I turn and walk out of the room of my heritage, my past, and leave the boy I wanted to give my reborn future to standing there, alone. Fighting back tears, I run down the stairs, through the main entrance past a shocked Tyler, and out into the night. The park is empty save for the homeless who pepper the sidewalks, already asleep beneath tattered blankets.
I find the huge tree next to the stairs and climb into the roots, wanting to sink into them. My heart is not stone. My heart is sand and Orion’s cruel tide has washed it away from me, scattered it, lost it.
Hands shaking, I pull out my phone. My mother needs to know about this. She needs to know there are other gods out there, and that they know about us. This must be it, it has to be it. The threat behind everything.
“There you are,” a knife-sharp, guttural voice says, and it’s only then that I finally place the salty, swollen dryness at the back of my throat that has plagued me.
It tastes like an embalmed body smells.
“Anubis,” I whisper, and look up to see his jackal eyes glowing in the dark. “What are you doing here?” I didn’t think anything else could shock me tonight, but the sharp canines Anubis flashes in a smile prove otherwise. “Did my mother send you?”
“Isis doesn’t know I’m here.”
“If she didn’t send you, why are you—”
“Soon enough.” He reaches down and takes my phone, crushing it between his powerful, paw-like hands. “Don’t want you calling Mummy and ruining the surprise. Now, I have been in this soulless country far too long, and tonight I’ll get what I came for. Hathor was wrong—your existence isn’t entirely pointless.”
He wraps his hand around my arm, pulling me up so hard I gasp in pain.
“Isadora?”
We both turn. Tyler’s on the bridge, leaning over and squinting down at us in the dark.
“Are you okay?” she asks, her voice tentative.
Anubis squeezes harder, whispering low in my ear. “Do you know what I did to that driver? I embalmed his organs while they were still inside him. If you value your friend’s life, tell her to leave.”
I swallow hard against the panic welling up inside me. I will not let Tyler get hurt. “I’m fine.”
“Who is that?”
“My brother,” I stutter. “Half brother.”
“Oh.” She sounds dubious.
“He’s giving me a ride home. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“Okay.” She hesitates. “Good job tonight.”
“Thank you.” I barely manage to push out the words, my throat so dry from Anubis’s smell.
She lingers as if torn for a few achingly long seconds, then waves and walks toward the parking lot. Anubis drags me up the wooden stairs and across the street. I’d gotten so used to being tall here; he towers over me and I feel powerless, like a child.
We circle the museum to the back door. “I know you have a key,” he says.
I don’t bother pretending like I don’t. I’m too busy trying to figure out what he wants. I’d dismissed him as a slimy lech, but I’d underestimated the cunning beneath his jackal face.
I open the door, and we walk through the now empty museum. A security guard, the one with the goatee and kind eyes, looks up from his chair by the stairs. I smile; it feels like a death mask, but does the job as I see the tension leave his shoulders.
“Forgot my purse.”
He waves us by and then we are in the pitch-black room, my room, where only a few minutes ago Ry broke my heart.
I laugh, a desperate, choking noise.
“What’s funny?” Anubis snaps, looking for a light switch.
“Guess I should have let him read his stupid poem.” Because whatever else the Greek liar is, he never made my soul clench with cold, salt-dried terror the way Anubis is. I can feel the tendrils of darkness seeping off him, clutching at me.