Cat's Claw

by Amber Benson

  She held up her cute pink RAZR phone like a weapon as she fumbled with the lock on the driver’s-side door.

  “It’s just that you really look like someone he used to know,” I said, trying a different tack, but the girl was having none of it as she threw open the car door and began shoveling her groceries inside.

  “Yeah, a dead Queen,” the girl said angrily, “from ancient Egypt. Now, why don’t you two just go back to whatever mental institution you escaped from and leave me alone!”

  Well, I couldn’t argue with her. Madame Papillon had told me that it was rare for a soul to remember its past lives, so if this girl didn’t know that once upon a time she was an ancient Egyptian Queen, then there was nothing Senenmut or I could do about it.

  “Okay, you win,” I said. “We’ll get out of your hair.”

  I turned around, not bothering to listen to her obscenity-laden response.

  I found Senenmut lying in the fetal position right in the middle of the parking lot, his arms wrapped around his legs as if he had returned to the womb. I squatted down beside him.

  “You all right?” I asked, reaching out to stroke the small of his back with my hand.

  I ignored the fearful looks we were getting from shoppers as they wheeled their carts around us to get to their cars and focused my attention on getting Senenmut out of the parking lot before the police arrived. I had absolutely no doubt that they were already on their way because out of the corner of my eye, I had spotted three Target security guards moving stealthily toward us.

  “My eyes burn like they are on fire,” Senenmut moaned as he rubbed at them—probably making himself worse in the process.

  “Well, don’t rub ’em anymore,” I said helpfully. “It’s just pepper spray. You’ll be fine . . . I think.”

  I looked over at the entrance to the Target and saw that the guards had gained ground on us. If we didn’t get our butts in gear soon, we were gonna be singing for our supper in jail—and how much fun would that be, explaining to the Las Vegas PD that they wouldn’t find my new Egyptian friend in their database because he’d been cooped up in a medieval torture chamber for the last couple thousand years.

  “Okay, I know your eyes hurt, but we have to get out of here,” I said, trying to be as calm and soothing as possible.

  “I don’t want to go,” he whined. “My eyes hurt.”

  “Well, guess what? I don’t care what you want,” I sniped back at him. “You’re just gonna have to trust me on this one.”

  I grasped him around the middle and tried to lift him onto his feet, but he was way heavier than I had anticipated.

  “Get up!” I hissed in his ear. He wrapped his arms around my middle and together we got him back on his feet. He leaned his head—and most of his weight—against me, causing me to almost lose my footing.

  “Stop it,” I said as I braced myself against a nearby car. “I can’t do this if you’re gonna be a baby about it.”

  Being called a baby seemed to be the kick in the pants that Senenmut needed. He stood up straighter, relieving me of the weight that had been so incapacitating.

  “Now, just follow where I lead,” I said, holding on to his arm as I began to snake through the aisles of parked cars, trying to keep the Target security brigade at bay.

  “Ow!” Senenmut said as his knee slammed into the bumper of a Buick Skylark because of my poor maneuvering skills.

  “Sorry,” I murmured as I wiped away the thick bead of sweat that had accumulated on my upper lip. I looked up at the brilliant blue sky and cursed the disgustingly hot weather.

  Damn desert climes, I thought angrily. It’s, like, bloody sweat city around here! If only we could have a torrential rainstorm and swim our way out of this mess.

  As soon as that thought crossed my mind, I realized it for the epiphany that it was. Immediately I began to wish for a bunch of nasty thunderheads to roll in and cause a flash flood that would wash away our quickly gaining pursuers and float us to safety.

  “C’mon,” I begged the sky, “help me out here. Can’t we have, like, one cumulonimbus cloud? Please?”

  I got nothing from the heavens, not even a gust of wind. The sound of Senenmut’s ragged breathing filled my ear as I mercilessly pushed him farther and farther into the maze of cars. The closer we got to the heart of the parking lot, the more frustrated by the situation I became. Finally, I’d had enough. I was tired of things just happening to me. For once in my life I was gonna make something happen for myself.

