by Jasmine Walt
Marcus’s shoulders tensed. “So he showed up. I figured he would.”
“Don’t you want to know what else he told me?”
“I can guess,” Marcus said, hanging his head. “Was it something along the lines of ‘Heru spent thousands of years killing your siblings’?”
“It’s true?” I whispered, wanting him to deny it. He didn’t, and I felt like the world was being ripped out from under my feet and I was falling endlessly into oblivion. My half-siblings, like Dominic and Kat, had been hunted down and killed by Marcus? Why?
“It’s part of the truth,” Marcus said quietly. He stood and walked to the door. “When you decide you want to know the rest, let me know.”
“Marcus,” I said, but he was already gone.
Part III
Deir el-Bahri Luxor, Egypt
26
Claim & Bond
As demonstrated by the brevity of my “people I care about” list, I’d never been one to hand out affection like candy on Halloween. But, on the rare occasion that I let someone in, they had a chance to become a cornerstone in my life. Of the people on my list, only my parents, Grandma Suse, Jenny, Annie, and Cara were cornerstones. Once I’d laid them in my foundation, it took a lot to remove them. Even Cara’s honest betrayal on the stand hadn’t done it, though her stability had been dramatically loosened. But, once they were gone, ripped from the recess that had been finely hewn to fit only them, they were gone for good. It was something hammered into the very fiber of my being.
Set’s words haunted me. “Heru spent over two millennia hunting down and killing my offspring. The blood of my children—your siblings—pours from his hands . . .”
I couldn’t fathom any reason to hunt and kill people simply because they had the misfortune of being fathered by a psychotic, evil man. Even if that father was prophesied to potentially lead one of his children to destroy the world, it just didn’t make sense . . . they were still their own people. Just because Set fathered them didn’t mean he owned their minds. And I wondered, had I been born a hundred years earlier, would Marcus have hunted down and killed me too?
Like Set’s, Marcus’s words echoed in my mind. “When you decide you want to know the rest, let me know.” He had uttered the emotionless syllables earlier that morning, before we’d even touched down on the sun-drenched runway at Luxor International Airport. It had only taken me the afternoon to decide—I wanted to know the rest. I wanted Marcus as a cornerstone. Especially with Jenny still in Set’s hands and the impending Nothingness on the horizon, I needed someone . . . I needed Marcus.
I emerged from the ten-by-twenty-foot canvas tent that would be my home for the next several months, taking a moment to stare in wonder at Djeser-Djeseru—Hatchepsut’s mortuary temple—about a half-mile to the west. Its three tiers of columned promenades were lit up for the night, making the enormous temple glow majestically and casting eerie, jagged shadows against the limestone cliffs towering behind it. Tomorrow, I would finally walk up the two gradual limestone ramps to Djeser-Djeseru’s third level and begin searching the upper Anubis chapel for the hidden entrance to Senenmut’s underground temple.
Sighing, I turned away and headed for Marcus’s tent. It was a duplicate of mine, a rectangular canvas structure divided into two rooms—a ten-by-ten-foot “office,” and beyond that, personal living quarters of the same dimensions—and had been erected only a handful of paces from my own tent. Together, our two canvas homes comprised the center of a tent town. Dozens of smaller tents had been set up around ours in a very neat grid pattern, with a main thoroughfare running east and west, directly between Marcus’s and my tents. Beyond the west edge of the mini-city of canvas and sand, an expansive canopy had been set up over several dozen collapsible picnic tables, and two long restroom trailers had been parked beyond the east edge of camp. The entire temple complex had been shut down to tourists and would remain so until August, leaving us free to conduct our work away from prying eyes.
As I crossed the sandy “main street” to Marcus’s tent, my two bodyguards followed, positioned like splayed wings behind me. I stopped when I reached the curtain-like door, trying to work up the nerve to push through and step inside. A soft, feminine laugh sounded within.
