Wrath & Bones (The Marnie Baranuik Files Book 4)

by A. J. Aalto

  Pia, I knew, was uncomfortable with my lifestyle and my interactions with Asmodeus; it was hard to defend the Devil's homeboy in the face of her faith. Pia’s and my paths after university had gone in vastly different directions, and on my last visit to Egypt, she had once lured me – with the promise of a cold Pepsi and “a neat surprise” – to the shrine standing where the angel Raphael had banished and bound Asmodeus after chasing him from Sarah’s bed. The shrine featured four pillars with chains and two broken wings, cast in the floor, said to be the demon’s real ones, turned to stone. Since I’d never seen Asmodeus with wings, I couldn’t speak to the accuracy of that part. It was said that Asmodeus had not fought His bindings in Egypt, but spent centuries there transforming into a snake and back into His seraphim form to amaze and mesmerize unsuspecting virgins, and lulling them with an undulating dance that would cause them to forget what He truly was and give up their virginity to Him, only revealing His demonic form at the moment of conquest.

  Knowing Asmodeus as I did, I could eeeeeeasily imagine this part of the myth to be, as Harry would say, spot on. I admit it, I have a thing for sexy assholes.

  I had stood at the shrine for a long time, and Pia had left my side, content to wander in the cool desert night, glancing over at me now and then, but never asking me what I thought of it. She knew my position. She knew about Harry, and the revenants, and my work with law enforcement, and she knew about Asmodeus. She probably knew more about Asmodeus than anyone on Earth outside the DaySitter community. I’d be willing to bet she had a few nuggets of knowledge that I didn’t, particularly when it came to the Old Testament and the Talmud. According to Harry, Asmodeus eventually grew bored of His chains and His sexy dancing in the desert and stepped from His bindings. He decided He needed company, and chose the First Turned from those who had bound him. Den. The being who would create the Falskaar Vouras and become Death’s Adversary, he who could stay the hands of time and grant immortality. It was there that the revenant line began, at that very shrine; Pia did not approve, but I had felt a secret thrill to be standing where the demon king had decided to take one man into the shadows of the undying with him.

  As much as she disapproved of my lifestyle, she was still willing to help. I turned to my business considerations, which consisted entirely of thrilling variations on the subjects of email, email, and email. So many people wanting my help already. I was not going to be bored in this profession. How to pick a first case? I was tempted to practice on Susan from Tacoma and her silly sock nonsense just to see how things went. There was also still the quote-unquote problem of the company name.

  “So Bare Hand Services was no good, eh?” I asked. The twitch of Declan’s lips said he was trying hard not to smile. “Guess that rules out Happy Endings.” I scratched it off the list. “Okay, Marnie, positive thinking. I can do this. I’m the Great White Shark of Psychic Investigations. I’m the Littlebutt Snack-Smacker.”

  “I don’t think you are,” Declan said uncertainly.

  “Maybe something that conveys stealth. How about Dirty Deeds?”

  “Done dirt cheap?” Declan finished.

  “Oh, shut up.”

  “Why not call it Great White Shark Investigations?”

  “Golden says I shouldn’t use ‘investigations’ in the name because it’ll show up on people’s credit card statement and might tip off a suspicious spouse or something.”

  Declan murmured in consideration. “How about something that sounds like a cleaning service?”

  “Like Marnie Maid?”

  “Not like Marnie Maid.”

  “Like Clean Hands? Dirty Hands?”

  Declan sat up straight. “Helping Hands!”

  My mouth popped open. “Hey, that’s pretty good. It’s what I do. It’s subtle. It’s not too pervy…”

  “Not too pervy,” Declan agreed.

  “I like that. Thank you, Irish.”

  He smiled, closed his eyes, and rolled his unruly black curls against the head rest. In a moment, he was fast asleep. I envied him; I could never fall asleep so quickly. I put my Moleskine away and re-folded the Overlord’s instructions, tucking them into an inside pocket, then wrapped the straps of my go-bag around my left ankle before kicking it just under the seat in front of me. My eyes burned with the need for real sleep, and I yawned.

