Scorpion Trap Read online

  “How do you know that?”

  “Because I know what you are, and I’ll tell you everything. But first, you must go to Cairo.”

  Cairo, Egypt. The land that time forgot. The land the gods sundered. The land the sands devoured. “Fine. These had better be first class.” I snatched the tickets back. “Why am I going to Cairo?”

  “I’ll tell you once we have arrived.”

  “Wait.” No, no, no. Please, by Sekhmet, tell me I’d misheard her. “We?”

  A smooth, knowing smile brightened her face. “Osiris will never know.”

  Chapter 2

  Shukra looked up from her desk. It was one of those rare occasions when she left the door open so she could see me coming and spring whatever trap she’d set for me that morning. Her lips twitched into what passed for her usual snarl, and then she noticed the Goddess of Light behind me. Shu’s smile froze, along with the rest of her face. Nothing good ever came from Isis visiting our offices. Shu knew this, and behind that mask, her whip-sharp mind would be racing through all the catastrophic motives for Isis dropping by.

  I could have called ahead to warn her, but then I wouldn’t have gotten to see Shu speechless. It was a marvelous thing.

  Isis came to a silent halt a few steps inside the office. She wasn’t glowing, and she’d toned down her blinding beauty. She appeared as nothing more than a businesswoman inspecting Shu’s desk with a mildly inquisitive smile. That smile was a portent of doom. When gods smile, someone is about to suffer.

  Shu placed her pen down, blinked once, and gingerly leaned back in her chair, making no sudden movements. “By Isis, all that has been, that is, or shall be. My queen, welcome.” She bowed her head, aware that if she said the wrong thing, she might lose it.

  Osiris didn’t want me—and by extension, Shukra—dead. Her death would be an inconvenience; mine would throw a giant wrench into Isis’s plotting. The goddess couldn’t set me up as her scapegoat if I was dead. Thoth’s murder, the prophecy that someone’s son would kill Osiris, Ammit’s death—all fingers pointed at me, thanks to Isis. But I’d caught her in her lies.

  “We’re going to Cairo,” I told Shu, throwing on some fake glee.

  Her dark complexion paled to a wheat-like color. Her hands—cradled on her desktop—trembled. But not from fear. Anubis was the only thing Shukra feared. Those tremors came from the anger warming Shu’s veins. Had we shared a telepathic connection, she’d be ranting and raging about the bitch-goddess pulling our strings and how getting between Osiris and Isis would get us killed. I’d get it all in the ear later, but in Isis’s presence, Shukra swallowed her objections. “That’s… wonderful?”

  Isis swiped her fingertips along the edge of Shu’s desk and drifted around the room. She admired Shu’s framed hieroglyphs and scanned the various files. She moved like a snake, slow, methodical, and at her leisure.

  Shu’s dark eyes flicked questioningly to me. I waved her off with a small cutting gesture. Everything would be fine, so long as we didn’t rile up the goddess. Whatever Isis wanted me to do, it would be over in a few days, and we’d be back in New York, picking up the cases we’d dropped in the meantime. No harm done. Easy.

  “Pack a bag,” I told Shu. “We leave tonight.”

  Shu rose to her feet.

  “Oh, there’s no need for that.” Isis turned, tossed a golden locket and chain onto Shukra’s desk, and spoke a single word. “Amcruka.” Enclose.

  The locket exploded in a blast of light. I flinched away from the sudden blanching whiteness of Isis’s power, but as quickly as the light had filled the room, it vanished, taking Shukra with it.

  “Now the sorceress is a carry-on.” Isis picked up the locket and threw it at me.

  I snatched it out of the air. Hot metal burned my palm, and my only thought was how I didn’t want to be within the sorceress’s spell range when she was free.

  Isis’s smile had turned toxic. “Will the Soul Eater miss his pet sorceress? I didn’t realize you two were so close. How beastly.”

  She could have bought another ticket instead of trapping Shukra, but Isis no more saw the sorceress as a person than she would a river beast. There was no point in arguing. It was done.

  I dropped the locket into my coat pocket, keeping all the things I wanted to say firmly under my tongue.

