Mortal Temptations

by Allyson James

  “The big deal is we told you to stay put,” Nico said.

  Andreas looked at him. “I liked women better in the old days: obedient.”

  “I agree,” Nico said.

  Patricia’s glare was palpable. “Well, welcome to the twenty-first century. If we think men are idiots, we’re not afraid to tell them so.”

  “The point is, it was damn dangerous to leave the room.” Nico loved how Patricia’s green blue eyes flashed in rage, making her more beautiful than ever. He knew Demitri wouldn’t have allowed Patricia to sit and talk with anyone who wasn’t safe, but he was enjoying the argument. He enjoyed every aspect of being with Patricia.

  “Not really,” Patricia countered. “There are two big men on the door, courtesy of your friend the hotel owner. We noticed them. They wouldn’t have let us out if we’d tried.”

  Nico tugged her into his arms. “You scared me. I don’t like worrying that I’ve lost you.”

  She looked up at him in surprise. “You don’t need to worry about that.”

  He did, and he knew he did. He kissed her hair, pulled her close.

  “Anyway,” Rebecca said, still fuming. “We won’t be here long. We’ll visit the museum tomorrow, take photos of the other fragments, and be done.”

  It sounded so easy. Nico remembered the strange feeling he’d had on the street and knew it would not be as easy as Patricia and Rebecca supposed.

  He also thought of Andreas’s conviction that chasing after the inscription was yet another twist of the knife in their long torture.

  He held Patricia even closer, need sparking as it always did when he was near her. He had to have her, had to pleasure her. She was annoyed with him, but it didn’t matter; he would break through that and please her, or the pain would flare to make him crazy.

  When she looked up at him, she seemed to understand. Her compassion for him broke his heart, but he growled in animal-like madness as he swept her into his arms and carried her from the room.

  Rebecca and Andreas watched them go, but the distance between the two of them remained wide.

  16

  THE Egyptian Museum was crowded and dense, tourists pouring off buses to tramp through the five thousand years of history packed inside. Patricia tingled with excitement despite Nico’s bad mood, and she couldn’t wait to feel the vibrations of some of the most exquisite objects in the world.

  Rebecca confidently bypassed the long line to the Tutankhamun gallery, saying she’d show them even better artifacts stashed away in the basement. Patricia was eager to see the fragments, which a phone call yesterday had assured them were here.

  As they made their way into the administrative offices, people began to stop and greet Rebecca. She waved at men and hugged women, her shyness gone.

  One of the men offered to take them downstairs so they could see the ostracons. Patricia had brought her digital camera, complete with fresh batteries.

  The basement was even more densely packed than upstairs, with storage rooms and huge spaces crowded with shelves and boxes. Patricia wondered how anyone found anything down here, but their guide seemed to know his way around. A larger museum would be opening soon in Giza to take the load off this one, their guide said, then added, “Inshallah.”

  Their guide, whose name was Ali, stopped at a door and opened it with a key. Inside were shelves covered with grills, all locked. He led them unerringly to a grill whose lock looked newly cleaned and oiled, and opened it.

  “Two fragments found near Alexandria,” he said.

  He pulled out one piece of limestone, about two feet square. Andreas reached for it, but Rebecca beat him to it. She gazed down at the stone in reverence.

  The second fragment was larger, about two by four feet. Nico lifted that one, and Rebecca touched it, her eyes shining. Ali moved boxes from a rickety table, and Rebecca positioned both pieces on it.

  “This one first, I think,” she said, tracing the hieroglyphs on the smaller piece. “And the other one fit in between. Yes, that’s just lovely.”

  She gazed happily at them, unable to stop touching them. Patricia pulled out her camera and turned it on, waiting for the light to tell her all was ready.

  A shout from Nico startled her. She looked up to see Ali heft a sledgehammer and bring it straight down on the fragments.

  Rebecca screamed and dodged out of the way. The smaller piece shattered, and then Nico and Andreas were on him. Ali, a small, slim Egyptian man in his twenties, fought them off, suddenly having the strength of ten.

