Once more, her lips parted and she ran her tongue lightly over those teeth and the tip of her tongue brushed slowly and lightly over her upper lip in a gesture so sensual that Ky felt heat wash through him, even though her eyes didn’t meet his.
“Holy shit,” John said, softly, as he visibly swayed with the pull of attraction. “Fuck.”
There wasn’t a man in the room that didn’t feel it, a tug of desire so strong, so deep and low it was nearly instinctive.
Ky felt it, held against it.
Closing her eyes, Raissa pulled it back, throttled it. “It’s why I eat so much. To find there what I can’t…”
“Damn,” Ryan said, shaking his head.
That had been about the sexiest thing he’d ever seen.
He’d always thought she was hot but that was incredible.
With a small shrug, she said, “So I’m afraid though we’ll have to do things the old-fashioned way and look for it. I can help keep you on course, there will be some things I might recognize and I can translate the texts more correctly.”
Ky looked at Tareq and saw that both of them had thought of the same thing at the same time. She could tell them so much about that time, correct things they or others had mistaken, solve mysteries. Oddly, Ky felt a burst of academic excitement second only to the thought of finding the tomb…but that was for later.
“Then,” Tareq suggested, “we had better get to it.”
Settling back in his seat, he frowned a little and said, “So, start at the beginning. When did you first see the Tomb?”
“It was to have been mine, as successor as High Priestess to Banafrit. The day after she was sent on her journey to the afterlife, we went in search of the location of what some day would be mine.”
She remembered that trip so vividly… Khai…
It had been a happy occasion, sending Banafrit off to her place among the Gods, however terrible her death had been, then searching for and finding the right location for something that even in the dire circumstances in which they lived seemed far off, despite the prophecies.
They had feasted when they found it, shared food and wine, she, Ky and the others.
“So Banafrit was High Priestess before you?” Ky asked. “We were never sure…”
He glanced at Tareq.
It had been the source of many late night debates between them, where Banafrit had fit into the succession and whether Nubiti and Irisi had been the same person.
Tareq nodded, smiled a little at the memory before looking at Raissa.
Raissa saw him glance at her hair and nodded. “Both names were for the color of my hair and eyes. I was born somewhere in Wales I think…”
Triumphant, Ky looked at Tareq. He’d been right. Tareq had been one of the proponents of the wig theory.
Raissa rolled her eyes at them, shaking her head.
“Did you take a litter or a chariot?” Ky asked.
“Neither,” she said, “I knew how to ride horseback from my days in the North but we were held to the pace of the litter with Banafrit’s body in it.”
“So if we find Banafrit’s tomb, we can find the Tomb of the Djinn?” Tareq said.
She nodded. “It will definitely help.”
With the museum coming back to life, Tareq sent for all and any information on a priestess of Isis called Banafrit.
“Khai is buried out there, too,” Ky said, suddenly.
Raissa stared at him.
It was a new pain, shockingly sharp.
“What?” Raissa breathed, and closed her eyes as she pressed a hand to her chest against the grief of centuries.
“He arranged to have his tomb built out there by the Tomb of the Djinn,” Ky said, more gently, “so that Irisi, so that you, wouldn’t be alone.”
Raissa pressed her fingers to her lips, grief moving through her again. “I never knew…”
For a moment she couldn’t breathe. She thought she’d sensed his presence now and again.
“So close.”
Her head bowed as she fought back tears. She turned to the window so they wouldn’t see them.
“If you loved him so much,” Tareq asked, gently, “why then did you never marry? Marriage was an important sacrament to the ancient Egyptians.”
“I would have if I could have but I had once been a slave and owned by the Grand Vizier, Kamenwati, the nameless one, the wizard who made the Horn of the Djinn. He wanted to be King. When the temple accepted me as priestess, freeing me from his service, Kamenwati was furious. He swore there would be no other but him and if there were they would die. It was no idle threat. Add to it there was no one he hated more than Khai, save me. Kamenwati wouldn’t have quibbled at using an assassin or poison. He had no honor. He hated me for escaping him. He hated Khai because he opposed him and because he couldn’t touch him. Khai was fearless but I wouldn’t risk his life. I couldn’t imagine a pain so deep as to know Khai had died because of me. So, we met in secret until we discovered it was Kamenwati who had created the Horn. By then it was too late for either of us. I wouldn’t bind him to me only to leave him. I wanted him to find love again. I wouldn’t have begrudged him that.”
