Cat's Claw

by Amber Benson

  I looked over at Ansel, his sad puppy dog eyes piercing my very soul.

  I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t press the button.

  I dropped my hand and cocked my head in Ansel’s direction.

  “You wanna press the button?” I asked brightly.

  The little kid stuck his fingers coyly in his mouth and nodded.

  “Hey, Ans, wow,” the dad said, squeezing the little boy. “What do you say to the nice lady?”

  Ansel dipped his head into the crook of his dad’s arm, hiding his face.

  “Phank ewe,” came the muffled reply.

  “Press the one that says ‘twenty-seven,’” his dad said, leaning forward so that Ansel could reach the buttons.

  “Then press the one that says ‘Atrium,’” I added quickly because I had no intention of going up to the top of the hotel with them.

  Ansel gave me a shy smile before turning his attention back to the numbered buttons. I watched, fascinated, as the kid stared down at the heavy brass panel, weighing his options with such intensity that I wondered if he was actually deciding whether to bomb Russia or not.

  Then, to my utter horror, the kid did the unexpected.

  He slammed both hands across the panel, hitting as many buttons as possible in one whack. The inclinator made a funny clicking noise, then took off. I stared, in shock, at the one button Ansel hadn’t pressed: the atrium-level button. Too late, I smacked the brass button just as we sailed past it.

  “Crap!” I said, glaring at the demon child, who was wearing the biggest, teeth-baring smile I’d ever seen. Senenmut probably would’ve called him “crocodile boy” in honor of Wayne Newton.

  “I’m so sorry,” the dad said as the inclinator came to a stop and the doors opened. “I don’t know what he was thinking.”

  I was speechless. If my count was correct, I had, like, a zillion floors to go before I even started to descend again.

  “Hey, it happens,” I said through gritted teeth as I clutched my hands into fists, hoping that the pain of nails against fleshy palm would ease my agitation.

  Totally didn’t work.

  The inclinator doors opened on the third floor, then shut again when no one got on. As we started for the next floor, I fumed while Ansel just enjoyed the ride.

  This went on for, like, twenty more floors. I knew I could’ve just gotten out and hoofed it on the stairs or waited for another inclinator—which could’ve taken even longer—but I was determined not to let the little snot muffin know he had gotten my goat.

  I have to say that it was to my credit that I didn’t reach out and flog the poor kid each time the elevator doors opened and closed. I had obviously decided to take the high road, so I was determined to close my eyes and “enjoy” the ride as much as my three-year-old counterpart.

  I could feel five sets of eyes watching my reflection in the mirrored inclinator walls as we ascended ever higher, but I ignored them. I wasn’t going to engage; I was just going to mind my own business and hope that they got off the inclinator sooner rather than later. Finally, after an eternity, we reached the twenty-seventh floor and the family quietly shuffled out.

  As the doors began to close on my toddler-sized nemesis and his family, Ansel and I locked eyes. I knew that we were both thinking the exact same thing: It had been a battle of wills . . . and I had been bested by a baby in Pull-Ups.

  “Bye-bye!” Ansel said loudly, his chubby, chocolate—God, I hoped it was chocolate—stained hand waving up and down at me with limp-wristed abandon.

  The doors eased shut with a quiet whoosh very much like what I suspected the first shovelful of dirt being thrown onto your coffin might sound like. I felt a shiver run up my spine at the thought. It was weird, but no matter what I did, I just couldn’t shake the feeling that something not so nice was about to happen.

  Alone in the inclinator now, I leaned back against the mirrored wall and closed my eyes. I realized I had absolutely no idea what to do when I actually found Senenmut. Hopefully, he would still be at the King Tut Museum when I got there, but after that I had zero ideas about what should happen next—other than that eventually I was gonna have to get on a stick and take Senenmut down to Hell.

  I supposed I could just call Jarvis and get him to meet me at the King Tut Museum. Together, we could probably trick Senenmut into entering a wormhole that would take him down to Cerberus, but then, if I did that, I was gonna have to deal with Bast, the Queen of the Cats, all by myself. She would keep Daniel, and I would be forced to fight her for him—and that was somehow not a task I thought I was up for at the moment.

