Queen of Kings - Maria Dahvana Headley [86]
The animals Cleopatra had traveled with would fight here, to celebrate Conquered Egypt. She could feel them beneath her, in the cages that had been installed in the catacombs beneath Rome. They’d be prodded up into the light and given shouts and applause when they surfaced in the arena to meet their fighting partners, the bestiarii, gladiators doomed to fight the doomed. Lions, tigers, and crocodiles pitted against men.
She would attend.
The poster hanger paused, looking behind him nervously.
She leapt at him, her talons slashing, her teeth in his throat before he had time to make the slightest sound. If he broadcast the emperor’s filthy lies about Antony, then he deserved to die.
From the shadows, Antony watched his wife tear savagely into the man’s throat. He’d searched every corner of the city for Cleopatra, and now he had found her. In shock, he watched her drink the workman’s blood.
What the emperor said was true. Was she under a spell or sickened with some sort of poison? He did not know what she had become, but he was horrified. He turned and disappeared into the shadows of the falling sun. He could not talk to her. Not now.
16
Chrysate woke suddenly and looked quickly about the room. It was empty but for the shade of Antony, who sat beside her, quiet and still. She had slept most of the day, and she still felt weak from the spells she’d cast the night before.
She felt magic around her, and not her own. The house was filled with it. She had not seen the other witches in the scry, and the old woman in particular made her uneasy. Chrysate had slept like one drugged, dreaming of threads, of being entangled in a sticky web spun by a tremendous spider. She stretched, reassuring herself that nothing had changed in the room, and then turned to look at her captive.
Antony stared beyond the ceiling, his eyes dark.
Had she not known better, she would have thought he grieved over something. This was impossible, though. No shade Chrysate had ever seen was strong enough to resist the forgetfulness of Hades for long, even if the shade was that of a previously formidable man.
“You may eat,” she instructed Antony, though he looked strangely substantial.
He passed to the table, dipping his fingers into the honey and milk all shades craved. Was her memory flawed? His skin had been ashen, and now it seemed less so. His arms had been nearly transparent, and now she could swear there was blood moving through the faded veins.
Had he left the room while she slept?
“What has changed?” she asked him.
“Nothing, my lady,” he answered.
She shook her head. The holding stone was tight in her hand, but something was not right, and her powers were not strong enough to understand what it might be. She wished the girl was ready, but that spell was not complete yet. There was no time to do what she planned for Selene, not before the venatio. Chrysate would have to suffer through the night in this condition and perhaps longer. It would not do to be interrupted.
There was enough power contained within Cleopatra to remove Hecate from her lowly position and bring her to rule over Persephone herself. There was enough power there to do anything Chrysate desired. She had only to capture her, and the change foreseen in the scry would be set in motion.
Chrysate smiled.
Sekhmet must have been foolish or desperate, to tie herself to a human, like a hawk to a chain. If the human was captured, the chain might be reeled in and the hawk seized, or so Chrysate hoped.
She did not expect it to be easy. She’d have to sacrifice more blood to keep Antony in her power. She needed him to lure his wife.
Wincing, she took a long, keenly pointed ritual knife from her garments and ran it across her wrist. Even after all these years, even across the white line of scar first put there when she was a girl, on a body long since abandoned, the necessary sacrifices remained unpleasant. Her skin felt frail and furrowed under