Seth closed his eyes and leaned into her touch. “I don’t know,” he murmured, his breath hot against her palm. “I don’t know. I did or I didn’t. But I’ve been dodging this for a long time, Theo. I have to go. I can’t meet Ammit this way. I can’t.”
“Then go.” The words felt heavy, but they came out in a bare whisper. “But be careful. And take this.” She pulled out the tyet amulet she had carried.
When it brushed against his hand, though, Seth jolted back. There was a hiss of burning, and a bright-red mark spread across his palm. Theo gave a startled cry and dropped the amulet, but her own fingers were fine.
“Seth, I’m sorry—” she began.
He shook his head.
“No heart,” he said. “Not a human one, anyway. I have to carry Isis’s symbol in a cloth; I’m a little déclassé for her since I first died.”
“That’s her loss.” She kissed him. “If you’ve really got books on this, think about finding them, okay? We’re not dead yet.”
“From your lips to the gods’ ears,” he said quietly.
Then he was gone.
Eyes stinging, she turned back to the half-conscious curator. He was slumped against the wall, eyes closed, seemingly unbreathing. For a moment, she wondered if he was in shock. But she moved, and the flat, pale eyes focused on her, pinning her to the spot.
“Miss Speer.” The words came out in monotone. “I’m fairly certain that this wasn’t supposed to happen.”
“No, Doctor,” she said. There didn’t seem to be another answer. “Are you okay?”
“I seem to have cracked a tibia. Would you mind having a look?” Still barely an inflection, just the dry, stale voice. “I’m having difficulty checking for myself.”
Theo pulled up the curator’s pant leg. His shin was swollen and purple, the flesh taut and hot. It was flecked with sweat, and when Theo touched it, Van Allen flinched and let out a hiss.
“You broke something,” she said, “and the swelling’s bad. But I think you’re gonna be okay.”
“I hope so. We’re going to have a lot of cleanup to do.” For a moment, the eyes unfocused again. “This could have fascinating repercussions. The account of Israelite slavery in Egypt is often considered apocryphal, since there’s been no discernible cultural link between Old Kingdom and, hah, Old Testament. But the mythology…”
“Dr. Van Allen, are you okay?” Theo said, more than a little worried. “You got a pretty bad whack on the head there too. You should probably relax and wait for the police.”
“Police?” Van Allen frowned. “Oh. Right. The police will be coming.” The bright-blue gaze skewered Theo, and she shifted, unwilling to meet it. “You’d better get moving, I think. You don’t want to be caught here.”
Theo gawked, momentarily baffled by a sudden rush of love for the sharp curator. Sure, Van Allen was shaken and she’d seen a chink or two in his steely façade, but it seemed that underneath that mask was more steel. So much for academics being soft! Paler than ever and clearly in pain, Van Allen was solid.
“Sir,” she said, “you’re the best boss ever.”
“And don’t forget it.” Van Allen grimaced as he tried again to move his leg. “And if you see Mr. Zimmer, tell him he’s fired.”
“With pleasure.” Quickly, in case he noticed signs of unprofessionalism, she squeezed his free hand as she stood up. “Thanks.”
* * *
A month ago, Theo Speer’s most grievous sin had been parallel parking. If you’d asked her to rob a museum, flee from the police, or rendezvous with a man on the run, she would have been completely at sea. To be honest, she still wasn’t too strong on most of those things.
But fleeing from police was necessary to save a life. Rendezvousing with a wanted man, ditto. And if she was going to run from someone, the museum was the place to do it. This was her turf.
Marble halls of academe gave way to starkly lit concrete corridors thick with years of paint. She automatically shifted to a flat-footed step, changing her stride to soften the sound of her footfalls. Her breathing seemed unnaturally loud and harsh in her ears.
In the distance, she could hear feet pounding and a rumble of voices. Trying to keep her breaths shallow, she cut a hard left and ducked through the door to Mammal Taxidermy. The doors should have been locked, but Shawn Faroe and his team tended to be slack. Nobody would want to steal dead pine martens, or so the logic went.
