Ricochet Through Time (Echo Trilogy Book 3) (36 page)

Aset’s smile broadened, her amber eyes lighting up. “Very well. I shall return shortly with food.”

***

When I roused after my next regeneration cycle, I felt hungry, but not famished, and I dared to hope that the regeneration process was over. I sat up, feeling more than a little refreshed and pleased to note that I still felt no hint of the telltale withdrawal headache.

“She returns from the dead once more,” Nik said, his lean frame little more than a dark shadow silhouetted in the doorway. It was night again, and the full moon had waned to half its former size, visible through the holes in the ceiling.

I snatched the linen sheet up to cover my chest. “Aset?” I asked, voice froggy from sleep.

“Bathing down by the river. How are you feeling? Up to getting out of bed?” When I nodded, he pointed to a spot beyond the head of my bedroll. “Your dress is folded up, just there.” He turned to the side. “I will be out here by the fire. Just follow the glow . . .”

“Alright.” I cleared my throat, reaching for the waterskin. After nearly draining the thing, I set it down and found my dress exactly where Nik had said it would be. I slipped it on over my head, pleased that the movement didn’t cause any twinge of pain in my side. It meant it was time for me to go. I wanted—no, needed—to get home, regardless of whatever was going on with my end of the bond between Heru and me.

But I had to do two things before I left.

Barefoot, I walked into a narrow hallway where the ceiling was still mostly intact. I could just make out hints of a shadowy design on the crumbling plaster. I followed the glow of flickering firelight off the far wall to a doorway leading to a larger room with a ceiling completely open to the stars. In the middle of the space, Nik crouched beside a small fire, alternating between tending a makeshift spit and stirring something in a small iron pot.

“Whatever you are cooking smells wonderful,” I said, wandering into the open-air room.

Nik pointed to the two large lumps skewered on the spit. “Rabbit.” He shifted his finger so he was pointing at the pot. “And rabbit stew.”

“Love the variety.” I chuckled and sat cross-legged on the floor to his left. “Nekure?” I asked, biting my lip.

“Hmmm?” He paused his stirring and looked at me, eyebrows raised and open expression lit by the dancing flames.

“I mean this in the least offensive way possible, but can I talk to Re?”

His lips curved upwards at the corners, just a little, and he resumed tending the stew. “Afraid not. He is in the At right now.”

“Oh.” I stared at the pot, mesmerized by Nik’s slow, hypnotic stirring.

“It is kind of nice, now, having some time without him.”

I looked at Nik’s face. He was resolutely staring at the pot of stew.

“He never used to go into the At alone before, but now . . .”

“Does it bother you, sharing your body with him?”

Nik shrugged. “Not usually, but . . . it makes certain things uncomfortable. I am never alone, not in here,” he said, tapping the side of his head. “He cannot see everything I am thinking, but . . .” Nik let out a deep sigh. “I can always feel him there, even when he is not communicating with me.”

“Does he ever sleep?”

Nik glanced at me, just for a moment. “He detests pain, so whenever I am injured, he tends to go—” Nik frowned. “Not to sleep, exactly, but something like that.
Dormant
might be a better word for it.”

“Huh,” I said to myself, thinking that little bit of information explained a lot about the man Nik would become millennia down the road. I inhaled, then held my breath for a few seconds. “If I asked, would you make a few things for me? Out of At, I mean?”

He brightened, grinning. “For you, anything.”

I laughed. “Charmer.”

His eyebrows lifted. “What do you need?”

“A bracelet and a small statuette of the goddess Hat-hur.”

Nik’s eyes widened. “A statuette?” He twisted around, reaching into a reed basket a few feet behind him. He pulled out a drawstring leather purse about the size of a bowling ball, and from that, he withdrew a very familiar little statuette carved from alabaster. “You mean like this?”

Now
my
eyes widened, and I held my hand out for the tiny stone goddess. “Where did you get that?” Because I had little doubt that it was the same statuette Genevieve had gifted me over a year ago, my time . . . over four millennia from now, Nik’s.

“My grandfather gave it to Mother a while back, having noticed the special interest she had taken in the Hat-hur cult.”

