Now, since Hades, it was all she could think of. As she drank of their blood, she knew all of their hidden things, all of their failures and glories, and she tried to send their souls to wherever they should go. There was no time for ritual. She left their bodies in the open so that they might be found and buried, so that they might not wait on the shores of Acheron, unmourned. Having seen that place, she could not doom souls to it knowingly.

A light appeared in the sky, brighter than the dying sun, brighter than the rising moon, moving toward the Cumæan temple as she watched.

Cleopatra leapt from her hiding place and bounded out into the daylight, her skin searing, her eyes blurring as she ran at the murderous grandchild of the sun god.

“You will not kill here!” she shouted.

It hissed at her, and its mouth was infinite, deep and black as the heavens and filled with uncountable fangs. Cleopatra knew, horribly, that her soul was bonded with this creature as well as with its mother.

What was she giving up to kill it? Her soul weighed heavier, heavier yet.

The Slaughterer shifted its face toward her, and she saw its mindless eyes. It did not care what she said. Once it had hissed, it did not bother to truly acknowledge her again.

She threw herself upon it as it turned its back to fly toward the temple and to its killing task there.

Cleopatra clutched its pulsating throat, its burning body, feeling its knife-sharp feathers cutting into her palms. She gasped as it twisted and bit her hand —and this was true pain, unlike the echo of pain her bloodless body had experienced since her transformation— but she held it still tighter, straining all of her muscle and bone against its escape. Its feathers sliced into her as it struggled, and its slender, arrow body twisted in her grasp.

“You will not kill,” she told it, and for the first time, she heard its voice, faint, strangely musical.

And what of you? Will you not kill?

She screamed with rage, feeling a tearing pain as she broke the Slaughterer’s back, snapping its spine.

Her fury was replaced with devastating agony as she held the broken arrow up to the light, Sekhmet’s roar of sorrow rattling her own bones.

“I dedicate this soul to Hades,” Cleopatra shouted, and then she hurled the body of the Slaughterer down, into the dark waters of Avernus, as she’d promised the god of the Underworld she would.

Cleopatra waited for the sky to open and strike her down, but nothing happened.

The waters steamed and boiled as Plague sank into them.

Her skin blistered, her body smoking, her hands burning, and healing cruelly even as they burned, Cleopatra limped back into the cave of the sibyl, sobbing at the loss of the thing she had killed. She did not love it, no, she did not, but Sekhmet did, and what Sekhmet felt, Cleopatra felt. The loss of a child. A dear one.