3 Blood Lines

by Tanya Huff

  “Well, uh . . .” He cleared his throat, sounding embarrassed. “I got this feeling that Henry needs me, so . . .”

  In order to be here now, he had to have gotten the feeling before Henry had the need. Wonderful. Prescient ex-street punks. Just what she needed to make the day’s experience complete. “And if Henry needs you, you come running?” Even to her own ears her voice appeared sharp, and she was embarrassed in turn to realize that its edge sounded very much like jealousy. Henry had needed her and she’d left.

  “Hey, Victory, don’t sweat it.” As though he’d read her mind, Tony’s voice softened. “It’s easier for me. I didn’t really have a life till he showed up. He can remake me any way he wants. You’ve been you for a long time. It makes it harder to fit the two of you together.”

  You’ve been you for a long time. She felt some of the tension begin to leave her shoulders. If anyone could understand that, it would be Henry Fitzroy. “Thanks, Tony.”

  “No problem.” The cocky tone returned. “You want me to nail you a cab?”

  “No.”

  “Then I better get upstairs.”

  “Before you split your jeans?”

  “Jeez, Victory,” she could hear the grin in his voice, “I thought you couldn’t see in the dark.”

  She listened to him walk away, heard the door to the building open and close behind him, then made her way carefully out to the sidewalk. In the distance, she could make out the glow of Yonge and Bloor and decided to walk. City streets had enough light for her to maneuver, even if she couldn’t exactly see and at the moment she didn’t think she could handle being enclosed in another dark space.

  A dozen steps away from the building she stopped. She’d been so caught up in getting out of Henry’s apartment that she hadn’t even asked him about the dream. For a moment she considered going back, then she grinned and shook her head, willing to bet that he’d be incapable of thinking coherently, let alone worrying, for the rest of the night. Tony had picked up a number of interesting skills during his years on the street, not the least of those being distraction.

  Five

  He gazed over the breakfast table—a bowl of strawberries and melon, three eggs over easy, six slices of rare roast beef, corn muffins, a chilled glass of apricot nectar, and a pot of fresh brewed coffee—nodded a satisfied dismissal at the young woman who delivered it, and snapped open his copy of the national paper. While he’d had the morning editions of all three Toronto papers delivered, it had been easy to tell which he should read first. Only one had more text than pictures.

  After devouring the child’s ka, he had spent the rest of the day acquiring suitable garments and a place to stay. The shopkeepers in the small and very exclusive men’s wear stores along Bloor Street West had been so concerned with status that they’d been almost embarrassingly easy to enchant and later the manager of the Park Plaza Hotel had responded so well to appearance and arrogance that he’d barely needed to use power at all.

  He had registered as Anwar Tawfik, a name he’d pulled from the ka of Elias Rax. Not since the time of Meri-nar, the first Pharaoh, had he used his true name and by the time the priests of Thoth trapped and bound him, he’d been called so many things that they could place only what he was, not who, on their binding spell. If they’d had his true name, he’d not have gotten free so easily.

  He’d chosen the Park Plaza because it overlooked both the museum and, a little farther south, the provincial seat of government. He could, in fact, see both from the windows of his corner suite. The museum held only a certain amount of sentimental significance. Queen’s Park, he would take as his own.

  In the old days, when those who had held secular power had also wielded religious might, when there had been no division between the two and the Pharaoh had been the living Horus, he had had to build his power structure from the bottom up, from the disenfranchised and the discontented. In this age, Church and State were kept forcibly separate and that left the State ripe for his plucking.

  Often in those days, he found only enough unsworn ka to extend his own life and had hoarded what power he had lest he and his god ultimately perish. Now, with so few sworn, he had no need to conserve power. He could use what magic he wished, bend the mighty to his will, knowing that a multitude existed for him to feed from.

  Akhekh, he knew, would not properly appreciate the situation. His lord had . . . simple tastes. A temple, a few acolytes, and a little generated despair kept Akhekh happy.

