Page 71 of Cheater Slicks

Pulse clanging in my ears, I spun around, ready to run, but Dis Pater blocked the doorway.

Swallowing my panic, I searched for indicators I had tripped a silent alarm or bumped a ward, but I couldn’t sense a thing that would have prompted him to teleport in almost on top of me.

“Looking for this?” He held up a cloche with a finger bone mounted on a stand under the glass dome. “I knew you would come running as soon as you pieced it together.” He curled his lip at me. “I don’t know where your savior complex came from. Must be the Alcheyvaha in you.”

Gods really loved speaking in riddles. “What do you mean?”

“You’re not Alcheyvaha, if that’s what you were hoping.”

“How can I have Alcheyvaha in me but not be one of them?”

Anunit had imbued me with a portion of her power in order to protect them. Maybe that was what he meant, but I doubted it would be that straightforward based on the conversation I overheard between him and the smoky-voiced man. Not that I was about to confess to eavesdropping on them.

“You cost me a source of power when Anunit handed you the mantle and you stole the Alcheyvaha.” He tapped his thumbnail against the glass. “That means you owe me a new one.”

Trawling my memories, I pinpointed what Dis Pater told me while I was helping Kierce locate the missing Alcheyvaha bones after I questioned his intentions toward them.

“Some things are sacred even to gods.”

Apparently that was a big, ol’ honking lie. “You were feeding off the Alcheyvaha.”

There had been no reason for him to remove the bones and risk Anunit’s wrath. Their power had leeched into the soil over the centuries, creating magically infused earth. I had fed from it myself. So had Josie. It had potency like a drug, which, hmm.

I should have considered that soil, not the cemetery, was the problem. Good thing Josie was so dead set on me kicking my grave-dirt-upper habit. If this was any indication, I could become addicted to the unlimited power of the Alcheyvaha. And fast.

Just as I had told Kierce, I didn’t have to sweat getting too big for my britches. I had siblings ready and willing to cut me down to size whenever I needed it. And sometimes even when I didn’t.

“Everyone does it, and as long as no one gets caught, we all look the other way.”

How had I been so naïve as to believe the gods would leave a power source alone out of respect for the dead? Other gods had killed the Alcheyvaha. Of course those same gods had violated the burial grounds.

No wonder Dis Pater had been so strung out when the site near Savannah was discovered. As a vocal advocate for protecting their resting places, he knew it would place him under close scrutiny from his peers who would expect him to fix the problem.

His desire to kill everyone who learned of the burial grounds was starting to make more sense.

He wasn’t protecting the dead. He was cleaning up after himself and the other death gods.

“And because that was taken from you, you decided to take my family from me?”

“Live long enough, and you’ll discover how far you’ll go to keep living. The rations we split aren’t enough for anyone to live on. Do you realize how many death gods there are in the world? Every culture has at least one. Most have three or four. Ninety percent of them have been forgotten. Erased from history along with the religions that spawned them. But they cling to life by their grubby fingernails thanks to what amounts to digging through trash for leftovers.”

“That’s what you call a preexisting condition and not my fault.”

Deflecting blame rather than embracing it? Go me! That might be a first.

“The transfer of power into a living guardian has reinforced the ancient wards protecting the burial grounds set by the last living guardian. No one can access the Alcheyvaha now. No one butyou. The workaround that’s kept the peace between death gods for millennia just quit working.”

Put like that, I was even more confused as to why Ankou had dropped in to save the day. You would think his god would also be eager for my downfall. Though, I suppose, the payoff might be worth it in terms of the chaos this power shortage would create among those who lacked a secondary food source.

Dis Pater was admitting I had an entire pantheon of deities gunning for me.

“You control the tap, so to speak.” He continued his tirade. “As long as your heart beats, your very existence reinforces the protections. You are starving beings who are already ravenous.”

Well, that explained why Anunit had defaulted to the guardian position. I was willing to bet any living guardian wasunliving the second they stood up to gods who wanted to feed on the burial grounds.

Would it have killed her to spell out the fine print before having me sign on the bottom line?

Or maybe it was the possibility it might killmethat had kept her twisting my arm that day until I agreed to her terms without full disclosure of how they might affect me.

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