From Taxidermy to Insect Preservation. Up one short flight to Tropical Fish. A quick swing from Fish into Herpetology. Kick over the trash can and leave the door to Oversized Herpetology open, in case they thought to check which way she’d gone through. Instead, she swung right and took the fire stairs, clipping out through the safety hatch to wind up in the cleaning corridor behind Cephalopods of the World.
She slipped out through the security door behind the biggest squid and emerged in a maintenance alley almost calf deep in snow.
Her path took her away from the museum campus and down to the lakefront. There, the golden ribbon of Lake Shore Drive resolved itself into eight lanes of high-speed traffic, crossed by occasional pedestrian bridges slick with layers of winter ice. Theo slogged along, keeping to the plowed-up patches of gravel and mud whenever possible.
Far off, she could hear sirens. It took an effort not to panic—there were always sirens in Chicago. It didn’t guarantee she was being chased.
But she probably was. The golems had wrecked the place, but who was going to believe that story when there was a convenient rogue employee to blame?
Ten minutes’ brisk walk brought her to the Roosevelt subway stop.
The subway was cold but not nearly as cold as outside, and Theo sank down on a bench and loosened her scarf. For the first time in what felt like hours, she had time to breathe and think.
THS2017, 004, and 023. They’d been three of the worst specimens in the collection, battered almost beyond recognition, their chest cavities gaping and empty and their limbs snapped off. But that hadn’t seemed to matter when they were being brought to life.
Or had it? Theo didn’t know. She only knew that the magician—could she really put that name to Zimmer?—had worked his spell on those three, out of the whole collection. Maybe he really had been trying to take over one of their bodies, but if so, why? And if he was trying to turn them into monsters, why those three? An army of golems would have done the job better.
Hearts? her brain supplied a little helplessly. Hearts were at the center of the Egyptian ritual canon. Having your heart eaten was supposed to be the final destruction. Seth had said they’d put animal hearts in the shabtis, and the tyet hurt him because he was living with a heart not his own.
But the shabtis to rise under the magician’s influence had been the ones without hearts. Her gut twisted at the memory of the liquid golems, screaming as they tried to take definite shape. Maybe the magic, whatever it was, didn’t work right when there was no heart in the shabtis…
Zimmer touching her heart…
Seth said his brother had theorized about magic. His brother—Mark Zimmer? She didn’t know.
Were the guards okay?
Why would Zimmer want to move his soul into her body? Was that what he’d been planning when he came to the museum that night, or had he just seized an opportunity when he learned she was there with Van Allen?
Her head ached; her shoulders burned; blood and clay and sweat stained her. She wanted sleep. She wanted food. She wanted Seth. But Seth was gone now, back to being an ancient Egyptian warrior running from an Egyptian magician. Or worse, actually facing him.
I can’t die like this, he’d said. His turf and his mission, so of course he’d follow his own rules.
Except he hadn’t been the one to stop the golems. They hadn’t been something he’d been prepared to face; the spirit was willing, but the flesh was out of ideas. But she’d won. There was motion there, she’d grabbed it with both hands, and she’d done something that he couldn’t.
And sh
e was supposed to go home?
Hah. Home. There were probably police watching her apartment. She couldn’t go back to Aki—no, she’d risked getting him into trouble already. And she guessed her parents wouldn’t be too thrilled to harbor a fugitive daughter.
Parents. A jolt of hope sparked through her. The house in Deerfield! Parents in Taos, a house standing empty. A house that the cops might not be watching. It would take her a couple of hours and several train transfers to get there, and that could help to throw them off her scent.
Chapter Fifteen
Ammit is the eater of hearts, the great devourer, the final death. Though each sin burdens your heart, it makes it all the sweeter to her. Poison yourself with goodness, that she will not love the taste of your flesh, and pass you by.
