Scorpion Trap Read online

  “What if Isis killed them?” she asked.

  I regarded the blood splatters and smears staining the floor, couch, bed, and walls. Isis was more than capable of this—she’d set the jackals on Ammit and ordered me to kill via Osiris many times in the past—but what was her angle here? Why would she slaughter people she’d seen as her servants? “Why?”

  Shu’s laugh cracked like a whip. “How did you even survive childhood? She has a history of setting you up. You walk into a massacre in Isis’s suite, with no witnesses, and you don’t think she might, oh, I don’t know, pin it on you for husband dearest? Let’s pretend, for a second, that Osiris knows you’re here with Isis. What’s Isis going to do? She won’t admit she asked you to come here. She’ll drop you in the shit and make you out to be the enraged jealous psychopath who stalked her halfway around the world and her as the sweet damsel in distress.”

  It was plausible. “Enraged jealous psychopath?”

  “That’s your takeaway from everything I said?”

  “Even Osiris isn’t stupid enough to see Isis as a damsel in distress.”

  Shukra’s glare had gone from mildly irritated to outright death ray. “You need to take this more seriously. This is my life too.”

  And there was the truth. She didn’t care about any of this, just saving her own hide. Maybe a little of the old Shu still existed in there. “Do you know if Osiris is on his way here?”

  “No, I—”

  “So quit worrying about something that hasn’t happened and worry about the fact that something or someone had the magical balls to break into Isis’s suite and kill her people.” I brushed ash from my hands and gestured around the room, still in disarray. “Do you sense any fragments of magic?”

  Closing her eyes, she shook out her hands and stilled. “There is something under all your ash… It’s familiar.” She opened her eyes. “The magic, it tastes like the scorpion curse from Senenmut’s tomb. Whoever set that trap was here.”

  That trap had been set when the sarcophagus was sealed thousands of years ago. People didn’t live long, so we were dealing with a god. “That narrows it down.”

  For another god to attack Isis so brazenly, they were either looking to destabilize the existing peace, or they were insane. Or both. Why did it always have to be gods, and why was I always stuck in the middle?

  “Do you think we released more than the scorpions when we cracked open that sarcophagus?”

  Shu caught my meaning. “We would have known.” But she didn’t sound sure.

  “Let’s take another look at that tomb.”

  Starlight glittered above the Valley of the Queens, and a swollen moon poured light over cooling rocks and settling sand.

  Shu lurched the Jeep to a halt where tourist buses parked during the day, stirring up clouds of dust. Up ahead, people blocked the valley. Lots and lots of people lined the paths winding between the steep valley sides. Hundreds of figures, at least.

  Shu cut the engine. “What the…?”

  I gripped the top of the windshield and stood, letting the sight sink in. Silence. The kind of rare, natural silence only found in isolated pockets of the world, or the sound of magic breathing in. Crowds don’t do silence. Either those people weren’t real, or something else was at work here.

  Shu and I wove our way through the silent lines of people. Some were draped in ankle-length galabiya robes, while others had arrived straight from their air-conditioned offices. All stared up at the valley, eyes glassy.

  Shu waved a hand in front of a man’s face and shrugged when he didn’t react.

  Godstruck, all of them.

  We pushed on through, following the eerie trail of their glares to a recently excavated hole in the ground that marked Senenmut’s tomb. The debris had been shifted. Deep inside, hieroglyphs glowed and shimmered like living things. The scorpions were long gone, but something was down there—something that had drawn all these people out of their daily routines and called them here.

  Shu peered down the ladder. “I’m not climbing into a hole in the ground with an unknown god.”

  “Pussy.”

  “I don’t do gods. That’s your specialty.” She backed away from the hole and thumbed at the blank-eyed groupies. “I’ll keep an eye on these fools.”

  I grabbed the ladder, wondered if this might be the last hole in the ground I’d climb into that wasn’t my grave, and descended.

  The tomb could have been finished yesterday. What had been dusty and faded during my last visit now shone with freshly painted brilliance and magic. I reached out a hand, more by reflex than thought, and ancient power pulled me in, just like in Duat.

