The Honey Mummy (Folley & Mallory Adventure Book 3)

by E. Catherine Tobler

  “Perhaps I am that missing piece, Miss Folley. Miss Barclay.”

  Pettigrew stood at the gates, looking every inch the gentleman he always had, though today, Eleanor allowed that his tie was somewhat rumpled, much as Mallory’s ever was. Pettigrew’s eyes held an exhaustion that Eleanor found new, curious.

  “Perhaps you are. Perhaps without all this stagecraft, we would have found that piece much sooner than now?”

  Pettigrew’s eyes narrowed a little, as if he were giving the notion actual consideration. “Perhaps, but… It’s all I’ve known for so long, Miss Folley. When one has lain in wait… It’s strange what one will crave, what a body will long for. And it wasn’t sunlight or the touch of another’s hand, or even fresh bread. It was the experience one knew upon a stage, when all eyes are upon them, when they are in control of the show.”

  “That’s what you want, isn’t it, Pettigrew?” Cleo asked. “Control. Become undying and controlling the stage of Egypt.”

  “Not given what she has become, a place where people wander the splendor that was, where people admire the way a great and thriving culture has been unmade and swallowed by the years. Surely she told you…”

  Here, Pettigrew paused, looking farther down the driveway, then back to Eleanor and Cleo. “You did not bring her?” He moved swift as a striking snake, to grasp Eleanor’s hand and pull her toward him. His thumb glanced over the rings she still wore. “Did you go at all? I did not take you for a simpleton, Miss Folley—I brought you the ring, you know rings, and you can move through the hollow spaces they reveal. You are a daughter of Anubis, are you not?” He let her hand drop. “Was Cle— Was she not moved? Would she not listen?”

  “We went,” Eleanor allowed, “but if you believe undying is a solution, you are incorrect. The years have had their way with her, Pettigrew—she is not as you knew her, or as history even remembers. That queen has been unmade.”

  “Undying.”

  Pettigrew whispered the word and his face reflected a myriad emotions; Eleanor watched him and could not say what was worse: when he realized Cleopatra was not coming, or that she had lived here all along, and still did, and that everything she had once been was gone.

  “Unmade,” he said. “Oh, don’t you see? This is what I long for, but it never comes. Oh, Miss Folley.”

  If the years contained a weight, and this weight could be conveyed within a voice, Eleanor was aware of it now, pressing upon everyone and everything around them. She thought at first she was hallucinating that the gate and stone wall were sinking into the ground, but when a clod of dirt rolled free and Cleo also noticed it, panic rose around Eleanor like a cloak. She could not do this, because she did not know what Pettigrew meant for her to do.

  “Miss Folley, you must help. You are my only hope.”

  Pettigrew grasped both Eleanor and Cleo by the arms, pulling them toward his house, also in apparent danger of sinking. Was the entire world going to swallow him and his collection, Eleanor wondered. Inside, the walls of the house vibrated; the deeper into the house he pulled them, the less intense the vibrations, but underground, it was hard to say. Perhaps the earth confined some of the motion, as they sank ever downward.

  “Only you,” Pettigrew cried as they circled down a staircase, into the dark. Eleanor’s free hand sought the stair rail, but there was none; she found Cleo’s free hand instead, her other clinging to Pettigrew. She could only trust that each step would come, that he would not lead them into an abysmal pit.

  When the stairs gave way to floor, Eleanor exhaled in minor relief, aware of the way her legs trembled, the way she staggered into a wall. The edge of the wall caught her shoulder, but Pettigrew pulled them ever on, toward a faint light source at the end of a hall. He took them to a room that was like nothing Eleanor had ever seen; here, the darkness parted for the illumination of lamps, to expose an intricate room of honeycomb, smelling deeply of the lotus she had known in the queen’s palace.

  The room resembled the innards of a beehive—there was no surface that was not devoted to bees and their manufacture of honey. For a moment, Eleanor thought the bees and comb were loose inside the room, but she gradually became aware of the glass walls—the same way Pettigrew displayed his mummies, he also kept his bees. Separate hives flourished within panes of clear glass, honey pouring into lower cells that—

  “Pettigrew.” Eleanor snarled.

