Echo Prophecy

by Lindsey Fairleigh

  Minutes later, I gathered my courage and pulled Marcus’s hand away from my neck. I held it to my lips, kissing each fingertip softly. “Thank you,” I whispered, pressing my lips against his palm. Impulsively, I met his gaze at the exact moment that I gently bit the meaty part of his palm and watched his eyes burn gold and black with desire.

  I had no idea why fortune had favored me with this aphrodisiacal power over such an imposing and undeniably desirable man, but I relished it. It was intoxicating—his responses drove me wild with lust. The fates, it seemed, believed in fair play, because his power over me was equally potent.

  “I’m going into the At,” I said against his palm before releasing it, “to look for my sister. If she’s really with Set, then I may be the only one who can find her, and I have to find her. He’ll use her against me, threaten her again, and”—my chin quivered—“Marcus, I don’t know if I can resist.”

  Jaw clenched, Marcus said, “Going into the At is unwise. If Set finds your ba while it’s in an echo …”

  I stood and started pacing in the small space. “I know. He could hurt me … maybe even trap me. It’s really stupid. But”—I turned to face him, wrapping my arms around my middle—“I’m doing it anyway. I have to.”

  Something in my eyes convinced Marcus that I couldn’t be dissuaded. “Then I’m going with you.”

  I shook my head, sincerely wishing he could accompany me. “It was harder to enter the echo at the fertility clinic when I had you or Alexander tagging along, and I knew that echo. I think the only way I can find Jenny is if I’m alone.”

  In an instant, Marcus was standing before me and his hands were on me, caressing my face, my neck, my shoulders, my hair. “Don’t do this, Lex. We’ll find another way …”

  Pressing my lips against his, I kissed him long and tenderly. “I’m going,” I whispered. “The only question left is—will you watch over my body while I’m gone?”

  “Of course.” His voice was rough.

  I smiled a weak, miserable smile. “Thanks.”

  ***

  I stood, surrounded by the horizontal whirl of colors, amazed at how much easier it had been to enter the placeless When—as opposed to the timeless Where—of the At than it had been during my finder test with Alexander. I focused on the time of my phone call with Set, the only concrete hold I had on him. But instead of Set, I focused on Jenny, searching the recent past for her.

  The colors shifted, flying by like they were stars and I was in a spaceship in hyperdrive. Abruptly, the motionless shifting of the At ceased. Glaringly bright, the sun shown down on sparkling, sapphire water, and gulls squawked overhead. An arrhythmic tap-thud-slap, tap-thud-slap, tap-thud-slap repeated endlessly. I was on Set’s yacht.

  It was beautiful, though in a totally different way than Marcus’s private jets. Marcus preferred tasteful and reserved décor, usually of grays or blacks, while Set veered toward gaudy and extravagant. He wanted to shove everyone’s face in his wealth and power. The disparity between the two men intrigued me, considering how close they had once been.

  I recalled Marcus’s admission that they had even “shared lovers.” What the hell does that even mean? Had they participated in a bunch of ménage-a-trois … or ménage-a-more-than-trois?

  Shaking my head, I focused on my fear for Jenny … on my devastation at the thought of losing her forever. If I let my mind stray, it would be too easy to accidentally relocate myself in the At and end up watching one of the ménage-a-whatevers, which I really didn’t want to do. Finding Jenny was what was important.

  I turned away from the gemstone ocean and scanned the deck. Sure enough, Jenny was sprawled lazily in a purple bikini near the bow of the boat, and no matter how badly I wanted to warn her of the danger she was in with Set, she wouldn’t hear me. I was viewing the past, and she wasn’t really there.

  Strong hands settled on my shoulders and began a slow, deep massage.

  Smiling, I admonished, “I thought I told you to stay …” I trailed off, realizing the person behind me didn’t smell a thing like Marcus. Instead of exotic and sweet spices, I was surrounded by a subtle, cool mint, almost like a mojito. “Set!” I hissed.

  “I wondered if you would come … though I thought it would take you longer,” Set said, smooth-voiced. “You don’t waste time. Has my dear cousin benefited from this element of your character?”