  “Rarru…” I whispered.

  The power purred in response and brushed up against me, welcoming me home.

  I could have lingered for hours, absorbing the old world and its magic, but time wouldn’t wait. People had died and more would follow if I didn’t get to the bottom of what Isis had stirred up.

  But it wasn’t a god that we’d missed after triggering the curse. Isis stood in the burial chamber beside Senenmut’s sarcophagus, startlingly small for a goddess. With her head bowed, her long straight hair cascaded down her back in a black waterfall. I could have mistaken her for a temple girl if not for the gold shimmering through her thin gown.

  “Isis—” I considered reciting her respectful greeting—it seemed fitting—but her words cut me off.

  “It was not meant to be this way.”

  Approaching a goddess from behind was a fine way to find yourself flung against a wall, especially considering the unusual circumstances. I hung back, my power tied up good and tight.

  Part of me wanted to grab her shoulders and shake all the answers out of her. Whatever crisis she was having, I didn’t want to care, but I feared part of me did care, and that was worse. What kind of monster cared about the Goddess of Light? She didn’t do vulnerable, and yet here she was, broken, and it was screwing with my unyielding hatred for her. Her drama was Osiris’s problem, not mine. I had a job to do. Free the archaeologists. Find the skull. Destroy it. Go back to New York. Polish off the bottle of vodka in my bottom drawer. And be the surly asshole everyone loved to hate.

  “Someone got inside your hotel room. Your staff were killed.” I spoke softly, but in the confines of the burial chamber, my words landed like hammer blows.

  Her shoulders tensed. She hadn’t known. “You don’t understand. No soul understands…”

  And I didn’t want to understand either. “Isis, someone killed your people—”

  “I do not care.”

  “And there are hundreds of people outside—”

  “I do not care about them!” she hissed, but didn’t turn. “I do not care about their lives, or yours, or anything in this miserable mockery of a world.”

  From the cutting edge in her voice, I knew what I’d see on her face the second she looked at me. Fury. It would have been wise to back away slowly and leave. Shu and I could go back to the bar and pretend this had nothing to do with either of us. But I couldn’t walk away. Isis had answers and the people outside needed dispersing. That meant figuring out what was wrong with her and talking her down.

  I took a single step inside the burial chamber. Stone slammed shut behind me with a ground-trembling clap. That answered my question about whether I could walk away. Now I was trapped with a goddess I couldn’t decide if I wanted to fuck or kill and a headless, desiccated corpse. Great.

  “The hardest part of eternal life is caring,” she whispered so softly, the words not meant for me. Maybe they were meant for the dead architect or the voices in her head. Who knew? Not me, and that was the problem.

  The hardest part of my life was avoiding her husband and staying alive, but I kept silent and moved around the foot of the sarcophagus. I could see her face now. Tears had left tracks down her bronze cheeks, but I’d been right. Fury burned fiercely in her finely black-lined eyes.

  “Goddess of Light…” I bowed my head. “No mortal
man has ever—” Her sudden, smooth laughter interrupted. Insanity clawed at her laughter, threatening to shred it.

  “Oh, silly, lying monster. You have no idea of the irony in your words.” She looked up, and her smile cracked and remade as she fought to hold on to it. “My dearest husband devised that ridiculous greeting and demanded all must say it to my face. Over and over I must listen to it, century after century, while wearing my smile and pretending each time it does not cut like a blade. After a few millennia of marriage, you may begin to understand what it is truly like.”

  Understand Osiris and Isis, siblings and lovers? That wouldn’t happen. And right now, my patience with her breakdown was wearing thin.

  “Isis, your people were killed. Don’t you want to—”

  Her eyes flashed. “Take that tone with me, Mokarakk Oma, and I will rip your tongue out.”

  Her threat was a warning slash in my direction, nothing more. Whatever she was angry at, it wasn’t me—for once.

  “Who killed your staff?”

  “They do not matter.” Her lashes fluttered, and she dropped her gaze to the corpse. “In many ways, I admire her. She and I were alike once. Women lost in the shadow of men.”