– Excerpt from The Commandments of Neferu,
circa 1700 BCE
Deerfield was the kind of suburb where the sidewalks were unimportant. Snow was piled a foot deep on the undisturbed lawns, occasionally tinted coral pink or pale green by Christmas lights and glowing inflatable Santa Clauses. Craftsman houses and pseudo-Victorians stood alongside modern cement-and-glass boxes, but the night blended them together into patches of soft color and shadow. It was a comfortable, quietly wealthy neighborhood where people slept after long days at the office and rarely walked farther than the mailbox.
After a moment, Theo decided not to turn on the lights. No one was supposed to be here, after all. Sighing, she walked stiff-legged up the stairs.
She wanted sleep, badly, but not as much as she wanted a shower. Chicagoans might not stare at a woman smeared with drying clay, but they would still remember her. Faced with the bathroom’s array of Italian shampoos and French-milled soaps, though, she balked and settled for a quick sponge bath at the sink. The clay, at least, peeled off easily. Then she wrapped a towel around her damp hair and walked down the hall to her old room.
The room felt sterile. Her locked cupboard of art supplies was in the same place, but everything had been cleaned within an inch of its life. Her Formula One posters and comics were long gone, replaced by Ansel Adams prints and a throw rug that had clearly never been walked on. It took her almost ten minutes to debone the bed—remove the pillows, shams, and decorative bedspreads—before she could collapse onto it.
The ceiling was layers of shadow. Staring at it did nothing for her.
She lay on a cold bed in a cold house, unable to turn on the lights because she was a fugitive. Her family had no idea where she was, and the man she wanted to be with had been forced away by something dark and evil.
The whole thing had gone further than Theo’d ever imagined. She was exhausted, alone, and had no idea of where to go next or how to help Seth. The world had spun out of control, and she was barely clinging to it.
So much for the greatest discovery in the history of mankind.
Automatically, hungry for a distraction, her mind seized on the thought. What had those words been? Not the shabti inscription but the prayer, the one Seth had recited to her hours before. Concentrating, she called up her paint mnemonic from the depths of her mind. The first colors had been slightly discordant—tangerine and gunmetal, that was it, ha and ne…
It took almost half an hour to reconstruct the sequence. She stole paper from the printer in her mother’s office and scribbled out the syllables, cross-linking them with the colors she had assigned. It was a quick-and-dirty system that had saved her bacon in a few college examinations, but this time it was infinitely more important. If she got a single syllable wrong, who knew what would happen?
No pressure, though.
Once she had the formula, she set it aside and headed for the computer. The only books in her parents’ house were coffee-table tomes and histories of political philosophy, but their Internet was top-of-the-line. Theo dove in.
Words streamed past her as she swam from one site to the next, frantically clicking and reading, compiling and adding. Wax models…practices similar to vodoun…ushebtis intended to substitute for the deceased…the power of the name and the image…
An idea began to coalesce. It was insane, but insane had been par for the course for a few days now, and Theo was more than angry enough to take a leap of faith. Wax and clay she didn’t have, but there were always other options.
Papier-mâché, for example. Theo ripped open the cupboards, assembling the ingredients she needed. Flour. Salt. Water. Newspaper. Mix and mold.
The object that emerged was crude—she’d never been much of a sculptor. But there it was, a mummiform figure with the bow and dog’s leash of a hunter in his hands. Servant of the dead. Tongue between her teeth, she scratched out the hieroglyphs on the damp surface, muttering the incantations as best she could remember and praying that her mnemonic would help her get it right. The damp paper strips bunched and tore under the knife blade as she worked.
There was one ingredient left. She threw the shabti in the oven to harden a little, then snatched a garbage bag and hauled the ladder out of the garage.
It would have been easier at her apartment, where generations of vicious city pigeons lived and died on the roof. Still, the house was a flat-topped International Style box, and Theo remembered how much random junk could collect up there. She scrambled up over the eaves and landed in a snowdrift.
Jackpot! A few dead birds at the edge, one still fresh. From the looks of things, Mom and Dad had been putting out traps to keep the pigeons from crapping on the roof, and the snow had preserved the evidence. Trying not to breathe, Theo scraped the freshest up and shoved it into the garbage bag. If she was going to be doing this a lot, she should really invest in a good chest freezer or something.