I scurried around the corner of the tent, motioning frantically for my guards to return to my own tent. Whether or not they would have obeyed didn’t matter, because a slender, caramel-complexioned woman emerged from Marcus’s tent saying, “. . . want me to stay.” She stuck out her lower lip in a sultry pout. “I haven’t been able to think about anything else for weeks.” There was no mistaking what she was talking about—sex . . . with Marcus.
Weeks? Why would she say that . . . unless . . . I choked on a scream. Had Marcus been with her—slept with her—during our two months of estrangement? He did say he was in Egypt . . . Jealousy unlike anything I’d ever felt before washed through me, setting me aflame with rage. My emotions where Marcus was concerned tended toward volatility, but this was getting ridiculous. I hated that woman. I wanted to hurt her. I wanted to erase her and whatever carnal experiences Marcus had shared with her from his mind.
“Hello, boys,” the woman mused, looking each of my guards up and down admiringly. She wasn’t Nejerette; she lacked the finely hewn perfection I’d come to recognize as a tell-tale sign, but she was striking nonetheless. Her bold features were just feminine enough for beauty, but too masculine for anonymity. I watched as she sauntered slowly away, toward the enormous parking lot east of the tent town.
“What are you doing, Lex?” Marcus asked in my general direction, his voice bland.
I stepped out from the shadows and into the moonlight. “Who is she?” I asked with nod toward the woman.
“Sara,” he said, his expression carefully blank.
“She’s human,” I said, which was noteworthy considering we’d agreed to keep the Nejeret camp human-free, aside from Genevieve. “What’s she doing here?”
Marcus opened his mouth to speak, but apparently thought better of whatever he’d been about to say and closed it again.
Without thinking, I turned on my heel and stalked after the willowy woman. “Hey! Hey, Sara!” I called after her, and she halted.
“Yes?” she asked with genuine curiosity. She turned gracefully, examined me from head to toe, and said, “I’m sorry, you seem to have me at a disadvantage. You are . . . ?” Her accent was upper-crust British, full of education and class.
“Lex,” I replied. “What were you doing in Marcus’s tent?” Accusation clouded the air, as did a growing crowd of Nejerets. Oh look, the Meswett is having a breakdown—let’s watch! I had no idea what I was doing, or why—other than feeling an overwhelming need to claim Marcus as my own.
Sara gave me a knowing look that seemed to say, “Oh, honey, don’t even bother with him. He needs a real woman.” Out loud, she said, “Why don’t you ask him?”
“Because I’m asking you,” I said evenly.
“We had a few drinks,” she purred.
“And . . . ?”
“Lex, come on. Let the woman go,” Dominic said as he carefully approached me from the left.
I thrust my hand toward him and growled, “I love you, Dom, but I swear if you touch me right now I’ll kick you in the balls so hard they’ll pop out of your mouth.”
More than a few Nejerets chuckled, and Dominic’s lips pursed and twitched. He didn’t, however, come any closer.
“And . . . ?” I prompted Sara again.
As she’d watched the exchange between me and Dominic, concern had formed a faint line between her eyebrows. She was starting to understand—I wasn’t just some young archaeologist with a crush on the excavation director.
“And we talked,” she said primly.
“About . . . ?”
Concerned or not, she was affronted. “About old times, if you must know,” she said haughtily. Old times. It was the wrong thing to say. Old times that had been spent in bed together? Maybe they’d been rel
iving old times?
A growing murmur was coming from the crowd of Nejerets. A quick glance around told me pretty much everyone in the camp was watching us.
What am I doing? Get a hold of yourself, Lex! Unable to stop myself, I stepped closer to Sara, and she stepped back. It was like there was an invisible force field between us. It amused some instinctual Nejerette part of me, so I did it again. Sara took another step back. She’s afraid of me, I thought, and though I didn’t know why, the realization gave me pleasure.
“Don’t move,” I told her, and cocked my head. “I won’t hurt you . . . if you don’t move.”
As I approached her, Sara’s wide, wild, chocolate-brown eyes burned into mine, pleading silently. She was an inch or two taller than me, but nothing could give her an edge over my all-encompassing fury. I was starting to wonder if heightened emotions accompanied the other intensified sensations afflicting my kind.
