The God Collector

by Catherine Butzen

  It appeared to be an MRE or Meal, Ready to Eat, the military foodstuff which had the rare privilege of its entire name being a bald-faced lie. Still, Theo couldn’t deny that she was hungry, not when she hadn’t had a real meal since the day before yesterday. Pilfering Aki’s Chex Mix wasn’t quite the same.

  “You’ve never died, though,” she pointed out as she extracted what was supposedly a chicken patty from its plastic tomb. “Not really. You said you haven’t…crossed over.”

  “No,” Seth admitted, gaze fixed determinedly on his meal. “But I’m in the house when the lights go out, you could say. Does this look like stew to you? I can’t tell.”

  Theo recognized a diversionary tactic when she saw one, but she let it go. If Seth wanted to talk about it, he would do so in his own time, and prodding would just make them both angry.

  “I don’t want to say what it looks like,” she said, tearing her rubbery patty in half. “Mom always told me not to use that kind of language. Have some of this instead; yours could probably eat you.”

  After some persuading, she managed to make Seth accept a few pieces of her meal. He didn’t seem to need more than a mouthful or two, which made a strange sort of sense to her. If she were designing a brand-new body for a soldier two thousand years before the birth of Jesus, she would want him to require as little food and water as possible. He would have to sleep less, be stronger, faster, heal better. And of course, hah, be taller. Six foot two was nothing much to modern eyes, but in the days of Amenemhat I, it would’ve made him a giant among men.

  Looking over the rim of her bottle of water, she found herself remembering the tuberculosis-racked body of the mummy. Seth, Anhurmose then, must have been in horrible pain. The vessel he had built for his soul had been an escape from that as well. And it was good for a man who was planning to live a long, long existence as a general in wartime conditions, though maybe there was a little bit of Short Man syndrome in there too.

  As she watched, Seth tore a few scraps of chicken from his own half of the rations. He tossed it into the bowl, poured a little bit of lighter fluid over it and fumbled for matches. Theo automatically looked up at the smoke detector in the ceiling, but she saw that its batteries had been removed. Having firemen break in on your burnt offering was definitely not part of the ritual canon.

  The fire blazed up and died away almost immediately, burnt out after only a minute or so. As it receded into ash, Seth murmured a prayer.

  “You can say that again,” Theo said. “So what now? What are we going to do?”

  “We need to find Zimmer,” Seth declared, waving away a wisp of smoke from the bowl. The meat had been completely consumed, leaving behind nothing but a thin crust of black ash. “He’s our only lead right now, whether he was involved or not. Do you know anyone who could help us get back into the museum?”

  “Not Aki,” Theo said. “He’s supposed to be working from home. But Sandy Navarro is pretty smart, and she might be willing to listen. Or Dr. Van Allen. I’ve known him for years, and he was head of the Classical Antiquities Department when I was interning as a scenery painter.”

  At that, Seth frowned. “Dr. Van Allen? I remember him. Short man, acts strange?”

  “Pot, kettle.”

  “I’m serious.” Now Seth’s expression really was serious, the brown eyes sharp and snapping. “He sent a request about six months ago. He wanted the Neith Trust to be extended to cover administrative and departmental costs. I didn’t think much of it at the time. Museums always bleed money.”

  “Come on, Seth. You’re not thinking he had something to do with this?” Theo almost dropped her cup in surprise. “He’s the curator of the Egyptology Department!”

  “He has the clearance,” Seth pointed out, setting down his own cup of water. “He can read hieratic and priest’s script. He would have known which shabtis were LoJacked. And he was extremely eager to have a large amount of capital funneled into a place where he could make use of it.”

  Theo formed a mental picture of Dr. Wayne Van Allen. She didn’t hate working under him; despite his standoffishness, Dr. Van Allen had helped keep multiple departments producing. And funded, of course, though the Trust had been a big part of that. A little man, quiet enough, but relentless in his work. Leaning across, she tossed a cracker into the embers.

