I trotted past the mess tent, saying hi to all the kids straggling out of it. Honestly, they didn’t have to get up before sunrise to eat, and yet the French girl, Sue, and Kathy (the girl who always looked like she smelled dog poop) were staggering out of the tent as if they’d just woken up. I knew this was their day off of work, but sheesh! “Hi guys. How’s the digging going?”
“Dirty,” Sue snarled, shooting a glare at Kathy as she scratched her hair. I couldn’t help but feel sorry for the dig kids. They didn’t seem to be able to wash much, and their clothes were always dirty and dusty. At least we got to take a bath each day.
Kathy ignored her. “Hi, Jan. What are you all made up for?”
I tried to flutter my eyelashes, but stopped when my upper and lower eyelashes glued together for a minute. I pried them apart before answering her. “Nothing. We had a talk last night about ancient Egyptian cosmetics, so I thought I’d try them out. See ya ‘round!”
I snatched up the linen bag with my cleaning supplies from the box, smiled brightly at Dr. Ray as he stood chatting with Kay and Dr. Paolo, then hurried up to the tomb’s opening. Seth and Izumi had ridden out on the first van, which meant they had quality time together.
“Morning!” I called out once I entered Room G.
Izumi, who had her head tipped toward Seth as she listened to him, turned around and started to say something, but choked to a stop and stared at me instead. I smiled to myself, pleased that a little makeup could have such an effect. Seth stared at me too, and I just about did a backflip when he left Izumi and came over to where I was setting up the lights and stool so I could work on Nekhbet’s face.
“Why have you been avoiding me?” he asked in a low voice so no one else could hear.
I glanced over at Izumi. She was still staring at me with a kind of shocked look on her face. A little zinger of guilt stabbed me, making me almost feel sorry I’d decided to fight for Seth. But all was fair in love and war, right? “To the best girl goes the hottie.”
“What?”
Seth looked confused. I gave him a shark grin and hoisted my butt onto the stool so I could brush off the day’s accumulation of dust on the wall. “Nothing. And I haven’t been avoiding you; I just haven’t…um…seen you.”
“You ran off last night,” he accused.
I opened my eyes really wide to show my innocence. “Who, me? Ran off? Huh-uh, I just went into Luxor with Michael. We went shopping in the market.”
His frown got even frownier. “I would have taken you if I’d known you wanted to go to the market. You didn’t have to go with Michael.”
“Really?” I asked, thinking I could probably win the award for Miss Perfect Impression of Innocence. “I thought you were busy last night.” Busy breaking my heart by giving another girl flowers.
His frown changed to an uncomfortable look. He glanced at Izumi (who had finally stopped staring at me and started doing her own work), then back to me. A fly buzzed around my face. I waved my hand at it as Seth said, “Jan, I want to explain about the flowers.”
The fly buzzed past my face again. I turned away from him, lifted my chin, and started brushing the dust off the wall, pausing to snap the cloth at the annoying fly. “You don’t have to explain anything to me. You can give flowers to whoever you want. It doesn’t mean squat to me.”
“Yes, I do have to explain.” He took a deep breath said quickly, “I never meant to give the flowers to Izumi. I brought them for you, but I didn’t know which bed was yours, and they ended up on hers by mistake, and now she thinks I brought them for her, and I didn’t want to tell her the truth because it would hurt her feelings.”
“And of course we wouldn’t want to hurt her feelings,” I said in a tone that sounded really, really snotty even though part of me wanted to dance and sing. He hadn’t brought Izumi flowers after all! He’d brought them for me! I tried to catch the buzzing fly but it zoomed around my head in fast circles.
“No, we wouldn’t,” he said softly, “but I don’t want your feelings hurt, either.”
I felt awful. Izumi was my friend. She hadn’t done anything to hurt me, and there I was thinking mean thoughts about her just because I thought Seth had preferred her to me. “I’m glad you didn’t tell Izumi the truth. She’s very sweet. But I’m also glad you didn’t mean to give her the flowers.”
He put a finger under my chin and turned my head so I was looking at him. “Truce?”