“Oh dear God, your eyes,” Sara whispered, once I was only a few inches away. The reaction had become normal from regular humans, and annoying enough that I’d started to wear brown contact lenses when the need for discretion arose. “Somebody get her away from me!” Sara screeched, looking around at the crowd. “She’s . . . she’s . . . possessed or something! Won’t anyone help me? Marcus?”
Nobody made a move to step in and rescue the terrified woman. This—whatever it was—was between the Meswett, a member of the Council of Seven, and some woman . . . some human woman. Nobody had the right to interfere, and nobody would.
I smiled, enjoying her fear. But, I needed to find out if she deserved worse than fear. I took another step toward her, and leaned in close like I might lay a soft kiss upon her full lips. She shivered as I breathed in through my nose. What the hell am I doing? I thought as I bent my neck to sniff both sides of hers and then her hair with long, deep breaths. There was no scent of Marcus’s tantalizing spice, only her subtle floral perfume—expensive and delicate—Scotch, and fear. Marcus hadn’t touched her, at least not enough to mark her.
“Leave now,” I whispered into her ear. “Don’t come back. Got it?”
I felt the air shift between our cheeks as she nodded.
“Good. Leave.”
As I watched her hurry away, I wondered why my jealous rage wasn’t dissipating. I’d taken care of the threat, but I still felt drunk with it.
“Don’t,” I told Dominic as he again started to approach me. At only a few strides away, I could see something in his eyes that looked like sadness mixed with admiration, or maybe envy. I couldn’t believe it. Does he think I handled that well? Was that some instinctive Nejeret thing?
The truth behind Marcus’s many claims that we weren’t human finally sunk in. In my recent identity crisis, I’d been asking the wrong question. I shouldn’t have been focused on the who, but on the what. What am I?
Not human.
Wrapping my wild emotions around me, I approached Marcus. The crowd parted for me obediently, each Nejeret head bowing as I passed. It had the feeling of ritual.
Marcus still stood just outside the door to his tent, arms crossed and watching me. He hadn’t moved a muscle to rescue Sara.
I stopped a few feet in front of him, watching him . . . waiting. His face was a thin mask of unconcern barely concealing some unidentifiable, intense emotion.
“Back to your tents,” he called over my head to the crowd before reaching behind him to hold open the flap covering the entrance to his tent.
I ducked under his arm and entered his temporary home. It was the first time I’d actually set foot in his tent. There was a small wooden desk, several folding chairs, and a few trunks set against the canvas wall. An electric lantern hanging at the apex of the ceiling was the only source of light. With a deep inhale, I assured myself that the interior didn’t smell like sex. What the hell is up with me and sniffing? I wondered remotely.
Marcus followed close behind me. The temperature had been in the mid-nineties earlier that day, but it had dropped drastically when the sun went down a short while ago. It was Marcus’s heat that seeped into me now.
“Satisfied?” he asked roughly.
I took several steps away from him, toward the doorway to his “bedroom,” and peered over my shoulder. “Satisfied? I definitely wouldn’t describe myself as satisfied at the moment.”
His chest rumbled, and his expression turned predatory.
Not human, I reminded myself.
“Would you like me to remedy that?” he asked quietly.
Looking away, I stepped out of my sandals and let the warm sand beneath the canvas floor mold to my feet. “Tell me why you killed my siblings.”
From the sound of Marcus’s exhale, he hadn’t moved. “I killed them because it was my job. I killed them because the majority of the Council decreed it and because they refused to forswear their bloodline and swear loyalty to the Council. I killed them because they followed Set blindly.”
I faced him, surprised by his answer. I’d been under the mistaken impression that he’d hunted Set’s offspring, killing any and all he could get his hands on.
“Ah . . . I see it in your eyes. You thought the worst. Did you think I killed them as babes in their cradles? Or maybe tore them from their mothers’ breasts? Or, perhaps I just killed the pregnant mothers? No. They were grown. They had a choice. They chose wrong.”
