“Not necessarily,” Seth said. “Zimmer could have brought in an outsider and told them.”
“Then I’ve got nothing.” Theo groaned and ran a hand through her hair. “I’m sorry, Seth, but this isn’t my field of study and we need more information. But someone profited by doing this, and I can’t figure out how or why.”
“So who could be the one profiting? A good principle of any mystery. Let’s begin with the people you know. You mentioned this woman Sandy. Would she know how the robbery happened?”
“Possibly. Whenever something like that happens, everyone’s briefed on what not to say to the press. Emails get sent out to the whole staff. You can usually work out what happened based on what you can’t say happened.”
“And Dr. Van Allen would know?”
“Definitely.”
“Then we should contact them both. Get the story from each of them and see if there are obvious discrepancies. Check it against news and police reports. If one is clearly lying, we may have our culprit.”
“How are we going to get police reports?”
This time, his good humor didn’t quite reach his eyes. “You make your phone calls, and I’ll make mine.”
And he would have too; Theo had no doubt of that. Unfortunately, several things happened at once.
The brazier lit up like a bonfire. Sheets of flame roared up, incinerating the meager offering in an instant and sending a wave of dry heat rippling through the close room. A strangled cry burst from Seth. His whole body stiffened, the tendons leaped in his neck, the blood drained from his face. One hand was pressed to his chest and clutched the hollow of his heart as if he were trying to keep it from escaping. His knuckles were white.
“Neith, protect me—” The rest of his words were in the language of his birth. He would have collapsed if Theo hadn’t dropped her food and caught him. As it was, his weight dragged her down, and she cradled him against her chest as she tried to sit back into a kneeling position. She thanked anybody listening that the smoke alarm was already out of commission. The makeshift brazier was burning so fiercely that the edges of the bowl were beginning to turn orange.
Something moved at the edge of her vision. There were almost no shadows left in the harsh light of the fire, but she could swear there was a shadow flickering at the corner of her eye. It circled the fire, moving as she turned her head, prowling like a dog on the scent. It was dark, not the gloss black of a statue or a healthy dog, but the four-legged dead black of—something.
Blood dripped from Seth’s nose and eyes. Theo stifled a scream as he clutched at his face, pink lines showing under his skin where the veins had burst. She tried to grab him but he scrambled to his feet, throwing off her hands with unnatural strength. He backed up against the table, almost knocking it over, his hands clamped to his face. The blood running from his nose dried almost instantly into red Nile clay.
“Neith, protect me. Neith, shield me. Neith, protect me.” English and the ancient language interwove, a bilingual chant of desperation and pain.
“Seth!” Her shout was cut off as he spasmed, crashing backward against the table again and knocking the remaining scrolls and statuettes off as one of its legs snapped. The clay fell away in wet chunks, leaving his face streaked with red-black mud.
Slowly, the shivers began to subside, and the prayers fell silent. His knees crumpled as the strength went out of them, and he toppled—collapsed, more like—slumping back against the ruins of the spindle-legged table.
Theo caught him again, trying to keep him from cracking his skull on the wall. His head lolled back, dark eyes wide and staring, tears mixing with clay to leave muddy stains.
“Seth, Seth,” she whispered.
He blinked, clay beading on his eyelashes.
“Can you hear me, Seth?” Numbly, she ran through the signs of stroke in her mind: check pupils for unnatural dilation, feel joints for floppiness. Spend time in a studio with lots of chemicals, you learn to memorize the emergency procedures. But it was impossible for her to tell how bad he was. No seminar she’d ever taken had told her how to give first aid to a man bleeding clay out of his eyes.
They focused on her, at long last. The dry lips parted and the streaks of reddish clay cracked when he moved.
Tears beaded in Theo’s eyes. “Seth,” she repeated, her voice hoarse. “Seth, can you hear me?” The words quavered. Even if he couldn’t, what could she do about it?