Marcus had once told me the statuette used to belong to his sister and that it had been a gift from their father. A gift Osiris had given Aset because of all the time she was spending setting up the order of priestesses who would make
my
journeys through time a success. A tiny laugh escaped from between my lips, and I shook my head as the seemingly unrelated threads of time wove together.

“What?” Nik asked. “What is it?”

“Nothing, really . . . just that it is so strange how something can seem random when viewed from one perspective, but when looked at from another angle, a clear pattern emerges.” I met his eyes, holding the statuette out to him. “Would you be able to make a smaller, At version of this
within
the original?”

“I could . . .” He accepted the statuette, looking from it to me and back. “But for what purpose?”

“Trust me when I say that it is a long story, but it will be essential to me making my first jump backwards in time.”

Nik’s eyes narrowed. “Very well.”

“Wonderful,” I said, clapping my hands together. “And as for the bracelet . . .”

***

I stood before Aset and Nik, bags packed and ready to go. Everything that needed to be done had been done, and I was, once again, fit as a fiddle. It had taken several attempts for me to get the charm on the statuette just right, using the subtler and more complicated of my sheut powers to attune the smaller statuette hidden within the stone to my ba and anchoring it to the correct time and location—end of the Sixth Dynasty, the Hathor Temple in Men-Nefer. Guiding Nik through the hieroglyph etchings on the bracelet listing all of the dates and locations he and Aset would meet up with me in their future had been nearly as complicated, and much more tedious.

Now, I was leaving two of the people I trusted most in the world with all the direction they needed to find me as they traveled along the slow path while I hop-skipped through time. I had a solid plan, jumping forward in time in hundred-year increments, using the Hathor Temple in Men-Nefer as my constant, my home base. It would take forty-one jumps through time, including forty-one periods of rest between. Depending on how long I had to rest between jumps, it could take as little as a few days, or it could take months. There was no way of knowing without trying.

“Thank you,” I told them, one of each of their hands in either of mine. “I love you both dearly.” I gave their hands a squeeze. “I could not have come this far without you.”

Aset offered me a sad smile. “Perhaps . . . perhaps not, but thankfully,
that
we will never know.” She leaned in and placed a light kiss on my lips. “Be well, dear friend,” she said as she pulled away. “I know in my heart that you have it within you to make it home to your family. Just remember that they are waiting for you—that
we’re
waiting for you.”

I nodded, tearing up, then looked at Nik.

He grinned his familiar, mischievous grin, but his heart wasn’t in it. I could tell by the shimmer of worry in his pale blue eyes. He leaned in, planting another light kiss on my lips. “Safe travels, Lex.”

“You, too.”

Releasing their hands, I took a step back, flashed a shaky smile, and jumped into the future.

Three jumps. Three hundred years. For once, zero problems.

I leapt into the 1700s BCE, the heart of the Middle Kingdom, with relative ease. I always jumped to and from the inner sanctuary of the Hathor Temple, and each time I landed, a new priestess greeted me within seconds, realized who and what I was, and carried out the requisite bowing and scraping that one apparently
must
do when one meets one’s God. Only when that was done did I proceed to scarf down whatever food they could offer me before resting for a couple hours.

I could feel myself wearing down. Even with the brief breaks, each succeeding jump was harder. I made a deal with myself that after five jumps—five hundred years—I would give myself a full day of rest.

After the fourth jump, I landed in the 1600s, nearing the end of Egypt’s Middle Kingdom, with a dull headache. I was hyperaware of the persistent throb at the base of my skull, at the slight ache in my joints. I told myself it was just the temporal jumps wearing me down—nothing a good long rest wouldn’t fix.

But after I rested, the headache was worse. The achy joints were worse. I couldn’t ignore the truth. Bonding withdrawals had begun.

This changed things. I no longer had weeks to get home. I barely had days, if my last bout with the withdrawals was any indication. I settled on shorter resting periods—fifteen or twenty minutes, a half hour at most—with maybe one or two longer periods of a couple hours. Full days were out of the question.

After my fifth jump forward in time, I landed in the temple’s dark inner sanctuary smack-dab in the middle of ancient Egypt’s golden age, the New Kingdom. If my jumps had been even remotely accurate, Hatshepsut was the current pharaoh, one of the few women to have ever claimed that title.

