Still, Kamen had spent hours in conversation with the Druid called Bella, whose talent was the ability to read any language put before her. Any language, that is, written by humans or the six Nightwalker races she knew of. The Bodywalkers wrote in Egyptian or the language they were reborn into, plus any languages they had studied over their incarnations. Kamen himself could read and write and speak almost any language put in front of him. The product of having his nose constantly in a book whenever he had a body.

But while this Bella could read Egyptian, she could not read anything that referred to any of the six races she was not familiar with. Instead, the pages would simply be filled with the Egyptian alphabet. Something that might seem strange, but not strange enough to have gotten her to question it earlier. And when books in the Demon language were brought to Kamen, all he could see was gibberish that meant absolutely nothing and was completely indecipherable. If Bella wrote something in English about the other Nightwalkers, it just looked like pages filled with the English alphabet.

It was clear that whatever was keeping the two factions apart was determined to do it in such a way that they would never have questioned it. And yet, for all of this misdirection and codification, somehow a prophecy in the Demon language about the twelve Nightwalker nations had survived, giving a hint of what was out there. It had been useless with no context, until Bella, a half-breed Druid, had literally run into Kat, a half-breed Djynn. While they could not see each other nor speak to each other, they could write to each other and use humans as go-betweens when getting messages across.

It made for slow going, this communication process. It had been seven months now since they had first found each other and they were still trying to smooth out ways of communicating and transferring messages back and forth.

He had been working with Bella since he had a larger store of language capability than anyone else in the Portales, New Mexico, compound. If a solution was going to be found, it was going to be found by the two of them. They just had to hope it would happen sooner rather than later. Time was growing short.

For Apep was about to give birth.

In this incarnation, the imp god had taken over Odjit’s body. He had then chosen a father from among the Nightwalker breeds, a powerful Night Angel named Dax, and had raped him in order to impregnate himself. Apep was due to deliver the child into the world any day now.

One god was nearly impossible to fight, but two? And while there was still hope they might stumble upon a text somewhere that would tell them how to get rid of Apep, the god’s child would be something never seen before. There would be no telling how to be rid of it.

Apep had been quiet for the duration of his pregnancy, but after he gave birth, he would focus on destroying them—Kamen was certain of it. He suspected that the Nightwalkers were key to Apep’s undoing, and that the god knew it. So he would destroy them as soon as he was able. Kamen believed that Apep’s pregnancy made him vulnerable, and while they should probably strike before that weakness was gone from him, there were two problems. They didn’t know how to attack him and they no longer knew where he was.

Actually…Kamen was fairly certain he had a spell that could locate him, only he hadn’t mentioned it to the others as yet. He felt in his gut that they weren’t ready to face Apep, that they were missing a key element that would allow them to defeat him at last. Bella agreed with him. And anyway, the surest way to defeat him would be if the two Nightwalker factions could coordinate their attacks, and until they figured out why they couldn’t see each other, they wouldn’t be able to enact that kind of coordination effectively.

It was a curse. It had to be a curse.

Kamen’s head spun with these thoughts over and over again. It was no wonder he hadn’t been able to sleep, sometimes for days at a stretch. These people were counting on him to fix the mess he had created, and if he failed…if he failed, every death Apep caused would be on his soul. A weight he would carry from now until the world ended and there were no more humans left to Blend with.

And when he did sleep, it was to have horrible nightmares. Nightmares about what he had set loose on the earth. He could end up being solely responsible for the destruction of all mankind, not just Nightwalkers. The only thing in their favor was that any written history about Apep they had found so far, as spare as it had been, had said he craved the adulation of his followers. Apep would no doubt prefer to enslave the world rather than destroy it.

Not that that was anything to feel better about.

Kamen walked to the bathroom and splashed some cold water on his face. Then he turned on the lights and picked up one of the ancient tomes he had been studying in hopes of finding a solution to any of his many daunting problems. And, failing that, he was searching for spells, both offensive and defensive—anything that would help protect the Nightwalkers when Apep’s next attack took place.

He had been reading for several hours when, suddenly, something on a papyrus scroll jumped out at him—hieroglyphs of the figure of a god using some kind of power to divide a group of twelve beings into two halves.

Kamen knew instantly that the god was Apep and that he had used his power to sunder the Nightwalker nation into two. Then it showed that the god had died as a result of the curse. This was new information. He felt an emotion akin to excitement—if a man as jaded as he was could even feel excitement and hope any longer. If the god could die from the curse, then that meant he could die, period. That his mortal body was fragile enough to be destroyed. The question was, how did they go about destroying that mortal body when they hadn’t even gotten close to doing so in spite of using strength and manmade weapons against him? He’d been shot directly in the heart and it hadn’t even made him blink. If that couldn’t kill him, then what could?

But the next hieroglyphs were even more important. They showed the god resurrecting, enslaving people, using his power to kill…and then they showed the twelve beings coming together to fight the god. Eventually destroying him.

Did that mean what he thought it meant? That if all twelve nations of Nightwalkers got together they could fight this god? If that were the case then it would be an impossible task. Not only because they couldn’t see one another, but because the twelfth nation, the Wraiths, were enemies to all the other Nightwalkers. True, there had been an unspoken truce of sorts these past decades, more a case of neither making any moves against the other. But every Nightwalker on this side of the faction, known now as the Second Faction, knew the Wraiths were cold-blooded and would just as soon touch you with their instantly fatal deathtouch as not. The First Faction was lucky they knew nothing of the Wraiths. They made Nightwalker blood run cold.