  “It’s possible,” she conceded reluctantly. “But I can’t see it, Seth. Curators always want money—it’s like a fish wanting water. But he’d never do anything to hurt the museum. It’s his life.”

  “Then let’s see if anyone else fits the bill.” Seth’s dark eyes focused on her. “You know the museum, Theo. Can you think of anyone? Anything?”

  Theo closed her eyes and thought. All those weeks and months, working and visiting from department to department, she’d been pretty secure in her position. She hadn’t been considering which of her fellow employees might be a thief or a would-be murderer. There were a few unpleasant types, especially in the Animatronics and Building Departments, but nobody really struck her as the sort of person who’d frame someone for antiquities theft.

  Though there was something else.

  “It has to be someone who was in the loft or with the cops,” she said. No question of which night. “Someone who heard my story about you. They did it while I was at your house, and I doubt that’s a coincidence. It made us look like we were in on it together, and to swing that, they had to know that I named you as a suspect in the first place.”

  “Not necessarily,” Seth said. “Zimmer could have brought in an outsider and told them.”

  “Then I’ve got nothing.” Theo groaned and ran a hand through her hair. “I’m sorry, Seth, but this isn’t my field of study and we need more information. All I know is that someone profited by doing this, and I can’t figure out how or why.”

  “So who could be the one profiting? A good principle of any mystery. Let’s begin with the people you know. You mentioned this woman Sandy. Would she know how the robbery happened?”

  “Possibly. Whenever something like that happens, everyone’s briefed on what not to say to the press. Emails get sent out to the whole staff. You can usually work out what happened based on what you can’t say happened.”

  “And Dr. Van Allen would know?”

  “Definitely.”

  “Then we should contact them both. Get the story from each of them and see if there are any discrepancies. Check it against news and police reports. If one is obviously lying, we may have our culprit.”

  “How are we going to get police reports?”

  Seth smiled another smile that, this time, didn’t quite reach his eyes. “You make your phone calls, I’ll make mine.”

  And he would have too; Theo had no doubt of that. Unfortunately, several things happened at once.

  The brazier lit up like a bonfire. Sheets of flame roared up, incinerating the meager offering in an instant and sending a wave of dry heat rippling through the close room. A strangled cry burst from Seth. His whole body stiffened, the tendons leaped in his neck, the blood drained from his face. One hand was pressed to his chest and clutched the hollow of his heart as if he were trying to keep it from escaping. His knuckles were white.

  “Neith, protect me—” the rest of his words were in the guttural language of his birth. He would have collapsed if Theo hadn’t dropped her food and caught him. As it was, his weight dragged her down, and she cradled him against her chest as she tried to sit back into a stable position. She thanked anybody listening that the smoke alarm was already out of commission. The makeshift brazier was burning so fiercely that the edges of the bowl were beginning to turn orange.

  Something moved at the edge of her vision. There were almost no shadows left in the harsh light of the fire, but she could swear there was a shadow flickering at the corner of her eye. It circled the fire, moving even as she turned her head to follow it, prowling like a dog on
the scent. It was dark, not the gloss black of a statue or a healthy dog, but the four-legged dead black of—something.

  Blood dripped from Seth’s nose and eyes. Theo stifled a scream as he clutched at his face, pink lines showing under his skin where the veins had burst. She tried to grab him but he scrambled to his feet, throwing off her hands with unnatural strength. He backed up against the table, almost knocking it over, his hands still clamped to his face. The blood running from his nose dried almost instantly into red Nile clay.

  “Neith, protect me. Neith, shield me. Neith, protect me.” English and the ancient language interwove, a bilingual chant of desperation and pain.

  “Seth!” Her shout was cut off as he spasmed, crashing backwards against the table again and knocking the remaining scrolls and statuettes off as one of its legs snapped. The clay fell away in wet chunks, leaving his face streaked with red-black mud.

  Slowly, the shivers began to subside, and the prayers fell silent. His knees crumpled as the strength went out of them, and he toppled—collapsed, more like—slumping back against the ruins of the spindle-legged table.

