Panting, she leaned against the doorframe. The door had been broken clean off its hinges, but there were no more footsteps. Had he turned around? Missed her in the dark?
She clutched her chest and forced herself to concentrate.
Something was happening in the dimness of the lab, though. There was a strange wet noise, like mud bubbling from a broken sewer pipe. Something creaked; something else shuffled. A damp snap.
Forcing herself to stand up, Theo pushed through and into the lab. Stainless-steel tables and racks of instruments were untouched, and there was no sign of Zimmer. Dim blue security lights flickered from a locked case, and something made a slurping noise as one of the lights died entirely.
The case was full of shabtis. Several had fallen and broken, while others had been knocked aside. Snapped limbs and bits of clay littered the case. But as Theo watched, three of them twitched and began to grow.
Their cracking surfaces bulged and shattered. New clay bubbled up underneath, slick and shiny and glutinous, like wax and blood mixed together. It boiled, trying to form a new crust, then cracked again to make way for fresh clay in an instant. Half-baked idea, Theo thought. They were trying to form new bodies but they didn’t know how.
In seconds, they were the size of men. Half-liquid fists trailing droplets slammed against the glass and spiderwebbed cracks across the bulletproof material.
They hammered away, pounding on the rapidly splintering glass, their fragile skins reforming with each blow. Chunks of dead clay fell from them and dissolved into dry red dirt, which rose from the case and whirled out on the eddies created by the air conditioner like a dust storm straight from the surface of Mars.
Even as she staggered back, the cracked panel collapsed. Alarms blared as the oozing shabtis burst out of the case, their faces contorted in expressions of pain that their stylized features had never been meant to convey.
Her heart hammered as the shabtis crawled to their feet. They were taller than men and as the clay built up layer by layer, they looked less and less human. Their shells still cracked with each movement, but the glutinous liquid underneath knitted them together again whenever it was exposed. One opened its mouth, letting out a strangled gurgle. Though their bodies twitched and their lavalike cores bubbled with each step, their gazes fixed on Theo.
She wasn’t going to wait for them to pull themselves together. She ran.
Her feet skidded awkwardly on the tiled floor, but she kept running. She didn’t dare turn around: the wet, sucking noise of liquid clay was following her, and the smell of damp dust suffused the hallways. By the time she reached the staircase, she was moving so fast that she just grabbed the banister and swung around onto the steps without stopping. And they were still following her.
Theo almost tripped over Dr. Van Allen when she reached him. He had pulled himself up against the wall and was leaning back, his eyes closed. Without hesitating, Theo grabbed his arm and hauled him to his one good foot, ignoring the gasp of pain. The smell was growing stronger.
“What is it?” Van Allen said. Theo jerked her head back, and he looked over her shoulder. His eyes widened. “Golems!”
The word was strangled. Theo fumbled frantically for the curator’s jacket, trying to grab the ID card that could get them through the security door, but her fingers slipped on the plastic.
“Golems! The etymology is Hebrew, but the legend—perhaps it has roots in Egypt—”
Maybe it was their own unnatural forms resisting them, or maybe the agonized shabtis didn’t honestly expect to see a curator theorizing about their connection to Jewish folklore, because the lumbering monsters paused barely long enough. Theo ripped the ID card off Van Allen’s jacket and swiped it through the slot, letting out a wordless yelp of triumph as the light turned green. The door slammed shut behind them; a clay hand reaching for Theo’s hair crumbled into dust as it was severed.
“The implications…” Dr. Van Allen murmured vaguely, staring at nothing while the door reverberated with blows and Theo pulled hard on his arm. “The implications of, yes, a true automaton…it could offer an alternate explanation for the Antikythera device, for a start…”
Theo urged him forward again, but Dr. Van Allen was dead weight. He descended into random mumblings about gears and folklore and Heron of Alexandria.
With nothing human to vent their rage on, the shabtis howled and attacked anything they could reach. Clay cracked and masonry crumbled, but she could hear glass shattering and the screech of metal as well. There went the windows. Theo pulled harder, hoping that the curator would miraculously develop mobility. He didn’t.