She cradled Seth’s head, wiping away the mud with the pad of her thumb. “It’s not time yet,” she said softly. His stubble felt rough despite the callouses on her fingers. “Four thousand years, and you’re going to die in a storage locker by the airport? So much for Mister Governor.”
The lips twitched, and the remaining clay in the corners of his mouth crumbled.
Theo almost collapsed in relief when she realized he was trying to smile. The eyes focused, red veins beginning to fade from the whiteness of the eyeballs as his strange inbuilt healing took over. The fire was dying as quickly as it had sprung up, leaving behind the pale yellow light of the fluorescents. Without the blaze of flame, the world seemed dimmer and colder.
“Yu iti,” he rasped. “Yu iti haty-a.”
Theo blinked away the last tears, trying not to show how worried she still was. Seth tried to sit back up, but fresh red lines bloomed on the skin and Theo put a hand on his chest to keep him down.
He tried again. “Gouverneur c’est…mein vater…”
“It’s okay,” she said quietly. “Just focus on me.”
“The governor was my father.” He stumbled over the words, but at least it was English again. “I was a…a rich kid.”
She wiped away a few streaks of clay. “Welcome back, rich kid. I thought you’d crossed over for sure that time.”
“I think I might have.” He mopped most of the remaining clay out of his eyes, grimacing at it. But his hand squeezed Theo’s tighter than ever, the skin cool and slick with sweat. “Someone has my mummy, Theo.”
Theo’s stomach clenched. “I thought you had it hidden.”
“In my townhouse.” He struggled up into a sitting position against the broken table, and Theo took one of his arms, giving him something to lean on. “I did think it was adequately concealed. I used some things to hide it.”
“Magic? Secret sigils?”
“Four locks and a fingerprint scanner. But I did add a few spells. Simple, but they should have turned eyes away from it. Someone found it.”
“What…?” she started as she wiped clay off her hands. The red lines had almost faded, but they weren’t completely gone yet. “What happens? Happened? I mean, what did they do?”
His mouth twisted. “I don’t know. It felt like I was being ripped in half. It’s been damaged; it has to have been. Someone—someone knew that hurting it would hurt me.”
He swallowed, and Theo knew what he was thinking. Maybe THS203 might’ve been dissected by the tuberculosis study, but not while it was also evidence in an ongoing investigation. The only one who could’ve accessed it would be someone who could see through magic, and the only one getting close to it would be someone affiliated with the case.
“Zimmer?” she said. The name tasted like ash in her mouth as she said it. She’d hoped to avoid that, but it was hard enough fighting the damn shadow who’d set them up, and it needed a name. The one man with universal access to the museum, the one who’d sent her to see Seth on a flimsy pretext and failed to respond when she tried to ask for his help… His was as good a name as any.
And the actual shadow? The stalking dog? She opened her mouth to say something, but swallowed the words at the last moment. Too much going on already.
“Or his accomplice.” Seth struggled to sit up again, leaning hard against Theo as he tried not to fall. She sagged back onto the couch, letting him rest against her as she helped him get settled.
His hands trembled, but he was no longer bleeding and some of the color was coming back into his cheeks.
“I guess this answers the do-they-know question, Seth.”
His hand squeezed hers.
Ten minutes ago, he had been on top of the world, or as close to it as possible in their situation, and now he could barely stand. And worse, he had fallen because someone had his mummy.
No, not his mummy. The mummy. An artifact that could hurt Seth, no matter what he was doing or where he was. Someone knew what Seth was, enough to circumvent the security he’d placed on the mummy and enough to know that hurting it would hurt him. It could be an accident, but the way their luck was going, it was more likely an attack.
Seth seemed to be thinking the same thing. “We have no time left,” he said quietly. “I have to find a way to get my body back.”
“There can’t be too many places you can hide a mummy in this city,” Theo said. She hoped, rather than knew, that that was the case. “I’ll make a couple of calls. There has to be someone else in the museum who’ll talk to me.”
