by Zoe Ashwood
A swish of air, and several metal lances fly through the air where we stood just a fraction of a second ago. I peer up from under Raphaël’s arm, gaping at what seems like deathly prison bars from my position on the floor. They retract a second later, disappearing into a narrow metal strip imbedded into the wall.
“Stay down,” Raphaël commands us in a tight voice. “Crawl forward, but don’t lift up until I tell you to.”
Levi and I obey without question. This has me spooked more than the mummies, because despite their creepy appearance, those poor old animal wrappings aren’t out to murder us. We slide over the dusty floor on our stomachs, combat-style, until Raphaël gives us the go-ahead.
I try to roll to my feet, but my knees are still wobbly, so I lean on the wall, uncaring of the beautiful art for once. “What the fuck? Those ancient witches were evil!”
Levi runs his hands over me, checking me for bumps and bruises. “Thank the gods that Raphaël saw it in time. I didn’t sense a thing with my magic.”
“Probably because it’s mechanic,” I say. “There’s got to be some switch we stepped on or whatever.”
But Raphaël clicks his tongue. He has crawled back under the dangerous area and is inspecting the tunnel floor. “There’s nothing here.” Carefully, he walks forward, then bends over to peer at something imbedded in the wall. “Aha, here we go. There’s a sensor here.”
“What do you mean?” I straighten up. “That can’t be true.”
“We tripped a wire, so to speak,” he says, indicating the wall, “when we passed this.”
To demonstrate, he swipes his hand in front of the black dot in the wall. Nothing happens for a second, then the spikes explode out of the wall, shiny and deadly. Now that I’m standing and paying attention, I can see they’re telescopic—they collapse on themselves as they slide back into the wall. But they would have skewered all of us if not for Raphaël’s quick reflexes.
“This is barbaric,” I whisper. “Why would— Who—?”
The answer is clear as day, however. The organizers must have put this mechanical booby trap in place. This is no Ancient Egyptian gizmo, and since it’s not powered by magic, most witches wouldn’t notice it until it was far too late.
Despite the stuffy air, clammy sweat erupts all over my skin. “This is sick,” I force out through chattering teeth. “Are they trying to murder us?”
Levi wraps his arm around my shoulders. “There’s a good chance, yeah. We’ll have to be more careful going forward.”
Raphaël goes to crawl under the danger area again, but I fling out my hand to stop him. “Wait. We need to put up some sort of sign to warn anyone who might follow us down here.”
He raises his eyebrows. “You think someone is following us?”
“Well, there’s a chance, isn’t there? And if I can help someone not get brutally murdered in this temple, then I’ll do everything I can. Even the Russians don’t deserve this.”
“Nora…”
Raphaël gives me a look that I can’t quite decipher. Does he think I’m too soft? Or wasting our time? This could help our competition—but I don’t want to win this race so badly that I’d willingly sentence someone else to get skewered.
“Look, I think of this as paying it forward. I’d have preferred it if someone warned us, wouldn’t you? And maybe whoever reads this warning will feel obligated to help us in return.”
In any case, it doesn’t matter. I’m doing this. Shrugging off my backpack, I root through it and pull out my Book of Shadows. It’s a beautiful leather-bound notebook that’s two-thirds full, and it pains me to rip out two pages. Hastily, I scrawl DANGER – SPIKES IN THE WALL. CRAWL! on one piece of paper, crumple it up, and toss it to Raphaël. Catching my intention, he smoothes it out and places it on the floor in the middle of the corridor.
“That’ll have to do,” I say, motioning for him to come to us. Then I place the second piece of paper on the ground where we’re standing. “This is so we’ll know we’re nearing this place when we return.”
Levi takes my hand and squeezes my fingers. “You’re too good for this world.”
I’m about to laugh it off when I see the look in his eyes. He’s completely serious, and for a moment, his expression takes my breath away. There’s pride I see, but also sadness, a strange sort of melancholy that I’m not used to seeing in Levi’s face.
