Mouthwatering aromas drew him next to a small metal cart where a man peddled twisted pieces of bread sprinkled generously with salt. In Seti’s day, salt had been a precious commodity, readily available only near the sea or from a few scattered and rare salt licks, and he was duly impressed by the merchant’s wealth. The smell of the baked bread made his stomach grumble, reminding him that he was famished.
“I need food,” he told Logan, fully expecting to be obeyed immediately. Unfortunately, Logan was proving to be frustratingly disobedient. He hadn’t obeyed a direct order from Seti yet.
“In a while. We have to keep moving!” Logan replied, tugging at his arm.
“Now.”
“Later!”
Obstinate servant! Seti wondered how the kings of this modern world kept their servants in line, since he saw no evidence of lashings on any of the people around him. Obviously, whatever their method, Seti was doing it wrong. Logan fought him at every turn.
Logan’s hand was tugging incessantly on his arm again. Seti allowed himself to be pulled along the sidewalk, but only until the next wonder caught his eye. Seti planted his feet and it would have taken a man much larger and stronger than Logan to budge him.
Window glass amazed him. It was nothing like Seti had imagined it to be. A most interesting invention, he thought, tapping his fingers against the storefront pane. Nearly invisible, hard, it let abundant light into the shop. Still, Seti considered, it also allowed prying eyes to see into a man’s personal affairs, just as Seti was doing now. He watched a young man slip curious-looking sandals on the feet of several patrons who sat within the shop. How did these people tolerate strangers nosing about in their business? Seti would never stand for anyone gawking at him.
Everywhere he looked, sights, sounds, and smells both alien and fascinating assaulted him, intriguing and beguiling him. Most were benign, some were enchanting – like the pretzel, as Logan had called the small, twisted loaves of bread – but some were completely repugnant.
Such a repulsive smell wafted to his nose at that moment, drifting up from a circular hole in the road. Seti winced, recoiling from the stench.
“Must be a sewer break,” Logan muttered, wrinkling his nose and tugging yet again on Seti’s arm.
Thank the gods, that smell must not be common here, Seti thought. Logan finds it as horrendous as I do. For once, Seti was happy to allow Logan to lead him away.
Logan turned into a darkened doorway, dragging Seti behind him. He didn’t want to enter – Seti had spent far long enough boxed up in a small, dark place. He wanted to see the sky, feel the fresh air caress his cheek.
But he was also hungry and thirsty, so much so that he was beginning to feel weaker by the minute, and Logan had promised him both food and drink if he came inside. Seti did as Logan bade him but with great reluctance.
He hated having to rely on Logan for his sustenance. It should be the other way around. Seti was a king, therefore the provider. It had always been that way, and it went against his grain to be dependent on anyone.
Still, he had no choice, at least not for now. He followed Logan into the building, through a dimly lit room to a table near the back. Seti slid in over the cracked leather, sitting opposite Logan.
“Well, who do we have here? Where did you find this hunk of fine-looking man flesh, Logan?”
“He’s…a friend from out of town, Wendy. On vacation,” Logan replied, eyeing Seti. A warning not to divulge his true origins, Seti surmised. Very well. By this point, if it would get him some food and water, Seti would gladly claim to be a lump of dung fresh from a camel’s ass.
“What’s your name, lover?” Wendy, as Logan had called the old woman, asked him.
“Seti.”
“Seti what?”
“Seti…from out of town.”
Wendy chuckled. “Cute and a sense of humor. Can’t beat that combination, Logan. I think he’s a keeper. All right, boys, what’ll you have?”
Logan ordered the food – burgers, fries, and a pitcher. Seti had heard of burgers and fries, and had high hopes that the pitcher would contain liquid of some sort.
Having suffered a constant, gnawing ache in his belly for thousands of years, his throat as parched as the desert sands, he nonetheless had survived – in a manner of speaking. And yet within the scant few hours since the curse had been broken, Seti felt as though his strength was draining away, leaving him as weak as an infant. He could barely sit upright. That, he remembered, was the curse of having flesh.
Wendy shuffled off, leaving them alone at their table.
“Okay. I want some answers,” Logan said. “Supposing – just supposing, mind you – that I believe you are who you say you are, then why now? Why me? Why didn’t you regenerate, or de-mummify, or whatever it is that you did today when your sarcophagus was first opened?”
“My tomb was never opened until now,” Seti replied, shrugging his shoulders. “The curse would not allow it. I was doomed to spend five thousand years entombed, and today must mark the last day of my sentence.”
“You mean to tell me that this curse kept everyone who came in contact with your sarcophagus from opening it? That’s ridiculous!”
“No more ridiculous than you breaking bread with…what did you call me? Oh, yes. The five thousand year old dead guy,” Seti countered.
