I nodded, feet dragging as I walked into the waiting area. The boost from the two energy drinks was depleting quickly, and I could feel the pull of regenerative sleep. It was tempting to give in—my wound would heal much faster then—but I’d be knocked out until my body determined it was recovered enough and ready for sustenance. I couldn’t shake the feeling that if I gave in to the pull, something would happen to Dom, but if I could hold on to consciousness with my much lesser wound, then he could hold on to life.
I plopped down in the chair by the phone and picked up the receiver. It was one of the old corded phones with real buttons you could actually push. I dialed the only number I could think of that would get me to my family back on Bainbridge. The line rang several times before anyone picked up. She probably wouldn’t answer; it was an unrecognized number, after all, and it was late, especially for the mother of a three-year-old. I thought the call was going to go to voice mail, so I reached out my other hand to press the phone’s hang-up mechanism.
“Hello?” Lex said after the fifth ring.
My voice stuck in my throat.
“Hello? Is anyone there?”
I licked my lips and swallowed roughly. “Lex?” My eyes stung, tears breaking free almost immediately. This was why I stayed away from the people I loved. This stupid, overwhelming vulnerability.
The line was quiet for a few seconds. “Kat? What’s wrong?” Because for me to call her now, after nearly three years of radio silence, it had to be something bad.
Well, damn it, it was.
“You guys need to come to Harborview . . . Aset and Neffe need to come here.” I cleared my throat, hoping Heru’s twin sister and daughter, the two oldest, most skilled doctors I knew, would be able to do something for Dom even if the surgeons here couldn’t. They had over ten thousand years of combined experience going for them, so the odds were in their favor. “It’s Dom . . .”
Lex didn’t respond for several more seconds, but I could hear her voice, muffled as though she’d pressed the phone to her shirt. And then she was back, clear as day. “We’re on our way.”
16
The hours passed in that waiting area in a blur, my mind trying its hardest to float away to the land of dreams while I did my damnedest to make sure that didn’t happen. I guzzled far more vending machine coffee in a couple-hour period than was safe. Add to that the packaged cookies and little brownie bites I kept scarfing down, and I was feeling increasingly nauseated, my heart jackhammering against my sternum and my hands shaking even as my eyelids drooped.
Eventually, the call of regenerative sleep was too much for the battalion of sugar and caffeine or the discomfort of the belt pressing into my injury and pinching the skin of my waist. I passed out, curled up on the chair by the phone, and was, for some unknown period of time, dead to the world.
***
The scent of grease and fried potatoes filled my nose, luring me out of a dreamless sleep. I groaned, not understanding how I’d come to be lying down or why my belt wasn’t pinching my skin.
“I knew that would work.” The voice was feminine and more than a little smug. I recognized it immediately.
“Lex?” I cracked my eyelids open to see a pair of white fast-food bags with the familiar orange and blue Dick’s Drive-In logo across the side, stuffed so full of glorious fast food that the paper bags were bulging. Lex’s face was beside them, her head tilted to the side, her strange, crimson eyes mere inches from mine.
“Hey, Kit-Kat.” Her lips curved into a hesitant smile. “How are you feeling?” She brushed a strand of hair from my eyes with gentle fingertips. She still treated me like her kid sister, even though I was technically about twenty years older than her due to a ridiculously complicated time travel situation. I didn’t really mind, though. It was actually kind of nice that she remembered me the way I used to be.
I pushed myself up from the string of chairs I’d stretched out on while asleep, moving the warm bags of greasy burgers and fries to the seat next to me, and rubbed my eyes. “Better,” I told her.
Peering down at myself, I pulled up my tank top a few inches to get a look at the stab wound. My belt was gone—coiled up on the floor nearby—and a neat gauze bandage had replaced the blood-crusted wad of paper towels.
“Aset cleaned you up when we first got here, while Neffe was in conferring with Dom’s doctors,” Lex explained. She moved the fast-food bags closer to me. “You should eat. You’re too thin.” It wasn’t a judgment, just a statement of the aftereffects of Nejeret regeneration. My body had diverted all possible resources to healing me, including drawing from any stored energy, namely fat.
