“You may have to,” I told him. “You have to promise me that if he gets my body, you will walk away, Raphael. You’ll go on, you’ll find someone to love, you’ll have children…”

“Shut up,” he told me.

“Promise me.”

“I’m not promising shit,” he said. “I would die before I lost you.”

“Raphael!”

“No.”

He slid in the bed next to me, holding me in his arms. His scent enveloped me, and I held on to him, until I fell asleep.

CHAPTER 15

In the morning I awoke alone in the hospital room. Doolittle delivered a huge breakfast to me and stood over me while I ate every last piece of scrambled eggs, sirloin tips, and pancakes. I gobbled it up and escaped the medical ward to go look for Roman.

I found the priest of the Evil God in a corner of the northern courtyard. It was one of those small outside spaces within the Keep, shielded by a tall wall and made to provide relative privacy. To get to it, I had to pass through the stone arch, cut in the bottom of a stocky tower, and midway to it, I heard high-pitched giggles.

The black volhv sat on a bench, surrounded by a gaggle of kids, and was making small things disappear from his hands and reappear behind their ears and in their hair. A female werejackal discreetly watched him from the wall. Visitors to the Keep were never left unsupervised, especially around children.

I leaned against the wall and watched the volhv, too. There was something so joyous about Roman. It was as if part of his life was so bleak and dark that he felt the need to live the rest of it to its fullest, squeezing every bit of fun and happiness out of it. Even his martyred, put-upon sighs had a slightly mocking quality about them, as if he only pretended to be upset.

Roman saw me. “Okay, that’s enough magic for today. Scatter now. Scatter, scatter, scatter.”

The kids took off. Roman spread his arms. “Can’t help it. I’m just popular.”

I smiled and sat by him on the bench. “I have a serious question.”

“I will give a serious answer.”

“Can a god be killed?”

The humor drained from Roman’s face. “Well, that depends on if you’re a pantheist or Marxist.”

“What’s the difference?”

“The first believes that divinity is the universe. The two are synonymous and nonexistent without each other. The second believes in anthropocentrism, seeing man in the center of the universe, and god as just an invention of human conscience. Of course, if you follow Nietzsche, you can kill God just by thinking about him.”

Ask a priest a question, get an enigmatic answer. Didn’t matter what religion…“Roman,” I said. “Can I kill Anubis?”