Sagira moved toward the group with the sound of rustling bells and shells. Sagira gathered Eleanor’s hands into her own and took a long look at her.
The Lady, as flesh and bone and blood, and Eleanor could only stare, thinking of Sagira’s body in the desert, given no proper burial. What would have led to such an end? What would make her flee this place? Here and now, she was beautiful, unlike the image Eleanor had often held in her mind, that of a smooth-faced woman immortalized in ancient stone. She was a living woman, time having made its mark upon her. Lines from laughter and tears spread outward from her expressive brown eyes. Her mouth pursed in surprise when she saw the rings, bent fingers reaching cautiously toward them. Eleanor extended her hand, seeing a similarity to her grandmother’s fingers in her own. This realization was like a prick of electricity down her spine.
“Oh.” Sagira’s fingers played lightly over the rings Eleanor wore. “I never thought I see them again. When Dalila come to me, she left one ring . . . on the other side, much to the . . . dismay . . . of Defenders.”
“Defenders of the Protectorate?” Mallory asked.
Sagira’s piercing eyes swung to him. “Indeed, young man. They come through and were as trapped as my daughter was.” She laughed in obvious amusement and freed Eleanor’s hands. “It give them a new, better admiration for their country.”
It would also explain why such a group had existed for so very long, Eleanor thought. Men—some of whom were also jackals—desperate to keep Egypt’s treasures for Egypt.
“You should have these back in your care,” Eleanor said and moved to take the rings from her fingers. Sagira held up a hand.
“No. I am not she you must entrust these to.”
Eleanor bristled at the idea of what Sagira meant. Did they belong to Anubis? Was it true that if his Glass existed, then he must? What did such a thing mean for every god the world gave name to?
“Eleanor,” Dalila said. “Walk with me among the trees. We have much to discuss.”
Her mother’s voice drew her out of the more troubling questions that wanted to drown her. She looked at Mallory, wanting him to join the conversation, but Sagira laughed.
“Go with your mother. I know how to entertain these men.” Sagira’s kohl-lined eyes fell on Auberon and Gin.
Gin’s expression welcomed the idea of entertainment, whereas Sabrina Irving looked about to be sick. Despite everything, Eleanor’s heart went out to the woman.
Eleanor followed her mother into the lower court, where myrrh trees flourished. They bordered T-shaped pools, making small, shaded havens. The number of people who congregated in them astonished Eleanor; it felt like they were all waiting for something.
“We have awaited you, daughter,” Dalila said as if she could read Eleanor’s thoughts. She guided Eleanor toward a wall decorated with carvings that Eleanor had only seen in their ruin. They stood fresh and new now, vibrant colors crisp against the stone.
“There were . . . ” Dalila struggled to find the correct word. “Portents. Your grandmother could almost always still feel the rings, so long did she wear them.”
“Portents?” Eleanor asked.
Dalila inclined her head, a gesture Eleanor wished she could say she remembered, but her mother’s bearing was utterly new to her: regal, reserved, and unknown.
“You gave Akila a curious look, daughter. Is she known to you? She is a Defender and walks between the worlds, by rituals known only to her and her people.”
Eleanor realized she meant the silver-haired woman. “She . . . ” Eleanor felt at a loss for words. The people in the canyon had been Defenders? She would never live that down with Mallory, and regretted doubting Christian’s word—but how could she not?
She reached a cautious hand out to the wall closest to them, to touch the image of Hatshepsut shown as a sphinx trampling her enemies. Eleanor was uncertain of what she should say to her mother. All this time, all this distance, and there Eleanor stood, tongue-tied.
“It took me the longest time,” Dalila finally said. “To touch any part of this world. I thought anything I did touch might send me back, but the days passed, and I realized I had no way to open the Glass.”
“But you didn’t want to come back.” It wasn’t a question.
“I did not,” she agreed.
Hearing the admission was less terrible than Eleanor had feared it would be.
