Painter of the Dead (Shades of Immortality Book 1)

by Catherine Butzen

  The beads from his hand had bounced far on the smooth hardwood. She picked one up and rolled it between her fingers.

  “You honestly believe that?” Theo said. The nodule between her fingertips didn’t crumble, and its surface was smooth and matte. “So you tried to burn it? God.”

  His hold slipped, and the painting slid a few inches through his fingers.

  “I know I’m no Matisse, but you still can’t burn my painting just because you think it’ll bring you bad luck.” There, that sounded sensible of her, didn’t it? “It’s the principle of the thing.”

  “Some things deserve to be burned.” He dropped the painting, kicking it away. The canvas skidded across the room and bumped into the wall. “Burn it. Cut it up. Paint over it. I don’t care. But it can’t stay that way, and it can’t stay here.”

  “Why not? Because you don’t like Art Nouveau? Or are you trying to get me out of here before I realize your blood turns into clay?”

  His eyes widened. “What do you mean?”

  “Artist. I know clay when I feel it.” She crumbled the bead between her fingertips and flicked the dust off. It felt good to say it out loud. “Old clay too. Montmorillonite.”

  “My blood—”

  “Your blood turns into clay, Seth.”

  “But it—”

  “It turns into clay.” She met and held his gaze, putting her anger and confusion and fear into her eyes as if she could pin him to the wall with the force of her stare. Like sticking a butterfly on a card. “At this point, there aren’t a lot of lies you can tell me. So are we going to keep dancing around the issue?”

  Another frozen moment passed, and Seth wavered. His eyes dropped for a moment, and his shoulders hunched. The taut lines of his body created pools of shadow that washed him out.

  “Tell me the truth,” Theo said. Her lips felt numb and the words came out slurred, as if they were trying to keep her from getting herself into more trouble. Mummies, shabtis, curses, robberies, life and death, paintings, and blood that turned into clay. “I’m ready to listen. Please, tell me the truth.”

  He paced a few steps, stopped, and glanced back, his fingers twisting reflexively. They were, Theo noted vaguely, completely healed. He swallowed.

  After a long moment, he straightened his back and faced her again as best he could. “It sounds insane,” he said.

  “Which’ll make a nice change from how dull the last few weeks have been.” She kept her gaze fixed on him. He looked like he wanted to run or sink into the ground, and though she wasn’t sure she’d blame him for it, it wouldn’t be happening on her watch. “Tell me the truth,” she repeated softly.

  The dead man in front of her struggled to find the words. His lips twisted.

  “I suppose you could say,” he began slowly, “that I’ve been stretching the truth. I’m not from around here.”

  “I guessed that,” she replied. Her eyes never left his face. “Where are you from?”

  “Waset.” A pause. “Thebes.”

  She took a deep breath. “I think the question is…when were you from Thebes?”

  He never blinked, but the dark eyes seemed to flinch. “I was born seven years before the ascension of Amenemhat the First.”

  Theo took another breath. She put a hand on the wall, her fingers splaying against the smooth surface. Her brain automatically threw out the information, culled straight from the museum’s exhibition bible. Twelfth Dynasty, right at the beginning of the Middle Kingdom. Circa 1991 BCE, if you believed the most common estimates. More than four thousand years ago. A time before cavalry or iron weapons.

  It shouldn’t be believable. If she hadn’t seen what she’d seen in the loft, she would have written the whole thing off as delusion. If not for clay blood and dying men turning to dust. Either it was true, or she was losing her mind.

  But in her life, her brain was the one thing she really had. If she were insane, she wouldn’t even have that. She couldn’t accept that thought.

  “And you”—Theo cleared her throat—“you’re that mummy?”

  “Was.” He paused for a moment, searching for words. “Old wine in new bottles.”

  “Old soul in new body?”

  “Exactly.”

  “It’s a good story,” she said. “Do you have proof?”

  Silently, Seth held his hand up for her to examine. She stared at it, searching for any sign of marked skin. But there was nothing. She touched it.

