“Mine,” Anubis said.
Eleanor didn’t know if he meant the rings or her, because they seemed one and the same.
Against her cheek his breath was fetid. She struggled to reach one ring and felt a small victory when her fingers closed over it. She offered the ring to him, his hand now spread before her. The ring would never fit his finger, she thought, yet her blood—still coating the ring—eased its passage. This ring was silver, impressed with Anubis’s own likeness that emerged as the blood funneled away.
“Soon, daughter,” Anubis said. His hand reached for her, clawed fingers tangling through her hair. She bowed her head and soil cascaded over her shoulder, down to her bare feet. Bury me, bury me here and let me rot . . .
“Eleanor!”
She startled at the sound of her name, but could not move from Anubis’s touch. The voice was familiar, and she struggled to come up with a name for it so that she might also give it power. By the time she did—Virgil!—there was a growling wolf at her side, lunging for Anubis. All four paws struck the god, but didn’t send him toppling. Mallory sprang back, onto the temple floor. Anubis’s hand uncoiled from Eleanor’s hair. Freed, she staggered backward. She turned to run the length of the firelit pool, toward the pale green bedroom she could see at its end. It was an image from a childhood book, Alice running back up the rabbit hole as she returned to her proper world. Or had she? Which world was proper? Had Alice ever known?
“Virgil . . . Virg—”
He flopped at her side, no longer wolf but man. The warmth of an Egyptian night was consumed by the reality of France as Anubis withdrew. Eleanor kicked the balcony doors shut, as if it would keep Egypt and Anubis out. She sprawled beside Mallory on the floor. He was cold and shivering, naked but for his silver ring. Eleanor drew a blanket from the bed to cover them both. She thought her hands would be bloodied from having held the rings, but they were clean.
Mallory reached for her under the blanket, curling around her with arms and legs both. There was no politeness to his touch now, only a hungry urgency that Eleanor met with equal appetite. She stretched against him, into him, opening her mouth to his kiss. He tasted like brandy and anger and heat, and in the confusing wake of whatever they had just beheld, Eleanor could not get enough. Each taste served as a handhold to keep her from sliding back down the rabbit hole.
His hands moved down her back, tracing the line of her body beneath her thin robe and nightgown. Down and down, over the curve of her bottom, grasping her hard and fitting her against his naked body until very little of Virgil Mallory was left to Eleanor’s imagination.
“Mine,” Mallory said against her mouth, and it brought back the memory of Anubis. Had Anubis tried to claim her, too?
Eleanor slid her hands across Mallory’s chest, across the scattering of dark hair and the scar that would forever mark him. Her fingers learned the way of his chest, shoulders and collarbones and neck, until they dug into his tangle of brown and blond hair. Her fingers—no claws, she told herself—twined into his hair to keep him where he was. Her body arched hard against him.
“Virgil.”
Mallory shifted when she spoke his name, bearing her flat to the floor, where he growled. The low sound rumbled up from his belly, into chest and throat. His head nudged hers and Eleanor turned hers to the side, remembering what he had done in the library, remembering his mark upon her. The press of his teeth against her skin was tender this time.
“Eleanor.”
Mallory whispered her name against her neck, then his tongue rasped over the skin he had just bitten. She felt the brief brush of his cheek against hers before he withdrew. He untangled himself from the blanket and stood.
“Damnation,” he snarled. He stalked away from Eleanor, lamplight gilding his naked body.
Eleanor tried to think of something other than the naked man before her. She failed. She had seen him in the Egyptian temple, naked after his transformation from wolf to man, but there had been considerably less light. Here—
“Vir—”
“Damnable rutting beast.”
The curses trailed into a steady stream of words Eleanor could not follow. Mid-rant, Mallory appeared to realize he was still naked, his clothes strewn about the floor, and he freed the sheet from the bed. He wound it around his torso as he continued his tirade against himself.
Eleanor picked herself off the floor, tossing the blanket back to the bed. From its tangles spilled her grandfather’s journal, and she picked it up. Her legs were unsteady and she didn’t go far, sinking into the chair that stood beside the bed.
