The door to my cell opened, and I hissed involuntarily, tail lashing until I made eye contact with a somewhat familiar face—a cat hybrid, black ears sticking up from blacker hair. Green eyes.
“Lionel?” I huffed involuntarily through my sharpened teeth, the form so foreign to me that I could barely speak evenly. I so very rarely wore my greater form. “Where is Gre?”
The depth in his gaze went glassine, and he shook his head. “Come with me. Judge’s orders.”
“Why are you here? Why—where is Gre?” I flinched as he approached, hand outstretched and hefted me to my unsteady feet. For such a waifish creature, he was strong. As I righted myself fully, my collar fell away with a clatter, and my human form melted over me like a comforting blanket.
“He made a judgment call andpraythat he’s made the right choice. He’s in the deic plane and is before my mistress and the others. They’re judging where his soul should go.” Lionel pulled me tight, and the world spun in place, that nauseating feeling spinning my insides and head as I dizzied. He held tight, though, and rested a calming hand over my stomach, almost protectively.
Before I could ask, he answered. “It’s safe for your little one. Bastet is with you, and she guides children into this world. And souls out.”
The way he said the last part made a broken sob wrench free. “He’s dead.”
Lionel nodded his head from side to side—a yes and no type of situation. “They’re deciding that. And you have a decision to make, too.”
A thousand scenarios passed through my mind and none of them were good. Would I be asked to make an exchange? Would my child or my mate be put up as a choice? I couldn’t pick one or the other. Nobody could be that cruel. “What decision?”
I caught my breath as the world around me fanned into the chaos of the upper plane, bright lights and golden streets shining around me toward cities in plain and distant view with their own storms and weather. The disorienting spin of it escaped me as Lionel took my hand ever so carefully and guided me not toward the pond and gazebo we’d met the first time but towarda looming temple in the distance where great pillars, painted statues, and Egyptian plain as everything written about.
We climbed stairs that stole my breath, white stone and sandy walls towering around me, dwarfing me as we passed the barrier, and I cried out as my magic drained from me at the door, once more leaving me in my demonic form, stripped of Ausmius. “Gre!”
Lionel hushed me, and I staggered. My breath clenched in my chest.
The great cathedral spread a football stadium wide, pillars of ancient stories pressed in cuneiform and hieroglyphs as far as the eye could see, leading toward an immense stage where sat a great beast not unlike a hellhound but whippet thin and angular and in possession of a human body.Anubis.
Lionel crossed his arms over his chest and gave a sort of one-legged bow that I stumbled to reciprocate, despite the position being odd for my belly. “Have you brought our witness, Lion of Bast?”
“I have, Lord of Scales and Master of Secrets.” Lionel kept his head down-turned as we approached the jackal-headed god.
It took me a moment to realize who stood beside him, besides Bastet and Diana with their hands folded, Diana aside from the rest. And next to her stood others I did not recognize.
A great beast of shadow, somewhere between bipedal and taller than it had any right to be, its head looming bleakly in a wavering sway far above Anubis’s own monumental form.
The shape of the head spoke to me, giraffid, and the eyes that stared out were golden burning pits, but that was where the creature broke similarity with Gre. Every inch of him was some mutation of bipedal form and long, gangly hooven limbs. From his neck and shoulders sprouted hair that hung like vines, each fanned with the tiniest leaves, like touch-me-nots swaying of their own accord.
“Who stands witness before me?” Anubis drew my gaze, and I stared up at him, trying to mask the fear I held.
“A vassal I have chosen, a dark moon, Esmeray, who had mated Greginald Hawthorne, my Mage of Gray,” Bastet spoke from his side, holding her sistrum in one hand crossed over her chest, the beaded rings rattling with tiny imperceptible movements. Each clink brushed my ears and disrupted the very blood in my veins.
Had mated.Past tense. I stared at the creature once more until Lionel nudged me.
“It is as she says, I am Esmeray Faust, firstborn of a prince of hell, Draevus, of the ring of law and trials.” I swallowed hard, and my heart thundered. The creature that I knew in my heart was Gre did not meet my gaze, but rather stared forlornly at the ground. A tone emanated from his very breath, a mournful whale song that whispered through the cavernous space.
“Then you are a good witness. Watch and see what your mage is.” Anubis turned to Gre as he lifted his chin, inhaling deeply to breadthen his chest. And before I could react, Lionel snatched my hand and squeezed with a warning hiss, keeping me from crying out as Anubis clawed his way into Gre’s chest. Golden blood spilled as he wrenched free a beating orb of gold and fire that splattered over the floor.
I choked on a whimper, but Gre didn’t seem affected by the loss of his heart at all.
“And before you, I lay his heart on my scales.” Anubis stepped forward to an ornament of sorts that had spread wings. I recognized it as a scale almost immediately as he placed the dripping ichor of my mate’s heart on one side and watched as the scale tipped ever downward. “A heavy heart.”
I blinked tears away.
“I speak for him as his goddess, and I offer to allow him to unburden himself of some of this weight.” Bastet tapped hersistrum against the ground, the staff rattling with a pleasing tone.
Violent flashes of light curled from the heart as memories long past played out like floating videos that caught my gaze one after another. A young Gre stealing books, disrespecting his parents, pledging his soul to other gods despite knowing he was spoken for. Nothing I would have held against him. Inner thoughts of lust played out like whispers in my ears, his carnal thoughts of my body when we first met—again, nothing I’d hold against him. He treated me so kindly and didn’t act on them.
A memory of a lover’s spurn, his hatred and inner battle with all manner of curses he sought out when he found magic. Curses that he’d attempted before, but had failed and thought better of casting. Still, they left marks on his soul.
“A deben of gold is a heavy thing,” Anubis said, reaching out to the scale to drop a fat golden coin onto the opposite plateau. It sank the side and lifted Gre’s heart only slightly. “And it is one great sin.”
