“Yeah,” I said aloud, pushing back the thin blanket and getting out of bed. I snatched up one of the three sets of white tops and pants that had been given me for work in the tomb. “Who needs him? The dawg. It’s not like I can’t have fun here unless I’m hanging off his lips! I’ll show him. He might be cute”— I peeled off my nightshirt and stuffed my legs into the pants. “and he might make my legs go all melty when I’m around him”— I slipped into my bra and white tee— “and he might be the champion kisser of the world, but that doesn’t mean I have to let him make me feel bad!”
I shook out my shoes quickly (in case of scorpions), then shoved them onto my feet, grabbing up my backpack as I ran out of the room and down the stairs just in time to jump into the last van heading out to the dig site.
Fifteen minutes later I dropped off my backpack, slammed the straw hat on my head, and marched down the incline to the valley floor, all the way thinking of just what I was going to say to Seth when I saw him. If he dared speak to me, that is.
“Jan!”
I gritted my teeth and refused to turn around to see the source of that wonderful voice.
“Jan!”
Kay, who stood talking to Dr. Ray at the base of the tomb entrance, glanced back at me as I grabbed my bag of cleaning tools.
“Jan, what’s the matter? Why are you ignoring me?” A hand clamped down on my upper arm, a nice hand, a tan hand, a strong hand with long, warm fingers that fit so well against my fingers…
I looked over my shoulder and glared at Seth. “Don’t touch me, you man slut, you!”
He jerked his hand back, his eyes wide with surprise. I stared for a minute at the white bandage that was taped onto his forehead, but refused to ask about it.
“What did you call me?”
I leaned forward so his mom and dad couldn’t hear me. “If the lip gloss fits, shove it!”
His eyes widened even more as I whirled around and stomped my way up the short path to the tomb entrance. I growled out hellos to the kids waiting in the antechamber for the two archaeologists before descending into another chamber, pausing for a second to glare at Chloe. She was complaining to the French girl about not having a bath for a week and didn’t see me.
“Jan!”
I turned on my heel and pretended I didn’t even notice Seth behind me hissing my name.
He grabbed me outside of Room G, pulling me into a smaller undecorated antechamber that now held only a lot of sand. “What is wrong with you? Why are you acting this way?”
“I would love to tell you, but I can’t because I am officially not speaking to you.”
He looked puzzled and angry at the same time. “But you are speaking to me.”
“No, I’m not.”
“Yes you are, you’re talking. Right now. To me!”
“I’m not talking to you; I’m just telling you that I’m not talking to you. There’s a difference. Got it? Good. Go away.” I brushed passed him into the room where the conservationists were preparing to start the day’s work. I set down my bag and grabbed one of the wooden stools that were stacked against a wall, ignoring Seth who came to glare at me as I flipped on the stand of lights nearest the lintel. Each wall had lights mounted on a floor stand that could be adjusted to a specific spot, so we could see clearly everything about the wall we were cleaning.
“You aren’t making any sense. What are you angry about?”
I eyed the section of the lintel we’d cleaned the day before. The paint on the side we’d cleaned stood out with lush, brilliant colors—golds, reds, greens, browns—against a background of snowy white painted plaster. There was relatively little deterioration of the lintel, so there was hardly any of the ugly greyish-brown plaster that had been used to patch areas of the painted wall that had fallen off.
Seth stood behind me, glaring a hole into the back of my head. “I give up. Obviously you’d rather not work with me. Since you want me to leave, I will.”
I shrugged one shoulder and decided it was too childish to pretend I couldn’t hear him. I would respond, but only politely, as if he were an acquaintance, not someone I’d locked lips with. “I don’t really care at all if you stay or go, but if you leave your mother won’t be happy with you since we promised her we’d have the lintel done by the end of the week.”
“Why should she be different from anyone else?” he grumbled, but tossed down his cloth bag of tools and flipped on a second light.
I slid a glance toward him out of the corner of my eye. He was dressed today in his usual black jeans, but wore a blood red T-shirt that had a picture of James Dean and the words “Rebel With A Cause” on the front. Seth was the only one who ignored the rules about wearing whites into the area we were cleaning. Although some of the other guys had glared at him over that, no one but Kay had said anything.
