Queen of Kings - Maria Dahvana Headley [72]
“What shall I do with this, then?” she asked.
“You’ll put it back where you found it,” he said, smiling.
She was a tease, this girl. Augustus thought about the things he would do to her. He had some ropes here, and a whip braided of soft leather, which would leave lovely marks on that pale flesh. His body hummed pleasantly.
“I think I will not,” Chrysate said.
Something changed in her. Her thighs clasped his, and Augustus felt, all at once, as though she were made of iron. The softness of her waist became something live and brutal beneath his palm. Augustus caught a glimpse of her face as she arched her spine, her throat toward the ceiling.
The green of her eyes had been eclipsed by black.
Augustus gasped beneath her, pain coursing through him. His hands scrabbled at her skin.
She opened the box, curled backward and drew her fingernails, almost lazily, along the stone of the floor. With a wrenching sound, a fissure appeared, a trench in the very earth. The priestess poured a measure of ash into the soil.
Augustus watched, horrified and paralyzed.
Chrysate pulled a pin from her braids and stabbed it into her fingertip. She held the finger above the ash for a century-long moment, before a glob of blood formed and fell into the trench.
With her terrifying, dilated pupils, she looked into Augustus’s eyes.
“Watch,” she ordered. “Listen.”
A wailing moan came from deep beneath the house. The floor tilted. The books spilled from the shelves, and Augustus himself fell to the floor, his face inches from the trench. He could not see to the bottom of it.
There were more sounds, shrieks and wails, indistinct calls in unknown languages, sounds of hunger and lust, sounds of despair.
A chill filled the room, and something began to move in the frozen dark down there. A dusky thing, twisting and rising like vapor over a river, a scrap of mist.
“Come,” the witch said to the mist. “Come to me.”
The thing rose, a creature taken from some deep ocean, and reeled into the air.
And then, before them, in Augustus’s chamber, was a man, transparent, strange, his eyes wide and black and terrified. A wound in his stomach, the blood itself transparent.
Augustus could see through his chest and into his motionless heart.
“Tell us your name,” Chrysate said. “Tell us who you are.”
There was a long pause. The man raised his hand slowly to his mouth and removed a metal coin from his tongue. He looked at it for a moment, and then clenched his fist, holding it tightly in his palm.
“I was,” the man said at last. “I was Mark Antony.”
“And so you are again,” the priestess said. “I have opened the gates of Hades for your shade to pass through.”
10
The shade wavered, the light of the candles pouring through the place where his wound had been. He held his hand to the spot, pressing his fingers against his lost flesh. He moved his hand from the wound and held it up, gazing at it. There was blood on the fingers, but it was immaterial, like a faint residue of ink washed over with water.
He was a flickering presence in the now frigid room. Augustus had to narrow his eyes to distinguish the man, and even then, he moved in and out of clarity, as though he were a sunken ship glimpsed deep beneath rippling waters.
In spite of his state, he was certainly Mark Antony. There was no doubt. The unruly hair and trimmed beard, the cleft chin, the wide chest, the handsome, weathered face. Augustus recognized the ragged, coiled scars, evidence of battles they’d fought together.
His enemy was more man than he, even as a ghost. Augustus picked up his goblet in trembling fingers and refilled it with wine, taking care not to meet Antony’s eyes.
“Is this safe?” Augustus asked Chrysate, taking care that his voice did not wobble. “You’ve brought my enemy into my house. I trust you know how to control him.”
“He is a shade,” Chrysate answered, smiling. “Not the man you knew. They are the perfect servants. Their will begins to slip away from them