  I needed Senenmut’s help, and for that, I was gonna have to help him first.

  the inclinator ride down went a lot more quickly than the ride up, the doors remaining firmly shut as we bypassed floor after floor until we hit the atrium level and the inclinator eased to a gentle stop. The doors slid open and I stepped out onto the carpet, the sounds from the casino a floor below like a ghostly echo all around me.

  I followed the signs that led to the museum, pausing at a nearby ticket booth to pay my nine-dollar-and-ninety-nine-cent entrance fee. I scanned the surrounding crowd before I went in, hoping to spot Senenmut, but he was nowhere to be seen. That meant that he was either inside the museum or he was long gone, never to be found again. I didn’t know why, but had I been a gambling woman—which I wasn’t anymore—I would’ve put my money on finding Senenmut in that museum.

  Either way, it looked like my only option was to go inside and see what I could see, so I pushed my way past the throng of people at the front who were waiting for the self-guided tour headsets and slipped inside.

  I bypassed a video presentation on King Tut’s tomb and its discovery by archeologist Howard Carter—not something I would’ve sat through even if I hadn’t been under the gun. The next part of the museum was divided into rooms that were exact re-creations of the actual tomb located in the Valley of the Kings in Egypt. There was a room just for King Tut’s golden sarcophagus, funerary jars packed with the guy’s internal organs, and assorted amphora full of rotten food and drink. The other rooms held golden statues, jewelry, pottery, and baskets: all the goodies a pharaoh needed when his soul transmigrated into the Afterlife. All in all, it wasn’t a bad little setup, if you ignored the hordes of tourists and the copious amounts of track lighting overwhelming the place—neither of which one expected to see in the great Tutankhamen’s real burial chamber.

  Being a weekend, the place was pretty packed, but the stupid self-guided tour headsets only made the gridlock worse. For some reason, the moment a human being puts on a headset, it’s like they’re transported into another world. In this other world, they are given license to just stop randomly wherever they are and stand there, blocking traffic, so they can read a little tiny sign next to an exhibit and hear the tour commentary at the same time. I was already flustered, worried that I had major-league screwed up with Cerberus, and now I had some dumb pedestrian planted in front of me like a grazing cow. It was ridiculous.

  “Excuse me,” I said, elbowing my way past the guy, but stopping short when I realized I had reached the end of the museum and I hadn’t seen hide nor hair of Senenmut.

  “Damn it,” I said under my breath, engendering a nasty look from the two older women standing beside me. I didn’t know how they heard me curse with their stupid headsets on, but I gave them an apologetic smile.

  “Don’t you wish it was a little bigger?” I said thoughtfully, but they ignored me. Sometimes, I think people only hear what they want to hear.

  By now, I had started to give up any hope of finding Senenmut in the museum. He obviously would’ve realized immediately that the place wasn’t a real tomb, just a tourist trap installed in a hotel to make some extra cash.

  “Look, Denise! Look at that man!”

  The alert had come from one of the old ladies beside me who’d given me a nasty look. The woman’s voice was so insistent and shrill that I turned around to see what had set her off. To my
surprise, I discovered that she was pointing into the next room, where a man was crouched beside King Tut’s golden sarcophagus, trying to jimmy the lid off.

  And that man was Senenmut.

  I pushed past the two old ladies and made a run for the sarcophagus. I got there just as Senenmut picked up a nearby statue and slammed it into the heavy sarcophagus lid with a resounding thunk that made everyone in the place look in our direction.

  “What’re you doing?” I hissed at him, grabbing his arm and trying to drag him away.

  “I am going home,” he said, pulling away from me.

  “Going home?”

  I had no idea what he was talking about.

  “I have made an offering to Amun-Ra.”