  Nico wrestled with him, while Rebecca tried to grab the pieces of fragments. Ali threw Andreas and Nico off like they weighed nothing and brought the sledgehammer up again. Andreas dragged Rebecca out of the way as the sledgehammer came down.

  Patricia watched in sickened horror as Ali pounded the fragments to dust. Nico tried to catch his arms and stop him, but Ali threw him backward across the room.

  Nico pushed himself up, his rage bringing out the divine light inside him. Andreas had already morphed to his leopard form, kicking out of his clothes and snarling like crazy.

  Ali brought the sledgehammer down one more time, then he wilted. The sledgehammer slid from his grip, and he crumpled to the floor, his eyes rolling back in his head.

  Andreas leapt on him, but Patricia rushed to them. “Wait. I don’t think—”

  Andreas flashed sharp teeth at her, but he backed off and sat on his haunches. Rebecca was crying, hugging pieces of limestone rubble to her chest.

  Nico retrieved the sledgehammer and stood above Ali. Ali opened his eyes and blinked up at them, then went pale with fright and started babbling in Arabic.

  Andreas growled again, lips curling back from his teeth. Rebecca wiped her eyes and dragged in a deep breath. “Leave him alone, Andreas. He doesn’t know what happened.”

  Rebecca spoke to him in fluent Arabic for a few moments, then Ali switched back to English. “I do not know why I did that. I could never do such a thing. A demon must have got me.”

  He climbed shakily to his feet, his face almost green with fear. He looked at Nico and Andreas, who surrounded him menacingly, and held up his hands. “I truly do not know. I would never destroy an artifact. Never.” Tears leaked from his eyes.

  “I believe him,” Patricia said. She quietly clicked off her camera, not needing it now. “But I don’t think it was a demon that possessed you, Ali. I think it was a goddess.”

  PATRICIA left the museum in fury, but Andreas and Nico seemed strangely subdued. “Dyons don’t have the brains to track down the fragments,” she said as they walked back to the hotel. “They can only follow us. But getting into the museum in broad daylight to attack would have been too hard for them. So she takes over the mind of an innocent to destroy the fragments once she knows where they are. We do all the work tracking them down; she walks in and takes over.” She raked a hand through her hair, wanting to scream in frustration. “What a bitch.”

  Rebecca nodded, her eyes glinting with the same anger. “Remember what I told you about my dissertation advisor? Same thing. I did the grunt work; she walked in and used every bit of it. But this is worse. Destroying an artifact is unforgivable. Unforgivable.” She stabbed the air for emphasis.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Nico said.

  “Of course it matters.” Patricia rounded on him in the crowded street. “It must have been the key to getting you free. Why else would she destroy it?”

  “He means it wasn’t meant to be,” Andreas said. “We weren’t meant to be free. It’s not going to happen.”

  “You can’t give up now,” Rebecca said, her face set in determination. “What we find on ostracons are mostly copies of other inscriptions, for practice learning hieroglyphs or to allow people far from a monument to read what was on it. All we have to do is find the original inscription. I remember some of what was on the first fragment. If we can find inscriptions with the same kind of theme, we can look until we find a match. We can—”

  She broke off as Andre
as seized her hand. “Peace, Becky. We’re finished. The inscription is destroyed. It was a nice try. Why don’t we just enjoy what time we have left?”

  Rebecca jerked away. “Forget it. I didn’t win all those research awards for stopping the minute it got hard. It’s just another challenge.”

  “Exactly,” Patricia said. “I’m good at tracking down elusive antiques, and Rebecca is good at tracking down elusive information. Between the two of us, you can’t lose.”

  Nico and Andreas exchanged a look. Patricia recognized the look for what it was, and her rage mounted. They’d given up, tired from struggling to free themselves. They didn’t want to hope.

  She folded her arms, not letting Nico go anywhere. “I refuse to run back home with my tail between my legs. I will keep searching and helping Rebecca. Besides, I’m in Egypt for the first time in my life, and I want to see a pyramid.”

  Nico gazed down at her from his height, his eyes dark as sin. She knew she’d never find a man like him again.

