CHAPTER FIVE
WOUND
Shame fell upon Mina like a plague of darkness.
Ate at him like locusts.
His own come sat coiled and fanged in his gut.
The pain from the flail burned across his stomach as he lay in the middle of the giant bed Anubis had carried him to after he’d cried himself into a near panic attack.
The tears had come hot and fast, Mina’s come-slick mouth still pressed to the black feet of the monster.
He’d fisted his hands into his hair and choked on the sobs until he’d felt hands on his shoulders, clawed and foreign, a soft, deep rumble all around him.
He’d jerked away, huddled against the wall where the straps that had bound his hands lay discarded.
“Get away from me!” He’d tried to growl, but it had come out unintelligible. High-pitched and childish.
The creature’s hands had persisted until they cocooned Mina’s quaking body, lifting him a short distance to a huge, plush bed in the center of the room that hadn’t been there before.
Had it? The taste of his sin pooled bitter and thick on his tongue, the aftertaste of poisoned fruit.
Mina had pulled a fur tight around him, pushing a frayed corner of it into his mouth, biting, feeling the musky hairs catch between his teeth and tickle at the back of his throat.
“Forgive me,” he’d pleaded into the fur. “Save me.” To God. To no one.
Mina fell in and out of a dazed sleep. When he finally woke, his eyes sore and swollen, he heard the creature walk into the room from somewhere behind him and reappear by the side of the bed.
“My group will come looking for me,” he said as the creature laid a wooden tray on the bed beside the pile of furs and silks under which Mina had burrowed himself. Pomegranates, figs, breads of various kinds, dried fish, nuts, and a dish of amber liquid that looked like olive oil.
The god hesitated for a moment before answering, “They won’t.”
Mina thought he might vomit. “You killed them.”
“You think me a monster?”
Mina didn’t dare answer.
“Eat. You are wounded and healing.”
“It’s just a few cuts, I’ll be fine.”
“That is not what I mean.”
Something in the strong brow of the creature unwound, causing his eyes to soften. Mina again felt like a child being coddled. He bristled and kicked at the tray with his toes under the blankets, sending the dish of oil sloshing onto the wood.
“I don’t need your food, and I won’t let you make me do that again.”
“If you will not eat, you should rest,” the creature said simply, turning away and walking behind the bed and out of the room.
Mina didn’t think this creature meant to harm him.
He didn’t know what it wanted. But somewhere deep down, Mina had the suspicion that if he flat-out told this creature to let him go, he might just oblige.
So, why hadn’t he tried that? Mina groaned low and long to himself, pulling the warm blankets over the top of his head.
Sometimes, he hated how little he understood his own mind.
Soon, Mina felt exhaustion threatening to overcome him.
The warm glow of the candle chandelier above and the warmth of the furs tugged on his eyelids as he let his body sink into the softness of it all.
Maybe when he woke, it would be from a dream.
Or a coma. Maybe he was actually in a hospital somewhere in Cairo, hooked up to monitors, his mother crying on a chair in the corner, his father clutching Mina’s silver cross in his hands, guilt-ridden for wishing his son was something different instead of accepting the one he was given.
But as Mina sank into sleep, the voice of the jackal god came back to him, deep and husky.
I want you to see yourself for what you are.
Which is?
A flame.
The dark, coiled thing in Mina’s gut twitched. Grew. And his final thought as his anger and confusion waned and sleep took him was: Please, god, let this all be real.
An involuntary moan rolled through Mina as he bit into the soft bread.
He’d woken sometime in the middle of the night or early hours of the morning with a growling stomach and a thrum of reluctant relief when his first sight was the deeply furrowed brow of the creature who had apparently sat and watched over him while he slept.
The wooden tray, cleaned of the spilled olive oil from his shame-fueled tantrum, lay balanced in the god’s lap as he sat cross-legged on the larger-than-king-sized bed that Mina had become burrowed in like a tick.
The presence of the god was like a thundercloud in a wide-open sky. Huge and looming.
“I’m sorry,” Mina mumbled through a mouthful of the warm pita Anubis had handed him, dusting flakes from the corner of his lips, sending them landing on the black silk sheets he’d pooled on his lap to hide the stiff erection from the dreams he was trying hard to forget.
Oiled skin. Hands and knees. Flail. Hungry mouth, wide open…
Mina shook his head and bit off another mouthful before he’d swallowed the first.
“For what are you sorry?” That familiar ghost of a smirk twitched at the corner of the god’s mouth, softening the husky gravel of his voice.
Mina shuddered, barely managing to stop his eyes from rolling back in his head at the sound of it. “I think I yelled at you before. When you helped me off the floor. I shouldn’t have.”
“To grow is to stretch beyond your limits. To become more than you once thought possible. It cannot come without pain.”
Mina swallowed his mouthful. “I shouldn’t have done…that.” His cheeks flamed. It wasn’t the god’s fault. He’d been in full control when he’d done it. The temptation had simply gotten the best of him. The heat of the moment. The rush of adrenaline. It wouldn’t happen again. It couldn’t.
“And yet you did it.”
“It was a mistake.”
“In what way?”
“It’s a sin. It’s not…I’m trying to get rid of those desires.”
The god cocked his head like a dog that hears its owner’s voice but doesn’t understand the meaning of the sound. “And where will you put them?”
Mina nibbled at a corner of his pita. “I’m praying that God will take them.”
“God? Which god?”
“The God,” Mina answered, too quickly. A defensive reflex. Rehearsed. He looked away, brushing crumbs absently off the silk in his lap, accomplishing nothing more than moving the mess from one place to another.
“What a strange thing to say, to claim to believe, after what you have seen.”
Mina plucked a fig from the tray, stuffing the whole thing in his mouth, a spurt of juice shooting out and landing between them. “Sorry.” He swiped at his lips with the back of his hand.
“Do you regret?” the god asked, his eyes glowing a deep crimson.
“I’m embarrassed.” His stomach churned. No.
“But do you regret?”
“I’m ashamed.”
No, no, no…
The god’s eyes flared. Mina readjusted the sheets around himself and cleared his throat. “My group will be looking for me,” he said weakly.
“And yet not once since waking have your eyes searched for the door. You have not even asked me to let you leave.”
Even as his cheeks burned with defiance, Mina held Anubis’s gaze. The god was right. Something was holding him here, and it wasn’t some almighty power. It wasn’t an expectation or an obligation. Mina looked behind him. A doorway led out into the dark hall of the necropolis.
He turned back around, slowly, a flower trembling open in anticipation of the rain.
If he wished, he imagined he could walk out of here right now. But sitting here, speaking with this impossible creature, it was just as easy to imagine that there was no door.
Mina had come in search of god.
Swallowing his fourth fig, he wondered, for the first time in his life, if this was what an answered prayer felt like.