by Amber Benson
“My body is renewing itself now,” he said. “I made an offering to Osiris with my blood and he has answered me.”
“What kind of offering?” I asked as we stood in the bathroom doorway, looking at each other.
He held up his arm and I saw a deep gash in his side. It still looked pretty nasty, but I could see that the wound was already starting to scab over.
“You did that with a ladies’ disposable razor?” I asked.
He shrugged. “Yes, I think so. It was all I had to make my offering with.”
Well, I couldn’t argue with that logic.
“You said that you were ‘in’?” Senenmut continued, looking up at me through long, dark lashes.
I nodded, trying not to let the fact that my body found him thoroughly attractive affect my ability to speak.
“Uhm, well, you were right about Bast. She won’t let Daniel go.”
Senenmut, looking grave now, nodded.
“Yes, she will hold on to him as long as she can. He is the way to controlling you and she knows that,” Senenmut said, running his hand across his now-bald pate. “She is a collector, Calliope Reaper-Jones. And the Daughter of Death would be a rather unique addition to her collection.”
“But Jarvis said that she was my dad’s spirit guide,” I said, confused. “How can she do anything against someone in his family?”
“I can only say that Bast would not become anyone’s spirit guide willingly,” Senenmut said. “That I know for truth.”
“Oh my God, you think he tricked her into it?” I asked.
It wouldn’t be the first time my dad had done something like that and it would offer an explanation as to why the cat seemed so hell-bent on making my life difficult.
Maybe using my sister and me to get to my dad was her ultimate goal.
“Well, whatever her reasoning, you were right,” I said, trying not to stare at the trail of downy black hair that started between his nipples, wandered down his flat belly, and disappeared beneath the towel.
“Then you will help me find Hatshepsut?” he said, grasping my hand and squeezing it in his much larger one.
“Uh-huh,” I almost moaned. “Whatever you want.”
“Thank you, Calliope Reaper-Jones. Thank you,” he said as he pulled me close and kissed first one cheek, then the other.
“Anytime,” I replied, dazed by his nearness.
“So, next we will make an offering to Nephthys, the Goddess of Hidden Things,” Senenmut said as he released me, “and she will tell me where I will find my lost love.”
I nodded, but something he said didn’t sit right with me. It took me a second to access the memory, but then I knew exactly where I’d heard the name “Nephthys” before.
“Wait a minute,” I said, trying to remember the exact words Bast had used back at the Jackal Brothers’ torture chamber. “Didn’t I hear Bast say that the Jackal Brothers were the sons of this Nephthys lady?”
Senenmut nodded. “Of course.”
“Well then, offering or not, why would she want to help you?” I asked incredulously. “I mean, you just escaped from her sons’ clutches. It kind of seems like a conflict of interest to me.”
Senenmut looked at me curiously.
“There will be no conflict of interest, as you say. She will help me because I ask. That is the way of the Gods.”
I wasn’t buying it. I knew that a mother’s love could be the most dangerous kind of love out there—and when you messed around with one of her kids, well, you could just forget about getting any kind of leniency from her at all.
“Are you sure about that?” I asked. “Women can get pretty squirrelly when you start screwing with their kids, Senenmut.”
He just shook his head like I was being ridiculous.
“In Egypt, it does not work that way.”
“Whatever you say,” I replied, knowing that I wasn’t going to be the one to change his mind. “Let’s just go make this stupid offering and see what she says.”
Senenmut nodded happily.
“But first, let’s get you some clothes so you don’t have to go around in that towel all day,” I said, stepping out of the doorway.
“Agreed,” Senenmut said as he dropped the towel and followed me into the hall.
it took every ounce of willpower that I possessed not to look at Senenmut’s junk as he followed me up to my dad’s bedroom and I pulled out a dark pair of slacks, boxers, and a men’s undershirt for him to wear. I tried to move as quickly as I could through the house, so that no one was exposed (no joke intended) to Senenmut’s nudity. From what I could see, if Senenmut was any indication, the Egyptians’ relationship with clothing was pretty laissez-faire. That is, they seemed to have no problem whatsoever with going around stark naked.
