"It wasn't just jealousy," I assured him. "I'm the one he challenged to a duel in the Khan el-Khalili, remember? I'm the one who he keeps calling a witch."
"I'm the one who brought you here in the first place."
I looked at him beside me, on the duct-taped, vinyl bench seat of the cab. He appeared downright tormented, his blue eyes shiny in the shadows, his jaw tight, his sleeve missing.
I grinned and kissed his cheek. "And thank you for that."
The driver, scowling at us in his rearview mirror, scolded us loudly—all I understood of it was "
La'
"
We ignored him. "For what?" asked Rhys. "For getting you attacked and abducted?"
"For bringing me back to my quest." I found his hand, squeezed it "For giving me the chance to find the Isis Grail.
If
Tala can be trusted."
Tala was waiting for us in the lobby of our unassuming hotel. When she saw us, her eyes closed in her pale face, and her lips moved in what seemed to be a prayer of gratitude. Several policemen awaited us, as well, and my first assumption was that she'd called them to report our kidnapping.
I'd assumed wrong, which I discovered when the hotel manager and the white-haired director of the project swooped down on us, as did my roommate, Eleni.
My former
roommate, as it turned out. The fact that our room had been ransacked during my absence had persuaded her that I was too high-maintenance. Either I changed rooms, she insisted in accented French, or she did.
The turmoil following that announcement was too much for me to track, much less describe. Bypassing the antique cage elevator as too unreliable, I rushed up all three flights to my room, leaving Rhys to debrief Tala. There I did a thorough accounting of my belongings.
The manager stood over me, alternating between apology and suspicion, while I unpacked everything onto my bed's worn chenille spread to do inventory. Extra traveler's checks, still there. Clothes, still there. Toiletries, still there. Sword under pillow—I checked that one surreptitiously—there.
Then I moved on to the next piece of luggage.
Laptop—gone. The case we'd been so careful not to leave in the car now held little more than a guide to
Egypt
and a scattering of pens, pencils, highlighters…
And a strange little metal thing I'd never seen before.
With a shout, one of the police officers scooped up the tracking device and began asking questions I couldn't begin to translate, much less answer.
Still kneeling on the scuffed linoleum beside the bed, stomach sinking, I thought:
Lex
.
It hadn't been in the ring, after all.
Damn!
The last time my belongings were bugged, it had been Lex's doing. I still hadn't fully recovered from that particular betrayal—which is probably why I jumped to that conclusion now. Even when the hotel manager repeated the authorities' questions to me in halting English, I said only, "I don't know. I don't know where it came from."
Now I was lying to the police for him, the bastard.
My eyes burned with an unwelcome threat of tears. I hadn't slept since arriving in
Egypt
, and I wasn't sure I'd eaten anything, either. My clothes felt sticky and dirty, except the parts that had dried stiff. My bare feet were sore and filthy. My laptop and mobile phone were gone. And now…
Behind me, Eleni's shrill insistence that she be found a different roommate escalated. When d'Alencon reminded her that there were few empty beds left, she stalked off to find somebody, anybody, willing to switch. That was all in French. The police and the manager discussed the tracking device in rapid Arabic—I couldn't understand their words, but the intensity with which they bent over the gadget was unmistakable.
When Rhys arrived in the doorway, without Tala, he swore in Welsh at the sight in front of him. "
Uffach cols
."
"It's a tracking device," I told him, not bothering to stand. Champion schmampion—I was exhausted. Good thing Eleni was willing to switch rooms, because it would take dynamite to blast me out of this one. "
Someone
put it in my laptop case."
I assumed he would understand whom I meant by
someone
—someone rich, powerful, handsome, involved with a goddess-hating secret society, and determined to protect me against my will. Someone with the initials Alexander freaking Stuart. Rhys had been involved in my last grail quest, after all. He knew the story.
But instead of leaping to the same conclusion I had, he said, "The airport."
I blinked up at him not, well,
tracking
.
"When those men surrounded us at the airport," he reminded me—and of course he was right. We'd been pushed, pulled and prodded. Any one of them could have slipped a tracking device into my case, far more easily than I could have gotten that same case through airport security if I'd had the device in
More to the point, Hani had shown up at both the airport and at the bazaar.
I'd been wrong. It wasn't Lex?
Now I wanted to cry for a different reason.
"You explain to them?" I asked, and rested my face in the bedspread, emotionally drained.
It hadn't been Lex
.
But I'd sure been quick to assume it was.
To my undying gratitude, Rhys did as I asked. The police officers seemed more comfortable speaking to a man, anyway. I only looked wearily up after I heard Rhys name Hani Rachid, at which point I saw the two officers exchange knowing looks.
"How do you know Hani Rachid?" I demanded.
But they said things in Arabic in tones suspiciously like
Don't worry your pretty little head
. I could pursue that at another time. A person could only take so much.
Then Catrina Dauvergne appeared in my doorway, suitcase in hand. "
Bonjour
, roommate," she said, with an evil smile.
I turned my face back into the bedspread.
I've stayed in more comfortable hotel rooms. The linoleum floor of this one was cracked, the mattress was lumpy and the occasional burst of light from outside the window whenever a trolley passed, accompanied by the sizzle of electrical sparks, was. hardly soothing.
But I've slept in worse, too.
What kept me awake that night wasn't my room, but my roommate. I've never shared a space with someone I trusted less.
