Chapter Twenty-Seven
“Why can’t I just use the front door?” I whispered.
She dismissed my question with a face that told me exactly what she thought of my intelligence. Estrid grabbed me by the elbow and yanked me to the ground. With gravel biting into my stomach, legs, and arms, I listened to her rebuttal.
“This isn’t like before, human.”
I glared at her, shaking my arm loose. I wasn’t thrilled that she was talking to me like she didn’t know me.
“The Phoenicians were expecting you. And even then, showing up at their gate could have turned out terribly. If Ella is in trouble—”
“And Kirby,” I said. I refused to let her forget about my friend.
Estrid’s nostrils flared at the interruption.
I wanted her to care a little more about the other human.
She wasn’t the only person with a loved one at stake.
“If they’re in trouble, then we can’t play this fast and loose.
He’ll have unimpeachable warding. I’m honestly surprised I’ve been able to get this close. ”
I peered at the smooth black rectangle. It was a fortress.
“Even if it weren’t magically warded, the doors and windows will all be locked,” I provided unhelpfully.
I thought of hours spent eating popcorn and watching movies about spies and burglars and heists.
“We don’t have time to ingratiate ourselves to the help, or to tunnel in from underneath, or to scope out weak points in the infrastructure. ”
“Be serious,” she grumbled.
I was being serious. Everything about infiltrating the fortress felt like a movie.
And for once, a supernatural being’s answers didn’t seem any better than mine.
Estrid looked at me as though I were personally responsible for Ella’s abduction.
Her glare cut my verbal processing short.
But I didn’t see any real options. Apep’s embedded cube of a home was in an area without coverage.
We’d be exposed the moment we stepped out from the underbrush.
Between the naked cliffs and the seaside, there was no way for us to approach, let alone enter.
“Estrid—”
“I’m thinking!” she snapped. Half to me, half to herself, she continued troubleshooting.
“We don’t have time to work out his wards.
We won’t be able to ascertain who’s loyal and who might be open to persuasion.
What if he has snipers? Gods, I have no idea what sort of security he has up for humans and fae alike.
For fuck’s sake, we don’t even truly know that she’s in there.
Odin’s bones, what if Ella’s fine? What if she’s a guest and we break in and then he turns on us? What if—”
“Estrid…”
She continued to ignore me, murmuring all of the ways we’d failed before our mission got off the ground. I took my cue. By the time she whipped around to glare at me, I’d already gotten up and leaped out of the way of her frantic grasp.
I had a plan.
It wasn’t great, but it was a hell of a lot better than hers.
My precarious footing gave way, and I slipped, kicking up a cloud of dust as I slid for the road that wound toward his home. I heard one note of Estrid’s strangled protestation before she bit off her yell.
I’d done the math.
She could plot from the sagebrush for hours, or days, or a year, but there would be no way for us to get in undetected.
I, however, had the luxury of ignorance on my side.
I could knock on the door, posing as a simple human on a fantastic quest, and ask him if he was interested in overthrowing Heaven.
I’d get through security. I’d be able to circumvent warding.
If things went well, it could even get me inside.
Maybe I could unravel the wards from within.
But we certainly weren’t going to achieve anything from our vantage point in the dirt.
My slide through the sand ended with an undignified stumble, but I managed to avoid scraping anything.
I kept the sea on my right and cliffs on my left as I started down the road.
I didn’t look over my shoulder at Estrid’s hiding spot.
I was sure she was furious, but she’d get over it.
She’d been created as a chooser of the slain.
That didn’t necessarily qualify her for strategy.
Maribelle, on the other hand, could get in anywhere.
I wished I had more swagger in my step, but there was a jelly-like quality to my knees.
Every stilted breath matched the tremble in my palms. I’d made a choice, and now I had to stick to it.
I could get us in. I could do it for the very same reasons that Estrid, Fauna, Azrames, and most importantly, Caliban, would never in a million years have wanted me to.
I was human, and as such, I was utterly defenseless.
Silas was the one who’d explicitly warned me against Apep.
But…Silas, like me, was similarly wary of every god in the universe, save for his own. What did he know?
Rocks crunched underfoot as I stayed the course.
I’d never been good at judging distances, but I had to be at least ten minutes away.
Maybe twenty. I had no way of knowing if my perspective was skewed until I got close enough to the house to understand its scale.
At least the walk would give me a few minutes to think. Though about what, I wasn’t sure.
I ran through everything I knew about the man.
Apep, the great serpent, was solely responsible for the end of the world.
He had no wife, no consort, no people.
He was the only god who had no temples that praised him, but many temples specifically dedicated to cursing him, to praying against him, to keeping him down.
I could work with that.
If the antichrist and the sun-swallower worked together, there was no telling what we could achieve.
Recruiting him would be an undeniable win for our side as we toppled power structures and upended the pantheons.
But if I couldn’t win him over…could he end the world on his own?
Would everything I’d done have been for nothing?
I pulled myself out of the despair spiral to focus on what we had in common. After all, I ran on a platform of unfair subjection. And if our intel was right, he had Ella. He had Kirby.
And I had little more than audacity and a fragile dream.
I’d scarcely made it two minutes into my walk before a moving column of dust billowed from somewhere near the house.
It expanded, scattering to the sky as its source moved.
It grew closer and closer until the reflection of sunlight on glass and metal helped me understand what I was seeing.
The sounds of rubber, rocks, and an engine’s purr hit me next.
I jumped to the side of the road as a vehicle whipped around the corner, kicking up stones and creating a brown, powdery haze.
All hope of preparing a speech evaporated.
The Range Rover speeding toward me would have cost a pretty penny before the bells and whistles, but I knew an armored vehicle when I saw one.
This baby was ready to drive into a war zone.