  Sekhmet grant me the patience to deal with emotional goddesses. “Who, Isis? Help me, and I can help you.” Does Shu feel like this when talking with me?

  “She rose to power, defying centuries of tradition. She begged me for assistance, spent hours in my temple on her knees. And I favored her with my blessing because I saw in her a passion I had so long ago lost.”

  She was talking about Hatshepsut. A piece of knowledge clicked into place, and the way Isis looked down at Senenmut’s body began to make a lot more sense.

  Love. Isis had asked me if I was capable of it. I didn’t believe she was, not anymore. But she clearly had been. Once.

  “You loved Senenmut?” I asked, trying not to sound skeptical and failing.

  “He was a good man. A fair man. Intelligent and loyal and caring. Good men are a rare thing, monster, and forever is a long time to love.” She spread her hand over the top of the sarcophagus, resting it gently over the sculpted wrists crossed over the heart. “But he was mortal, and I… I am not.”

  I was wrong. She hadn’t killed Senenmut to keep her secrets safe. That look in her eyes had nothing to do with anger and everything to do with regret.

  She looked up, right at me, an urgency now in her words. “There were rumors, of course. Hatshepsut grew jealous when Senenmut built for me the grandest shrine of all. Not a tomb, but a place I might take my slumber and wait the ages away. He toiled for years in secret, and I loved him for his honor, his pride, and his heart, and for doing what my husband had refused to do. Osiris would not let me sleep. And so I loved a good man, but he could not love me. A mortal cannot love a god as we are blinding, but I loved him, Mokarakk Oma, and for the first time in centuries, I cared.” Her words trembled, as did her lips.

  I knew where this tale was going, and it did not have a happy ending. It never does when gods fall in love with mortals.

  “He discovered the truth,” she whispered.

  It didn’t take a genius to figure out who “he” was.

  “My husband’s spies watched and waited. They did not strike. Instead, they would tell my husband of the times Senenmut came to me. You see, like those people outside lining the valley, Senenmut could not help himself. I knew it was a mistake, but for so long, I had been cold and empty. I needed him, just the simple love of a good man, not a god. Do you see, Mokarakk Oma? Can you possibly understand?”

  “Yes.” And I did. I knew what it felt like to be an empty, uncaring creature, and I knew what it felt like to be a man who cared and loved and hated and feared. I knew which I’d rather be.

  Spite cut her laugh in half. “A monster like you understands. Osiris was blind. A mortal’s love made me happy, but my husband’s love could not.” Isis’s fingers curled into her palm, turning her hand into a fist. “Osiris commanded Hatshepsut’s court to string Senenmut up. She loved him too, but she could not compete, and so her love turned to jealousy, and in my husband, she found an ally. They tore Senenmut apart in a spectacle for all to see, drawing out his death for nine days and nights, and then, when it was done and Senenmut’s soul had passed on, Osiris destroyed his name so he would be forgotten in this life and the next.” A shiver ran through Isis, the memories haunting her. “It was because of my love that a good man died…”

  “He wasn’t forgotten. His soul was weighed,” I said, remembering Ammit’s account. It was the least I could offer Isis. “Ammit told me his soul was one of the lightest she’d known. He took his journey through the Twelve Gates and entered the Afterlife.”

  Her wide eyes glistened. “And I should feel something for that, but I do not care. I cannot care. I was once the Goddess of Light, of Creation, of All Things, of Love. But it has been so long. Time has carved out my heart.” She stepped away from the sarcophagus and looked around us. Her expression hardened, and her vulnerabilities vanished behind a mask as golden and lifeless as that of the sarcophagus. She looked at me as though realizing she’d told her inner most secrets to her worst enemy and now needed to either crush me or twist me up in knots so tight I’d have no hope of escaping. “And so it has come to this. That it is you here with me.”

  I was losing her. She’d shut me out and stalk off, and I’d be stuck at the beginning all over again, with no answers and archaeologists to find. “Isis, the skull…”

  “Hatshepsut or Osiris moved the skull. All I want is to find it and set right the past.” She flicked her hand and the stone door rumbled open. “As we can’t ask either, I… I do not know what can be done.”

