She left, taking the light and her warmth with her.
With a little difficulty, Thorne lowered himself to the
floor, his hips wedged in the narrow opening, his legs inside the stairwell. “See anything interesting?” His voice echoed slightly off the roughly hewn rock. The red glow of the torch danced on the walls, casting macabre shadows as she walked.
“Nope. Just a straight shot so far. But you weren’t kidding about it being steep. The actual tread is shorter than my foot, by—I don’t know—I think this is only about six-ish inches. What’s normal?”
“Ten.”
“The riser is way high. Who did they think would be running up and down these stairs, short-toed people with long shinbones? I told you aliens were involved.” He smiled, leaning against the wall, his legs stretched out. God, it was good to sit down. His thigh had been begging for mercy for hours. Clamping his fingers around the worst of it, he tried to massage out the vicious knot. Isis had not complained once. Not about any of it.
“I don’t think they were thinking of people continually running up and down.” He raised his voice so she could hear him. “They were thinking of thieves.” Thorne realized he was braced for her scream. For her cry as some fucking ancient booby trap snared her. For her frantic yell for help. What the fuck had he been thinking to allow her to go down there alone? Down there at
all
.
“Make sure you extend the torch so you can see as far ahead of you as possible. And test every step before you put your weight on it.” He sounded like—like someone worried for someone else’s safety. Other than Garrett,
Thorne hadn’t been worried about anyone else to this extent in his life. His heart beat a staccato rhythm as he listened to her footfalls scrape across the stones.
“Anything interesting?” After this he wasn’t letting the woman out of his sight. He was not a man to make small talk, or ponder the workings of a woman’s mind. He’d never given a flying fuck what made a lover tick, other than in the most basic sense, and yet here he was, listening to every footfall, every harsh breath, eyes straining to see what he knew damned well he couldn’t see in the darkness.
“Hmm. No marking on the walls.” Her voice echoed up the shaft. “Just rough stone—taking a jog to the right here. Uh-oh, the stairs are narrower on one side than the other…”
“It’s a winder so they didn’t have to carve out a landing.”
“Straightening out for a while. Crap. There’s a winder going left now.”
Thorne didn’t like it. He could no longer see even the lightest glow from the torch, and though her voice was clear, it was fainter.
“Talk to me.”
“It’s kind of hard to be going down three million teeny stairs and chat at the same time, Thorne.”
“Humor me.”
She continued the running commentary—loudly for a few minutes—and then all he heard was the grit of her rubber-soled shoes on sandy stone resonating up to him. “Isis?”
“Oh, crap. It ends at a wall.” Even with the echo, and from this distance, Thorne heard tears in her voice.
He got stiffly to his feet, his leg protesting directly into his cerebral cortex as if someone had taken a sharp knife and sliced him from skull to ankle. Oh, yeah. Someone pretty much had. “Take a breather and come back. We can—”
“Hold your horses…”
He wiped damp hands on his jeans and sucked in a breath, holding it so he didn’t miss any sounds she might make.
She gave a whoop of excitement. “But no.
Not
a wall. Hang on…” He heard a teeth-jarring high-pitched screech bounce off the narrow walls, then Isis shouted up. “Smell that? That, Mr. Thorne, is the stink of a million bats and freedom! I’m coming back up there—”
His shoulder slumped against the opening, and he let out his breath. “No. Stay put. I’ll come down.”
“I have the torch—”
“I’ll find you.” Anywhere, anytime. Every time.
He started down the stairs. On the seventh tread, the door above him ground closed, the sound resounding in the stairwell. The darkness was absolute.
“Oh, God. What was that? Are you okay?”
Thorne laughed. “I’m on my way to see these bats for myself.”
He followed the stink of bat shit, and the sound of Isis’s voice down the stairs.
ISIS COULDN’T SEE MORE
than a couple of feet in any direction. She wrapped her long scarf over her head and
face, but she could still feel the air move with the beat of the bats’ wings overhead.
She winced with each of Thorne’s heavy steps as he navigated the stairs. Her leg muscles were quivering with exertion, and she didn’t have a sliced-and-diced thigh. “Almost to the bottom!” she yelled. Having no idea how far down he was, just wanting to be his cheering section.