  “All right,” he said quietly.

  Patricia had drawn a breath to fling more arguments at him, and she stopped in surprise. Nico gave her a nod and turned her to walk next to him again. “Keep looking,” he said as they went. “I won’t stop you.”

  He wouldn’t explain what he meant and was quiet all the way back to the hotel.

  THE pyramids of Giza, across the river from Cairo, were every tourist’s destination. Nico, Patricia, and Rebecca found people from every corner of Europe, North America, and Asia waiting in lines to ride camels or be ushered across the rocks by tour guides to the base of the ancient pyramids.

  Andreas had refused to come, much to Rebecca’s annoyance. She pretended she didn’t care as she walked with Patricia, but Nico sensed her hurt.

  Nico knew exactly why Andreas had remained behind. The feeling of being watched hadn’t left either of them, and Andreas had faded into the shadows to see if he could flush out their mysterious follower. It hadn’t been Hera or a Dyon; they were far more direct and gave off different vibrations.

  Patricia’s face lit up as they came to the base of the Great Pyramid, a structure built before Nico was born. Even the famous Tutankhamun had considered the pyramids of Giza to be ancient.

  He looked up the great blocks of stone, while Patricia and Rebecca took pictures of each other with it in the background. Climbing the pyramids was now forbidden, but that didn’t keep them from scrambling around the base, looking in wonder at the giant blocks of stone. Rebecca knew much about it and kept up a babbling commentary to Patricia.

  Nico scanned the crowd with caution, on the lookout for Dyons. Now that the fragments were destroyed, perhaps the Dyons would back off, but then, with Rebecca’s and Patricia’s determination to keep looking, Hera might well decide the best way to stop them was with their deaths.

  He looked back at Patricia and Rebecca in time to see them disappear around a rock. Cursing under his breath, he leapt lightly to the top of the slab he had been leaning against, to see them descending to the temple behind the pyramid.

  Nico could move fast when he wanted to and skimmed over the stones on their trail. He saw them stop and greet an Egyptian in a Western business suit, odd attire for this dusty venture.

  Nico moved toward them, wondering if this was the antiquities dealer they’d spoken to before at the hotel. Patricia was certainly chattering with him without fear, Rebecca nodding at points. Nico slowed a little but continued his descent.

  Then he felt it, the whisper of wrongness that had bothered him ever since they’d walked out of the Cairo airport. The whisper touched him, and the Egyptian man looked up at him.

  He saw a sudden flash of light, blinding power that seared his eyes, and when he blinked them clear, the Egyptian man, Rebecca, and Patricia were gone.

  ANDREAS reached him within half an hour of Nico’s call. “What the fuck?” he panted, drawn and gray with the effort of getting there.

  “The man following us was a god,” Nico said, his throat tight. “I don’t know what god, but that explains why we couldn’t track him down. If they don’t want to be seen, they’re not seen. Patricia wouldn’t have seen his aura, either, unless he let her; it doesn’t matter how psychic she is.”

  “Damn it.” Andreas looked around the crowds of tourists and camels, Egyptians in caftans and Western clothes, colors amid the dusty white. None of them seemed to have noticed the flash of white or the three vanishing. “What the hell did he take them for?”

  “With a god it could be anything.”

  Andreas growled agreement. Gods were capricious. He might want to share a good wine with Patricia and Rebecca because he liked them, or he might want to father a new race with them. It depended on who he was and what agenda he had. And if he was friend of Hera’s . . .

  “You didn’t recognize him?” Andreas demanded.

  “No. He was hiding his true form and hiding it well.”

  “So what do we do? Tear apart Egypt, or toddle quietly back to our rooms and wait for him to return them, if he ever does?”

  “They might be far from Egypt by now,” Nico said.

  “I know that.” Andreas flashed a scowl around the crowds. “You know, it would be great if I could say this is the best thing, the easiest way to get ourselves away from them, but you know I can’t.”

  “No.” Nico knew he didn’t have to say anything else.

  Andreas had his hands on his hips, still scanning the crowd. “Now that we know we’re looking for a god, we might be able to spot him.”

