"Fuck me."

My stomach heaved and I leaned over, vomiting beside the fire. Ragger wrinkled his nose in disgust. The past hour had been exhausting.

Ragger sat quietly, tail wagging. "Do you understand everything I've told you?"

I laughed. "Not even close."

I could still feel the overwhelming edges of the ancient Visharath's consciousness every time he spoke—that endless whirlpool of experience.

My stomach lurched again, and I coughed, spewing the rest of the bile in my stomach onto the dirt floor of the lean-to.

"Never thought I'd get my ass kicked mentally by a coyote," I wiped my lips as I spoke, shaking off the trailing drool that collected on the back of my hand.

"I am not a coyote."

"Well, no shit."

"I am a Jackal."

I paused and looked at him. "Yeah, you don't look like any 'yote I've come across."

He sighed and lay down, crossing his paws across his nose. "How did you not even pick up on that? One more time."

I felt the blood drain from my face, and my heart began to pound as I panicked. I threw my hands up, shouting, "No! Wait, I'm not -"

****************************************

"He's quite more delicate than he lets on."

"Humans generally are; it's one of the things that endeared me to them... although, in this case, I'm not sure if that's a good trait for him to hold on to."

"He's really quite a good person... Oh, he's waking up."

I turned onto my side and vomited again. Holy hell. My head felt like it was going to explode.

"I am not delicate," I moaned. "We just weren't designed to have shit like this happen to us."

Echo laughed. "Agree to disagree, Alec."

"Did you catch all that this time?" Ragger's voice slipped through my mind almost too quickly to process. No, I hadn't, but I wasn't going to tell him that.

"Yup."

"He's lying, but I got most of it, Karagorn."

"Please do not call me that."

"How can I not, knowing who and what you are?"

"Because I told you not to."

Echo fell silent. Hard to argue with that one.

I sat up and stared at the coy... jackal across from me. "She has a point. It's a little hard not to treat you differently, knowing you're a God."

"I am not a God. I am flesh and blood, just like you."

"Yeah, but also like... You're a GOD."

It snorted and stared at me. "That was a very long time ago."

"Uh, no. I'm pretty sure people still worship Anubis in certain parts of the world. Hell, they were still making movies about ancient Egypt not long before y'all showed up. I mean, the Mummy only came out... Oh my God, the Mummy is almost forty years old. Brendan Fraser is probably dead or Turned. Decidedly less sexy in my mind now. What an awful thought, Jesus Christ."

"Those movies were stupid."

"Ha! You went and saw them!"

Ragger shifted uncomfortably. "Every decade or so, I allowed a human family to "adopt me" so I could keep an eye on politics and things of that sort. Easy enough to watch TV while they were at work. And yes. I was curious."

The sheer idea of an ancient Egyptian god not only hanging out in someone's house and eating dog food - but watching movies on Hulu had me cackling.

When I finished laughing, I wiped the tears from my eyes.

"It's not that funny," he growled. "I was the family dog of a Sultancy for nearly a hundred years." Oof, okay, God growling at me, better get my act together.

"Oh my God, okay. Okay. Brass tacks." I chuckled again. "So lemme get this straight. You and a couple other Visharath showed up about seven thousand years ago."

"Yes."

"You were scouts here to start a pathway to making us complacent about invasion, so you possessed some random animals, showed off some alien tech, and set yourself up as Gods."

"Yes."

"And you, you are, your name is, fucking Anubis, the God of fucking Death."

"In your tongue, yes."

"And because you got fat and cozy, decided to kill your fellow scouts and then lived as a dog for the next five-ish thousand years."

The hounds' ears flattened against his head as he snarled, "Is he an idiot?"

"Not usually..." Echo murmured. "You may have broken something in here with the mental connection..."

"I'm not a fuckin' idiot," I snapped. "But honestly, this is a little absurd."

Ragger sighed again, putting his face between his paws once more before speaking aloud. "I did not kill my friends, family, and mate because I was fat and cozy."

He paused, and a pang of guilt hit me. That part hadn't been really clear in what he'd shown me. My mouth was going to get me in trouble.

"I killed them because I could not convince them to abandon the mission."

"Why did you want to abandon your mission in the first place?"

"Because of you. Not you, directly, but humans. And in a way, yes, you, directly, in a way."

"Great. Cryptic Yoda has arrived."

He shook his head, flapping his ears. I couldn't tell if it was annoyance or laughter. "You are not the first of your kind," he said, looking directly into my eyes.

"Well, duh. I have parents."

"Christ, he is an idiot," he said, allowing his host's natural growling undertones to permeate his voice. Kendall speaks so highly of you, too."

What? I sat forward. "What did you say?"

"Your brother. Oh, did I not..."

I leaped to my feet. "How do you know my brother? I swear to God if -"

He snorted into the dirt, glaring at me. "Don't be ridiculous. How would I know anything about you if it weren't for someone who knew you? And as I didn't know about you, I couldn't track down anyone who knew you. That's cyclical logic; stop it. They sought me out, not the other way around. Sit down. Your brother is fine. As is your wife."

My jaw hung open. I didn't know what to say or how to react. Memories came flooding back, things I'd intentionally held at bay for so very, very long. Tears flooded my eyes as I sank back into the dirt.

"How... When..."

"About a year ago, Alec," Echo said softly. "It was all there in what he showed us."