  “What I do with him is none of your business,” I snapped, acutely aware that this was the first time I’d spoken to Set face-to-face, so to speak.

  He spun me around to face him. “On the contrary, daughter. What Heru does with my property is every bit my business.”

  His property? “Fuck you!” I spat.

  Set smiled—a simple baring of teeth—and scoured my body with his eyes. “It’s a little unconventional, even for Nejerets, but if that’s what would sway you to my side, I’m sure I could oblige.”

  “Ugh! No! What’s wrong with you?” I tried to shove off his hold, but he was far stronger than me.

  “Hmmm …” He cocked his head to the side. “I don’t want us to be enemies, Daughter. What can I say to ease your antagonism toward me?”

  “Nothing. Your actions have spoken loud enough.”

  “What evil deeds have you assigned to your loving father?” he asked pleasantly.

  “Joe Larson is my loving father and he’s done nothing evil,” I said, verbally slapping Set. “You, on the other hand, stalked me throughout my life—probably hoping to kidnap me—assigned a man to drug and rape me, broke into my apartment with a group of your cult followers, and then kidnapped my sister and threatened to kill her.” I glared, trying to stab him with my eyeballs. “Don’t you think that’s enough?”

  Set’s grasp on my shoulders tightened painfully, but I didn’t do anything to indicate my discomfort. I was too worried it would please him.

  “I am your father. Without me, you wouldn’t exist. Don’t forget that, girl. And did you consider that perhaps I was just watching you as you grew to keep you safe? And that idiot, Mike, kept lathering on the drug-laced lip balm until you nearly overdosed. He was supposed to use it to lower your inhibitions only enough that you’d willingly share his bed. And pretty Jenny came with me willingly. She thinks she’s in love with Seth McDougal,” he explained, puffing up.

  His excuses were crap and I told him so. “What about the men who broke into my apartment?” I asked, and he shrugged.

  “Like I said, actions speak.” I watched as something darker than the inky black of his irises—possibly his sanity—slid around in his eyes, sometimes filling them, other times leaving them wild and vacant. Holy crap, I thought, terrified of the man before me. He really is insane.

  “How about these actions,” Set said softly. “Your beautiful Heru spent over two millennia hunting down and killing my offspring. The blood of my children—your siblings—pours from his hands, but you would damn me for merely threatening the life of your sister. You should be damning him!”

  “You lie!” I cried and kneed him in the groin as hard as I could. As he crumpled to the ground, I fled back into my body.

  I was lying on my back on the bed in Marcus’s private jet. Opening my eyes, I raised my head and stared at his broad shoulders, at the chorded tendons and muscles snaking up his neck and the line where night-dark hair met golden-honey skin. He sat in the same position he’d been in when I first closed my eyes, just beyond my feet at the end of the bed.

  “I found her,” I said quietly, but Marcus didn’t turn. I sat up.

  “And … ?”

  “She’s with him, but she’s not hurt. He said she’s in love with him.” I watched closely for a reaction.

  Marcus’s shoulders tensed. “So he showed up. I figured he would.”

  “Don’t you want to know what else he told me?”

  “I can guess,” Marcus said, hanging his head. “Was it something along the lines of ‘Heru spent thousands of years killing your siblings’?”

  “It
’s true?” I whispered, wanting him to deny it. He didn’t, and I felt like the world was being ripped out from under my feet and I was falling endlessly into oblivion. My half-siblings, like Dominic and Kat, had been hunted down and killed by Marcus? Why?

  “It’s part of the truth,” Marcus said quietly. He stood and walked to the door. “When you decide you want to know the rest, let me know.”

  “Marcus,” I said, but he was already gone.

  PART THREE

  Deir el-Bahri

  Luxor, Egypt

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  Claim & Bond

  As demonstrated by the brevity of my “people I care about” list, I’d never been one to hand out affection like candy on Halloween. But, on the rare occasion that I let someone in, they had a chance to become a cornerstone in my life. Of the people on my list, only my parents, Grandma Suse, Jenny, Annie, and Cara were cornerstones. Once I’d laid them in my foundation, it took a lot to remove them. Even Cara’s honest betrayal on the stand hadn’t done it, though her stability had been dramatically loosened. But, once they were gone, ripped from the recess that had been finely hewn to fit only them, they were gone for good. It was something hammered into the very fiber of my being.