Her head swam and Isis sat down before she fell down. No water, no food, no more adrenaline. The slog down the stairs had taken all her reserves. She plopped her butt down on the sandy marble floor, her back against the threshold to make sure the door stayed open. She peered into the unrelieved darkness, resting her elbow on her undrawn knee and cupping her hand over her nose and mouth.
The room
felt
large, and dear God—the
smell
. Her eyes and nostrils stung, burning from the acrid stench of ammonia.
The space was filled with the cacophony of squeaks, scratching, and wings flapping of assorted rodents occupying the ceiling high above. “Please stay there, and
please
don’t crap on me—again.”
Pushing to her feet when she heard Thorne’s approach, Isis winced. God, it must be so painful coming down all those uneven stairs sideways, the only way his feet would fit on the treads. Wanting to race up to meet him, she stayed where she was, arm extended into the stairwell to light his way. If the upstairs portal had
slammed shut without her amulet, she wouldn’t budge until Thorne reached her side.
The smell made her eyes water, and she figured if she couldn’t see what she’d been sitting on, or walking on, ignorance was bliss. She was already filthy, and in a few minutes Thorne would be just as stinky and dirty as she was. Small comfort after what they’d been through, but, hey, she’d take it.
From a distance she heard a sharp sound of a horn, or car alarm—but when she tried to separate it from the sound of the bats crying and flapping overhead she figured it was just her imagination and wishful thinking telling her they were near civilization.
“When you turn that last left-turn jog, watch the next few steps; they’re even narrower and steeper.
There
you are!”
Surprising herself, she burst into tears as soon as she saw him. Dashing the tears from her cheeks, she flung her arms around him and hugged him so tightly he let out a strangled laugh. “Did you think the aliens beamed me up to their spaceship?” he teased, hugging her back. He held her by the shoulders, then used his thumb to wipe away a tear from her chin. “Let’s get the hell out of Dodge.”
“Under normal circumstances…” Isis sniffed, slipping her hand into his because she loved the way he curled his fingers around hers. She handed him the torch, which was now less than two feet long, the tip charred and crunchy, the glow almost out.
“Which,” she added, “I’d like to point out, these are
not
—having those flying rats swooping overhead and using my head as a toilet would freak me out. However, these are not normal circumstances, and I don’t give a damn as long as they stay way up there, and leave us the hell alone. What are you—Oh, God, it was almost better not being able to see this.” She squinted into the sudden brightness after what felt like years in the dark.
Somehow Thorne had unerringly found a large spotlight in the darkness and managed to switch it on. He
did
have eyes like a cat.
Self-consciously she put a hand to her head, then dropped it. Her messy hair was the least of her problems. She looked around. “This looks like some kind of antechamber,” she said with a frown as she took in the beautiful wood chariot with their elaborate paintings and gold wheels, the twenty-foot-high statues—and the boxes and boxes and boxes of already crated artifacts. Of course. “Looters. Do you think it’s safe to have a light on? What if they come back?”
“They were finishing up their haul when we arrived. I suspect they’re long gone. But judging by the stuff they’ve packed up, they’ll be back. I suspect with all the activity happening on the rim of the valley that they’ll wait for nightfall, and loot under cover of darkness.”
“Bastards. We’ll call a press conference, let everyone know—”
He tightened his grip on her hand. “Take a breath. There are channels we have to go through, and we’re not going off half-cocked. The people have already tried to kill us, and kidnapped us. We still aren’t sure who’s
involved. I’ll make some calls. Let’s get outside and assess the situation, okay?”
She nodded. “I guess so. I can at least call my father and tell him about this.” Would he even understand? She hoped so.
“Take a look back there before we go.” Thorne gently took her upper arm, turning her around.
There was no sign of the door they’d come through just moments before. It was now shut, leaving not so much as a sliver indicating it was there at all. But that wasn’t what stole Isis’s breath as she turned fully to face the way they’d come.
The wall before them—a hundred feet high, by that and more wide—was a solid sheet of gleaming hammered gold. Bas-relief gods and goddesses, birds and soldiers, sparkled with jewels and semiprecious stones. In the very center, about halfway up, a twenty-foot-tall couple stood, hands clasped as they looked over the vast chamber.