I’d expected Apep to be stacked against the gods, but there was something particularly ominous about human-proofing his belongings.
It was as if he looked at the world of gods and men and said, I don’t care who you are, or what you wield. You have no power here.
The vehicle slowed and came to a stop fifty feet away.
Two men exited and remained poised by the car.
Between their black suits and sunglasses, they looked almost comically villainous.
The urge to laugh at the absurdity of everything gnawed at me, taking the sting out of the fact that I was almost definitely going to die.
I lifted my hands and flattened my palms to show I meant no harm.
“State your business,” said the driver, acting every bit as a video game character trapped in his guardian loop.
“I…” I swallowed. What could I tell them that might gain me admission? Did I lead with being the Prince’s human? Did I feign ignorance over Ella and Kirby?
Threats wouldn’t work. Bribes and good graces had no place here.
But everyone wanted something.
“I think,” I began at long last, “your master and I have a common interest. He’s going to want to hear what I have to say.”
I hadn’t realized they were armed until the men exchanged glances. It was only through the subtle motion of rotating toward one another that I caught the holster of a gun in the sun’s glare. A new cloud moved in, chilling me once more as I waited.
“State your business,” the driver repeated. This time, there was venom in his words.
“I seek an audience with Apep,” I said, leading with Maribelle’s self-assuredness. “He’s always made his wants perfectly clear. He’s set to overthrow those in power and reign for a new, golden age. What if I told you I was here to help him achieve those goals?”
It was the passenger this time who said, “You stand against Ra?”
“I stand against everyone,” I said coolly. “I’m aiming for much bigger fish. The biggest.”
A victory bloomed within me the moment I knew my words had landed. Even at fifty feet away, I saw the microscopic relaxation of their shoulders, the tilt of their heads, their openness.
Bingo.
“How could you offer anything of significance?” asked the driver. He left two words unspoken: You’re human.
“Because,” I said, voice dropping just enough to force them to listen. “I’m the antichrist.”
***
January 29, age 22
There was money, and then there was money.
New money was flashy. It dressed to impress. It had designer clothes, name-brand everything, and dripped in its urgency to tell you that it could afford whatever you charged.
Old money—true old money—had nothing to prove.
I wouldn’t have taken Noah if he hadn’t come recommended. Taylor sent me his contact along with two words: Trust me.
It was one of the moments that made me rethink my entire life.
I stood outside of the unimpressive apartment building in a poorly lit neighborhood looking down at my phone, then back up at the building with square, intermittently amber windows.
I shivered on the curb for the better part of ten minutes before having a conversation with myself about what this boiled down to.
Either I trusted Taylor, or I didn’t. And if I didn’t trust her, I shouldn’t have gone to Bali, I shouldn’t have taken her client in Japan, I shouldn’t have done any of the million things she’d coached me through or advised me on—all without percentage or cut or pay.
She was no pimp. We were a network. We were friends. We were family.
I put on my Maribelle mask and smiled my warmest, falsest smile when he greeted me.
He chuckled and told me that the place was a shithole.
I didn’t have to pretend I was happy to be here.
He had furniture. A bed frame. Clean sheets on the bed.
No trace of dust or filth or obvious red flags. I just…didn’t understand.
“I can do cash or bitcoin,” he said.
“Cash, I think,” I responded cautiously.
He smiled and sent both. He handed me an envelope of cash that was too heavy to be my rate. A notification on my phone told me I’d been tipped in cryptocurrency. At the time, it seemed like nothing. A few years later, I’d understand the money tree he’d planted in my front yard.
Noah was nice.
He was a little stiff. His jokes were a bit dry. His bids for attention were slightly desperate. But he was kind.
I often wished clients would just hurry up and finish.
I’d spent months being annoyed by men who attempted to get me off when we both knew why I was there.
When Noah asked to dine at the Y, I hedged, but the man was the wagyu steak of oral sex.
I’d gone in with the expectation of patiently waiting for him to finish and very quickly was transported to my favorite memories.
I was no longer in a shitty, sparsely decorated apartment.
I wasn’t even with a human. He sent me to true disconnect.
A place where I could experience pleasure without corporeal form.
When I came, I came hard.
The shock on my face as he wiped the droplets from his chin was no act, and he knew authenticity when he saw it.
Noah booked me three times in total.
It was later I learned who he was, what he did, and what he earned.
His family had been wealthy since before the pilgrims first had gotten on their colonizing ships. They’d granted him bottomless pockets before their great-great-grandchildren had been born. He was so rich that he was bored by money and was no longer interested in the flash.
Years after our encounter, I reaped the benefits of the bitcoin plants that had grown roots and budded in my yard. One, I’d harvested too soon. The others, I’d let blossom until I truly appreciated their worth.
Noah had money. Real money. Deep money.
It took me a while to reflect on our experience for signs I’d missed.
Three men in T-shirts and jeans side by side were indistinguishable from one another to the untrained eye.
Perhaps they’d all thrifted their outfits.
None were in fashion, tightly fitting, or obvious.
Maybe they all lived where they wanted, drove what they wanted, listened to what they wanted.
But there was a difference in the defensive posture and speech of the man who was poor but wished he was rich.
There was an obnoxious piety to the granola-eating man who was poor and made it a core pillar of his personality to have transcended the need for wealth.
And there was a relaxed, secret smile to the man who sat on billions but revealed it to no one.
I developed an eye for the small changes, the tiny details, the subtle things that could transform someone from bankruptcy to quiet wealth.
It seemed like the sort of skill that only mattered when speaking of cold, hard cash. It was important as an escort. Hell, it was as valuable as an author taking meetings and rubbing elbows.
But it was a vastly different experience when slapped with true wealth—ancient wealth—when it came to the game of gods.