I glanced up and saw a man. He stood in the river, nude, with the waters lapping at his thighs. The last rays of the setting sun colored his side, throwing orange highlights on his skin, tracing every contour of the etched muscle. He looked so…perfect. Except his face was a blur.

“Who is it?”

The man’s body arched up, his back bending back at an unnatural angle, the ridges of the stomach muscles stretching and his face came into focus. Raphael.

A figure rose above him, an eight-foot-tall man with the head of a jackal. He raised his hand, a golden staff in it, and passed it over the body. The skin over the Raphael’s chest and abdomen split.

I gasped. No!

Blood fountained, coloring the waters of the Nile. Raphael’s muscles opened like bloody petals. Anubis held his hand with outstretched fingers and a human heart, steaming hot and drenched in blood, tore itself out of my mate’s chest and landed in the god’s clawed fingers.

My own heart skipped a beat.

Anubis waded through the water toward me, the heart still beating. I tried to back away, but my feet sank into soft mud.

The god bent over me and offered me the heart. It was terrible. Dread pulsed from it in waves. Dread, sorrow, and guilt. It was choking me.

“Take it.”

“You bastard! I’ll tear you apart!”

Anubis raised the heart, holding the bloody organ just inches from my face and let it go. It hung in the air, terrible, bleeding drop by drop into the Nile.

The river faded. When I awoke, the faint rays of the sunrise, weak and transparent, sifted into the room through my window. I had slept for barely an hour.

I smelled a familiar scent and turned my head. At the other end of the room, near the wall, wrapped in a blanket, with his pillow resting on the floor, lay Raphael. He was back in his human form, and his dark hair fanned across the pillow, his profile perfect against the pale fabric.

He must’ve let me have the bed, because in our beast forms both of us wouldn’t have fit on it.

I looked down and saw myself on the sheets. I had turned human during the night. Olive mud streaks marked my ankles in two smudged rings.

Fear curled in the pit of my stomach, scratching at my insides with icy claws. I wanted to crawl out of my bed, tiptoe across the room, and slide under the blanket with him. He would put his arm around me, and I would lay safe, wrapped in him, breathing in his scent. It would be only an illusion of safety, but I wanted it so, so badly.

I didn’t want to die. I didn’t want to give my body to any gods. For the first time in my twenty-eight years I was truly living. I wanted to love and to be loved in return. I wanted happiness, and family, and children. I wanted a long life and I wanted Raphael to live it with me. I was terrified that I would fail and little Brandy would pay for my mistakes. Fear gripped me, making it hard to breathe.