Strange and Ever After (29 page)

Oliver slept too.

“I don’t like this idea,” Daniel muttered. His gaze burned into the side of my face. “There are too many ways this could go wrong.”

“And when,” I retorted, “have we
ever
had a foolproof plan? We broke into Laurel Hill cemetery with only a
boat
and
baseball bat
. And we descended the tunnels of Paris with only pulse pistols and a crystal clamp. At least this time we may choose where our battle happens, and we can prepare.”

Joseph’s lips pinched tight, and ever so slowly he nodded.
“Eleanor is right. We will have at least some advantage if we
choose
where to fight.”

Daniel gave a strangled groan, but other than that, he brooked no argument.

And I knew it was not the ambush that bothered my inventor. It was the thought of
me
raising corpses. At the first mention of my falcon scout, he had balked, and at the mere word “army,” he had gone deathly pale.

No matter how hard Daniel tried, no matter what had happened between us last night in the field, he still was not easy with my magic.

Joseph cleared his throat. “The first step will be to find a location. Preferably somewhere with old bodies.”

I stared at the maps, my eyes catching on Cairo. Then dragging down to Saqqara. Again, something about the name scratched at my brain. Why did I know it?

I gasped.
Professor Milton
. It had been the excavation in which Clay Wilcox had invested. . . . It was far from civilization or people, and best of all, it had been a
necropolis
. A city of the dead.

Without a word, I darted from the pilothouse to Allison’s cabin. Her trunks were still here, the lid tossed back. Her first aid kit was strewn on her bunk. In fact, it looked as if she might come back at any moment.

For a split second panic wound through me. What if Allison
was
compelled? Maybe we were abandoning her to Marcus by not following.

But my gut knew better. Allison wanted revenge, and like a patient spider, she’d spun her web . . . and then struck.

Fresh fury slid up my spine, gathering at the base of my neck. Scalding. Insistent. But I forced it aside and focused on what I’d come for.

The booklet about Professor Rodney Milton.

I found it quickly enough, tossed atop Allison’s gowns. The pages were bent and ripped as if she had crushed the booklet viciously in a fist. Yet it was not too damaged to read, and I flipped ahead to the page I remembered her reading at Shepheard’s.

During his excavations, Milton uncovered an entire necropolis, or city of the dead, where hundreds of catacombs were built to honor ancient Egyptian deities. He estimates thousands of mummified animals are buried below the dunes. However, due to a lack of tourist interest in the catacombs, Milton focused his excavation on the pyramids only. One day when funding permits, he hopes to uncover the animal tombs and reveal their secrets.

A grin spread over my face. Thousands of mummies. Even if they were animals, they could still do precisely what we needed: attack.

Now I merely had to convince Joseph—and I doubted I would find any resistance there.

My grin widened, and I sent out a pulse of magic to my falcon.

He was still flying south. Even if Marcus were to turn around now, we would have a few hours to prepare.

This time
we
were the ones in charge. As long as we screwed our courage to the sticking place, we could not fail.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

..................................................................

To reach Saqqara, we followed the Nile six miles
south, then moved east past cornfields and date groves. We must have drifted over a thousand palm trees, our shadow covering their latticework of shade before we finally reached a barren realm of yellow rocks and sand.

And it was a world of pyramids. One after another they rose up, with edges so old as to be curved now. The dunes around them were littered with shards and bricks—as if the entire necropolis had been smashed with a hammer and the pieces left to scatter in the wind.

Joseph, Daniel, and I stayed silent as we floated beneath the late-morning sun, the shifting of levers and the creaking steering wheel the only sounds as we focused on the ruins
below and the pyramids passing by.

Joseph broke the quiet first. “That mound at the very northwestern corner—beside the column.”

We all squinted into the distance. On the far edge of the ruins was a mound rising up from a dune that I never would have thought man-made if not for the eroded column thrusting up beside it.