Once he was properly attired, we went back downstairs and out into the backyard. Senenmut’s idea of the perfect offering to Nephthys included burning some of his hair and then throwing the ashes into the ocean. Since it all seemed pretty benign to me, I just sat back—after I found him some matches to use—and let him do his thing.
We walked across the back lawn until we were at the very edge of the cliff, where the three stone benches that had creeped out my sister and me as children stood. Trying not to feel uncomfortable about the impending visit from Nephthys, I sat down on the middle bench and watched as Senenmut pulled some of his hair from his pocket and set it alight.
“O great Goddess Nephthys, hear my prayer!” he yelled into the furiously blowing wind as it whipped at my hair and made me shiver. I hadn’t realized how cold it had gotten recently, but now I felt the chill deep down in my bones.
Luckily, I had been able to make a quick clothing change while Senenmut was getting dressed. I had slipped into my old room and found a pair of thick corduroy trousers and a hot pink mohair sweater. I hadn’t had time to shower, but just slipping out of the nasty old Missoni sweater made me feel like a brand-new human being.
Once I was dressed, I’d snuck into my mother’s bathroom and sprayed a little Chanel No. 5 on my pulse points. If I could’ve bathed in the stuff, I probably would’ve—that’s how much I loved it. It was hands down my favorite perfume and I just adored the way the scent lingered on my skin and clothing long after I’d put it on.
“It’s not working.”
I looked over at Senenmut, my nose still filled with the scent of Chanel No. 5, and saw him pacing angrily up and down the edge of the cliff.
“I hate to say I told you so,” I offered, but he was too lost in his own head to hear me.
“I will have to try something darker, then,” he mumbled to himself.
I watched as he pulled the disposable pink razor out of his pocket—where the hell had he been hiding that thing when he was running around without the towel on?—and raked the blade across the top of his shaved head. Instantly, a pool of blood began to well up where the blade had crossed it, spilling down the side of his head and into his ear. The image was so gross that I had to avert my eyes.
“Nephthys, Goddess of Hidden Things, take this offering of my blood as payment for my answer!” he screamed.
I opened my eyes, shocked to see a large red bird with a curved midnight-colored bill swoop down from the empty blue sky and land right on Senenmut’s shoulder, where it quickly began to lap up the blood that was spilling from his scalp. Once the bird had had its fill, it lowered its coal black beak to Senenmut’s ear and began to whisper something to him. I was too far away to hear what it was saying, but from the look of exaltation on his face, I knew it had to be good news.
As suddenly as it had appeared, the bird took wing and disappeared back into the cloudless sky. Senenmut turned to me, a wide smile on his handsome, bloodied face.
“It is done. By Nephthys, I know where my lost love’s present incarnation resides!” he said wildly, his arms lifted in victory. Then, as the blood from his scalp began to gush in time with his heartbeat, he keeled forward and passed out at my feet.
I did
n’t know if it was from sheer happiness or just a side effect of all the blood loss—but my bet was on the happiness.
nineteen
“Damn,” I moaned under my breath as I squatted down beside the unconscious Egyptian, unsure how to help him. “I wish I had a frickin’ towel.”
Instantly, a clean, white, fluffy bathroom towel appeared in my hands. I was so surprised that I nearly dropped it on the ground. This “ask and you shall receive” stuff had happened to me a few times in the past, usually when I was in a high-stress situation, but it still made me feel weird. It was one thing when I could make magic happen of my own accord, another still when my body did it without my knowledge.
“Thank you,” I said to whatever magic had provided the towel before pressing it against Senenmut’s scalp.
I get a little squeamish when it comes to blood—okay, just the sight of the stuff makes me grit my teeth and want to scream—but since I was the only one available to help him, I sucked up the queasiness I felt as best I could and tried not to watch as the towel in my hands went from white to scarlet to brown as the blood soaked in, then dried.