  “Give me a goddamned thunderstorm!” I screamed up at the sky with every ounce of energy I possessed in my body. Senenmut realized what I was doing and grabbed my hand, squeezing it hard as he funneled his own magical power into my effort.

  Instantly, the air was rent by a jagged flash of lightning that split the sky; the rumble of approaching thunder filled my ears.

  “Yes!” I screamed, giddy with my own power—and sent a silent thank-you heavenward.

  The first splash of rain hit my cheek, the coolness of it shocking on my hot skin. A few more drops closely followed and then, like a gift from God, the heavens opened up, spilling their bounty onto the sizzling asphalt.

  It was a deluge, collecting dirt and garbage in its slipstream as it pounded the earth. People around us shrieked and ran for cover inside cars and underneath the wide front lip of the Target store. A few daring souls braved the downpour, holding purses and newspapers over their heads as they ran through the parking lot.

  Senenmut released my hand and stopped beside an SUV. He leaned backward against the car, raising his ruined face to the sky. I had a feeling that water was probably the best thing we could’ve asked for to dilute the effects of the pepper spray. I looked back to see what our stalkers—the security guards—were up to, only to find that they had turned back in the face of the unexpected storm. All I could see of them as they ran higgledy-piggledy toward the safety of the building were their sopping, blue security-uniformed butts.

  “Let’s get out of here,” I said after a few moments, my pink sweater waterlogged and my boots as heavy as snowshoes. I felt like a drowned rat and I was pretty sure that I looked like one, too. I hefted my soaking leather purse over my shoulder and took Senenmut’s arm.

  “I think we are in desperate need of a ride.”

  Ignoring the rain, I took out my phone and dialed the only number I knew by heart.

  “Hi, Information? I need the number for a local cab company. I don’t care which one . . . Fine, why don’t you just give me all of them?”

  As I dialed the first number that Information gave me, I took out my trusty rubidium clock from where I’d stashed it in my back pocket.

  “How much time?” I whispered.

  Nine hours.

  More than enough time to have a bath before we went to Hell.

  Senenmut said he wanted to go back to Egypt. But since that wasn’t really an option, I did the next best thing.

  I booked us a room at the Luxor Hotel.

  With the need for a shower and something to eat ingrained in my brain, I couldn’t help myself. I mean, how often does a person get to stay in a fake Egyptian pyramid with one of the guys who probably helped invent the architectural style in the first place?

  When the taxi pulled up to the front of the hotel, I could barely keep Senenmut in the car. His face was still a red, puffy mess, but the water and time had helped wash away most of the pepper spray’s effects so that he could at least see again.

  With its clean steel and glass lines, the hotel may have resembled a deconstructionist’s vision of what an ancient Egyptian pyramid looked like, but that didn’t seem to faze Senenmut at all. As soon as the doorman (a handsome young guy in a well-fitting beige costume) opened the car door for us, Senenmut was out like a shot. He bounded past the doorman—nearly knocking the poor guy over in the process—and made a bee-line for the automatic front doors.

  “Wait for me,” I said as I paid the driver and tipped the doorman so he wouldn’t sue us.<
br />
  Boy, this guy is expensive, I thought as I looked down at the fast-dwindling wad of twenties I’d pulled out of a 7-Eleven ATM only a few minutes earlier. The taxi driver hadn’t wanted to make a pit stop at the 7-Eleven, but when I told him it was the only way he was gonna get paid for services rendered, he quickly obliged me.

  I caught sight of Senenmut blocking one of the automatic doors as he stepped in and out of range of the door’s sensor. Lucky me that my new best friend was so obsessed with modern conveniences—or else I’d have probably lost him to the call of the casino already. I hastily made my way down the graded entranceway, bypassing a horde of German tourists who were watching Senenmut’s battle of the automatic doors with unabashed curiosity, and took my friend by the arm.

  “Enough playing with the door. Let’s go inside.”

