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 Rome, for nothing. For this.

Her mouth opened wide in a hiss. Her cobra’s hood spread wide, the torchlight shining through it, and where were his defenders? The circus was half empty now, he could see from his vantage point, and the people who had not been quick enough to flee the stadium were trampled and dead in the stands. His soldiers were engaged in battle with the wild animals, whose assigned human combatants had fled the circus for the streets. Agrippa lay across a row of seats, possibly dead himself. Usem crawled up the aisle.

Augustus’s eyes began to close, the world dimming before him. The snake surrounded him, pressing in on his bones and blood, chilling his heart. He’d been a fool to think Agrippa would kill her with a dagger or with any of the other weapons they’d assembled. She was not of this earth.

He felt his body giving over to her.

“No,” he whispered. Cleopatra looked into his eyes, caring nothing for his life.

“You killed my husband,” she hissed. “You killed my son. You took my home.”

Augustus felt his bones beginning to crack, his ribs splintering inside his chest. The serpent coiled tighter about him.

Then he saw the Psylli stand, his eyes dark and wrathful. A whirlwind hung beside him and then dispersed, whipping through the air of the circus. The warrior shook his head furiously, and a sound suddenly began to echo, swooping and whirling from end to end of the stadium.

Cleopatra, in the throes of her triumph, felt herself falter, her body transfixed. She began to lose her grasp on her prey.

Amplified by the wind, Usem stood in the stands, singing the song he’d learned as a child in the desert to make snakes forgive the sins of humans. He sang, his throat open to the sky, his hands thrown out into the air, his feet stamping in the dance of the Psylli.

The serpents of Rome heard him.

All over the city, people leapt from their doorsteps in horror, watching serpents surge from tunnels and secret holes, watching the streets of Rome fill with a slithering, tangling mass, all the snakes proceeding to the circus. They continued to come until they ran like water down the Appian Way, stacked ten deep in every slender alley. They swam the river, their heads bobbing over the surface of the water like eels. They poured through marble hallways and over the tombs in the graveyards. They slipped through secret doorways, coursing over the unsuspecting bodies of illicit lovers and spilling across their beds and out of their windows.

There were more serpents in Rome than there were human souls.

The snakes danced for Usem the Psylli, and in the Circus Maximus, the great serpent that was the queen rose up as well, her green scales shimmering. Augustus fell from her grasp, tumbling end over end to the ground beside Agrippa, who lay transfixed, looking up at the serpent that had almost killed him.