For a moment she felt terribly alone and reached out to brush her fingers over the glass. She wanted to be one of them.
She wasn’t.
She never had been.
From the time of her birth she’d fated to be a servant of the Gods. The Druids who had raised her had seen it, and Kahotep, priest of Horus. Her friend.
She wouldn’t be less than honest, not with herself, not with them. Not now, when it was too late. And too important.
“The old thief, my employer, had told me of those who searched for the Tomb, and I began to realize the magnitude of what I was up against. You see, we never considered that anyone would search for the Tomb out of curiosity. We were concerned with those who would seek it out for what was inside it, and with thieves. It was easier in the past, far more direct. Either lead the searchers astray by one means or another or kill those who persisted. It was hard to feel guilt for killing those who would steal from those in the afterlife, even more so for those who sought what was in the Tomb. The original plan, if I could not lead everyone astray―that was my first intention―was to lure all of those interested in the Tomb to it and then seal them within it, whether they released the Djinn or not.”
“Did you kill the old thief?” Ky asked.
Raissa looked at him. “No. I told you the truth. He had many enemies and his life was not without its dangers.”
“And now?” Tareq demanded.
Rubbing her forehead, Raissa took a breath, sighed.
“That wasn’t possible to do with good men. I met Ky…Professor Farrar…and Ryan, Komi, John. I couldn’t betray them. The old thief was right, too. In a strange way he became my mentor of sorts, familiarizing me with this new world.”
Startled, Ky said, “He knew what you were?”
“Not until the end,” she said, quietly. “I found him dying. He told me I couldn’t defend the Tomb by myself, not anymore. As I discovered. As I’m still discovering. He told me I needed help, allies, but I didn’t know who to trust. He was the reason I went to Professor Farrar, he was the only one the old thief wouldn’t approach. He said he was too honest.”
Tareq hadn’t missed the slip, or the change to Ky’s title, and he saw the aching loneliness in eyes that had been so merry when he’d first met her and he found he grieved for that. Still, he wouldn’t have wished on Ky the pain he might have to face from this. For it was just as clear to him, if not to Ky, where Ky’s feelings lay.
Their eyes met, his and Raissa’s, and he saw the sure knowledge of her fate in them.
She’d never been meant to survive.
Briefly, she turned her head to the man they were both thinking of.
Ky.
With a sigh, Raissa acknowledged she’d foolishly thrown that chance away. Not that she could ever really have taken it.
It was her own fault. She should have been honest with him from the first. But then, there had ever and always been only the Tomb…and her duty.
She thought of those who waited below in the tomb, those who had survived those terrible dark days, and those who hadn’t, of the sacrifices that had been made to keep the world safe.
And of what would be loosed on it if she failed.
She shuddered.
In the face of that, what choice did she have?
Nor could she afford to lose any more allies, or any more friends.
“Now?” she said. “You’re right, Dr. Hawass. It would be better for Ky, for Professor Farrar, to find the Tomb than those others. What we’ll do about the Djinn when we get there, I don’t yet know.”
“So,” Tareq said, going still. “The Djinn are real?”
“They are real, very real,” she said, looking at him, but she could see he didn’t really believe her, didn’t see the danger, not in his heart.
None of them did.
Still, he was curious.
“You’ve seen them with your own eyes?” Tareq asked, his tone avid, seeking more information.
“I’ve seen and I’ve fought them,” she said, softly. “Ghul, ifrit, sila, marid. All of them. Even now they batter at the walls of their prison, demanding to be let out among the living…”
She shook her head.
“What they would do in this world, in this time, especially the marid, will make your terrorists look like those boys in the souk, like the petty bullies they really are.”
“Why? How?” Tareq asked. “I know the stories, but…”
She looked at him and laughed. “But you don’t believe in them. By the time you learn better the damage would be done and they would be free. Although most aren’t as smart as men, they are cunning and physically much stronger, quicker and they heal very fast. It takes a direct blow to the heart, or the head, or a number of wounds so great that even their bodies can’t heal quickly enough to kill them. You would have a nearly invincible army rolling over the earth outward from Egypt.”
