Wendy shuffled off, leaving them alone at their table.
“Okay. I want some answers,” Logan said. “Supposing—just supposing, mind you—that I believe you are who you say you are, then why now? Why me? Why didn’t you regenerate, or de-mummify, or whatever it is that you did today, when your sarcophagus was first opened?”
“My tomb was never opened until now,” Seti replied, shrugging his shoulders. “The curse would not allow it. I was doomed to spend five thousand years entombed, and today must mark the last day of my sentence.”
“You mean to tell me that this curse kept everyone who came in contact with your sarcophagus from opening it? That’s ridiculous!”
“No more ridiculous than you breaking bread with… what did you call me? Oh, yes. The five-thousand-year-old dead guy,” Seti countered.
“I remain unconvinced of that fact,” Logan said. There was a defiant tilt to his chin that made Seti want to smile. He looked like a small boy stubbornly refusing to obey his parents. “If it’s true, then you must know things about history that no one else alive—for lack of a better word—knows. Tell me something about the Renaissance. Something no one else would know.”
“I cannot. I know little of history except my own.”
“Aha!” Logan cried, jabbing a finger at Seti. “I knew it! You don’t know anything because you aren’t the mummy!”
“I know little because my tomb was only discovered fifty years ago,” Seti replied patiently. “I spent the preceding four thousand nine hundred fifty years buried under a hundred feet of sand.”
“You were buried—”
“Alive, for lack of a better term.” Seti finished Logan’s sentence, watching his face pale as the truth slowly sank in.
Logan sat back in his seat, the air in his lungs escaping in a long, low whoosh. “Jesus, Seti. I’m not saying I believe you, but if it were true, how could you not lose your mind? Five thousand years….”
Seti smiled softly at the compassion he heard in Logan’s voice as the enormity of Seti’s curse hit him.
“I spent a great deal of time, especially in the beginning, thinking of Setekh and the countless, creative ways in which I would kill him, had he been human. After that? I slept as often as I could, hoping my dreams would bring to me someone I once knew.”
“Ah,” Logan whispered. “Your wife. Did you have children, Seti?”
“Thirty-two at last count.” His smile was bittersweet, remembering the dozens of dark-headed young ones scampering about his tents. “But I had no wives. Concubines, yes, but I never took any woman as a wife.”
“Thirty-two! Then you might have family, Seti! Great-great-whatevers.”
Seti chuckled. “Perhaps. Life was harsh then, Logan. There is no telling that any of my blood survived. Or that Setekh allowed them to live after I was gone. In fact, I am certain that he did not. Part of my curse was to be forgotten, and that would include the decimation of my bloodline.”
“That’s awful. I’m sorry, Seti. For what happened to you. What exactly did happen, by the way? What caused you to be cursed in the first place?” He wasn’t sure when it happened, but Seti’s tale, simply told without embellishments or affectations, was beginning to seem more like truth to Logan than fabrication. He was beginning to think Seti might be telling the truth, as incredible as it sounded.
A dark cloud colored Seti’s face as memories assailed him, bidden by Logan’s innocent question. Memories he’d spent the last five thousand years trying to forget. “I do not wish to speak of it.”
Wendy saved Seti from the myriad of questions he knew danced on the tip of Logan’s tongue by setting steaming platters of food in front of them and a pitcher of something amber and frosty-cold between himself and Logan. “Eat up, boys. The pitcher’s on me.”
“Thanks, Wendy,” Logan said, smiling up at her.
“Yes. My thanks,” Seti parroted. In his day, servants were never thanked for the service they provided—it was their place, their duty in his world to serve. But it seemed times had changed, as he noticed more and more with every passing moment.
“You’re welcome, hon. Make sure Logan eats—he’s too skinny.” She smiled as she walked away.
Skinny? Logan did not seem underweight to Seti. He was smaller than Seti, certainly, but his flesh seemed firm and his muscles strong. As they ate, Seti seized the opportunity to fully appreciate the young man who had released him.
