“They will try,” Cleopatra told him. “If I am bested, they will use Sekhmet. My goddess is older than you. Hecate is older as well. Perhaps together, they are stronger.”

Hades sat up in his throne. “They are not stronger.”

“I will bring you the priestess who assists Hecate. I will deliver her to the gates. It is no small task. I ask another boon for it.”

“What is your price?” the god asked.

“I desire the soul of Augustus, emperor of Rome, and I desire it for eternity. He will not go to Elysium. He is no hero. He will travel with me, no matter the mourners, no matter the sacrifices, no matter the prophecies.”

The god of the Dead looked at Cleopatra, his eyes endless depths, and he smiled.

“Will you accept my bargain?” Cleopatra asked.

“I will,” he said. “It is a good bargain.”

Suddenly, there was a quaking, a groaning at the very base of Hades, and a sound of chains dragging across the ground.

14

Dark magic traveled through the corridors while Auðr worked at the fates of those in Krimissa. She looked up, distracted by the sounds coming from Chrysate’s chamber. She had thought the Greek witch was merely working a love spell on the emperor, but now she could hear screaming from her room. The sound had been, at first listen, disguised as the song of nightingales and larks, but Auðr suddenly heard it for what it truly was.

A murder of crows, screeching over a victory.

Auðr moved as quickly as she could toward Chrysate’s chambers, hobbling into the witch’s rooms through the half-open door.

The floor of the chamber was covered with black petals, like ashes left behind after a tremendous fire. Dozens of crows clung to the bed frame, their dark wings unfurling as they looked down into the bed. The curtains were drawn, but the seiðkona could see movement behind them. A shadow shifting in the candlelight, bending over something stretched on the mattress.

The witch’s hand moved. Auðr watched it in silhouette, drawing a line from one end of the figure on the bed and downward.

“You will love me,” Chrysate said.

“Yes,” said the girl.

“You will love only me,” said the witch.

“Yes,” said Selene. There were tears in her voice. A ragged sound in her breath, but her voice was certain and pure.

“None but I will have you,” said the witch, and her voice changed in that moment into something ancient and murderous, the voice of earthquake and landslide, the voice of dead rivers and poisoned flowers. The vicious and brokenhearted hounds of Hades howled beneath her tone.

The crows began to scream their song.

The wind rose up and tore away the curtains, and Auðr saw what they had been hiding, the creature crouched atop Cleopatra’s daughter, and the girl, her skin pale with loss of blood, stretched upon the bed like something already dead. Auðr saw Chrysate’s snarling face, the ravaged skin, the single, glowing green eye, the knotted hanks of hair, the bloodred lips stretched over sharp teeth.