Not even Lex, at our worst.
After everyone else had gone, even Rhys, I made an effort at closing my eyes and getting some of that sleep I so desperately needed. To say this had been a full day was an understatement. But my awareness of Catrina moving around the room, rubbing lotion onto her arms and hands, combing out her hair, kept me awake. When I heard her bedsprings squeak as she climbed in, and then heard the spurt of a match and smelled cigarette smoke, I'd had it.
I opened my eyes to the lamplight. "What the hell are you doing?"
She arched one Gallic brow at me, eyes particularly catty behind a pair of narrow reading glasses, and lifted the paperback novel she held in one hand. The hand not holding the cigarette. Then she went back to reading.
Like I'd leave it at that. "Why did you agree to switch rooms with Eleni?"
She sighed and put the book down. "The poor woman was terrified."
Like she was such a humanitarian.
"But you're not. Why? Is it because you already know who broke into my room?"
She rolled her eyes, which I took as a claim that she did not.
"Then why?"
"I am not afraid," she admitted, on a wisp of smoke, "because I assume that whoever broke in either found what they wished or learned it was not here. This, and I do not frighten easily."
As someone who didn't frighten easily either, I believed that. But—"Then why move in with me?"
Her eyes widened in poorly feigned innocence. "
Pourquoi pas
?" Why not?
"Because we hate each other's guts?" I suggested.
"
Mon Dieu
, such hyperbole. I do not hate you." Catrina took another long draw on her cigarette, then narrowed her eyes. "I just dislike you very, very much."
"Why is that?" Since I wasn't sleeping anyway, I sat up. "Yes, sure, you think I had something to do with the destruction of the abbey, but even if I did—which I didn't—it wasn't personal. It wasn't
your
abbey."
The image of Cat as a nun, despite the fact that she wore an incongruous Mary medal, was so ridiculous, we both blinked dumbly at one another for a moment. Then the sparks from a trolley outside our window helped me regain my senses.
"On the other hand," I continued, "I brought you the Melusine Chalice in good faith, and you turned around and sold it on the black market. It was
my
chalice, my family's in any case. I'd risked my life to rescue it.
That
was personal. And yet you act as if I…
I
… "
I couldn't think of anything personal to compare it to, but Catrina provided an example on her own.
"As if you stole my tapestry?"
At the time I'd met her, she'd been pretty excited about a unicorn tapestry she hoped to add to the
Cluny
's already impressive collection.
"Okay," I said. "As if I stole your tapestry."
The bitch threw her cigarette at me!
"Hey!" I dodged it, then picked it up and swung.
I have to give her credit; she didn't flinch as I deliberately missed her and stubbed the damned thing out against the cover of her book. Then I threw the butt into the ashtray on the table between our beds. "Do that again, and I feed it to you."
"You
did
steal my tapestry," she accused, throwing down the book. Whether she reverted to French as a power play, or because she was so emotional, I couldn't tell.
"What? That's ridiculous! I left
France
two days after you took the chalice. You're the one with a super-saver card for the black market, not me."
"I do not know how you did it," she insisted, "but I know it was you. I was almost done with my report, advising that we acquire the tapestry, when my supervisor tells me, 'But no. The owner, he has changed his mind. He has already received a more generous offer from the Cloisters.'"
"The Cloisters in
Her
duh
glare made that clear. And true, the Cloisters' collection of unicorn weavings rivaled the
Cluny
's. But—
"Sorry to ruin your little fantasy, Cat, but I don't have anywhere near enough pull with the museum community to convince them to buy your tapestry out from under you. Not to mention that it would take a hell of a lot of money to fund a buyout that quick…ly… "
Her eyebrows arched as I remembered that, in fact, I
had
told someone about that particular tapestry.
Someone who could afford to purchase it for the museum.
Someone I'd wrongly suspected of planting a tracking device in my luggage…or my faux wedding ring.
Someone I'd promised to call when I got to the hotel!
"Damn it." If I had my cell phone, I could've called him from the room, but Hani Rachid had taken care of that. There was nothing for it but to put my clothes back on and head downstairs to use the phone in the lobby.
Either that, or wait until morning. And I was already feeling guilty about Lex, after the tracking device.
"You do know something," guessed Cat, as I swung my legs over the edge of the bed and stood to dress.
"Water under the bridge, Catrina." I doubted it really was, but my words seemed to annoy her, which made them worthwhile anyway. "I just remembered I need to make a phone call. Delightful though this little bit of bonding has been… "
She made a rude sound and scooped up her singed book, and I pulled on a skirt and blouse over my PJ's, grabbed my key and some change for the pay phone, and headed down the stairs. By now it was well after
,
Egypt
time, which made it early the previous evening in the city.
The way the desk clerk ogled me as I struggled with the operator on the pay phone made me glad I hadn't just grabbed a robe, even if most of the clientele at this particular hotel were European.
Placing long-distance calls from a foreign country is a challenge under the best of circumstances, much less when dizzy with exhaustion. After finding an operator who spoke English, I finally had to place the call collect. I hated to do it, but my change purse had been stolen. No way did I have enough twenty-five- or even fifty-piastre coins for long distance.
Of course Lex agreed to accept the charges. I hadn't realized how hungry I was to hear his voice until I relaxed at that little reassurance. When the operator went away, the first thing I said was, "Thanks. I'll pay you back."