I knelt on the temple’s stone floor, head hanging. I was dead tired. One of those longer, day-long breaks sounded pretty damn tempting. It didn’t matter that it was also pretty damn impossible. The withdrawal symptoms were noticeably worse. Not debilitating, but definitely worse.

At the sound of footsteps, I craned my neck to see the doorway.

A man stepped up onto the ramp leading to the inner sanctuary, not quite what I was expecting—certainly not a priestess. He was slim and bare-chested, wearing a white linen kilt that nearly reached his ankles. His head was shaved, and his bare face was unfamiliar save for one distinctive element—its unquestionable, ageless perfection. He was Nejeret.

He stopped halfway up the ramp and looked from me to the doorway, then glanced over his shoulder, his expression utterly bewildered. Looking at me once more, he said something, but I didn’t understand New Egyptian, at least not the spoken variety.

“Who are you?” I asked in the original tongue, narrowing my eyes. “What are you doing here?”

The Nejeret’s eyebrows rose. “I would ask you the same,” he said.

I stood and took a step toward the doorway, but my knees buckled. I stumbled forward, catching myself with a hand on the plaster wall.

The Nejeret rushed forward, reaching for my elbow. “Are you unwell?”

I pulled my elbow out of his grip and took a sideways step along the wall to put some distance between us. “Who are you, and what are you doing in my temple?”

His eyebrows rose once more, and a moment later, his lips spread into a broad grin. “You are Hat-hur? One-time wife to the Great Father?”

I eyed him warily. Nobody should have remembered that, nobody except for my priestesses, Aset, and Nik. “Who are you?” I repeated.

The man’s smile faltered, giving way to a look of wide-eyed awe. He touched the fingertips of one hand to his chest and bowed his head. “I am Senenmut, head scribe to Heru, leader of the Council of Seven, sent here by Heru himself to record the accounts of, well,
you
from the temple walls.”

My eyes widened. “You—you’re Senenmut?” I was as surprised to find him here as he was to find me. I’d seen him once before, in the At, but only for a few seconds before Apep-Set appeared and imprisoned my ba.

“Indeed.” Senenmut nodded, then raised his head, his eyes meeting mine. “Is the mythical Hat-hur familiar with my name?”

I nodded once, slowly. “I am familiar with you, yes.”

Senenmut was the man who’d engraved the two tablets that originally set me on this course—one containing directions to the hidden, underground temple where our people’s greatest artifact, the ankh-At, had been stored, the other inscribed with Nuin’s final words. With his last prophecy. It had always been a mystery as to how Senenmut had discovered the forgotten prophecy. Now, it was starting to make sense.

Senenmut was able to inscribe the forgotten prophecy onto that tablet because
I
told him the prophecy. Because, at this moment, I was the only living person who remembered it. Once again, threads I’d believed tied in a chaotic jumble revealed themselves to be woven into a beautiful, intricate pattern—one only had to view it from just the right angle.

I rested my forehead against the plaster wall. In a bit . . . I could think more about the mysteries of time travel in a little bit. Right now, I needed food and rest. “Have you seen any of the priestesses?”

Senenmut entered the inner sanctuary, reaching out tentatively in case I pulled away again. I didn’t. His grip on my elbow was sure but not overly tight, and I let him guide me out through the doorway. “Come, Golden One, who consumes praise, who desires dancing, who shines on the festival, who is pleased to dance all through the night . . .”

His words tickled something on the edge of my memory. There was a sense of familiarity in the recited verse.

“Your priestesses are busy with festival preparations.” He smiled, a little shyly. “It is good timing on your part, for there is much to eat . . . and, appropriately, most is meant as an offering to you.”

I looked at him, the verse clicking. “The festival of drunkenness?”

“The very one.”

I frowned. What I would’ve given to be able to witness one of the ancient Egyptians’ most famous religious events. The festival of drunkenness was said to be a purely spiritual time when the ancient peoples would gather at the temples—especially the Hathor temples—and drink until they passed out in the hopes of inducing a divine epiphany. Orgies were said to be involved as well. But I wouldn’t be confirming that tidbit, not today.

“I cannot stay,” I said regretfully, the archaeologist in me dying, just a little, as the mother in me beat her into submission. “But I would have you sit with me while I rest. There is something I must tell you, Senenmut . . . something you must record.”