“You must feel it,” she murmured, turning her head so the soft garden lighting spilled over her golden skin, highlighting the downturn of her lips and the too-bright glisten in her eyes.
Enough. “I didn’t come here to reminisce, Your Highness. I don’t want to be here at all. So let’s cut the bullshit and get on with whatever you’ve dragged my ass out here for.”
She pushed her hijab back from her face and let the silk pool over her small shoulders. When had she started looking small? Those pretty eyes of hers glistened with magic, because it couldn’t be tears. Isis didn’t do those.
I pulled Shu’s locket free and dangled it between us. “Bring Shukra back.” I needed that damn sorceress here to stop me from doing something stupid—multiple stupid things in multiple ways.
Isis’s eyes narrowed on the spinning locket. “She is an abomination. Why would you want her here?”
“Why don’t you?”
A shrug. “I do not care either way. Condemned demons do not feature in my thoughts at all.”
“Good, then bring her back and continue not to care.”
“No.”
I gritted my teeth, aware I was already making demands, but I had my limits and she was getting close to the edge. “You assume I won’t tell Osiris any of this, but I could.”
Her eyes hardened. “That would be… unwise.”
“So don’t make me post an update on Facebook. ‘Having a fantastic time in Luxor with the Goddess of Light.’ Bring Shu back and I promise I won’t tag Osiris.”
A tiny ungodlike snarl pulled at her grimace. “Who do you think you are to threaten me in this manner?” Oh yes, this was more like the Isis I knew. Rage burned away whatever tears had swum in her eyes, and I was back in familiar territory: an angry Isis, and me pushing her buttons.
“I’m the Soul Eater, Ace Dante, Nameless One, and the last time I checked, Godkiller. So bring Shukra back. Do it or this expedition goes viral.”
She lifted her chin. “Nobody speaks to me like this and none have for millennia. You are a base creature, a monster with no name. You should not be here, breathing my air, walking this same earth. I am Light. You are the dark. You should be under the Halls with your disgusting river beasts. Why my husband allowed you a seat in the weighing chambers, why he allowed Ammit to take you in, to lift you up to the heights of the gods, I wish I knew. You are a scourge, Mokarakk Oma.”
I smiled at the venom in her words, letting each insult drip right off. “Bring Shukra back. Now.”
Isis ripped the locket from my grip and tossed it into the pool. It splashed into the still water, sending ripples lapping at the edges, and sashayed to the bottom.
“You and your demon lover can rot in mu moka until the End of All Things.”
Say what you will about me, but I sure know how to piss off goddesses.
Isis clicked her fingers and vanished as a blast of white light boiled half the pool dry and birthed a hissing, spitting ball of furious demon sorceress. Shu climbed over the pool’s edge, dripping water and seething so much I could feel the heat from where I stood. Silent lightning crackled across the cloudless night sky. Okay then…
Shukra swept her wet hair back, lifted her chin, straightened her waterlogged fur coat (ideal for New York’s windy streets, but not so good for the desert) and glared daggers at me.
There’s no right thing to say to someone who had a goddess trap them in a locket for over twenty-four hours and almost six thousand air miles. I smiled, careful to hide my relief over having her back. “It could have been worse.”
She lifted a finger and pressed her lips together, fighting to keep from speaking. A curse bubbled on her tongue. I couldn’t see it, but I could feel it in the power rushing toward her.
She blinked a few times, noticing the pool, then the palm trees, and lastly the heat, and figured out she wasn’t in New York anymore. A deep breath shuddered in. She held it, and only when she had herself under control did she say, “I am going to the bar.” Each word was clipped, holding back demon growls. “If anyone so much as comes near me, I’ll dice them up and mail them to their closest living relative.”
“Shu—”
Boots squelching, she walked away like she might murder the next living thing to cross her path and saluted her middle finger over her shoulder.
I didn’t care that she was pissed at me. She was back, and with Shukra at my side, there was a chance I might survive Isis and Egypt.
Chapter 4
“You smell like hot sand and baked rock,” Shu grunted by way of greeting.
