Thief of Hearts (Elders and Welders Chronicles Book 3) (16 page)

“You want me to go after Miss Bartholomew?”

Simon rolled his eyes. “Obviously. I can pay you well…”

“I don’t want your money,” he said gruffly. He would
not
put a price on a human life, especially Hex’s. “Where is she?”

“Abdeen Palace, apparently,” Simon said grimly.

Rowan let out a long, resigned sigh. Just a month in Cairo, and even he understood the implications of that. Hex had entangled herself with someone very powerful indeed. He wasn’t even that surprised. The woman was a magnet for trouble. He just hoped that he could use his powers for something other than hauling around smuggled goods for once…and that Hex was alive to appreciate it.

THE SUN WAS
just threatening to set across the Nile when Rowan reached Abdeen Palace, its vast alabaster façade rising up out of the gloom like a ship at sea—or a mushroom on a log, an undeniable part of a whole, but always just the tiniest bit out of place. The part of Cairo surrounding the palace was too new and too European in its architecture to ever feel a true part of the ancient city. In the far distance, as if to underscore the point, the medieval Citadel’s spires, at the center of Islamic Cairo, seemed to loom over the palace disapprovingly, gleaming in the setting sun.

It had been relatively easy to disappear among the diverse population of the docks—he was not the strangest character there by far. But here, in the wider boulevards, with its policed streets and well-heeled citizens, blending in was a harder prospect, even at night. He was too tall to ever be inconspicuous, too European to pull off his second-hand Arabic robes, and too dirty to belong anywhere near the immaculate palace grounds.

Between the obstacles this presented and the sheer bloody size of the place, Rowan’s hope of a speedy resolution quickly dwindled to nil.

Yet he couldn’t give up. He had to know Hex’s fate. If she were already dead, as Simon feared, he’d discover it for himself. And if she weren’t, then he was damn well going to rescue her, whether she liked it or not.

She may have given up on herself by sending out that bloody distress call, but Rowan wasn’t about to. No matter how they had parted and no matter that all debts had been settled between them, he couldn’t just leave her to her fate. He had only a month’s worth of memories to his name, and Hex figured prominently in them. She may have wanted nothing to do with him, but she’d been kind to him…

Well, not
kind
, precisely. But she’d been real and honest and
brave
, even when he’d rather her not be, and that was more than he could say about anyone else he’d met since his awakening.

Besides, there was just something so bloody familiar about her. He got the same headache when he thought of her that he did when he half-remembered something about his past. That couldn’t be coincidence.

She was keeping something from him, had been from those first few moments of their acquaintance. Now, faced with losing her completely and not even having the option of finding out what she was hiding, he knew he had to act.

It had
nothing
to do with infatuation. Simon didn’t know what the hell he was talking about.

It took several hours to get close enough to the palace without attracting too much attention. It took another hour to figure out how to get inside the heavily guarded building. His chance finally came just after sundown when a call to prayer from the palace’s minaret initiated a change of the guard.

In the momentary commotion, he intercepted one of the guards at the rear of the palace. He easily subdued the man, knocking him out cold with a precision that rather startled him. Muscle memory had simply kicked in, as if it had once been a common practice for him to render people unconscious. He was not sure how he felt about
that
particular revelation, but he had no time to dwell on it.

He dragged the man into a stand of ferns and quickly exchanged his soiled robes for the man’s uniform. The navy jacket fit just a bit too tight in the shoulders, and the matching trousers with gold stripes down the sides were about an inch too short. The whole thing stank of tobacco and dried sweat, but the boots were a good fit—much better than the ratty hemp Jerusalem sandals he’d been wearing for weeks.

He fitted the metal helmet low on his brow and walked as nonchalantly as he could out of the shadows. No one questioned him as he slipped inside one of the servants’ entrances along the western wing of the building. He wandered down opulent corridors, avoiding eye contact with anyone he passed, his ears open for mention of the English archaeologist Simon had told him about.

At first, he feared he’d never find Hex or this Netherfield fellow in the maze of rooms. The khedive’s residence was home to not only an extensive royal family, but also all sorts of foreign visitors and government officials. Even at such a late hour, the palace was bustling, most of the staff focused on an elaborate dinner party being thrown by the khedive himself.

He soon managed to overhear a pair of servants gossiping about Netherfield, who was apparently the guest of honor at the party. It was an unusual distinction for a lowly European professor, but then again, from the frightened tone the servants used when they spoke of him, Netherfield was obviously something more than that. It only confirmed Simon’s suspicions about the level of trouble in which Hex had managed to land herself.

It took him nearly an hour, however, to work out Netherfield’s haunts from the servants’ chatter, all of which centered around the third floor library. The entire palace staff had apparently been forbidden from entering it, which was exactly the sort of place where one might find something—or someone—Netherfield was trying to hide.

The library, when he finally located it, could have been more appropriately called a museum. He was confronted by display case after display case of moonlit Egyptian artifacts lining the walls, undoubtedly priceless.

He crept into the vast room, trying his best to keep to the shadows, the feeling of something…
off
tingling at the base of his spine. The room was as deserted as the corridor had been, but that was not reassuring to him at all. In fact, it was downright disconcerting, for the moment he’d opened the door, he’d known immediately he’d found trouble from the smell alone.

He had discovered over the course of the last month that his senses were a bit sharper than an ordinary human’s, and so underneath the smell of day-to-day life—dusty books, lemon polish, a decanter of whiskey left unstoppered on a desk—he could identify the faint miasma of decay. He’d smelled dead bodies before—he couldn’t remember precisely when or where, and it hurt his head to try and dredge up specific memories—but he knew without a doubt that was what he smelled now.