“There is no easy way to say that I never felt a part of that world,” Dalila said. She reached a hand toward Eleanor, perhaps meaning to stroke it over her hair, but pulled back before she could. “I did miss you.”
The words, when at last they came, spilled in a rush from Eleanor. She let them come as they would, before she lost both the nerve and the opportunity.
“I’ve spent my life looking for you. I had always hoped to have this conversation and now, here I stand and have no clue what to say to you. When I was younger, I used to think I would bring you home to Da and that everything would mend itself. But look at you.” Eleanor looked at her mother, a woman who looked like she had been born here. “You’re already home.”
Dalila’s onyx braids whispered against her shoulders. “I will remain with Sagira and the pharaoh and serve them both as long as I am able.” There was only the briefest of pauses before she asked, “How is Ren?”
Eleanor pressed a hand to her aching side and debated how to answer the question. Her father was not the man her mother had married, nor the man who had lost her. Eleanor looked back to the temple, where she saw Mallory crossing toward the huddled Irvings. Howard held fast to Sabrina, defensive in the face of Mallory’s approach. Marriage, Eleanor decided, was entirely too complicated.
“I think the honest answer would break your heart,” Eleanor eventually said. She looked back to her mother; those eyes evaded Eleanor’s, bright teeth biting into a plump lower lip. That expression was familiar, the look Dalila had always held before breaking something open. Equal parts anticipation and dread.
“Tell me you have not spent your life the way I spent mine.”
“There was only ever you,” Eleanor said. The same despair she had known countless times over the course of this journey welled up inside her. She didn’t want to be angry, but was. Angry and sad both—wasn’t that what her father had said? “I had to know. Da said you were dead. Over and over he told me you were gone.” Eleanor’s voice broke, thinking of him in his hospital bed, a similar wound in his side.
“I meant to say goodbye, Eleanor. After we found the Lady.” Dalila’s voice took on a new urgency, and she turned toward Eleanor, reaching out to grip her arm now. The touch made Eleanor flinch where once it would have flooded her with comfort. “I would not be so cruel as to leave you without a word, you must know that.”
“But you still planned to go!” Eleanor hated the way she sounded—like a child. And yet how much of her still was the child who had witnessed her mother vanishing that day? That little girl who stood bleeding in the desert as she lost everything she had known.
“I did.” Dalila released Eleanor and turned away. “None of this is fair. I never intended for you to lose me like that, Eleanor. I wanted you to understand that I had never felt a part of that world, so long as my mother was in this one. I never wanted you to know that same ache.”
Eleanor laughed, a hollow sound that broke from her like a bark. “How could I not? It was all I ever knew.”
“Those men—”
“Don’t put this on them.” Eleanor’s voice was rough as she turned on her mother. “You wanted this, no matter what actually occurred.”
Dalila looked to the star-spangled sky arching over them. “I thought your father would explain. I never thought you would search—”
“And don’t you dare place this on his shoulders, either. He tried. He told me you died that day.”
“Perhaps I did, Eleanor. At least the mother you knew died.” Dalila trailed her fingers over the carvings on the temple wall, sand whispering out of the nooks as she
went. “I have not spoken English in years. This world has shaped me into someone else, into Dalila el Jabari, daughter of the Queen of the Mirror.”
“Better ‘mirror’ than ‘rabbit hole’?” Eleanor’s words were bitter as she thought of her grandmother’s name written on the temple walls. It made a strange sense now, that two women from the future had given Hatshepsut’s people the notion for the portal Anubis could open.
Eleanor knew the woman she had looked for all these years was truly gone, lost that day in the desert. It wasn’t a matter of her mother not loving her, or not loving her enough; they had shared a journey, Dalila searching for her own mother as Eleanor had searched for hers. Eleanor knew her mother understood the pain and the longing better than anyone else ever could.
“I do love you, my daughter, but my place is here.”