Back in the kitchen, it was the work of a few gruesome moments to remove the heart. Murmuring the prayers helped—she could almost imagine she was back in Seth’s Egypt, the kitchen an embalmer’s workshop.
Or not. She switched the oven off and ran to throw up in the sink.
Into the shabti went the heart. One final set of incantations, close the hole in the chest with a plug of papier-mâché, and…
…nothing.
Nothing at all. Her disgusting little mixed-media sculpture sat there silent and inert, a testimony to the depths she’d reach, if given the opportunity. Paste and blood on her hands, an amateur autopsy on the kitchen table. Egyptian voodoo.
What would Mom think?
“Not very chic,” Theo said aloud, a smile tugging at her lips. What would Amy Clarendon Speer, star of the dinner-party circuit, with her Hermès scarf and English rose complexion, say if she could see her daughter now? She’d probably be outwardly proud her baby girl was expanding her horizons, but inwardly she’d cringe at the thought of dismembering animals. Maybe she’d line up a good shrink. Pretend it was a dream.
The laugh bubbled up inside Theo, hoarse and completely mirthless, a cackle with an edge of hysteria that tore its way out of her dry throat. She laughed and laughed, tears leaking from her reddened eyes, as her crude project sat quietly on the kitchen table in a puddle of fluid and flour paste. Arts and crafts with Leatherface.
She laughed until she had no more breath or tears and staggered into the living room to sleep. Her abortive attempt at black magic lay abandoned on the table.
* * *
Four thousand years was a heavy burden for anyone to carry, but if Seth was lucky, it could help him. He’d been in danger so many times before, and still lasted into the current day with shabtis to spare. What had he done then? What could he do now?
This cache was the biggest he had in the city. It was an old bank building, good turn-of-the-century construction with granite walls and marble floors that he owned through a dummy company. The aboveground floors were abandoned and falling apart—one more piece of urban decay in a city that had seen two hundred years come and go. Underground, though, the cool stone basement and vault were perfect for preserving documents. And other things.
Seth muttered to himself in Kemetic as he pawed through the scro
lls. Toulouse? When had he been to Toulouse? As his eyes scanned the parchment, taking in the scrawled lines of hieratic, a dim memory stirred. Oh, 1216, with Fiorentino da Firenze. He hadn’t thought about it since he last recopied the scroll in—he checked the tag—1870. About the time Rachid al-Adhur had come to America, in fact.
Fiorentino da Firenze. Nice man. Not that it was going to help Seth now.
Growling, he dropped the scroll and grabbed another one. Volume three: barely fifty years out of time. With a faint sense of disgust, he perused the familiar lines.
I know this is a sacrilege, but I cannot call it anything but an opportunity as well. When I return home, I can present myself to the king under any name I like! Once I’ve gotten his attention, I can resume my old duties and discover the fate of my children. I can do what I was made to do, and win back some favor into the bargain.
I have all eternity at my disposal. There was never a man who could do what I can! I can conquer death—what’s to say I won’t also conquer fear? I can be an institution, a nation of men in service of Waset. In another hundred years, I’ll be the greatest general of all. I doubt the gods can overlook that.
He’d been so stupid back then. No man, no matter how long-lived, could conquer fear.
Seth, under many names and faces, had fought. He’d fought and died and killed under dozens of banners, and he’d never found perfection or true fearlessness or proof that the gods had forgiven him. And those the gods did not forgive…
The thought ate at him.
And he was still afraid, afraid that he would die, that the tearing, wrenching feeling would return as his mummy was broken again. Magic or not, he was flesh, and flesh had its damn weaknesses.
At least Theo was safe now, he thought with a sneaking sense of relief. A hand had lain on her heart. She had brushed the threat of the magic aside, but Seth knew what it could have done. His enemy had tried to step into Theo’s body, replacing her soul and mind. And if it had been done? She would be a true Trojan horse, the perfect weapon against Seth. Thank the gods for the tyet—the thought of her being so used had him shuddering with fear and rage.
Painter of the Dead (Shades of Immortality Book 1) Page 24
