Blackhearted Betrayal (25 page)

Unless …unless there
will
be a Nan to depend upon. You forgot to ask Imseti if he’d seen her shade, you idiot!

Before I could criticize myself
too
severely, Scott and Elliana bounded up, big canine grins on their snouts after they each dropped a sizeable green rabbit at my feet.
Okay,
those
must have been a bitch to track in the grass …
I made a face—more for the unnatural color than the bloodstained condition of their offerings. Yeah, I’m an unabashed carnivore.

“Good Hounds,” I remarked dryly because they seemed to expect praise for their mad hunting skills; then I pointed to the frigid stream. “Now wash that blood off.” They whined unhappily, but when I bared my teeth, they scampered off to obey. Fury trumped Hound on the alpha-meter, at least when they were in animal form.

I turned my attention to the M&M-colored hares and frowned. Okay, so I was a meat eater, but I’d never claimed to be a hunter or trapper. Jeserit took pity and apparently had more practical knowledge than I; she borrowed the blade Scott had given me earlier and went to work skinning the rabbits. Seemed fair, really, considering that she needed to eat, and I didn’t.

By the time a cleaned-up Scott and Elliana returned in human form, so had the others, and Jeserit had the makings for a decent supper of rabbit garnished with bizarre but nonpoisonous (they had me taste to be sure) vegetables and a dozen eggs stolen from the nests of a bird that sounded like a cross between a pink flamingo and a piranha on steroids.
I
wouldn’t have wanted to eat any of it, but everyone else seemed to manage just fine. Then again, it
had been
nearly an entire day since they’d eaten, a day complete with forced marches in subpar conditions and multiple deadly fights to cap it off.

Feeling full and refreshed, the others insisted we could keep pushing on, which had me secretly grateful. The Mandate’s ticking deadline throbbed in the back of my brain, never letting me forget that time was running short. Durra seemed to share my sense of urgency—she’d barely touched her portion of food and coaxed the others on to greater speeds when any of them seemed to slow down. Then again, it
was
in her mother’s best interests for us to beat that stupid deadline—something I was beginning to believe Ala had imposed to increase
our
chance of failure and her lover’s chance for success.

Jeserit’s trusty scrying stone led us on an unerringly eastern path for another hour, up and down fortunately low, easy-to-climb
mountains
more like the Ozarks than the Rockies. She paused at the foot of another overgrown hill to consult the stone once more, doing the usual spiel of lifting the chain, chanting mumbo jumbo, and twirling the stone above the ground; only this time nothing happened. Jeserit frowned and repeated the whole process but with the same disappointing results.

My heart sank. “What’s wrong?”

She pursed her lips and kept spinning the stone’s
chain. “Well, either someone’s blocking the magic, or we’re nearly there.”

I knew which option
I
would prefer. “And how do we tell which?”

“I keep doing this until the damn thing works again—or we’re ambushed.” My expression must have been suitably dark because she shrugged. “Divination is not an exact science under the best of circumstances, Nemesis, but I’m leaning toward the theory that the Hall must be—” The scrying stone suddenly burst into incandescent blue mixed with silver and pointed directly below, something that appeared puzzling since there were no cave entrances to be found where we currently stood. Jeserit cursed and tried once more, only for the stone to flare with even more silver light and point to the exact same spot.

I huffed out a breath. “It seems both Imseti and the stone insist the path for our destination lies below.” I turned to arch a brow at Charlie. “Think you could check to see if we’re missing something?”

He nodded, face appearing much less haggard than when he’d had to rearrange the earth several hours earlier. The rest of us stayed out of Charlie’s way as he paced around the spot where Jeserit had been standing, channeled earth every so often, then widened his search area by a few feet at a time. Frustration had just started to etch his face when the ground trembled, and he let out a satisfied call. “Here!” We hurried over and found him gesturing to—an innocuous rock wall carved into the nearest hillside. Charlie frowned when we started at it in puzzlement, then he caught on to the problem. He murmured something in Latin and stepped
into
the wall.

