CHAPTER SIX
WRATH
The shimmer of a dream began to form around the edges of Mina’s consciousness. Voices. Faraway and echoing.
After filling his stomach with pita and figs, exhaustion had overtaken him so suddenly that he couldn’t even remember actually falling asleep.
The voices continued, but the dream never materialized. Calling out his name, over and over. Mina! Where are you? Mina! Mina!
He shot up in bed, the thick pile of blankets tumbling off his sweat-sticky body. It wasn’t a dream. He recognized those voices.
His class group!
Not close, somewhere far and higher above him, their thin voices drifting down the long and echoing halls.
Mina looked around for Anubis, but he was alone in the room. The same room he’d been in since he was first bound to the wall with decadent furniture, statues, pottery stacked haphazardly, and half-finished murals painted over stone.
But no Anubis.
Quietly, Mina slipped from the bed and onto the cold stone floor. He was still wearing the white shendyt and nothing else. He searched the room for his ruined clothes, but they were nowhere. How on earth was he going to explain this?
The voices were moving now. Farther away and growing harder to decipher, though Mina thought he could hear Devon’s above the rest. The thought gave him an unexplainable thrill. He pushed it down.
Suddenly, the need to get out of here was all-consuming, and he began to panic at the thought that soon the group would be out of earshot.
Why had he not tried to escape sooner? What had he been thinking?
Had he been under some kind of intoxication?
Possessed by the creature?
How had he so easily given up on his promise to God? On giving his faith one last try? What chance did he have here? With this creature?
Mina found the doorway behind the head of the bed and ran out into the dim tunnel. The voices continued to call out, but Mina knew that in just a couple more minutes, it would be too late.
He stood still, straining into the quiet, but couldn’t decipher which direction, left or right, would take him closer.
What would happen if they never found him?
Would they just assume he was dead and give up the search altogether?
He couldn’t chance being left behind. Mina had no choice. God, please save me, he prayed.
Mina gathered all the strength in his lungs and called out, “I’m down here! Hey, I’m down here!”
The voices stopped.
And then all sound stopped.
A deep rumble grew into a quake more terrible than anything he’d yet experienced, shaking the foundations of the temple.
Fearing another tunnel collapse, Mina staggered back into the room.
Incredibly, it seemed as though nothing in the room was being affected by the quake.
Vases on furniture were still, and even the dust on the ground remained undisturbed.
Mina wrapped his arms tightly around himself at the feeling of his bones being shaken loose from his muscles. He managed to make it back to the bed, clutching one of the thick posts for support.
A shadow passed across the room. Turning to look back toward the doorway, he froze.
It was Anubis. His red eyes blazing, thick muscles beneath black furred skin pulsing like each possessed a fury all its own.
Mina felt the weight of the god’s presence cover him like oil, hot and claustrophobic. It made him want to crawl out of his skin.
“What do you want from me?” he screamed over the quaking bones of the temple.
But Anubis did not speak. The god growled and bared his teeth. The ground continued to thunder, and somehow, impossibly, the god grew before his eyes. Bones stretching, muscles expanding until he was the twelve-foot-tall monster Mina had first encountered in the statue chamber.
The fear was so real, it felt like a living thing. Coiled around his throat, so that he struggled to breathe.
Mina braced for a punishing voice. For shame. For guilt. For all the things he’d always felt when he did something wrong.
But there was no voice. No sermon of shame. No grand declarations.
Anubis did not block the door.
He did not reach for Mina or command him to stay.
Mina looked into the god’s eyes and saw not anger, but pure, raw, unfiltered power. He saw a reminder.
It was as if the god wanted to ensure that if Mina were to leave, he would leave knowing exactly what it was he was leaving behind.
Every prayer he’d ever prayed came back to his mind.
Please hear me.
Please see me.
Please save me.
Please change me.
But there was never an answer.
And now, here was a god.
Who heard and saw. Who promised to save. Who promised change.
Here was an answer.
Mina fell, knees cracking hard on stone.
The quake began to subside. The fiery glow in the great god’s eyes dulled. Anubis became his smaller (though still much larger than Mina) size again.
“Please,” Mina cried. “Please, please.” What he was begging for, he couldn’t even be sure.
Mina couldn’t stanch the flow of childish sounds pouring out of him.
The dark and needful thing in his gut writhed in panic and want.
My god, my god, don’t forsake me. Don’t leave me, all of the desperation he felt trying to find its way out of his mouth in the language of scripture—a familiar, meaningless tongue.
All of the authority in his life thus far had felt like a shell—the thin skin of a cheap costume—compared to the power that pulsed through his body in Anubis's presence.
It filled him up. It made him want to bow, to worship, to please.
It made him want to find the broken pieces of himself and put them back together.
It made him want to deny the god nothing.
Deny himself nothing. To be full and complete and happy, for the first time in his life.
Mina no longer wanted to be found.
He’d been found.
And it terrified him.
“I want to trust you. But this will change so much.”
Anubis, too, knelt before him. His chest glistened magnificently. His massive, powerful arms bulged, even as with a delicate hand he held Mina’s small, quivering chin. “This will change everything.”
The god cocked his head. His eyes fluttered and softened—the fire there warm and welcoming.
“I am never wrong about the measure of a man’s heart.
You, Mina, are pure as gold. Lighter than a feather.
But you are shattered. You are broken into all the parts of yourself you’ve torn with your own hands in an attempt to hide.
They are not shameful or sinful. You are a beautiful, decadent, ravenously lustful creature.
I am here to help you put those pieces back together so that you may see them.
Taste them. Feel them on your tongue. Press them against your beautiful body and experience the fullness of your wants and desires so that you might build yourself back up new and perfect. ”
Mina pressed his eyes hard, pushing out the blurry remnants of his terror so that he could see the god more clearly.
He wanted to reach out and touch Anubis.
He found himself wanting to feel his hard body against his soft one.
He wanted to feel the god’s strength pouring into his own weakness.
But he still had so much fear. The shape of true worship was still foreign to his bones.
“Yes,” rumbled Anubis, voice like cracking stones. “I can smell it. Your fear. Your reluctance to give over full control to your wants and desires. It is sour, spoiling everything. Perhaps…”
Anubis looked at the wall to his right.
Through stinging eyes, Mina followed his gaze to a painted scene. Of the god himself standing over a figure lying prostrate on a long wooden table and being wrapped in cotton cloth, mummified.
The god turned back to Mina, a grin tugging at one corner of his mouth. “Perhaps if control were taken from you.”