  Set’s words haunted me. “Heru spent over two millennia hunting down and killing my offspring. The blood of my children—your siblings—pours from his hands …”

  I couldn’t fathom any reason to hunt and kill people simply because they had the misfortune of being fathered by a psychotic, evil man. Even if that father was prophesied to potentially lead one of his children to destroy the world, it just didn’t make sense … they were still their own people. Just because Set fathered them didn’t mean he owned their minds. And I wondered, had I been born a hundred years earlier, would Marcus have hunted down and killed me too?

  Like Set’s, Marcus’s words echoed in my mind. “When you decide you want to know the rest, let me know.” He had uttered the emotionless syllables earlier that morning, before we’d even touched down on the sun-drenched runway at Luxor International Airport. It had only taken me the afternoon to decide—I wanted to know the rest. I wanted Marcus as a cornerstone. Especially with Jenny still in Set’s hands and the impending Nothingness on the horizon, I needed someone … I needed Marcus.

  I emerged from the ten-by-twenty-foot canvas tent that would be my home for the next several months, taking a moment to stare in wonder at Djeser-Djeseru—Hatchepsut’s mortuary temple—about a half-mile to the west. Its three tiers of columned promenades were lit up for the night, making the enormous temple glow majestically and casting eerie, jagged shadows against the limestone cliffs towering behind it. Tomorrow, I would finally walk up the two gradual limestone ramps to Djeser-Djeseru’s third level and begin searching the upper Anubis chapel for the hidden entrance to Senenmut’s underground temple.

  Sighing, I turned away and headed for Marcus’s tent. It was a duplicate of mine, a rectangular canvas structure divided into two rooms—a ten-by-ten-foot “office,” and beyond that, personal living quarters of the same dimensions—and had been erected only a handful of paces from my own tent. Together, our two canvas homes comprised the center of a tent town. Dozens of smaller tents had been set up around ours in a very neat grid pattern, with a main thoroughfare running east and west, directly between Marcus’s and my tents. Beyond the west edge of the minicity of canvas and sand, an expansive canopy had been set up over several dozen collapsible picnic tables, and two long restroom trailers had been parked beyond the east edge of camp. The entire temple complex had been shut down to tourists and would remain so until August, leaving us free to conduct our work away from prying eyes.

  As I crossed the sandy “main street” to Marcus’s tent, my two bodyguards followed, positioned like splayed wings behind me. I stopped when I reached the curtain-like door, trying to work up the nerve to push through and step inside. A soft, feminine laugh sounded within.

  I scurried around the corner of the tent, motioning frantically for my guards to return to my own tent. Whether or not they would have obeyed didn’t matter, because a slender, caramel-complexioned woman emerged from Marcus’s tent saying, “… want me to stay.” She stuck out her lower lip in a sultry pout. “I haven’t been able to think about anything else for weeks.” There was no mistaking what she was talking about—sex … with Marcus.

  Weeks? Why would she say that … unless … I choked on a scream. Had Marcus been with her—slept with her—during our two months of estrangement? He did say he was in Egypt … Jealousy unlike anything I’d ever felt before washed through me, setting me aflame with rage. My emotions where Marcus was concerned tended toward volatility, but this was getting ridiculous. I hated that woman. I wanted to hurt her. I wanted to erase her and whatever carnal experiences Marcus had shared with her from his mind.

  “Hello, boys,” the woman mused, looking each of my guards up and down admiringly. She wasn’t Nejerette; she lacked the finely hewn perfection I’d come to recognize as a tell-tale sign, but she was striking nonetheless. Her bold features were just feminine enough for beauty, but too masculine for anonymity. I watched as she sauntered slowly away, toward the enormous parking lot east of the tent town.

  “What are you doing, Lex?” Marcus asked in my general direction, his voice bland.

  I stepped out from the shadows and into the moonlight. “Who is she?” I asked with nod toward the woman.

  “Sara,” he said, his expression carefully blank.