  I barely woke up when we landed in Amsterdam, some passengers disembarking for other flights or to wherever they were off to, and others boarding for passage to Cairo. Since Declan and I occupied both seats in our little row, nobody jostled us, and I was out again before the flight crew was done telling us how to buckle our seatbelts in four different languages.

  Chapter 27

  The Egypt of today was not the Egypt I’d once known; due to the political climate and, according to the travel advisories, my safety as an English-speaking white woman on the streets of Giza was not as assured as it had been a few years ago. Scanning for a familiar face, I saw no signs of hostility in the people around me. It was reassuring, and when the youthful smile of my friend came into view, I allowed myself to relax a bit. Pia Bakaras had always been a fiercely intelligent and determined student. A curly-haired brunette of Greek and Jewish heritage, living in a tiny minority neighborhood in one of the most populous cities in the Arab world, I knew her to be both humble and bold. She hurried toward us through the crowd in a long, loose-fitting cotton blouse and jeans; a black scarf around her neck was tucked into her collar. Normally a serious and stern woman, she was also prone to sudden fits of braying laughter that seemed to come out of nowhere, leading one to wonder if she had her own private comedian performing in her head. If so, she seldom shared the jokes. She was all at once cautious, cunning, modest, deft, and forceful; in her handling of lab work and explorations, however, she couldn’t be more ungainly. Perhaps the inner comedian was distracting. Or perhaps one too many accidents had scrambled her brains. That totally wasn't my fault. Mostly. Probably. Look, I'd only set our specimen drawer on fire the one time. Jeez.

  Now a lead researcher of cryptozoological studies at Cairo University, Pia had been my lab partner through most of third year chemistry at McGill until an accident with some phosphorus took out her left eye and she came home to romp through old tombs instead. A month into her first dig, a sinkhole had opened up, revealing an unknown causeway to a sunken pyramid no one had known was there, pitching Pia and two of her crew down a leg-breaking thirty-foot drop. Never one to be outdone in the arena of bad luck, she quickly found herself on the receiving end of a genuine, full-blown mummy’s curse, though people closest to her would say Pia had been cursed the day she was born. She was, without exaggeration, the most unlucky person I’d ever met, including myself.

  Our taxi was an old Volkswagen, and our driver insisted that we should stop at his cousin’s jewelry shop on the way to our destination. Pia haggled with him about the fare in rapid-fire Arabic, slipping into English when she thought it might matter to Declan and I in the back seat, and insisted we were only interested in the one stop but we’d be happy to tip him extra if he could avoid the city streets and find a decent shortcut. It was nearly three in the morning, and we obviously weren’t typical tourists looking to see the Giza Necropolis or the ruins of Thebes or hang at the Sphinx KFC. She impressed upon him that we were scientists with a keen interest in anthropology and that more tips would be forthcoming if he didn’t ask any more questions. This seemed to make him unhappy and suspicious, but he did start driving, and Pia didn’t explain to us what tack she was taking. She leaned her curls against the headrest and relaxed as the driver made his way through the hectic, overcrowded streets. The street lights cast a tawny glow at this late hour, and in between sand-colored high rises and the all-night McDonalds sign, we could glimpse the tips of the Great Pyramids in amber glory, the dust seeming to rise behind them. They looked so close, but I knew that was a trick: they were just that big.

  Declan opened the map and laid it across our laps. “Our destination is really close. I
wonder why the Stonecaller picked such a recent find.” I didn't mention that Declan was immortal, and I didn’t think it would occur to Pia, but it felt like lying; though I knew it wouldn’t fly with her to know the truth, it also didn’t sit well with me to hide it.

  “How recently did they uncover the tomb of Huxtahotep?” I asked her.

  Declan elbowed me with a small smile. “Hey, you said it right that time.”

  I noticed the driver looking at me in the rear view mirror. It hung precariously to one side and was wired on, so his reflection was a little bouncy, but the look in his eyes was speculative.

  “Are you sure you can get us close?” I asked Pia.