I huffed out a breath. “And here I was hoping to pick up a few years for a couple days . . . see what it’s like to be a real-life grown-up.” I dug into the first paper bag, pulling out a cheeseburger wrapped in foil paper and tearing it open, stomach rumbling. I was ravenous.
Lex laughed softly, but no hint of mirth touched her eyes. “I got you a strawberry milkshake, too,” she said, her gaze flicking to the table with the phone, where two Dick’s cups awaited me. “And a Cherry Coke.”
I grabbed the latter, taking a deep pull from the straw. The sweet, fizzy liquid helped me get the burger down in three bites. I unwrapped a second as soon as the first was nothing but crumbs. “Thanks,” I said around a mouthful.
She nodded and stood, not the least bit disturbed by my pig-out session. She knew my hunger as well as any Nejeret who’d been injured enough to go through regeneration cycles. She crossed the waiting area to sit in a chair beside her husband, Heru. I was studiously avoiding looking at him. I knew what I’d find if I did—that haughty, hawkish stare, his burnished gold eyes focused on me, and his expression a cold, emotionless mask. Painfully beautiful, just like his sister’s and his nephew’s faces, but giving nothing away.
“So, what happened?” It was Lex who asked first, despite Heru’s eyes searing the question into my skin. “To Dom,” she said. “And to you.”
I could only stand to look at her for a few seconds. I didn’t see blame in her garnet eyes, but that didn’t stop me from feeling it. My gaze quickly diverted to the floor, seeking out the pale stains no amount of carpet cleaner could remove from the mutely patterned ivory and blue rug.
“Explain,” Heru said, the one word an iron-clad command. It was the first time I’d heard his voice in years, but his faint, slightly Middle Eastern accent was exactly as I remembered it. As was the power he could wield with his voice alone.
He was a Senate member, elected by our people along with Aset and Lex. But he was more than that, too—the leader of my clan and the general to our people. He’d been the former for more than twenty years, since I swore an oath forsaking my clan of birth for his, and the latter for over four thousand years. Power wafted off him in waves, and he had more charisma and charm than anyone I’d ever met, though he could turn it off like flipping a switch. I never understood how Lex could do it, be with him. But somehow she managed, and not as a doormat, but as his equal. His partner.
I locked eyes with Heru. It was a mistake, because once he had me, I couldn’t look away. My hands stilled, a half-unwrapped cheeseburger sitting on my lap.
I considered lying to him about everything that had happened over the last few days. For all of two seconds. “Nik came to me,” I confessed. “He told me Dom was missing and asked me to look into it because, you know . . .” Actually, I realized that maybe they didn’t know; I’d been keeping my distance for so long. Which then made me wonder how Nik had known in the first place. I made a mental note to pry the truth out of him later before starting my explanation. “My sheut,” I said, “the way it’s developed—well, it makes it so the things I draw have power.” I continued unwrapping the burger, hands shaking a little. How could they not be, when Heru was staring at me so . . . stare-y. “In some ways, it’s like they’re alive.”
I took a bite of the burger, considering the quickest and easiest way to explain what I could do and how
and why Nik thought I’d be able to find Dom and the other missing Nejerets when nobody else could. “There was this case about a year and a half ago—a missing sixteen-year-old girl. The cops weren’t having any luck, and the older sister came into the shop, wanting to get the girl’s name tattooed on her wrist.” I took another bite, washing it down with a sip of Cherry Coke. “She got to talking, and one thing led to another, and my sketches of the girl’s name started taking on a life of their own, changing and spelling out different things.”
I set down the cup by the phone on the end table. “I called in an anonymous tip as soon as the girl’s sister left, and they found the girl later that day. She was a little worse for wear, but she was alive. Some sick fuck had abducted her and was ‘training’ her to be sold as a sex slave.” I glanced down at the burger, momentarily too disgusted for even my ravenous post-regeneration hunger. “That’s how my side business of finding people started.”