  Nico wasn’t so sure. Gods were experts at keeping themselves hidden. They’d become especially adept in the last millennia or two as belief in the old gods was all but destroyed.

  Nico had already searched the spot from which the three had vanished and found nothing, not even a disturbance in the dust. He and Andreas looked again, then walked around the pyramid and gazed into the shadows of the entrance.

  Patricia suddenly stepped out into the bright sunlight and smiled at him.

  “Patricia, damn it,” he said, starting toward her. “Where did you go? I thought—”

  She didn’t seem to hear him. She laughed and beckoned to him. “Well, come on.”

  Nico turned to call to Andreas, and when he looked back at the entrance, Patricia was gone again.

  With Andreas right behind him, Nico dove past the line of tourists and into the dark hole of the pyramid.

  PATRICIA had no idea where she was, but the vibrations of the ancient tomb were spectacular. The place was lit with generator lights, showing all four walls and ceiling painted with beautiful, bright scenes of Egyptian life. The tomb must be thousands upon thousands of years old, the vibrations so strong she had to raise an extra shield to protect herself.

  Rebecca, who didn’t have to worry about psychic residue, simply gazed at the walls with the hunger of an avid archaeologist.

  “I’ve never seen these before,” she said in wonder. “I can’t believe how well preserved it is. No one’s tried to chisel off the panels, the paint hasn’t faded, the colors are as fresh as the day they went on. Of course, the Egyptians knew how to make things last. It’s amazing how smart and practical they were and how romantic at the same time.”

  The woman was nearly salivating.

  “They are coming, yes?” their Egyptian friend, Mr. Ajeed, said.

  Patricia couldn’t quite remember how she’d gotten here, into this deep tomb that Ajeed promised held wonderful artifacts. The best in Egypt, he’d said, but a well-kept secret. They would have to traverse many secret passages to find it.

  Patricia had no memory of walking down here, though her legs were tired enough. She’d gone back outside, to see Nico staring at her in amazement, though she didn’t quite remember that journey, either. She’d told Nico to follow, but he was taking his time.

  “Why don’t I know about these wall paintings?” Rebecca was asking. “This is my field: reading and translating inscriptions. When one is uncovered, someon
e calls me or at least sends me an e-mail. I’ve never heard about these.”

  Ajeed smiled, showing white, even teeth. “That is because, my dear young woman, it has not yet been discovered.”

  “Huh?” Rebecca stared at him. “If it hasn’t been discovered, how did you know the way down here? Giza’s been gone over pretty thoroughly. I’d be surprised if someone doesn’t know about it.”

  “It is not in Giza.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?” Rebecca demanded. “We didn’t walk that far; we should be just behind the Great Pyramid, in one of the temples.”

  Ajeed smiled. “You must trust me. You need answers, and I have found them for you.”

  Patricia frowned at him. When they’d met him in the lobby of the hotel, Ajeed had seemed an ordinary antiques dealer, the same kind she’d met in her business travels before. He dealt in antique furniture, mostly from the Ottoman period, and sold to dealers throughout Europe, the U.S., and the Arab world.

  Patricia had tried to read his aura, on the lookout for Dyons in disguise—not that they seemed bright enough to use disguises—but she’d found the aura of an ordinary person. Nothing supernatural about him.

  Without changing expression, Patricia let her shields down again, touching Ajeed with her psychic senses.

  She nearly screamed. The power that emanated from him was brighter and fiercer than any she’d ever seen. Even Andreas’s and Nico’s auras weren’t as strong, and Andreas and Nico had knocked her to her knees.

  Ajeed lifted his hand, and abruptly the white-hot light vanished. Patricia gasped, finding herself flat on the floor, her head pounding.

  “I am so sorry, Miss Lake,” he said, reaching down to help her. “I should have anticipated you would try that again.”

  “What are you?” She refused his offered hand and climbed painfully to her feet herself. “No, wait, maybe I don’t want to know.”

  Rebecca was looking on in shock. “What do you mean, what is he? What did he do to you?”