“Yeah,” I said with a smile, feeling all warm and happy inside as he smiled back. For a second. Then his smile turned to a look of stunned horror as I glared at the corner of my eye.
“Jan?”
“Hmmm?” I asked, still glaring.
“Do you know that you have a fly caught in your eyelashes?”
I transferred my glare from the fly to him. “Well, of course I know I have a fly caught in my eyelashes! How can you have a fly stuck to your eye and not know it?”
His lips twitched.
“Don’t you even think about laughing,” I snapped. I held out my hand. “Tweezers.”
He grabbed the pair of tweezers that we used to pull off leftover fibers from the mulberry bandages, and slapped them into my palm. “Would you like me to do it?”
The fly tickled as it buzzed like mad, caught in the tangle of eyelashes at the far edge of my right eye, the sticky snare of my mascara evidently strong enough to trap insects. “No, thank you. I always remove my own eye flies.”
He said nothing as I plucked the fly free. It was almost as annoyed as I was embarrassed, but not even having a fly stuck to my eye could ruin my day—Seth had meant to give the flowers to me!
“Cy’s band is going to play tonight after dinner.”
“Your brother has a band?” He probably stole the instruments.
“Yes. Cy and a couple of the diggers. They’re not very good, but it’s better than nothing.”
I brushed at the wall. “Don’t you play with them?”
He shook his head. “I can’t play a musical instrument.”
I dropped the cloth as I spun around to face him. “Neither can I! All my brothers and sisters can, but I can’t even play the guitar! I break strings when I try. Wow! That’s. like. so freaky that you can’t play, either!”
“I thought maybe…would you like to have dinner here with me, and watch them afterward?”
My mouth fell open, but only for a few seconds. I swallowed hard. “You mean…like a date?”
His eyes were wary. “Do you want it to be?”
Uh-oh! I had to be really careful here. “Um. I do if you do.”
He thought about that for a few seconds. “I do.”
A breath I didn’t know I was holding whooshed out of me. “I do, too.”
“Good.”
“Yeah.” I smiled at him. He smiled at me. We smiled at each other until I figured we’d better do some work or else I’d throw myself at his head and kiss him until we both passed out from lack of oxygen.
The day zoomed by at warp speed, thank God. While we cleaned the wall, Seth told me about his trip to Armana and his grandmother. After lunch (we spent it sitting in the shade talking with Gemal and his little brother, who was a digger) I told Seth about what it was like to be the only talentless person in my family. I wasn’t sure I should let him in on my secret, but he understood everything I said.
“The black sheep,” he said carefully just before we were to stop work.
“Black sheep?”
“It is not right? Black lamb?” he asked, his eyes puzzled.
“Oh! You mean I’m the black sheep of my family? Oh, man, with fries on the side!”
His eyebrows shot up.
“That means you’re right,” I explained. “I’m so black sheep, I’m baaing.”
“I am as well,” he said, a little frown settling on his forehead.
“Hey, I meant to ask you—just how did you hurt your head last week?”
He swished his brush around in the little tin cup of water we us
ed to wet cleaning clothes, shaking the brush before putting it away in his bag. “I fell off a rope ladder into the burial chamber.”
“Oh.” I eyed his forehead carefully. There was a small scab on it, but nothing that looked serious. “Chloe was there?”
“Yes.” He looked up as I hauled the stool back to where they were stacked. “Why did you want to know?”
“No reason. I was thinking that maybe there was a story about someone trying to off you because they think you’re an evil god come back to life, but that sounds like it was an accident not a curse.”
The minute the words left my lips, I could have kicked myself. Seth had been happy during the day, talking about himself and his life, and how isolated he felt from both his parents and his brother—something I totally understood, feeling pretty much the same—but as soon as I mentioned the curse, he went all moody again. “Chloe is lucky I was hurt instead of her.”
“You’re not going to start that ‘I’m dangerous to anyone around me’ biz again, are you? ‘Cause if you are, I’m going to ask Michael to be my date for dinner.”
He looked outraged at that. “You do not take the curse seriously!”