Except it wasn’t a column. As we approached, I realized it was an obelisk, like the one at Heliopolis, and it burned like a candle flame beneath the sun. And the mound behind it was a pyramid, weathered almost to dust.

Joseph took the wheel, while Daniel went to the cargo hold to prepare us for mooring. Several minutes later, the ladder clacked down, and Daniel began anchoring us on a series of stones on the north side of the pyramid. The stones
almost
seemed to extend in a straight line, as if they’d once been a street, but now all they led to was a great, sloping dune.

I checked my falcon. It had been flying for hours now, yet it still diligently followed Marcus. If we were lucky, the necromancer would go all the way to the Valley of the Kings, wait some time, and
then
head north. We needed all the time we could get. . . .

But it was best never to rely on luck.

While Joseph slept, I sat with Jie in her cabin and fought to keep my eyes open. She looked so peaceful, and the remains of Oliver’s magic gave her face an unearthly glow.

Eventually Daniel relieved me, and I staggered to my bunk
to enjoy a dreamless sleep of my own. When I awoke it was sunset, and after feasting on apples and hard bread, I wandered into the cargo hold. The hatch was open, and a rope swung through it. Daniel had set up a simple pulley system to lower his crates of equipment onto the orange earth below. He was tying off knots around several small boxes when I came in.

He smiled at me. “Where’s your falcon?”

“South. Always south.”

“Then good. Always good.” He moved to the hatch and shouted, “These are the last ones, Joseph!” Then he shoved the crates through the hatch, the pulley’s wheel squeaked, and the box lowered from sight.

“What are you doing?” I moved to the open hatch and waved down to Joseph. His hands full, he only nodded back.

“All these dunes around here will work in our favor.” Daniel wiped at sweat on his brow. “I’m thinkin’ I’ll lay out copper wires—rig up something like our Dead alarm in Philadelphia. But these lines will trigger pulse bombs instead of a telegraph.”

My breath caught. “And then when a mummy crosses, the spiritual energy will detonate a bomb. How very clever, Daniel.”

He grinned, flushing.

“So what can I do?” a soft voice asked.

My head whipped to the door—to where Jie stood, her hands in her pockets.

She looked . . .
different
. There was a bright challenge in her eyes that I hadn’t seen in days.

“You’re awake!” I cried, stumbling toward here. “How do
you feel? You look all healed, but—” I hesitated. “Sorry. You’re probably tired and don’t want—”

“Oh, shut pan.” She punched me lightly in the shoulder. “I feel great, yeah? Never—” Her next words were lost in the bear hug Daniel flung around her shoulders.

“I thought I’d killed you, Jie. I’m
so
sorry.”

She made an uncomfortable grunt and pulled free. “Where’s Joseph?”

“Here,” he answered, rising up through the hatch. He gave her a small smile and moved slowly toward her. “I am . . . glad you are well. Immensely glad. Have you had a fresh incision to resist the compulsion spell?” He winced as he asked, and when she shook her head no, his wince only deepened.

“I know how to use the scarificator,” Daniel said gruffly, moving toward Allison’s cabin.

Jie’s face fell at the prospect of more bloodletting, but she didn’t argue when Daniel returned. And as he had her sit on one of the equipment crates in the cargo hold, she explained what had happened while we were inside the Great Pyramid.

“You had been gone awhile,” Jie began. “I was getting nervous, so once it was time for another cut, I started calling for Allison. I was by the Sphinx, yeah? And she was still in the airship.

“When she didn’t come to my call, I climbed the ladder. That was when I realized she wasn’t on the airship at all. I saw her from the pilothouse, trekking around the dark side of the pyramid toward
another
balloon. . . .” Jie’s voice faded as
Daniel pressed the scarificator to the inside of her arm, and
click!

The blades popped out, and when the device pulled back, three narrow slices welled with blood on Jie’s arm.