Someone had killed in here.

It was not exactly the sort of location one could get away with concealing such an act for long, what with all of the servants and hangers-on milling about the palace. And it just seemed too easy that he had simply walked into the library, doors unlocked and unguarded. Much too easy.

The feeling of being watched stalked him across the room as he followed the smell with his nose. At the rear of the vast room, he noticed a small recessed alcove behind a display case. He could hear the faint sounds of movement on the other side of the door, and for the first time since he’d entered the library, he felt a faint ray of hope.

He just prayed he wasn’t about to discover Hex’s dead body.

The stench of decay hit him like a brick wall when he jerked the alcove door open, so overwhelming that his eyes began to water and bile rose in his throat. But something else was alive and moving in the shadows. Rowan could just make out a flash of red hair and a pale, freckled face in the moonlight drifting in from a small, barred window. His heart swelled with relief. Not dead, after all.

“What are you doing here?” Hex demanded in a testy whisper.

Well. She was clearly just as maddening as when he’d last seen her.

“I came here for you,” he retorted. He glanced at the apparently eviscerated remains of the man under the window and nearly cast up his accounts. “Dear God. What did they do to him?”

“Nothing good. It’s Omar, by the way,” she said, much too matter-of-factly.

“Omar?” he cried. “How the hell did he get mixed up in this?”

Her lips flattened into a taut line. “It’s a long story.” She held out her bound hands to him, and he made quick work of untying them. “Simon?” she asked after he was done, shaking the circulation back into her wrists.

“He’s on his way to Helen in the
Amun Ra
.”

She nodded, looking grimly pleased by this news, and surveyed his uniform dubiously. “So you decided to come here and play my knight in shining armor?” she asked archly.

“I
could
leave, if I’m inconveniencing you,” he retorted.

Her eyes widened in the moonlight, as if surprised by his sarcasm. She’d better get used to it. He’d changed a lot in the month they’d been apart, and he was bloody well at the end of his rope after hours of searching for her. She was lucky he’d found her at all in this labyrinth.

“I’ll take the inconvenience if you can get us the hell out of here,” she finally said.

“How magnanimous of you, Miss Bartholomew,” he drawled.

“You know, using big words like that will not make me like you more.”

More
? He’d rather thought
at all
would be more accurate.

“Good thing that was not my intention,” he muttered.

She snorted with amusement, and his pulse leapt. Oh, God, they were bantering, weren’t they? Over eviscerated remains, no less.

“How did Simon find you anyway?” she asked.

He gave her a flat look and attempted to breathe through his nose as he caught another powerful whiff of…Omar. “I would prefer to have this conversation when there is not a dead body present.”

Her nose did
not
scrunch up in an adorable way with dismay. He was
not
infatuated.

“I must have gotten used to the smell,” she said, following him out the door.

“
I
haven’t,” he muttered.

They made their way into the main room. She glanced around her in disbelief. “Not that I’m surprised, but how did you get past Netherfield’s guards?” she whispered.

He stopped up short, that uneasy feeling he’d had since he’d entered the library settling low in his gut. “There weren’t any.”

“Son of a…” she hissed. She turned to him, her eyes wide and panicked. “There were two of them. And they weren’t…well, human.” She shook her head ruefully. “I can’t believe my life has come to the point where sentences like that are actually necessary,” she muttered.

He decided to ignore her existential crisis, since he was in the middle of his own. “What do you mean they weren’t human?” he demanded, his insides twisting even more in a mélange of dread and hope. Would he finally have some answers? But why
here
, and why now? “Were they like me?”

She shook her head, looking a bit green about the gills at whatever she was remembering. “Nothing like you, trust me. And they wouldn’t have just let you walk in here,” she said flatly. “It has to be a trap.”

Well, obviously. Hell and damnation, he’d known it had been too easy.

There was a click, and all of the gas lamps set within the walls flickered to life. He spun around, catching sight of two figures approaching from the doorway. They moved too quickly to be human, just as Hex had said, but he was able to track them easily.

A blonde woman in an evening gown and diamonds flew in Hex’s direction. Her beautiful alabaster face contorted with malevolence, and her eyes glowed with amber fire, while long, metallic canines protruded from her mouth. He was so shocked by the unlikely sight that he gave an embarrassingly high-pitched yelp of surprise.

Another one, a hulking male with pale, lank hair and an excessively muscled body practically bursting from his evening clothes, came at Rowan, silent and quick and deadly. Rowan automatically struck out and sent the man flying clear across the room. He landed hard against one of the display cases, glass and wood splintering beneath him, the plaster on the wall crumbling down on his head.

Too quickly, he was on his feet again, pulling out a shard of glass from his arm with barely a flinch, dark, ichorous blood dripping on the floor in noisy splats. He growled like an animal at Rowan and began staggering in his direction, disoriented but undaunted, his fangs gleaming.

Rowan moved to intercept the woman, but the man had distracted him for a second too long. In a flash, the woman had one arm around Hex’s waist and another around her neck. Hex struggled ineffectually, and the woman—or whatever she was—tightened her hold until Hex cried out in pain and fell still.

The look in those glowing eyes stopped Rowan cold. The woman could—and would—snap Hex’s neck if provoked, of that Rowan had no doubt. He didn’t dare to make another move.

“You are, of course, correct, Miss Bartholomew,” came a smooth, cultured voice from the distant doorway. A man, tall, slender and harmless-looking enough, stepped into view, immaculately dressed in full dinner tails, a smug smile gracing his lips. His eyes, sharp and intelligent, swept over Rowan before pausing on his face.