Cleopatra felt repulsed, but also something else.

“Who jails her?”

“The gods,” Antony said. “She interfered.”

“I was a queen, too,” a soft voice said, the sound echoing around them, rattling and hungry. “Do not be so proud.”

“Don’t look at her,” Antony told her. Cleopatra could not help herself.

She shuddered, but Antony strode on past the apparition, Cleopatra’s hand in his.

“The witch who imprisoned me serves that goddess. She sought to use you and Sekhmet to bring Hecate up from the Underworld,” Antony said. “To release her and upturn Hades.”

“How would she do that?”

“She would sacrifice you,” Antony said. “The longer we stay here, the more likely it is she will get her way. She still has your body. It is only luck that she does not know how to kill you.”

“No one knows how to kill me,” Cleopatra said. “I do not. Do you?”

“I don’t want to kill you,” Antony said. “I am the only one who feels that way.”

At last, before them, crouching in the darkness at the mouth of a cave, was an enormous black dog with three heads, its throat wreathed with a tangle of hooded serpents.

The dog’s eyes glowed red, and its fur shone with a dark and oily iridescence. Each of its teeth was as long as a ritual dagger, and it tossed its heads, rotating each one to look upon Cleopatra. The creature was as tall as an elephant, and its tremendous body filled the entrance to the cavern. It snorted and slavered, and its fur rippled with muscle and sharp bones. Its eyes were as bright as flames.

Cleopatra felt her body flexing, twisting, and preparing itself for battle.

“She does not live,” Antony informed Cerberus. “And we will pass. You will clear the way for us.”

Growling, the dog inhaled the air about Cleopatra’s face.

Cleopatra felt her own jaws stretching into a hiss, whether serpent or feline, she was uncertain. Antony looked at her, clearly startled.

She gazed into the eyes of the snakes twined about the dog’s throat and spoke with them in a language she did not know. She felt the empty chamber where her heart had been, filling with a rippling endlesstongued chant.

A version of the song that had flung her own body into the dust at the arena poured from her mouth. She was mistress of this new language, as easily as she’d always understood foreign tongues. The words were hers now.

“Give me your everything,” the song went. “You belong to me. We are one thing, and we have the same longings. We are one thing, and we have the same desires. Sing with me, serpent children, dance with me. We are one.”

The dog bared its teeth as the serpents about his throat tightened their grip on him, twisting and constricting his movements.

“Kill him,” she told the serpents, for this was a creature in opposition to herself.

Antony gripped her arm, distracting her from her task.