“He’s usually not so forward,” the mother said, taking the other boys by the hands—both were older than Ansel, but with the same white-blond hair—and reining them in close to her sides. “I think he likes you.”
The woman was slim, with feathery blond hair, blue eyes, and a warm smile that was genuinely welcoming. She had a nice figure—especially for someone who’d popped out three kids—but she wasn’t what you would call a beautiful woman. There was a sharpness to her chin and nose that kept her from being truly striking.
We aren’t really that different,
I thought to myself as I watched the woman struggling to keep the two older boys from slipping out of her grasp.
This could be my fate, too, someday . . . if I want it to be.
“C’mon, Walker, stop pulling on Mommy’s shirt,” the woman said, taking her kids’ exuberance good-naturedly. Still,
I
could tell—call it women’s intuition here—that all she wanted to do was find a black hole to drop her family into for a couple of hours, so she could hit the spa without feeling guilty about it.
Not that I blamed her. She looked like she very much deserved a couple of undisturbed hours roasting in a seaweed and black mud wrap.
The inclinator doors opened and the evacuating tourists swarmed us like a horde of agitated, foreign-tongued wasps. The tourists, while loud and obnoxious, were very slow moving, taking so much time to disembark that the family and I almost didn’t make it inside before the doors closed in our faces.
“Well, that was intense,” I said as I moved to press the button that would take me to the atrium.
I paused, my finger hovering over the button, when I caught sight of my little buddy, Ansel, staring at me with a look of utter defeat on his cherubic face. I realized that
he
wanted to press the button, but since he was trapped in his father’s arms, he was stuck. I knew that I didn’t owe the kid a thing—he’d slimed my boot, for God’s sake—that all I had to do to get to the King Tut Museum and find Senenmut was to just finish my action and press the button.
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?