  Beneath the room of hives, beyond the glass floor, Eleanor saw the ring of glass cages and the men hoisted on racks inside each. She knew Mallory at a glance and Auberon too. Mallory’s scent reached her and it was sharp and sweet, and like opium all over again. She blanched at the smell of it, and despaired at the idea that Pettigrew had kept them drugged this entire time. What had that drug done to Mallory when he was only just beginning to shake its influence?

  “What have you done?” Eleanor fought for the words through her horror, advancing toward Pettigrew.

  “This ends here,” Cleo said, breaking from Eleanor’s side. She came at Pettigrew from the other side, effectively closing him in so he had nowhere to escape.

  “You misunderstand!” Pettigrew cried.

  “I don’t think we do,” Eleanor said. “You’ve kept these men here, drugged while you experiment with this honey—this honey that will do nothing without a spark. What now, now that you have failed?”

  Pettigrew moved more swiftly than Eleanor had ever seen him. He lost his human shape entirely—air and whispers, the queen had said. He did not move toward Cleo, but came for Eleanor, vaporous on approach, and solid once more when his hands latched into her hair. He hoisted her into the air and in one violent move, swung her over the edge of the catwalk. Eleanor shrieked at the tearing of hair, unable to do little else but latch onto his forearms. She tried to haul him over the rail, but found to her consternation that Cleo held him from behind, keeping him anchored on the platform.

  “This never should have been so complex,” Pettigrew spat, hands tightening in Eleanor’s hair. “You—” He stared down at her with a sneer. “Call to him. If you have not brought me a queen, you shall summon me a god.”

  Eleanor’s fingers curled hard into Pettigrew’s arms. The walls beneath the platform were glass, filled with honey and hive, and she braced her booted feet against them, trying not to think of Mallory in the room below, in a drugged haze. What had Pettigrew done, what had he— She shoved the panic into a box and locked it tight. That panic was only a squirrel, a squirrel she could not afford to chase. It wouldn’t do to run, not with Pettigrew’s fingers ripping at her hair. She kicked the glass wall, annoying both the bees inside and Pettigrew.

  “Miss Folley!”

  “You really have lost your mind,” Eleanor spat. “I will not—”

  Pettigrew’s hands tightened in Eleanor’s hair again and twisted, pulling another shriek from her. “You will call him and he will come and this will cease! You will watch all you love be unmade.”

  The jackal was close; Eleanor fingers vanished under the swift arrival of claws, claws that latched into Pettigrew’s jacket—but only his jacket, given that his arms beneath had gone to vapor again. Vapor should not be so solid, she thought. Eleanor hooked herself in, his jacket straining across his shoulders as her weight shifted.

  “Cleo,” Eleanor said.

  Beyond Pettigrew’s shoulder, Eleanor found Cleo’s panicked eyes. Cleo’s metal hands were curled hard into Pettigrew’s tweed jacket, each precise finger locked into place, as hard as Eleanor’s own claws were. Her hold did not waver. Even as Eleanor pulled, meaning to yank Pettigrew over, Cleo anchored him, refusing to let them fall.

  “Cleo, listen to me.”

  “I will not let you go,” Cleo said. As if to prove her point, she dug in, mechanical fingers tightening, each making a pressure mark in the tweed he wore. “I won’t let you fall. Not the way—”

  Eleanor could finish that sentence—“not the way I did”—and could picture the riot of panic and emotion inside her friend, becaus
e she felt it too. Squirrels running everywhere, distracting. The idea of giving into the jackal here, when Cleo had no idea what she was, was repellent, but the jackal was closer with every breath. The time for decisions was wearing thin.

  “Call him, Miss Folley,” Pettigrew said. “Now.”

  “Cleo,” Eleanor said, pointedly ignoring Pettigrew, her voice edging into a growl as her jaw began to distend, “you will let us fall. Something is going to happen and I—”

  “I will not.”

  The last word was wrenched from Cleo and Eleanor felt it as a pull on her own heart, as if the hand of Anubis had reached inside her. But there was no hand, there was only Pettigrew’s sneer and Cleo’s rising fear, and the idea that Cleo would see Eleanor’s true nature. There would be no coming back from it, but this Eleanor realized, was already true. She was what she was. They all were.

