“Look, if Mike Celluci called me up and told me aliens had him trapped in his house, I might not believe him, but I’d show up with a flamethrower just in case. And as you’re the closest thing to an expert on rising from the dead I know, I’m asking you. Is this possible?”
“Let me get this straight.” Henry rolled over on his back and laced his fingers behind his head. “Detective-Sergeant Michael Celluci came to you and said,
There’s a mummy loose in Toronto, murdering janitors and Egyptologists.
And let me guess, he can’t tell anyone else because no one else will believe him.”
“Essentially.”
“Are you sure this isn’t just an elaborate April Fool’s prank?”
“Too complicated. Celluci’s a salt in the sugar bowl kind of guy, and besides, it’s October.”
“Good point. I assume he gave you his reasoning behind this stu . . . ouch, unusual idea.”
“He did.” Tapping out the points on Henry’s chest, Vicki repeated everything Celluci had told her.
“And if PC Trembley confirms that there was a mummy, what then?”
She wound a short, red-gold curl around her finger. “I was hoping you could tell me.”
“We help him stop it?”
“How?”
“I haven’t the faintest idea.” He heard her sigh, felt her breath against his chest, and lightly kissed the top of her head. “Did he ask you to speak to me about it?”
“No. But he said he didn’t mind if I did.” He’d actually said,
Use a ghoul to find a ghoul? Why not?
But under his sneer there’d been a sense of relief and Vicki had gotten the feeling that he’d been waiting all evening for her to ask, unwilling to bring it up himself. “He had to go to a hockey practice or I’d have suggested he tell you all this firsthand.”
“That
would
have been a fun evening.”
Vicki grinned. Celluci’s reaction would have been louder and more profane but essentially similar.
Henry sat down at his desk and turned on his computer. Over the hum of the fan he could hear deep, slow breathing coming from the living room and, under that, the measured beat of a heart at rest.
“Don’t expect me to stay around every night,
” Vicki had warned him, yawning.
“I expect most of the time I’ll show up just before dawn to tuck you in. But, as long as I’m here, you might as well do some writing and I might as well get some sleep.
” She’d led the way out of the bedroom, pillow tucked under one arm, blanket under the other.
“I’ll sack out on the couch. The airflow’s better out there and you won’t have to sleep surrounded by blood scent.
”
It was a plausible, even a considerate reason, but Henry didn’t believe it. He’d seen the lines of tension smooth out of her back as they’d left the room. He listened to her sleep for a moment longer, then shook his head and turned his attention to the monitor. The book was due the first of December and he figured he was still a chapter away from happily ever after.
Veronica paced the length of her room in the Governor’s mansion, silk skirts whipping around her shapely ankles. Captain Roxborough would hang on the morrow unless she could find some way to prevent it. She knew he wasn’t a pirate but, even though the Governor had been more than kind, would her word mean anything once everyone discovered that she’d made her way to the islands disguised as a cabin boy? That Captain Roxborough had discovered her and that he’d . . .
She stopped pacing and raised slender fingers to cover her heated cheeks. None of that mattered now. “He must not die,
”
she vowed.
“I can’t seem to get away from dying at dawn,” Henry muttered, pushing back from the desk.
Last spring, the dawn had caught him away from safety and he’d raced the sun for his life. He still bore the puckered scar on the back of his hand where the day had marked him. Would it happen as quickly as that had, he wondered, or more slowly? Would it be instantaneous as his flesh ignited and turned to ash, or would he burn slowly in agony, screaming his way to the final death?
He forced his mind away from the thought, listening to the even tempo of Vicki’s breathing until he calmed. There had to be something else he could think about.
“Celluci seriously believes that an ancient Egyptian has risen from his coffin and killed two people at the museum.
”
He’d been to Egypt once; just after the turn of the century; just after the death of Dr. O’Mara when England had seemed tainted and he’d had to get away. He hadn’t stayed long.
