Thief of Hearts (Elders and Welders Chronicles Book 3) (6 page)

“This is why you don’t steal from the dead, Janus,” she said dryly. “The tomb is obviously cursed.”

She was only halfway jesting.

He didn’t disagree with her. He too began to back his way toward the shaft, palming the hilt of the revolver at his hip.

The two Bedouins who had joined the party had wisely exchanged Janus’s trowels for their blades and were the only ones not scrambling toward the shaft. It was as if they were preparing for battle. With a mummy. Which obviously made them insane.
She
was insane, to even be entertaining the idea of a…a
mummy
actually existing. But what else could be on the other side of a sealed Egyptian tomb?

The more logical explanation was that this was somehow part of Hubert’s master plan, but one look at her father’s terrified face and she knew this couldn’t possibly be the case. Even Hubert wasn’t that good of an actor.

Janus seemed to come back to himself long enough to remember he needed her alive, for he grasped her arm and began pulling her along with him. For once, she didn’t even attempt to stop him. Janus was her fastest ticket out of this dime novel, and she was more than happy to use it. She didn’t fancy sticking around for whatever happened next.

But it seemed she didn’t have a choice in the matter. Just as they reached the mouth of the tunnel, a deafening boom filled the room, and she spun around just in time to see the sandstone slab that had blocked the entrance to the burial chamber literally fly through the air. It crashed into the ceiling, dislodging a worrisome amount of debris, then landed with another loud, echoing
thunk
right at the feet of the Bedouin warriors some twenty paces away.

Clouds of dust and the acrid, metallic tang of ozone permeated the chamber, momentarily blocking out the glow of the flares. When the dust finally settled, she glanced toward the tomb’s entrance, now open and bathed in shadows. Dread settled into her bones.

Nothing…
human
could have moved that stone, could have sent it flying through the air. It was seven feet tall and
three feet thick
, for heaven’s sake.

The Bedouins must have come to a similar conclusion, for they crouched low behind the stone in an attempt to hide. She couldn’t blame them. One of the Bedouins shouted something toward the roiling shadows. Her understanding of Arabic was very limited, but she caught a lot of references to
Allah
and
smiting
and
false gods
. The usual.

She had to commend the man for sheer bravado, if nothing else.

When a voice from the shadows actually answered the Bedouin’s imprecations moments later, however, she nearly whimpered, just like Omar was doing next to her. The disembodied voice was deep and echoed off the corridor’s walls, speaking in a language that even the Bedouins didn’t seem to understand.

She hoped to God it wasn’t Ancient Egyptian.

The voice paused. Then it spoke again, this time closer and louder as something shuffled in the shadows. It took her a long time to realize it was speaking in a different language than the one it had first used. Yet another one that no one understood.

Janus pulled out his revolver and aimed it at the burial chamber, though something told her that a gun wasn’t going to help him out of this one.

The voice came again, and this time it sounded a bit…exasperated?
And
it was speaking French. She recognized the language well enough, though she still didn’t understand a word of it.

French.
Somehow she hadn’t expected ancient mummies to be fluent in
that
particular language. But she was far from being able to find comfort in this. It was yet one more disturbing layer to the mystery.

When the voice was met with nothing but stunned silence, it growled ominously, and the shadows shifted yet again.

Janus tensed by her side even more, and she froze and sucked in a shocked breath as the figure of a man began to emerge from the tomb. He bore no resemblance to the shabby, macabre illustrations of the mummies on the covers of penny dreadfuls, which was a relief.

Instead, he seemed to have more in common with the Greek statuary she’d once gawked at when she and her father had cased the British Museum years ago on a job. He was easily taller than anyone else in the chamber and molded in hyper-perfect lines she hadn’t thought existed outside of chiseled marble.

Her former husband certainly hadn’t resembled this…
exemplary
creature when he’d shed
his
clothes.

She didn’t know whether the sound that emerged from her throat was caused by her terror or her realization that the man was as naked as one of those statues, wearing nothing but dust and ash. Absolutely, utterly starkers.

And he was by all appearances quite real, neither a monster of antiquity nor a marble god, but rather a man with smooth, pale skin and wavy, mahogany hair that covered his well-formed head…as well as the dangly bits lower down she was trying desperately not to notice.

Though she
did
notice.

Her former husband’s dangly bits were certainly not measuring up in
that
department either.

Well.
The day had taken a very unexpected turn. She was ogling a naked man who had just emerged from a four-thousand-year-old tomb that, judging from the size of that stone, had most definitely
not
been opened in millennia.