The carving was more three-dimensional than everything else on the wall, and so lifelike Isis wouldn’t have been surprised if they stepped down off the wall where they had stood joined together for thousands of years. Wearing the royal raiments of Isis and Osiris, they were surrounded by the sun god Ra and the seven venomous scorpions.
Isis brought Thorne’s hand, clasped in hers, to her heart, and swallowed a lump in her throat. “Cleo and Mark.”
Bittersweet tears welled, making the gold wall shimmer.
She wished her father could see this. “I have to take pictures.” Unsnapping the catch of her case, Isis took a rapid succession of images, barely taking time to frame her shots.
The perimeter walls had, until recently, been packed with artifacts. And while there were still thousands of things to catch her eye, it was clear that at least half of the items, if not more, had been dragged out. Streaks of dust on the floor where boxes had been pulled, and put onto some sort of wheel cart for transportation out of the tomb, told the story. She got dozens of shots of those, too.
A stack of gilded and bejeweled chariot wheels were braced against the far wall along with ritual couches, beds, chairs, and tables. Isis figured the assorted furniture was worth a queen’s ransom, all of it just piled one on top of the other as if this were an ancient Egyptian thrift shop. Intricately carved ivory chests embedded with gemstones awaited pickup by the front entrance.
And a fifty-gallon barrel with a spigot on it. “Dear God. Is that
water
? Thank you, modern times.” She tugged at Thorne’s hand, hauling him over to the plastic container. “You go first.” She expected him to dip his head under the spigot to drink, but he surprised her by cupping his hands.
“Pour,” he said, catching the stream until his hands were full. “Drink.” Not looking a gift horse in the mouth, Isis drank from his cupped hands, a surprisingly intimate thing to do. Before her thirst was quenched, she lifted her head. “Your turn. There’s plenty.”
She held the spigot until they each slaked their thirst. “I’ll never take water for granted again,” she said.
Satisfied, she waited her turn and splashed room-temperature water on her face. Thorne took her elbow as she used her T-shirts to dry off.
“We’ve got to go. Who knows when they’ll be back?”
“They’ll know we were here. Does that matter?” She walked beside him, taking pictures as they crossed the space.
“We’ll be long gone. It’s a good thing you’re getting shots of this—no time for cataloging, but it might be the last image anyone will see of this place. So much empty space means they’ve already taken a lot. The organization for this kind of operation had to take months, if not longer.” He waved his hand at what was left. “If this is what they decided to leave for last, imagine what they
did
take.”
Her chest ached. Her father had worked his entire life to see this, to prove that this tomb existed. “They’ll sell off everything to private collectors, and the public will never know that Cleopatra’s tomb was discovered.”
Thorne stopped walking, to turn to her. “The items will have no monetary value unless they can be tied unequivocally to Cleopatra’s final burial place.”
Anger made her heart beat too fast as she said with uncommon bitterness, “Which will be filled with water.”
“No. It just came to me, as I saw all of the tags on the items. I think they want to reconstruct the find—what if this site is suddenly ‘discovered’ a hundred miles away at Abusir by your friend Dylan Brengard?”
“Oh, my God.” Her stomach rolled and the water rose up in her throat. “That’s—that means that Dr. Najid and Dylan must have been working together all along.” She ran to a tag, then another one, realization dawning with acrid horror. “My father came here, found Cleo”—she met Thorne’s compassionate gaze—“and of course he would tell Dylan, who planned with Najid to kill my father and take the glory.” Her eyes burned and her fist clenched. “There aren’t enough curse words to describe them,” she said in short syllables, furious beyond anything she’d ever felt before. Heat pulsated behind her eyes and her body shook.
“I’m sorry, Isis.” His hand on the small of her back was a comfort, but also a prod to keep moving. “I’d hazard a guess,” he said, “that Yermalof is up to his eyeballs in this as well. Once the tomb is found at Abusir, where most Egyptologists have long believed it to be, and there’s an official provenance for the items, he’ll sell whatever they siphoned off the top. The rest will be artistically placed in the new tomb. No one any the wiser. It’s actually quite brilliant, and almost flawlessly executed.”