Chapter Twenty-Eight
I sat in the back of the armored Range Rover expecting to enter Lex Luthor’s den. We pulled into the sort of subterranean garage that only existed in spy novels.
The men in suits hadn’t asked further questions, and I hadn’t prompted.
Once I was in their care, I was either dead meat or an honored guest. There was no advantage to annoying them.
There was an NPC quality to the driver and the passenger as I eyed them, trying to get a sense of their personality from any micro-expression, the tick of a jaw, the flex of a knuckle. They had none.
The driver killed the car, and I waited for him to open my door.
I’d done this. I’d chosen this. But I didn’t feel ready.
“Come on,” one of the men coaxed. The moment my feet hit the sealed concrete, they began patting me down.
The driver grabbed my phone from my back pocket and handed it to the passenger.
He ran his hands up and down my legs, and I began to sweat.
The s?lje was tucked into my waistband. My heart skipped as he paused at my pocket.
Shit.
He didn’t ask me to empty my pocket. His hand plunged directly into it to fish out a tiny golden poppet.
He looked at the figurine, then at me. I kept my mouth shut, but my stomach rolled.
The poppet had gotten me into trouble once, but it had gotten me out of impossible odds on more than one occasion.
I guessed I was going to have to be my own guardian angel.
I couldn’t think of a single time in my life I’d been more outwardly anxious.
I wasn’t oblivious to the fact that I was concealing the cold sweat poorly.
There was an obvious tremble to my hands.
I tripped over every other word. One of the NPCs looked over his shoulder, pausing with an almost-human quality as he pressed his thumb into the keypad that would lead us from the garage to whatever lay beyond.
He inhaled slowly. His glance remained obscured by the sunglasses that were no longer necessary.
When the security system’s melodic beep chimed his acceptance, we both dropped whatever could have been. I wouldn’t be making an excuse as to how I was a lost tourist on unknown land. I wouldn’t be escaping through the side door. I’d made my bed, and I’d arrived to lie in it.
I wasn’t sure what I expected when the door opened.
Magma, maybe.
I readied myself for computerized walls, for robot servants, for a mysterious, sexy woman dripping in diamonds to serve champagne.
Instead, they led me through a dimly lit hall that felt surprisingly cramped.
It was dark and disorganized, like I was pinned between my grandma’s laundry room and closet as I shuffled to get to the kitchen in the middle of the night.
I didn’t protest as one guided my arm through the gloom, though a nostalgic part of me waited for someone to ask me to take off my shoes.
We rounded a corner before I saw the first sign of light.
It wasn’t an ominous, cavernous blackness.
It was the lights-off hall of someone who couldn’t be bothered to keep the breakers on.
I made out the dark gray shapes of open-concept couches and furniture in obscure shades of shadow.
It was a big home, but not one filled with lasers and iron suits and weapons.
This was bored money.
The homeowner paid me no mind as I entered the room.
A pool of dim yellow light illuminated a man in his forties or fifties.
He propped himself over his book, scarcely interested enough to look up at our arrival.
He had a close-cropped salt-and-pepper beard, wore a black button-up shirt, and had features that did nothing to hide his lines of age, nor obscure the fact that he’d lived a full life, while still embracing the body and posture of someone who commanded a presence.
He looked up from a rounded glass drink that may have been vodka or may have been water.
He glanced beyond me to address the lead NPC.
“Who did you bring?”
The driver hadn’t released my elbow. He wasn’t rough as he tugged me forward.
“She claims she’s…” Perhaps he possessed enough sentience to realize how ridiculous it would sound to parrot what I’d said on the road.
He had an impressive control of his throat, as his redirect sounded nothing like a nervous swallow.
It was more like he’d been inconvenienced by a loose granule in his throat before coughing it free enough to say, “She’s seeking an audience with you. She says you have a common goal.”
The stranger looked up from his clear drink and examined me. “You believed her?”
The NPC released my elbow. He straightened his shoulders. “I did. I mean, I do, sir.” He procured the poppet and plopped it onto the countertop.
The man eyed the figurine; then his gaze slid from it as if he couldn’t be bothered.
He flicked two free fingers of his drink-grasping hand, and the NPCs disappeared.