  “She’s human,” I said, which was noteworthy considering we’d agreed to keep the Nejeret camp human-free, aside from Genevieve. “What’s she doing here?”

  Marcus opened his mouth to speak, but apparently thought better of whatever he’d been about to say and closed it again.

  Without thinking, I turned on my heel and stalked after the willowy woman. “Hey! Hey, Sara!” I called after her, and she halted.

  “Yes?” she asked with genuine curiosity. She turned gracefully, examined me from head to toe, and said, “I’m sorry, you seem to have me at a disadvantage. You are … ?” Her accent was upper-crust British, full of education and class.

  “Lex,” I replied. “What were you doing in Marcus’s tent?” Accusation clouded the air, as did a growing crowd of Nejerets. Oh look, the Meswett is having a breakdown—let’s watch! I had no idea what I was doing, or why—other than feeling an overwhelming need to claim Marcus as my own.

  Sara gave me a knowing look that seemed to say, “Oh, honey, don’t even bother with him. He needs a real woman.” Out loud, she said, “Why don’t you ask him?”

  “Because I’m asking you,” I said evenly.

  “We had a few drinks,” she purred.

  “And … ?”

  “Lex, come on. Let the woman go,” Dominic said as he carefully approached me from the left.

  I thrust my hand toward him and growled, “I love you, Dom, but I swear if you touch me right now I’ll kick you in the balls so hard they’ll pop out of your mouth.”

  More than a few Nejerets chuckled, and Dominic’s lips pursed and twitched. He didn’t, however, come any closer.

  “And … ?” I prompted Sara again.

  As she’d watched the exchange between me and Dominic, concern had formed a faint line between her eyebrows. She was starting to understand—I wasn’t just some young archaeologist with a crush on the excavation director.

  “And we talked,” she said primly.

  “About … ?”

  Concerned or not, she was affronted. “About old times, if you must know,” she said haughtily. Old times. It was the wrong thing to say. Old times that had been spent in bed together? Maybe they’d been reliving old times?

  A growing murmur was coming from the crowd of Nejerets. A quick glance around told me pretty much everyone in the camp was watching us.

  What am I doing? Get a hold of yourself, Lex! Unable to stop myself, I stepped closer to Sara, and she stepped back. It was like there was an invisible for
ce field between us. It amused some instinctual Nejerette part of me, so I did it again. Sara took another step back. She’s afraid of me, I thought, and though I didn’t know why, the realization gave me pleasure.

  “Don’t move,” I told her, and cocked my head. “I won’t hurt you … if you don’t move.”

  As I approached her, Sara’s wide, wild, chocolate-brown eyes burned into mine, pleading silently. She was an inch or two taller than me, but nothing could give her an edge over my all-encompassing fury. I was starting to wonder if heightened emotions accompanied the other intensified sensations afflicting my kind.

  “Oh dear God, your eyes,” Sara whispered, once I was only a few inches away. The reaction had become normal from regular humans, and annoying enough that I’d started to wear brown contact lenses when the need for discretion arose. “Somebody get her away from me!” Sara screeched, looking around at the crowd. “She’s … she’s … possessed or something! Won’t anyone help me? Marcus?”

  Nobody made a move to step in and rescue the terrified woman. This—whatever it was—was between the Meswett, a member of the Council of Seven, and some woman … some human woman. Nobody had the right to interfere, and nobody would.

  I smiled, enjoying her fear. But, I needed to find out if she deserved worse than fear. I took another step toward her, and leaned in close like I might lay a soft kiss upon her full lips. She shivered as I breathed in through my nose. What the hell am I doing? I thought as I bent my neck to sniff both sides of hers and then her hair with long, deep breaths. There was no scent of Marcus’s tantalizing spice, only her subtle floral perfume—expensive and delicate—Scotch, and fear. Marcus hadn’t touched her, at least not enough to mark her.

  “Leave now,” I whispered into her ear. “Don’t come back. Got it?”

  I felt the air shift between our cheeks as she nodded.

  “Good. Leave.”

  As I watched her hurry away, I wondered why my jealous rage wasn’t dissipating. I’d taken care of the threat, but I still felt drunk with it.