Chapter Twenty-Nine
I held perfectly still, smile frozen on my face, as my vision went fuzzy around the edges.
There were layers to being caught red-handed.
The first and most obvious was physical.
I was ten, nabbed with a book I wasn’t allowed to read, stomach plummeting into my toes as I awaited the raw welts of the leather belt against my backside.
But I could take the pain. I’d learned how to outlast every punishment, biting my lip through the tears, choking down the urge to sob as I repeated to myself: Soon this will be a memory.
But there was more to breaking the rules than a red, swollen bottom and the inability to sit for several days. The second layer, the condemnation that accompanied it, was so much worse.
“You break God’s heart when you disobey your parents,” my mom would say. “I don’t want you to go to Hell, Marlow. Why are you trying to spend eternity away from your parents? Why are you hurting God?”
I’d tried to be perfect. I had no intention of leaving with raw wounds and a broken heart.
But their expectations had been moving pieces, and I’d never quite understood what would set them off.
One TV show would be fine, and the next would get me in trouble.
One joke would be okay, and the one after that would lead to my discipline.
They’d created a maze so complex that it was impossible to develop an internal compass.
My sense of morality, my understanding of the world, my best intentions, they could all be wrong.
The only way to know if I was walking in God’s plan was to get verification of each and every action, every thought, every choice, from my parents.
The only thing they’d truly achieved was teaching me that the surefire way to escape abuse was to lie. If I could talk my way out of it, if I could win them over, or flip the narrative and make them see my side, then I could circumvent the horrors that came with their displeasure.
Calming myself down was a fool’s errand. My gut had known this for what it was. My skin hummed with prickly, painful terror as my thundering pulse forced sweat to bead above my brow.
I was ten years old all over again as I stared at the serpent. There had to be something I could say. There had to be an excuse, a way to talk my way out of this.
Lie, the voice inside me begged. Do something!
I was still caught in frozen speechlessness when I heard a commotion come from the kitchen. I looked down the darkened corridor the way we’d come.
Ten seconds later, one of the NPCs emerged with Estrid in tow.
You have to say something, I screamed internally. Estrid has no social graces. She’ll try brute force. She’ll ruin everything. She’ll—
“And why,” Apep said, looking past me at Estrid, “did you remain in hiding while this human approached?”
She grunted, struggling and failing to shake herself loose.
Just like that, I knew we had no hope of remaining in his good graces.
Estrid bared her teeth. She jerked her arm, but the NPC did not release her. “I had no idea she was going to approach. I’d planned to break in without you ever knowing we were here.”
For fuck’s sake.
I winced as the bridge I’d built between myself and Apep crumbled.
Potential ally, pacified serial killer, sun-eater. It didn’t matter.
The dizzying wave of dread made it difficult to breathe, but if I didn’t do something, I was certain we’d both pay the price.
“We didn’t know it was your house when we arrived,” I said.
I couldn’t think of a sufficient lie. But maybe a distortion of the truth could save us.
“Estrid was just looking for her partner. Once we realized who we were visiting, I knew there was no one I’d rather have on our side for the final battle. ”
It was barely a lie. We did need him on our side.
We needed all of the apocalypse deities to fight with us, not against us, if this was going to work.
Tackling the King of Heaven was impossible enough without fighting a war on multiple fronts.
If I could convince gods like Apep to work with me, then we could fight to invert power structures and bring change to the pantheons.
We could circumvent the senseless violence that came with countless world-ending prophecies.
This had to work. We had no other choice.
“Your side,” he repeated slowly. He took a thoughtful swig of his beer.
He jerked his head toward the door and led the way.
I was going to be sick. I floated in a cocktail of fight or flight, and I landed on the third and least helpful of the survival responses.
I was too frozen to do anything aside from comply.
I followed, my legs becoming jelly once more as I put one foot in front of the other.
Estrid grunted against her captor behind me as we filed into the next room.
What we saw stole my breath. My lungs were left in painful, burning agony as they screamed for me to inhale, but I couldn’t move.
Estrid’s reaction was less subtle. “How dare you,” she seethed.