A hand landed on her shoulder, and Theo let out a yelp. “Let me go, you son of a—” she began, rounding on her attacker with fists flying.
Instead of dodging, Seth caught her first punch and shifted, throwing her off-balance. Theo stumbled and almost fell, but his grip was like iron and its strength kept her upright.
“What the hell are you doing here?” she gasped out. His arm was rock steady, but there was a faint tremor in the fingers that wrapped around her wrist.
“Followed you,” he said tightly. “I was afraid you might do something reckless. Come on, we have to go!”
She would have bristled, but the thunder of the fists on the door made losing her temper a distant second priority. “Wait! We can’t leave the doc!”
Seth slung an arm around Dr. Van Allen and lifted him clean off the ground. Theo stumbled at the sudden loss of balance, biting her lip hard as she tried to reorient herself. Van Allen sagged and fell quietly unconscious, and Seth draped him over one shoulder in a fireman’s carry.
They ran, and the door burst open behind them. The shabtis screamed as they broke through, a noise like knives on glass, and Theo’s heart shuddered in her chest.
The end of the corridor was coming up fast. The urge to escape had been too strong, and the shabtis were between them and the staircase. There were two ways out now: the iron-gated elevator and the security door that led outside. No contest.
Theo grabbed the card and swiped them through the security door, trying to ignore the alarms ringing in the background. She gasped as the cold outside air hit them like a slap in the face.
They were on a fire escape. The steel bars formed a small balcony before turning sharply downward, vanishing into the orange-tinted shadows and creating harsh black lines against the cold white exterior of the building. Snow fell through the gaps in the metal, but ice clung to it, making the footing treacherous. Seth clutched the railing with one hand and balanced the unconscious Van Allen with the other, eyes wild.
“What are we going to do?” Theo panted. Despite the thick security door, she could hear the golems crashing around, making the building shake. They seemed to be bent on destroying everything they touched. “Tell me you know how to kill those things!”
Seth shook his head. “The magic’s been twisted. I could sense it a mile off—some kind of spell. I think someone was trying to take over a shabti body.” The door vibrated again, knocking icicles free and sending them clattering down the long stairway. “We need to get down, now. Hang on to me and I’ll climb.”
“Are you crazy? We have to stop them!” Theo’s breath caught in her throat. Yuri was on the night shift most of the time. With the alarms blaring, he’d come running, and… Oh God. Not an option. Think think think. Magic, Egyptian magic. Shabtis. Seth. Shabtis as magic. Shabtis as Seth…
It was the sight of him, his dark eyes locked on her, that gave her the idea. “Stay here.” He grabbed her arm, but she shook him off.
“Theo, don’t!”
“No! Stay here.” And before he could say anything, she slammed back into the museum.
Wet clay. Wet clay was malleable, and in a creature like that, malleable was dangerous. Two of the three golems had begun to melt into each other, and their howls echoed and re-echoed down the hall as they struggled to separate themselves. The third was smashing every glass case it could get its muddied hands on
, leaving streaks of clay on the walls and the carpet. When Theo stopped in the hall, though, their heads turned to follow her.
You spent so much time there, talking to them as if they were real. It had to make an impression.
“My poor little guys,” she said.
The golems recoiled. The biggest of them—THS2023, she guessed, judging by the remnants of dark pigment on its head—settled back on itself. Several expressions dragged across its face in quick succession, each feature disconnected from the others in a way that made it impossible for any of the expressions to ever be complete. An angry mouth warped, but the eyes seemed almost afraid.
“Maybe you didn’t like it in the prep lab, but at least you were safe,” she said, trying not to let her fear show. Her heart pounded and her skin was slick with clammy sweat, but she kept her gaze on the warped face. “Now you’re out here, getting clay on the carpet and getting jerked around by magicians. Four thousand is way too old for this kind of thing.”
It was like talking to a skittish animal. The words didn’t really seem to matter; it was about the tone and the familiar voice, letting them know that there was someone there they knew. She hoped it would be enough.