I rubbed my eyes, but reality didn’t bend. Still the same rock wall standing a few feet away, blocking our
path, but then Charlie reappeared, and
I
figured out what was going on. “Illusion spell?”

He nodded with a grin. “Pretty good one, too. I tried erasing it, but apparently it only worked for me. Here, I’ll mark it so everyone can see.” A few swipes of the heavy axe he always carried sent several chunks of stone flying and outlined a vaguely rectangular shape in the wall, large enough for two of Charlie to pass through side by side.

“So what’s on the other side?”

“An underground tunnel pretty much like the one we popped into.”

Of
course
it couldn’t have been a three-ring circus or a gigantic castle perched on picturesque Scottish moors. No, we were stuck with more subterranean enclosed spaces.

I insisted on taking point position and the initial leap of faith through Charlie’s rock doorway. Okay, not so much a leap as a stumble, but it got the job done. Magic teased my skin as I crossed the cavern’s threshold. My left foot caught on a crack, and I not so gracefully found my balance before falling flat on my face. Once steady, I moved away from the entrance and surveyed my surroundings. Dull gray floors pocked with miniature fissures and stone rubble, matching walls that also boasted glowing purple lichen, and dank air that inspired gooseflesh. Although strange, the lichen provided sufficient illumination that I was able to avoid any other near tumbles while waiting for the others to file in. Their spectral glow also allowed me to see clearly the tall, dark, and handsome god who stepped out of a nearby tunnel.

Not Anubis, but that didn’t mean a damned thing considering the sheer number of lesser immortals he had at his beck and call. Retreat seemed the wisest course of
action, especially since the others were taking their own sweet time coming through. My back slammed against a barrier that shouldn’t have been there, and the deity’s hands gesturing wildly told me
why
no one had followed me in. He’d blocked them.

Option Number Two it is then.

Nike hissed in agreement as I surged forward, talons front and center, intending to demonstrate just how well a demigoddess measured up to a lesser god, but then something unexpected happened. Silver light flared over the deity’s head and flickered furiously, shaping into an octagon that very much resembled a stop sign. The whole thing reminded me very much of when Imseti had taken over Charlie’s body to speak with me, and I froze. Could this be Imseti’s hijacked body under the navigation of a mere arcane?

The light dissipated when I broke off my attack, hands still lifted but mind racing to consider my options. Could I help Imseti oust the interloper somehow? A full-blown god by my side just about then would be worth his weight in platinum. The shade we kicked out could then be sent back in figurative pieces as a warning to his Jackal-Faced gang leader and—

The imposter god’s face shimmered and transformed into a visage familiar to me, someone I’d regarded fondly until innocent puppy love blossomed into uncomfortable sexual advances and resentment toward the man I loved; someone neither of us had seen since the day renegade Sidhe clones had—so we all believed—abducted him.

Scott’s baby brother Sean shot me a devastatingly devilish grin. “Honey, I’m home.”

THE SENSE OF SHOCK—AND BETRAYAL—HAD
me gasping for breath. “
What
the hell are you doing in Duat?”

“It’s good to see you, too, Riss. Shouldn’t you be happy to see me? Heard you’ve been looking for me high and—most especially low.” He chuckled at the stupid pun: calm, collected, and—damn him—sexy as sin,
sin
being the most operative word. He wore much the same getup as he had the last time I’d seen him: tight blue jeans, white sleeveless shirt, and way too much confidence for someone as young as he. Then again, if Imseti and appearances could be believed, he
had
helped Anubis take over another god’s physical form …

I forced my eyes to meet his. He looked like he’d grown up a lot in the past several months, which pissed me off considering how hard we’d been looking for him,
and he hadn’t bothered to let us know he was alive and apparently quite well. I gritted my teeth and tried to keep my voice neutral. I needed to stall him until I figured out how loyal to Anubis he really was, or the others managed to break through his spell. “Of course,
we’ve
been searching for you high and low. Nobody kidnaps one of
our
own and gets away with it.”