Then he visibly shakes himself and turns forward again. “We’ve come this far,” he says, his voice tight but level. “Let’s see what’s hiding at the end.”
With a ball of dread in my stomach, I follow him, praying to the gods that we’ll make it out of here alive.
Twenty-Eight
Levi
There’s only so much I can do to protect Nora if the organizers of this competition are intent on killing us off using non-magical means, and it annoys the fuck out of me. What were they thinking? I knew there would be curses to unpick and obstacles to overcome, but I hadn’t thought they would actively threaten our lives.
Maybe we should have taken the hint from that crying man in Glasgow who’d lost his partner during the race. Whatever he suffered must have been horrifying, but in the broad light of day, I just hadn’t taken his story seriously. Nora and I had both brushed it off as too dramatic. Too sensational. Surely witches from all over the world wouldn’t flock to this competition year after year if its creators were homicidal maniacs.
Turns out, we were wrong. All the scary stories were true, and now we’re stuck in one of them.
The well of my magic is still full and glowing, but every pulse of power I send into the corridor ahead of us depletes me a little more. The endless path is getting to me, too. We’ve been walking for close to half an hour, and whatever is waiting at the end is probably worse than everything so far. Since that includes the spell that nearly blew us up in the valley and the lethal wall spikes, I don’t really want to know what we’ll have to overcome to get that token.
“Wait,” says Raphaël suddenly.
I stop in my tracks. With his superior night vision, he saved our lives just minutes earlier, so if he says wait, I’ll damn well wait.
“What is it?” Nora asks.
He squints. “I thought I saw light up ahead.”
I can’t distinguish anything yet, but we continue even more carefully. Step by slow step we advance, and the dark walls, painted with freaky hieroglyphs, seem to converge in on us. The images in the story are becoming increasingly violent: there’s Set, chopping up his divine brother, and a god with a crocodile’s head eating a fistful of peasants. A goddess holds a human heart in her palm, her lion’s teeth bared as she bites into it.
“I thought Egyptians didn’t do human sacrifice,” I mutter and flash the beam of my headlamp over the low reliefs.
“Their religion was interpreted incorrectly. People thought they worshipped only death because they spent so much time building tombs and succeeded in embalming their dead. But they actually loved life.” Raphaël’s voice is curt. He stops and studies a statue of another robed woman.
“Mm,” I say, pointing ahead. “I’ll take your word for it.”
Nora gasps as her gaze lands on a depiction of two human armies colliding under the watchful gaze of a stone-faced Set. The dead litter the ground, their blood seemingly soaking into the reddish-brown sandstone of the tunnel.
“I’ve never seen anything like this,” Raphaël admits, his expression troubled. “If this tomb was discovered by human scientists, it would change their explanations of the Set myth significantly.”
Nora sidles closer to me and grasps my arm, her fingers digging into my flesh. “Let’s just get this over with. I want to get out as fast as possible.”
I’m glad I’m not the only one who feels that way. We advance slowly, and within a minute, even I can see the light glimmering at the end of the tunnel. It flickers and dances, so I’m not surprised when we round the last sharp bend in the corridor and find a large underground chamber illuminated wit
h flaming bowls.
Who lit them, I have no idea, but my magic tells me they’re spelled to burn eternally. It’s a complicated spell that takes a powerful witch, and I wonder whether it’s a remnant from the Ancient Egyptian times or a modern touch added by our Scottish friends. Either way, the effect is dramatic.
The entire chamber is painted red, the walls carved with row upon row of hieroglyphs that seem to pulse with magic. In the center of the room sits a statue of Set carved from obsidian, his stern animal face glimmering black like oil in the light of the flames. He’s almost twenty feet tall, but the ceiling rises another ten feet above him.
“Oh, wow,” Nora gasps, and her voice echoes strangely in the stone chamber.
I turn off my headlamp, and they both follow suit. There’s enough light to see here, even if the flickering flames play tricks with my eyes and make the images on the walls seem alive.
