Seth stood up, dusting himself off as Cy rolled up to a sitting position. He rubbed the spot on his shin I had kicked. “Proof? Why do you need proof? I just told you that she gave me a package to deliver.”
“Yeah, but you didn’t look in it, and it’s just your word against hers.” I turned to Seth, who was back to looking thoughtful, tugging on his lower lip as he watched me. “We need proof. Real proof. The most important thing is how Dag could have snatched the bracelet to begin with. How could she get into the antiquities trailer if it was locked and she didn’t have the key?”
Seth’s lips twitched for a second; then he grabbed my arms and pulled me up to his chest, bending over me like he was going to kiss me.
“Do you two have to do that in front of me?” Cy asked in a disgusted voice.
Seth’s dark eyes were lit with victory. “You have a smut in your eye.”
I blinked at him. “What?”
“A smut. You have a smut in your eye.”
It slowly dawned on me what he was talking about. “Mr. Massad!”
Seth nodded.
“Dag is playing squishy-squishy with him, so that means she could have nabbed his key to the trailer and…” I paused for a minute, gnawing on my lip. “could she have had a duplicate made?”
“In town. At the market.”
I smiled as he let go of me. “Then that’s proof, isn’t it?”
“Almost. One of us should go into town tonight and question the key makers.” We both turned and looked at Cy, who was still rubbing his shin.
“Who, me? I don’t want to go into town.”
“You have to. Seth and I have other stuff to do tonight,” I said, tugging Seth toward the door of the tent.
“Like what?” Cy asked, his normally smiley face in a pout.
I leaned forward and gave Seth a quick kiss before turning back to his brother. “Like arranging it so that Miss Dagmar Sorensson is caught blue-handed in front of the authorities!”
“Blue handed? I thought it was red-handed?” Cy’s voice trailed after us as I dragged Seth after me.
MUMMY WREAKS VENGEANCE BEYOND THE TOMB!
“Are you all coming for lunch?” Izumi looked up in surprise as Seth, Cy, and I filed into the mess tent the following day.
“Yeah. There’s something we want to see.” I glanced around the tent. Almost everyone who wasn’t fasting was present, although I noted with irritation that Chloe, that Seth-kissing hussy, wasn’t there. Neither was Connor.
“Really?” She looked past me to where Kay, Mr. Massan, Dr. Ray, and the armed guard all filed into the mess tent. “What’s going on? Why do you have my sketchpad?”
“You’ll see.” I turned to Seth. “You’re on next!”
He nodded, squeezed my hand, then went over to talk to his parents.
Cy sat down next to Izumi. “Did you know I could be a pickpocket if I wanted?” His fingers did their little waggle, and a coin appeared in them. “However, I’ve found that it’s much harder to plant an object so someone will pick it up than it is to take something from them.”
Something like the bracelet we’d treated, then placed just outside Dag’s tent door where she was sure to see it and pick it up on her way here, I mused to myself, watching Seth as he talked to his parents. He had wanted me to be the one to explain everything to them, but I had insisted that he take credit for figuring out the situation. His parents would see that he was serious about becoming an Egyptologist, so they’d find a way to send him to college in the United States along with Cy.
I really hoped so, because my heart was already breaking when I thought about having to go home without him.
“I am very busy now, Seth. There is much to do, and I cannot take the time to indulge you in a folly.”
“It’s not a folly,” Seth told his father. “It’s important. Please, do this.”
Dr. Ray looked like he was going to refuse, but in the end he sighed. “Everyone, might I have your attention, please?” He clapped his hands and shouted his request. Although the Germans had gone, the usual gang was pretty chatty at lunch, and it was hard to be heard over them. People stopped talking and looked over to where Dr. Ray was frowning at Seth.
“I can see where he got that trait,” I said to myself.
“My son wishes to say something to you all,” Dr. Ray said, evidently not happy. His lips were a thin line as he gestured toward Seth.
“What I have to say is about the curse of Tekhnet and Tekhen,” Seth said, and everyone who had been whispering and giggling stopped dead.