  I hated how the man would just not explain a goddamned thing. He made an offering to Amun-Ra—whoopee for him, but what did that really mean? The last time we’d done the whole “offering” thing, we’d ended up traipsing through about a zillion random Target stores and still coming out of the experience empty-handed.

  “Look, I know it was a low blow, your lady friend not recognizing you, but I think if we just go back to Sea Verge and talk about this—” I began, but Senenmut shook his head.

  “No, the time for talk is through.”

  I didn’t know what to do. Everyone in the place was staring at us, I’m sure someone had already called security, and if we didn’t get our exit strategy planned, like, right now, we were gonna be totally screwed.

  “Okay, fine. We won’t talk anymore,” I said, “but let’s just go before security gets here. I don’t think my heart can take another police chase scenario.”

  I really thought my last words had gotten through to the Egyptian because I could feel the muscles in his arms relax, but before I could congratulate myself on a job well-done, Senenmut let out a loud yowl and ripped himself out of my grasp, slamming himself bodily into the sarcophagus. The thing toppled forward with enough velocity to hit the wall and break some of the surrounding statuary. This caused some random screaming, followed by the mass exodus of all the tourists. Within seconds, we were the only ones left in the room.

  I wonder what the self-guided tour headsets had to say about all that, I thought wickedly as I picked up a broken piece of pottery and examined it curiously.

  “We’re screwed, you know,” I said to Senenmut, who was still busy trying to get the lid off the stupid sarcophagus.

  The giant thing had landed on its side, but the lid had remained firmly in place. I didn’t have the heart to tell Senenmut that no matter what he did, the lid probably wasn’t going to come off. I mean, there couldn’t be anything inside it—it was just for show—so why would they need it to open, right?

  He ignored my negative comment and picked up what looked like an effigy of one of the Jackal Brothers. He measured the weight of the thing in his hands, then grabbed it by its jackal head and began to hammer away at the lid with it.

  Now I knew for sure that security had to be on their way. You didn’t just destroy casino property, cause a stampede, and hang around afterward to break more stuff without someone coming after you. There wasn’t an exit strategy in the world that could get us out of the mess we were in. Resigned to spending the night in jail—which would seal my fate as the next Guardian of the North Gate of Hell and make me lose Daniel and Runt at the same time—I sat back on my butt and waited for whatever was gonna happen to happen.

  The whole thing was my own fault. I’d caused everything to get all screwed up and now there was no one to blame but myself. Who was the idiot who had made the deal with Cerberus in the first place? Me. Who was the nincompoop who tried to help Daniel, only to have his Shade stolen by the Queen of the Cats? Me. Who was the dumbo who’d taken pity on Senenmut and gone to Las Vegas only to find that the guy’s lost love didn’t even remember him anymore? Yours truly. That’s who.

  I began to feel the stirrings of a pity party coming on—and from what I could tell, it was gonna be a big one, a frickin’ block party-sized one. Rage at my own stupidity overwhelmed me, and before I even realized what I was doing, I had picked up a piece of broken pottery and was throwing it as hard as I could at Senenmut’s head. He must’ve sensed the pot coming because he dodged my throw, letting the potshard explode into a million pieces as it hit the sarcophagus.

  That was when I heard a pop . . . and then the lid to the damn thing fell off.

  twenty-two

  There was a blinding flash of light as the lid hit the ground. I covered my eyes with my hands, trying to block out the brightness, but the aftereffect lingered behind my eyelids. There was a rush of dry, hot wind that ruffled my hair and made my body start to sweat. This was followed by a barrage of small, sharp particles that stung every available piece of flesh on my person. The stinging lasted only a few minutes, but I felt as if my skin had been sandpapered off when it was over.

  The wind began to die down, blowing with less intensity now that the stinging particles had ceased attacking me. Still worried that the wind might pick up again at any moment, but curious to see where the hell I was, I cracked open one eyelid. Nothing happened, so I opened the other eye, too. To my surprise, I found myself sitting in the middle of a desert, my body draped in the finest of white linens, leather thong sandals on my feet. I looked down at my arms, terrified that I would find the topmost layer of skin stripped away, but happily my skin was all in one unscathed piece.