“I remain unconvinced of that fact,” Logan said. There was a defiant tilt to his chin that made Seti want to smile. He looked like a small boy stubbornly refusing to obey his parents. “If it’s true, then you must know things about history that no one else alive – for lack of a better word – knows. Tell me something about the Renaissance. Something no one else would know.”
“I cannot. I know little of history except my own.”
“Aha!” Logan cried, jabbing a finger at Seti. “I knew it! You don’t know anything because you aren’t the mummy!”
“I know little because my tomb was only discovered less than a hundred years ago,” Seti replied patiently. “I spent the preceding four thousand nine hundred years buried under a hundred feet of sand.”
“You were buried…”
“…alive, for lack of a better term.” Seti finished Logan’s sentence, watching his face pale as the truth slowly sank in. “In answer to your earlier question, there was only one canopic jar because I do not believe Setekh ever intended for me to live again, either in this world or the next.”
Logan sat back in his seat, the air in his lungs escaping in a long, low whoosh. “Jesus, Seti. How did you not lose your mind? Five thousand years…”
Seti smiled softly at the compassion he heard in Logan’s voice as the enormity of Seti’s curse hit him.
“I spent a great deal of time, especially in the beginning, thinking of Setekh and the countless, creative ways in which I would kill him, had he been human. After that? I slept as often as I could, hoping my dreams would bring to me someone I once knew.”
“Ah,” Logan whispered. “Your wife. Did you have children, Seti?”
“Thirty-two at last count,” His smile was bittersweet, remembering the dozens of dark-headed young ones scampering about his tents. “But I had no wives. Concubines, yes, but I never took any woman as a wife.”
“Thirty-two! Then you might have family, Seti! Great-great-whatevers.”
Seti chuckled. “Perhaps. Life was harsh then, Logan. There is no telling that any of my blood survived. Or that Setekh allowed them to live after I was gone. In fact, I am certain that he did not. Part of my curse was to be forgotten, and that would include the decimation of my bloodline.”
“That’s awful. I’m sorry, Seti. For what happened to you. What exactly did happen, by the way? What caused you to be cursed in the first place?”
A dark cloud colored Seti’s face as memories assailed him, bidden by Logan’s innocent question. Memories he’d spent the last five thousand years trying to forget. “I don’t wish to speak of it.”
Wendy saved Seti from the myriad of questions he kn
ew danced on the tip of Logan’s tongue by setting steaming platters of food in front of them, and a pitcher of something amber and frosty cold between himself and Logan. “Eat up, boys. The pitcher’s on me.”
“Thanks, Wendy,” Logan said, smiling up at her.
“Yes. My thanks,” Seti parroted. In his day, servants were never thanked for the service they provided – it was their place, their duty in his world to serve. But it seemed times had changed, as he noticed more and more with every passing moment.
“You’re welcome, hon. Make sure Logan eats – he’s too skinny,” she smiled as she walked away.
Skinny? Logan did not seem underweight to Seti. He was smaller than Seti, certainly, but his flesh seemed firm and his muscles strong. As they ate, Seti seized the opportunity to fully appreciate the young man who had released him.
Logan’s light brown hair was cut short, just long enough to curl over the tips of his ears and brush the collar of his shirt. He had a pleasant face, open and honest, and his smile – on the rare occasion that he let it tilt his full lips – was winsome. There was a single dimple that deepened in his left cheek when he allowed himself to grin boyishly.
But it was his eyes that captivated Seti, and had since the moment Seti had awoken and stepped out from the chamber in which his sarcophagus had been kept.
They were large, expressive, intelligent, framed by dark lashes that were so long that they curled.
More than that, Logan’s eyes were a bright green. A familiar green; a green that had haunted Seti’s sleep for thousands of years.
Impossible, the voice of reason in Seti’s head said emphatically. It cannot be. He is no more than the dust of the earth now, dead before Set laid the curse on your head.
And yet…
Stop it. You look for similarities where there are none. Again that irritating inner voice remonstrated.
But how wonderful would it be, how comforting, to have some connection to his past, however fragile. Especially if it was a connection to the only one who had ever held Seti’s heart.
Ashai.
The name floated through Seti’s mind like a prayer. His throat constricted as memories of Ashai swept through him, unbidden. His laugh, low and free, his gentle touch. His kiss, his body…
Enough!
Seti turned his thoughts back to the food Wendy had placed before him by sheer force of will. So this was a burger, he thought, picking it up. For years he had heard Perry speaking to others, ordering them to fetch him one. He examined it before biting into it. Two round slices of bread enveloped a char-burned piece of meat. It didn’t look very appetizing, but it smelled wonderful. Seti’s stomach growled angrily, reminding him that he hadn’t eaten in millennia.