I couldn’t ascertain whether they’d left or just vanished.
I wasn’t fully certain I’d so much as heard them close the door. But at once, we were alone.
“Well, come in,” the man said with the sort of exhausted sigh that came from any introvert who neither wanted nor expected company.
I stopped myself from confirming that he was the serpent. This was his lair, after all. I would only win his game once I learned his rules.
I ran through a million thoughts in a fraction of a second.
The first was that there was no way a titan lived in these lights-off conditions.
I panicked that I’d come upon an innocent man who had no concept of gods or demons or wars.
I forced myself to remember that Estrid’s…
honing whatever had brought her to Ella.
I reminded myself once more that I was in an obsidian cube half-buried in the earth. This was no humble man’s home.
“And you are?” he asked with the sort of wearied irreverence that had me questioning my presence for the millionth time.
He was handsome, but not astonishingly so.
He was well dressed, but not notably. He studied my face long enough for me to count the crinkles of lines in his.
He reminded me of a black-and-white actor who’d stepped from the movies, as if his life had been perpetually frozen in the most glamorous, desolate point in a film.
He was aged and beautiful, but in a way that was both confusing and hopeless.
Nothing about this man or his home screamed wealth, murderer, or kidnapper.
That detail alone—or lack of detail—reassured me that I was in the right place.
His every man plainness did something unnerving deep in my bones. The thump-thump, thump-thump, thump-thump of would-be prey looking at a wolf in sheep’s clothing. The Ted Bundy charm of the psychopath masquerading as the guy next door.
I steadied my breathing, forcing myself to remember that Estrid was crouched in a bush scarcely a half mile away.
I had to stay calm. Dealing with this man was exactly like handling a nuclear bomb: a game-changer in the right hands, and a world-ender in the wrong ones.
A single error on my part would be catastrophic for us all.
It took me a tenth of a second to flip through my Rolodex of answers. For right now, he had to be Noah. My wealthy client of yesteryear. Someone who had everything and was impressed by nothing. I had to cling to the only thing that might pique his interest.
“I think the guy in power is a dick,” I said.
After a beat, the corner of his mouth ticked up in a half-smile. My pulse skipped at the small win. I went in for the kill.
“And I have the manpower to take him down.”
His brows lifted. He looked at me as if seeing me for the first time. He examined me for a long minute before setting down his drink. After a pregnant pause, he said, “Someone else was amassing forces a few days ago. It’s a nice dream.”
“I’m not amassing,” I said without missing a beat. “I am the dream.”
I wasn’t sure what forced the confidence, save for the knowledge that we’d all die if I failed.
Bet big, win big.
He chuckled lightly, which I took as a good sign.
He pushed back from the counter and looked at me for a moment.
My pulse quickened again, praying he wouldn’t come any closer.
I needed to keep him calm. So far, he was not interested enough to ask me my name, nor beholden enough to offer me his.
I hoped it was because he was relaxed, and not because he knew better than to name his victims before taking them down.
He rested his arm against the counter before asking, “What makes your pitch different from the ones who came before?”
Maybe he meant Ella and Kirby. Maybe he meant the Egyptian pantheon and practitioners and eons of humans and worshippers throughout the Golden Age who had seen him as a threat. But this house didn’t speak of someone newly out of prison.
A long-dormant piece of me dug through my mythological origins. I shuffled the deck of cards through my lived experience. Apep was meant to bring chaos at the dawn of darkness. The man before me was spent. Disinterested, even.
After an uncomfortably stretched beat, I said, “I could tell you what every other pantheon wanted to hear. They’ve rallied behind me to stand against Heaven because I’m the Prince’s human.
They want an antichrist, and they thought I’d birth them one.
They’ve pushed it, and betted on it, and prayed for it for cycles.
I don’t know how long you’ve been free from your pit of darkness, Apep, but I’ve been caught in the trap of their expectations for two thousand years. ”
He perked up, though I couldn’t garner what exactly had piqued his interest.
I pushed my luck. “I don’t trust their guidance anymore. I’ll do it myself. I have the gods and the humans behind me. Have you turned on the news lately?”
His fingers walked across the counter to grab his drink. From the way he sipped it, I gathered it had been liquor all along.