At the touch of a familiar hand against her shoulder, Eleanor turned into her mother’s arms. The embrace was awkward, the child in Eleanor trying to hold the mother who had vanished so long ago. She smelled different, of lotus and oil and the paints that decorated her skin, but deep down, when Eleanor closed her eyes and shut the rest of this world away, she found that Dalila still smelled like her mother. Like home.
Home. Where she belonged.
Eleanor extracted herself from the embrace and looked at the woman before her a long moment. Dalila did not flinch under the study, but looked at Eleanor in kind. Eleanor was curious what her mother thought, but did not ask. She wasn’t sure she wanted to know; Eleanor had spent her life much as her own mother had, chasing a thing that didn’t want chasing. What would she think of her daughter’s masculine clothing? What would she think of the woman her daughter had become? Eleanor wanted to tell her mother about Virgil, about wandering the Egyptian halls of the Louvre, and of the mechanical pterodactyls in the Exposition’s gallery hall, but she knew these were matters that no longer concerned Dalila el Jabari.
“Is it possible to get home from here?” Eleanor extended her hand, the rings winking in the moonlight.
“You command the Glass,” Dalila said as if this were an ordinary function of life here. She took hold of Eleanor’s hand to brush a thumb over the rings. “Anubis has judged you, my daughter, and he will send you home.” Dalila’s expression suddenly filled with mischief. “After you return his rings to him.”
Virgil stared at the dust-coated casket and the Irvings who stood nearby, and gritted his teeth. It should never have come to this, their daughter unearthed from her resting place, but Virgil had trouble censuring them, for what would he do if it were his own child? To be confronted with the miraculous and magical every day, yet not be able to have his heart’s desire, could not have been an easy thing for Howard Irving. To see the possibility that lay beyond grief, to imagine Caroline whole and living once more: how tempting a thing it must be to a father.
Virgil touched the silver ring he wore. There had been times he wished his life might be lived over again, that he could change decisions he had made; that he might take back the night on the train and see Caroline again. But one look at Eleanor told him that was no way to live. He watched her speak, some distance away, with her mother. Eleanor’s face showed, at first, pain . . . and then slow understanding.
No one stopped him when he approached Howard and Sabrina. They looked at him with matching expressions—though not expressions he would have expected. They both smiled.
“Your lady friend must give the rings to Anubis,” Howard said, drawing himself to his full height. “We also require an audience with him.”
Virgil stared at Howard and Sabrina and clasped his hands to stop himself from giving them both a hard shake. Did Irving believe it was so simple? That they could petition Anubis and Caroline would return like abducted Persephone having been freed from Hades’s hellish clutches?
“Caroline is dead, and you should let her rest.” Virgil was certain he had never said those words aloud before. Speaking them now was a relief, as if he were finally setting a weight down.
“Have you?” Sabrina asked him in a whisper.
The question caught Virgil off guard, and he said nothing. If his silence damned him, then so be it, but the satisfied smirk on Sabrina’s face told him she wouldn’t hear whatever he said. The Irvings wanted their daughter back, come hell or high water. Or, Virgil considered, come hell or Ammit, the monster who sat ever-ready to devour an unworthy soul.
“You are a curiosity, Virgil Mallory,” Howard said, so softly that none around them might hear. “You are also an abomination, a creature I have never understood even if I have employed your foul kind in my work. Yet there were nights I prayed our Caroline would come back, even as such a monster. We slept near her grave with the hope she would, but she never did. You were chosen, you took her, and yet she never . . . ” He trailed off and scrubbed his shaking hand across his mouth. “I had to find other ways.”
“Do you still taste her blood in your mouth in the night, Mallory?” asked Sabrina.
The idea of Caroline’s parents sleeping beside her grave horrified Virgil. It came as no surprise that Howard knew his true nature, given his Mistral ties, but that they knew of his role in Caroline’s death—that was something of a shock.
The idea that Irving had employed Virgil’s “kind” in his work turned Virgil’s thoughts to the train and Caroline’s freshly dead body. The jackals—had Irving sent them to escort his daughter in her own perilous work? They could have carried word of Virgil’s involvement back to Irving easily enough. Irving used people as he saw fit, no matter their nature.