I slung the cloth bag over my shoulder and gave Seth a look that should have said it all, but I knew he wouldn’t get it (guys are clueless that way). “Curse, schmurse. You’re not cursed, Seth; you’re just a bad-boy biker. In case you don’t know, that’s good. Girls like bad boys.”
He grabbed my arm as I was about to walk by him, his hand sliding up my arm underneath the sleeve of the horrible white T-shirt. “Do you?”
My stomach started doing jumping jacks as his hand, warm and gentle, stroked down my arm. “Like bad boys? Yeah. I like them really bad.”
“So bad they’re cursed?” he asked, tugging me close so that I leaned up against him. There was no one else in the room, but I could hear people talking in the antechamber. I didn’t care, though. I just wanted to stand there shmooshed up against Seth, breathing in the wonderful spicy smell that always seemed to surround him. I slid my arms around his waist as he wrapped his arms around me, making me feel safe and happy and a lot like I was going to burst into flames. Spontaneous combustion, that was it. I was sure I was going to spontaneously combust if he kissed me again.
His eyes went all dreamy as his head tipped toward me, his lips brushing mine.
“What’s a little fire?” I breathed into his mouth as he started kissing me for real. His lips were warm and soft, and made my knees go melty until I had to cling to him to keep from falling. Just when I thought it couldn’t get any hotter, his tongue touched my lips. My blood seemed to boil as I let him into my mouth, prepared to back off if it got gross (I mean, it was his TONGUE!), but it didn’t. In fact, it got better. His tongue touched mine, teasing it, sliding around it with little touches until I figured what the heck, I might as well do this properly. So I did a little tongue dance around his and just kind of lost my head after that.
“Jan? Seth? Are you coming back to the monastery tonight, or are you staying for Cy’s—oh!”
I sucked my tongue back into my mouth and jumped back from Seth. “Hi Kay. Um. We were just…uh…” I glared at Seth, hoping he’d say something that would explain what happened.
“We were kissing,” he said, not seeming to mind at all that his mom knew.
I, on the other hand, wanted to die right there on the spot. After I killed him, of course.
“No, we weren’t kissing. Hahahahah! What a comedian. We were…uh…I had this fly stuck to my eye, and Seth said he’d get it off, but it was really small, and—”
Seth wrapped one arm around my waist and hauled me in close to him, his jaw set as he looked at his mother. “We were kissing.”
“Yes, I rather thought that’s what you were doing,” she said, her voice neutral, like she didn’t care. “Are you both staying behind?”
“We weren’t kissing,” I said quickly.
“Yes we were,” Seth said. “And yes, we’re staying behind. I’ll bring Jan back to the monastery on my bike.”
“It wasn’t really a kiss—”
“Very well. Enjoy yourselves,” she said, pausing to give Seth a mom look I recognized. “But not too much, dear.”
“—it was more a little peck—Oh!” Kay left the room without another word. I did the blink thing because I was feeling a bit light-headed after kissing Seth. “She left. Doesn’t she care that I was kissing you?”
“No. Why should she?” Seth let go of me to grab both our bags.
“Well…I don’t know,” I had to admit, then decided not to worry about it. Life was too good to worry about something that no one else was worried about. I had Seth, we were going on a date tonight (even if it was just a date at the camp), and he was going to give me a ride home on his motorcycle. There was only one thing that blotted my happiness—finding proof of Cy’s guilt. Would Seth hate me for proving that his brother was a thief? I decided that even a journalist deserved a night off, so I pushed that worry aside for the night, and did my best to forget all about the bracelet.
“I’m so happy,” I told Seth later, as we walked out of the mess tent where Cy and his band had been playing. “This was the best date ever!”
“It was fun, even if the music was awful,” Seth said with a grin. “Cy’s new guitar didn’t make him sound any better.”
It was a wonderful, clear night just like all the other nights, with a bright moon, twinkling stars, and a gentle breeze. Everyone was laughing and chatting happily as they streamed out of the tent, a kind of party atmosphere making everyone a bit silly. A couple of the girls were dancing their way toward their tents, singing together in voices almost as bad as Cy’s and his band’s.
