Witches' Bane (The Soul Eater Book 2)

‘
W
itches’ Bane
’

2# Soul Eater

Pippa DaCosta

Urban Fantasy & Science Fiction Author

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Copyright © 2016 Pippa DaCosta.

August 2016 US Edition. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictions, and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

US Edition. Edited for US readers in US English.

Version 1.0

www.pippadacosta.com

“
I
didn’t earn
the name Godkiller, but in three days I’ll own it.”

Witches are disappearing all over New York and Ace Dante couldn’t care less. Until one holds his friend at gunpoint, demanding Ace take the job.

The witch produces a girl's severed arm, bearing an unusual hieroglyph, and Ace starts to care a whole lot more. He recognizes that mark. It’s connected to Ace in ways he doesn’t yet understand. Why is it on a dead witch’s arm?

Missing witches and severed arms aren’t Ace’s only problems. With a new name around his neck—
Godkiller
—Ace has a promise to uphold. He has three days to kill the god, Thoth. Or risk Osiris’s wrath. The last time Ace defied Osiris, he earned a curse that crippled his life and turned him into Osiris’s puppet for eternity.

This time, Osiris won’t be as lenient. Ace must kill Thoth. An impossible task. It takes a god to kill a god, and Ace is just a washed-up mercenary. Isn’t he?

As the spells are cast and the truth is revealed, there’s only one way out. Ace must become the monster the gods fear him to be.

The Soul Eater has a new name, and now, nobody is safe.

* * *

T
he Metropolitan Museum
of Art had rolled out the red carpet for New York’s mayor, otherwise known in exclusive circles as Osiris, God of the Underworld and God of Fertility, Rebirth, the Circle of Life, and everything in between. The museum’s curators obviously didn’t know he was a psychotic bastard—nobody here did. So charming, he’d singled-handedly reduced New York’s crime rate by twenty percent and heroically helped birth babies in taxicabs. Ask anyone, and they’d say the sun shone out of his eternal ass. Now he was kind enough to loan the museum a priceless tablet from his extensive collection of Egyptian artifacts.

I would’ve preferred to slit my wrists than tag along with him, but after he’d been so kind as to invite me to this shindig, I couldn’t refuse. Literally.

I stole a flute of champagne from a side table, wishing I had the hefty weight of my sword, Alysdair, in my hands instead, and lurked at the edges of the Seckler Wing. The
Temple of Dendur
—the original, shipped here from Egypt as a gift to the US from the Egyptian government—was backlit with dramatic, slowly undulating lights that cast a burnt-orange glow over the sandstones, the crowd, and the decorative pool—an artistic rendering of the river Nile. The entire exhibition was a theatrical delight that made Osiris smile from ear to ear.

I gulped down the contents of the glass, hoping it might settle my nagging restlessness and the need to palm my sword and devour the souls of everyone in this room. It didn’t. Clearly, I’d need something stronger than champagne to get me through this.

I tugged at my suit jacket and pulled the shirt collar away from my neck. Where the expensive fabric chafed, my skin wanted to curl in on itself. It wasn’t technically my suit. Osiris had lent it to me, apparently on a permanent basis.

Osiris hadn’t bothered me in decades, but in the last three months, the god had kept me on speed dial for every charity function or political event he could think of. I was an odd choice for his plus one, considering I’d like nothing better than to watch him die a slow painful death. He knew it too. With a few thousand years of life tucked under his belt, Osiris had an acquired sense of humor.

My wanderings had carried me to the dais between the temple’s “gate” and the main eight-meter-high temple building with its two impressive columns. A bone-deep thrum rippled beneath the chattering crowd. Magic. Even this far from home, through distance and time, the little temple clung to its power. It paled in comparison to its former glory. The resonance had once shone like a star but today it was nothing more than dying embers. Still, I felt its evocative touch wrap around me. Comfortable and warm. Familiar. Like meeting an old friend.

A waiter drifted by and I swapped my empty glass for a fresh one. Folding my free hand around the rail, I breathed in, momentarily forgetting everything “New York.” In those few seconds, I could smell the sunbaked grasses, feel the warm spiced breeze on my face and taste it on my lips, and hear the voices of market-goers bartering for goods.

“Ironic, don’t you think?”

Osiris’s voice snapped me back into the present, where I was surrounded by fake smiles, too many people, and a suit that itched. A hollow sadness lingered. I hadn’t thought of the homeland in months, and before that, not in decades. I was different now; the world was different. No use dwelling in the past. That road led all the way to insanity.

