She looked from me to Nik and back. “Use me as a guinea pig. If the procedure doesn’t work, I’ll die, but if it does work . . .”

“You’ll live,” I said with a rough laugh. “And a hell of a lot longer than you would’ve otherwise.”

“I don’t care about that,” she said, and to my amazement, she meant it. “If it works, you have to promise to use the procedure on my son. It’s the only way he’ll ever have a chance at a normal life.”

I stared at her, weighing her request. Was it possible that everything she’d done had been for her kid? I would never say I approved of her methods, but I couldn’t deny that she was a solid mother. Maybe a little extreme with the whole putting the well-being of her kids first—ahead of the whole damn world—but she wasn’t all bad.

Finally, I shook my head, a wry smile twisting my lips. “Why the hell not,” I said, offering Constance my hand. Besides, I needed her just as much as she needed me. Some of the best partnerships started that way.

Constance shook my hand, and the agreement was made. “Thank you,” she said softly.

I pulled my hand back and turned to the two men huddling at the other side of the room, as far away from us as possible. “Don’t think I’ve forgotten about you, boys.” I dipped the tip of the needle dagger in the vial of infected blood to re-coat it and stalked their way. “So . . . you two were in charge of the day-to-day operations on this project. Isn’t that just fascinating?”

They exchanged a look. It reeked of piss on this side of the room, and it only took a glance down at Scott’s trousers to see why.

“I wonder who might’ve let Sammy out?” I stopped a few feet from them and waggled the tainted dagger in front of their noses. “Who wanted the disease to get out—to spread?”

They recoiled.

I crouched down, elbows on my knees. “First person to spill the beans doesn’t get infected . . .”

“It was me,” Scott blurted. “I did it.”

I blinked, taken aback by the quick response. I hadn’t expected it to be so easy to get a confession. I also hadn’t expected that confession to be a lie. “Now why would you ever lie about a thing like that?”

Gregory sighed, and the older man’s entire demeanor changed. Not just his demeanor, his whole damn appearance. He stood, his head filling out with thick, dark brown hair and his face shedding several dozen years even as his shoulders broadened and he gained a few inches. The muddy brown of his irises gave way to an ethereal bronze that shimmered with an alien light and swirled with a whole galaxy’s worth of stars.

“Because I compelled him to,” he said.

“Holy shit,” I breathed, standing and stumbling back a few steps. Gregory—or whoever the hell he was—wasn’t human. And he wasn’t even Nejeret; no Nejeret had eyes like that. The man standing before me was a fully-fledged Netjer, an actual, full-powered god, like the two who were currently still on sabbatical from our universe.