The three boudas went from chastised to baring their teeth in a blink.
“Don’t put your hand on me again,” I said.
He poked his finger into my chest again. “Well, I have something to tell you: don’t let the sun set on you in this county, because…”
I grabbed his wrist and yanked him forward, tripping him with my foot. He went down back first and I caught him by his throat, three feet above the ground, lifted him up a bit and bent down to his face. My eyes glowed with murderous red. My voice turned rough with an animal growl. “Listen well, because I won’t be repeating myself, you racist prick. If you make any trouble for me or my people, I’ll hunt you down like the pig you are and carve a second mouth across your gut. They’ll find you hanging by your own intestines. The next time you hear something laugh and howl in the night, hug your family, because you won’t see the sunrise.”
I opened my fingers. He crashed on the ground, his face white as a sheet. He scrambled backward, rolled to his feet, and took off.
The three shapeshifters stared at me, openmouthed.
“That’s how you intimidate people. No witnesses and not a mark on him. Get your asses to the car.”
CHAPTER 12
It was close to noon when I finally walked through the doors of the office. Kate sat at her desk. Grendel sprawled by her feet, an enormous black monstrosity that had more in common with the hound of the Baskervilles than with any poodle I had ever seen. He saw me and wagged his tail.
I paused to pet his head. “The Consort in the flesh. You grace us with your presence, Your Majesty. I’m so honored.” I pressed my hand to my chest, hyperventilating. “I shall alert the media posthaste!”
She grimaced. “Har-de-har-har. Did you have lunch yet?”
“No, and I’m starving. I could eat a small horse.”
“Acropolis?” Kate asked, rising.
“Way ahead of you.” I grabbed the file off my desk and went out the door. “By the way, we have a nice police tail that we aren’t supposed to lose.”
“The more, the merrier.”
When we had both worked at the Order, Parthenon had been our favorite lunch joint. It served the best gyros. Unfortunately, now we were about forty-five minutes away from Parthenon, but we had found Acropolis, half a mile away, which was just as good if not better. It didn’t have Parthenon’s outdoor garden, but we made do with a secluded booth near the window in the back.
We ordered a heap of gyros, tzatziki sauce, a plate of bones for Grendel, and yummy pink-drop fruity drinks. Even with my shapeshifter senses, I had no idea what was in them and we both had decided it wasn’t prudent to ask. Our police escorts, an older woman and a man in his twenties, were seated all the way across the room, by the window. For now we had privacy, at least.
I took the picture of the knife from the file and pushed it toward her. “Ancient knife.”
She pondered it. “This is not battle-ready.”
“Raphael thought it was ceremonial.”
She nodded. “It’s a fang.”
“What?”
“It’s a fang.” She turned the picture toward me. “Wolf, maybe. Here, look.”
She reached down and pulled Grendel’s upper lip up, revealing huge canines. “Exactly the same.”
She was right. The knife was shaped just like a canine tooth. “How did I miss this?”
Kate wiped her hands on the cloth napkin. “I wouldn’t have connected it either, except Curran gave Grendel a pork chop last night and this doofus wolfed it down and got a bone shard stuck in his gum. I had to pull it out and got a close look at his teeth. I can’t seem to impress on the Beast Lord that giving him pork chops is not a good idea. He says wolves eat boars. I say that wolves never had a boar sliced into chops, which makes pork bones very sharp.”
I unloaded the whole story on her, sparing no details. Kate’s eyes kept getting bigger and bigger.
“And here we are,” I finished.
“The place smelled of jasmine and myrrh?”
I nodded.
Kate thought for a long moment. “You said the millionaire’s name was Anapa?”
I nodded. “I checked on it. It’s some sort of small town on the Black Sea in Russia.”
“It’s also in the Tell el-Amarna Tablets,” she said. “In the late 1880s clay tablets were found on the site of an old Egyptian city. The tablets dated to about the fourteenth century BCE. They were probably part of some royal archive, because most of it was pharaohs’ correspondence with foreign rulers.”
“How do you even remember this stuff?”
“Most of the tablets are from Palestine and Babylon,” she said. “It was part of my required education. Anyhow, the tablets are written in Akkadian, and the name Bel Anapa is mentioned. ‘Bel’ meant ‘master’ or ‘lord’ in Akkadian, similar to the Semitic Ba’al.”
“Like the demon Baal?”
Kate grimaced. “Yes. They had this thing where only priests were allowed to say the god’s name, so they just ba’aled their gods. Similar to the way Christians use ‘Lord’ now. So some Greeks ended up thinking that Bel or Ba’al meant a specific god, but it doesn’t: Bel Marduk, Bel Hadad, Bel Anapa, and so on.”
Great. “Which god is Anapa?”
“The Greeks called him Anubis, God of the Dead.”
Whoa.
“The one with the jackal head?” I asked, raising my hands to my head to indicate ears.
Kate nodded.
Okay. No god that had “of the Dead” attached to it could be taken lightly. Hades, Hel, none of them were cuddly puppies.
“He can’t be a god,” I said. “There isn’t enough magic for gods. We’ve established that.” Gods ran on the faith of their worshippers like cars on fuel. The moment the magic receded, their flow of faith was cut off and the gods dematerialized.
“He could be just using the name,” Kate said. “He could be the child of a god.”
I stared at her.
“Saiman is the grandchild of a god,” Kate said. “Anapa could be also.”
I thought of the office in Anapa’s mansion. That otherworldly office no human being could’ve made. “Do you think the knife might be modeled after his fangs?”
“It’s possible.”
“Does Anubis have any sort of helper animals?” I asked. “Like something about five feet tall with the jaws of a crocodile and…”