  Theo awkwardly caught him again, trying to keep him from cracking his skull on the wall.

  His head lolled back, dark eyes wide and staring, tears mixing with clay to leave muddy stains.

  “Seth, Seth,” she whispered.

  He blinked, clay beading on his eyelashes.

  “Can you hear me, Seth?” Numbly, she ran through the signs of stroke in her mind. Check pupils, check joints, look for burst blood vessels. Spend time in a studio with lots of stressed-out people, you learn to memorize the emergency procedures. But it was impossible for her to tell how bad he was. No seminar she’d ever taken had told her how to give first aid to a man bleeding clay out of his eyes.

  They focused on her, at long last. The dry lips parted and the streaks of reddish clay began to crack when he moved.

  Tears beaded in Theo’s eyes. “Seth,” she repeated, her voice hoarse. “Seth, can you hear me?” The words quavered. Even if he couldn’t, what could she do about it?

  She cradled Seth’s head, wiping away the mud with the pad of her thumb. “It’s not time yet,” she said softly. His stubble was rough, even through the callouses on her fingers. “Four thousand years, and you’re going to die in a storage locker by the airport? So much for Mister Governor.”

  The lips twitched, and the remaining clay in the corners of his mouth crumbled.

  Theo almost collapsed in relief when she realized he was trying to smile. The eyes focused, red veins beginning to fade from the whiteness of the eyeballs as his strange inbuilt healing took over. The fire was dying as quickly as it had sprung up, leaving behind only the pale-yellow light of the fluorescents. Without the blaze of flame, the world seemed dimmer and colder.

  “Yu iti,” he rasped. “Yu iti haty-a.”

  Theo blinked away the last tears, trying not to show how worried she still was. Seth tried to sit back up, but fresh red lines bloomed on the skin and Theo put a hand on his chest to keep him down.

  He tried again. “Gouverneur c’est…mein vater…”

  “It’s okay,” she said quietly. “Just focus on me.”

  “The governor was my father, not me,” he said, stumbling a little over the words. “I was a…a rich kid.”

  She smiled down at him. “Welcome back, rich kid. I thought you’d crossed over for sure that time.”

  “I think I might have.” He mopped most of the remaining clay out of his eyes, grimacing at it. But his hand squeezed Theo’s tighter than ever, the skin cool and slick with sweat. “Someone has my mummy, Theo.”

  Theo’s stomach clenched. “I thought you had it hidden.”

  “In my townhouse.” He struggled up into a sitting position against the broken table, and Theo took one of his arms, giving him something to lean on. “I did think it was adequately concealed. I used some things to hide it.”

  “Magic? Secret sigils?”

  “Timed locks and retinal scanners. But I did add a few spells. Simple, but they should have turned eyes away from it. Someone found it.”

  “What…?” she started even as she wiped clay off her hands. The red lines had almost faded, but they weren’t completely gone yet. “What happens? Happened? I mean, what did they do?”

  His long face sagged. “I don’t know. It felt like I was being ripped in half. It’s been damaged, it has to have been. Someone—someone knew that hurting it would hurt me.” He swallowed, and Theo knew what he was thinking. Maybe THS203 might’ve been dissected by the tuberculosis study, but not while it was also evidence in an ongoing investigation. The only person who could’ve accessed it would be someone who could see through magic, and the only one who’d even be getting close to it would be someone affiliated with the case.

  “Zimmer,” she said. The name tasted like ash in her mouth as she said it. She’d hoped to avoid that, but it was hard enough fighting the damn shadow who’d set them up, and it needed a name. The one man with universal access to the museum, the one who sent her to see Seth on a flimsy pretext and failed to respond when she tried to ask for his help… His was as good a name as any.

  And the actual shadow? The stalking dog? She opened her mouth to say something, but swallowed the words at the last moment. Too much going on already.

  “Or his accomplice.” Seth struggled to sit up again, leaning hard against Theo as he tried not to fall. She sagged back onto the couch, letting him rest against her as she helped him get settled.

