Catacombs (The Sekhmet Bounty Series Book 2) (4 page)

Frost pushed her backpack through the hole, letting it crash to the ground as she scrambled out of the tunnel, nearly falling on her face and knocking several femurs around in the process. She pulled in deep breaths, beat at her legs with her hands, and shuddered. “I’m fine,” she wheezed between breaths. I hadn’t been worried about her. She was moving, so obviously she was fine. “I don’t mind tight spaces, but I hate rodents. And was it just me, or was it hard to breathe in there?”

I picked up the displaced bones and tossed them back inside the tunnel. “You should make some more noise. I don’t think the entire city has heard you.”

She flipped me off. “We should have gotten those helmets with lights on them.”

I nodded. “I didn’t think about that. Next time. Have you recovered from your brush with our breakfast? Can we go, or do you want to flail around?”

Her lips curled in disgust. “I’d rather starve.”

“It won’t have to come to that if you get a move on.”

“Just a sec.” She reached into her pocket and retrieved a piece of chalk. She made an X on the wall next to the tunnel. “I like to have an exit plan, or at least know where I’ve been, so I’m not walking around in circles.”

I hadn’t thought about that at all. It was a good idea, especially given all the twists and turns of the map. Granted, it would make it possible for someone to follow us, but it’d be easy to get turned around down here and not be able to find our way out. Out of the two, an exit seemed more important. I opened the map, smashed it against the wall with one hand, and shined the light on it with the other. “This is where I think we are,” I told Frost, poking the map with the end of my light. “Everywhere you see an X is where a recent body was found. I want to check out the locations and see if there are any clues that survived the human police. Hopefully we can find something that will lead us to Shezmu.”

She studied it for a moment, her brow furrowing. “Are you sure you’re holding it in the right direction?”

I put the map away. Who was she to question my map-reading skills? Of course I was sure. I had been reading maps longer than she had been alive—well maybe not, but close enough. “Yes, I’m sure. We’re going this way.”

The tunnels we were in didn’t look like the pictures you saw of the catacombs. There wasn’t any art constructed from the skulls and bones. In fact, in this particular tunnel, most of the bones lay scattered over the floor where they’d been knocked out of the way from the offshoots that led to the more decorated areas. The further we went, the more something around us grew, but I wasn’t sure what it was. The suffocating feeling nagged at me until I finally put my finger on what it was. There was a constant white noise, probably caused by water, judging by the beaded droplets on the ceiling.

My chest tightened. This mission had better pay off in a big way if I ended up having to swim. Like, when I got out I better have the information I needed to make the council crap their pants or it so wasn’t worth it. Why did there have to be water? There were other noises too, but I couldn’t pick them out—mostly because I couldn’t stop listening to the water, waiting for the moment it would come rushing toward me. Of all the ways to die, drowning had to the worst.

One of the early lessons Sekhmets learn in dealing with emotion is to direct the energy to another source. I was scared of the water, but instead of thinking about that, I thought of all the ways having to bring Frost annoyed the hell out of me. First, she’d never said a damn word to me before this and, frankly, she wasn’t saying much now either. In fact, it was almost like being alone. Obviously, it was driving me crazy. Holden was chattier than this woman. She was the interloper; the least she could do was entertain me. Second, I couldn’t touch her and she couldn’t touch me. How exactly was she supposed to be useful on this mission? She couldn’t save me from drowning. I couldn’t help her if she got caught anywhere. Mostly she was a mute time bomb waiting to kill me. Third, she was noisy. She might not have spoken, but I could hear all of her steps. And if I could hear them then so could Shezmu. There would be no element of surprise.

As we walked, we passed another passage completely filled with bones. It was cool in a creepy I-like-dead-people sort of way. Maybe Frost really enjoyed it in here. She could be having a moment or something. I glanced over my shoulder, sort of hoping she’d be giddy with excitement. “Hey, Corpse Bride, enjoying the sights?”

She gave me an annoyed look. “Never heard that before. Dead jokes are almost as funny as short jokes. Do you really want to piss me off when there are six million bodies I could tell to rise up and tear you limb from limb? This is my world, not yours.”

Now that was an impressive threat. Maybe I’d underestimated her. “If you can really do that, maybe you’ll be useful after all. And here I was thinking you were just a burden.”

“I guess you’ll have to wait and see.” It was quite possibly the first time I had ever seen Frost crack a smile. It almost made her seem…pleasant.

“You’re different,” I said. “At least different than how I thought you’d be. You’ve always seemed so standoffish. I mean, you aren’t a ray of sunshine now or anything, but you also aren’t a complete drag.”