“This is bad,” Raphaël snaps. “This is a place of great violence.”
I look at him, surprised at the urgency in his voice. “What?”
“Red was the color of death in Ancient Egypt,” he says. “Unlike black, which signified life.”
“So all of this,” Nora begins in a small voice, “means…death?”
The vampire jerks his head in a nod. “We need to leave. Now. Find the marker and go.”
We circle the statue, searching for whatever we’re meant to find. There’s another set of shelves holding those strange alabaster jars, but surely that’s not it. We saw hundreds of them in the room we visited earlier. Our steps echo, and I keep searching the room with magic to make sure no other traps are waiting to be sprung on us.
The lights flare, and we all jump, exchanging freaked-out glances. This is the right place, I’m sure of it. But those tokens could be anywhere.
“Here!” Nora calls a moment later. “I found it.”
Raphaël and I rush to her side to find her kneeling at Set’s feet. Between them, in a shadowed space, lies a row of three scarab beetles made of the same black stone as the statue itself.
I peer closer and realize four tokens once lay there—a fist-sized indent indicates that one was already taken from its place.
“So the Russians beat us here,” I say. I glance over my shoulder, half expecting them to pop up from around the corner and start flinging curses at us.
“That, or another team picked Egypt that we don’t know about yet.” Nora extends her hand to take our token, then pulls back. “Wait, let’s both make sure there’s nothing nasty hiding underneath that beetle.”
I close my eyes and concentrate on the obsidian shapes in front of us.
“Hurry,” Raphaël mutters from behind me.
My magic responds sluggishly, as though it’s tired, which is strange. I wrangle it into the shape of a probe and send it down, searching for any indication that we’ll get slammed with some ancient curse the moment we move a token.
“Weird,” Nora says, “my magic is—”
“Quiet,” Raphaël whispers, slapping a hand over Nora’s mouth. “I hear something!”
Nora looks up with wide eyes, then shakes Raphaël’s hand off. Her hand darts out, and she picks up a black scarab beetle token, hefting it in her palm. She stuffs it in her backpack and stands.
“There’s nowhere to hide,” I murmur, aware that seconds are ticking by. “We can meet them head-on. Whoever this is, they won’t be a match for us.”
Raphaël crouches slightly, a predator ready to pounce. “Nora, stay back.”
But she clicks her tongue impatiently and yanks on my arm. “Come on. We’re not fighting.”
She tugs me into the corner of the chamber, and Raphaël follows reluctantly. Then she puts her hands up and frowns in concentration.
“I’m making us invisible, but they’ll still be able to hear us, so be quiet,” she whispers. “I’m not risking a fight if we can avoid it. And if they discover us anyway, you two can do your thing, okay?”
Her face flushes in the stuffy heat of the room, and she lets out a harsh exhale.
“What’s wrong?” Raphaël asks.
Nora’s arms tremble slightly. “There’s something wrong with my magic. This place is evil.”
I grip her hand and instinctively offer her my support. She glances at me, wide-eyed, as I open up the pool of my power to her. We’ve never done this—it’s intimate and dangerous—but ever since our magics intertwined when we had sex, I’ve been thinking about this.
“I can’t make us invisible,” I whisper in her ear. “But I can help.”
She gives me a quick peck on the cheek. “Thank you.”
Then she pulls a scoop of magic from me and uses it to create an invisible barrier around us. It shimmers golden in front of my eyes—it’s beautiful, intricate magic that deceives the mind and bends light. Nora is the only person who’s ever performed this spell that I know of, and it’s enough to have me gaping in awe.
“Come closer,” Nora whispers to Raphaël. “The spell gets harder to maintain if I have to spread it wide.”
The vampire steps closer, and the fine hairs on the back of my neck rise from his closeness. I try to cover my reaction to him by taking a deep breath, but I wonder if he can hear the drumbeat of my heart speeding up.