"I couldn't make heads or tails of half of what he showed us, Echo... Thirty, forty worlds, different hosts, millennia of time... We aren't meant to have that in our heads."

"What do you mean, they sought you out? I'm sorry, I don't have the mental capacity to sort through everything you showed me."

Ragger tilted his head to one side. "Your family came looking for you after you disappeared."

"Why? As far as they knew, I was dead at best, Turned at worst."

"You haven't told him?" Ragger stared directly at my forehead as if his gaze was boring directly down to where Echo resided. I felt her shift inside my head. When she spoke, her voice was laced with discomfort.

"No. It did not seem... Pertinent. And it's not like he was talking to me anyway, and he wouldn't have believed me," she whined.

"What wasn't pertinent," I demanded. "What did you not tell me?"

"After... After you and I... fused... a few days are missing from your memory, correct? There were... Complications."

"What kind of complications? What is that supposed to mean?"

"You were in a fugue state," she grumbled. "I had... a small... modicum of control. Nothing," she added, "Nothing too much, I could just kind of... Initiate the change into our other body."

"And?"

"Like I said, you were in a fugue state. That's why you can't remember it. Our joining was a massive shock to your system. All you wanted to do was get back to your family. I knew that was a terrible idea. They would have killed you on sight. While your brother and family would have been more receptive, there were others in the group, such as Finn, who would simply shoot first. So I forced you into your other form so they would run you off."

"And?" I was getting impatient. She needed to get to the point.

"So, on some level, you knew what had happened to you. You fought with me. Closer to your camp, you went back to being human. Snuck in. Snuck around camp."

What she was saying was impossible. There was no way I wouldn't remember this. We had just crawled to some hole or rubble somewhere until my body healed.

She paused, reading my thoughts. "No, Alec," she said sadly. "You were healed within six hours of our meeting."

No no no no no. Horror crept over me. I knew where this was going.

She continued softly. "You knew where all the cameras were. The alarms. Snuck right by and into the main area. You had some drive to just make sure they were all safe. While we were there... Something happened. I'm not sure what."

"An intruder," Ragger broke in, sensing that Echo was struggling with telling me this story. "There was an intruder. Couldn't pin them down to see if they were a fresh Turned. Your guards shot him, and it ended up the case that they were, in fact, human. A human child. Your brother made a hard choice and put him out of his misery."

My heart clenched as I remembered my last words to him: "Lead when you have to." I never told him what leadership required at times, and it must have been terrible for him.

"An argument ensued between Kendall and the rest of the group. Kendall stormed off to be in the woods alone. You followed him, sticking to the shadows. He stopped and fell asleep on an outcropping above a nearby river."

"We fell asleep, too," Echo said. "We slept a lot in those early days. We hadn't found the fluorine we needed for either of your bodies to be at full capacity. We were weak, tired, and fighting an endless mental battle... We awoke to gunshots."

My fingernails dug into my palms. What had happened to Kendall? "Tell me what happened, Echo."

"I..."

"Your brother was beset by a family of mountain lions. Alone, in the dark, with low ammo, almost a full mile from camp," Ragger said. "He enjoys telling this story, very proud of it, in fact, so I'm trying to do it justice as he isn't here to tell it."

I blinked. "Proud of it?"

"In all things, Alec, your brother is always proud of you. Of who you are and to be your kin. Anyway, as he tells it, he goes running through the dark, having managed to injure two of the mountain lions -"

"He hadn't," Echo interjected. "They were fine and he was shitting his pants. It was two cubs and a mother."

"He will deny that until the day he dies," Ragger laughed. "According to him, it was three fully grown lions, and he badly wounded two of them but ran out of ammo and couldn't finish the job."

Echo let out an exasperated sigh. "He's a storyteller, just like you."

"Okay, enough, tell me what happened."

"We happened, Alec. When you awoke and found him under attack, running for his life, that was the last moment I had control. You reached deep within yourself and instantly understood all there was to know about us: our body, our union, our power, our capabilities. I... I think I loved you then, not that our species loves... I accepted my fate, at the very least."

Ragger snorted derisively and snarled, stamping at the dirt in irritation. "Is that what they tell you these days? That we are cold and distant soldiers, only doing what we must? That we do not love, that we do not bond? That is a complete and utter lie. I loved my mate, Isis, dearly. The depths to which the Atung will stoop never cease to amaze me. Do not ever doubt that we are capable of such things, Echo."

Echo was silent for a moment, contemplating. I felt the familiar, slow rise of warmth in my chest as her emotions spilled into mine.

"Maybe so," she said. "Anyway... You slaughtered the threat to Kendall. Not that a few mountain lions would be much of a threat to any Reaver-type turned, but you... It was magnificent. To his credit, Kendall understood that he was not witnessing a regular Visharath encounter. He approached you, and you reconnected with him. You held his hand, and you... You showed him your eyes. Your real eyes. Your human eyes. And he recognized you."

Horror crept back into my stomach once more. "No."

"Yes, and then..."

"Then," Ragger interjected, "they were able to fully witness your transition on a camera you had forgotten about. Between that and you being in camp without hurting anyone and saving Kendall—Kendall, Lilly, Mathis, Irene, and Whiskey were able to convince people that you were not a threat and that they had to go find you."

Each of their names punched me in the gut as he spoke them. "All this time..." I swallowed.

"All this time, they have been looking for you."