Seth waved me forward. I peeled back the covering to Izumi’s watercolor pad, flipping through it to the page I had painted the night before. I had begged Seth to do it, claiming his artistic skills had to be better than mine, but he insisted I try it. “Have you ever done a watercolor?” he had asked as we sat alone in the tomb, everyone else having gone to bed.
“No, but I don’t need to try. I can’t draw worth squat.”
“You don’t know what you can do until you try,” he pointed out, and in the end I’d given in and copied a scene from the wall. It didn’t turn out awful—you could see that what I had painted were Egyptian hieroglyphs and not just colorful blotches on the page—but it wasn’t art.
“As you all know, the inscriptions on the wall in the upper chambers have already been translated,” Seth said, looking around the mess tent to make sure everyone was listening to him. He didn’t have to worry—people had stopped eating and were watching him carefully as he took the tablet of paper from me and held it up. “But the hieroglyphs on the lower levels, including the burial chamber, have not yet been translated. This painting, made by Jan James, is of a section in the burial chamber behind the sarcophagus.”
He handed the tablet to his father. “I thought you might like to translate it here, Dad.”
Dr. Ray gave his son a narrow-eyed look before taking the paper. I squirmed a little, worrying he was going to tell everyone the painting was so bad he couldn’t understand the symbols, but he didn’t. “It appears to be warning of some sort,” Dr. Ray said. “A curse, if you will, regarding the Handmaiden of Tekhnet.”
I slid a glance to where Dag sat, a plate of lamb kebab in front of her. Her face was frozen, as if it were a Dag mask. I peeked at Mr. Massad, still not entirely sure that he wasn’t helping his girlfriend to the dig goodies.
“Specifically, it says that he who removes the Handmaiden from Tekhnet’s tomb will be struck by Set.”
There was a hiss of breath as several people gasped and looked at Seth. I edged over to him and touched his hand with mine. He slid his fingers through mine, giving them a little squeeze. My heart did flip-flops like it did every time he touched me.
“The god Set, lord of chaos, would strike the thief down by turning his hands, tongue, and feet blue so that all would know his perfidy.”
Seth turned his head slightly and winked at me. I missed Dag’s initial reaction because I was too busy grinning back at him, but as soon as she started shrieking curses at Seth, I turned back to watch the fireworks.
“Lies! The evil son is being telling of lies!” Dag screamed, standing up to hurl her accusations at Seth. “Pipples and childrens are not to be listening to cursed son! Curse of mummies dead is not that!”
“Really?” I asked, stepping forward, pullingin front of me the cloth bag that usually held my cleaning tools. “You’re the one who is always saying there is a curse on stuff, Dag. Are you saying now that the bracelet isn’t cursed?”
She looked confused for a second before her confusion turned into anger. “You! You are not knowing what talking about!”
“Ya think?”
“Seth is lying! You are his lady of bed. You are for him lying most horrible!”
Lady of bed? Oh! I put my hands on my hips. “I’m not doin’ the nasty with anyone, not that it’s any of your business.”
She waved my objection away, shouting that Seth was evil, Seth lied, Seth was to blame for every bad
thing that had happened at the camp.
“That’s what you’d like everyone to believe,” I said, moving back beside Seth. He put his arm around me. “But the truth is, he’s just a convenient scapegoat, isn’t he? It’s called misdirection. You make everyone focus on Seth so they won’t notice what’s really going on.”
“One moment, Jan,” Dr. Ray interrupted me, holding up a hand to stop Dag. “I don’t quite understand what it is you are saying, but I assume you are about to make an accusation against Dagmar. That is a very serious situation.”
“More serious than the theft of antiquities?” I asked.
Dag gasped and hurled a bunch of Swedish at me. I figured it wasn’t telling me how brilliant I was, so I ignored it.
Dr. Ray swapped glances with Kay, then turned to Seth. “What do you know about this?”
“Everything,” I answered for him, grabbing the cloth bag. “Seth figured it all out.”
