Thief of Hearts (Elders and Welders Chronicles Book 3) Read online

  Unfortunately, outright thievery was off the table for her these days.

  “You’ve heard of the Book of the Dead, I assume?” Netherfield asked her.

  She shrugged and touched her gloved fingertips to the glass as she studied the scrolls, not bothering to hide her covetousness. “Vaguely. I’ve come across a few scrolls here and there. Nothing so fine as this, of course. Osiris, the afterlife, the weighing of the heart, right?”

  Netherfield nodded approvingly at her, an odd smile twisting his lips and an even odder gleam lighting his brown eyes. “Ah, yes, the weighing of the heart, my favorite part,” he murmured. “You are quite the encyclopedia, Miss Bartholomew.”

  She snorted at his flattery. “Hardly. I just know what puts money in my pockets. So is this from the Book of the Dead, then?”

  He shook his head. “The study of the Book of the Dead, specifically the weighing of the hearts ceremony, is a passion of mine, and one that London University has indeed sent me here to study. But this particular manuscript is a bit of a side project. My benefactor and I have endeavored to investigate its…unique contribution to history. This text belongs to a much older mystical tradition, begun at the end of the Old Kingdom.”

  She whistled. That was very old.

  He gestured to the first papyrus in the displayed row. She squinted down at the neat columns of hieroglyphs set above beautifully rendered illustrations. If he expected her to understand what she was looking at, then he was quite mistaken. She barely knew what the Old Kingdom was.

  “This first scroll tells of the cataclysms that plagued Egypt at the time of the Old Kingdom’s collapse,” he said. “Natural disasters, more specifically. Drought, sandstorms, earthquakes, all very biblical.”

  “Sounds like Egypt right now,” she muttered.

  Netherfield’s smile was all teeth. “Doesn’t it just?” He gestured to the next papyrus. “Of course, the Egyptians blamed their bad luck on the gods. In the reign of Pepys II,” he said, indicating an enthroned figure she assumed was the pharaoh, “a god apparently fell to earth.”

  He pointed to the most prominent figure on the page, bigger than the others and pale-skinned, his body decorated with a vibrantly colored, serpent-like design, his eyes a startling yellow ochre. Even she knew the figure was unusual. It was like nothing she’d ever seen before in the Egyptian artwork she’d come across over the years. Usually, the gods who were portrayed tended to have the heads of their various animal familiars. They were definitely not tattooed like some modern-day merchant marine.

  Netherfield gestured to the glyphs above the vignette and began a rough paraphrase. “Here it says the god was a giant among men, with skin the color of clouds and eyes like the sun, with a large serpent ‘entwined’ in his skin. This text refers to him often as the ‘painted man’, or ‘painted god’. But he is also believed to be Apep, or Apophis, god of chaos, fallen to earth. The great suffering of Egypt at that time is attributed to him. In later texts, he is merely referred to as Apophis, and is depicted as a giant serpent. Not nearly so interesting.

  “This is the earliest surviving papyric manuscript mentioning the god Apophis, and again, the only one that represents him in his human form. I have seen another earlier pyramid text in Memphis that tells a similar story, predating even this scroll by a few hundred years at least. But this one is a rather lovely work of art, is it not, Miss Bartholomew?”

  She couldn’t deny that. “Why are you telling me all this?” she demanded.

  He gestured toward a section of the same scroll at the opposite end of the case, where Apophis seemed to be directing a legion of stoneworkers. She’d seen such a tableau before in other manuscripts. The rich and powerful of ancient Egypt seemed to have taken universal delight in ordering about their underlings.

  She supposed not much had changed in thousands of years for the human race.

  “Here is the god himself overlooking the construction of his tomb, in this particular text referred to as the Tomb of Mirrors,” Netherfield continued. “During his time on earth, according to the story, Apophis built his own funerary chambers, where he was eventually transported back to the underworld, restoring balance to the world and ushering in a new age. As the story goes, the tomb was filled with unimaginable treasures gifted to the god during his years on earth, and countless magical secrets. No records survived of precisely where to find it, but this manuscript and others place it in the Western Sahara.”