“Virgil.”
“I am utterly repulsive.” He stared at her, his expression some mixture of disgust and lust. “Loathsome. Repugnant.”
His hair stood up in wild spikes, though from her own ministrations or his, Eleanor could not say. She bit her lower lip, trying not to laugh, because she didn’t find Mallory repulsive in the least. He was the most fascinating person she had ever met.
“I am unfit for human company. I am revolting and should be locked away where I might not disgrace anyone with my—”
“Virgil!” Eleanor came out of the chair and crossed to his side, trying to take his hands. Each time she tried, he moved, refusing to be touched or held. “Virgil.”
“Lust is a sin, Miss Folley, and this—” He reached out as though he meant to touch the mark he had left on her, but in the end refrained. “This . . . ” He gestured to the room, to the ruin of his clothes and his current undressed state. “That—was lust.” Mallory pointed to the floor where they had tangled. “Forgive me.”
“Then you,” Eleanor said, “must forgive me as well, for my heart is plainly as wanting as yours.” She stared at Mallory and he stood there, looking as if he had been struck with a fist rather than words. His jaw worked, but no sound came out. “Do not tell me you were alone under that blanket.”
Mallory scrubbed a hand through his hair in an effort to tame it. Slowly, it began to lie down. “Mmm.”
Eleanor tried not to smile at this simple logic and failed, but it was a soft smile, one she hoped was not boastful but rather understanding.
“Mmm,” she echoed. She looked past him to the bedroom door that was, thankfully, closed. She could only imagine what Margarite would have said, had she seen them tangled up. “What brings you to my room this late?”
“Damnation. What was that?” He leveled a finger toward the balcony doors.
Now they looked like doors and nothing more. Mallory strode to them and grasped the doorknobs. Eleanor wanted to tell him not to, for she felt certain they would find themselves in Egypt again, but their opening brought only a blast of cool French air. Mallory stared at the night, then thrust the doors shut once more.
“I thought I was dreaming—there were four rings in my hand, Mallory, and we don’t have four rings.” At his deepening frown she said, “I couldn’t sleep, was pacing the floor, and then . . . Anubis.”
“If you weren’t sleeping, you couldn’t dream.”
Mallory’s words left her cold. She moved to the bed and crawled back into the mess she had made of it. The sheets no longer felt gritty, only soft, if cool, and she smoothed the blanket flat. She pulled her grandfather’s journal into her lap and made another attempt at explanation, to both herself and Mallory.
“I was reading because I couldn’t sleep. There was a knock on the door, and when I opened it, a temple.” She exhaled, thinking she could still smell the rotting underworld. She pressed her hands against her cheeks, trying to keep herself in the here and now. “I had the rings and was giving them to Anubis.”
Mallory, still sheet-wrapped, crossed to the bed and sank to the edge of the mattress. “Christian said Anubis was using us to gather the rings. Do you think . . . ?” He trailed off, then lifted his sharp gaze to Eleanor. “What if you can’t come back?”
The question didn’t surprise her, because the sensation of standing in that temple with Anubis’s soil pouring over her was still fr
esh in her mind. She had wanted only to be buried; everything else had been lost. Could Anubis take her away? Did he have that ability, or must one freely surrender? She considered her mother and grandmother before her, and still had no answers. Surely her mother had willingly followed Sagira’s path, but Sagira’s own . . .
She touched her neck, feeling the lingering mark of Mallory’s bite. Mallory’s eyes followed the motion.
“I can’t leave this,” she said, and while she believed it, she also believed in the feeling of the underworld, of the dirt piling over her. She couldn’t leave either and didn’t know what it meant.
As if her words had settled an ancient argument, Mallory nodded. He crawled up the length of the bed and nudged Eleanor into the pillows until Mallory was cradled between Eleanor’s legs. He ran his hands down her body to the curve of her bottom, where he held her hard against him again.
“You aren’t going anywhere,” he said. “And if you do go anywhere, you’re going to have a companion.”