This was obviously some sort of horrible nightmare…or a very,
very
good dream. He was, after all, the finest specimen of manhood she’d ever come across, even with those uncanny eyes of his—amber, wolf-like eyes that practically glowed in the dim chamber.

She shuddered. Nothing
human
had eyes like that.

Janus must have come to a similar conclusion as well, for he cocked his revolver and fired unceremoniously. The sound of the gunshot was so loud in the enclosed space that she covered her ears with her hands and cringed as more rubble fell from the ceiling. She hoped he didn’t bury them all.

The man—or whatever he was—staggered back a step and clutched at his chest, glaring in Janus’s direction with his unnatural eyes. When he dropped his hand from his chest, she expected to see a gaping bullet wound—anything—but there was nothing. His chest was as unblemished and as perfect as before.

Which was impossible. Unless Janus had missed.

Though he hadn’t. Had he?

The revolver dropped to the ground from Janus’s trembling fingers with a thud.

The man’s eyes widened when he noticed her beside Janus, and the area around his cheeks seemed to darken with a blush. Which was also impossible, though the next thing he did was reach down and cover his privates with his hands as best he could, as if protecting his modesty.

Then he spoke again, this time in a language she could finally understand.

“Look, I don’t mean to be a bother,” he drawled in the toniest Queen’s English she’d ever heard, “but might you shoot at me
after
I’m clothed? There is a lady present, after all.” The way he paused before the word “lady”, and the dubious glance he aimed in her direction, however, suggested his doubt in this matter.

She was too traumatized to be offended—well,
almost
too traumatized. She settled for a gasp of outrage.

No one, however, moved to provide him with clothing. They’d seen him take a bullet in the chest without batting an eyelash, after all—
and
toss a ton of sandstone across the chamber as if it weighed no more than a feather pillow.

“Who are you?” Janus finally barked out. “
What
the hell are you?”

The man looked puzzled and a disoriented by the questions. He forgot his nakedness and clutched at the side of his head instead. He staggered a little, and his granite-hewn jaw clenched, as if just thinking about how to answer Janus was painful. He seemed very human in that moment.

“You know, I have no bloody idea,” the man finally said in a small voice that wasn’t god-like at all. He locked eyes with Hex once more, and she could see the panic swiftly rising deep within those inhuman depths. “Hex, I don’t know who I am!” he cried.

Then his eyes rolled into the back of his head, and he pitched forward in a dead faint, a cloud of dust rising all around him.

She stared blankly at his pale, perfectly sculpted rear, which was, alas, impossible to fully savor at the moment, given the circumstances. The roar of her own racing pulse filled her ears and bile rose in her throat as her body finally responded to the shock of the last few minutes. The rising tide of dread, of
wrongness
, threatened to overwhelm her completely.

This was no dream.

And the handsome mummy knew her name.

THE SOUND OF
someone calling his name pulled him from oblivion.

Rowan.

A man’s voice. Low and broken and familiar. The flash of yellow-gold eyes, a gilded dragon slithering over charred skin.

The voice called to him again—
Rowan
—and there was such anguish in it that he felt his mind quake and shatter, like a broken stained glass window, impossible to salvage. He had to try, though. He had to find his way back to the man with the tattoo and the wrecked voice.

But when he finally woke up in a nest of silk pillows what seemed like a lifetime later, he was alone.

A dream, then
.

Tanned canvas billowed in the air all around him, fierce sunlight burning bright beyond the fabric, straight into his oversensitive eyes. He brought his arm up to shield them against the onslaught, but even that small movement sent a searing pain through his body, as harsh and cruel as the sunlight.

He groaned and turned on his side, trying to escape the glare. His muscles, tendons, and bones—even the surface of his skin—screamed in protest, but he knew somehow that he needed to ignore the pain and recover his wits as soon as possible. He was in danger, and he had to find the man from his dreams. These were the only things he knew for certain.

Beyond his silken bed lay weathered brocade rugs thrown across a floor of sand, and a long, carved table made of dark, scarred wood piled high with silver trays of fruit, nuts, and breads. As if to spite the sweltering heat, steam poured out of the sinuous spout of a tall, silver pot, the rich smell of coffee permeating the air.

He tried swallowing, but it hurt, his throat sandpaper-dry and filled with grit. He wasn’t hungry, and he wasn’t much of a coffee drinker, but he’d have killed for a decent cup of tea.

He liked tea. Another thing he knew for certain.

But that was it for the moment. He was far from anything familiar. No stone walls, no wet spring days or overcast skies. No clink of fine china, or smell of fresh newsprint, or boot heels echoing on marble. The closest he would have come to this sort of place—at least in recent years—was in the pages of a book, enjoyed from the comfort of his favorite armchair. He’d ceased traveling years ago, having seen enough of the world to last several lifetimes.