“Now that you’re talking to me, are you going to tell me why you’re so angry at me?” Seth picked up his cleaning rag and the small bottle of solvent.
I used my fingernail to pick at a tiny remnant of the mulberry-bark bandage that had been used to hold the cracked part of the plaster together before it had been stabilized. “Angry with.”
“What?”
“It’s angry with or mad at. The other way around might be grammatically correct—I wouldn’t know; I’m a grammar weenie—but when people talk, they say angry with or mad at.”
His hands flexed like he was trying to keep from strangling someone at the same time he sighed heavily. “Are you going to tell me why you’re angry with me?”
“It’s not important,” I said with much nonchalance as I brushed away a speck of splattered mud and started cleaning the detail around Nekhbet’s golden vulture headpiece. “Why do you have a bandage on your head? Did your curse get you again?”
His shoulders stiffened at my words. “It wasn’t the curse this time—it was Chloe.”
“Chloe!” The word burst out before I could stop it. “What, did she crack her head against yours when she was playing Tongue: The Musical with you?”
He set down his cloth and stared at me. “What are you talking about?”
I lifted my chin and cleaned one of the gold-and-red tail feathers of the vulture headdress. “You know what I’m talking about.”
“No, I don’t.”
“Yes, you do.”
“No, Jan, I really don’t.”
I threw down my cloth and glared at him. “Then you are not only a dawg, you’re a heartless dawg! That’s the worst kind!”
“You’re calling me a dog again?” He looked outraged, his eyes blazing at me, the muscles on his arms lying under the lovely, smooth latte-colored skin bunched and tight.
“Not a dog, a dawg!”
He threw his hands up in a dramatic gesture of defeat. “You are impossible!”
“And you’re a poophead! A great big fat hairy one!” I yelled. The last word of the sentence echoed for a few seconds. I glanced around the room. Everyone from Dr. Paolo down to quiet, shy Gemal was staring at us with openmouthed expressions of surprise. I gritted my teeth together and forced my lips into a smile before grabbing my cloth and resuming work on the wall.
I ignored Seth the rest of the morning. As if that wasn’t bad enough, he ignored me, too. Inner Jan reminded me that Gram had always said what was good for the goose was good for the gander. I told Inner Jan to shut up, and spent the long hours of the morning feeling miserable. Seth worked right next to me, his arm sometimes brushing mine, but I couldn’t talk to him. My heart broke into little itty-bitty pieces, turned to dust, and blew away in the wind like some half-baked folk song.
By lunchtime I was ready to murder someone. At first I figured it would be Seth (staked out in the desert while wearing itchy wool pants, big mittens, a thick parka, and a fur hat), but then I thought about things, and I decided that Chloe was the one who was to blame. She was just the type to try to lure Seth away from me with her lip gloss wiles.
The hussy.
“Are you coming to
lunch today?” Izumi asked me just as she asked me every day.
I rinsed out my brush and put it inside my cloth bag, sliding a quick glance at Seth as I did so. Seth was tucking away his brush, too, his eyes wary. “No. Ramadan. Fasting.”
“But you didn’t have breakfast this morning! You can’t go all day with no food or water!”
I did a halfshrug (it was too hot for a full one). I was horribly thirsty, but one of the things I reminded myself was that artists suffered for their work, and journalism was a form of art. A wordy form. “I’ll be OK. Kind of.”
“You must come to the mess tent regardless,” Dr. Paolo said as he and the rest of the conservators filed out. Usually the Muslims went to wash and do their noon prayer to Allah while everyone else had lunch. “Everyone must attend. Dr. Tousson has an announcement to make.”
I couldn’t help but peek at Seth again. He stood with his wonderfully fabulous arms crossed, the black and gold of his tattoo (hieroglyphs that translated into the name Set) standing out on his bicep. My fingers positively tingled to run up and down the sleek muscles of his arm, but I reminded myself that I was mad, and you can’t fondle someone when you’re mad at them.