Eleanor let her thoughts drift to fanciful places, where she and Mallory stepped through the Glass and were trapped in ancient Egypt, much as her mother may have been. She brushed a tangle of Mallory’s hair from his cheek, fingers tracing his beard.
“Gin will be with me,” she teased.
Mallory’s hands tightened on her, his lips curling with what she took for an amused snarl. “Something like that.” He stretched beyond her, to claim her grandfather’s journal. He opened it between them and smoothed the pages flat. “Find anything of use in here?”
Eleanor looked to the pages, trying to place her attention there and not on Mallory sprawled against her.
“Quite a bit,” she said and turned the page in the journal for him, to show him where she had left off. “As any good archaeologist would, Tau included illustrations of the rings.”
“We’re fortunate your father still had this,” Mallory said, his fingers brushing over the illustrations of the Lady’s rings. On the lapis ring, Tau had added a smudge of blue, and on the carnelian, a faint wash of coral.
Fortunate, but Eleanor wasn’t surprised her father had kept the journal. While it may not have held sentimental value to Renshaw Folley, it was a piece of the fading past. “I don’t think he could bear to destroy it.”
Her grandfather Tau had made notations beside each ring, of markings, size, weights, and composition. Notes on where the rings had been found were also included—initially, the rings had been discovered together, in a shallow broken pottery bowl that had since been lost. The journal was—not surprisingly for an Egyptologist, no matter his native tongue—in French.
“God willing, we won’t need that bowl,” Mallory said as he read on.
Eleanor’s fingers hovered over the image of the fourth ring, seeing it in detail for the first time. It was made of silver and featured a likeness of Anubis embossed into the metal. Eleanor shuddered at the pointed jackal face. It was the ring she had seen moments ago.
Mallory’s fingers traced Tau’s careful writing. “Listen to this. ‘Sagira cut her hand on a pottery fragment this evening. The doctor says it is no matter, he isn’t concerned, but there was so much blood.’ And later, ‘The wound is like none I have seen; it refuses to close. The doctor stitched it, yet it still weeps.’ ” Mallory turned deeper into the journal. “ ‘Dalila found me as I worked, said her mother was not in the tent. I thought she played at a game, and followed. Sagira was nowhere to be found, and later I realized that neither were the rings. A storm is rising.’ ”
Eleanor made Mallory read the words twice more, pressing herself into the pillows as he finished again. A chill moved up her spine, but this was not from the wind still rattling the doors. “She was there, Virgil. There when her mother vanished.” She felt a scream clawing for release. How could her mother have placed her in the same situation?
“See here, how the Lady lies,” her mother had said, and swept her brush over the timeworn bones in their cradle of sand.
How the Lady lies . . .
Eleanor knelt beside her mother and watched as her bedtime stories came to life, as a woman who should have been only fiction emerged from the desert.
“Maybe that’s why your father fought so hard for you to place this behind you?” Mallory asked. “He knew exactly what Dalila had been through and didn’t want you—”
“I used to have nightmares about it, Virgil,” she interrupted. “About my mother vanishing. My father didn’t want to talk about it, because she was dead, end of story.”
But it had never been that.
“For the longest time, I thought I was insane, that she was really dead and I was inventing memories of that day to prove otherwise. While I think my father did try to shield me in some ways . . . I don’t think it helped me.”
Silence held until Mallory said, “I thought that too, you know.”
Eleanor closed her grandfather’s journal between them and watched Mallory’s face. As distrustful as she had been of him before, she could not imagine sharing this journey with anyone else. He knew what it was to live a life of doubt, of conflict. He knew what it was to deny a thing inside himself, even as it clawed to get out. When it came, her smile was slow.
“That I was insane?”
Without the book between them, Mallory slid closer, hands encircling Eleanor’s waist. “No, but that I might have been. The first time I became the wolf.” He looked to the balcony doors as if pondering something he didn’t know how to say. “I pushed it away, called it a dream. I tried to run from so many things, whereas you, you tried to confront what scared you.”