I couldn’t help but shoot Chloe a look when we walked by her. Seth paused to put his leather jacket around me when I shivered. Chloe just rolled her eyes and said something to Connor that had him laughing.
“Let me get my backpack and I’ll be ready to go back,” I told Seth as I let go of his hand in order to duck into the small tent that held the packs.
“I’ll go start my bike.”
“OK. Be right there.” I watched him head over to the area where the dig trucks and vans were kept, then opened my pack looking for my mirror. So far the makeup had worked wonders, and even if I knew now that Seth had really brought the flowers for me, I figured it couldn’t hurt to make sure I looked good all the time. As I reached into the backpack for the little round mirror, my hand closed on a similarly shaped object. It was round all right, but it wasn’t a mirror.
I pulled the object out and stared at it, my eyes narrowing with suspicion, anger, and determination.
It was the bracelet, the Handmaiden of Tekhnet. Someone—and I knew just who it was—had ditched it in my bag.
“Right, this time it’s personal,” I said softly, folding the bracelet into the spare T-shirt I kept in the pack, tucking it away on the bottom of the bag. “This means war, Chloe. Prepare to be defeated!”
EGYPTIAN CURSE RUINS TEEN’S LIFE!
“You’re going to eat lunch today?” Izumi yelled as I set my tray down next to hers. All I had on the tray was a bowl of fruit, a spoon, and a napkin, but I wasn’t planning on eating anything. I couldn’t tell Izumi that I was there on an undercover mission, though, because then she’d want to know what my mission was (plant the bracelet on Chloe…again), and why I didn’t turn it over to Ray (revenge, pure and simple), not to mention the whole story of how I ended up with the bracelet. I hadn’t even told Seth about it yet. He didn’t seem to connect the missing bracelet with the one I had bought, so I figured it was better to keep him in ignorance about that, just in case Dag was right and it was cursed. He was curse-happy enough without his girlfriend owning a cursed bracelet, not to mention possibly being the person who would put his twin in jail.
My mind went a bit squirrely at the word girlfriend, but I quickly brought it back to order, promising it that it could go squirrely later, after I’d dumped
the bracelet. “Yeah. I thought if I break the fast once in a while, Allah won’t get too mad at me, especially since I’m not a Muslim and all,” I yelled back, as nonchalantly as I could.
“Absolutely,” she bellowed. “Are you going to get a bottle of water?”
“Yup. Want one?”
She nodded, obviously tired of having to speak in such a loud voice. I signaled that I’d bring her one, and started the trek across the tent to where the bottled water was. Normally this wouldn’t be a journey, but considering that the camp had been inundated with German tourists—important tourists, tourists who were paying a lot of money to mingle with real archaeologists on a real dig site—moving from one end of the mess tent to the other was like those nature films of salmon swimming upstream to spawn. Only I wasn’t likely to squat over a convenient rock and lay eggs.
“The swimming–oh, sorry, didn’t mean to step on you–upstream part is–ow! That was my kidney you just rammed your tray into!–pretty darn accurate. Cheese on rye, does everyone have to have lunch in here?”
I squeezed between German tourists, trying not to step on people or knock anyone’s tray over, but it wasn’t easy. The Germans were all excited, calling to one another, chatting, laughing, and generally getting in everyone’s way. The tent was packed to capacity, with every bench taken. I grabbed two bottles of water and turned to make my way back to my spot. That’s when I saw Chloe get up from her seat next to the door, and push her way through the crowds to where another cooler was kept, this one holding soda pop.
The second she disappeared into the crowd I squeezed my way over to her spot, setting both bottles of water down and bending over as if I were going to tie my shoelace. I palmed the bracelet from my pocket, glancing around quickly to make sure no one was watching. The coast appeared clear, and as luck would have it two Germans on the other side of the tent picked that moment to collide with a crash of trays and plates of food, as well as shrieks of laughing dismay. While everyone turned to look, I flipped up the napkin half tucked under a plate of chicken schwarma, and slid the bracelet under it.
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