He opened his mouth wide and took a large bite. Thick and medium rare, the meat’s juices ran down his chin, its smoky flavor filling his mouth, his eyes rolling back in his head in delight.
“This is good,” he said around a mouthful of beef. “More.”
“One is enough for now. That stuff will clog up your arteries,” Logan replied, pouring them each a mug of the cold, amber liquid. “Besides, we have to get going soon. It’s only a matter of time until the authorities come here, looking for me.”
“I will protect you. I will allow no one to harm you.”
“Yeah, right. How do you plan on doing that? You don’t have any weapons, and even if you did you can’t just enter into hand-to-hand combat with the New York City Police Department.”
“I am Seti. I have other resources.”
“How comforting.”
“After all you have seen today, you still doubt me?”
“The only thing I don’t doubt is that I’ve lost my mind.”
“Still you scoff. What will it take to convince you that I am who I say I am?”
“At this point it doesn’t really matter, Seti. Whether or not you’re the mummy or just some fabulously inventive thief, the consequences of taking you out of the museum and not turning you in will be the same for me.”
“I will protect you,” Seti said again. He grew weary of the argument, feeling as though he was butting his head against sandstone. “What is this?” he asked, picking up the mug, seeking to change the tiresome subject.
“Beer.”
Seti cocked a brow, sniffing at the mug. “What is this white foam?”
“That’s the head.”
“Your beer is alive?”
“No, that’s just what we call the foam.”
“It doesn’t smell like beer.”
“How would you know?”
“We had fine beer in my day. Brewed with barley and wheat,” Seti answered. He took a small sip of the golden liquid, immediately crinkling his nose. “This is not beer. This is piss water.”
“This draft is Budweiser! That’s the King of Beers,” Logan protested.
“King? Nonsense. This swill would not be fit for peasants to drink! Beer should have a sweet, fruity taste. Not like this piss.”
“Kindly stop calling it piss. Wendy bought us this pitcher – you should be grateful.”
“Are you certain that she bought the pitcher and did not simply p-”
“You’ll never know how much is riding on you not finishing that sentence,” Logan growled.
Seti smiled. Not the weak, half-smiles he’d been allowing himself since his reanimation, but a full, wide, delighted smile. How brave young Logan was, defending his friend, no matter that Seti was bigger and stronger than he. How loyal. In Seti’s day such stalwartness would have made Logan a fine warrior, one trusted and admired for his grit, and he told Logan so.
“Warrior? Me? I’m a bookworm, Seti. I spend all of my time either nose-deep in textbooks or up to my armpits in old, dead things.”
“Old, dead things like me?” Seti chuckled at the chagrin on Logan’s face.
“That’s not what I meant,” Logan replied, blushing furiously. “I’m no warrior.”
“I did not say that you were. I said that you had the makings of one.”
“Right now, I’d settle for the makings of the Invisible Man. Hurry and finish, Seti. We have to get out of here.”
No sooner had the words left Logan’s lips than there was a flurry of activity at the front door of the establishment. Two men hovered near the door, their presence vaguely menacing, obviously looking for someone or something.
For them, Seti realized.
“Oh, shit!” Logan whispered, his face strained and pale. “We’re fucked. There’s no way we can slip out without them seeing us.”
“These men seek to do you harm?”
“They don’t look like cops. They might be private security from the Museum. But either way they’re going to find us, and we’re going to be in for a shitload of trouble. I just know it.”
“I will allow no one to harm you. I already told you this.”
“You can’t stop them, Seti, and there’s no way we can get past them,” Logan replied, shaking his head. “You don’t have a weapon, and I wouldn’t want you to use one if you did. That would only get us into worse trouble.”
“I also told you that I have other resources.”
Seti looked over at the men. One of them was talking with the barkeep, who pointed a finger toward Logan and Seti’s table. Seti narrowed his eyes, then closed them, reaching out, calling to the wind.
Would it remember his voice, even after all these years? Or would his command go unheeded?
He needn’t have worried.
The wind answered in a howl, smashing open the doors of the bar, blowing in the two large pane glass windows at the front. People fell like dominos, toppled by the fury of the gale, scrambling for cover from the shards of window glass. Like a monstrous entity, the wind swept through the room blowing dishes and glasses off the tables, lifting dust, broken glass, peanut shells, and napkins up into the air.
A funnel swirled to life in the center of the bar, standing as an impenetrable barrier between Seti and Logan and the men who soug
ht them. Screams were heard under the roar of the wind as people fought to escape the terrifying maelstrom that undulated and twisted like a wind-demon, sucking everything that wasn’t bolted to the floor into its deadly embrace.
Seti grabbed Logan’s wrist, pulling him from his seat and dragging him toward a door at the back of the bar. He could not keep the wind constrained for long. He was still too weak.
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