  He didn’t seem to like the sound of my plan very much, but he reluctantly let me lead him away, looking back only once with longing as the automatic doors closed behind us. Inside the casino, we were immediately greeted by a blast of cold air that made me shiver. I had forgotten from my one and only trip to Las Vegas that the casinos were notorious for freezing your ass off 24/7, so you wouldn’t get sleepy while you were throwing all your money at the craps table like an automaton—something I’d had some personal experience with and didn’t like to discuss (a bachelorette party in Atlantic City gone wrong) because it made my pocketbook hurt just thinking about it.

  The hotel was dressed in varying shades of gold, beige, and brown—all of which I decided were on the tasteful side of the color spectrum. In fact, I would’ve said that the place was well-appointed and imposing if it weren’t for the fake Egyptian statuary and hieroglyphic-inspired scenes painted all along the walls and the fake mud brick and palm tree motif (not my favorite) that overwhelmed most of the interior design, making the place look vaguely cheesy in a way that was particular to Las Vegas.

  “What is this place?” Senenmut said as we left the confines of the lobby and headed toward the front desk.

  My plan was to grab our key, head to the shopping area, buy some dry clothes, take a shower, order room service, and, while we ate, call Jarvis to come and pick us up via wormhole. I thought it was a pretty great plan and I was more than ready to put it into action.

  “It’s called a casino,” I said, stepping in line behind a tall man with long, wavy gray hair and glasses.

  He gave us a cursory look then made one of those haughty sniffing sounds. Before I could give him a nasty look in reply, he was called up to the front desk and I was left fuming quietly to myself.

  Senenmut, on the other hand, didn’t seem at all fazed by the man’s bad attitude. Instead, he was too busy goggling at the wide-open expanse of gaming tables and slot machines to care what anyone thought about us.

  “This is unlike any pyramid that I have ever seen,” Senenmut said in hushed tones. “Where is the burial chamber?”

  When Senenmut said the words “burial chamber,” I didn’t think for a minute that my Egyptian friend was referring to the basement vault where the casino kept all their cash. No, he was talking about a real-deal burial chamber where the real pyramids kept their mummies and funerary finery.

  “Uhm, this isn’t a real pyramid,” I said, trying to explain.

  The old guy who’d sniffed at us earlier had gotten into some kind of argument with the lady behind the front desk, and it did not seem to be coming to a quick resolution. I was pretty sure we were gonna be standing in line for a while, so I decided to elaborate.

  “You see,” I began, “Las Vegas is a city unlike pretty much any other city in all of America—not including Atlantic City, New Jersey, of course. It’s actually called Sin City by those in the know because it was built on a love of gambling and sex and really tacky clothing.”

  “I don’t understand,” Senenmut said, frowning.

  “Okay, let me try this a different way.”

  “Please do,” Senenmut said as the line behind us only seemed to grow.

  “Well, this place we’re in is called the Luxor—”

  “We are in Egypt?” Senenmut said, surprised.

  I shook my head.

  “No, we are in a building called the Luxor, but it’s nowhere near Egypt. It’s actually in America and it was built to resemble an Egyptian pyramid on the outside, but on the inside, it’s used for something totally different.”

  “Then there are no Kings buried here?” Senenmut asked suspiciously.

  “Nope,” I said. “Not a one.”

  Senenmut narrowed his eyes.

  “Then what is that?”

  He was pointing to a sign hanging from the ceiling. It read KING TUT MUSEUM and had an arrow pointing directly ahead.

  “Uhm, well, that is—”

  “You have lied to me, Calliope Reaper-Jones,” Senenmut said evenly, the complete austerity of his words at odds with his puffy red face. “And for that, we are no longer compatriots.”

  “Hey, that’s not true—” I started to say, but Senenmut wasn’t listening to me anymore. His focus was now on the sign and wherever it would lead him.

  “Until we meet again under better auspices,” Senenmut said, then turned around and walked away, leaving me standing in the line at the front desk of the Luxor Hotel all by myself.

  twenty-one

  Just as Senenmut made his untimely exit, two hotel security guards—how many damn security guards was I gonna have to deal with in one day?—came striding toward me. Panicked, I left my place in line and started fast-walking in the same direction I’d just seen Senenmut take. As I made my way into the casino proper, I looked back to see what kind of lead I had on the security guys, but to my surprise, I found that they weren’t anywhere in my vicinity. In fact, I wasn’t the person they’d been gunning for at all. It was the snooty older man with the wavy gray hair that they’d been after.