Daniel pressed a suctioning cup over the cuts and offered Jie an apple. She resumed her story, pausing every few moments to munch. “I took Daniel’s spyglass and saw . . . Marcus in the balloon. I
saw
Marcus and realized you were all in danger. So I ran—as fast as I could up the pyramid and to you. But . . . I wasn’t fast enough, I guess.”

“Or you were just in time,” drawled a new voice.

I started—we all did, snapping our heads to the door, to where Oliver lounged against the frame, intently focused on his shirt cuffs.

“Perhaps we would all be dead if you had not cleared a path,” he added, glancing at Jie—and then quickly back down.

“Oliver.” Jie smiled—a strangely happy crinkle around her eyes.

He sauntered into the hold, an unmistakable pink flush on his cheeks as his eyes dragged to mine. “There are a
lot
of mummies to be found, Eleanor, so if you are finished dillydallying here, I think we ought to get started. An army of Dead won’t raise itself.” He stalked to the exit hatch, and Jie skipped off her crate after him. Then they both shinnied down the ladder.

I glanced at Joseph, who merely nodded his approval. Though there was a confused furrow on his brow.

And Daniel’s face was drawn. There was no doubt we all
wondered the same thing: what had Oliver done to Jie? He had healed her body . . . but was there something more? While she and Oliver had reached a tentative alliance before,
this
was entirely different.

“Here. Take these,” Daniel said to me, though his gaze stayed on the hatch as he offered me a jar of glowworms. “It’ll be dark soon,” he added. “So be careful . . . and keep an eye on Jie.”

“Of course,” I murmured. Then, with Milton’s book and the glowworms, I set off after Oliver and Jie in the sand.

“Oliver said we’re gonna raise old mummies to make an army.” She squinted into the darker east. “Where will we look first?”

“You, uh . . . don’t mind if I raise the Dead?” I asked.

“Not if it will stop Marcus.” She cracked her knuckles on her jaw. “Besides, Oliver won’t let anything go wrong, will you?” She punched him fondly in the bicep.

He gave an uncomfortable grunt and looked at his toes. “Let’s start our search over there.” He waved east, toward the rest of the ruins. Far in the distance, palm trees and cornfields were alight with a flaming sunset, and if I looked hard enough north, I could see the Giza pyramids reaching for the sky.

Oliver and Jie trekked ahead of me, hopping walls and dunes with the ease of desert cats. I, of course, was boiling and coated in sticky sweat before we’d even reached the nearest, lumpy pyramid—a spot where Oliver
thought
there might be a catacomb of mummified birds. Yet after poking through the sand
and crumbling stone for what felt like hours, we found nothing.

By the almost-vanished sunlight and rising moon, I consulted Milton’s booklet.

“There ought to be a temple devoted to Anubis,” I said. “If we continue east, we’ll hit a series of columns that were once his temple. Below that, we should find some tunnels.”

“I see columns,” Jie said. She pointed ahead, to a sad set of spikes surrounded by slanted dunes. Without waiting to see if we followed, she kicked into a jog.

Oliver moved to follow, but I snagged his sleeve. “Wait a moment.” I let Jie step out of earshot. Then I hissed, “Why is Jie acting like this?”

His yellow eyes shuttered. “I haven’t the faintest idea to what you refer.” He tugged free and stomped ahead.

But I simply scurried after. My boots kicked up sand and pottery, but with long enough strides, I managed to keep pace with him.

“Did you
do
something when you healed her?”

A single pulse of unease flashed through our bond—but instantly cut off. “I did what needed doing,” he mumbled. “That was the command you gave me.”

“It was,” I admitted, “yet why is she acting so . . . affectionate? She was tolerant of your presence before. Friendly, even, but now . . . now she seems to
adore
you.”

“I didn’t do anything.” Oliver glared daggers at me. “I merely . . . Well, I showed her who I was. Just as I showed you. I suppose she saw something in me that was acceptable.”