Which was why so many had sought the Tomb over the years.
“Some of the Djinn can take on the shapes of others, other men, other creatures both benign and terrifying. Most can take the shape of very attractive men. It’s how they procreate. The only way they procreate. Think of it, a species almost entirely male that can procreate only through human women. All but the ghul. The ghul can recreate themselves easily, and that only if they can control their appetite enough to bite and not feed. A bite, one bite, without cauterization, is enough. In less than a year you’d have thousands more Djinn.”
“So that’s where the stories of zombies came from?” Ryan speculated.
Puzzled Raissa looked at him and then at Ky, questioningly.
Ky gave him a look. “Just ignore him.”
“Just sayin’, boss,” Ryan said, with a grin.
Tareq eyed them both, shook his head and said, carefully. “Few talk of the Djinn these days. They are tales of the past, save for those few who still believe in good Djinn.”
He wasn’t certain yet that he believed any of it.
If it were true, though…
“The Horn called many of them but not all,” Raissa said. “The King, though, the Pharaoh as you call him, took no chances and so he created a secret society. One child out of each generation from certain families, the best of them, male or female, were chosen to seek out the dark Djinn, hunt them down and kill them. It would become their life’s work, their purpose. Their other would be preventing anyone from finding the Tomb.”
“Perhaps that allowed the good Djinn to thrive,” Tareq said.
The thought eased her a little. Something positive, then, had come of it all. She could live or die with that thought.
She smiled. “Perhaps it did.”
“Perhaps,” Tareq offered, with a smile. “So the Horn, too, is real?”
Nodding, Raissa said, “Very real. Or you would have grown up as cattle beneath the Djinn.”
The certainty in her voice was interesting.
“And the Heart of the Gods?” Ky asked.
For the first time, her blue eyes met his. “Real, too.”
“A ruby the size of my fist?” he asked, incredulous.
With a light shrug and a sigh she said, “I wouldn’t know, I never saw it.”
“And the Guardian was the Key and the Lock, the Light and the Dark,” Tareq quoted.
She turned to look at him, her face expressionless.
“Yes,” she said.
“And you can lead us to the Tomb,” Ky said.
She looked at him in apology and slowly shook her head. “No, I can only help you find it.”
A little puzzled, Ky said, “But you came from there.”
Slowly, she shook her head with a sigh. “I didn’t. Not the way you think.”
Biting her lip, she gestured at herself.
“This is not the body I was born with. That...”
She waved, closed her eyes at the memories, took a breath and said, “That remains at the Tomb. This is a construct, something I created with magic, Isis’s gift to me and chants from the Book of Emerging into Daytime, what you call the Book of the Dead. A thing born of the life energy of the thieves that entered the Tomb. A form I could wear. It resembles me because the essence of me lies within it. My body, such as it is, remains in the Tomb. When they entered the Tomb I was there and I was in the village with the old thief when he fled, where the closest ‘threat’ was. Him. And you. You don’t know how difficult it was to do this, to make this body of mine. It took time.”
“Why?”’Tareq asked, “Why was it difficult to do? Why do you need allies? You’re the Guardian of the Tomb.”
She laughed, a little wryly, a little bitterly.
“We were arrogant, I suppose. Like your people, we never thought our Gods wouldn’t be worshiped forever. We never considered the divine feminine would be put aside, that in a thousand years the Goddesses wouldn’t be revered as equally as the Gods, that two thousand years from our time Isis wouldn’t still be worshiped in her temples as the Mother, as Sekhmet was worshiped in her guise of the Healer. There is power in belief, no matter what you believe. It’s a small blessing that some still worship Her and so some power comes to me from her but it is a fraction of what I knew. I grew weaker with each passing year.”
“Can’t you just go there and then come back?” Ky asked.
To go back….?
Her eyes closed. Just the thought made her shudder.
Ky saw the brief look of a horror so deep and atavistic it made his gut twist in sympathy.
“No. To do that,” she said, “I would have to let this go…”
She gestured at herself.
“And return…”
To the close darkness...
She shivered.