  Folding the paper into quarters, he poured himself a cup of coffee and sat back, allowing the October sun to brush warmth across his face. He had awoken in a cold, gray land where leaves the color of blood lay damply underfoot. He missed the clean golden lines of the desert, the presence of the Nile, the smell of spice and sweat but, as the world he missed no longer existed, he would make this world his own.

  And frankly, he didn’t see how anyone could stop him.

  “Homicide. Detective-Sergeant Celluci. You sure? Caused by what?”

  Dave Graham watched his partner scowl and took bets with himself as to who was on the other end of the phone. There were a number of reports still outstanding although they had already received the photographs and an analysis from the lab on the contents of the trap.

  “You’re sure there’s nothing else?” Celluci drummed on the desktop with his fingertips. “Yeah. Yeah, thanks.” Although obviously annoyed, he hung up the phone with exaggerated care—the department had refused to replace any more receivers. “Dr. Rax died because his heart stopped.”

  Ah, the coroner. He owed himself a quarter. “And why did the good doctor’s heart stop?”

  Celluci snorted. “They don’t know.” He picked up his coffee, swirled it around to break the scum that had formed over the last two hours, and drank. ”Apparently, it just stopped.”

  “Drugs? Disease?”

  “Nada. There were signs of a struggle, but no evidence of a blow to the chest. He’d had a sandwich, a glass of milk, and a piece of blueberry pie about four hours before he died. He was, according to fatigue buildup in the muscles, a bit tired.” Celluci shoved an overly long curl of hair back off his forehead. “Dr. Rax was a healthy fifty-two-year-old. He caught a naked intruder in the Egyptology workroom and his heart stopped.”

  “Well,” Dave shrugged. “I suppose it happens.”

  “What happens?”

  “Hearts stop.”

  “Bullshit.” Celluci crumbled his cup and tossed it at the garbage basket. It hit the rim, sprayed a few drops of coffee on the side of the desk, and dropped in. “Two deaths by unexplained heart failure in the same room in less than twenty-four hours is . . .”

  “A gruesome coincidence.” Dave shook his head at his partner’s expression. “This is a high stress world we live in, Mike. Any little extra can tip you over. Ellis saw something that frightened him, his heart couldn’t take it, he died. Dr. Rax interrupted an intruder, they fought, his heart couldn’t take it, he died. As I said, it happens. Cardiovascular failure, occurring not as a direct result of violence, doesn’t come under our jurisdiction.”

  “Big words,” Celluci grunted.

  “Well, I’m ready to conclude this wasn’t a homicide and toss it over to the B and E boys.”

  Celluci swung his legs off the desk and stood. “I’m not.”

  “Why not?”

  He thought about it for a moment and finally shrugged. He couldn’t really come up with a reason, even for himself. “Call it a hunch.”

  Dave sighed. He hated police work based solely on intuition, but Celluci’s arrest record was certainly good enough to allow him to ride a hunch or two. He surrendered. “So, where’re you going?”

  “Lab.”

  Watching his partner stride away, Dave considered phoning the lab and warning them. His hand was on the receiver when he changed his mind. “Nah.” He settled back in his chair and grinned. “Why should I have all the fun?”

  “This is a piece of linen?” Celluci stared into the
mylar envelope and decided to take Doreen’s word for it. “What’s it off of?”

  “An ancient Egyptian ceremonial robe, probably a size sixteen extra long. It had an empire waist, pleated sleeves, and how the blazes should I know?” Doreen Chui folded her arms and stared up at the detective. “You bring me twenty-two milliliters of sludge that’s just had an acid bath and I pull out a square millimeter of linen. More miracles than that you shouldn’t ask for.”

  Celluci took a step back. Small women always made him feel vaguely intimidated. “Sorry. What can you tell me about it?”

  “Two things. One, it’s old.” She raised a cautionary hand. “I don’t know how old. Two, there’s a bit of pigment on one of the fibers that’s about fifty/fifty blood and a type of vegetable paint. Also old. Nothing to do with last night’s body. At least not as far as precious bodily fluids are concerned.”