“They’re almost here,” he breathes. “Two men. One American, one…”
He doesn’t finish the sentence because the first flashlight beam shines into the chamber, announcing the strangers’ arrival.
When they step into the light, out of the dark corridor, it’s all I can do to hold back a surprised inhale, because firelight illuminates the metal barrel of a handgun.
Twenty-Nine
Nora
The first man to enter the chamber is Isak Einarsson. He’s as tall as I remember, and just as handsome. But right now, his face is frozen in a mask of fury, and it takes me a second to figure out why.
The second man, a stranger dressed in army gear, is holding a gun to his head. Well, no—he’s walking several paces behind him like a professional would, always keeping a firm target on Isak’s blond head.
I bite my lip and swallow a gasp. Levi’s fingers tighten around mine. I glance at him to find him scowling at the scene in front of us.
“Merde.”
Raphaël’s barely audible expletive is an accurate assessment of the situation.
The man with the gun has to be human. No self-respecting witch would ever be caught dead with a projectile weapon of human make—we’re plenty lethal with magic, and magic can’t be traced by human forensics.
What happened to Isak that he got stuck with being on the wrong side of the barrel? Maybe this man isn’t related to the competition at all but is a random grave robber who happened to see Isak enter the temple. Or maybe Isak just has terrible taste in associates and it’s his team member who turned on him.
It doesn’t matter. The already dangerous situation has just escalated to deadly. If the mercenary fires that gun without knowing we’re here, he could hit us by accident. And if he did know we were here, he’d likely shoot us all the same.
I focus back on Isak’s handsome face. He’s sunburnt, I can tell even in the golden light of the flames. His nose is pink and peeling, and his cheeks are ruddy as though he’d forgotten to protect that pale Nordic skin of his. He’s scowling and silent, waiting for the other man to make his move.
Then his nostrils twitch, and he draws in a deep inhale. He takes a step forward, and another, sniffing, and finally focuses his gaze right on us.
I check the invisibility spell again and feed it more of my own and Levi’s power. It’s still holding strong, so Isak for sure can’t see us. And we’re barely breathing.
But can he smell us?
Crap, we need to get out of here before we get sucked into problems that aren’t our own.
“Find the tokens,” the man with the gun orders Isak. “Come on, Professor. This is what you do, isn’t it?”
Isak’s scowl deepens, and he finally tu
rns away from us. “Fuck you.”
The other man lets out a derisive snort and walks over to the row of alabaster jars on the shelf. He’s already carrying one under his arm, and his backpack looks heavy and strangely bulging—I guess he looted the chamber above.
Bad idea.
I want to scream at him to leave the artifacts alone. Stealing aside, this place is clearly cursed, and if I was him, I wouldn’t want any of that bad mojo with me when I leave the temple.
The men shuffle around the chamber, searching for the tokens. Under the cover of my spell, we slowly circle the room, hugging the wall, inching toward the only way out. Just fifteen more feet, and we’re free.
Or at least safer than here.
Raphaël puts a hand on my arm, stopping our progress. His lips find my ear, and he whispers, “Can’t you stop him? With magic?”
I feel more than hear the words. With a rueful glance at him, I shake my head in denial. Whatever evil energy resides in this place is dampening my magic, and it’s all I can do to keep us invisible. If I tried doing anything else, our veil would disintegrate instantly. And for now, hiding and retreating seems like the best option.
Even though it makes me sick to my stomach to leave Isak here at the mercy of this idiot. Isak doesn’t seem scared, so maybe he can handle himself, but guns… Guns freak me out even more than magical booby traps.
“Aha,” the man yells suddenly. “Found them!”
He crouches in front of Set’s statue and plucks a fat, heavy black beetle from between the god’s feet. With a powerful swing of his arm, he tosses it at Isak. “Think fast!”
For a moment, it seems that the token will either hit Isak in the head or shatter against the painted red wall, but the Icelander lifts his hand with incredible reflexes and catches the stone beetle before it brains him. Despite his scowl, he puts the token in his backpack and straps it to his shoulders again.