  I stretched an arm across the doorway, blocking Isis’s exit. “I do.” I had to go back to Duat, to the River of Souls, but before then… She’d been about to snarl and flick me out of the way like the insignificant bug she thought I was, but my words pulled her up short. “But you must release Masika, Wheeler, and the other archaeologists.”

  “The vultures? Why would I have them?”

  “You don’t?”

  “Perhaps they moved on to pick another carcass clean. Now move from my path.”

  Her compulsion trickled off, but I obeyed and stepped aside, then followed her out of the tomb. Shu backed well away from the goddess and joined the ranks of dull-eyed people hanging out in the valley. As Isis passed them, they dropped to their knees and kissed the earth. She ignored every single one.

  I trailed behind, watching people fall like dominoes. None of them would remember this, but that didn’t make it any less disturbing. If she could control the population of a small village without lifting a finger, what could she do with the power of whatever was hidden in the valley at her disposal?

  I had to find that skull and the many answers along with it.

  Chapter 12

  Shu and I had the hotel to ourselves. Whether it was Isis’s influence or just off-season, I wasn’t sure, but I didn’t doubt Isis had her claws in the entire hotel staff. They hurried back and forth, reminding me of the priests who used to manage the temples during the various and many old-world festivals.

  Shu was taking advantage of the unmanned hotel bar. She saw me coming and scooped up an unbranded brown bottle and sloshed some of its contents into a glass.

  “Do I want to know?” I asked, giving the liquid an experimental swirl.

  “Vodka. I think. Or gasoline. They don’t appear to really do alcohol in Egypt.”

  “Technically, it’s illegal, but hotels get away with it.” I planted myself at the bar and downed the drink in one gulp. Fire lit up my insides, but before I could splutter something obscene, the raging inferno tempered to something mildly survivable. “I’ll assume you aren’t poisoning me,” I wheezed and held out the glass for another.

  “I like this.” She swept a hand at the stretch of bar top. “I should kick out the diner in my building and open a bar back home. Call it Shu’s Sins.
”

  Her bar here today was a little on the empty side. “You don’t have any customers.”

  “That’s the best bit. Got all these drinks to myself. Can you imagine the concoctions? I’d add some ancient Egyptian spice to the cocktails and see if I can’t shake up those uptight city boys and make them see magic.” She waggled her fingers.

  I laughed along with her and made a mental note not to allow Shu to purchase any bar equipment.

  “So, tell me all the juicy gossip,” she asked, enjoying her role as bartender. “What happened in the tomb?”

  “Isis got all teary-eyed over the past. I asked her to release the archaeologists before I go back to Duat, and she denied having them.” The thought of revealing everything Isis had said about Senenmut and her affair tightened my insides. My moral compass had broken years ago, sending me off course at about the same time I started consuming innocent souls because they tasted so damn good, but despite my disliking Isis, she’d told me the intimate truth of her affair with Senenmut. Somewhere inside, it felt wrong to spill all that information to Shu. Maybe my moral compass had life left in it.

  “That’s it?” Shu frowned.

  “More or less.”

  “What’s her connection to the dead guy?” She sipped her drink and hissed at its potency.

  “They were lovers.”

  Shu spat her drink out. “Wait, wait… Isis, the wife of the God of Fertility, was screwing around with a human lover? Oh, that’s… that’s gold. Oh, that’s… I like that. The bastard deserves it. Can you imagine Osiris’s face when he found out his wife was banging a mortal, not even a noble? She couldn’t fuck anything worse—besides you.”

  There was that moral compass again, nudging me back on course. I should hate Isis—I did hate Isis—but I also understood some of what she’d endured with her husband forever at her side. I mean, Osiris was all ego, and the “I’m the God of Fertility so I can screw anything” excuse had gotten old real quick. I’d happily take Alysdair and carve him in two if I thought killing him would stick, and I’d only been under his curse for a few centuries. After a few millennia, I’d be out-of-my-tree insane too.