  All around them, the house moved, as if the earth were swallowing it, as if the British were shelling Alexandria all over again, despite the fact they now occupied it. Everything had to go…everything…

  Eleanor closed her eyes and reached for Anubis, but the place she normally found Anubis was empty; they had not spoken since she had found Cleo outside the hotel, and now that she had need of him, he was gone. As far distant as her mother. She could not bring the queen, she could not summon the god; she could do nothing in this moment but hang on—

  And that’s when her eyes opened, to stare at the twisted wreck of Pettigrew above her; he did not look human in that moment as he snarled his demands at her. Anubis, Anubis, Anubis. Eleanor had no desire for Anubis—but knew he was part of her even so. The part of her she tried to embrace; the part of her she tried to push away.

  Now, she did not allow the jackal inside to swallow her, but reached for the jackal willingly, fusing her logic into the animal’s relentless nature, saturating the jackal’s appetite for the hunt with her own appetites: work, discovery, revelation. Preservation. The jackal did not burst out of her this time; she willingly became what she had constantly refused in polite society. It felt like throwing a corset off and breathing deep for the first time. When done, Pettigrew no longer held her by the hair, but by her ears; this was more painful than Eleanor thought possible. She snarled anew and glimpsed Cleo’s wide eyes beyond the villain between them. There were no apologies for being what she was. Eleanor pulled hard on Pettigrew, and Cleo’s mechanical hands opened, letting them fall.

  Eleanor and Pettigrew crashed through the glass that divided the hives from the cells. Cracks fractured the glass, the cracks widening ever more as the house continued to sink into the earth. Bees and honey were loosed into the rooms, Eleanor sharply aware of both as they splattered her jackal coat. Thousands of tiny lotus-scented feet pressed into her cheeks, the scent of honey and flower billowed into the air by thousands of panicked wings. In the crush of glass and honey as they landed, Pettigrew refused to relinquish his hold on Eleanor.

  “Summon him!” he screamed.

  Eleanor gave no vocal reply, but neither did she release him, finding a new focus in the rings that she still wore, metal from the stars wrapped around her jackal toes. She focused on these the way she had the rings of Anubis, the rings she had commanded with her blood.

  There would be no oblivion—surely Pettigrew knew this. Eleanor knew this, as the rings around her toes were warmed by the honey, as the rings seemingly swallowed the sweetness. The rings knew this honey, reacted to it, and blinded Eleanor with a spark of light that shattered the world.

  In this space, there was no Anubis, but at the end of a long corridor of light—along which she and Pettigrew rushed—there was a queen, young and sane, and she lifted her chin to the pair before her. Pettigrew stood transfixed—by the idea of the woman he had once loved, or by the moment itself, Eleanor did not know. Pettigrew lifted a hand, reaching for the queen, but never quite able to touch her. He howled his anguish across this world and every other and Eleanor remembered the queen’s words—air and whispers. In his moment of distraction, she narrowed in and lunged for Pettigrew’s neck, for the tie and jet tack he always wore.

  Anubis was not coming—but she was here and could do this.

  The stone shattered beneath Eleanor’s jackal teeth, sharp and bitter jet cutting her tongue, and the world fell to pieces once more. A cascade of honey and glass erased the queen from their sight and at last Pettigrew’s hands eased against Eleanor’s ears—mostly because his hands had vanished again. Eleanor sensed him vanishing as a whole, as the honeycomb around them caught fire and burned. They fell for a long time—surely, she thought, they should have hit the ground floor—but the house was sinking, and the hole grew endless, and Eleanor could not look from Pettigrew as they fell.

  His face came apart like smoke unraveling from the tip of a cigar. At first, he had a presence and he reveled in the new form, nearly smiling as it was exactly what he wanted. To be unmade, to come at last apart. To not slumber and wake by turns—to not even sleep. To be the nothing he was, not even air and whispers.

  But then everything changed. Eleanor could sense the approach of the beast, and if it was Ammit, the monster that crouched near Anubis’s scales, she could not say. She never saw the thing, only sensed the finality of its presence; the dreaded weight of feet, the unending howls of a hungry belly.