  His hands trembled a little, but he was no longer bleeding and some of the color was beginning to come back into his cheeks.

  “I guess this answers the do-they-know question, Seth.”

  That drew a tired smile from him, and his hand squeezed hers.

  Ten minutes ago, he had been on top of the world, or as close to it as possible in their situation, and now he could barely stand. And worse, he had fallen because someone had his mummy.

  No, not his mummy. The mummy. An artifact that could hurt Seth, no matter what he was doing or where he was. Someone knew what Seth was, enough to circumvent the security he’d placed on the mummy and enough to know that hurting it would hurt him. It could be an accident, but the way their luck was going, it was more likely an attack.

  Seth seemed to be thinking the same thing. “We don’t have any time left,” he said quietly. “I have to find a way to get my body back.”

  “There can’t be too many places you can hide a mummy in this city,” Theo said. She hoped, rather than knew, that that was the case. “I’ll make some calls. There has to be someone else in the museum who’ll talk to me.”

  “No.” Seth managed to sit up this time. His color was back, and his voice was stronger this time. “This is getting out of hand. You need to go to the police. Turn yourself in. Tell them that I threatened your family if you didn’t help me. I can drop off the radar, find the mummy myself and disappear.”

  There was a moment of silence. Then Theo swept another strand of her hair aside and looked him straight in the eyes. “To hell with that.”

  “Theo—”

  “No. To hell with that.” She crossed her arms as Seth straightened up, trying to protest. “You heard me. I’ve been with you on this so far, Seth. If you just don’t want me around anymore, say the word and I’m gone; I don’t stay where I’m not wanted. But if this is just you trying to save me trouble or something, then screw it. You almost died just now. That mummy means they have a way to hurt you, and they don’t strike me as the type to let you catch up with them!”

  She stopped, panting. Her face burned, not from embarrassment but with the flush of anger. All the pent-up emotions of the last few days—frustration and rage and the terror of something moving and alive that she’d never quite felt before and couldn’t recognize—they were all rushing through her, making her shiver.

&nb
sp; “You’re serious,” Seth said after a moment. He looked stunned.

  “If I didn’t stop at grand larceny, why would I stop now?” she snapped back. “If you’re bored with me, then say it, I’m gone. But don’t think you’re doing me a favor by trying to send me away. Capisce?”

  “You’re crazy,” he said slowly. A small smile tugged at his lips. “That’s supposed to be your line, isn’t it?”

  “I’m an artist, Seth.” Theo threw her arms out, encompassing the room and the mummy-man and the whole insane world in one gesture. “I paint dead things. I pretend that I can re-create the faces of ancient corpses or turn walls into portals into the past. I know the skeletal structure of a Struthiomimus sedens better than most people know their credit card numbers, and then put a freaking Santa hat on it. I’m sitting in a storage locker with a man who can’t die, and I not only believe him, I volunteered to help him. I am…I am a flake. Believe me, if I were crazy I wouldn’t have any problem telling you.” She took a deep breath, vaguely aware that her hands were shaking. “Now, are we going to start hunting down this bastard or not? Because I take it kind of personally when someone tries to kill you by long-distance voodoo.”

  “Theo,” he said softly. Something in his eyes made her stop her impassioned half rant. “Theodora. It’s an old name. Do you know what it means?”

  She frowned, brought up short by the question. “Theodora means ‘gift of God’. It’s Greek, my grandma said. Why does it matter?”

  “I met a Theodora once before.” He stood up, wavering a little, and opened one of the boxes. After some quick digging, he produced a scroll, clearly one of the oldest and tied with a scrap of what looked like purple silk. The dangling tag was lettered in hieratic, and Theo picked out the letters, mentally calling them by their hieroglyphic equivalents: basket K, water N, folded cloth S, loaf T, box-stool P, quail-chick U. She frowned, trying to place the vowels that hieratic didn’t have. The last symbol threw her for a moment, but some sounds hadn’t existed in the old alphabets.