CHAPTER TWELVE
WITNESS
The next morning, Mina woke alone. The morning fire was blazing, and a tray overflowing with pita, figs, pomegranate, and salted perch sat on the table beside him. All of his favorites.
But no Anubis.
Mina called out to the empty room.
He paced for minutes, hours, picking nervously at the bread and trying not to panic. He called out into the dark corridors outside their room, but still nothing.
Did something happen?
Had the jackals betrayed Anubis?
But Anubis had left breakfast, enough for two. Perhaps a sign meant to tell Mina that he would be back.
Mina poked his head from the doorway out into the dark tunnel.
He never went anywhere without letting Anubis know where he was going.
By now, Mina knew the areas of the necropolis that were safe to avoid the rest of the group, but Anubis still liked to make sure that there was a hedge of extra protection around wherever Mina or the pair walked. He didn’t like to take any chances.
But as the minutes crept on and Mina’s panic became dread, he considered breaking the rules.
Just as he was preparing to step out of the room, a sound caught his ear.
Feet. Slow, dragging shoes across stone.
Not the sure-footed, long-stride gate of Anubis.
This was something else. This was…someone else.
Mina stepped back into the room and listened as the footfalls grew closer and closer.
A shadow passed before the door. Just as Mina was considering throwing himself behind the bed, a figure emerged in the doorway.
“Mina?”
“Devon?”
“There you are!” his classmate shouted, running into the room.
“Where have you…” Devon stopped short, staring, his eyes growing wider the longer he looked.
Mina couldn’t figure out what Devon was gawking at, but then he considered his appearance through his classmate’s eyes.
His short white Egyptian skirt. His bare, glistening skin.
His hair, which he now wore partially tied back with a black leather cord ever since it got so long and wild it touched his shoulders.
“Mina, what…happened to you? Your hair. Your…what are you wearing?”
“Devon, how did you find me? How are you here?” Mina looked around, nervous now that Anubis would appear suddenly. He didn’t know how the god would react to another mortal intruder.
“We’ve been lost in here for almost two days, Mina. I think. It’s hard to tell down here.”
Days? That couldn’t be right. It should only be hours at most. Isn’t that what Anubis had said?
“Well, I’ve been lost anyway. I separated from the rest of the group when I thought I heard something. Or felt something. Or maybe smelled something? I don’t know, it’s hard to explain. I just reached a fork in the tunnel and had a feeling and knew I had to follow it. But then I got turned around.”
Mina racked his brain trying to understand how this could have happened. Anubis said he’d made it so that time moved more slowly for the outside world. That he could keep it up indefinitely. Was his power slipping? Surely not. If so, Mina would have been found by now.
Somehow, Devon had found his way through. Had something in the temple reached out for him, just as it had for Mina?
“I thought I was going to die. Speaking of which, do you have water?”
Mina grabbed the pitcher of water and small brass cup that sat on the tray Anubis had left on the bed, but before he could pour the water, Devon snatched the pitcher and drank it nearly down to half in what seemed like one single gulp.
“Thank you,” Devon choked, water dripping down his neck, soaking the front of his shirt so it started to cling to his chest.
Mina turned away, annoyed that the sight turned him on. He really needed some release soon.
“Anyway,” Devon continued. “Then I saw a light and followed it, and that’s how I found you here.” Devon looked Mina up and down again, this time his dark eyebrows raised in amusement. “But seriously, dude, what is this outfit and why?”
“It’s hard to explain. I can’t…look, you have to…”
Footsteps echoed in the tunnel just outside. Long and sure.
Mina grabbed Devon by his wide biceps, squeezing, looking as urgently and seriously into his classmate’s face as he could. “You have to hide. Right now.”
“What?” Devon arched one eyebrow.
“Now,” Mina hissed. “I don’t know what he’ll do to you.”
Devon’s eyes went wide.
“There.” Mina pointed to a dark corner on the far side of the bed behind a green marble statue of Osiris. Devon hesitated for only a moment before running and ducking behind the statue.
No sooner was he out of sight than Anubis stepped through the doorway. Despite his racing heartbeat, Mina almost immediately forgot about his classmate and ran to Anubis, wrapping his arms around the god’s waist and burying his face in his chest.