Osiris leaned against the railing, arms crossed and his face lifted toward the columns. In the sunset reds of the lighting, his dark skin took on the typical reddish, vermillion glow found in many of the statues that depicted him in all his godly finery. All that was missing were the crook and flail.

“They place our temples in temples of their own,” he continued.

“It’s a museum, not a temple,” I grumbled. Petulance was my middle name.

His thin lips twitched, and he turned those dark eyes on me. Although he held his substantial power in check, his presence tugged on the glances of every man and woman here. Instincts warned them they were in the midst of some
thing
dangerous, but human instincts arced back to the days when they hunted on the plains with spears, and Osiris was exactly the kind of warrior they would’ve wanted by their side. Flash forward to the twenty-first century and everyone wanted a piece of him, but if asked, none could say why.

“They come,” he said. “They yield their coin as offerings and walk among these relics, their whispers filled with awe.”

There was little point in arguing with him. You can’t win an argument with a god. And perhaps he was right. It was ironic.

“Dedicated to you and Isis,” I said, nodding at the temple.

“Was it? I hadn’t noticed.”

Liar. He’d known. From where I stood, I could see his name carved in hieroglyphs in a dozen places. This temple, the museum, tickled his ego. That was what the secret smiling was about.

“Why give the museum the tablet?”

The tablet in question sat on its podium next to the various other exhibits against the far wall of the hall, away from the throngs of people. I’d seen it before in Osiris’s private collection. The hieroglyphs had survived the trials of time mostly intact and depicted scenes of death and rebirth, Osiris’s specialties. Tablets were often imbued with the magic of their owners, much like the temple resonating around us.

“Why not? I have dozens. It seemed like a nice gesture.”

Nice
. The way he’d said it, with a single eyebrow rising by little more than a millimeter and the corner of his lips curving in the same way, suggested there was nothing nice about the gesture. I’d never met a genuinely nice god. Bastet probably came closest, when she wasn’t hunting down her targets and sinking her claws into their backs.
Nice
was a word that should never be uttered alongside the name of any god.

I had no idea what this god had planned for these people—it could be nothing—but I did know, without any doubt, that the mayor of New York was an eternal being with too much time on his hands. The gods hadn’t stirred up trouble in thousands of years. It was overdue, like waiting for the San Andreas Fault to let go. When the gods did break, I didn’t plan to be anywhere near the epicenter, which would be difficult if Osiris continued to drag me around like a dog on a leash.

“No Isis this evening?” I asked, wondering how much conversation was required before I could call it a night.

“No.”

No explanation. No change in his expression.

I smiled into my champagne flute. Osiris I could handle—mostly. Isis was a whole other bag of snakes. Angry, poisonous snakes with fangs at both ends. Unlike her husband, she’d stayed out of my way, and I’d done everything I could to stay out of hers. Besides her occasional knowing glances, she hardly seemed to notice me. But I didn’t like the knowledge behind those glances or how they peeled back another layer of me. I hadn’t forgotten how she’d cornered me in her tropical garden, making it damn hard on me to resist her. How could I forget when my dreams were filled with what might have happened next?

Osiris had lifted his face to the temple again, and when a well-dressed middle-aged couple introduced themselves to him, I excused myself, downed the drink, left the glass on a side table, and started to filter back into the crowd.

Dislocated movement caught my eye. Beyond the pool, where the other exhibits were lit, four men moved separately from the crowd, their strides stiff with purpose. They were dressed like realtors out for a late-night drink after a busy day at the office.

I’d taken half a step toward them when the lights shut off, plunging the room into darkness. A few bleats from the crowd peppered the quiet. No panic, not yet.

Osiris’s power rippled, casting an invisible and uncomfortable static surge across the room. My instincts kicked in, ready for an attack. Nobody here was crazy enough to go toe to toe with Osiris. Only a few gods would consider it, and most of them were slumbering the centuries away. But no such qualms existed when it came to attacking me.

A glass shattered against the floor to my left. Someone yelped. Panic nipped at the tension. Something was
wrong
here. A slow, sly, magical intrusion crept its way through the dark, but its source eluded me; it was like trying to identify one wrong note in a complicated melody.

Flashlight beams swept over the heads of the crowd and bounced off the dappled ceiling, scattering shadows in all directions.

“Everyone, please stay calm,” an authoritative voice announced. “It’s just a temporary glitch. We’ll have the lights—”

The lights blinked back on, brighter than before, blasting away the party mood and illuminating a floor that
moved
. The crowd noticed the countless snakes writhing between their high heels and polished dress shoes and erupted into a screaming, heaving mass.