He’d met Lady Wallington on the terrace at Shepheard’s. She’d been sitting alone, drinking tea and watching the crowds of Egyptians making their way up Ibrahim Pasha Street when she’d felt his gaze and called him over. A recent widow in her early forties, she had no objection to keeping company with an attractive, well-bred young man. Henry, for his part, had found her candor refreshing.
“Don’t be ridiculous,
” she’d told him, when he’d expressed his sympathy on her loss,
“the nicest thing his Lordship ever did for me was to drop dead before I was too old to enjoy my freedom.
” And then she’d stroked the inside of his thigh under the cover of the damask tablecloth.
Publicly, they were as discreet as the society of 1903 demanded. Privately, she was just what Henry needed after the incident with the grimoire. He never told her what he was and she accepted the time he spent away from her with the same aplomb as the time he spent with her. He rather suspected she had another lover for the daylight hours and found himself admiring her stamina.
On the nights he had to feed from others, he stayed away from the English and American tourists and slipped into the dark and twisting streets of old Cairo where sloe-eyed young men never knew they paid for their pleasure with blood.
And then he began to feel watched. Although he could identify no obvious threat—dark eyes watched all the visitors and certainly seemed to watch him no more than the rest—the skin between his shoulder blades continued to crawl. He began to take more care moving to and from his sanctuary.
A moonlight climb to the top of the Great Pyramid had become “the thing to do” and it took little pleading for Henry to agree to accompany Lady Wallington on her expedition. The city had started to feel like it was closing around him, as if it were some large and complicated trap. Perhaps a few hours away from it would clear his head.
They stepped out of the carriage onto moon-silvered sand that drifted up against the base of the monuments like new fallen snow, its purity broken by the pits that marked vandalized tombs or sunken shrines. The light had erased the patina of age from the pyramids and they in turn cast dark bands of shadow across the features of the Sphinx so that he looked both more and less human as he gazed enigmatically down on the night. Unfortunately, flaring torches and crawling bodies marred the pale sides of the Great Pyramid and the sounds of their progress carried clearly on the desert air.
“Hot damn, ain’t we there yet?”
“While I admire Americans as a breed,” Lady Wallington sighed, tucking her hand in the crook of Henry’s elbow, “there are a few individuals I could gladly do without.”
As they approached the pyramid, they braced themselves for the charge of self-styled guides, antiquities peddlers, and assorted beggars who stood clustered around the base waiting for the chance to part foreigners from their money.
“How strange,” Lady Wallington murmured, as the men remained where they were, peering out at them from under their turbans and muttering to themselves in Arabic. “Although, I suppose we can manage quite well without them.” But she looked rather dubiously at the monument as she spoke, for in full evening dress the three to three and a half foot steps would not be easy to navigate without assistance. Most of the women already climbing had two men pulling from above and another pushing from below.
Henry frowned. Under the scent of dirt and sweat and spice, he could smell fear. As he leapt up onto the first block and reached down for Lady Wallington’s hand, one of them made the sign against the evil eye.
Lady Wallington followed his gaze and laughed. “Don’t mind that,” she explained as he lifted her easily up onto the next level, “it’s just that in the torchlight your hair looks redder than it generally does and red hair is the mark of Set, the Egyptian version of the devil.”
“Then I won’t mind it,” he reassured her with a smile. But the smile would have meant more if he hadn’t seen the knot of men melt away the moment he’d climbed beyond the range of a normal man’s vision.
Over the years, the top of the pyramid had been removed, leaving a flat area about thirty feet square at the summit. Breathing a little heavily, Lady Wallington collapsed onto one of the scattered blocks and was immediately surrounded by natives who tried to sell her everything from bad reproductions of papyrus scrolls, guaranteed genuine, to the finger of a mummy, undeniably genuine. Henry, they ignored. He left her to her purchases and wandered closer to the eastern edge where, past the obsidian ribbon that was the Nile, he could see the twinkling lights of Cairo.
They came from upwind, moving so quietly that mortal ears would not have heard them. Henry caught the sound of hearts pounding in a half dozen chests and turned long before they were ready.