The stench of iron assailed my nostrils, drowning out the spicy tones of my Chanel No. 5, and it became very hard not to pass out myself. I tried to think about something else as I applied pressure to the wound, but the only thing that kept popping into my head was how bizarre it would be for someone to die by ladies’ disposable razor.
I’d had a few run-ins with a disposable razor in my time, so I knew how painful a cut from the little buggers could be, but I’d never thought of them as dangerous weapons before. I couldn’t help imagining what it would be like to accidentally exsanguinate by razor as the water in the bathtub slowly turned ice-cold around you.
Ew! I thought to myself. This is so not helping the situation.
Finally, after what seemed like eons, Senenmut opened his eyes and looked up at me. He still had that stupid exalted look on his face—up close it was more lovesick than exalted—but his pupils were dilated and he kept opening and closing his mouth like he wanted to speak but couldn’t find the right words. If Jarvis had been there, he would’ve gone all Mary Poppins on the Egyptian and told him to shut his mouth spit spot on the double now before he ate a bug.
Just the thought of Jarvis standing there, intoning lines out of a Disney musical, made me giggle. Then I started to feel bad. I had obviously hurt Jarvis’s feelings by following Bast into the tapestry—and the suckiest part of the whole thing was that he had been totally right. I should never have gone without him. I knew deep down that the little faun had my best interests at heart, which was not something I could claim about the cat.
I decided that after I got back from helping Senenmut, I was going to go find Jarvis and apologize to him—then I was going to do what I had promised and somehow, Lord knew how, hook him up with my corpulent beauty of a boss, Hyacinth.
“Why do you laugh?” Senenmut said groggily as I helped him to sit up.
“Oh, no reason really,” I mumbled, feeling silly. “Just thinking about something funny.”
“Would you tell me what this funny thing is?” Senenmut said as he pulled the towel from his head and probed the wound with his fingers.
“I was just thinking about what my friend Jarvis would say if he’d been here,” I said, faltering as I realized that without the proper context, i.e., knowing Jarvis as well as I did, there was no way Senenmut was gonna find any of this funny.
“You know what? Forget it,” I said, interrupting myself. “It really wouldn’t be all that funny to anyone but me.”
Senenmut nodded, as if he saw the wisdom in what I was saying.
“So, where is she? Your special lady friend?”
Senenmut got that silly lovesick look on his face again, and the saccharine-ness of the whole thing totally made me want to gag. I decided that it was one thing to talk about helping someone find their true love; it was another thing entirely to actually help them do it—particularly when it got you no closer to finding the same thing for yourself.
“She is in a place called Target,” he said.
I sighed.
“Did the little birdie happen to mention which one?”
Senenmut nodded excitedly.
“The ibis told me that this place is not far from here. It even gave me directions.”
He paused, trying to remember the bird’s exact words.
“Yes, I remember,” he began excitedly. “I am to take a thing called Highway 80 all the way to a place called Las Vegas. This Target resides there.”
Oh, brother.
there were eleven Target stores in the greater Las Vegas area. This I gleaned from a quick web check on my PDA.
I usually neglected to bring my dippy BlackBerry wannabe with me whenever I went home because it never got reception there—in fact, from what I could tell, no cell phones worked within the vicinity of Sea Verge. I knew from experience that if you wanted to make a private call, you had to take a walk off the property. If you were a teenager home from school for the summer, trying to have long, meaningful gossip sessions with your best friends, using your cell phone was a losing endeavor. Let’s just say that the battery on my phone died long before I was ready to stop talking.
Of course, you could always use the house’s landline, but who knew if there was someone listening in or not? That was one of the nonperks of being the Grim Reaper’s kid: no real privacy to speak of. There was always someone, somewhere, watching.