Logan’s light brown hair was cut short, just long enough to curl over the tips of his ears and brush the collar of his shirt. He had a pleasant face, open and honest, and his smile—on the rare occasion that he let it tilt his full lips—was winsome. There was a single dimple that deepened in his left cheek when he allowed himself to grin boyishly.
But it was his eyes that captivated Seti, and had since the moment Seti had awoken and stepped out from the chamber in which his sarcophagus had been kept.
They were large, expressive, intelligent, framed by dark lashes that were so long they curled.
More than that, Logan’s eyes were a bright green, a familiar green, a green that had haunted Seti’s sleep for thousands of years.
Impossible, the voice of reason in Seti’s head said emphatically. It cannot be. He is no more than the dust of the earth now, and has been since before Set laid the curse on your head.
And yet….
Stop it. You look for similarities where there are none. Again that irritating inner voice remonstrated.
But how wonderful would it be, how comforting, to have some connection to his past, however fragile. Especially if it were a connection to the only one who had ever held Seti’s heart.
Ashai.
The name floated through Seti’s mind like a prayer. His throat constricted as memories of Ashai swept through him, unbidden. His laugh, low and free, his gentle touch. His kiss, his body….
Enough!
By force of will, Seti turned his thoughts back to the food Wendy had placed before him. So this is a burger, he thought, picking it up. For years he had heard Perry speaking to others, ordering them to fetch him one. He examined it before biting into it. Two round slices of bread enveloped a char-burned piece of meat. It didn’t look very appetizing, but it smelled wonderful. Seti’s stomach growled angrily, reminding him that he hadn’t eaten in millennia.
Opening his mouth wide, he took a large bite. Thick and medium rare on the inside, the meat’s juices ran down his chin, its smoky flavor filling his mouth. His eyes rolled back in his head in delight.
“This is good,” he said around a mouthful of beef. “More.”
“One is enough for now. That stuff will clog up your arteries,” Logan replied, pouring them each a mug of the cold amber liquid. “Besides, we have to get going soon. It’s only a matter of time until the authorities come here, looking for me.”
“I will protect you. I will allow no one to harm you.”
“Yeah, right. How do you plan on doing that? You don’t have any weapons, and even if you did, you can’t just enter into hand-to-hand combat with the New York City Police Department.”
“I am Seti. I have other resources.”
“How comforting.”
“After all you have seen today, you still doubt me?”
“The only thing I don’t doubt is that I’ve lost my mind.”
“Still you scoff. What will it take to convince you that I am who I say I am?”
“At this point it doesn’t really matter, Seti. Whether or not you’re the mummy or just some fabulously inventive thief, the consequences of taking you out of the museum and not turning you in will be the same for me.”
“I will protect you,” Seti said again. He grew weary of the argument, feeling as though he were butting his head against sandstone. “What is this?” he asked, picking up the mug, seeking to change the tiresome subject.
“Beer.”
Seti cocked a brow, sniffing at the mug. “What is this white foam?”
“That’s the head.”<
br />
“Your beer is alive?”
“No, that’s just what we call the foam.”
“It doesn’t smell like beer.”
“How would you know?”
“We had fine beer in my day. Brewed with barley and wheat,” Seti answered. He took a small sip of the golden liquid, immediately crinkling his nose. “This is not beer. This is piss water.”
“This draft is Budweiser! That’s the king of beers,” Logan protested.
“King? Nonsense. This swill would not be fit for peasants to drink! Beer should have a sweet, fruity taste. Not like this piss.”
“Kindly stop calling it piss. Wendy bought us this pitcher—you should be grateful.”
“Are you certain that she bought the pitcher and did not simply p—”
“You’ll never know how much is riding on you not finishing that sentence,” Logan growled.
Seti smiled. Not the weak half smiles he’d been allowing himself since his reanimation, but a full, wide, delighted smile. How brave young Logan was, defending his friend, no matter that Seti was bigger and stronger than he. How loyal. In Seti’s day such stalwartness would have made Logan a fine warrior, one trusted and admired for his grit, and he told Logan so.