  Her fingers folded around his. The skin was coarse but unmarked, the old scars she’d seen at the party gone as cleanly as if they’d never been there. His hand was warm and strong, with none of the teeth marks she knew she’d left. The webbing and ball of the thumb were whole, despite the skin that had been torn not so long ago.

  “Nothing heals that fast,” she said.

  “You’re right,” Seth said. “Nothing can.”

  “New bottle?”

  “Old wine.”

  “Very old,” Theo murmured. Her eyes stung, but to her surprise, a bitter smile edged its way across her face. “And to think I was intimidated when I thought you were, what, in your fifties?”

  “We’ll split the difference,” he said softly. “The new body is about thirty.”

  “Really?”

  “I promise.” His thumb traced the side of hers, flesh lightly gliding over flesh. “Young and healthy.”

  She swallowed. “Mr. Adler, are you trying to seduce me?”

  Oh God. Faced with a man who claimed to be more than four millennia old, his long, dark fingers wrapped around hers as he transfixed her with his stare, and the first thing that came to mind was The Graduate? His expression was knowing, and she resisted the urge to slap herself in the face.

  “Are you feeling particularly seduced?” he responded.

  “Not exactly.”

  “Good.” His tone had a twist of wryness. “That would make things awkward.”

  “That’s right; I’m way past thirteen,” she said. “So what were you? A priest, right? Condemned for love?”

  “You’ve been watching too many movies. And for the record—I’ve been wanting to say this since the party—those mummy films are garbage. None of that ever happened.”

  “I know,” she said. “I mean, who ever heard of someone coming back from the dead?”

  Seth stepped back, seemingly gauging her mood. His eyes flickered over her, and Theo’s hand felt chilled with the loss of his touch. She sternly ordered herself to focus and tried to ignore the pounding of her heart.

  “What were you?” she repeated softly. “Tell me, Seth. Please. Give me anything to prove that we’re not both going insane.”

  He let out a slow breath. “I was the son of the governor of the Crocodile District,” he said. “Downriver from Thebes itself. Beautiful land, very fertile. My brother and I became trusted servants of the great Amenemhat. And I had the honor of marrying the pharaoh’s grandniece.”

  Of course. A mummy man had to have a connection to a pharaoh, didn’t he? Nobody ever claimed to be a reincarnated peasant from nowhere. Her bullshit detector pinged. “Right,” she responded. “So was she the great love of your life? You transcended death for her, right? Or are you going to disavow her dramatically?”

  “I didn’t love her,” he said flatly, “because it was a political match. But we were good friends, and she was my wife and the mother of my children. You should know when you’re crossing a line.”

  “Have a heart,” she said. “I’m taking a lot on faith here. Maybe I was wrong and people do heal that fast. I’m just a flaky artist—what do I know about this stuff?”

  Seth looked down, his jaw tensing. “I answered your question, Theo. I told you the truth. Are you satisfied?”

  “No.”

  “No? What else could you want?”

  “Everything,” Theo said. Seth pulled back another pace, his expression openly wary and distrustful.

  “Okay, maybe I didn’t put that right,” she continued quickly. The wo
rds stumbled over themselves as they raced out. “I don’t want to blackmail you or steal your magic potion or anything. But if you’re telling the truth, if you really are some kind of…of ancient mummy…” She shook her head, still unable to believe what she was saying. “Then you’re the only person—the only person alive today—who remembers those times. If this is a lie or a hallucination or something, it’s such a big one that you can’t expect me to let it go.”

  She shivered. Colors and textures tumbled through her mind: old gold, cool blue-green, startlingly red ochre painted onto yellow plaster or dabbed into the hollows and crevices of low relief. “You could know…so much. Don’t you get how many questions there are?”

  His expression was unreadable. “Questions?”

  “How you lived. What you did. What you believed.” She swallowed. “How you’re here.”

  “I believed in the gods that watched over us all. But how I’m here…that was my brother’s work.” He shook his head. “He was a great priest, one of the greatest I ever knew. He made the shabtis for me.”