Despite my stressing the words
we’ve
and
our
, he seemed to turn that into
me
,
myself
, and
I
. “Oh yeah, my Fury’s lost none of her edge.”

Something in his now freaky, silver-rimmed eyes had me narrowing my own. “The Sidhe didn’t kidnap you outside that facility, did they?” Gears started turning in my brain as I began putting unwanted pieces together. His repeated attempts to seduce me—clumsily but enthusiastically—whenever Scott wasn’t around; the times it seemed like someone inside the Murphy compound was feeding information to the assassins Stacia sent to drive me into Turning Harpy; the Sidhe who escaped from Stacia’s secret laboratory when we freed Amaya and the others, only to find out they’d hijacked Sean along with his getaway car. We’d originally assumed they needed a driver and held on to him as a hostage just in case. But now …

“It was you.”

“What was me, love?”

I let the
love
slide. “Feeding information to the enemy. There
was
a traitor in the family.” Jesus. I couldn’t take a step without tripping over yet another one. Sweet, baby-faced Sean—the Murphy nobody would ever suspect. Not even me.

“Ah, love, you wound me. I don’t consider myself a traitor, merely a man seeking his place in the world, out
of the shadow of his
big brother
.” He spat the last two words as if they tasted bitter.

Rage stirred quietly. “You
do
realize you nearly got us killed several times over?”

His tone became affectionate. “I would
never
do anything to hurt you, Marissa. Everything I’ve done, I’ve done for you. Nothing I told them would have hurt you or the ones you love. Well”—his voice grew hard—“I didn’t know you’d show up with Scott that day at Faneuil Hall.”

The hair along the back of my neck rose. That day at Faneuil Hall, the day Scott’s friend Harper lost one of her lives to a Sidhe clone impersonating Scott. It made much more sense to hear that Sean had set the mad scientists to try to capture her that day since they’d attacked her before my electronically tracked ass had shown up with Scott.

“Sean, what the hell do you want?”

He sighed. “So single-minded in purpose. Just one of the things I love about you. Gods, I hope my little girl takes after you.”

His little girl? Sean didn’t have …a …daughter. Nausea burned a hole in my stomach when a sickening thought occurred to me. We’d never figured out just
where
Vanessa’s captors had gotten the Hound DNA they’d spliced with Fury and Sidhe when they impregnated her.

“You—you
raped
my best friend?
You
did that to her?” Nausea faded as Rage sent metaphysical sparks dancing along my skin. Nike spat venom toward him. My hands curled, and I was halfway toward Sean before conscious thought caught up and I forced myself to go very, very still. I couldn’t rip Scott’s baby brother limb
from limb because he currently had control of a deity’s body, meaning he
couldn’t
be killed. Besides which, love for Scott dictated I find out if he could be swayed to our side
before
I set to maiming.

Sean stayed equally still but stared into my eyes earnestly. “No, gods no, Riss. I’d
never
force myself on any woman, especially not someone you cared about so much. I didn’t even know the scientists I volunteered my, um, sample to had Vanessa.”

Slowly, I beat the Rage back to a more controllable level. “So, wait, it’s okay to help them take Harper, let them take your own freaking
sister
, because
I
didn’t care about them?”

He let out a frustrated breath. “They just wanted to know where Scott would be that morning, so when he called me to check in and mentioned Faneuil Hall, I passed that info on to them. Far as I knew they just wanted to take samples from him and Harper and let them go. And I would
never
have helped them if I’d known about Amaya. She’s my big sis.” Affection laced his words, an affection he used to show for Scott. I wondered what the hell had happened to change his feelings for his brother so drastically. It couldn’t just be that his boyhood crush on me had grown into something much darker.