Drew tried to wrap his hands around my neck but I grabbed him by the wrists to stop him. So he head-butted me instead.
It was so cute. I was going to reward him so well for being such a strong man afterward. But first…
I slowed my breath, concentrated on every grain of sand, every speck of dust, every piece of earthly dirt that heeded my command and summoned it to me. The magic wrapped around me turning to sand magic and I directed it right at Drew.
It struck him in the face and his eyes rolled back, pulling him into an induced slumber. I grabbed him as he collapsed and eased him onto the floor before I turned my attention to Horus.
"I'm not the same man who fought you before. So yes. I think I can survive you. Now…how about you fight me like a man?"
As I turned to Horus, I glanced at the frozen man beside him and breathed a sigh of relief that he was still a prisoner of time. It only gave me reassurance that the rest of Horus's harem was also incapacitated. So Horus’s unfreezing must have something to do with the scarab.
Interesting!
"Fight you?" Horus laughed, shaking so violently his cigar splintered into two, one half falling to his desk and setting his whiskey on fire.
“Yes, fight me. Like a man. I don’t know how you escaped last time but this time I’ll make sure you die.”
Horus hissed.
“How I escaped? How? Well, let me tell you brother, I didn’t. You stole my power and you took my life. You killed me.”
I groaned.
“If that were true, you wouldn’t be standing here.”
He smiled.
“Well, yeah. See, something saved me that day. Something saved me from you wiping me out of this world. My magic. Whatever godly magic was left inside after you robbed me shifted. It changed. It evolved. It took my soul and split it into fragments. Fragments of consciousness buried into every one of my subjects. It guided them. It drove them. They worshipped me because they could feel a part of me inside them. That was the only thing that kept me…alive. If you can call that living. You might have killed my body but you butchered my spirit. And I had to fight tooth and nail to put it back together.”
The revelation made a chill rush down my spine.
That sounded…horrible. Horrible and terrifying.
What if we could never kill him? What if he survived again? What if there was no way to rid the world of his evil?
“If any of that is true, how do you still have your compulsion powers?”
Horus slid a hand down the middle of his chest like a creep.
“Oh I have this body to thank. He was born with compulsion powers like my own.”
That wasn’t possible. Even if that was the case Horus shouldn’t be able to use them. The powers of the body he possessed should have died with the last remnant of the man’s soul.
But maybe I was wrong. Maybe it didn’t matter in this case. Horus was a perversion of magic and nature. The rules may not apply where he’s concerned. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know what to think.
“You were always a leech but you’ve taken it to a whole other level.”
He shrugged. “I care very little what you think. Now you will give me the scarab."
“Like I said, you’ll have to fight me for it.”
He stopped laughing and turned to me with an overconfident grin.
"I don't need to fight you, dear brother. I actually know you'll give me the scarab in the next five seconds."
"How are you so sure?" I asked and he grabbed the blazing and ash-filled whiskey and downed it as if it wasn't poison.
When he was done, he threw the glass across the room and it smashed on the wall behind me but I didn't let that faze me.