“No.” Seth managed to sit up this time. His color was back, and his voice was stronger. “This is getting out of hand. You need to go to the police. Turn yourself in. Tell them that I threatened your family if you didn’t help me. I can drop off the radar, find the mummy myself, and disappear.”
There was a moment of silence. Then Theo swept another strand of her hair aside and looked him straight in the eyes. “To hell with that.”
“Theo—”
“No. To hell with that.” She crossed her arms as Seth straightened up, trying to protest. “You heard me. I’ve been with you on this so far, Seth. If you don’t want me around anymore, say the word and I’m gone; I don’t stay where I’m not wanted. But if this is you trying to save me trouble or something, then screw it. You almost died in front of me. That mummy means they have a way to hurt you, and they don’t strike me as the type to let you catch up with them!”
She stopped, panting. Her face burned, not from embarrassment but with the flush of anger. All the pent-up emotions of the last few days—frustration and rage and the terror of something moving and alive that she’d never quite felt before and couldn’t recognize—they were rushing through her, making her shiver.
“You’re serious,” Seth said after a moment. He looked stunned.
“If I didn’t stop at grand larceny, why would I stop now?” she snapped back. “If you’re bored with me, then say it, I’m gone. But don’t think you’re doing me a favor by trying to send me away. Capisce?”
“You’re crazy,” he said slowly. A small smile tugged at his lips. “That’s supposed to be your line, isn’t it?”
“I’m an artist, Seth.” Theo threw her arms out, encompassing the room and the mummy-man and the whole insane world in one gesture. “I paint dead things. I pretend that I can recreate the faces of ancient corpses or turn walls into portals into the past. I know the skeletal structure of a Struthiomimus sedens better than most people know their credit card numbers, and then I put a freaking Santa hat on it. I’m sitting in a storage locker with a man who can’t die, and I volunteered to help him. I am…I am a flake. Believe me, if I were crazy I wouldn’t have a problem telling you.”
She took a deep breath, vaguely aware that her hands were shaking. “Now, are we going to start hunting down this bastard or not? Because I take it kind of personally when someone tries to kill you by long-distance voodoo.”
“Theo,” he said softly. Something in his eyes made her stop her impassioned half-rant. “Theodora. It’s an old name. Do you know what it means?”
She frowned, brought up short by the question. “Theodora means ‘gift of God.’ It’s Greek, my grandma said. Why does it matter?”
“I met a Theodora once before.” He stood up, wavering a little, and opened one of the boxes. Some digging produced a scroll, clearly one of the oldest and tied with a scrap of what looked like purple silk. The dangling tag was lettered in hieratic, and Theo picked out the letters, mentally calling them by their hieroglyphic equivalents: basket K, water N, folded cloth S, loaf T, box-stool P, quail-chick U. She tried to place the vowels that hieratic didn’t have. The last symbol threw her for a moment, but certain sounds hadn’t existed in the old alphabets.
“Constantinople?” she said finally.
Seth nodded.
“An empress,” he said. “Theodora, wife of Theophilos. Not a perfect woman, but she loved the icons. They made her a saint for restoring the images of Christ to the palaces and churches of the Byzantine Empire.”
Theo swallowed, her mouth dry. “You met her?”
“I did. I was with the Roman Empire for a long, long time.” He held out the scroll, and Theo touched it as carefully as she dared. “She believed that her deity was in the images. A good name for her, to be called a gift from her god.”
“It’s just a name.”
“Names have power.” When she didn’t take the scroll, he set it down on the table instead. “I was—am—called the son of the war god, and see how I turned out.”
“I don’t think soldiers are supposed to live forever,” she pointed out. Or run from a problem, she added mentally, though she couldn’t exactly blame him for that. Soldiers didn’t usually have to deal with angry gods or eternal life.
There was something enigmatic in his expression. His features were set, glacial as they had been that night at the museum, but his eyes were fixed on hers and seemed to be asking for something. His hand rested on the scroll, toying with the end of the scrap of silk. As she watched, he wound it around one coppery-blue finger, silk folds lying taut over the smooth flesh. She swallowed hard.