Eleanor touched the fall of Mallory’s hair against his cheek. “Not always,” she said, reminding him that she had also run, and had kept running for years on end. “I’m not running now, Virgil. Not from this or from you.” The words should have embarrassed her, but when Mallory pushed up to kiss her, she could only find promise in them.
Eleanor woke abruptly to the sound of a slamming door. She stared at the room around her, watching Mallory stalk across its width. He was looking for something, his shadow prowling after him in the low lamplight. Eleanor pushed the blanket off and looked to the balcony doors. It wasn’t Egypt she saw or Anubis’s temple room, only the sleeping French countryside.
“Mallory?”
They had fallen asleep reading the journal, paging through more of Tau’s observations, even if little more was revealed. Mallory was not yet clothed, still wrapped in the bedsheet from earlier. When she spoke his name, he looked at her only briefly, then reached for the small trunk which had carried her few belongings.
“We aren’t doing this.” He didn’t speak the words so much as growl them. He opened the latches on the trunk, each sounding like a revolver’s sharp report in the small room.
“What aren’t we doing?”
Sleep still clung to Eleanor, and she had difficulty shifting her thoughts from the pleasant tangle of sleeping with Mallory to this—him clearly upset by something. His mood set her on edge, and she felt that darkness creep closer. Whether Anubis or something else, Eleanor felt it like a yawning mouth meant to consume her.
Mallory ripped open the wardrobe and reached in for Eleanor’s clothing. “This. We are not staying. We are not looking for that cursed fourth ring. Let it stay lost—let it be, wherever it is. If we leave it be, all is well.”
His words felt like a pendulum, set swinging by rough hands that did not care what it threw into motion. Eleanor slid to the edge of the bed, and while her bare feet pressed into the carpet, she didn’t feel entirely present within the room. She felt she was on that pendulum, moving to and fro, about to fly into the darkness worming closer.
“Mallory—”
“And do not call me that!” He turned on her, his eyes ablaze with the gold of the wolf inside him. He threw handfuls of blouses and skirts into the open trunk, then stalked to the foot of the bed.
“Have you gone mad? What in hell are you—”
Mallory lunged for
her, taking her roughly by the arms. Within that hold, Eleanor felt the first uncurling. The waking of the darkness inside her, an echo of Anubis’s own darkness that had been content to slumber. Until now.
Soon, Eleanor.
She tried to twist out of Mallory’s furious hold, but couldn’t. He wouldn’t let her go.
“If you think I am going to endure what your father did—mourning all those years, knowing you would rather have that life than this life—you are mad. I am not letting you go.” His voice deepened until every word was edged in a snarl. “I am not letting you open the Glass, because I will not lose you, Eleanor. I will not!”
Each word felt like a carefully aimed barb, and she twisted hard to remove herself from his grasp. She slid down the length of the bed to place the carved footboard between them. She held to the wood, her legs unsteady beneath her, as Mallory’s tirade continued unbroken.
“I don’t care if this destroys your life’s work,” he said as he stalked after her. He gave her no space to move. “I don’t care if the entire community laughs at your failure. I don’t care.”
Eleanor felt the world around her going dim. Anger closed a hard hand around her, and she tried to sidestep Mallory. But he was there, in front of her no matter which way she turned. He gave her no quarter, pressing her almost the way he had on the Nuit. Close, growing, demanding.
“What are you doing?” She asked the question, but feared she already knew. Mallory had told her in the temple, that anger made his beast come. Fury strained her voice now, stole her ability to think of anything other than the hot rush of rage bubbling inside her.
“Virgil—I thought we—”
Eleanor couldn’t find the words and took a staggering step back. This placed her against the wall, with nowhere else to go. Mallory would not cease, stalking toward her; the bed notched into the corner, her other side was blocked by a chest of drawers. She reached for the chest to steady herself, but saw only the line of scars up her hand, pale and ragged and—
Rings of Anubis: A Folley & Mallory Adventure Page 33