  “Come,” Isis urged, already striding out of the office.

  “I have appointments to cancel—”

  She waved a hand. “Have the cat organize your diary.”

  “Cat left.”

  “The cripple, then.” Isis paused at the end of the hallway and turned. As she did, she loosed a fragment of her power. The true goddess bled through, bringing with it the weight of her timeless power. The office, the building, it all started to feel smaller, and there I was, trapped inside with the presence of a true goddess about to crush me. “Do not test me, Nameless One, or you will find yourself being shipped to Cairo as cargo.”

  She clicked her fingers and disappeared, leaving only the echo of her words and the faint scent of warm orchids behind.

  An array of alcoholic drinks accompanied the first-class flight from London Heathrow to Cairo. I set myself the goal of sampling them all and settled in for four hours of cradling expensive whiskeys, hoping to catch some sleep before the plane touched down on Egyptian soil. Egypt had always been restless. Deep within the country’s bedrock, were memories of how its gods had once ruled the worlds and how those same gods had lost it all. History tells us Egypt’s wealth waned, its crops failed year after year, and its political power shrank. In the history books, Egypt’s might didn’t burn out; it was snuffed out over many, many centuries. History is wrong. Egypt didn’t die a slow, inevitable death; it was slaughtered. When gods go to war, worlds tremble beneath their feet. Egypt had borne the brunt of the great sundering. Vast cities, glorious temples, and verdant lands had all been annihilated, leaving nothing behind but dust, sand, and ruins.

  I didn’t want to go back.

  I didn’t want to remember.

  Hence the whiskey. I’d have preferred vodka, but considering how this journey had the makings of a nightmare, I’d have drunk paint thinner.

  I sensed Isis before seeing her. As much as she could wrap her power up and hide it away, my survival instincts were attuned to nearby gods and goddesses with murderous impulses. Isis poured her entire presence into the first-class booth next to mine. She hadn’t joined me on the transatlantic flight. I’d started hoping she’d missed the flight altogether. I should have known my respite wouldn’t last.

  I downed the whiskey and hailed the attendant for another.

  “Slumming it with the peons?” I asked Isis without looking at her. In the corner of my eye, I saw her soft hands run over her thighs, smoothing out any creases in her expensive black satin pants. “Or checking up on me?”

  The attendant delivered my fresh glass of whiskey. I’d probably had enough to drink, but the edges of reality were still too sharp and the alcohol hadn’t dulled the sense of dread hanging around like bad cologne. And now I had a visitor. Maybe I could drink myself unconscious to be rid of her?

  Taking a generous sip, I looked over at Isis and immediately wished I hadn’t. A multicolored silk hijab framed her exquisitely beautiful face. Beautiful didn’t touch the vision of her. Dark eyes and long lashes made sultry promises, and when she turned her gaze on me, I found myself wishing Shu were here to slap some much-needed sense into me. Osiris instilled respect and devotion in people, but his wife was made of finer things. Many souls had fallen into her trap over millennia. Isis was among the few still worshipped by a handful of fools. Once, she had been a queen, a goddess, a mother, a symbol of brightness and all that was righteous. But like her husband, the years after the sundering had twisted her into a cruel imitation of herself. As vicious as she was, that didn’t stop the human parts of me from appreciating the timeless art of her design. Goddess of Light. Do. Not. Touch. By Sekhmet, how was I supposed to resist the temptati
on that was Isis over however many days this would take? I’d never had much self-control.

  “I have not returned since the sundering,” she said with a forlorn sigh.

  I stared at the back of the booth in front of me, willing my heart to stop racing.

  “I could not bring myself to see it,” she added.

  I knew what she felt because I felt it too. The land we had loved had become a parody of itself. Thousands of tourists trampled over sacred grounds, touched temple reliefs and crumbling ancient art with their oily fingers, and bought cheap papyrus with their names scrawled in hieroglyphs, as though the death of the greatest civilization that had ever existed was a cosmic joke bought for a few Egyptian pounds.

  It wasn’t the whiskey giving me nausea. “Then why are you going back now?”