A few black-and-gold snakes slithered onto the dais. King cobras. And they weren’t illusions. I dropped into a crouch, caught the gaze of one, and muttered the spellword “
San
”
—Stop—
while pushing a deep compulsion behind it to make sure the spell carried through every serpent. They stopped, frozen solid, alive and unharmed but now as dangerous as rubber toys. Snakes were easy enough to compel, which begged the question: why send them? A prank?

A smile teased at the corner of my mouth. Shukra would’ve loved the turn this party had taken. Osiris, on the other hand, did not. I straightened and wiped the smile off my face at the sight of him glowering down from the dais.

“Retrieve my tablet,” Osiris hissed. A crack sparked up the wine glass in his hand.

My gaze shot to the tablet’s empty podium, and right on cue, the alarms sounded.

Damnit
. My freewill honed into a point of single-minded focus I couldn’t control. I vaulted over a nearby railing, landed hard, and shoved through the panicked crowd into the hallway. The four men I’d spotted could have split up, but I was gambling on the fact they hadn’t—and wouldn’t. I’d seen that determined, glassy-eyed look before, in men compelled to act. I probably wore the same look, given that I didn’t have a choice in my current actions. Osiris’s order has hijacked my body. It was all I cared about, all I could hear, all I could see.

Retrieve my tablet.

I burst through the museum doors and out into the New York night. Traffic streamed along Fifth Avenue. Cabs were lined up at the foot of the many steps, but climbing into a silver Chevrolet sedan were my guys.

I clocked the license plate, snatched my cell from my pocket, and dialed Cujo. It didn’t matter what time it was. It didn’t even occur to me
not
to call.

Retrieve. My. Tablet.
It beat like a drum in my head, like a second heartbeat, one that kept me moving forward.
Nothing
could stop me.

“Ace—” Cujo said.

“I need you to live-track a plate.” I switched the cell to my right ear and wedged it against my shoulder, and then I dug into my pocket, looking for my Ducati’s keys, while I strode away from the museum. The street fell away beneath my feet. The city noise, the smells—I carved through it all.

“Er, sure. Okay, I guess. It might take a—”

“Now, Cujo.” Reeling off the license plate number, I jogged down the garage ramp to where my bike was waiting. Cujo covered his mouthpiece, muffling his conversation with whoever was next to him. It didn’t sound friendly.

I can’t stop. You have to do this.

“Give me a few seconds, man.” Cujo must have heard my responding growl, because he added, “This is one of those incidents, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” I snapped, plunging the key into the Ducati’s ignition. I had the sport bike under me and the engine turning over in the next second. The sound of it filled the parking lot like thunder. “Do you have it?” I barked into the phone.

“Almost…” Cujo added something colorful, not aimed at me. He was among the few who knew about my curse and exactly how Osiris could, and often did, pull my strings.

“I have it entering the Lincoln tunnel three minutes ago.”

I hung up the call and spun the bike around. I’d thank him tomorrow, when I was in my right mind. But now I had my target.

The Ducati came alive beneath me. Hunkering down, I had the bike on the street and threading through traffic fast enough to blur the world.
Retrieve my tablet.
I’d track them to the ends of the earth if I had to. In five hundred years, I’d never shaken off Osiris’s curse, nor had I weakened it. I’d tried, especially in the beginning. I’d driven myself insane trying to wriggle out of its bonds. Fighting it was a waste of energy. Better to go with it, get it done, and then bury myself in a bottle of vodka so I could forget the free-falling sense of helplessness.

Emerging from the tunnel on the New Jersey side, I spotted the sedan’s taillights and wove between cabs, soccer-mom vans and hybrid buses, following my suspects’ car toward Port Imperial.

I didn’t have Alysdair or any of the guns I regularly used while on the job
,
which left only my fists—they’d never failed me—and magic. One would make stopping the car a whole lot easier than the other, but at a cost. Unfortunately, Osiris’s curse didn’t care about witnesses or the potential fallout. I had to stop that car before the situation got desperate and I went biblical on the boulevard.

I eased the bike up behind the Chevrolet, ready to dart around it and force them off the road, but their turn signal flashed before I got my chance. Dropping back, I let them peel off the street into Weehawken Waterfront Park’s lot. The Chevrolet rolled to a stop at the far end, between an SUV and the shrubs that fenced in the tennis courts.

A place like this, they were likely meeting up with another car to offload the tablet before the cops could pull them in. That wasn’t going to happen.

I brought the bike to a halt a few rows back, tucking it in neatly behind a Prius, and cut the engine. Instead of waiting for their contact, my targets abandoned their car and headed straight into the park without looking back.

If they were meeting in person to hand off the tablet, there were better places to go about it than a brightly lit public park.