Queen of Kings - Maria Dahvana Headley [98]
He felt the Psylli pressing the hilt of a weapon into his fumbling hand. Agrippa looked up and saw Usem yank Cleopatra’s head back. Agrippa thrust the serpent-poisoned dagger deep and hard into the monster’s breast, feeling nothing but her demonic body engaged with his, hearing nothing but her shrieking roars. Her breast. At once creamy and bare and tawny-furred, both lioness and queen, and the blade had struck true, he knew.
He felt the dagger penetrate deep into her chest, and he twisted it, grunting with the effort. Surely, she would die. Surely.
He could hear swords clashing, men surrounding them, his own men, he thought, but he was not sure. Someone tried to wrest Cleopatra from his arms.
Chrysate muttered under her breath, whispering darkness, trying to bind the queen. She was strong enough to weaken her but not to break her. She called to Hecate, but Hecate was bound herself. The priestess clutched her holding stone. The shade was resisting her, too, and beside her, Cleopatra’s daughter trembled in terror, barely contained. She turned her head to look for Auðr and saw the Northerner, her hands high in the air, moving rapidly, spinning, the distaff nearly invisible between them.
Agrippa’s men were fighting Roman soldiers who had come from nowhere, and who seemed to be trying to defend Cleopatra. The shade of Antony shouted encouragement at them.
Cleopatra’s face was pinned upward, the general clenched about her throat like a chain, muscles heaving and sweating, blowing like a bull. She hissed, air slipping from her lips.
Something was weakening her. Cleopatra shuddered, feeling a chill rising inside her, dragging her back into her human body.
Her husband, a false vision. An illusion. It could not be Antony.
She tried to convince herself, to banish it. They were tricking her. She’d seen something that could not be true. The man she had seen could not be Antony, but with every part of herself she knew it was. The smell of mint and wine. His smell.
She could feel the magic coming from the old woman, with the strange motions of her distaff, and the other, the one whose hands rested on Antony’s shoulders, chanted words in a language even Cleopatra did not know. Any sorceress who had sway over the dead had sway over Cleopatra. She was not alive enough to resist it.
She struggled against Agrippa’s hands and against the other man clinging to her shoulders. How could a mortal man hold her so tightly? Usem’s dagger lay in her breast like a hornet’s sting, maddening. She wailed, not for pain but for Antony. She had touched him, and now he was gone. She had touched him, and yet he was dead. He had cringed away from her. His face had shown her things she never wanted to see.
She terrified him, and with good reason. She terrified herself.
She let her body go limp, and Agrippa released his grip on her throat slightly, thinking her dying. She felt herself gripped by several other men, the soldiers who had appeared fighting Agrippa’s men. She shook them off.
“NO!” Usem shouted, but Agrippa had no time to move before her tail whipped up and wrapped around his torso, flinging him deep into the stands, and Usem down through the crowd. Agrippa landed on his back, feeling ribs crack, an arm splinter. He gasped, unable to breathe, and then, choking with horror, he watched as the snake’s tail lashed around the paralyzed Augustus and lifted him from where he stood.
She twisted the emperor’s body before hers, bringing his struggling form to a level with her eyes.
Augustus looked into them, strangely calm. It was happening at last. He should have died in Alexandria. Human. Snake. Lioness. None of these things, and all of them. He had not been mad, nor had he been preparing all these months for no reason.
As the pressure of her coils grew greater around him, he felt his heart trying to leap out of his throat. He gagged on bile. This would be the end of Augustus. He knew it with every bit of his soul. All these years of surviving intrigue, surviving