Seth made a self-deprecatory move of his head. “Jan and Cy helped. We all figured it out together. Cy got the proof, while Jan and I arranged for this demonstration.”
“Seth wrote the curse,” I pointed out. “Without any training, yet! Wasn’t that smart of him? Only a real Egyptologist could do that!”
Kay glanced at Dag. “What exactly is this demonstration?”
Seth gave me the nod to proceed. I pulled the small black object from the cloth bag and held it up.
“What are you doing with that?” Dr. Ray asked.
“Going to prove who the thief is, with Tekhnet’s assistance,” I said, clicking the small wand on. It hummed to life, a bluish white glow coming from one length of it. “The curse reads that the thief’s hands, feet, and tongue will turn blue.”
Dag snarled something, then held her hands up palm out for everyone to see. “It is not I who am having hands blue!”
“I didn’t say you were the thief, did I?” I said sweetly, walking over to her. “But as you’ve volunteered, let’s just see what Mr. Ultraviolet Scanner has to say about it.”
I waved the scanner over her hands. Under the light, her right palm showed up a dark navy, as if stained by an invisible ink.
“No!” she screamed, jerking her hand out from under the scanner. “It is not be! The Handmaiden is in my trunk most hidden. I have not touching it—oh! It was being the other!”
She stopped speaking as I reached out with two fingers and gently tugged the bracelet from the pocket of her khaki pants, right where Cy, Seth, and I had watched her place it a few minutes before. Our plan had gone like clockwork—Dag had found the bracelet where Cy had partially hidden it, and after glancing around quickly to see if anyone was watching, she had snatched it up and stuffed it in her pocket, getting the powder we’d spread all over the bracelet on her palm.
“Oh really? So what are you doing with this?” I asked, holding the bracelet up so everyone could see it.
She screamed again and lunged at me, but Seth was there, holding her hands curled into claws as she tried to scratch me.
All hell broke loose then, with everyone jumping up, running around, talking, yelling, and asking for explanations. By the time the guard was leading her away, she was borderline manic. Dr. Ray stared at Seth like he’d never seen him before while Kay beamed at everyone. “Weren’t they clever? I had no idea last night why Jan and Seth were asking about the fluorescent powder we use to show hairline cracks in the tomb walls, but it was very smart of them to put that knowledge to such a good use.”
I wrapped my fingers around Seth’s. “It’s smart unless the police don’t find any proof that she’s really guilty, and then it’s…uh…what is it?”
“Entrapment,” Seth said, his fingers tightening around mine.
Mr. Massad came in from Dag’s tent at that moment shaking his head as he held out his hand. On it lay the Handmaiden. “It will not be entrapment.”
My mouth dropped open as I looked from the bracelet in his hand to the bracelet lying on the table. “There’s two of them? Two Handmaidens of Tekhnet?”
“Twin bracelets for twin manicurists,” Dr. Ray said, his voice full of pleased surprise. “It makes sense.”
“I knew there were two mummies, but I didn’t know they were twins. Imagine that,” I said, grinning up at Seth. He grinned back at me, his wonderful eyes sparkly and bright with a look that left me feeling warm all over.
Cy wandered over, giving the two of us a sour look. “You’re going to start kissing again, aren’t you?”
“Yes,” Seth said, and pulled me out to the nearest tent. “How do you feel, January James? You’ve caught the thief, cleared my name, and proved you can paint—three miraculous accomplishments in less than a month!”
I wrinkled my nose, then leaned forward and nipped at his lower lip. “I’m just happy about my best accomplishment.”
“What’s that?” he asked, his voice like velvet as his arms wrapped around me.
I slid my hands up his back and kissed each corner of his mouth. “I got the guy, silly!”
THIEF CAUGHT AT LUXOR DIG
(Luxor): last week officials from the Supreme Council of Antiquities announced that an arrest had been made in the thefts of various antiquities uncovered in the tomb of Tekhnet and Tekhen, twin manicurists to Queen Nefertari. Mr. Gaballah Massan, Undersecretary of the Department for Egyptology, was on the site when the thief, Dagmar Sorensson of Stockholm, Sweden, was arrested.