“Forced socialization has ruined me. I tried to tell the coven that, but they just kept hugging me and making me watch chick movies with women and crying. Now I see telephone commercials and get weepy.”

I laughed. Maybe she wasn’t the worst partner.

Her mouth dropped open and her eyes widened. “Um, Femi—” She pointed at the floor in front of me.

I pulled up short and nearly tripped avoiding the heap. It was my own fault for not watching where I was going.

Frost shined her light on the form. “Maybe we didn’t go the wrong way,” she said, putting a hand underneath her nose. “That’s disgusting.”

In front of us lay a man’s body, torn limb from limb and left in gory pieces. Large segments of skin had been cut from him. In a signature Shezmu move, the skull had been crushed in what was probably a vise of sorts. I picked up his severed left leg and took off his shoe. Sure enough, his heel revealed a coin imbedded deep into his flesh, as if it had always been there. Damn it.

“What is that?” Frost asked.

“His toll for the River Styx.”

She made a face. “That’s not real, right?”

I shrugged. “People believe what they want to believe. It’s one of Shezmu’s signatures—that and the very specific mutilations you see before you.”

“It’s a bit of an overkill.”

I looked down at the body. After my father was killed, I had become moderately obsessed with Shezmu and what he did to people. I couldn’t help picturing the things I read over and over again as I thought about my father’s final hours and how horrible they must have been. But it never looked like this in my mind. My young, fragile imagination could have never visualized this sort of desecration. The man hadn’t just been killed—he had been carved like a piece of meat, mouth frozen in the shape of a scream. Shezmu liked to hear his victims suffer to the point that if they passed out he would stop until they awoke again.

The distorted face on the body suddenly morphed into my father’s. Mangled and swollen from trauma, it stared lifeless at me, as if saying, “This is what will happen to you.” I tightened my jaw and made fists with my hands. Over my dead body. I touched the demon-killing knife at my side. The slaughterer of souls was going to regret the day he ever came near my family. I looked away. Blew out a slow breath. It wasn’t my father. It was just my imagination. I forced myself to look again, and the body was back to being the stranger’s.

I cleared my throat. “According to legend, the coin is made from the blood of his victim. It holds the only remaining blood in his entire body. Want to see?” I pulled out a knife. “It’s the only way to know for sure.”

“That’s destroying evidence.”

“Who cares? It’s not like humans would know what to do with it. Besides, we don’t want them to find Shezmu or even make that connection. Wouldn’t this just be proof of the Abyss? That’s exactly what we’re supposed to prevent them from finding.”

Frost tugged on her braid. “I don’t want to ruin his chance of getting into the underworld. He’s still a person.”

I shook my head. It was still possible someone was copying Shezmu’s signature, and part of me needed to know which parts of the legend surrounding him were real. “He’s not going to the underworld. This is just for looks. Shezmu devours the souls of those he defeats. Even if he was going to the underworld, which he isn’t, he would have to believe it to be bound by it. What are the odds? And it’s the only way to know for sure.” I stuck my knife into the center of the coin. With a pop, blood gushed from it, leaving only a deflated gold circle of skin.

“That’s bizarre.” Frost’s nose wrinkled. “How do you know all of this?”

“Let’s just say it’s become a passion of mine.”

She stared at the foot in my hand. “How does he make the coin?”

“I have no idea. We can ask him when we find him.” But this proved it was definitely Shezmu’s work. I didn’t know any other creature that killed like this.

“Do you believe you need the coin?” she asked.

Belief probably wasn’t quite the right word, but a long time ago I decided that if that was the way my dad went, that was the way I’d go too. “Doesn’t hurt to cover your bases.” I took out two coins and handed them to Frost. “Wipe off my prints then put them in his pocket.”

“I thought you said he wasn’t going to the underworld.”

“He isn’t right now, but if we kill Shezmu, I hope it will free the souls he has trapped.”

She nodded, wiping the coins on her shirt before bending down and placing them in his pants pocket. “What does he do with the rest of the blood?” Frost asked.

“He keeps it along with a few organs, puts it through his wine press, then drinks it to gain his victim’s power.” I looked at the body one more time. Through his open shirt there was obviously a large chunk of skin missing. “I don’t know what he does with the skin.”

She nodded. “So we’re thinking that if he’s here, there’s definitely a gate to hell nearby, right?”