“Warrior? Me? I’m a bookworm, Seti. I spend all my time either nose-deep in textbooks or up to my armpits in old, dead things.”
“Old, dead things like me?” Seti chuckled at the chagrin on Logan’s face.
“That’s not what I meant,” Logan replied, blushing furiously. “I’m no warrior.”
“I did not say that you were. I said that you had the makings of one.”
“Right now, I’d settle for the makings of the Invisible Man. Hurry and finish, Seti. We have to get out of here.”
No sooner had the words left Logan’s lips than there was a flurry of activity at the front door of the establishment. Two men hovered near the door, their presence vaguely menacing, obviously looking for someone or something.
For them, Seti realized.
“Oh shit!” Logan whispered, his face strained and pale. “We’re fucked. There’s no way we can slip out without them seeing us.”
“These men seek to do you harm?”
“They don’t look like cops. They might be private security from the museum. But either way they’re going to find us, and we’re going to be in for a shitload of trouble. I just know it.”
“I will allow no one to harm you. I already told you this.”
“You can’t stop them, Seti, and there’s no way we can get past them,” Logan replied, shaking his head. “You don’t have a weapon, and I wouldn’t want you to use one if you did. That would only get us into worse trouble.”
“I also told you that I have other resources.”
Seti looked over at the men. One of them was talking with the barkeep, who pointed a finger toward Logan and Seti’s table. Seti narrowed his eyes, then closed them, reaching out, calling to the wind.
Would it remember his voice, even after all these years? Or would his command go unheeded?
He needn’t have worried.
The wind answered in a howl, smashing open the doors of the bar, blowing in the two large-pane glass windows at the front. People fell like dominos, toppled by the fury of the gale, scrambling for cover from the shards of window glass. Like a monstrous entity, the wind swept through the room, blowing dishes and glasses off the tables, lifting dust, broken glass, peanut shells, and napkins up into the air.
Swirling into a funnel in the center of the bar, it stood as an impenetrable barrier between Seti and Logan and the men who sought them. Screams were heard under the roar of the wind as people fought to escape the terrifying maelstrom that undulated and twisted like a wind demon, sucking everything that wasn’t bolted to the floor into its deadly embrace.
Grabbing Logan’s wrist, Seti pulled him from his seat and dragged him toward a door at the back of the bar. He could not keep the wind constrained for long. He was still too weak.
In the doorway, a wild-eyed Wendy stared at the carnage being created in the bar by the storm. The woman was Logan’s friend, Seti reminded himself, even if she did serve piss water and call it beer. He grabbed her hand, pulling her along with them. There was a door at the back of the kitchen, and Seti dragged them both through it just as he lost his grip on the storm.
The shriek of the wind grew louder, deafening even in the back alley as the storm within the bar exploded. Peering into the kitchen, Seti could see flashes of lightning coming from the bar as the tempest grew in power, thunder crashing, shaking the very foundations of the building.
They needed to get away. The storm would blow itself out quickly now, and the museum’s men would continue their search for Seti and Logan.
“Where is your home, Logan?” Seti asked. He shook Logan lightly, until at last the fear and confusion drained away from Logan’s eyes. “Your home. Where is it?”
“Oh, yeah… we can’t go to my place. They’ll be watching it, I’m sure,” Logan said. “We can go to Jason’s apartment.”
“What was that?” Wendy interjected, tugging on Seti’s arm. Her eyes were still wide with terror, and she shook so badly Seti feared she would collapse.
“Sit down, Wendy. All will be well now. You are no longer in danger. Listen! The wind dies even as we speak,” Seti said distractedly, helping lower her to the ground. He had more pressing matters to tend to than a frightened woman. Seti turned his dark eyes on Logan. “Who is this Jason?” he asked, feeling an unexpected, piercing shaft of jealously slice through him. He shook it off, telling himself that he only cared because he wished no one else to know of his existence.
“He’s one of my best friends—we can hide out at his place.”
