness chased away the other emotions. “He indeed forced me out of my body, something that should be
impossible,
but
he
was not the one to take over my physical form. Instead, he—through one of his high-ranking priests—gave it to one of his pet followers. An arcane.”

He spat the last two words, and his revolted terror suddenly made perfect sense. The thought that a god—even a lesser one—could be expelled from his physical body was bad enough. Learning that a nonimmortal had been transmuted into his place nearly had me turning tail then and there. If a full-fledged
god
could be evicted from his body, what chance did a mere
temporary
demigoddess have? Scott and the others wouldn’t even have a snowball’s chance in hell. But if we didn’t stop Anubis immediately, where would it all end? If he and his priests already had the power (thanks to blood sacrifice) and skills (thanks to stealing the knowledge) to oust immortals and take over
their
power and skills, nothing would stop him from rolling over the Triad, then, all other immortals.

Which was very likely the plan. Other than a few minor losses, it would be a relatively bloodless coup. And Anubis would get around the conundrum of not being able to kill his enemies by transmuting them instead, giving their bodies to those loyal to him. Like Stacia, Medea, and all his other shades itching to return to the living world, one way or another.

My eyes narrowed as another thought occurred to me. “I found out that he has a lover among the greater gods, one who has a spouse with a great deal of power. Someone who might make a perfect transmutation victim for a lesser god hoping for an easy promotion. And considering that you were ambushed only
after
Ala contacted you, and her spouse is about as powerful as they come …”

Imseti’s horrified gaze met my own. “You think
she
is Anubis’s lover and plans to help him take over her own husband’s body? But—that would give them a majority on the Triad. They could do
anything
they wanted without anyone the wiser until it was too late to stop them.”

I nodded grimly. “Exactly.”

His silver-rimmed eyes went blurry for a moment. “I hate to think such a thing of her, but she
did
contact me the moment the portal was taken over by Anubis and supposedly
helped
me regain enough control to go and aid my followers—which was precisely when I was ambushed.” Something that must have happened long after the rest of us rushed away from the oasis. Exhaustion suddenly washed over Charlie’s face. “I fear your friend is taking exception to my
borrowing
his body. Not that I can blame him, considering. I came to ask you to restore me to my rightful form if you can, to warn the other Deities if you cannot. Either way, you will be rewarded.”

My gaze grew fierce. “I will restore you if I can because it’s the right thing to do. The same reason I will avenge your followers’ murders if the chance arises. They didn’t deserve what befell them.”

“Without my corporeal form, my ability to assist you will likely be limited. But rest assured I will shadow you as long as possible and do whatever I can.”

As he’d helped with Jeserit’s divination, his offer was something that was not to be taken lightly. His abilities might be limited from a deity’s point of view just then, but that by no means made his assistance insignificant. And at this point, I would
so
take what I could. He was gone before I could respond, something heralded by Charlie’s beginning to twitch beneath me again. I scooped up Nike and jumped to my feet, watching as Charlie slowly returned to himself. His eyes fluttered for a good thirty seconds, at which point they shot open, and he lurched to a sitting position.

“I—whuh—what just happened?” A shudder, this one purely reactionary, racked his body one more time. “I feel like shit. How’d I end up down here?”

Since time was at an ever-growing premium, I helped him stand and filled him in as we walked back to the others. He bounced from ticked off at being used without permission to understanding
why
Imseti had resorted to treating him the way Anubis had treated Imseti, to equally determined that Jackal-Faced had to be stopped at any costs.

Funny how I no longer thought that sacrificing the lives of others—even Scott’s—would be nearly as difficult as I’d earlier imagined …

JESERIT WAS AWAKE AND ALERT—AND REHY
drated, thanks to Mac—by the time we made it back. I gave everyone else a CliffsNotes version of what had taken so long, leaving off Imseti’s confirmation that Mijai was indeed dead. What Jeserit had to do was hard enough given the uncertainty over her husband’s fate; we couldn’t afford for grief to debilitate her if she learned the truth now. A cold and practical decision, but one that had to be made. Guess Nike and Nemesis were right after all …

You are
not
a coldhearted bitch for doing what has to be done,
Nike chided my dark turn of thought.
And we can’t afford for
you
to go into self-pity mode.

Touché.
And too true.

During my absence, Durra and Elliana had dutifully erased every trace of our time there, starting with the worse-for-wear pentagram and ending by wiping away
as many of our footprints as they could manage. Charlie summoned the energy to put the land back into order while Sahana and I did what we could to bolster Jeserit’s flagging strength. Since neither of us were true healers, we couldn’t do much; but every little bit helped. Sahana pulled a neat little trick out of her Raga bag: She sought out every instance of cellular
death
in Jeserit’s body and flushed them away, restoring quite a lot of the Seer’s energy lost during her harrowing divination. I then stepped in to siphon some of the residual magic pooled beneath us and funneled it into Jeserit’s flesh and bones, much as I had for Cori not so long ago to give her increased speed and vitality. Jeserit wouldn’t be setting major land-speed records anytime soon, but her body would be able to do more with the energy Sahana had given her than would otherwise be possible.

The two Hounds volunteered to trail behind our group to scout for signs of pursuit, an offer I gladly accepted. Durra and I stepped to each side of Jeserit, not yet putting our arms around her shoulders, but there for her to lean on if that became necessary. Mac, Sahana, and Charlie fell into place behind us, and I nodded. “We’re ready when you are.”