She stared out the window, looking at the young couples there on the Mall.
“He never married,” Ky reminded her, gently. “There would never be any other.”
For a moment, there was silence.
“So, if we find Banafrit’s tomb, we can then find the Tomb of the Djinn,” Tareq said, to break it.
“Perhaps,” she said.
He and Ky exchanged triumphant glances. After all the years of searching, they were finally close.
“We have found our first real break after all this time,” Tareq said.
To them it had all occurred three thousand, four thousand years ago. To Raissa, it had been yesterday.
It was clear ]they didn’t know their danger, they didn’t accept it.
There was no way that they could. Nothing like the Djinn had existed for millennia and most magic had disappeared.
She remembered, though, vividly, remembered the blood and the death, the battles and the pain.
Ky’s distance only made it worse.
The easy camaraderie between them was gone, too, and she didn’t know how to get it back. It broke her heart to know that.
More than ever, she felt suddenly and horribly alone.
Chapter Twenty
If it wasn’t for the visits from the police with their questions about the ‘terrorist’ attack, it was almost as if nothing had changed, with the old Raissa back as they began the translations of the papyrus she’d found in the fort, except she now had the trump card when the debates took place―she’d been there. But directions, impressions…this point of view, that…They were all still open to interpretation. What they learned from her, though, even in casual conversation was incredible.
Then there was Ryan, every now and then grinning and asking if he could check her heartbeat, just to be sure, for the excuse to get her to let him lay his head on her chest…to her and their amusement.
Not that she let him.
She still ate like there was no tomorrow. It became rapidly clear she ate just to stave off that other hunger―if she was getting enough of the other, she wouldn’t need to eat so much.
Every once in a while she would look at Ky in the old way, with a glint of mischief in those bright sparkling blue eyes. And his heart would tug. As much as he wanted to trust her, though, she’d lied to him from the beginning…and there was the other…that hunger. Sekhmet’s gift.
And so he fought it.
They pulled every piece of papyrus that related to Banafrit’s tomb, the Tomb of the Djinn. Irisi’s or Nubiti’s tomb, pieced together hints to give them a direction or directions. To some success. They had some landmarks to go by, landmarks mentioned by the texts. How much those landmarks would have been changed by millennia of wind, sand, earthquake and man remained to be seen.
With the increased protection of additional guards on the Museum and the police attention, they had no further incidents but Ky knew once they returned to the dig site they would be far from the protection of the Egyptian authorities and that worried him. Taking John and Komi aside, he asked if they could see if they could find them weapons. Carefully.
For himself, Ky had to admit he was fascinated by one of Raissa’s swords. Especially the left-handed one. The one she’d thrown like a javelin at the assassin.
It was intriguing, unique. The police had returned them at Tareq’s insistence―it was clear they were very old and so he claimed they were part of the museum exhibit and that Ky had used them out of necessity. No mention had been made of Raissa.
The steel in the blades was clearly crude but also finely polished. The hilts were wooden, banded with steel, and with little in the way of decoration or ornamentation. They were tools, nothing more.
Only the one was unusual, flatter on one side and padded with leather down part of the length of it.
He was playing with it idly, turning it around and around in his hands when Raissa took notice.
“I designed it myself,” she said, hesitantly, almost cautiously. “I believe at the time we were in part of what would now be Lebanon. They were getting a reputation as makers of steel. We had been hired to work there.”
“We? Hired by whom? For what?” he asked.