  “Is that…” she began.

  Seth nodded, his eyes dark. “He wrote a prayer to say over them, and another to cut into them. ‘Words spoken by the son of Merenptah. This is a vessel for him, and will become as him through his will. A savior of the ka, a form to cast the sheut—’”

  “—‘a home for the ba,’” Theo whispered. Nobody outside of the department knew about those inscriptions. It was a battered line of hieroglyphics, pieced together from the few remaining marks on dozens of statuettes, but the professors had been incredibly excited about it. Nothing had been published yet; they were quietly planning a study of it and its potential impact on the modern view of funerary customs. There was no way he could know it. Unless…

  “I believe you,” she said. Finally. It felt like a weight had been lifted, and she breathed out, terrified and exhilarated at the same time. She believed him. She accepted, somehow, that the dark-eyed man standing in front of her was something that she knew shouldn’t exist. It scared her, but it freed her. The worst had happened; what could be stranger?

  “You believe me?” he asked, his voice oddly uneven.

  “I believe you,” Theo repeated. “You’re not normal.” Another smile began to appear in spite of herself. “And I just won a prize for understatement.”

  “I’ll admit, I’ve never been called ‘not normal’ before,” Seth said, “I think. I don’t remember it all.”

  “Well, you know me,” she said, wrapping her arms more closely around herself. The stillness of the gallery pressed in around her. “I always was pretty good at saying the wrong thing.”

  “I don’t know about that,” he replied with a smile of his own. “‘I believe you’ was pretty good.”

  Against all odds, she found herself smiling back at him. A warm feeling settled in her chest, along with a twinge of nervousness. Motion, pure motion, was there if she could grab it. He was a foot from her now, his hand near hers, a flush in his face coloring his high cheekbones.

  “So you wanted the artifacts so you could stay alive,” she said. Focus, Theo.

  “‘A vessel for him, and will become as him,’” Seth recited. The words had a rolling, sonorous quality, like a chant in church. “The tomb was my cache, my place of sanctuary, where the shabtis were hidden. But it was robbed in the 1880s, while I was in India. I set up the trust as a cover and spent years tracking down everything.”

  “And that night in the loft”—she was proud her voice faltered only a little—“you breathed on one of the shabtis before you sent it down the shaft. You died upstairs—”

  “And came to life downstairs.”

  A man dying of tuberculosis enlists his brother, the priest, to create fake bodies for him. Something to hold his soul in the real world. An ancient Egyptian man does this, knowing that his entire world is constructed around the eventuality of death, and that he was going against every rule his universe is based on. Order versus chaos, and trying to hide from the afterlife was the absolute essence of chaos.

  “So when you found them,” she said, “you thought you had to steal them back. Them and your mummy.”

  He flinched at the mention of the mummy. She saw a flicker of apprehension in his gaze, and she knew she was on the right track.

  “You need the mummy,” Theo continued. Seth didn’t say anything, but he couldn’t hide the emotion in his eyes. “The body is the home of the soul and must be preserved. As long as it exists, the soul can continue.” Her head shot up. “That’s why you took it!” she burst out. “I told you it was going to be used in the study—”

  “And possibly dissected,” Seth said flatly. “I might not be wearing it anymore, but I have a certain fondness for it.”

  “You said you didn’t want to do it that night,” she said. Seth relaxed a fraction, but his gaze stayed fixed on her, both cautious and defensive. He seemed to be waiting to see which way she’d jump.

  Theo stepped back, running a hand through her hair and breathing deeply. “This is big,” she said, half to herself. Putting it into words was hard, but with every word that she added to it, it took on more solidity in her mind. “This is…this is something so big I can’t even say how big it is. I can’t—I mean, I can’t make you give them back. Not now.”

  The words felt strange. To admit straight out that she wanted to let someone keep something they’d taken from the museum burned, though these were definitely extraordinary circumstances. She didn’t see people come back from the dead every day, after all.

