Then it moved.
CHAPTER 25
In the Grey Sekhmet turned her lion head and stared at me. “What are you?”
For a moment I just blinked at her. She was a lion-headed woman—half a woman, really, since the statue was only a bust—and the window below her had in it what someone uneducated might well refer to as “pots.” Sotheby’s was the last place Jakob had ever run an errand for Purcell. Sotheby’s, where the amphorae that Purcell said weren’t his had been delivered and where my ex-boyfriend worked when he wasn’t turning up tortured and murdered in my sleep.
A shape of light moved away from the carved black stone bust above the doorway and trickled to the pavement beside me, manifesting as the misty image of the goddess—a thin, bronze-skinned woman with the head of a lioness and a false mane created by her heavy, braided wig. She wore a thin dress of crimson linen that left her small breasts bare. Her hands were slim and graceful, but the fingernails were black claws. A sword and a knife were loosely belted at her hips. Gold bracelets and bands decorated her muscled arms and she had a bow slung on her back. A golden cobra sat on her head, holding up a disk that was as red as the sun seen through clouds of battle smoke. The cobra moved restlessly side to side, making the small sun sizzle.
Sekhmet looked me over with kohl-darkened eyes in her leonine face and licked her chops. “I have seen something like you before. ” she said. “Speak up: What are you?” she commanded. Her voice was an angry growl in my head, without substance in the air. “I may have to kill you.”
“You’d be the second in as many days to try,” I replied. She spooked me, but I wasn’t going to let her know that. Lionesses are the ones that do the killing, after all, and last night I’d done all the running from predators I intended to do for a while.
She turned her head a little and looked at me from the corner of her eyes. “Have you an enemy? Are you a hunter that your prey turned upon? Speak!”
“I guess I’m a sort of hunter,” I replied, glancing at the few people passing on the street. They pretended not to notice my conversation apparently with myself, but hurried on. Maybe they thought I was using a cell phone with one of those ear widgets. “I look for things, for people, for answers.”
“And you come to my house on what business?”
“Your house?”
She sniffed in disdain. “They are soft and care not for blood-shed and war—they prefer gold as their weapon and baubles as their love—but they have taken me as their own for these past years when others had forgotten me. I do not let them suffer if it is in my power to stop it. You touch darkness and death. I shall not let you spread them here. What brings you? And do not prevaricate. My patience thins.”
“A man—a sort of frog-man—named Jakob came here a few weeks ago on an errand. I want to know what it was.”
“The river spawn. He brought a charmed letter for one of my people within. He had a stink to him I did not care for. I made him leave it and go.”
“He’s the servant of a vampire.”
“Ah! The asetem-ankh-astet.”
“The what?” I asked, wincing internally at having interrupted a goddess—they tend to be cranky about that.
She showed her teeth but forbore from attacking me. “The tribe that are the life of Astet—the priest who died, yet lived. They are numerous here, but not like the kind of my home. Those—the true asetem—are few, and you can tell them from the common blood drinkers by their fine white skins and cobra forms. They do not feed on blood, but on the ka—the soul. Once they helped me, but now. even they do not honor my name! Ambitious fools! I did not think your river spawn reeked of their habits, but perhaps his own odor and that strange charm confused me. ” Sekhmet scowled. “I should have sent him away the first time with an arrow in his spine. He would have been better as a frog on a pike, roasting in the sun for crocodiles.”
My mind was spinning and I felt a sense of doom rising in me. Some shrieking, distant voice in my mind was insisting that something horrible from the past was repeating itself, swelling out of history into the present like poison gas. The vampiress in the club—surely she was one of the asetem-ankh-astet? The description fit. It rang another bell as well: Hadn’t my father described his “white worm-man” in similar terms? The thought made me queasy and I wanted to ask her about it, but I knew she wouldn’t have much patience. And what about Alice? The white vampire I’d spoken with last night hadn’t even liked her, so what was the connection? If the asetem were responsible for Purcell’s disappearance, how was Alice connected? Or was she? She hadn’t been connected to my father or she’d have taunted me with that information long ago.
I chided myself. I wasn’t seeing something. I was letting myself be distracted by my fear and incredulity. I needed to stick to the most immediate question. “Jakob was here before?” I asked.
“I say it; it is so! He has been here several times in two cycles. He did not stink so badly at first, but he began to rot once he touched the wine jars. The corruption sealed in those vessels offends me even yet. What waste of blood! The asetem took them away, but the smell lingered.”
“These wine jars. were they Greek ones? Amphorae?”
“They were the Greek style, but they never came from the clay of Greece. No Greek stores blood in jars such as those.”
“There was blood in the jars? Old blood?”
“No! Corrupted with death and magic but fresh enough. I should have slaughtered them all!” And she gave a roar of fury, snatching at her blades to clang them together over her head. She whirled back to face me, menacing and enraged. “Now you say you seek these things?”
“I don’t. I wanted to know what was in them. I have a bad feeling they’re meant for something terrible, that they have something to do with my past and my father’s, but I don’t know what. And I have a friend here I’m worried about. Someone who shouldn’t have had anything to do with these jars, but I’m starting to wonder. ”
“Who? Which of mine do you care for?”
“His name is Will.”
She shook her dreadlocked mane and growled. “Describe him to me!”
“Tall, talks like me, has silver hair, but he’s young—”
“Gone! He has not come here since he took the letter your Jakob creature brought.”
“The charmed letter? Was for Will?” Cold clutched my chest, strangling the breath in my lungs. My dreams weren’t just dreams: Will was in trouble and it was Purcell who was behind it—Edward’s agent, Edward’s “friend.” Or the asetem who seemed to know Alice and Wygan and white worm-men who’d probably killed Christelle and driven my father to suicide.
I started to bolt, to find Will wherever he was. The goddess snatched my arm, jerking me back around. I should have been able to pull free, but I couldn’t. Sekhmet sliced the palm of my left hand with the tip of her knife, releasing a fine bead of blood. She bent her head and lapped the wound, which closed again as she touched it. Then she narrowed her eyes at me.
“I taste life and death in you, hunter. You are of my charge—a warrior—but you shall have to choose your course yourself. I will not help you this time. You must first prove your worth. I charge you to choose justice. Or I shall see you at the gates of hell and Anubis shall eat your heart. Do not betray me—I am a forgotten god, but not powerless where you go.”
She threw down my hand, spinning me back to face Oxford Street. “Now. Run,” she commanded.
I ran, twisting back only once to look for her, but she’d returned to her plinth above the door, cold stone, black and patient. It wasn’t fear of a god that made me go, or even fear of the past that chilled my bones, but fear for the living. I didn’t understand how it had come about. I was here on Edward’s business and it was Edward’s broken empire that had been used to set this up, I had no doubt. Alice had tried to topple Edward before and it seemed she ought to be the one I found at the core, but the leads somehow came back to me and my father and whatever had happened to him. This was the cycle again, whatever it led to: The asetem had wanted something from my father, so they took Christelle. Now they may have taken Will.