  “Welcome to Egypt.”

  A long shadow cut across the sand and I looked up to find Senenmut standing above me, clad in the same white linen getup I was wearing—but this Senenmut was another man completely. He was so tan that his skin was the color of toasted almonds, and dark hair coiled thick and luxurious to his shoulders. The biggest change was how relaxed and rested he looked.

  “This isn’t Egypt now, in my time, is it?” I asked as I stood up and brushed the sand off my butt. I noticed that the piece of linen I was wearing was cut exactly like one of my all-time favorite dresses: a silk Givenchy sheath that my mother had given me for my seventeenth birthday. I’d loved that dress so much I’d worn it until it disintegrated. Needless to say, I was superexcited to find myself wearing an ancient re-creation of it.

  “And by the way, who makes these things?” I continued, indicating my new favorite dress.

  Senenmut stared at me, then shrugged. I guess it was an ancient Egyptian fashion faux pas to ask who had designed one’s dress. I could just imagine Joan Rivers asking Cleopatra what designer she was wearing and getting an asp in her face for her trouble.

  “Forget it,” I said. It wasn’t like I was gonna be here long enough to track the seamstress down anyway.

  “I asked Amun-Ra to return me to the day that I died,” Senenmut said evenly. “We are in the Valley of the Kings.”

  “Are you crazy?” I yelled at him, then quickly lowered my voice. “Why would you do that?”

  We may have looked alone out here in the desert, but I didn’t believe for one second that we really were. Maybe it was because the Valley of the Kings had all those mummified bodies hidden in tombs beneath its sands—or maybe it was just me being paranoid, but I got the distinct feeling that someone, somewhere, was watching our every move with great intent.

  I scanned the hills around us, noting that we weren’t just surrounded by sand. Here and there were eroded outcroppings of man-made brick—each one probably marked the entranceway to a sacred King or Queen’s burial place.

  Creepy!

  “I will find Hatshepsut and tell her of my journey. I will explain everything, and my ending will not be repeated,” Senenmut said, his words precise as bullets.

  Wait just one little minute there, buddy! I thought angrily. Something smells pretty damn fishy in the State of Denmark and I think it’s you!

  I realized for the first time that I had just been taking what Senenmut told me at face value. I had just assumed that he wanted to see his lost love because he missed her and loved her, but now, from the rigid set of his
jawline, I understood that what he had led me to believe might not be the exact truth.

  This man was on a mission, but not what I would call a love mission by any stretch of the imagination.

  “Hold it right there,” I said as Senenmut began to trudge through the sand toward one of the outcroppings of brick. He stopped, his shoulders taut as a rubber band someone was just about to flick. He sighed and turned back around to face me.

  “You’re a liar,” I said plainly, since there was no use beating around the bush. “You conned me, under false pretences, into letting you drag us all over Hell and high water looking for some woman who—for all I know—you might’ve made up to manipulate me into doing your bidding in the first place!”

  “Calliope—” Senenmut tried to interject, but I poked him in the chest with my finger.

  “You used my problems in the romance department to sucker me into buying something completely different than what I thought you were selling!”

  Ashamed, Senenmut hung his head. He didn’t argue with me or tell me that I was totally off base with my assumptions. All he said was:

  “She does exist.”

  No offer of explanation, no begging for my forgiveness, just a three-word sentence that didn’t even go halfway toward an apology—which was exactly what I thought my little Egyptian friend totally owed me.

  “Go on,” I said, glaring at him.

  He sighed again and I could see that he was mulling over in his brain how much he really needed to reveal to me.

  “All of it!” I yelled, not caring who was listening—dead people be damned!

  “As you wish,” Senenmut said resignedly.

  “Damn straight I wish it,” I hissed at him.

  “It is a long story and we do not have much time, so I will try to be precise,” Senenmut said.

  I wanted to interrupt him with another snarky comment, but I decided that the best thing I could do given the situation was to just keep my mouth shut.