“You must attend, too, Seth,” Dr. Paolo said a few minutes later as we staggered up the incline to the plateau, all of us hot, sweaty, and tired from the morning’s work.
“I have something else to do,” Seth answered, shooting me a dark look before walking off toward the Muslim side of the camp.
Dr. Paolo said something in Italian as he shook his head. I fought the urge to go after Seth and see what he was doing, about to give in when Izumi tugged me inside the mess tent. I plopped down on a bench next to her, smiled at Connor when he waved (poor stupid fool—he probably didn’t know that Chloe spent every free moment jumping innocent guys and locking her lip-glossed lips onto theirs), and tried my best to ignore both the wonderful smells of the lunch being lugged in and the hungry rumblings of my stomach. I hadn’t admitted it to Izumi, but I had eaten while she was having a bath that morning, so I wasn’t exactly starving.
The Muslims lined up at the far end of the tent, none of them sitting at the tables. Out of respect for them, the big metal pans of food had been kept covered, but the heavenly smells of cooked chicken crept out and teased me until I had to swallow a gallon or so of saliva.
Ray stood with Kay at the front of the tent, both of them talking with the antiquities official, who wore another hot-looking dark suit, and a tall, dark man in a turban who had a gun strapped to his belt. My eyes bugged out at the sight of the last guy.
“Hey, did you see?” I nudged Izumi and nodded toward the group in front.
“What?” Izumi asked, craning her head to see around the people in front of her. “Oh! He has a pistol! Why does he have a pistol? I was told this area was very secure and that we would not need armed guards.”
“Dunno. It’s probably got something to do with what Dr. Ray is going to tell us.”
Izumi looked troubled. “I do not like pistols. They can be dangerous.”
“Maybe he is here to protect us from a wild tribe of nomad warriors who are planning on riding into camp and carrying off all the women,” I suggested, thinking what a wonderful story that would make (I WAS A TEENAGE HAREM GIRL!).
Izumi giggled and glanced across the room. “They would have to be very handsome nomad warriors.”
I followed where she was looking and saw Cy sitting at a table joking with a group of girls. The smile faded from my lips as I looked around the tent. Chloe wasn’t anywhere to be seen.
Neither, of course, was Seth.
Anger roared to life within me again, anger at both of them. For a few minutes I didn’t know who I most wanted to see strapped out in the desert covered with poisonous man o’ war jellyfish, Chloe or Seth, but after a few minutes of imagining them both being eaten, I finally settled on Chloe. I had trusted Seth before she came into the picture. Given that I knew her type (manstealer), I would allow Seth to offer an explanation before I continued with my torture fantasy.
Ray interrupted my dark thoughts by clapping his hands and calling for order. “I apologize for delaying you from your lunch or prayers, but my announcement is an important one. We’ll just wait for…ah, there she is.”
Dag entered the tent, looking a bit surprised at the sight of everyone gathered in the tent. Even though the mess tent was made up of open-meshed fabric to allow the breeze (what there was of it) through, with the whole camp gathered inside, the heat and humidity level rose until my white tee was plastered to my chest and back.
“What here is happening with pipples?” Dag asked as she stopped next to me, glancing around at everyone. When her eyes landed on the guy with the gun, she sucked in her breath in a long hiss. Izumi turned at the noise.
“Someone else who doesn’t like guns,” I whispered to her as I nodded toward Dag.
“It is with much regret that I must announce a significant loss has been discovered. One of the artifacts recovered from the tomb has been stolen from the artifacts trailer.”
“Not another one?” Michael said behind me to one of the diggers. “That makes three in as many months, doesn’t it?”
I didn’t hear the reply because Dr. Ray was holding up a glossy picture of an object. An object I immediately recognized. An object that was horribly familiar.
An object that was stolen—and currently resided in my backpack.
“Cheese on rye,” I whispered, my stomach twisting into a ball. What if the guy with the gun was there to arrest me for having stolen property? I could just see the headline —MUMMY’S CURSE SENDS INNOCENT TEEN TO JAIL!. Eeeek! How could I be a journalist if I was in jail?