“Where the hell were you?” he asked. “I was about to go searching.”
“You would not have found me. And you would have risked discovery. You never have to worry about me.”
“Where were you?”
“I was summoned.”
“Summoned. Ok. Who summoned you?” Mina smirked, pushing one of Anubis’s thick arms. But something in Mina’s gut tightened.
Anubis looked far away, avoiding Mina’s eyes.
“No.” Mina reached up with one finger, hooking the jackal god’s snout and pulling his face back to look him in the eyes.
“We talked about this. You don’t get to do this to me anymore.
You have to be honest with me. What’s the matter?
You’ve taken care of the jackals. We’re safe now, right? What aren’t you telling me?”
“It is not just them, my kianga. There is another for whom the manipulation of time is a more difficult river to slow. Three days it’s been in the outside world.
He became suspicious when…” The god’s eyes darkened.
The truth behind them shimmered like a charge of electricity gathering for a flash of lightning.
“He’s become suspicious that I have not yet delivered your soul to the underworld.”
Mina blinked. There was a sharpness to the air. It crackled across his skin, but for a couple of seconds, Mina lingered in that tiny moment between the opening of a wound and the sensation of pain.
But then it came, stinging across every inch of his body.
Anubis's commitment to helping him when they first met.
The shepherding.
The god’s hesitation to have sex with him, to fully commit to what Mina thought had become love.
“One soul every one hundred years,” Mina whispered.
Anubis flinched, letting out a soft whine like a scolded animal, as if Mina were the god and had raised a hand to him.
It was all piecing itself together.
“That’s why the jackals came. They were expecting you to take me to the underworld because...” Mina swallowed hard. “Because that’s what you were planning to do all along. That’s what your father is waiting for. I’m right, aren’t I?”
This time, Mina did raise his hand. He did bring it down, a pathetic little fist, onto Anubis’s chest, which probably hurt his knuckles more than it hurt the god.
“You’re supposed to take me to the underworld, aren’t you?
” Mina raised another fist and brought it down again.
Anubis didn’t try to stop him. “That’s what you were preparing me for.
It wasn’t to help me discover myself or give me the gift of awakening or whatever the shit you told me.
So, what, you’re fulfilling some kind of soul quota? ”
“My kianga, please…”
“No!” Mina brought both fists down onto Anubis’s chest this time, hammering over and over.
He might as well have been throwing his fists at the stones of the Great Pyramid.
“Enough with that beloved shit. Where were you today, jackal?” The word spat out of his mouth like a curse.
Dog, he might as well have said. “Negotiating for another extension on my life? Get a few more days or weeks or months with me in your bed before you have to drag me down to the underworld and wait another hundred years for your next sex slave?”
Anubis's eyes narrowed. He threw his hands around Mina’s fists before they could come down on him again. Mina bit his tongue. He immediately regretted his words.
“Is that what you think you are to me?” the god whispered.
Mina stared at the floor, digging his fingernails into his palms as Anubis held them in place above his head. As quickly as the anger had flooded him, it was drained.
“No. I don’t…I don’t know. You had no right to interfere with my life, Anubis.
Knowing that this was going to be my fate.
All of this has supposedly been about what I want.
What I desire. But I wasn’t ready to die.
I didn’t consent to being taken to the underworld.
Really, it’s just been about you. All along, I’ve just been a pawn in the hands of another selfish god who doesn’t give a shit about me. ”
Anubis dropped Mina’s wrists and looked away into the dying flames, the embers painting the sharp edges of his dark form. Obsidian and emerald.
“This city is a tomb,” Anubis spoke into the embers.
“There are none who love or worship the old gods. We are a spectacle. A myth. There are no souls who come to me for shepherding. However, in order for me to remain on earth, it is the task I must perform. So, every hundred years, the temple delivers to me a soul to shepherd from the thousands who wander through my home here. A soul on the precipice.”
The god took Mina’s left arm in his, broad thumb brushing across the sensitive area of Mina’s wrist.
“Stop that,” Mina choked.
“You were there, Mina. On the edge of the abyss. You nearly fell in.” Anubis’s finger traced the scar.
“Let me go.”
“We have never spoken of this. I have never asked because I know it brings you pain. I know you pretend this scar isn’t there. That it doesn’t still hurt.”