“We are shocked, deeply shocked,” Mr. Massan said when questioned about the identity of the thief. “This dig has been plagued with thefts of minor pieces for the last six months, all of which we now know were carried out by Dag…er…Miss Sorensson and her two brothers. Miss Sorensson’s method was to confiscate an item, carry it to Cairo, and there dispose of it in a small shop, claiming it was a reproduction.”
An American teen working at the Tekhnet dig site stumbled onto the truth about the thefts when she inadvertantly purchased one of the stolen objects. According to the Cairo police, the shop owner was promised a reward if he sold the objects only to individuals who mentioned the Valley of the Servitors, the Sorensson’s code phrase. The object was then resold on the black market, providing Miss Sorensson with distance should the police have tracked it to the shop and connected it with her.
“Naturally all three Sorenssons will be prosecuted to the fullest extent our laws allow,” Massan added. “I believe I speak for everyone when I say how profoundly shaken we are to find a member of Dr. Tousson’s highly respected dig team a thief.”
Key in discovering the identity of the thief was Seth Tousson, who uncovered the facts leading to the identity of the culprit.
“Once we put together the facts, there was only one person it could be,” Seth said when asked how he came to the conclusion that the Dig Egypt! volunteer coordinator was guilty. “She tried to confuse everyone by claiming there was a curse haunting the site, blaming me for everything that happened, but in the end, she was the one who suffered.”
Tousson, eighteen and incredibly sexy with long black hair, and pretty eyes with gold flecks, smiled and added, “I couldn’t have done it without my girlfriend, Jan. She’s the one who really started the investigation. Cy and I just helped her.”
When asked what he was going to do with the reward of thirty-five thousand piastres for the arrest of the antiquities thief, Tousson grinned. “I’m going to use the money to study at the University of Chicago. My brother will be there as well, but the best part is that Jan lives just a few hours away in Wisconsin, so we’ll be able to see each other on weekends and holidays. She’s the best thing that has ever happened to me—I’d be lost without her.”
Reported by January James, guest correspondent and girlfriend to a god
ABOUT KATIE
For as long as she can remember, Katie MacAlister has loved reading. Growing up in a family where a weekly visit to the library was a given, Katie spent much of her time with her nose buried in a book.
Two years after she started writing no
vels, Katie sold her first romance, Noble Intentions. More than fifty books later, her novels have been translated into numerous languages, been recorded as audiobooks, received several awards, and have been regulars on the New York Times, USA Today, and Publishers Weekly bestseller lists. Katie lives in the Pacific Northwest with two dogs and a cat, and can often be found lurking around online.
You are welcome to join Katie’s official discussion group on Facebook, as well as connect with her via Twitter, Goodreads, and Instagram. For more information, visit:
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OTHER BOOKS BY KATIE MACALISTER
Dark Ones Series
A GIRL’S GUIDE TO VAMPIRES
SEX AND THE SINGLE VAMPIRE
SEX, LIES, AND VAMPIRES
EVEN VAMPIRES GET THE BLUES
BRING OUT YOUR DEAD (novella)
THE LAST OF THE RED-HOT VAMPIRES
ZEN AND THE ART OF VAMPIRES
CROUCHING VAMPIRE, HIDDEN FANG
CUPID CATS (novella)
IN THE COMPANY OF VAMPIRES
CONFESSIONS OF A VAMPIRE’S GIRLFRIEND
MUCH ADO ABOUT VAMPIRES
A TALE OF TWO VAMPIRES
THE UNDEAD IN MY BED (novella)
Aisling Grey Guardian Series
YOU SLAY ME
FIRE ME UP
LIGHT MY FIRE
HOLY SMOKES
DEATH’S EXCELLENT VACATION (short story)
Silver Dragon Series
PLAYING WITH FIRE
UP IN SMOKE
ME AND MY SHADOW
Light Dragon Series
Eyeliner of the Gods Page 15