I put down the leg. It was possible, but why were humans trying to get through the gate? The gate had to be hard to find, or this would have been a problem much sooner. It seemed unlikely if there was a tunnel that it was new. Surely someone would have noticed a shift like that much sooner. Also, why the constant and sudden stream of victims? I was willing to bet Shezmu was here because of something else, and this had nothing to do with hell. He was a pretty major demon or deity to put on guard duty. It didn’t make sense. Something must have changed recently. Something set this ball in motion. “That’s the assumption we’re operating under, but there’s no guarantee. We just need to find him and kill him. I don’t really care what he’s doing here.”

Frost snorted. “I hope you know how to kill a god, because I sure don’t.”

I shook my head. “There isn’t a way to kill a god, at least not for people like us. I’m hoping he’s more demon than god. I can definitely kill a demon.”

“Okay, but let’s say we can’t kill him. Then what? How do we stop him from killing someone else? Someone like the two of us?” She shifted her legs, glancing back at the body then back to me. “Please tell me you have a plan.”

“Of course I have a plan. If he is more god than demon, we only have one choice. We send him back to hell and you earn your keep. Please tell me you have a spell for that. And hopefully one to keep him there.”

“In my bag. Sending him back is easy enough; binding him to the location is trickier. And once we send him back, what’s to keep him from coming back and this time coming after us? Are we going to close the tunnel? I really think we should. I don’t want to make a new enemy, especially one I can’t defeat.”

That would be the smarter thing to do. Shezmu’s shit list wasn’t a place I wanted to be. At least not until I figured out how to kill him. And there would be a way. Everything could die. The council, though, hadn’t stipulated. They just wanted me to send him away. No one ever mentioned the tunnel. “Hey, what do I know? I just work here. No one said anything about closing the tunnel.” I rolled my eyes. If the council hadn’t sent her to spy on me (or maybe even if they did), she was coming into this blind. “What did Sy tell you about this case?”

“That humans were being killed in the catacombs in Paris and we needed to stop it because it was drawing too much attention. That’s it. Why, is there more?”

I nodded. I hated the company line and the fact that Sy kept toeing it—and now I was toeing it too, which was even worse. If Frost was going to risk her life, didn’t she have a right to know who she was risking it for? If she didn’t know about the council, telling her now wasn’t going to do her any favors. All it would do is put her and the coven even more on the council’s radar, and they didn’t play fair. The coven was better off only being a vague interest for the council that would hopefully someday fade into nothing. “Our job is to stop Shezmu, whatever that takes. If we can’t kill him, we send him away. I agree that shutting down the tunnel would be smart, but he’d only find another one, and it isn’t as easy as it sounds.”

Frost stood back up. “Have you done it before?”

“Once. If you have a couple ancient souls you’re willing to sacrifice, it’s a breeze. But you know, that’s the one thing I forgot to pack.” The last one I’d helped close required the sacrifice of two of my friends. I wasn’t doing that again. “Anyway, we don’t need to worry about it until the damn tunnel with a ‘this way to hell’ sign is standing right in front of us. For all we know, it doesn’t even exist. Now beam your light back down here.”

I used the end of my flashlight to turn the flattened head with bulging eyes to the side, just in case it turned into my father again. The most dangerous bounty-hunting cases were the ones that looked cut and dry. It was easy to get cocky and overconfident. People missed clues that could cost their life. Add in emotions and we were as good as dead.

Now I was fairly certain the council was right about Shezmu being the killer, but we were still missing the
why.
Shezmu rarely involved himself in the human world. If he was here now, there had to be a reason. He was known as the killer of the gods because he wanted their strength. He couldn’t have gotten that much strength from killing a few humans. Even if it were as innocent as the humans stumbling onto the tunnel and he thought,
Why the hell not? It’s been a while since I murdered someone,
that didn’t explain why he was leaving the bodies where they could be found. And more importantly, why had all these people suddenly stumbled across his lair after what had to be decades and decades of existence? It was fishy. Either something was leading them there or Shezmu had just come. Either way, bigger wheels were turning.

I started patting down the body. Maybe there was a clue as to why or how the humans found him. Frost kicked me with her combat boot. “What are you doing?”

“Looking for clues. You know, what bounty hunters are supposed to
do
. You should try it sometime. Maybe you wouldn’t have to bring in all of your bounties dead.”

Frost sucked in a breath.

Okay, maybe that wasn’t completely fair. She couldn’t necessarily control if they touched her in a fight. “We need to know how this guy found Shezmu. Also, he might have supplies we could use.”

“I think he’s been through enough. Haven’t you heard of respect for the dead? I’m not robbing him. He’s been through enough. What’s wrong with you?”