Blood Hunt by Lucienne Diver

into a million pieces?”
    She let go of my neck and I rubbed it, glaring at her. She glared back. “Yes, that one. Worse, he fed his…er, nevermind…to the fishes.”
    His “nevermind”? Wow, chaste was understating things if in all her years she hadn’t come to terms with the word penis. I was tempted to pull a George Carlin and run through all the alternate words for a guy’s man parts, but I suspected she might wash my mouth out with soap…or worse.
    â€œOkay, got it. Really bad dude. You think the Roland brothers have fallen in with him somehow?”
    â€œâ€˜Fallen in’ might be overstating things. Set is still bound. His wife-jailor Taweret assures it. But it seems the brothers have encountered some of his talismans—an amulet and six smaller tokens, based on what’s missing from the museum inventory—and it appears they might be under his influence.”
    â€œThat can’t be all there is to it. Objects are objects, aren’t they? I mean, power might be stored or they might be built to do a specific thing, but…”
    â€œAnd if that thing they’re meant to do is create chaos? Or put a man into a coma-like sleep? Anyway, you don’t understand spellcraft. Everything is representative. You know those thousands of terra cotta soldiers found in China, each different from the others? They were put there to become an actual army for the emperor in the afterlife. The same is meant for the clay representations of food and animals that were sealed into tombs with the bodies in ancient Egypt. So, if an object is created with Set’s likeness…”
    â€œThere’s some kind of connection to the man himself,” I finished for her.
    â€œ God ,” she corrected. “And he’s a right bloodthirsty bastard.”
    â€œOkay, but how do you know all this? Not about the spellcraft. I’ll grant you’ve probably learned a thing or two in all your years. But how are you tracking the Roland boys? The murder only just happened.”
    â€œ This murder only just happened. There’s been at least one other.”
    Neith pulled out a phone I’d never even noticed. I guess that with her ancient goddess aura I assumed she sent ravens or doves or psychic messages. The modern device in her hand seemed so out of place, especially when she started scrolling through it for photos. The first one she showed me nearly made me lose this morning’s chocolate croissant.
    I couldn’t even tell at first whether the body was male or female. There was so much blood. Pools of it. It seemed like she’d been torn open, painted in her own lifeblood and…
    â€œWhat happened?” I asked, swallowing back bile.
    â€œShe was killed. Right in the museum from which the artifacts were stolen. Mutilated, as you can see and…well, best not to talk about that.”
    I filled in the blank— assaulted. Given Athena’s history with Medusa, I wanted to lash out and ask her if this was somehow the victim’s fault as well, but despite my efforts to choke it down, bile still flooded my throat. Besides, that was ancient history. It was possible she’d changed with the times. Hera certainly had, no longer revenging herself on Zeus’s lovers, but now an actual woman’s advocate.
    â€œBut that’s not even all of it,” Neith continued. “She was found in the museum’s vault. The museum had just gotten in two very unusual sarcophagi. The names have been lost to history, their spirits not commended to the next life, but… Osiris knows the hearts of all those who have died. These were very bad men. Killers, rapists. They’d managed to kill nineteen women and two men back in their day before they were taken down.”
    â€œAnd yet someone went to the trouble to embalm them?” I managed.
    â€œThey weren’t embalmed so much as interred. Spells were set to bind them in, to