So perhaps he did rather know a few other things about himself.

He sat up with a groan, every molecule of his being protesting angrily against the action. Whatever had happened to him had been beyond unpleasant, but the fine details of it remained obscured in his mind.

Before the oblivion and the voice, he remembered light, brighter than a thousand desert suns, searing through his skin, down into the marrow of his bones. He remembered the exquisite, excruciating pain of it, as if his flesh had been flayed and his organs poached, wiping his mind clean of everything that had come before.

Nothing but shadows remained, ghosts of people he must have once known walking through those wet spring rains and marble halls. He closed his eyes and tried to capture the sound of their voices, the color of their hair, the slope of a name across a page—anything to make those ghosts solid once more. But nothing remained in his mind’s grasp for long. Even the sound of the man’s voice in his dream was slipping away.

He had nothing.

Just a name. Rowan. And he couldn’t even be certain it was his own.

A fist seemed to reach inside of his chest and squeeze his heart in a vise-like grip. Panic. He gasped for air and ran his hands over the familiar yet alien landscape of his face, over the loose white robes that covered his body. He was tall, lean and surprisingly whole—at least on the outside. He hadn’t expected the latter, for his pale flesh stung to high hell from the mere brush of his fingertips.

He turned his hands palm up on his knees and stared down at the unblemished, smooth skin, frowning. He’d felt as if he’d walked through fire—been
pulled
through fire—yet he hadn’t a mark on him. The only remnant was the pain. It wasn’t normal.

But he’d not been
normal
in centuries, had he?

His stomach began to churn, for it seemed even his reason and logic were as broken as his memory. Centuries? Impossible. Years, perhaps, and not many at that. These weren’t the hands of an old man. Yet even with the ocular evidence of his youth right in front of his eyes, he still felt…ancient. Out of step with the world around him in a way that went beyond the memory loss.

He was beginning to doubt his senses completely, though the pain felt all too real.

He swung his legs to the sandy carpet, trying to muster the wherewithal to stand. He needed water. Or even the bitter burn of coffee at this point. His throat was desperate for any sort of appeasement, even if it wasn’t tea.

The cling of metal broke the stillness of the tent as he finally pulled himself to his feet, and something hard and unforgiving tugged at his ankle. He fumbled aside the robes—definitely
not
his usual choice in wardrobe, he knew that much—and spotted the source of the sound.

A wide metal band encircled his left ankle, connected to a strong metal chain. His eyes followed the chain across the carpet, where it was looped through the end of a thick metal pole driven deep into the sand. He tested the chain with a few gentle tugs, and the pole bent slightly but didn’t give altogether.

Someone didn’t want him to leave this tent. He had no clear memories, no idea where he was—much less
when
he was—but he was apparently being held prisoner by coffee-drinking strangers. In a tent. In a desert. For some reason, he didn’t think the shackle would deter him very much, given the way the pole had bowed just from a light tug, but the fact that he was supposed to be some sort of captive did nothing to improve his mood.

Somehow, however, he didn’t think this was the first time he’d been in a dangerous situation.

The canvas rustled, and someone drew back a flap on the tent, letting in a burst of raw desert sun. He cursed and sat back down on his cot, shielding his eyes. Deep voices barked out orders in an unfamiliar language—Arabic, perhaps, but very different from the dialect with which he was familiar. He could make out only a few words.

But on the upside, it seemed that he knew
some
permutation of Arabic. Yet another piece of the puzzle: he was a man of languages.

A small, squirrelly sort of man in dusty brown robes fell into the tent with a shriek of protest, hands bound in front of him. The tent flap fell closed, dimming the light, and the little man scrambled forward haphazardly. He glanced up once, met Rowan’s eyes, shrieked again, and buried his face into the carpet. He began to mumble under his breath in a tangle of broken English and Arabic, begging Rowan not to hurt him. It was as if the man were terrified of him.

He shifted uneasily on his pillows, the chain clinking as a reminder of his captivity. The sound startled the little man into lifting his head once more. His dark eyes were the size of tea saucers, and his gaping mouth worked silently, as if he’d finally run out of words. He looked like he fully expected Rowan to murder him at any moment.

Rowan tried to clear his throat to speak, but even this seemed to send the man into hysterics. He had to admit that the sound was rather harsh. He
really
needed that drink.

He ignored the pain in his body and staggered his way to the table. He poured himself a goblet of water from a sweating silver ewer and drank it down greedily, feeling like some sort of imperiled sultan out of the
Arabian Nights
.