  At that thought, she let out a short bark of laughter, drawing an odd look from Seth Adler. “I’m sorry,” she said. “But this wasn’t what I planned on when I went to art school.”

  “It wasn’t what I planned on when I took my commission from the Minister of War,” Seth responded dryly. “Though at the time, my concern was mainly with advancing my family.”

  “You must have been scared,” she said suddenly. He raised his head slightly, lips parting a little. “To try and make yourself a magic body.”

  Seth looked down. “Terrified,” he said. “I thought I was cursed.” His voice was hoarse. “I prayed every day. For a year. The aches got worse and my family began to collect my burial goods.”

  “A very odd burial,” Theo quoted, remembering the conversation at the donors’ night, “and a very sick mummy.”

  “I didn’t do anything!” he burst out. “I paid my dues; I was faithful to my wife; I honored my gods and my family! There was no reason for the gods to do that to me!” His fingers flexed, clenching instinctively as if he were trying to find a way to fight the memory. “I thought they wanted me dead. One sacrilege was hardly an overreaction. I wanted the long life that had been stolen from me.

  “Good men don’t earn much. Accolades when they live, but cheap stelae when they die. If I didn’t make a plan, I was going to die like a slave. No more war, no more seeing my family grow, no more chances to earn glory for my name or bring victories for my king.” He turned again, angry, but not at her. “So I went to my brother. Shabtis were said to become whatever we wanted in the next world—so why not shabtis that could return me to this one in a new body? Meren called it sacrilege, but we did it anyway. Why should a cursed man care if he offends the gods?”

  Theo shook her head. “What a mess,” she said. There didn’t seem to be anything else she could say. Seth let out a short laugh.

  “Definitely not normal, eh?”

  “No. Not normal.” She tried not to think about the light in his eyes. His breath was coming faster, anger seeming to fire something in him. He moved closer, and Theo’s heart thumped as he put his hand on her forearm. For a dead man, he didn’t feel very cold.

  Speaking of not normal…

  “What was your name?” she asked.

  This time, Seth didn’t hesitate. His gaze was fixed on hers. “Anhurmose.”

  She turned the word over on her tongue. A name for the mummy. A name for the man i
n front of her.

  “Anhurmose,” she repeated. “Anhurmose.”

  “I like Seth better,” he said. She shivered as his warm breath touched her face.

  “I like them both,” she told him. She did, despite the insanity of it all. Poor mute, sad-smiling THS203—all he’d wanted to do was live forever, and in a way, he’d managed it.

  Seth was something else. She still had reasons not to trust him, especially over the robbery. But he was also something that she had literally never encountered before, and that night in the loft had torn her customary realism to shreds and given her motion on canvas like never before. She wanted to see, do, and know more. She wasn’t forgiving him for everything that had happened, but understanding blunted the edges of her anger.

  “Really,” he said gently, “you don’t have to lie, Miss Speer. I haven’t exactly made your life easy.”

  “Theo,” she said. “And easy…no. Interesting?” She moistened her lips again. “Yes.”

  “Is interesting a good thing?”

  “It’s a change,” she murmured. “Change is good.”

  “Theo.” The shadows made deep pools of darkness under his eyes and in the hollows of his throat. He was a bas-relief, a sculpture from a time when the world was both more and less civilized. Her brain screamed that she was about to do something incredibly dangerous, that there was no point in moving further when she knew she was going to get in over her head. Her body threw other images at her: the warmth and tantalizing roughness of his lips, the taste of motion that cascaded across the canvas after she had known real fear. God, one incident and she’d turned into a thrill junkie.

  She wanted that back again. And if it ended in tears, wasn’t that what artists did? Chased heartbreak for their work?

  “Seth,” she said, “interesting is a very good thing.”

  It was barely a kiss, just a brush of her lips across his as she stood on tiptoe, a touch that lasted a frozen moment. But something struck, a match flared, and Theo’s heart shivered. She could feel Seth’s pulse pounding hard in the skin beneath her hand.