  “I’ll get you right next to him. Just a moment,” Pia was saying, holding her phone to her ear. “No. Yes. My permits from Cairo have been delayed,” Pia said into her phone. “No. No. Now we wait. It’s fine. It’s very good. I will contact you soon.”

  I used this time to text Batten some very important questions about his middle name, just hoping to get a response. I know what it is. Mark Cavendish Batten. No answer. Maybe he was sleeping, like all sensible people. I chewed my lip and tried again. Mortimer? Nothing. Fernando? Nothing. Moe!

  He texted back: Mark Moe Batten?

  Maybe your parents were crazy for the Stooges. I put my phone in my pocket, and was comforted by the little buzz against my hip; he’d be insisting his middle name was Kill-Notch, so at least we were still speaking. He was gone, but he wasn’t gone-gone. He might not have been all-in, but he wasn’t out.

  Relying on GPS, the driver left the old road behind. That was fine by me. It was mostly covered by drifting sand dunes. Declan was nervous, though. Perhaps he didn’t appreciate the open desert after dark. Other than the undulations of the dunes and the deep ripples in the windblown sand, the open desert was featureless under a starry sky and a cold full moon.

  Pia led him with quiet directions in the front seat and the ruins we finally saw over the ridge were nearly lost in the darkness of the starlit desert. When the cabbie came to a complete stop near a construction zone with chain link fencing, trailers, and warning signs, I hopped out with my go-bag and went to the trunk with Pia.

  “Three,” she reminded me.

  I nodded. “The minute I’m out. Tell me a bit about this Huxtahotep dude before I get in there.”

  “Definitely Early Dynastic Period,” she said. “No indication yet what his status was. We were able to gather his name from the stela at the entrance of the tomb.”

  “Gonna chaperone?” I said, doing my best not to study her face too intently. I drew psi and read her emotions. She wasn’t the least bit worried, but I wasn’t sure what that meant. “I wouldn’t want to be accused to stealing a mummy’s treasure.”

  Pia guffawed merrily. “We’ve already removed the grave goods to the museum for further study. Besides, I trust you. You say you just want to peek, then you just want to peek.” She nailed me with a hard look and I smiled with relief as she handed me some supplies.

  Declan thanked the driver, and Pia unlocked the gates then promised to wait in the car.

  “What was that all about?” Declan whispered.

  “Oh, just trading fibs with one of the best liars I’ve ever met.”

  “Why do you have a bucket and a shovel?”

  I made a loud buzzer noise. “What is: 'Things you don’t ask a psychopath,' Alex?”

  “No, but for real, Dr. B?”

  “I didn’t know what to expect. I asked Pia to supply a few things. Shovel, pail, headlamps.”

  “And what did she mean by three? Three what, exactly?” he said, dropping his voice as if he knew he was on much nosier ground.

  “The only thing Pia likes more than a mystery is cold, hard cash,” I said. “She knows I’m not going to just peek, or she wouldn’t have supplied a damn shovel, would she? Now, let’s make tracks.” I motioned to the broken stones and started walking through the sand; it wasn’t packed by traffic but it was windswept, the soft, loose grains blown away, leaving the hard crust behind.

  “You realize what she confessed to back there in the car, Dr. B.?” Declan asked.

  “What, the mummy’s curse?” I considered this. “Could happen to anyone.”

  “Anyone plundering a mummy’s tomb, you mean.”

  I grimaced. “Define 'plundering.'”

  “Removing things. Especially parts of the body. I don’t know a lot about ancient Egyptians, but I do know some of them did not take kindly to the dismemberment of their bodies.”

  This rang true with me; some believed the existence of their soul in the Netherworld depended on their bodies remaining whole or mostly whole in this living one. Had Pia mutilated a mummy? Hard to believe, given what I knew of her interests and devotion to science and the preservation of artifacts. She’d dedicated her life to this field of research. Had she stolen goods from the tomb? Not likely, unless moving those items to a museum counted as “stealing,” but, perhaps in the desiccated eyes of the original owner of said mummy, it did.

