The Last Supper Before Ragnarok, page 12
“And Fitz won’t stop congratulating Sekhmet on being a badass. What the hell do we do? What do we do, what we do?” Naree paces in three-step circles, running nervous fingers through her hair. Tanis unloads another clip into Sekhmet. “This is not how I envisioned my wedding day to be. And why does Cason look like a giant halogen bulb? Can’t you do something?”
“Again, hand is a ham—”
“Again, could really use ideas and not excuses!” shouts Cason. “Constructive effort, people! Any kind of constructive effort!”
He lands a knee in the twisting xylophone of Sekhmet’s ribs, propelling the goddess upwards and over his head. She impacts the wall and swivels exactly at the point of collision, using the momentum to launch herself back at Cason.
He shrieks, “Oh, come on!” as he once again finds himself a cat toy. “Now? Please?”
“Fuck. This. Bullshit.” Tanis wades in before any of us can wedge in another wisecrack, Cason’s light throwing her in stark shadow. For a second, she is a black hound, a barghest come for the dead. Then, she is Tanis again, lit-up like salvation and she is no longer shooting at Sekhmet, but sinking her fists into the goddess’s pelt and pulling. I’m halfway to shouting for them to stop, when something else happens—
The light flows from Cason, pouring through Sekhmet like divinity is the world’s best superconductor. It floods up Tanis’s arms, spreads in thickening capillaries until it immolates all facial definition. “Get the fuck off him.”
Sekhmet whirls on the intrusion but Tanis is not cowed.
“I said: get the fuck off him.”
And Tanis does what Cason did, except better. Whatever alchemy of meat and magic that defines the lamia, it takes better to the lambent energies gusting from Cason’s core. She lands a ferocious right hook and the sound that follows, Guan Yin forgive my lack of compassion, is like a hosanna answered. It is a paean in the language of crunching bone, shattering cartilage, ruined tendon, a wet, fatty, tender noise, and Sekhmet whimpers at its end. Light, like someone had bled the sun dry, swells through the restaurant.
In the instant before my brain mutinies against the whole world, I see the darkness enveloping Sekhmet billow and break, undulating down her spine, her sides. The eyes that perforate her flesh close; the extraneous offal, until now suspended from her belly, fall in meaty clusters. She sighs gauzily, a noise that I have no time to interpret. Darkness comes, deep and cold upon my tongue, and I fall grateful into its arms.
WATERED-DOWN CREAM or some other soured substrate of milk hits my face. I startle back into awareness in time to see a lioness come within an inch of my nose. Before I can speak or even decipher which direction is up, she unrolls her massive tongue and laps at my cheek. The sensation, of course, is sandpaper rubbed over flesh: a peculiar feeling, in that it is, at first, not wholly unpleasant, but your brain knows it is several circuits away from reducing your flesh to a little nub of quivering meat.
“Couldn’t—ow——you have—ow—used water?”
Sekhmet, bereft of her parasite, poses a majestic, if highly discomfiting vision: a lioness of unparalleled size, with a dune-coloured coat so glossy and luminous it looks fit for a shampoo commercial. Her eyes are peculiarly human, however, as is the texture of her expression. Upon closer inspection, Sekhmet isn’t quite as regal as I’d initially perceived; she’s closer to the opening sequence of a nightmare, where everything is fine so long as you don’t think too hard about what you’ve seen.
She licks my face again.
“Ow.”
“According to legend, Sekhmet is easily lulled by the powers of alcohol,” Naree announces, coming into view. She taps one of the lioness’s silken ears with a finger, and when no protest is discovered, then begins scratching the massive skull.
“You could use a saucer.”
“And miss the opportunity to watch you get licked to death by a giant cat god? Nah.” Fitz is sitting at the periphery of view, hunched in a chair. Rust-dark blood speckles the floor beneath him. He glances over, one eye obscured by a handkerchief, the other limned with red.
“What did I ever do to you?” I push a hand in Sekhmet’s way; unfortunately, the one I’d so recently char-grilled. An entire lode of flesh comes loose, unleashing a brief shriek from my lungs. Blood and pus weeps down my arm. “Will you stop doing that?”