  She didn’t answer, choosing instead to stew in silence. It was all an act. Isis was beyond emotions such as sadness for a long-dead world. She was a goddess, crowned queen of New York, the Light of Life. This sadness was make-believe, probably to soften me up and have me dutifully do her bidding. I might have once—a long time ago—but not after she’d tried to seduce me, framed me for killing two gods, and possibly set in motion the kind of prophecy that would get her husband killed and my insides scattered throughout the underworld. Add to that the frivolous murders she and her husband had compelled me to commit. Yeah, she could take her pseudo-sadness and shove it where her eternal light didn’t shine.

  “Archaeologists discovered a tomb in the Valley of the Queens,” she finally answered. “They are excavating as we speak.”

  I didn’t need to see her face to see the twist of her lips. Her disgust was clear in the abrasive edge to her voice. Few gods appreciated human “experts” picking through the remains of the past.

  “There are items inside that the archaeologists must not disturb,” she said.

  “What items?”

  Her long, heated look could have shriveled souls. Clearly, I’d asked the wrong question.

  I tried another angle. “Whose tomb is it?”

  “A minor noble,” she replied, looking around the cabin as though this conversation bored her.

  She knew every tomb in those ancient valleys, including those that curious professors had yet to plunder. She hadn’t plucked me out of my nine-to-five to visit a minor tomb and retrieve trinkets for her. She could have done that herself or asked a devoted fan or her husband. Whatever was going on here, it wasn’t minor, and she didn’t want Osiris knowing.

  I couldn’t tell Osiris about this trip without the god losing his shit. He was already aware that I might have, once or twice, imagined his wife and me in situations too hot for YouTube. If he discovered my vacation with Isis, he’d turn my testicles into shriveled cufflinks and wear them to his next charity gala.

  “You aren’t going to tell me anything of use, are you?” I asked.

  “You will find out soon enough.”

  “Or you could save me the surprise?”

  “Do not worry yourself with details, Ace Dante.”

  My name on her lips sounded entirely too wrong. Ace Dante was a lie. “When do I get to learn who I am?”

  “When we’re done.” She lifted her hand and summoned an attendant. The same woman who’d served me approached Isis. “Fetch me a drink,” the goddess ordered.

  The attendant, for some reason, looked at me as though I had something to do with Isis’s attitude.

  “She thinks she’s a goddess,” I muttered, smiling my overly bright grin.

  “We have a selection of spirits or champagne—”

  “Only the best,” Isis replied and then added a sensual, “Please.”

  I almost choked on my whiskey. I wouldn’t have believed the word please was in Isis’s vocabulary if I hadn’t heard it myself. The attendant dutifully hurried off to fetch her drink, and Isis eyed the woman hungrily. I needed to remember that Isis had been playing her games for thousands of years. I no more knew her than I knew the elusive Amun Ra.

  I sank low in my seat and vowed to keep my head down and my wits about me so I could get this secret vacation over with. If luck was on my side, I might even come out the other side with all my body parts intact.

  Chapter 3

  The cabin door opened, and Egypt’s oven-hot air blasted in, stealing the breath from my lungs. Inside the terminal, the suffocating sensation didn’t ease until I’d shuffled through immigration, alongside all the other passenger-cattle. Finally stepping from Cairo International onto the pick-up/drop-off area, I dragged in a long, deep breath and tasted baked stone, traffic fumes, and hot dust. A local man made a grab for my bags. He’d try to ferry me toward a waiting tourist bus a few hundred yards away and demand an extortionate tip. I must have been away too long for him to mistake me for a tourist.

  “Emshi, ibn kalb,” I said, reeling off a mildly offensive term in Arabic and driving the point home with a touch of soul-eater glare.

  He scurried off, muttering, “Ana aasif, aasif…” already searching for his next unwitting victim.

  Sweat dripped down my neck, gluing my shirt to my back. It would take a few days to acclimatize. Hopefully, I’d be back on a plane before then.