“I wish this hadn’t happened,” she continued gently. “I loved you guys so much, seeing you all ready for that exhibit. It’s not fair, you getting pushed out here before you get a real chance to shine.”
The biggest one clutched its head, its hands sinking into the soft clay. The smaller ones were folding in on themselves as their forms bubbled and shifted. One reached out several pseudopods, temporarily taking on a familiar shape. It was trying to return to its old form.
“It’s okay,” Theo said, taking a few cautious steps forward. The smallest of the golems tried to reach for her, but fell back, its body spasming. “I’m so, so sorry, guys. I wish I could do something for you right now. But I promise, everything’s going to be okay. Whatever happens, there’s still gonna be an exhibit, and hundreds and hundreds of people will come by every day to see how amazing and beautiful you are. No one can take that away from you.”
The golems shivered. They were losing coherence, their bodies melting into shapeless blobs.
She kept talking, murmuring reassurances, telling them what wonderful things they were, and finally—with a sigh, as if they were giving up—they collapsed. Liquid clay flooded the corridor and began almost immediately to dry into hard patches.
She stumbled back, propping herself against the wall as the golems dissolved. Her eyes stung; she mopped her face with one hand, feeling roughness under her fingers. She, like everything else in the corridor, had been sprayed with quick-hardening ceramic. Clumps were tangled in her hair.
“It’s all right,” she called out. The alarms were still echoing in the depths of the museum, but to her ears, they seemed to have faded into the background.
The shabtis. Oh God. She leaned against the wall, trying to steady her breathing. The security door creaked open again and Seth appeared in the corner of her eye, a blur of blue copper topped by the dull orange of the doctor’s jacket, but she couldn’t seem to turn her head to focus on either of them.
Her little survivors. Four thousand years old, those figurines, existing not because of magic or science or preservation labs, but simply because they were works of art that people had chosen to protect. She’d talked to them, teased them, praised them, and maybe loved them a bit. Loved them enough to awaken their link with Seth, and perhaps draw him to her. But she’d never seen them move, and she’d never watched them die. Her vision blurred as tears began to well up.
There was a soft thump as Seth set down the doctor. Van Allen’s head lolled, but his eyes were half-open and his color was coming back.
Theo took a deep breath and mopped away the tears with the back of her hand.
“Theo.”
Seth took a couple of steps toward her. Theo glanced down as she blotted the last of the tears. She could feel the warmth of him, see his striking colors without looking directly at him, but she wasn’t sure what to do now.
He put one hand on her shoulder and gently raised her chin with the other. “Theo,” he said softly. “Theo, are you still with me?”
“I’m here.” The words came out in a whisper.
“Never do that again,” he said. “Please. I don’t think my heart can take it.”
“Theirs sure couldn’t.” She closed her eyes and, for a moment, leaned into his touch. She could feel his heart—or something’s heart, anyway—under her hands, beating too slowly to be human. Slow, but steady, and she took comfort in its rhythm. He pressed a kiss to her lips, and she wanted to stay there and let herself enjoy it.
But she couldn’t. The guards would have responded to the alarms by now if they were able, but even if Zimmer had somehow incapacitated them, the police would be getting the alarm signal too. Later, she silently promised herself as she kissed him softly. More of this later. Now, though, she pulled away.
“What happened?” Seth asked, taking the hint.
“I came to see Dr. Van Allen about the second theft.” Theo raked a hand through her dirty hair. “Zimmer was here. He grabbed me,” she added with a humorless twist of her lips. “His Five-Point Palm Exploding Heart Technique needs work. But he did something to the shabtis and created…that.” She busied herself with peeling scraps of hardening clay off her hands, hoping not to meet his eyes.
“He touched you? Where?”
When she showed him, he hooked his fingers into the neckline of her shirt and began to gently tug it down. She tried to push his hand away, but his finger touched something and she winced as another wave of pain flooded through her chest and shoulder. He had torn the neckline, exposing the soft, white cup of her bra and the curve of her left breast. What had been plain skin was marred by a huge fresh burn, bright red with raised, bloodied edges, like a knife had been run over the flesh. It was the size of a man’s hand and formed a familiar shape—an ankh with its arms folded inward.