  Maybe it was only oblivion sinking invisible teeth and claws into every bit of Pettigrew that remained. The horror in Pettigrew’s eyes was all encompassing—the knowledge of all he had given up. The loss of all he had loved about this world, but then too the realization that he had lost these things centuries ago—before there was a queen, before there was an Egypt. Before there was an anything.

  Eleanor hit the ground hard and Pettigrew’s satisfaction washed over her, as thick as the honey that still pulled her down. He loved the very horror that consumed him; he resisted the nothing, even as he drew it closer. A ragged laugh escaped what remained of his mouth; his fists tightened once more in her hair—and then nothing. Nothing.

  Eleanor collapsed into the honey, staring at Cleo far above. Beyond Cleo, the fracturing house framed a hole in the sky, in the world.

  “We—” Have to go, she meant to say. Have to get out. But Eleanor’s throat was raw—and she was human, human and could hardly move from the honey that held her.

  But move she did, looking at the cages that held Mallory and Auberon and the others. All men, all bound, and all up to their waists in honey. It was not hard to summon the rage, or the strength of the jackal. Eleanor pulled on this well of strength and strode to Mallory’s cell. She slammed her shoulder into the glass that kept him prisoner, and the house around them shifted again. The glass cell buckled, honey cascading from the cell.

  “Little bee,” she whispered, and reached for Mallory’s head, to haul it upright by a sticky handful of hair. “Mallory!” His eyes were shut tight, breathing shallow, and he made no reply. “Virgil.” She gave him a shake and his eyes fluttered open, before rolling back into his head. “Oh, Virgil.”

  She pressed her mouth to his, his lips strangely cold and clammy against her own. He tasted sickly sweet, not like honey but of opium. She wished for Anubis, for Mallory to wake and pull himself free from opium and rack alike, but neither of these things happened. A ragged sound escaped her and she pushed the fear aside, told it to wait its turn, and pulled again on the strength of the jackal. The jackal was no longer a separate thing, however; she knew its strength in her arms, there without summoning. She pulled on the chains that bound Mallory into place, their honey-sticky bodies rocking together as the house shuddered and sank around them.

  When the wood housing split apart, Eleanor didn’t waste time wondering if it was the movement of the house, or if she had managed to break it herself. She pulled the chains free and gave Mallory another shake, another kiss, and when he did not wake, she bit him. Bit his bottom lip hard enough to draw blood—and a scream. He came to, smothering his scream as he kissed her in return, as sense and sensibility
slowly returned.

  “You …smell like angry…honey,” he whispered, clasping her sticky body against his own.

  “I do,” Eleanor agreed with a sob, “but this house is sinking, Virgil—sinking, and we have to get these others out.”

  Eleanor had no intention of waking the others with kisses or bites, but the other men appeared less influenced by the drugs—or less drugged as a whole. She and Mallory pulled the others free of their honey cages, Auberon among them. They ran upward on unsteady, sticky feet following the spiral staircase as the world swallowed the house.

  There were too many feet, too many scared bodies, and Eleanor felt her attention pulled in every direction. Squirrels. She forced herself to focus, watching Auberon lift Cleo into his arms when her smaller stride could not keep her with them. He kept hold of her as he ascended the stairs two at a time. Eleanor lost count of the broken halls and scattered rocks she had overstepped by the time they all emerged into the—

  It was no longer day, night had swallowed the day once more. High in the sky, the moon stood eclipsed, only a shard of silver against the black night sky. Eleanor stared, seeing not the eye of Anubis, but that of distant Cleopatra. A queen smiling in far-reaching approval, even as she went mad beneath the streets of modern-day Alexandria.

  Eleanor flopped to the first stretch of unbroken ground that she came to, unable to go further. She was vaguely aware of Mallory scooping her up around her waist and carrying her to the shelter of the fallen sphinxes as the house continued to sink.

  “It can’t all go,” Eleanor whispered, thinking of everything Pettigrew might have kept within those walls. The mummies alone… And Cleopatra’s lotus. All those flowers, kept all these years…

  But it could all go, and did, without a trace of ever having been, just as Pettigrew himself had. Eleanor could only watch as the world swallowed it whole. As it had Cleopatra’s palace. As it would every other thing, given enough time.