As I had absolutely no interest in, nor did I have the time for, taking a prolonged road trip with my new Egyptian pal, I knew that I was going to have to up my time frame for apologizing to Jarvis. He was the only person, other than Clio (who was under Bast’s spell and not an option), who could pull a wormhole out of his hat and get me where I needed to go in a timely fashion.
I left Senenmut sitting on the bench by the cliff’s edge, staring out at the ocean, towel pressed to his rapidly healing head wound, and walked back to the house to make my peace with Jarvis. I kept looking over my shoulder as I crossed the yard, feeling kind of bad for my new Egyptian friend. At first, Senenmut hadn’t seemed to notice the humongous body of water that surrounded us, but once he’d gotten Nephthys to give him the info on his lost lady love, he’d stopped being so one-track-minded and actually started paying attention to his surroundings.
“I loved the sea as a boy. My father would take my brother and me to Kem-Ver—the Black Sea in your tongue—and we would watch the slaves building the ships,” Senenmut said wistfully. “Those were some of the happiest times in my life.”
I could empathize with the guy—minus the slaves. There was something about remembering your childhood that made you feel all old and sad inside. Of course, for me, I had only twenty-some years to reflect back on. For Senenmut, his memories straddled thousands of years and the death of his whole world.
Maybe empathy was overrated.
Damn, he just looked so out of place at Sea Verge. He didn’t belong here in this time. He was from a whole other period in history where magic and an open dialogue with one’s Gods still existed. The world was different now, and I had the distinct impression that once the novelty of being free again after thousands of years of bondage wore off, Senenmut would become disillusioned and depressed. This realization made me understand that the kindest thing I could do for the guy was to deliver him to Cerberus—whether we found his lost love or not—and get him into the system of rebirth and death again, so he could let go of his old self for good.
It really is for the best, I decided gloomily as I reached for the knob on the back door of the main house. Before I could even turn the dumb thing, the door swung open and I nearly fell face-first into the house.
“Hey!” I said as I grabbed onto the nearest thing I could find to steady myself—which just happened to be Jarvis and the doorjamb. “Hey, I was just coming to look for you.”
Jarvis stiffened, but continued to let me use his shoulder to steady mys
elf inside the doorway.
“Yes?” he said once I was finally back to a full upright position.
“Just a minute,” I said as I checked to make sure that one of the heels on my boots hadn’t come loose. “All right, sorry about that.”
I reached out and tried to brush some pretend lint off the lapels of Jarvis’s shirt, but he shooed me away.
“Stop that!” he said, looking down at his shirt just to make sure there wasn’t really anything on it.
“Look, Jarvis,” I said, hanging my head and looking down at my feet in contrition. “I’m really, really, really sorry that I left you in the Hall of Death and went with Bast all by myself.”
I peeked through my lashes to see if he was buying my apology—which he wasn’t. Instead, he was using the edge of his pince-nez to pick some dirt out from under his nails, barely even deigning to pay attention to me.
“You want a manicure, I’ll get you a manicure,” I said, putting my hands on my hips. “But right now just listen to me for a minute, okay?”
Jarvis sighed and looked up, slipping the pince-nez into his jacket pocket.
“Fine. I suppose I can spare a few moments.”
I gave him a wobbly smile.
“Thank you, Jarvis.”
He shrugged, but at least he was listening finally.
“I want to apologize. It was straight up all my fault. You were helping me out and I totally blew you off,” I said. “And I’m just . . . really, really sorry. I know that saying I won’t do it again means nothing, but I promise you before I do something stupid again, I’m gonna stop, take a minute, and ask myself: What Would Jarvis Do?”
Jarvis cleared his throat.
“You pinched that off the Jesus freaks, didn’t you.”
I nodded.
“Yup, I saw WWJD on a rubber bracelet, and for, like, two seconds I actually thought it did stand for ‘What Would Jarvis Do?’—I swear to God I’m not lying.”
I could see the edges of Jarvis’s mouth trying to draw up into a smile, but the little faun was doing everything in his power not to give in and accept my apology.