She laughed a little. “It was a long, long time ago. I don’t remember who it was that hired us. I was a mercenary, and our group had been hired to fight. It wasn’t always necessary to know which side had hired us…”
“You fought with mercenaries?” he said, incredulous, his eyes going over her height, her slender body, as muscled and firm as it was, and knowing her skill from that day in the souk and that night in the Hall.
Even so…
Her lips curved and her eyes sparkled with amusement.
“People have become taller as time has passed and as the quality of what they ate improved. For that day and time, I ate very well, my parents being farmers, although they didn’t own the land they farmed. At the time I was average height for a woman. When my parents died in a bandit raid, the priests took me in. I had a natural skill for the sword, so they brought in teachers. When I became old enough, they sold me, apprenticed me, to a mercenary band.”
She shook her head.
“Imagine my surprise to find I had shrunk over the ages.”
Ky laughed and she smiled. It was good to see him laugh again, to see his brown eyes warm, if only a little.
“How old were you?” Ky asked, curiously.
He tried to tell himself the information was for historical accuracy.
“Probably thirteen or fourteen,” she said.
Thirteen or fourteen. She’d been little more than a child. She would have been barely past puberty… He just stared at her, shaking his head.
“It was a different time, Ky,” she reminded him gently. “Life was different then, too. Harder in some ways, simpler in others. That was the average age for such an apprenticeship. I was with them for a number of years. As for the sword, I hated shields, they were heavy, cumbersome, difficult to work with, so I had a sword maker make that for me as an alternative.”
“How did you wind up in Egypt?”
Everyone around them had gone silent, listening.
“We were hired to the wrong side, by one of the cities Egypt had decided to conquer and claim as her own. Against the might that was Egypt we lost,” she said. “I was the only survivor...and therefore a prize of war.”
He looked at her and somehow he knew. “Khai captured you.”
Nodding, she smiled a little, her eyes going soft as she remembered.
“Yes.”’
Her smile grew wry.
“And then things got complicated.”
That drew chuckles from almost everyone.
“So,” she said, sitting on the arm of his chair, leaning forward. “You hold it like this, reversed, so it lays flat along the back of the forearm.”
He tried it but the hilt didn’t fit.
“My hands are smaller,” she said, as her blue eyes flicked up to him.
She was so close he could smell her scent, soft with that bite of spice. The Water of Life? Leaning the way she was, he could see the rounded tops of her breasts.
Resolutely he tried to put the thought away but it kept coming back. He shifted uncomfortably.
Now, though, he knew where she learned to fight. She’d been born to it.
In the morning they would be leaving finally, their week up. This was their last day in the Museum and as happens when you spend any significant time in a given place and start to develop habits, it had become easy to become attached to the place. And he’d already had attachments to it from those long ago years he’d spent in it.
This was the first place where he’d seen Narmer’s Wall with its hieroglyphics and heard that deep stentorian voice speak of an ancient time, an ancient people and an ancient General with a name like his own who had loved a beautiful Priestess.
Irisi. Raissa. The woman who sat so close to him.
Now that other voice was overlaid with hers, the rise and fall of her rhythmic accent, a compilation of her native Welsh, her years as a mercenary and the time she’d spent in her adopted home. Egypt.
How many years had he dreamed of her, of two of them, Irisi and General Khai?
She was still beautiful, with her long shimmering hair, her blue eyes brilliant.
It was time to go, the Museum was closing. Everyone gathered their things.
They walked through the great museum, their footsteps echoing on the hard floors.
He looked back one more time at the statue of General Khai… at the empty place beside him.
Irisi’s seat.
The rest had gone ahead.
Including Tareq, who despite the danger insisted on going with them now that the myth of the Tomb of the Djinn might prove to be real. He wanted to be there when they found it, opened it. A new thing in and for his beloved Egypt. Something risen out of myth and legend.
Raissa looked back, too, the image catching at her, also.
Khai. He’d been as alone as she.
“He took me as slave, you know,” she said and smiled wistfully. “As a slave, I was at the mercy of any who wanted to use me, unless an officer claimed me for his own use.”
Ky looked at her but her eyes were on the distant statue. All he could see was her profile.