“We must go,” Seti said firmly. He didn’t like the idea of seeking shelter with this friend of Logan’s, but he realized he had little choice in the matter. He urged Logan into motion, although it was plain that Logan did not want to leave Wendy sitting in the muck of the alleyway. “She will be all right, Logan. We will not be if we do not leave this place.”
Logan nodded, squatting down at Wendy’s side. “You okay?” he asked, putting his hand on her shoulder.
“Leave her!” Seti ordered, towering over them both, glaring at Logan for disobeying him—yet again.
“I’m not leaving until I’m sure she’s okay,” Logan yelled, scowling up at Seti. He turned back to Wendy, whose frightened face was streaked with tears. “Wendy? Are you all right?”
Seti was tempted to pick Logan up and throw him over his shoulder, giving him no choice but to leave, every instinct telling him to flee. He wanted—needed—to get Logan to safety, and Logan’s refusal to leave was infuriating him.
“Logan!” he roared. “We need to leave!”
“You’re in trouble, aren’t you, Logan?” Wendy asked, wiping away tears with the back of her hand. “You need to go, kid. I’ll be fine,” she said, giving a small laugh. “I’m a tough old broad. Listen to your friend. Go. And don’t worry… I never saw you today.”
“Are you sure?” Logan asked, giving Wendy a hug.
Seti’s fingers itched to drag Logan up from the ground by his hair. “Logan!” he hissed. “The storm has ceased. They will be coming!”
“Go on. I’m fine,” Wendy said. She looked up at Seti, narrowing her eyes at him. “You take care of this boy, you hear me? Don’t let anybody hurt him, Seti. He’s like my own son.”
“I’m a big boy, Wendy,” Logan said. Seti could tell that Wendy’s declaration had embarrassed Logan by the blush that crept up his neck. “I can take care of myself.”
“Then go, already!” Wendy said, giving Logan a push.
Logan stood up, much to Seti’s relief. He grabbed Logan’s arm, pulling him bodily down the alley toward the street.
There was a huge crowd gathered outside the bar, voices chattering excitedly about the damage, survivors, bruised and bloody, wandering in shock along the sidewalk. Logan and Seti took advantag
e of the chaos, melting into the crowd and disappearing.
Chapter Six
“WE HAVE a problem.”
Silence met Perry’s angry whisper. Then a voice answered him in a clipped, cultured monotone. “You had better have a vital reason for calling me at this number. Any news less than catastrophic will prove detrimental to your health.”
“It’s gone. Is that cataclysmic enough for you?”
“Gone?” There was a hint of unease in the cultivated voice, a slight wavering of control. “What do you mean, it’s gone?”
“Just what I said. The sarcophagus has been destroyed, and the mummy is missing.”
“That’s ridiculous.” The voice dripped with derision. “The curse will not allow anyone to break the seals on the sarcophagus until the very last day of Seti’s sentence ends.”
“I know the fundamentals of the curse as well as you do, Ethan. Still, the mummy is gone. What does that tell you?”
Silence returned, thick and heavy with unspoken disbelief. “Surely you jest. Must I remind you of how little patience I have? Levity will get you killed, Perry.”
“Do I sound as if I’m joking? Your threats mean nothing to me at this point, Ethan,” Perry hissed, spittle coating the telephone receiver. “You were wrong! I’ve asked you repeatedly over the years to let me verify your research—”
“My data was sound, Perry, and my translation was accurate. The curse will be broken in exactly one month from today. You tire me with your incessant worrying.”
Perry snorted, a dry, humorless sound. “It appears that your translation is flawed, Ethan. Your dates are off by thirty days. That sarcophagus was broken out of, not into. He’s come back, and now he’s loose in New York.”
“That’s impossible!”
“Evidently not. This is what comes of your pretentious, arrogant, supercilious attitude, Ethan. You never trusted any of us with the translations. You had to prove that you were the most brilliant, the most crucial to our cause. You were so afraid that one of us might find an error in your work that—”
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