“So, you’re a PI?” Lex asked.
I shrugged, shaking my head. “I don’t have a license or anything, and I don’t advertise, but people still come to me. Word of mouth, I guess.” I thought of Garth and the missing street kids. “Some of the cops have even heard about me now.” I hoped Garth was all right, but my fear for Dom’s life far surpassed my concern for Garth. Even so, I thought I might get up and wander the hospital in search of him in a bit. It would be nice to stretch my legs, and seeing that he was really all right—if he was all right—would set at least part of my mind at ease.
Heru exchanged a quick glance with Lex. “And Nik knew about this?” he asked. How? was unspoken, but implied.
I swallowed and nodded, just as in the dark about the how of that reality as he was. “He came to me a few nights ago,” I said. “Told me about Dom and the others. I did some readings and sketches, and I have this wall—” I waved a hand to the side dismissively. “It doesn’t matter.” After a deep inhale, I continued, “I kept seeing the same symbol over and over. And then this cop got involved, and I realized the missing Nejerets are linked to a bunch of street kids who’ve gone missing over the past couple months.”
“A cop?” Lex asked, at the same time as Heru said, “What symbol?”
I couldn’t ignore Heru’s question. He was a man whose passive greatness was so stifling that if you told some random human that he was a god, nine times out of ten they’d shrug and nod, admitting it was a possibility. “A snake eating its own tail,” I told him. “It helped me link the disappearances to the Ouroboros Corporation.”
Heru’s golden tiger eyes narrowed.
“Mari’s working with them,” I said. “Did you know that?”
Lex’s mouth fell open, and Heru shook his head ever so faintly.
“So, yeah . . . she’s not ‘missing.’” I gripped the side of my abdomen, still aching dully from the stab wound. “She’s the one who did this. I’m pretty sure she has Nik . . . and she managed to get me with an anti-At dagger.”
“What?” Lex was standing before the word was out of her mouth.
“I’m fine,” I said, holding out my left hand, emblazoned with the black-veined Eye of Horus. “Turns out my sheut’s good for more than just drawing pictures, reading fortunes, and finding people . . .”
Lex moved closer, crouching and eyes squinting as she studied my palm. “What is that?”
“At ink,” I told her. “Nik made it.” I shrugged out of my jacket and set it on the chair beside me. “It’s what these are, too. The only permanent ink there is for a Nejeret.”
“And it protected you?” Lex asked, looking from my hand to my face and back.
I nodded vehemently. “And that’s not all it did.” I remembered the way it had itched, then burned, when Mari had first emerged from the container. “I think it tried to warn me that I was in danger—I just didn’t know it.” I stared hard at Lex. “You guys should seriously consider letting me ink you with one of these bad boys. Could save your life . . .”
“I’ll think about it,” she said with a frown.
I looked at Heru. God or not, it was my turn to spear him with a hard stare. “How’d this all happen? How did you let it? And how the hell did the Senate not know what Ouroboros was up to?” Not that I really had any clue what exactly they were up to, just that it involved abducting Nejerets and human kids and apparently tearing the bas out of their Nejeret captives. “Even Nik’s been paying attention to them. He said their ‘life extension’ products seemed fishy.”
“For some time,” Heru said, “it has been my belief that there is corruption within the Senate.” Irritation tensed his exotic features. It was the most emotion I’d seen in him in years. Then again, this was the first time I’d seen him in years.
I scoffed. “You think?” I’d sensed that vein of corruption the day they tasked me, a nineteen-year-old freshly manifested Nejeret who just happened to be invisible in the echoes thanks to the first time Mari stabbed me with an anti-At dagger, with hunting down and eliminating their enemies.
Heru’s responding stare put mine to shame. “All of this stays between us.”
“I literally talk to no one.” At least, no one who mattered to them. “Who do you think I’ll tell? My receptionist?”
The corner of Heru’s mouth twitched like he was holding in his amusement, but Lex frowned.