“I visited Karnak last night,” I replied, keeping my voice low so it wouldn’t carry across the cavernous hotel lobby. Wandering around ancient temples was a fantastic way to get arrested and thrown into an Egyptian prison cell. The Egyptian authorities didn’t screw around. They couldn’t afford to have tourists stumble in the dark, liable to get kidnapped and ransomed or shot, or have them accidentally scrub out ancient hieroglyphs that had survived over thousands of years just fine. But I wasn’t any tourist, nor was I normal.
“Did Karnak say hello?” Shu asked.
“No.” I didn’t elaborate. I’d tried waking Karnak, just enough to see what, if any, power remained, but the old temple stubbornly lay dormant.
“Maybe you don’t have enough juice.”
I hadn’t devoured much of anything in weeks. My juice was low. “Maybe.” But this land was potent, and it had started stirring parts of me I preferred to keep buried. It wasn’t a mystery how bad shit happened when I got twitchy. I’d hoped Karnak might help settle my nerves, but it hadn’t. If anything, it had made it worse.
Shu tapped her sandals impatiently against the floor. “Bitch is late.”
“It’s Isis. Time revolves around her.”
Shu plucked at her long-sleeved beige blouse. Her white linen pants and light blouse complemented her dark skin. She looked marginally less likely to stab someone in the heart than when she’d crawled from the pool.
“Nice hat,” Shu said, making it sound like, You’re a dumbass.
I flicked the rim of my Indiana Jones fedora hat, bartered from a market stall on my way back from Karnak. “You’ll want one just like it once you’re in the midday sun.”
I had on the loose pants and shirt from the night before, hence why Shu could smell the temple on me. Isis wouldn’t notice. She didn’t care what I did or said or wore, so long as I came to heel like a good little mutt.
“If you wore your true skin, you wouldn’t get burned.”
“Oh sure, turning into a storm made of shadow and ash that happens to consume souls wouldn’t terrify the locals at all.”
She shrugged. “You weren’t always this milky, mocha-skinned New Yorker.”
“I wasn’t always a lot of things. Time changes everything.”
“Not everything.”
There were many layers beneath her meaning in the way she spoke. Time had changed me, and her, and the gods—those who remained. The rest, the gods who’d taken their slumber, didn’t change and neither did those like Anubis, who continued to rule the underworld. Sometimes, in the dead of night, when even New York was quiet, I wondered about those sleeping gods and what they’d do when—if they returned.
Isis emerged from inside the hotel, sunglasses on. She wore billowing white pants that looked more like a skirt than pants and a green silk blouse. The same hijab hid her dark hair and shielded part of her face from prying eyes. If she was trying not to stand out, she was doing it wrong. The hotel staff and tourists all turned to her. What would they do if they knew Isis walked among them?
“Stop me from saying something that’ll get me killed,” Shu mumbled.
I’d been about to ask her the same. “We survived the Chicago outfit,” I said through a fake smile as Isis glanced our way, fixing us in her sights. “Survived Osiris, wars, murderous plots, scuttled ships, slave traders, arctic winters, enraged demons, angry gods, superstitious mobs, vengeance, and Anubis’s justice.
We can survive Isis.”
Shu swallowed hard.
“Come.” Isis sauntered by, waving us into motion behind her.
Shu rolled her eyes, and we set off after Isis. Outside, the open-top Jeep that would take us to the Valley of the Queens waited.
Ta-Set-Neferu, the Place of Beauty, today known as the Valley of the Queens, had once been a verdant valley. The nearby Nile, a network of farm troughs, careful management and Osiris’s life-rich touch had kept it green. Now, as the Jeep pulled to a halt, dust wafted into the air. Sunlight beat down, baking the sandstone rock faces and turning the steep valley into a furnace.
Isis climbed out of the vehicle and surveyed the section of road that split off toward Hatshepsut’s temple. Her hijab protected her mouth and nose from the dust, while her sunglasses shielded her eyes, though she needn’t have bothered. Not a grain of dirt touched her. Shu and I, on the other hand… I’d seen camels wear less desert than us two.