“To where my body is. The…attention drew me out and the old thief…the things he said, and the way that he said them, the certainty of his words, held me. I was supposed to return to my place. There was no imminent threat. I should have returned to my place… instead I created this. If I do, though, this body will die and I could very well go back to sleep until you actually do find the Tomb the hard way. I might forget all of this and attack when you come, it’s my mission, my duty… Or the wrong people might find it before you do.”
And she didn’t want to go, didn’t want to forget.
Whatever else, in the long years alone, these were the first living souls she’d known in centuries.
“It was a journey of days on horseback. And I was only there twice. I was never supposed to visit there a second time, not alive. That second time I had far more important things to think of, the spells I needed to chant from the Book of Emerging into Daylight that would keep my heart and soul, my ka and ba, intact. The desert is vast and treacherous, constantly changing. So much of it looks alike. Three thousand years of shifting sands, of time, war and wear, have changed the landmarks I knew. Even if I could, it would be weeks on foot to return, to see all I must see to lead you back. This is still a body. It requires sustenance. Weeks without it…under the hot sun…”
With a grin, Ryan said, “And we know you can’t go without that…without sustenance.”
She smiled a little at the joke. It wasn’t that far from the truth.
Watching her, Ky could see what it cost her to speak of it.
Ky remembered what she’d said the night before and the look in her eyes, the odd shiver that had gone through him. Was that why she ate so much, to keep something else at bay?
He remembered what she’d said of Sekhmet and wondered.
“I would die,” she said, simply. “For real.”
The prospect of real death, of not passing into the afterlife, sent a shudder through her.
“So you can die?” Ryan asked, surprised.
Looking at him, she said, a little wryly. “Oh, yes, I can die, although I heal very quickly. If you put enough bullets in me I will die. Shoot me in the head or cut it off and I’ll die. If I don’t feed…?”
I’ll go mad and die, but she didn’t say it.
At one awakening she’d fought it, denied what she’d become, as she’d become more accustomed to the shock of awakening and the power of Sekhmet’s gift. She remembered Djeserit speaking once of the blood lust that could overcome her followers. At the time she hadn’t understood, hadn’t truly believed. She shuddered at her own memories.
She hadn’t truly believed and then she had.
It was her worst fear, to feel that madness come on her once again, worse even than returning to the stele and the dark.
There was a brief flash of a level of despair in her eyes that was shattering to see and nothing like the Raissa Ky knew.
What was it that was so terrible it put that look in her eyes?
“Feed?”
It was Tareq who asked, Ky couldn’t bring himself to think about it, much less ask.
Raissa turned back to the window, faced away from them.
That wasn’t a good sign. Ky had the feeling he would like what was coming even less.
“Sekhmet’s gift…”
Her voice was so soft they strained to hear it.
For a moment, Tareq paused, thinking of all he knew of the Goddess Sekhmet, who Ra had set on mankind, much as later Gods would visit plagues on their people, because mankind wouldn’t obey his commandments. And so he’d loosed Sekhmet upon them and she fell on them, drinking their blood…
“You’re a vampire,” he said.
Turning, she looked at him, frowned in puzzlement. “I don’t know this word…”
“You drink blood to survive,” he said, astonished.
It was incredible.
There was a word for it, she thought, in astonishment.
Letting out a breath, she said, “Yes.”
“No way,” John said, “Uh, uh. No way. No how.”
Raissa looked at him. And sighed.
If she were going to be honest…
She hated this.
For a moment, only a moment, she unleashed her ever-present hunger. She struggled to keep it contained, chained to her will. Even so, to show even this much awakened it again.
She didn’t look at any of them.
Her tongue flicked over her teeth. She could feel them slide down, the canines lengthen, the tips brush her lower lip…
They all felt it, clearly, the shift , the sudden atavistic knowledge of a predator in the room with them that was more ancient even than she was.
Ky looked where she stood in the light of the window, her hair shimmering like the sunlight that cascaded over her, her eyes a vivid blue. It seemed as if her skin had become luminous, as if she glowed from within. It was ironic but in that moment she looked more beautiful, more erotic than she ever had, even as she struggled with the hunger within her, as her upper canine teeth lengthened, overlapped her bottom lip just a little…