At the sound of footsteps coming from the hallway leading to Dom’s operating room, all three of us swiveled our heads. Neffe approached, scrubs smudged with crimson bloodstains, dark hair held back by a blue cap tied behind her head, and a surgeon’s mask pulled down below her chin to reveal her striking face.
Born during the most famous ancient Egyptian period, the New Kingdom’s Eighteenth Dynasty, to Queen Hatshepsut and the great god Heru—the very same Heru sitting in the waiting area with me—Neffe was a stunning vision of a woman. And her brain was even better; her intellect and skill as a healer was nearly unmatched. Though her personality left something to be desired.
“How is he?” Lex asked, taking a step toward Neffe, hands wringing. Lex, Dom, and I shared a father, and she and Dom had always had a special bond.
Neffe took hold of Lex’s hands, showing more compassion than I’d have thought her capable of. “It is not good, I’m afraid. Aset is still in there, leading the team, but . . .” She shook her head, her honey eyes filled with sorrow. She and Dom had been a part of each other’s lives for centuries, so I don’t know why it surprised me so much that she actually gave a shit about him. But it did. “He’s not healing. No matter what we do, it’s like working on a patient with a severe autoimmune disease—the exact opposite of what should be happening.”
I opened my mouth, then snapped it shut again. Surely I hadn’t skipped over the part about Dom’s ba having been torn out of his body, had I? I quickly reviewed our conversation so far in my mind, and much to my shame, I had. “It’s his ba,” I said, standing and retrieving the anti-At orb out of my left pocket, then holding it out for the others to see. Neffe reached for the shimmering black orb, and I quickly drew it back to me. “Don’t touch it!”
Neffe pulled her hand back. “Is that—”
“Anti-At?” I said. “Yes.”
Her eyes rounded. “But how are you—”
“It’s a long story,” I said with a huff. “The point is, Dom’s ba is in here, courtesy of Mari. Is there any way you can get it out of here and back into him?”
“Short of a needle made of anti-At . . .” Neffe shook her head. “No, I don’t believe so. Not even Nik would be able to break through it.” She turned and started back toward the hallway. “This changes things. I’ll return shortly with a new assessment of the situation.”
I went to stuff the orb back into my pocket, but Lex grabbed my wrist. “Is that really him in there?” she asked, bringing her face close to its poisonous surface.
I pulled free from her gentle hold. “So Mari claims . . .”
“Can he hear us?” Lex asked, straightening as her eyes moved from the orb to my
face and back.
I lifted one shoulder and shook my head. “I honestly don’t know.”
“Mari did this?” From the hard glint in Lex’s eyes, I wagered that Mari—whatever reasoning she’d had behind splintering Dom’s body and soul—was about to get far more than she’d bargained for. Heru was shit-scary when he wanted to be. But if there was one person I didn’t ever want to piss off, it was Lex. She’d been through hell traveling through time across millennia to get back to us, and she knew what it meant to lose everything. I mean, come on—the woman birthed the two new, true gods of our universe.
And she loved Dom as much as anyone. Maybe more. If there was anyone I pitied right now, it was Mari. She was in for a universe of hurt.
17
I’m not used to sitting still without having something to do. I’ve always got a pen in hand, a tattoo machine, or my tarot cards. I had none of those things in the hospital waiting area, and once the food was gone, it was painfully dull, which only increased my anxiety about Dom. If only I had my cards . . . but then they’d have taken a dip with me in the waterway, and I doubted even their magic ink would’ve survived that.
The minutes felt like hours, the hours like days. Not that I’d made it even a half hour sitting down there, doing nothing, but still . . .
I pushed up out of my chair maybe an hour after I woke to the scent of cheap burgers and fries. “I need to move,” I said, reaching my hands over my head and arching my back in a stretch. Now was as good of a time as any to search for Garth. “I’m gonna walk around.” I picked up my leather jacket off the chair. It wasn’t cold in the hospital, but it wasn’t toasty, either.
Lex’s eyes moved to the jacket in my hands, then back to my face. “Oh, um, alright.” Did she think I was ducking out? Not that I could blame her if she did. My track record was less than stellar in the slinking-away department.
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