“Oh, Magnificence!” the man cried suddenly in English, startling Rowan so much he choked on the water. “Please let my punishment be swift and painless. I am unworthy and weak. I have only disturbed your eternal slumber to feed my family, Magnificence. I have a wife and two sons and ask that you spare me for their sake!”

Rowan wiped off his chin and gaped at the other man. “Oh, dear
Lord
, I’m not going to kill you,” he rasped out. Unless the ridiculous man called him Magnificence one more time.
Then
he might consider it.

There was another round of angry voices outside the tent, and once more the flap was thrown open. He groaned and covered his eyes until the flap fell back into place and the arguing subsided. When he opened them, a young, red-haired woman was stumbling to a stop in front of him, her wrists also bound tight with rope. She was scowling back toward the entrance, her bright blue eyes flashing, her freckled face red from either anger or the sun. Probably both. She was as out of place in this desert environment as a pig in the ocean.

His eyes fixed on her hair, and he found himself nearly powerless to look away. Mounds and mounds of fiery red curls were piled high on top of her head, half of it escaping all attempts at containment and tumbling down her shoulders in a chaotic snarl.

It was…familiar. So damned familiar. The most familiar thing he’d encountered since he’d awakened into this nightmare. Yet he could not place her.

She huffed and straightened her clothes: men’s jodhpurs and a worn leather waistcoat over a linen lawn shirt, all of which fit her like a second skin. Not that he was
concerned
about the fit of her clothes…though the woman was attractive,
very
attractive—at least to him.

He liked gingers, then. Another thing to add to his list.

She smoothed down the waistcoat as best she could with her wrists bound and her hands encased in leather gloves. Finally, after muttering a few choice curses toward the entrance, she turned and faced him. She’d clearly not expected what she found, for she nearly stumbled over the prostrated man in surprise.

When the silence stretched for too long—or what passed for silence, what with the little man fervently reciting some sort of prayer for deliverance under his breath—he realized he was staring a little too intensely at her hair. He met her eyes, which were no longer flashing with anger. In fact, she had the wary, wide-eyed look of an animal that had come face to face with a predator. She was, just like the man, frightened of him.

Well,
he
wasn’t the one who’d tied the rope around their wrists. He didn’t know why they would be frightened of
him
and not the people who had imprisoned them.

He scowled at her.

She scowled right back, anger quickly overtaking her wariness, and he felt a spark of admiration for her unexpected mettle.

“You’re awake,” she said, then cringed, as if she regretted a statement of such obviousness.

“You’re American,” he said. He’d not met one of them in years. They’d rather curtailed their visits to the Old World since the Crimean War. Not that he could blame them. The war had been…devastating.

Yet another thing he remembered. He’d been a soldier, perhaps, since just the thought of the war conjured up vague images of blood and gore, the clash of weapons, and the boom of incendiaries. Though that didn’t make much sense, considering it was 1897. He’d have been an old man by now if he’d fought in that war…

“
You’re
not,” she replied, narrowing her eyes, pulling him out of his muddled thoughts. “I would say you’re British from that fancy accent of yours.”

He shrugged. That sounded about right, though he couldn’t be certain of anything at the moment.

“But you just emerged from a four-thousand-year-old Egyptian tomb, so I’m not sure
what
you are,” she continued conversationally.

That
, however, did
not
sound right at all. Feeling suddenly faint, he sat back down on his cot and scratched the nape of his neck.

“I don’t
think
I’m Egyptian,” he said rather lamely.

The woman, who was currently attempting to soothe the little Arabic man, looked at him as if he’d suddenly grown horns.

“
That
was what you got out of the conversation? That you don’t think you’re Egyptian? What about the tomb?”

“I don’t remember a tomb,” he said. “The last thing I remember is…” Well,
how
to finish that statement, he had no bloody clue. He settled on shrugging rather helplessly.

“You don’t remember,” she said flatly. That wary look hadn’t left her eyes, despite her bravado.

“I don’t remember,” he confirmed, just as flatly.

“Nothing that happened in the tomb? Me?” she demanded.

“Should I?” he countered. “Do I know who you are?”

She hesitated, something shuttering in her eyes. “No,” she finally said. “You don’t know me, and I certainly don’t know you.”

He had a feeling that the woman was normally a splendid liar, but that pause had given her away. She wasn’t telling the whole truth, but he decided not to press her on the matter. Not yet, at any rate.

The enormity of his predicament was just beginning to sink in, and that vise-like dread in his chest was only growing stronger. Everyone in this tent was shackled in some way, and he didn’t even know if he could consider the others his allies or enemies. He couldn’t even say where he was, or why he was there. He couldn’t even say
who
he was.