“Anubis will see,” Sabrina said. She rocked back and forth and wrapped her arms around herself. “Anubis will understand all that has happened. He will see you for what you are, Mallory—never a son to us, never a husband to Caroline. A foul creature guided by his own needs. He will see the wrong life was taken. All will be made right.”
In the early days after Caroline’s death, Virgil had believed those things, especially the notion he had never been a proper husband to her. He had spent long nights questioning how he might have done everything differently, how he might have replayed the entire hand he’d been dealt. He had, for lack of a better description, indeed lay awake with the taste of Caroline’s blood still in his mouth. Sabrina would have enjoyed his guilt, he was certain.
Those nights had given way to hazy days where he struggled to make amends for all he had done, for all he hadn’t managed to do. If he had found better methods to control the beast; if he had sought a teacher; if he had not let his blind rage consume him that night. If, if, if. But this game had only shown Virgil that the world was imperfect, for he could play it with Caroline’s actions, too. And if her own father had known of her duplicitous nature, surely he bore a measure of the blame himself.
Placing blame helped no one, Virgil knew. He had made what amends he could.
As for bringing Caroline back to life, that was surely an impossible feat, even for Anubis.
“You will never know what I went through after Caroline’s death,” Virgil told them. “Even if I told you, you would not care or believe. I loved her, but that means little in the face of your own love for her and your loss. I wished for so many things with her, only to be denied because Caroline’s work always took her away.”
Was it doubt that flickered over Sabrina’s face? He saw the brief drop of her eyes, from his face to her own clutched hands. Virgil didn’t know what to take it for. He knew that in the end, his words would be discarded; they would forever side with their daughter, which was as it should have been. But to say the words for his own benefit and relief— He swallowed hard and attended to that task. This confession. The wolf inside him curled close.
“When I realized it was her on that train—” His voice broke, but he felt no shame. He gave himself up to the feeling of loss all over again, and—word by word—began to finally set it aside. “It was too late. There was no going back. Her blood was on my hands, and that will be a thing I will forever live wit
h.” Live with, but it won’t strangle me. No more. For my sake and Eleanor’s. “To have killed the woman I loved was a thing I could not comprehend.”
“Thou shalt not,” Sabrina whispered.
Perhaps she was saying he would never understand it; perhaps she was reminding him of God’s commandments. Either way, Virgil agreed.
“I had no idea you knew I had killed her. If I had, I would have prayed that one day you would both forgive me. But now I see that it isn’t you I need forgiveness from. It’s myself. Nothing can replace a child—but you also never knew me. Never knew the true me, who loved Caroline and mourned her, and now, finally, moves on.”
Virgil looked at the casket again, not wanting to think on what remained inside. He stroked his fingers over the solid wood. “As wrong as everything went, this is not the way to repair it. I have let Caroline rest, and now you must.”
“An abomination moves on,” Howard spat the words. “To that knickknack bunter who does as she will, the rest of the world be damned? What a fine way to honor the memory of your dead wife.”
“You will never speak of Miss Folley in those terms again.” The wolf inside him pressed to get out, to stretch its jaws around Howard’s neck. “I pray you will both be able to heal, but attempting to bring Caroline back isn’t the way.”
With that, Virgil turned away from them and, even when Sabrina screamed after him, he kept walking. Down the temple’s ramp and away from the guilt and shame he had felt in their presence through the years; away from every bad memory and blue parrot and mistake. He could only move forward.
Forward to Eleanor, who had left her mother and now stood at the edge of a lower ramp. She extended a hand to him when he neared. He slid his hands around hers, trying to understand the look in her brown eyes. Reflected firelight danced there, but, strangely, no tears.
“I wasted so much time,” Eleanor whispered. “Please tell me that from here on, we never look to the past and wish for what might have been.”
Rings of Anubis: A Folley & Mallory Adventure Page 39