“But you’re delicious.” Sekhmet has the exact kind of voice you’d expect: throaty, mellifluous, deep as the waters of the Nile. She fixes liquid eyes upon me. “We thank you for the sacrifice.”
“That really wasn’t a sacrifice—”
“You held your meat and blood for us.”
“I was trying to shove your face away.”
She laps her tongue over her muzzle. I’m still processing the current armistice; percolating through a small corner of my head is the thought, why haven’t we tried to properly murder her yet? It is, of course, an idea that isn’t without its prejudices. Everyone should be given a second chance. But as a matter of principle, I trend towards being bigoted towards murderous anythings. “You even salted your flesh before the roasting.”
“Now you’re just making fun of me.”
She grins.
“Someone please explain to me what happened.” I look away from the lioness, my injured hand held close to my chest, away from the reach of feline appetites. “Cason, you tell them. Communication is—where’s Cason?”
“Paying for the meal.” Tanis jabs a thumb over her shoulder, leading the eye to where Cason’s nonchalantly making small talk with a slim-boned girl of about nineteen at the counter, the only Caucasian I’ve seen among the service staff. Her attention is clearly anything but strictly professional, but Cason seems unaware. His manner is warm, brotherly, without even the smallest suggestion of interest. He rolls up a sleeve to reveal his recently acquired scratches, his manner shading from fraternal to paternal. Poor kid.
“It must be nice to have savings,” I announce wistfully. “I wish I could afford to—hey, ow, quit it—actually, ignore me. Carry on. Don’t let me stop you.”
Distracted by Cason’s generosity, I’ve completely lost track of Sekhmet. She leans in and swipes her tongue over the ruins of my hand. Except this time, nothing flakes away from the bone. Instead, a luminous warmth pools and grows. I watch in fascination as my hand regrows, one layer at a time, meat and flesh cabling over burnt bone. Skin sprouts patchily, and not every stratum at once; the bare muscle pinks and blanches in sticky turn until at last it’s over, save for a faint burning itch.
I scratch at the back of my hand, marvelling at the restoration. “Can you do that with my hair?”
Sekhmet cocks an amused look. “Yes.”
“Could you?”
“Yes.”
She settles back onto her haunches, smirking, an act that Naree decodes as invitation, all but flinging herself around Sekhmet’s neck. I take inventory of my options. I could take the self-evident hint, or I could ask the moronic question.
“Will you?”
“No.”
Closure is worth its embarrassment in diamonds. I shrug jauntily. Cason returns from the counter, looking mildly perplexed as he examines a square of paper he’s be given. Quietly, while the girl is looking elsewhere, he sets it atop a table and steps gingerly away. I look back to Sekhmet, to Tanis, to Naree who has her face burrowed into the lioness’s throat. The words “so soft” rise muffled through the thick golden fur.
“So, what’s going on again?”
“As it turns out, Sekhmet isn’t actually that much of an asshole.” Tanis nods at Sekhmet, arms across her chest.
I size up the lioness. “No?”
“If we were, we would have eaten you for what you did to Sobek. He did not deserve to be gutted like cattle.” Sekhmet shrugs free of Naree’s affection and pads towards Cason, twining around his legs, nearly upending the man. “He deserved a burial, not a cowl of flies.”
“Sorry.” Cason jerks his arms out, steadying himself. “Desperate times.”
“Yes,” says Sekhmet. “They are. They have been desperate for a long, long time. We believed it was terrible when Ra absented himself from the firmament. But compared to what things are now, it was only an inconvenience. If only doubt was our only grief. I would pay in the lives of old Cairo for such sweetness.”
“I think she’s serious,” I stage-whisper to no one in particular, then continue, “Why did you attack us then? Why did you follow us? You’re a goddess of... hunting, right? Or war? Something martial and reliant on strategy, at any rate. I feel like you should have been better at subterfuge. We knew you were following us.”
Her gaze is placid, but without anything of humour. “Yes.”
“Was that on purpose, or are you really bad at your—?”
“It was on purpose.” Her jaw rises by an infinitesimal amount: enough to broadcast disdain, insufficient to suggest personal offense. Sekhmet is regal as any queen. “We wanted you to know. We wanted you to help.”