  It bothered me, now that he mentioned it. I’d always written Pia’s curse off as a quaint tale, another one of her mishaps. I glanced back at her. She was leaning against the taxi driver’s door, chain smoking and seemingly deep in conversation, more so than you’d typically be with a stranger. Did she know him? Were they in this together? Or was I giving in to a slippery slope of doubts based on one comment? Pull it together, Baranuik, I self-chastised, and dug a couple of N-95 surgical masks out of my go-bag. “Here, put this on.”

  Declan looked at the mask. “Shouldn’t we have proper respirators?”

  “Probably. Aspergillus niger has been found in very old tombs, but I have a sneaking suspicion that Huxtahotep isn’t going to prove to be an ancient mummy.”

  “How do you figure?” he asked as we walked past the inscribed stela at the mouth of the tomb.

  “Aren’t you an anthropologist, Doctor Edgar?”

  “A preternatural anthropologist. My research focuses almost entirely on revenant history and physiology.”

  “Ancient Egyptian masonry and engineering skills were undeniably extraordinary,” I pointed out. “But they were not perfect. And structures like this were usually made of carefully cut stones.” I slapped a flat wall. “This symmetry is mechanically cut down into limestone and basalt by modern tools.”

  “You think it’s fake?”

  I was beginning to think this whole quest was bullshit. It felt like I was walking into a trap. Again. “It’s a sham, Dr. Edgar. A shim-shammy sham. A wham-bam-thank-you-sham. A bee bop a loo bop, a whop bam boom.”

  “Whose sham is it?” Declan asked, his voice falling to a whisper. His bright green eyes glowed in the light of my headlamp over his surgical mask as he pinched the metal tighter around his nose. I could only answer with a shrug; it was too early to tell.

  There was a silence in this place that had nothing to do with emptiness; rather, it was the silence of waiting, a wary, watchful silence that let us know our continued presence wasn’t necessarily welcome. Pia’s nonchalance had either been deceptive or foolish; perhaps her ambition helped her ignore whatever was in here. The Blue Sense did not report any immediate danger, but I drew it around me like an early warning system nonetheless.

  “I don’t like this,” I told him.

  “You didn’t like Undercroft,” Declan agreed. “I expect you won’t like Kathmandu.”

  “Are you saying I don’t like anything?”

  “Well, yes,” he said. “But I’m not saying you should like fairy mischief and old tombs, nor am I saying clipping a yeti’s toenail will be much better.”

  “I need a new job,” I whispered, mostly to myself. “Maybe I could be a waitress.”

  “You’d punch the first rude customer.”

  Point: Irish. “I could be a landscaper.”

  “Didn’t you grow mushrooms on a guy’s scalp once?” Declan's voice echoed flatly in the stone hallway.

  “He had that comi
ng!” I said. “Also, I have a new job. And a spriggan that would be an awesome secret weapon. Why am I here, and not hunting for Susan from Tacoma’s missing socks? That sounds like a job for me. This is kooky nonsense.”

  The halls were laid out symmetrically, but it felt a bit like a maze, especially since we had only a limited range with our headlamps.

  “You’d think if they had student archeologists down here on a regular basis, they might put up a few signs,” I whispered to myself, and nodded to agree with myself. “Some Post-Its, chalk marks, something…” I stopped short, Keds kicking up a cloud of dust that didn’t travel far in the windless hall. Going any further without some sort of cues or direction seemed ridiculous, so I crouched and started looking at details from the bottom up, casting a small circle of light with my headlamp. I’d been at cases with Batten enough times to be able to envision what he was doing right now, off on his own little quest, examining his surroundings, noting everything with a trained eye, being competent and badass as long as there were no fairies smoking pipes to fool him.

  I laid my shovel down at the next junction pointed down the hall we’d just left, and at the next junction, I tucked the bucket against the corner to show me to turn left on the way back. I started humming “One Way or Another,” and then singing it, because Debbie Harry was one of the few singers I could nail with my voice every time. Declan took the lead, aiming his headlamp down this corridor and that. My voice bounced down empty hallways and came rushing back at us, cutting me off. We went still and listened for a minute. It felt like we were not alone, but I hoped it was just the echo keeping us company. I really didn't want to run into anything else saying it was gonna getcha getcha getcha.