Jeserit raised the scrying stone in the air, uttered a few unintelligible words, and twirled the gold chain several times. On its third pass, the stone flared with sapphire energy and stood on end, pointing clearly to the east: the same direction Charlie and I had just come from. He and I exchanged rueful glances, then we started walking.

The difference between our earlier random blundering around and the new situation became evident early on. Once we passed the point where I’d come upon Charlie, we didn’t find ourselves stumbling upon tracks we’d
already made in the sand. We also weren’t plagued with random bursts of thick fog or disorientation, either. Jeserit and Imseti sure could cast a
mean
divination. We made more progress in twenty minutes than we had in all the hours before. Night-drenched desert quickly gave way to unexpected bog land replete with hair-curling humidity and wildlife, things the blue sand had been devoid of.

We didn’t come across any signs of
sentient
life, merely gigantic, ungainly (and orange) frogs, dragonflies the size of small bats, and dull tan crocodiles that were way more timid than their earthly counterparts. We never got closer than a few dozen feet to any of the crocs, something I couldn’t say I minded. Snakes were one thing, crocodiles quite another.

On the plus side, the bog didn’t try to suck us into quicksand or drive us mad with heat exhaustion and dehydration like the desert. On the minus side, mosquitoes as big as my fist started going for as much blood as possible—and those SOBs
hurt
. I would have
killed
for a can of supernatural
Off!
but finally, we broke free of the malodorous marsh and stumbled into comparable paradise: a landscape of low-lying mountains that was neither hot nor cold, wet nor dry, with dozens upon dozens of caves dotting the surrounding hillsides.

We paused at the mouth of an ice-cold, mountain-fed stream to refill our canteens and allow Jeserit to take a much-needed breather. She looked up from the rushing water she’d been staring at in the moments since everyone else decided to forage for something to eat. The last thing we needed was to face any new threats with most of our party weak from hunger.

“Mijai is dead, isn’t he?”

The guilty expression flashing across my face gave
me away; no sense in denying it—not that I was willing to outright
lie
anyway. “I—I’m sorry, Jeserit, but yes, he is. The three of them gave their lives defending your god.” Okay, so technically Anubis’s priests had slaughtered them to gain enough Death magic to kick Imseti out of his body, but that was playing semantics. They very much
had
given their lives for Imseti and deserved to be honored accordingly.

Tears shone in Jeserit’s eyes, but she didn’t allow them to fall. “I—think I felt it when they fell, sometime during the divination, but I didn’t want to admit it. It was like …if I could just do that damned spell right, maybe I’d find out I was wrong. Maybe—maybe the scrying stone would lead us back to Mijai, and we could finish this together. Gods, I sound so stupid, don’t I?”

I hesitantly reached out and touched her shoulder when she didn’t recoil. “Not at all, Jeserit. I—just a few months ago, I lost the Fury who was like a sister to me. We were close before either of us Fledged, and watching her die knowing that I failed to save her was like losing a piece of my soul.”

She shuddered, and one of the tears managed to break free, trickling down her pale cheek before slipping to the ground, where it would soon be absorbed into the nearby stream: The gods-bedamned circle of life.

“That’s it exactly.” Her hands went to her belly and cradled it exactly the way Serise did hers. I held my breath. “I hadn’t even gotten the chance to tell him …tell him we’d finally been blessed with the baby we’d wanted for so long. I think he guessed, though, and
that
was the real reason he insisted I go with you when he is—was—a hundred times more powerful than I. I
wasn’t thinking straight when I offered to stay. It’s still so strange to think …”

Son of a …
I gritted my teeth. So not only did I have to worry about saving
one
pregnant woman, I had
two
to think about. Annoyance flared. Surely Imseti had figured
that
out when he helped with the divination, if he hadn’t known already …Most likely he had but hadn’t wanted to betray her trust until she chose to share the news.
Unlike certain
other
betrayal-happy gods I could name.

I forced myself to speak softly. “You’re right, he probably
did
guess. I’ve noticed a lot of husbands pick up on that even before their wives do. It’s obvious he loved you both very much.” Several more tears shadowed the first, and all I could do was rub her shoulder softly. There were no other words I could offer, certainly nothing that would bring back the father of her child. That seemed to be all she needed in that moment. Soon her tears dried, and she pushed to her feet with resolve glinting in her eyes.

“I’m going to guide you to the Hall, both because it’s the right thing to do and to honor my husband’s memory. I hope you’ll understand that my first priority must then become seeing my child to safety. He—or she—is all I have left of
him
.”

A wistful smile crossed my face as I stood. “I understand and would have insisted myself, now that I know.” I couldn’t help but wonder if Scott and I would ever reach that stage. He had made it clear he wanted children, and part of me would love to see mini-Scotts running all over the place. The other part, however, wondered just how fair it would be to have children when one parent worked as a soldier-for-hire and the
other was
two
times a cop. Look at Mijai and Jeserit—they’d been innocuous-enough priests caught in the cross fire of a power struggle among immortals—and one parent was dead, and the other might soon be. Their child would be, at best, fatherless and, at worst, not even born before moving on to the underworld. Scott and I were
paid
to put our lives on the line on a regular basis. There would be no semiretired Nan to raise our children like Mom had had, not to mention a mundane father who
didn’t
regularly risk life and limb.