“As you can see, it is a onyx bracelet decorated with lapis and mother of pearl. It is known as the Handmaiden of Tekhnet. The small bird on top is of lapis, while the glyphs on the side offer a prayer to the god Set. If you have seen this bracelet, anywhere, anywhere at all, I ask that you notify me. This gentleman is from the Council of Antiquities.” He gestured toward the turbaned man with a gun, “He is here with Mr. Massan to investigate the theft, so I ask that you give them your fullest cooperation. Thank you.”
The Handmaiden! Goose bumps rippled down my arms and back as I remembered the horrible dark alley in Cairo where the Scandinavian guys had demanded I give them the handmaiden. It was the bracelet they were after! The bracelet the old man had insisted I take…My breath hissed in a silent gasp as I realized something I’d been too stupid to see before—the old man had given me the bracelet by mistake. That’s why Hans and Franz came after me—which meant there was a whole lot more going on than just artifact theft.
“Thank god I’m here to figure it out,” I whispered to myself, visions of journalistic fame and glory filling my mind.
“It is curse most terribly!” Dag said loudly over the buzz of conversation that started the second Dr. Ray turned away. “It is curse of Tekhnet and Tekhen, mummies dead! I warn of keepings of cursed objects! They must to burn! You must to destroy before on all pipples becomes the curse evil!”
Dr. Ray smiled with weary resignation. “As I’ve explained before, our goal is to preserve the past in its entirety, not destroy those parts you find distasteful.”
“Is much wrong!” Dag said, stalking toward him. “Is curse not claimed already enough victims?”
“There is no curse,” he said gently. “That is just superstitious silliness—”
“Is not true! Curse is written on top entrance to tomb! All here have feared it. Pipples working into tomb are doomed!”
“It is traditional for tombs to have a curse written to discourage tombrobbers, but it has no real effect,—++” Ray started to explain, but Dag cut him off again.
“No real effect? Your son it is not who is being cursed?”
Cy’s eyebrows rose as everyone turned to look at him.
“No,” Dag yelled, her hands gesticulating wildly as she spoke. “Not him. Other son. Evil son! Evil son is ta
ken by curse!”
Murmurs of “Masha'allah!” whispered softly from the far side of the tent.
“Now you know that is just nonsense, Dag. It’s the heat—it’s making everyone cranky today. Why don’t you lie down in the hospital tent for a bit until you feel better?” Kay bustled over to Dag making soothing noises. She took the backpack that Dag had dropped and shoved it at one of the girls sitting at a nearby table. “Sue, dear, put this in the pack tent, would you? Come along, Dag. You’ll feel so much better after you rest for a bit.” We all watched as she gently steered Dag out of the tent. Dag continued to shout about the curse until the two women disappeared into a tent with a big red cross painted on the side.
“I’m sure I do not need to say again that there is no curse on either the tomb, or the objects contained with in it,” Dr. Ray said smoothly, a dull sweat of sheen glistening on the top of his bald head. “I do insist that if you have seen the bracelet, you tell me. I will be in the cleaning trailer during the rest of the day.”
Conversation erupted as Dr. Ray said something else to the two men who waited with him before all three marched out of the tent. The Muslim workers followed, heading for their camp. The serving boy peeled off the lids to the food, and everyone else lined up to gather trays and plates, chattering madly about what had just happened.
I sat there feeling sick to my stomach as a horrible thought occurred to me. “What…uh…what do you think they’ll do to the person who stole that bracelet?” I asked Izumi as she stood up and smoothed down her white pants. I stood up as well, worrying about the bracelet. What on earth was I going to do with it while I investigated the story? If anyone found I had it, I would be in deep doodoo, which meant I had to get rid of it as quickly as possible.
I froze as a second horrible thought struck me: What about Seth? He knew I had the bracelet! What if he told on me?
“What will they do? I don’t know. Something bad,” Izumi said, giving me an odd look.
“You don’t think they’d do anything really awful if it was someone like, you know, a tourist?”
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