  Things finally began to make more sense to her. She should have known that bad business in the desert would come back and bite her on the ass.

  “Did you fund Harlan Janus, then?” she drawled. “Is that what this is really about? You’re wondering where he is now, and whether he decided to keep all of that ‘unimaginable treasure’ you speak of for himself?”

  Netherfield looked disgusted at the idea. “Harlan Janus is no associate of mine. A philistine, only interested in filthy lucre. No, my benefactor and I have a much more…profound connection to the tomb of Apophis.”

  “Bully for you,” she muttered, not believing him for a second. She’d never met anyone not interested in filthy lucre.

  “You were successful in ferrying Janus to the tomb, and so I would ask you to do the same for me and my men. You would be well-compensated, of course,” Netherfield said.

  “Sorry, but I’m still not interested in your offer,” she gritted out.

  “I’m afraid I’m not giving you a choice, Miss Bartholomew,” Netherfield answered her apologetically. “I do so hate employing the same inelegant tactics as Harlan Janus, but I will, if needs must.”

  She really didn’t like the sound of that, but she was damned if she’d back down now. “Harlan Janus and his men kidnapped me, threatened me, commandeered and nearly destroyed my ship, and did their level best to murder me. I felt no compunction about leaving them in the desert to rot.” Well, maybe a little, since she wasn’t a complete monster. “What are you going to do to make me cooperate with you? Wrap me in ancient scrolls? Chant some magical spells at me? I’m not interested.”

  Netherfield gazed at her with appreciation. “You are alarmingly spirited. Too much for the poor Mr. Gray to handle, weren’t you?”

  The man knew way too much about her. She wasn’t going to even ask how he knew about her life in Baltimore. And she was certainly not going to give him the satisfaction of seeing how that particular barb stung her.

  Instead, she smirked at him. “Way too much, Professor Netherfield. He hadn’t a clue what to do with me.”

  Netherfield looked as if he did, or at least as if he wanted to try.

  Well.

  There was no way she was going to let him. She crossed her arms over her chest and glared. His amusement only seemed to deepen—as did her resolve to have nothing to do with him.

  “I can’t help you, professor,” she repeated firmly. “Find someone else.” Though she could already see from his tight expression that this wasn’t going to happen.

  She turned to leave the room and was surprised how far she actually got before she was stopped. Theodora Hendrix emerged from the doorway, along with a man she’d not seen before. Tall, blond and built like a brick wall, he looked like the type of thug she wouldn’t want to encounter in a dark alley…or anywhere else, for that matter. Violence practically oozed from his pores. The professor had not hired this man for his brains. Or his personality. The once-over the man gave Hex made her blood run cold.

  She would have rather faced the palace guard.

  “You’ve met Theodora,” the professor drawled. “Allow me to introduce Vasily.”

  Hex backed up as the two stalked farther into the room. She weighed her options and decided that she’d been in worse spots, even with a man like Vasily to contend with. Provided the palace guard was not waiting for her in the hall, perhaps she had a chance to escape after all. The professor was obviously no fighter, and Theodora…

  Well, Theodora was dressed like a Parisian fashion plate and looked as
if a stiff wind could fell her. If Hex was just quick enough, she might be able to slip the net. She checked her movement backward and feinted to the left, straight toward Theodora, thinking to use the woman’s position and ridiculously wide skirts to trip up Vasily just long enough to get past them. But she’d barely gone half a step before both Theodora and Vasily were looming over her and hemming her in, as if they’d read her intentions.

  And they’d moved much too fast. A blink of an eye, and they were on top of her from halfway across the vast room. The only other time she’d ever seen someone move that fast was when Rowan had stepped in front of a bullet meant for her. She still had trouble believing she’d not simply imagined it—she still had trouble believing she’d not simply imagined Rowan full-stop.

  She prayed she was imagining the present moment as well.

  Her heart in her throat, she reluctantly raised her gaze and gasped at what she saw. Both of their eyes began to glow an eerie yellow-amber, similar to Rowan’s but even brighter, and a pair of razor-sharp, metallic fangs protruded from their lips. Their expressions were both distorted in a feral sneer, their bodies tensed to attack. Not an attractive look on either of them. She even thought she heard Vasily growl.