  He took a closer look at the fleck of grayish-brown substance. Raymond Thompson had said that the coffin was Eighteenth Dynasty. He wasn’t sure when exactly that was, but if the bit of linen could be placed in the same time period . . . he’d be building a case against a mummy that everyone insisted didn’t exist. That should go over like a visit from a civil rights lawyer. “You couldn’t find out how old this is, could you?”

  “You want me to carbon date it?”

  “Well, yes.”

  “Drop dead, Celluci. You want that kind of an analysis done—provided I had a big enough sample which I don’t—you get the city to stop cutting my budget so I can get the equipment and the staff.” She slapped her palm down on the desk. “Until them, you got a scrap of linen with a bloody paint stain on it. Capesh?”

  “So, you’re finished with it?”

  Doreen sighed. “Don’t make me explain it to you again, Detective. I’ve had a hard morning.”

  “Right.” He carefully slid the envelope into his inside jacket pocket, and tried an apologetic smile. “Thanks.”

  “You really want to thank me,” she muttered, turning back to her work, the smile apparently having no effect, “put a moratorium on murder until I take care of my backlog.”

  Dr. Shane held the mylar envelope up to the light, then, shaking her head, laid it back down on the desk. “If you say that’s a piece of linen, Detective, I believe you, but I’m afraid I can’t tell you what it’s from or how old it is. When we get the inventory finished and find out what’s missing, well, maybe we’ll know what went down the sink . . .”

  “It had to be something that the intruder felt would give him away,” Celluci mused.

  “Why?” The detective had a very penetrating gaze, Dr. Shane realized as he turned it on her. And very attractive brown eyes with the sort of long, thick lashes most women would kill for. With an effort she got her train of thought back on track. “I mean, why couldn’t it have just been senseless vandalism?”

  “No, too specific and too neat. A vandal might have dumped acid on some of your artifacts, but they wouldn’t have rinsed down the sink afterward. And,” he sighed and brushed the curl of hair back off his forehead, “they wouldn’t have started with that. They’d have knocked a few things over first. What about the blood/paint mixture?”

  “Well, that’s unusual.” Dr. Shane frowned down at the linen. “Are you sure that the blood was actually mixed with the pigment and hadn’t just been splashed on at some later date?”

  “I’m sure.” He sat forward in his chair and leaned his forearms across his knees, then had to shift as his holster jabbed him in the small of the back. “Our lab is very good with blood. They get a lot of practice.”

  “Yes, I suppose they do.” She sighed and pushed the sample toward him. “Well, then, the only historical explanation that comes to mind is that this is a piece of a spell.” She settled back and steepled her fingers, her voice taking on a lecturing tone. “Most Egyptian priests were also wizards and their spells were not only chanted but written on strips of linen or papyrus when the matter was deemed serious enough to need physical representation. Occasionally, when very powerful spells were needed, the wizard would mix his blood with the paint in order to tie his life force to the magic.”

  Celluci laid his hand down on the envelope. “So this is a part of a very powerful spell.”

  “It seems that way, yes.”

  Powerful enough to keep a mummy locked in its coffin? he wondered. He decided not to ask. The last thing he wanted was Dr. Shane thinking he was some kind of a nut case who’d gotten his training from old Boris Karloff movies. That would definitely slow down the investigation. He slid the envelope back into his jacket pocket. “They mentioned carbon dating at the lab . . . ?”

  Dr. Shane shook her head. “Too small a sample; they need at least two square inches. It’s why the Church objected to dating the Shroud of Turin for so long.” Her gaze focused somewhere in memory, then she shook her head and smiled. “It’s one of the reasons anyway.”

  “Dr. Shane?” The tapping on the door and the entry were pretty much simultaneous. “Sorry to disturb you, but you said you wanted that inventory the moment we finished.” At the assistant curator’s nod, Doris crossed the room and laid a stack of papers on the desk. “Nothing’s missing, nothing even looks disturbed, but we did find a whole pile of useless film in the darkroom. Every single frame’s been overexposed on about thirty rolls and we’ve got a stack of video tapes that show nothing but basic black.”