The room was aglow with the crackle of electricity.
There were no traditional lights in the room—only the blinding silver glow at its center.
It illuminated shelves and books and the very weapons I’d expected to see the moment we’d pulled into the villain’s lair.
A dark, rapidly spinning circle had been secured to the ceiling.
Its twin mirrored it on the floor, twisting so quickly that the lightning bolt suspended between them became a fixed, solid forcefield.
Two figures sat slumped in the center of the shimmering cage, both dead to the world.
“Kirby.” Panic pulled their name from me before I could stop it. Their jeans and flannel looked so out of place amidst the futuristic whir of machinery and power.
I understood the dark house all at once. The energy it would take to power an electric cage would be astronomical. He’d created a cage that would hold gods and humans alike. Though if Ella had been conscious, surely she could have walked out. Estrid could bypass it, couldn’t she?
Unless the electricity was his ward.
I didn’t know enough about electrical fields to do the math.
Then again, I wasn’t sure they offered a physics class that would have covered the science of gods and sigils.
He was the second god paranoid enough to combine magical entrapment with physical, as far as I knew.
Astarte had created an entire god-catching city in order to amplify her kingdom.
Apep, on the other hand, had fashioned a villainous nightmare.
After a millennium of worshippers praying for his entrapment, it appeared he was taking no chances.
Apep took another drink and smacked his lips with satisfaction as he polished off his beer. He set it on a bookshelf and began taking purposeful steps around the room, running his finger along the shelf as he did so.
He paused before the mounted display of a long, sheathed katana. “You swear to me that you plan to overthrow those in power?”
“I do,” I agreed, perhaps too eagerly. I nearly choked on the words, taking a desperate half step toward him as I did so.
There was a fuzziness to the room that lifted my hair at its roots, creating static everywhere, from my skin’s surface to the sludgy thoughts that struggled to make sense of how everything could have gone so wrong so quickly.
“Excellent,” he said. He wrapped his hand around the sheath of the curved sword and rotated it toward me. “Then I’ll fight with you.”
Estrid went perfectly still at my side. I didn’t move, save for the flicker of my eyes as I looked between him and the unconscious hostages at the room’s center.
I struggled to breathe, each inhalation a shallow sip as I did my best to hold on to reality.
My chest ached, my stomach twisted, and my forehead prickled with sweat.
“You have the door?” he said over our shoulders to the NPC.
The man gave a low grunt in confirmation.
It was the sort of absolute panic I’d only seen in books and movies. I’d written my characters into corners like this. I’d forced fictional beings to face this futility.
But I was no fighter. I had no weapons. And nothing compared to the utter hopelessness of watching his guard ensure that we had no escape for whatever came next.
Apep dipped his fingers into his pocket and procured a thin remote.
He pointed it at the electric cage and pressed a button.
The circles began to slow. The solid wall of silver wavered, winking as it dulled.
I didn’t so much as exhale while the device came to a stop, revealing two arms that, when activated, would reignite to contain its prisoners once more.
The room dimmed significantly as its two sources of light were now immobilized.
I remained fixated on the device, scanning it for a tell, for something important. I couldn’t be sure, but the outermost edge of the arm closest to me appeared to have sigillary script etched into it. It cut off at the arm’s edge, like a termite’s path in wood ending without rhyme or reason.
Estrid took a jolting step toward her partner, but she was held firm.
“Tut-tut,” Apep chastised. “See, the thing is: I don’t believe you.”
“It’s true,” I said on a breath. My eyes went from him to Ella and Kirby.
They didn’t appear harmed. Their hairs were in place.
There was blood in their cheeks and their chests rose and fell rhythmically; they were fine, at least from a distance.
They didn’t even appear to be bound. They were simply unconscious.
I redirected my attention to him, pleading, “We have to work together. Everything we do. Everything we’ve been doing—”
“Do you know why I failed my first time?” he asked, balancing the blade in his hand. He looked from the weapon to me. “Family. Trust. Misplaced priorities.” He unsheathed the blade. “You can keep one.”
I blinked at him.