  What. The. Hell.

  Professor Netherfield just chuckled and ambled around the room to Theodora’s side. He took a long, smug sip of liquor and stroked Theodora’s hair, as if she were a beloved pet. It was…disturbing.

  “Believe me when I tell you, my dear Miss Bartholomew, you won’t get very far should you try to escape. Vasily in particular is…an eager one. And neither of my associates has had a proper feeding in quite some time. They had to share their last snack, and it has left them a bit fractious.”

  Hex tried to say something, but the words stuck in her throat. She was exceedingly concerned about what he meant by a “proper feeding”, but at the same time she suspected she really, really didn’t want a clarification. Ever.

  All she knew was that she was staring into the face of something inhuman. And clearly evil. Rowan may have been equally inexplicable, opening her mind up to extraordinary possibilities, but he’d not been evil.

  How, she wondered, had this become her life? Had she truly become a character in one of Helen’s penny dreadfuls without anyone bothering to tell her? For it surely seemed the most logical explanation at that point. The real world wasn’t supposed to have four-thousand-year-old resurrected pharaohs with snooty British accents. The real world wasn’t supposed to have these…things out of Eastern European folk tales and hackneyed gothic novels.

  She swallowed thickly and tried to regulate her galloping heart rate. It was as if Theodora and Vasily were fixated on the pulse in her neck, could smell her terror. And God, was she ever terrified.

  But she was also Hex Bartholomew, damn it, and she wasn’t about to let anyone see her cowed. Especially these creatures.

  She mustered up the remnants of her bravado. “What? Too weak to handle me on your own, Netherfield? Had to call in your guard dogs?” she scoffed.

  Theodora didn’t like that at all. Hex had to admit that poking the animals with a stick wasn’t the smartest thing she’d ever done when a truly unsettling growl—yes, they did indeed growl, apparently—issued from Theodora’s dainty, alabaster throat. The woman surged forward, and Hex jumped back, her heart in her throat, her pulse racing. Only Netherfield’s gentling hand on Theodora’s arm stopped her from tearing Hex apart.

  Hex wondered how deep Netherfield’s control over Theodora actually went and decided to test that a little by smirking at the woman despite her terror. Theodora snarled and lunged again, and she decided that too was not the most prudent course of action she could have taken.

  Netherfield once again steadied the woman and gave Hex a tight, humorless smile. “Not yet, my dear,” he said to Theodora, never taking his malevolent eyes off of Hex. “We need her yet. But if you are good, I shall let you have her when I am done with her.”

  Theodora grinned. It was extremely off-putting with those metallic fangs still protruding from her mouth and cutting into her lips so that two macabre trickles of blood made their way down her chin. Vasily looked unimpressed with Netherfield’s pronouncement, however, and the private smile that he fixed upon Hex behind Netherfield’s back made her gut churn with dread.

  Vasily would not wait. He would certainly not be good. And he’d “have” her before Theodora did. Whatever that entailed.

  Hex edged a little nearer to Netherfield and Theodora. They actually seemed the safer bet, at least for the moment.

  Netherfield withdrew a length of rope from his pocket and began to bind Hex’s wrists. When he was done, he slid her gloves off and studied her Welding hands. His brows lifted in something like admiration, and she had to avert her eyes. She hated when people noticed her hands, but she endured Netherfield’s inspection without flinching once. Anything to keep his attention away from Simon’s wristwatch, which was still, thankfully, hidden beneath her sleeve.

  “Very fine work, Miss Bartholomew. I’ve not seen true craftsmanship like this in centuries.”

  She grit her teeth as he stroked the fine metalwork and only barely refrained from taking one of his fingers and squeezing it until it broke. She was fairly certain she could have done so before his attack dogs could react, but she doubted she’d like the punishment that would follow.

  “Centuries?” she bit out dubiously.

  He just continued to smirk at her. “You know, I did ask you nicely,” he said a few moments later, releasing her hands and stepping away from her. “A simple trip out to the desert and back. Hardly outside your usual purview, and certainly easier money than you could ever make through your petty smuggling.”