As a silent, shameful tear slid down my cheek, I asked, “Why didn’t you just tell me the truth on the plane? I imagined such awful things about you.”
He chuckled, but the sound held no amusement. “You thought the worst, and yet you were still willing to claim me as yours. You are unbelievable.”
I shifted my feet and frowned. “Claim you as mine?” I remembered thinking something similar, but I had no clue where the urge had come from. Who claims another person?
Shaking his head, Marcus said, “And you don’t even know what you did. I forget sometimes that you weren’t raised among us, that you don’t know our ways. But, it would seem that your instincts have a way of making up for your missing knowledge.” He hitched his head toward the direction of my confrontation with Sara. “What you just did—that was one of several types of claiming ceremonies. In the old ways, you just declared me yours.”
“I did? But I didn’t mean to.”
“Too late. It’s done.” He took a small step toward me, then another. “Do you know what comes next?”
Swallowing, I shook my head.
“Once the Nejeret, or Nejerette in this case, claims her intended, it’s up to the claimed to complete the ceremony by either rejecting or accepting the Nejerette,” he explained.
Looking at his boots, I asked, “How would the claimed reject the Nejerette?”
“By publicly vowing never to speak to her, touch her, or look upon her again. It’s the reason claiming is not very common.”
My eyes flew up to his, searching his face for any hint of his intentions. Will he reject me? After what I’d thought of him, I feared it was a distinct possibility.
“And how would the claimed accept the Nejerette?” I asked softly.
A slow, wolfish smile spread across Marcus’s face, and his golden eyes darkened with desire.
“Oh,” I breathed. My belly tightened, and my groin throbbed in rhythm with my suddenly speeding heartbeat.
“Would the Nejerette like her claimed to accept?” Marcus took another small step, leaving only a few feet between us.
Unable to look away from his eyes, I nodded. Short, quick breaths prevented me from speaking.
“Tell me you want me to accept.” His deep voice, with its complex accent, curled around me, enticing, encouraging. “Tell me what you want.” Not “beg me to accept,” or even “ask me to accept.” He wanted me to tell him. He was giving me the control, setting me up as his equal.
He took one last step, closing the distance between us.
“I want you to accept,” I said, and miraculously, both my gaze and voice were steady.
�
��Finally,” he growled, picking me up by the waist and setting me on the desk. Just like that, he took back control.
By the time his lips touched mine, he was between my legs, grinding against me. I let out a throaty groan and grasped his firm backside, increasing the friction between us.
Marcus kissed me like I was air and he’d been underwater for years. His jaw forced mine open, allowing his tongue entry to explore. I thought I’d experienced the glories of his mouth before, of his lips and tongue, but I’d been wrong.
While he kissed me, his hands traveled over my white linen dress, from my hips to my waist, searing along my ribcage and breasts, until they reached the thin straps at my shoulders. One at a time I removed my hands from their hold on his rhythmically clenching glutes so he could slip the strips of fabric over my shoulders and down my arms.
Only then did he break our kiss. As each part of me was revealed, he worshiped it like I was a goddess . . . his goddess . . . his she-falcon. First my breasts, then my rib cage, waist, and hips received his mouth’s devoted attention until, finally, he reached my lower abdomen.
He began at my left hip, laying a line of feather-light kisses along the top of my pale-blue lace panties until he reached the other side. Lips still pressed against my oh-so-sensitive flesh, he looked up, locking our gazes. His eyes were black wells of desire, his pupils dilated completely. He looked high out of his mind. I felt high out of my mind and wondered if my eyes were as black as his. The heightened emotions he stirred within me—the jealousy and desire, and above all, something that could only be described as love, except love wasn’t strong enough, didn’t encompass the enormity of what I felt for him—they were addictive. I craved him and the emotions he stoked so desperately that I felt I might die if I didn’t get another, stronger fix. It felt unnatural and possibly unhealthy, and I didn’t care. I needed him . . . more of him . . . all of him, body, mind, and soul.