  I watched, feeling vindicated, as the older man was led away, his mouth set in an angry O, both hands held behind his back by the two security guards.

  Yes! Finally, the real jerk gets in trouble, I thought happily as the old man and his entourage disappeared into the crowd, his indignant protests swallowed up by the madcap chiming of slot machines paying out their winnings.

  Safe now, I looked around the casino for another sign that would direct me to the King Tut Museum. I spotted one across the floor, the museum’s name printed in big, bold letters with the universal sign for “elevator” (the little square box) beside it. I made my way back across the sea of gamblers—old blue-haired dowagers; middle-aged, potbellied married couples; and clumps of tackily dressed twentysomethings looking for a little action to get them through the night—and wasn’t even tempted once to stop and put a quarter in a slot.

  I got to the elevator (or inclinator, as they called it at the Luxor, built on an incline to match the angled interior walls of the pyramid) right when a family with three little angelic-faced kids walked up. The littlest kid, a boy of about three with white-blond hair, a booger-infested nose, and the remains of a chocolate candy bar on his face, reached out his grubby hand and pressed the call button, smearing chocolate all over it.

  “Sorry about that,” the father said, looking sheepishly down at his child and ruffling his hair.

  He was so laissez-faire about his kid sliming the elevator control button that there was no way he could be one of those anal, yuppie dads that planned out their family’s vacations down to the last potty break. This guy seemed more like the cool dad. You know, the one who smoked pot with you and told you stories about the girls he banged when he was a teenager.

  “No problem,” I replied with a smile.

  It wasn’t my elevator. Besides, while his kids may have been messy, they were obviously well loved.

  While we stood there waiting for our inclinator, the same little boy dropped to his knees, crawled over to where I was standing, and poked my boot.

  “King Poot,” he said as he poked the tip of my shoe again, getting chocolate
on it.

  “Ansel!” the father said, bending down and scooping the small child up in his arms.

  No wonder the kid has issues, I thought. With a name like Ansel, who wouldn’t?

  “He’s usually not so forward,” the mother said, taking the other boys by the hands—both were older than Ansel, but with the same white-blond hair—and reining them in close to her sides. “I think he likes you.”

  The woman was slim, with feathery blond hair, blue eyes, and a warm smile that was genuinely welcoming. She had a nice figure—especially for someone who’d popped out three kids—but she wasn’t what you would call a beautiful woman. There was a sharpness to her chin and nose that kept her from being truly striking.

  We aren’t really that different, I thought to myself as I watched the woman struggling to keep the two older boys from slipping out of her grasp. This could be my fate, too, someday . . . if I want it to be.

  “C’mon, Walker, stop pulling on Mommy’s shirt,” the woman said, taking her kids’ exuberance good-naturedly. Still, I could tell—call it women’s intuition here—that all she wanted to do was find a black hole to drop her family into for a couple of hours, so she could hit the spa without feeling guilty about it.

  Not that I blamed her. She looked like she very much deserved a couple of undisturbed hours roasting in a seaweed and black mud wrap.

  The inclinator doors opened and the evacuating tourists swarmed us like a horde of agitated, foreign-tongued wasps. The tourists, while loud and obnoxious, were very slow moving, taking so much time to disembark that the family and I almost didn’t make it inside before the doors closed in our faces.

  “Well, that was intense,” I said as I moved to press the button that would take me to the atrium.

  I paused, my finger hovering over the button, when I caught sight of my little buddy, Ansel, staring at me with a look of utter defeat on his cherubic face. I realized that he wanted to press the button, but since he was trapped in his father’s arms, he was stuck. I knew that I didn’t owe the kid a thing—he’d slimed my boot, for God’s sake—that all I had to do to get to the King Tut Museum and find Senenmut was to just finish my action and press the button.