“By attacking us?” I demand.
Whatever enchantment had kept us unnoticed by the restaurant still persists. No one comes to eject Fitz from his chair, or to inform us that the presence of a giant lioness is against health regulations.
The babbling, as it often does, has become compulsive now, spiralling. “Also, why the hell didn’t anyone pay any attention to the fucking firefight? Speaking of which, why haven’t you spontaneously combusted? Don’t gods hate putting themselves in situations where you’re, you know, beholden to unsolicited witnesses? What the hell is going on? More importantly, does someone have ibuprofen? Because I think I’m starting to get a hangover.”
Cason disentangles from Sekhmet, raising one leg over her bulk and then another, and helps Fitz hobble to his feet. “She filled us in on all that while you were knocked out.”
“And?”
“Basically,” says Tanis, “the new gods don’t operate on the same rules as the old ones.”
I pause. “And?”
“And what?” says Tanis.
“Is that all the information I’m getting?”
In unison, the response: “Yes.”
“Can I at least get the—fine, fine. I’ll do it myself. ” I haul myself upright and gash open my thumb with my teeth, then scribble an infernal character onto my jeans with the blood. It’s a small, filthy spell: conveyance as healing. I pass the headache swelling behind my right eye to a customer lying slumped on an adjacent table. A selfish decision, but as it stands, he—-a middle-aged man with a ring on his finger, clean clothes, a table full of lightly swaying friends—has more resources than me. Tomorrow, he might wake up with a migraine splintering his vision and an angry spouse critiquing his life choices, but at least it will be in a bed he recognizes. Tomorrow, who the hell knows where I’ll be?
“Sorry,” I mutter anyway, a pang of guilt like a mineral taste on my tongue.
“We have more advice,” says Sekhmet as the crew finally comes together, ready to leave. “I will not be the last one. The new gods, they have”—a tsking noise—“colonised the divine of Egypt. We were chosen because of our animal aspects. Because it was… ‘cool,’ they said.”
Naree shudders. “Edgelords.”
“Yes,” says Sekhmet in a tone that says, without condescension or judgment, she neither understands nor intends to try. Her face transforms incrementally as we walk, becoming more human than lion, bones fissuring under her tawny felt. Between one blink and the next, she is suddenly an imposing Egyptian woman, hair dyed scarlet, eyes gold as suns. “Parasites. Riding our bodies and our stories, as they learn what it means to be divine.”
Outside, Florida gleams with an unseasonable frost: diamonds on the streetlights, a chill in the lungs.
Naree slots her hands into her armpits, breathing out mist. “What the hell happened to Florida?”
“Too many gods.” Sekhmet is a nucleus of heat in the strange weather: the air burns to dew around her, dampening her hair, turning it the red of ageing blood. She raises an elegant hand, the wrist bangled with amber. “The world bends at the seams from the weight of us.”
“I can hear them,” Fitz whispers, leaning hard on Cason’s support, a hand splayed over his belly. “I can hear them all. I can hear them talking. I can hear them.” His voice plunges into a swaying hiss. “They’re afraid.”
“As children are in the dark,” says Sekhmet grimly.
“They’re afraid that there is no place in this world for them, afraid to be forgotten, to be loved, to be responsible, to be alone,” Fitz murmurs, his eyes becoming rimmed again with ichor. The words grow wet and he coughs, shaking like an old dog in the black of winter. Slowly, though, the litany divests itself of meaning, becoming pure rhythm, tick-tocking between two words, Fitz wincing around each vowel: “They’re afraid, they’re afraid.”
“It’s killing him,” Cason whispers, stricken.
“It is what they want,” Sekhmet says, merciless in that indifferent way of predators. “It is what they need, we have decided. To make their fear into a pestilence worse than that afflicting their own psyches. If the world is more afraid than them, if it is dying of that terror, there will be no one to see that these new gods are cowards.”
Tanis’s eyes go cold and bright as headlights, her mouth pinched so tight you can hardly see the lips. That look on her face is the moment before disaster, the half-second before impact crushes the breath from the body. “Do I die?”