“Anyway,” she said loudly, forcing her thoughts back to the present, “I’m not ditching you, not now. We need a plan. This person hurt you from miles away. He has the mummy. What’re we going to do?”
“Find him. Stop him.” Seth shook his head. “Retrieve the mummy intact, if possible. I know this may be shocking to you, but I’d prefer not to die again.”
“Damn right,” she said softly. Her lips twisted in sad, bitter humor. “If you try to die on me, I’ll paint you another portrait. A Cubist portrait.”
The silk slipped from his fingers. He stretched one arm out, mutely offering something neither of them could put into words, and she went to him and curled into his embrace. His breath ruffled her hair as she rested her head against his shoulder. For a moment she let herself relax, wrapped in his arms, enjoying the closeness.
“Noted,” he murmured, his voice a low rumble. His hand stroked softly over the curve of her hip, toying with the hem of her remaining shirt.
“Seth…” She pressed a kiss to the hollow of his throat, caressing the pulse point there. She could feel his heart thundering under her cheek. When she said his name, though, his muscles tensed and his hands dropped away.
“I should finish the papers,” he said, and stepped back. Theo watched him, chilled by the sudden distance, as he sat down at the table again and picked up the knife. His hand shook.
The knife slid from his grip. He gripped it again, white-knuckled.
Seth Adler was afraid. His world was crashing down around him, and mortality was staring him in the face for what had to be the first time in thousands of years. Theo knew the way the story went: the mummy was preserved in order to provide a home and anchor for a part of the soul, and without it, the soul could be lost forever. His weakness was in someone else’s hands, and Anhurmose son of Merenptah was scared. He was going to die, and maybe Theo was going to die with him.
But she was mortal. Completely, utterly normal and mortal. She didn’t want to die, but it had always been part of the plan—the last act, the final hurrah, the ultimate brushstroke on the canvas of her life. The immortal man feared death because he could avoid it, but the mortal woman knew something he didn’t.
She knew that they weren’t dead yet.
“I want to try something,” she said softly.
Seth was concentrating on his work. “You have an idea?”
“Sort of.” The words felt awkwar
d, but they were nothing but words. She leaned over and, as gently as if she had his life in her hands, brushed the fine, dark hair off the nape of his neck. He tensed under her hands, but she pressed a kiss against the skin and the merest tremor ran through the muscles there.
“Theo,” he said hoarsely. Raggedly. “I’m trying very, very hard not to take things out of context right now… Ah!”
She wondered if he knew how much that little noise, deep in his throat as she nipped at the jut of his collarbone, meant to her. It sent a deep thrill through her, whispering of control and safety and don’t think, do. It was a feeling she liked.
“Mr. Adler,” she said quietly, her lips brushing against the taut skin, “am I trying to seduce you?”
A laugh broke from him, but it trailed off into a moan as she ran her nails ever so lightly over the softest skin at the base of his ribs. “I think you are,” he rasped.
His breath was coming faster and his dark eyes burned as he half turned in his chair, trying to face her. One hand wrapped around her wrist, keeping her fingers from probing farther—for her safety, maybe, but perhaps also for his. There was a glint in the fine, dark hair of his temples where sweat was beginning to gather.
“Theo.” Her name was a hoarse whisper on his lips. “Theo, I…I don’t know. It’s a matter of…”
“If you say ‘life and death,’ Seth Adler,” she said, her own voice rough, “you won’t like what I do.”
The challenging words broke something in him. Surging up from his chair, he kissed her hungrily, biting on her lower lip and drawing a gasp from her. His arms went around her, hard and strong and demanding, but not tight enough. He was still restraining himself. Words were still left unsaid. And Theo didn’t like not having things explained. She shivered as the stubble rasped against her lips, but she pulled him closer.
The words finally came out in low whispers between kisses. “Theo. It’s not responsible. We’re on the run. I don’t have anything. And the magic—the gods—”
Painter of the Dead (Shades of Immortality Book 1) Page 20