  Isis strode from the terminal exit, designer sunglasses shielding her eyes. She looked as though she had just walked off a photo shoot for Elite Traveler magazine and captured the gaze of every man and woman loitering nearby. She ignored them and me, stopped at the curb, and lifted her hand. A sleek, white Mercedes peeled free from the traffic and prowled to a stop along the curb. The chauffeur, a young Egyptian man with an eager smile and a knitted skull cap, hopped out and opened the door for Isis. He left me to haul my own bags to the trunk.

  Isis didn’t speak a word as we carved through Cairo’s traffic out of the city, but behind those shades, she was watching the modern buildings reel by. Once the city gave way to desert, she fell into an immobile, silent mood. A connecting flight to Luxor would have been easier, or she could have clicked her fingers and appeared wherever she needed to be, so the six hours spent staring at sand probably had a reason, but it was beyond me. I dozed and only once fell asleep, but I woke with a start, my head filled with dreams of blood-red sand and hungry shadows.

  Her driver dropped us off inside a gated luxury resort. Hotel staff busied around Isis like ants around their queen, and I was again left trailing behind. The cavernous foyer shone with polished marble, glass, and gold. The pretentious interior should have been hideous, but the designers had erred on the right side of subtle, playing with warm light and gold accents to create something that plucked on my memories of Duat—home.

  Isis disappeared while I checked in and headed to my room, taking the pressure of her presence with her. For the first time in what felt like a lifetime of traveling, I breathed freely. I had a lot that I wanted to tell the goddess, but over the years, I’d learned that demanding answers out of her was the wrong way to go about things. I could try prying them out over the next few days, without an Osiris-shaped shadow looming over us. A dangerous game, Shukra would have said, but one I was equipped to play. While Isis wanted something from me, I held all the cards.

  I wandered through my ridiculously huge multi-room apartment. Who needed blue mood lighting around a bath? If my room was this luxurious, Isis’s was probably a palace. If everything went well, I’d never see it. Goddess of Light. Do. Not. Touch. That was the only rule I couldn’t break while in Egypt. An easy-enough task. She was, after all, as crazy as a sack of cobras.

  My feet had found their way to the windows. A couple of miles beyond the hotel gates, the ancient Karnak temple glowed in the dark. I could sense its song, the constant background hum warm and inviting. Impressive as a ruin today, it had been astonishing during its prime—a riot of color and light and celebration. Now, time had gnawed at its edges, but the huge stone pylons still held power.

  I opened the window, letting the super-heated evening air pour in.

  “Rarru,” I whispered. Hello. Unlike
Duat’s Halls of Judgment, Karnak didn’t answer. But it was there, slumbering, still alive and waiting. I wouldn’t be able to stay away for long.

  I leaned against the window frame and relaxed the Ace Dante persona, easing some of my magic through. The air took it and swept it out of the window, spreading it far like pollen on the breeze. Stretched far and thin, I could lose myself. I breathed it back in. I was a fool for believing coming back to Egypt would be simple. The land might be dead to most, its truth hidden in myths and legends, but to me, the magic beat through the earth like a leviathan’s heavy heart. And it would be beating for Isis too. She’d sense it more keenly and remember her power from before. Remember the might of the gods and how thousands upon thousands had worshipped her. If these lands tugged on me, they had to be crying out to her.

  I pushed away from the window, turned my back on Karnak and its temptation, showered, dressed in a baggy shirt and the only pair of loose linen pants I owned, and headed through the hotel to the pool area. Light bloomed around the gardens, bleeding through leaning palm trees. Nothing obscene, just subtle touches of light here and there. Isis stood at the far end, at the top of limestone steps, looking toward Karnak, though swaying palms blocked the view. We were the only people outside, besides the occasional waiter checking that each chair and blade of grass was in the correct place. I could see why Isis liked it here; the attentive service must have reminded her of how things used to be.

  “Are you ready to tell me why we’re here?” I asked as I approached, not wanting to startle her.

  Her shoulders stiffened. “I knew it would be difficult, but I…” Isis’s voice cracked. Nothing about her ever cracked. It never wavered, or failed, or showed any weakness.

  I dug my hands into my pants pockets, curling Shu’s locket around my fingers. She’s a viper. Just because this place is getting to her, it doesn’t change a damn thing.