“What?” I say.
“Everyone dies,” says Sekhmet.
“Firstly, fuck you.” Tanis gathers Naree into her arms, lets her shelter against her chest, Naree’s head tucked under Tanis’s chin. Her expression still pale, the lamia repeats, voice haunted by whatever decision she’s coming to: “Do I die at the end of this? Do you know? Am I going home?”
“We don’t know,” Cason says. “I don’t know if any of us get out of this. But if you ask me, the answer’s the same as before: the risk is worthwhile. Can you imagine our kids inheriting the worst-case scenario? Because you’re not going to live forever. They’d have to be alone in whatever world we leave them. Besides, if you die, and forgive me for saying this, you’re at least better off than me.”
“Why’s that?” says Tanis.
A muscle in Cason’s jaw tightens, a spring wound too tight. “Bee is young. She won’t remember you.”
“Naree,” whispers Tanis, and the air itself leans in to listen. “One last time, love. It’s all down to you. Tell me what to do. Tell me if you’re sure. If you think this is where I need to go, I’ll go.”
Subtle enough to be imperceptible is the nod that comes as answer. Naree fists her hands into the material of Tanis’s shirt, face buried in the hollow of her wife’s throat. She bobs her head again. A third time. “Yes.”
Tanis clasps her hand around the back of Naree’s head.
“Okay,” she says, wrung out, bereft of fight. “Okay. I’ll go.”
THE UBER RIDE to the couple’s home is funerary: no talking, pallbearer faces. Even Cason is uncharacteristically curmudgeonly, answering the uneasy driver in monosyllables, his smile gone bleak as best wishes on a death bed. We arrive home to Amanda in the porch, her face a locked door.
“I heard.”
No one asks how. Even the happiest place in the world is a surveillance state these days. Amanda comes down the driveway, gait lengthening with every step, until the distance between her and Naree closes into a fierce embrace. A minute later, Naree raises her head from Amanda’s shoulder and beckons Tanis forward. The lamia joins in.
A wind curls around us like an apology, aching, weeping again with that bright, unnatural cold. We stand there for a minute, illuminated by the street lights and the dim glow from the houses: three fools and three women, at least three bad decisions down to a future drowned with no answers, and a goddess watching on.
“Y’all need sleep before you go.” Sudden, ferocious. Naree digs the heels of her palms under Amanda’s collarbones and shoves herself away. “All of you.”
We turn as one to gawk at her. She smooths strands of black hair from her face, bobby pins them in place with tiny restless motions.
Fitz blinks, slow and unsure. “Is this—?” He falters. “…your way of saying, ‘Leave, we want to have goodbye sex’? Because I assure you there are better ways to go about that.”
Naree doesn’t even spare him a glare, her attention on Tanis.
“You especially, Tanis.”
The lamia starts, spluttering in Greek, then something else I don’t recognize, a shotgun-blast of indignance which she swallows to make place for a strangled, “Excuse me?”
“You heard what I said. You need to sleep. Don’t think I haven’t noticed you sneaking out of bed at night and pacing around the house. I’ve heard you awake, whispering of the black dog and the salt road so many times now. I know. This is why they’re here. This is why we’re here, doing this, why all of this is happening. I...” Her breath wobbles in her lungs.
“How did you—”
“That’s why I agreed to talk to Amanda.”
“Why didn’t you say anything about it?”
“I don’t know. Because you’d have told me not to worry about it? Then tried to hide it forever. I knew I needed professional help.”
“But—”
“No butts. Even if yours is cute.” Naree’s gaze sweeps away from Tanis, takes us all in, threads us together with her unsubtle disapproval. “Same goes for the rest of you. Cason, Rupert, Fitz, I don’t know who hurt you boys, but clearly, some amount of psychological trauma is at play here. Fucking take a night, and go to sleep.”
“I understand where you’re coming from,” says Cason in his even-keeled, everything’s-okay dad voice. “And I’m grateful for the offer, I am. But we’re already out of time. We need to get ready—”
“There’ll be fried chicken.”
I stop in place. “Korean fried chicken?”
“Fresh,” says Naree.