Before returning, I’d known what remained of the valleys, but standing on those remains while my memories superimposed the old lush scenes over the barren landscape shifted reality around me, taking my balance with it. Streams of tourists poured into the valley to pay their respects to the dead. They would come and leave offerings or beg for help from the pharaohs—who, in death, were granted godlike status. They weren’t gods, of course. The pharaohs had died like all mortals. Some had carried god-given favors with them to the underworld—borrowed magic—while others weren’t as lucky, but all had been weighed and dealt with accordingly, unless they’d been unlucky enough to cross me. I’d eaten the sweetest ones.
“If you two are finished staring into nothing,” Shu grumbled, stomping past me, “let’s move.”
Isis didn’t spare us a glance or acknowledge Shukra. She started up the winding path in her own time, and by her easy strides, she didn’t appear to be in any hurry. Old gods always struggle with time management. She passed Shukra as though the sorceress was nothing more than the dust she walked through.
I trudged up to Shu. “What are the chances this will be over by lunch?”
“Same as me getting a pay raise.” Shukra shooed a few flies away from her face and squinted after Isis. “Is she always this icy?”
“Be grateful.” I didn’t elaborate, which earned me a scowl. Shu and I could talk back at the hotel bar, but here, I understood Isis’s need for silence. Despite the invading tourists, grumbling tour buses, and chattering tour guides, this was a sacred place. The earth hummed with slumbering power, fragmented and scattered over time until all that was left might as well have been dust in the wind, but it was there, like the dying embers of a collapsed inferno. The weight of terrible loss pulled on my damaged soul. I kept my head down and marched on, climbing to where the valley narrowed and the tombs collected.
There was little to show the tombs on the outside, just steps down what appeared to be random holes in the ground. Each hole was marked by an information board. The Valley of the Queens didn’t attract the same volume of tourists as the Valley of the Kings. With too much to see, tourists often overlooked the queens for Tutankhamen’s desiccated body and Hatshepsut’s sprawling temple.
I tried not to sneer at the few ruddy-skinned tourists ambling along, snapping selfies with their cells. Shu didn’t bother restraining herself and scared off a few with a look and a snarl.
Isis continued her relentless march up the hill, and I started to wish we’d ventured here at night. There weren’t many tourists around, but it would have been much easier to rob a tomb in the dark. This was probably a recce.
Isis stopped at the information board that definitely didn’t mark a newly discovered tomb, but the excavation going on behind us was. A simple make-do cordon of tape and stones marked the hole in the ground, but no one was home. Tourists wandered by, more interested in the open tombs than the depression in the ground.
“The archaeology teams work at dawn and dusk,” Isis said. It was the first time she’d spoken since leaving the hotel. She didn’t look behind us, and with those shades guarding her eyes and her hijab hiding her mouth, I couldn’t read her expression. “Go inside. You don’t have long.”
I scanned the tomb openings and tried to orientate myself with who was buried here, not that it would do any good. Tombs were often forgotten and reopened, moved, or dug over. There was no order to their locations, but this end of the valley held some of the oldest known resting places. Most archaeologists had believed this branch was all tapped out. Someone had gotten lucky to find the capping stone and recognize it for what it was.
“Are you going to tell me what I’m looking for?” I asked, pretending to admire the information board next her. “Or shall I grab armfuls of gold and hope for the best?”
“A skull.”
“A skull?”
She tilted her head. “Leave anything else behind.”
I could hide a skull under my shirt. Trying to smuggle a desiccated two-thousand-year-old corpse out of the Valley of the Queens would have been interesting.
“Nothing else?” I asked, keeping my frustration from my voice. All this way to grab a skull? She didn’t need me for this. She didn’t even need to be here. A few phone calls to the dig team and she could have gotten her skull shipped via UPS. “No trinkets, jewelry, or finger bones?”
“Nothing.”
“Are there more remains inside? More than one skull to pick from?”
“Just retrieve the skull,” she snapped, white teeth flashing.
Shukra caught my eye and clearly believed this excursion was a waste of our time; we could have been back in New York, breathing in diesel soot instead of sand.