One man moaned, grimy fist shoved up to cover his mouth. Another stepped back, whites showing all around his eyes. The remaining four only froze where they stood and over the stronger stink of fear, Henry caught the smell of steel and saw moonlight glint on edged weapons.
“An open place for thieves,” he remarked conversationally, hoping he wouldn’t have to kill them.
“We are not here to steal from you,
afreet,
” their leader said softly, his voice pitched so that none of the other foreigners on the pyramid would hear, “but to give you a warning. We know what you are. We know what you do in the night.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” The protest was purely instinctive; Henry didn’t expect to be believed. Even as he spoke, he realized from their bearing that they did know what he was and what he did and that the only option left was to find out what they intended to do about it.
“Please,
afreet
. . .” The leader spread his hands, his meaning plain.
Henry nodded, once, and allowed the persona of slightly vapid Englishman to drift away. “What do you want?” he asked, the weight of centuries giving his voice an edge.
The leader stroked his beard with fingers that trembled slightly and all six carefully kept from meeting Henry’s gaze. “We want only to warn you. Leave. Now.”
“And if I don’t?” The edge became more pronounced.
“Then we will find where you hide from the day, and we will kill you.”
He meant it. In spite of his fear, and the greater fear of the men behind him, Henry had no doubt they would do exactly as they said. “Why warn me?”
“You have proven yourself to be a neutral
afreet,”
one of the other men spoke up. “We do not wish to make you angry, so we try a neutral path to be rid of you.”
“Besides,” the leader added dryly, “our young men insisted.”
Henry frowned. “I gave them dreams . . .”
“Our people had a civilization when these people were savages.” A wave of his hand indicated the tourists, Lady Wallington among them, still haggling over souvenirs. “We have forgotten more than they have yet learned. Dreams will not hide your nature,
afreet.
Will you take our warning and go?”
Henry studied their faces for a moment and saw, under the dirt and malnutrition, a remnant of the race that had built the pyramids and ruled an empire that had included most of northern Africa. To that remnant he bowed, the bow of a Prince receiving an ambassador from a distant, powerful land, and said, “I will go.”
We have forgotten more than they have yet learned.
Henry drummed his fingers on the edge of his desk. Somehow he doubted that much more had been learned in the ninety odd years since. If Celluci was right and a mummy did walk the streets of Toronto, a mummy who brought with it the power of ancient Egypt, then they were all in a great deal of danger.
“Slumming, Detective?”
“Just seeing how the other half lives.” Celluci leaned on the counter at 52 Division and scowled at the woman on the other side. “Trembley and her partner in yet? I need to talk to them.”
“Good God, don’t tell me one of you boys from homicide is actually working at six fifty in the a.m.? Just let me circle the date . . .”
“Bruton . . .” It wasn’t quite a warning. “Trembley?”
“Jee-zus, take a man out of uniform and he loses his sense of humor. Not,” she reflected, “that you ever had much of one. And you always were a son of a bitch in the morning. Come to think of it, you were a son of a bitch in the evening, too.” Staff-Sergeant Heather Bruton had shared a car with Celluci for a memorable six months back when they’d both been constables, but the department had wisely separated them before any permanent damage had been done. “Trembley’s not in yet. You want to wait or you want me to have her give you a shout?”
“I’ll wait.”
“Be still my beating heart.” She blew him a sarcastic kiss and returned to her paperwork.
Celluci sighed and wondered if Vicki had known who’d be on duty when she suggested he talk to Trembley. Just the sort of thing she’d think was funny. . . .
“. . . so then she says, ‘Aren’t you going to arrest him, Mommy?’ ”
Trembley’s partner laughed. “How old is Kate now?”
“Just about three. Her birthday’s November.” She turned from Harbord Street onto Queen’s Park Circle. “And can you believe it, for Halloween she wants . . . oh, fuck!”
“What?”
“The accelerator, it’s stuck!”
The patrol car sped over the bridge and into the curve, picking up speed. Trembley swerved around a tiny import, fighting to keep control. She pumped the brakes once, twice, and then the pressure was gone.