“Tyet,” Seth murmured. Blood was draining from his face. “He touched your heart, Theo. He wanted to take your body.”
“What?”
Her voice rose in a yelp, and the long hall echoed it back, turning it into a chorus of indignant disbelief. “What do you mean?” she whispered, trying and failing to keep a lid on her surprise. “Tell me that’s not what it sounds like!”
“It was…theorized,” Seth hazarded. He couldn’t meet her eyes. “As an extension of the technique I used. If a soul could be earthed in a shabti, couldn’t you find a way to move one soul into another living body? Throw the owner’s soul out into the darkness and take his form? But I never…”
“Theorized.” Theo swallowed. “By who?”
“Meren.” His expression was grim. “My brother.”
It took a moment to process. Theo’s first thought: But Mark looks so freaking Irish. Then her normal thinking caught up and the words left her mouth without being cleared by her brain, “But your brother’s dead.”
“So am I.”
“No you’re not, you’re…” She looked for the word and didn’t find it. “You said you weren’t, Seth. You’re in the house when the lights go out.”
“I haven’t died completely. But I’m supposed to be dead, if things worked the way they should.” His gaze flicked over the tyet-shaped burn on her chest. There was a small pink mark next to it, where Seth’s teeth had nipped at her breast hours before. “This is magic, deep magic. The kind my brother specialized in.”
Theo’s hand flew to the pocket of her jacket. The shape of the tyet amulet was still there. Seth’s eyes followed her, and his shoulders relaxed a fraction as he saw the outline against the fabric.
“She protected you,” he said. “I’ll burn a hundred offerings for her. If you hadn’t had that, you might not be alive right now.”
Theo ran a hand through her hair again and tried not to look him in the eye. The expression there was making her stomach twist. “What now?”
“I have to leave,” he said. That got her attention. “I have some books, copies of texts he gave me, in another cache. I might be able to find out if he could have done this. Or if not him, who else.”
“Seth,” Theo said softly. “Are you rabbiting again?”
“It doesn’t matter what I’m planning, Theo. Your involvement ends here.” For a moment, Theo wanted to punch him. Or hug him. She wasn’t sure which impulse came first. Seth looked like the dead man he was, his expression haunted, his clenched fists white-knuckled. She wanted to scream at him that this wasn’t the solution. That she wanted to go with him, or make him stay. With an effort, she made herself speak calmly.
“Going it alone won’t solve it,” she said, pulling her shirt up to cover the tyet mark. “Please, Seth, think. We need to figure this out.”
“Theo,” he said, and her name was a harsh whisper. “When I thought this was simply crime, that was one thing. Crime is human. People want gold and antiques for themselves, tombs get robbed—it happens. But this is magic. Gods are involved, Theo. I saw a jackal shadow in the hall—” She couldn’t keep her expression neutral, and he flinched. “You saw it too?”
“I…maybe,” she said. “I might’ve been hallucinating.”
“Hallucinations only cover so much.” The words were bitter. “I know better than anyone that magic is dangerous. Gods, more so. Gods you can’t control, especially when they’re angry. Someone’s going to die, and nobody else in this whole freezing city has bodies to spare!”
He used the word freezing like a curse. Theo didn’t let his anger touch her. She moved forward and, gently, took his head in her hands. The muscles under the skin stood out like twisted bands of steel, and the skin itself was papery and dry. Stubble scratched at her palms.
She looked him in the eyes and saw desperation.
“Seth,” she said. “You didn’t do anything wrong.”
It was the one thing she could think of to say. But that look in his eyes was so wrong that she wanted, dearly, to wipe it away. A month ago she would’ve given an arm to be able to paint that desperate fear, to share it with the world. Now she never wanted to see it again.
Painter of the Dead (Shades of Immortality Book 1) Page 23