I hopped over the flimsy tape barrier and confidently descended the timber ladder, feigning a right to be there. Shu followed me down and stooped beside me. The dig team hadn’t fully cleared the chamber floor of seasonal flood debris, and much of it was still banked against the walls. My hat brushed the tomb roof. I plucked it off and ruffled my hair, shaking dust free. Ahead, a string of work lights illuminated a long hall and more… This was no insignificant tomb. Hieroglyphs covered the walls and ceiling, without an inch of surface to spare. Time had worn away what had once been a fantastic display, but much of the burial scenes were intact.
“This is nuts, even for her bitchiness,” Shu remarked as she brushed dust from her hands.
I started forward. “Check the cartouches for a name. I want to know whose tomb we’re in and why its occupant has Isis tied up in knots.”
Shu hung back and examined the hieroglyphs as I strode on, sucking hot, dusty air through my teeth.
“I’m not seeing any curses,” Shu announced. Her voice bounced around the tomb’s interior, echoing left and right. “Don’t feel anything either.”
That was something. Some tombs had been cursed to deter robbers. Most had had their curses broken as easily as kicking open a lock, but some, like Tutankhamen’s, had carried real bite behind them.
“Huh?” Shu said.
I pulled up short of the end of the hall, where it appeared to split off in two directions, and turned at the question in Shu’s voice.
“Someone scrubbed out the cartouches.”
I could just make out Shu’s shadow on a wall. The rest of her was tucked around a chamber corner. “All of them?” I called.
“So far… Whoever’s buried here, someone really, really didn’t like them.”
“Kres,” I cursed. Erasing a name from inside a cartouche did more than scrub someone from history; it scrubbed them from the underworld too, destroying them in life and death. There wasn’t another form of punishment that came close, besides me, naturally. It also meant I wouldn’t discover whose tomb this was or whose skull I was about to steal for Isis.
Shu appeared, hunched over to keep her head from brushing the ceiling, and headed toward me. “You should have told Isis where to stick her little trip—”
A wave of rock poured into the chamber, blasting hot air down the passageway
and engulfing Shukra. The dust cloud blasted over me. Grit pummeled my face and bit into my skin, and then it was over. The rumbling ceased. Pebbles tumbled. Rock settled. I blinked into the rolling clouds, eyes dry, and spotted Shu’s shadowy outline. She coughed as she emerged from the dust, covered head to toe in powder-soft sand.
The work lights still glowed, so we weren’t plunged into darkness, but the exit was blocked. Shu regarded the rockfall with a snort. “Egypt. The gift that keeps on giving.”
I spat dust and sand to the side, wondering if the real reason Isis had brought us all the way out here was to bury Shu and me in a tomb. It wouldn’t be the worst thing the gods had done to us.
“Could be worse,” I spluttered.
“You need to stop saying that before I show you worse.” Shu brushed by me and stalked off deeper into the tomb. “Since I’m stuck here with you, I’m taking the tour.”
I let her go and eyed the rockfall. There was a slim chance the collapse had been natural, but I hadn’t seen any cracks in the ceiling. My gut said Isis had just buried me alive, but what my gut didn’t reveal was why. As I pushed into the tomb, the hallway narrowed and the old flood debris piled higher, squeezing out space. Shu’s swearing bounced off the walls ahead. There was probably another way out. Possibly. If there wasn’t, we’d find out how long a soul eater and a demon sorceress could survive without oxygen.
Chapter 5
“Why is Isis so hot for you?”
“Why wouldn’t she be? I’m a prize catch.” I grinned at Shukra’s eye roll and continued shifting rocks away from a small opening into yet another chamber. We’d already passed through five others. Hours had slipped by. The tomb was a maze of chambers, ante-chambers, alcoves, and corridors, and there was no skull in sight.
“Isis never used to look twice at you. Now she’s asking for favors and getting in your head and your pants.” Shu chuckled, like the idea of Isis and me was ludicrous. I would have laughed right along with her if Isis hadn’t been stalking my dreams every night. “So, what changed?”
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