Her task would be accomplished tonight.

She sheltered in the ancient lair of the Sibyl of Cumæ, who had once called out prophecies to loyal citizens, her voice echoing from the crater walls. She’d asked for an extended life but had forgotten to ask for eternal youth, and as a thousand years passed, as many years as the grains of sand she’d foolishly demanded equal her days, she’d grown smaller and smaller, older and older, until all that was left of her was a voice, and a body so tiny that it had to be kept inside a bottle to avoid being lost. At last, even those things had gone. She was long absent from here now.

Cleopatra had listened for her when she arrived and heard nothing, only the whispers of bats roosting in the dark cave corners.

She closed her eyes and felt the Slaughterer journeying. She felt Sekhmet, her back stretched against the sky, catlike, taking the light of the sun as succor while she awaited sacrifices by Cleopatra and by her arrow.

Cleopatra had sacrificed more to her on the journey here. A shepherd calling to his sheep, his blood tasting of an old grudge against a scholarly brother. A prostitute painting her face for evening, her blood tasting of the time she fell down a flight of stairs and was picked up and bandaged by a man who turned out not to love her. A slave drawing water for an evening meal, his blood tasting of a spice market, of a wooden cage shared with a dying friend. A fisherman reeling in his nets, his blood tasting of a mistress in another port, mother to several bastard children. An old widowed man left outdoors to see the stars, who looked up at Cleopatra with dazzled eyes, smiling in the face of his death. He had no secrets left.

Each one of her killings weighed on her.

She’d never thought of these things when she was in power, when she was mortal. Thousands had died in battle, acting on her orders or killed by her soldiers. She’d ordered killings of the families of traitors, of opponents. She had been a queen, and as queen she had done what she thought necessary, regardless of the human cost.

She’d never thought about where their souls went.

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.

And what was she? A betrayer. A child killer. Was she not the same as the creature she had murdered? Was she not herself a murderer? At the same time, she had torn herself from Sekhmet. She had done something on her own, something in opposition to the goddess. She had delivered the first portion of her bargain. One more act, the sacrifice of Chrysate, and she would win Antony’s soul and those of her children as well. They would go to the Duat. If that was all she could do, it would be enough. She might be a slave to a goddess, but they would be in heaven.

She stretched herself on the cold stones of the sibyl’s cave. The bats looked down upon her, their faces curious. Their high-pitched song filled her ears and gave her no comfort.

At last, she slept, dreamless.

As she slept, snakes slithered into the cave. Cats twined their sleek forms against the rock walls. In the valley beyond the crater, a bear trundled down a hillside, and a tiger traveled silently across the field. The rhinoceros immersed itself in the lake of Avernus, washing the dust of the road from its rough skin. A small splash, and a crocodile surfaced in the lake, having traveled by water through underground caverns and along coastlines for days.

An elderly lion, toothless and mangy, padded across the mouth of the cave, lashing its tail, and guarding the queen who slept within.