  “Do you know what was on them?” Celluci asked getting to his feet.

  Doris looked chagrined. “Actually, I haven’t the faintest. I’ve accounted for everything I’ve shot over the last little while.”

  “If you could put them to one side, I’ll have someone come and pick them up.”

  “I’ll leave them where they are, then.” Doris paused on her way out the door and glanced back at the police officer. “If they’re still usable though, I’d like them back. Video tape doesn’t grow on trees.”

  “I’ll do my best,” he assured her. When the door had closed behind her, he turned back to Dr. Shane. “Budget cuts?”

  She laughed humorlessly. “When isn’t it? I just wish I had more for you. I went over Dr. Rax’s office again after your people left and I couldn’t find anything missing except that suit.”

  Which at least gave them the relative size of the intruder—if there had even been an intruder. The ROM had excellent security and there’d been no evidence of anyone entering or leaving. It could have been an inside job; a friend of the dead janitor maybe, up poking around, who’d panicked when Dr. Rax had his heart attack. The name Dr. Von Thorne had come up a couple of times during yesterday’s questioning as one of Dr. Rax’s least favorite people. Maybe he’d been poking around and panicked—except that they’d already questioned Dr. Von Thorne and he had an airtight alibi, not to mention an extremely protective wife. Still, there were a number of possibilities that had nothing to do with an apparently nonexistent mummy.

  While various theories were chasing each other’s tails in Celluci’s head, part of him watched appreciatively as Dr. Shane came around from behind her desk.

  “You mentioned on the phone that you wanted to see the sarcophagus?” she said, heading for the door.

  He followed her out. “I’d like to, yes.”

  “It wasn’t in the workroom, you know. We’d already moved it across the hall.”

  “To the storage room.” He could feel the stare of the departmental secretary as they crossed the outer office. “What are you doing hanging around here?” it said. “Why aren’t you out catching the one who did this?” It was a stare he could identify at fifty paces just by the way it impacted with his back. Over the years, he’d learned to ignore it. Mostly.

  “You’ll find it’s just a little large to maneuver around.” Dr. Shane stopped across from the workroom and pulled out her keys. “That’s why we moved it.”

  While the workroom doors were bright yellow, the storeroom doors bordered on day-glo orange.

  “What’s with the colo
r scheme?” Celluci asked.

  Dr. Shane’s head swiveled between the two sets of doors. “I haven’t,” she said at last, forehead slightly puckered, “the faintest idea.”

  To Celluci’s eyes the sarcophagus looked like a rectangular box of black rock. He had to actually run his fingers along the edge before he could find the seam where the top had been fitted into the sides. “How can you tell that something like this is Sixteenth Dynasty?” he asked, crouching down and peering in the open end.

  “Mostly because the only other one ever found in this particular style was very definitely dated Sixteenth.”

  “But the coffin was Eighteenth?” He could see faint marks where the coffin had rested.

  “No doubt about it.”

  “Is that unusual? Mixing time periods?”

  Dr. Shane leaned on the sarcophagus and crossed her arms. “Well, we’ve never run into it before, but that may be because we’ve run into very few undisturbed grave sites. Usually, if we find a sarcophagus, the coffin is missing entirely.”

  “Hard to run away with one of these,” Celluci muttered, straightening and having a look at the end panel. “Any theories?”

  “On why this one was mixed?” Dr. Shane shrugged. “Maybe the family of the deceased was saving money.”

  Celluci looked up and smiled. “Got a good deal on it secondhand?”

  Dr. Shane found herself smiling back. “Perhaps.”

  Moving the sliding panel into its grooves, Celluci let it gently down, then just as gently eased it up again. There was a three-inch lip on the inside that blocked the bottom edge. He frowned.

  “What’s the matter?” Dr. Shane asked, leaning forward a little anxiously. Pretty much indestructible or not, this was still a three-thousand-year-old artifact.

  “They might also have chosen this style because once inside, it’d be the next thing to impossible to get out. There’s no way to get a grip on this door and because it slides, brute force would do bugger all.”