“Mm. While you’re researching Apep, maybe pick up some of the books on Athena and her creative punishments before you decide to be a menace in the kitchen.”
“Raise your hand if you thought Professor Thornheart was going to turn me into a pig first if anyone was getting the swine treatment!”
“Before you turn yourself purple again or rot your penis off, nothing in the potions lab is a hallucinogen,” Headmaster Mykene drawled. “Professor Thornheart knows you’re pinching ingredients and some of the things you’re putting in your mouth are worse than temporarily being turned into a pig.”
“Noted.”
“Have you seen Iman?” Ivar asked.
“No, but her missing could be completely benign. She frequently disappears. Iman likes to wander. The first time she went missing, we all worried and I just so happened to be checking social media and found a photo of her sprawled on the couch of a fairy in the village surrounding the school. I’ll still look into it with everything going on.”
Yeah, this was where Mazen and I could help. I’d been around Iman enough to know her scent. Mazen had been helping me figure out which way my instincts wanted to go so I could track.
We’d hopefully get a line on Iman.
We had all been immersing ourselves in the Old Gods of Egypt looking for any clue on how to fully kill a void creature. We hadn’t found anything, but we at least knew what they’d tried. I knew Bastet had killed Apep a few times because cat beats snake. Apep didn’t stay dead, so we hadn’t dragged Iman into it. I figured she was safer with everyone just thinking she was someone’s familiar since she never shifted back.
Iman was always with Ivar, Ari, Alexios, and now Adrian, so she knew everything that was going on. I knew she wassome kind of prodigy genius, but that didn’t necessarily mean she knew the same things Khalid knew about the old gods. She hadn’t exactly shifted back to contribute. Liam and Morgana had an affinity for talking to animals and Imanreallydidn’t like it when they tried to communicate with her.
Morgana stopped trying and said she would speak when she wanted to, but Liam kept trying, even though Iman had taken a few swipes at him and drawn blood. Whatever she was dealing with, she really didn’t want to talk about it.
I hoped she hadn’t been eaten by the void and had the chance to deal with her shit.
“My Da taught me if you need to destroy evidence in a pinch to just set it the fuck on fire because fire destroys everything. If we can’t get petrol, I can make a Molotov cocktail with a rag and a bottle of nail polish remover if Old Jingo doesn’t want to donate a bottle of booze to the cause. The smell is atrocious, but we could turn their bones to ash if we burn them long enough. Think Headmaster Mykene would get mad if we baked a reincarnation in the academy ovens if it saved the world?”
Gross. I’d never be able to eat here again unless they completely gutted the kitchen.
“Mm, not going to work,” Lucian hummed. “One, we don’t know how long it takes for them to come back. Two, cremation in proper ovens takes several hours and we don’t have those here. Three, you can’t use an oven you bake things in to cremate a body. Four, that’s nasty. We eat out of those ovens.”
“Well, I wasn’t going to bake pastries in them after we cooked a body. Obviously, the ovens would have to be replaced.”
“Let’s put a pin in completely ruining my ability to eat anything but takeout while I’m here, but you might be onto something. Incinerating their bodies might mean they can’t come back from the dead. If Scorpia can find their originalbones, we might be able to do the same thing and they can’t come back at all.”
I hadn’t realized Khalid was back from his run and had joined us. Now that he was getting more in tune with his jackal, he could move without making a sound.
“You could be onto something,” Khalid said. “Ancient Egyptians would have been horrified at cremation. It wasn’t done because they believed your soul needed your physical body to survive in the afterlife. If Apep’s soul went to the void and not Duat when he died, then there was nothing stopping him from returning to his physical body. Especially if his physical body was buried instead of destroyed.”
“Obviously, I don’t have any experience in disposing of corpses like his highness the Horned God, but it takes time and we don’t know how long it takes for them to come back.”
“What if dragon fire can do that and that was why they went after Kira?” I asked.
“Well, there’s a certain dragon ponce you certainly aren’t asking because he enjoys sending dick pics,” Liam snarled.
“Pretty sure he’s not much of a social butterfly anymore and only leaves his dorm room to go to class because the birds keep shitting on him,” I pointed out.
“They aren’t going to stop even if I felt like asking them to. His giant flying iguana is an entitled turd who thinks he owns the sky. He’s hurt parents and younglings. He’s got all that poop coming.”
“There are a ton of other dragons here you could ask,” Khalid said. “Ones that don’t send dick pics. Maybe a nice female dragon who isn’t even tempted.”
“I already sent Headmaster Mykene a message through the school app because we don’t know ifalldragons like sending naked pics,” Lucian said. “She said dragon fire will incinerate most things, but gods are difficult to burn. Your bones aredifferent or something. She said it’s an excellent theory, but you’d need something hotter and faster than dragon fire and she doesn’t know what that is. She did say the Fates recycle us for a reason and they could be trying to make things right after Fairy got destroyed. Some creature who makes fire that hot could be at the school with us right now. An original who got destroyed before they could sire a new race.”
If someone did something unholy to become an original that made fire hotter than a dragon’s that could completely obliterate a god, were they destroyed because the gods didn’t want an entire race of beings who could kill them or were they just so dangerous with their magic thateveryonecame together to kill them?
There were only so many theories we could throw around before they got completely ridiculous and we had to stop. Fire was a good start, but trying to figure out what kind of creature might have that kind of power and who they might be got a little stupid. Khalid suggested an Ifrit, Lucian thought it was some kind of salamander, and Liam was sure we were dealing with the reincarnation of a cyclops who didn’t have shitty vision in this life.
When Liam started going on about googly eyes and getting kicked out of a museum as a child, we decided to put a pin in it for the night. Lucian stood and stretched his back out like a cat because he’d been hunched over his phone and laptopresearching. Khalid was watching me like a predator and his brown eyes were a little more amber than usual. Liam took a running leap and jumped on my bed.
“Seems a bloody shame we did the big dorm room switch and we haven’t been filthy in the bed yet. It’s terrible to leave the bed out when we christened that teacher’s desk.”