  Hex’s jaw tightened. She didn’t know how Netherfield had found out about her extracurriculars, but she didn’t like it. She had been so careful since she’d come to Egypt.

  “Something must have truly scared you out there,” he mused. Well, someone. “A greedy little opportunist like you wouldn’t turn down the small fortune I offered without a good reason. I so wish you’d share it with me.”

  “Go to hell,” Hex bit out.

  Netherfield’s brow quirked with amusement. “You are…plucky, I’ll give you that.”

  He snapped his fingers, and the two…whatever they were…came up on either side of her and grabbed her by her arms. She was just glad Theodora had postponed ripping her throat out for another occasion.

  They dragged her behind the display cases into a dim alcove at the rear of the room that hid a narrow door. She nearly gagged as the cloying odor of rot overcame all of her senses, growing ever stronger the closer they got to the door.

  She was used to the myriad unpleasant smells that pervaded Cairo: rotted food in the gutters of the souk, human waste clogging narrow streets, and the smell of the Nile just outside the slaughterhouse docks on a hot day. But this…

  She’d not smelled this particular foulness before—or if she had, not in such singularity. She could only guess what it was…

  And what she guessed was not good. Not good at all.

  Theodora and Vasily pushed her inside a small, narrow chamber on the other side of the hidden door. The smell was so potent now that her eyes watered.

  Netherfield hovered in the doorway, a handkerchief over his nose. “I’m so sorry for the inconvenience”—he wasn’t—“but I must insist that you remain at my disposal. I wouldn’t have had to importune you at all in order to discover the tomb’s location, Miss Bartholomew, but unfortunately our only other option proved tragically uncooperative.”

  He gestured behind her into the shadows of the small room, and she nearly lost the contents of her stomach at what she saw. It was Omar. Or what was left of him. His eyes were glazed over in death, his mouth set in a rictus of terror. The rest of him…

  She wasn’t sure what had happened to the rest of him. There was too much carnage to tell. It looked as if someone had done a very thorough job of prying him open and
scooping out what was inside. She covered her nose and mouth with her hand, trying not to breathe too deeply, understanding at last what she’d been smelling. Death.

  And she’d naively thought things couldn’t get any worse once the fangs had come out.

  “Mr. Aziz was very detailed, if somewhat fanciful, in his description of your expedition,” Netherfield continued, “but he was unable to articulate the precise coordinates of the tomb. Perhaps in time he could have managed to lead us to the tomb, but he refused quite violently to return there. So violently, in fact, that my colleagues lost their temper with him.”

  Theodora and Vasily’s snack.

  “Some temper,” she managed despite the rising bile in her throat.

  “Tomorrow at dawn, we will start our journey,” Netherfield said. “I’m sure the Amun Ra is sky-worthy enough, despite your claims otherwise.”

  “Fuck you,” Hex gagged out, trying to keep her breathing shallow.

  Netherfield’s smile tightened. “How delightfully coarse. Let me phrase this in a way you will understand: if you do not cooperate and take us back to that tomb, not only will you die, but so will your sister. Helen, I believe? Frail little thing, isn’t she? I have heard that the nuns at St. Mina’s take good care of her.”

  Hex’s heart sank to her toes. “How could you possibly know about Helen? Who told you?”

  Netherfield’s smirk grew, and he cocked his eyebrow, as if it were obvious who’d told him.

  Hex glanced at Omar’s remains out of the corner of her eye and groaned. Damn it. Obvious indeed.

  The poor man had been over his head from the moment he’d fallen into Hubert’s orbit. There was no telling what he’d told Netherfield and his lackeys by the end of things. But it was hard to be angry with the man. No one deserved such a horrible fate. She could only hope hers would not be so…gruesome.

  “Sleep well, Miss Bartholomew,” Netherfield said, backing out of the room.

  “You’re not going to shut me in here with a dead body!” she cried.

  Netherfield paused and gave her another cold smirk. “Careful, my dear. Don’t bother trying to escape. Theodora and Vasily both shall be watching over you. And as you can plainly see from the state of Mr. Aziz, they become…messy when provoked.”