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

  “That’s because…”

  “…you knew I wouldn’t have agreed? You’re damn right I wouldn’t have,” she hissed. “I told you to stay away from me, and you drag me into this.”

  Hubert’s brow creased, as if she were the one being unreasonable. “Don’t worry, my dear,” he whispered. “Things will work out. Trust me. As soon as we have the treasure aboard the Amun Ra…”

  She snorted. Of course. Of course he had put her through two days of hell because he was hatching some scheme. Yet again.

  “Trust you? Trust you?” she hissed. “I knew you were up to something. It would be too easy for you to just pay off your debt. You think you’re going to double-cross Janus, don’t you? And use my ship to do it?”

  He gave her that pleading look she’d never been able to resist as a young girl. She hated that look. “The entrance to the burial chamber is completely undisturbed,” he gushed. “Sealed tight. Omar’s seen it with his own eyes. No one has been inside in four thousand years. Think of it, my dear! If it’s anything like what Petrie has been finding down south, we’ll be set for life.”

  She scowled in the direction of the interpreter, who pretended to not see her. And to think she’d felt sorry for the little weasel. Innocent bystander her ass.

  “So Omar is in on whatever foolish con you’re trying to run. I should have known.”

  “All we have to do is wait for the right moment, my dear, once the treasure is aboard.”

  There were so many things wrong with his plan—foremost among them not even knowing exactly what was in the tomb—that it was hard to know how to argue against it. Not that she was going to argue at all, for that would only encourage him.

  “You assume that I’ll fall in line with your schemes, but I’m not a little girl anymore.”

  Hubert’s eyes dropped ever so briefly down to her gloved hands, clenched angrily at her sides, and some shadow—perhaps guilt, perhaps mere frustration—passed over his expression. But it was gone in the blink of an eye, too quickly for it to count at all.

  “My only goal is to get the four of us back to Cairo,” she growled. “Alive. But if you fail to follow my orders when I give them, I will leave you to your fate. My duty to you has its limits. I’m not dying for you, father, and neither is Simon.”

  “But…”

  “Do you not believe me?” she cut in. She’d be damned if she listened to his wheedling for a second longer.

  Now he was definitely frustrated. He glared at her petulantly. “I believe you,” he said in a low rumble, something hard and just a bit cruel glinting deep in his eyes.

  Oh, she knew that look well too—the look of the true Hubert, hidden behind all of that Scotch charm—and she knew that she was going to have to watch her back even more diligently. Hubert was going to attempt to have his way come hell or high water, even if it meant sacrificing her. He’d done it before, and he’d damn well do it again.

  Well, he’d find out the hard way just exactly how far she was willing to go if he decided she was expendable. Hubert was always finding things out the hard way, as his greed inevitably trumped his foresight. It was a testament to his sheer pigheadedness that he was still alive at all.

  She glanced longingly toward the Amun Ra, its sleek, gleaming mahogany hull hovering above the shimmering desert sands, suspended by three colossal, billowing thermal ballonets the same soft color as the sky.

  For a moment, she was tempted to reconsider Simon’s advice. Even with one of the sun panels down, she and Simon could make a clean break from all of this and run far enough away that Janus could never catch them. She really didn’t owe her father anything, did she? Especially when she knew all too well he was going to stab her in the back the first opportunity he had.

  Only the thought of Helen kept her rooted to the desert floor. If she abandoned her father, she’d never be able to look her little sister in the eye again. Damn it. But if thinking of Helen had worked to rouse her conscience, it might do the same for her father’s. He, after all, actually loved Helen—or so he was fond of reminding her.

  “Just remember Helen,” she murmured to him. “Remember she’d not want you to endanger yourself. Or me.”

  That petulant look returned, but the hard edge in his eyes was blunted at the mention of his favorite daughter. He huffed out a breath as if greatly put-upon. “I will be careful. And careful of you. How could you doubt it?”

  She barely restrained her eye roll. She doubted everything that came out of that mendacious mouth of his. It didn’t escape her notice that he’d not actually promised to set aside his scheming against Janus, but his half-hearted assurances would have to be enough.

  For now.

  JANUS AND THE sheikh finally reached some sort of agreement and mustered their respective troops in the direction of the dunes, where crates hauled from the ship—some filled with tomb-raiding paraphernalia, some empty and ready to be packed full of plunder—sat waiting to be put to use. This was not Janus’s first job pillaging priceless historical artifacts from their less-than-eternal resting places, so his men got straight down to business, prying open the crates with crowbars and rummaging around for their tools.

  An equal number of the sheikh’s men dismounted their horses to join in the effort, arming themselves with shovels, picks, steam torches, and rope. Omar finally led the party to a narrow crevice, hidden behind a large sandstone rock at the base of the inexplicably petrified dune.

  In the end, after another interminable round of arguing, it was decided that two of the sheikh’s men and two of Janus’s men would accompany Janus, Omar, and Hubert on the first foray into the dark passageway.

  Needless to say, by the time this last negotiation was worked out, the sun was at its zenith in the sky and Hex was dying of boredom.

  Men. And they had the nerve to claim that the female sex were the indecisive ones.

  She propped herself up against the sandstone rock while she waited and kicked her boot against the petrified dune. It was as hard as the rock at her back, millions of particles of sand melted and fused together into a quartz-like amalgam.

  She reached out and touched the base of the fulgurite with the bare skin peeking between the sleeve of her shirt and leather glove. Static electricity sparked at the contact, and she recoiled with a muttered oath.

  The surface was sizzling, hotter than the normal sand surrounding it, as if still churning with the energy from last night’s electrical storm. So very strange—everything about the site was strange and slightly…well, skewed. A bit dizzying to look at, almost as if she were staring through a giant kaleidoscope.

  It gave her a bad feeling just standing there touching the melted sand—the kind of feeling that would have normally made her turn tail and run. She’d narrowly averted death and disaster in the past by heeding this same gut instinct, but somehow she didn’t think she’d have that luxury this time around. Without her ship, there was nowhere to run, for if Janus’s men didn’t kill her, the desert would.

  “You,” Janus said roughly, coming up behind her and nudging her shoulder with something hard to gain her attention. When she turned to him, he pushed a torch and a load of small, cylindrical flares in her arms and shoved her in the direction of Omar, who hovered at the narrow entrance to the tomb.

  She balked, quickly catching onto Janus’s scheme, which was even worse than she’d predicted. “Oh no, I don’t think so.”

  “You’ll go down first with the interpreter and set up the lighting for the rest of us,” he growled.

  “Like hell…”

  He jerked her by the arm, giving her no choice but to stumble in Omar’s direction.

  “Climbing into dark, dangerous places is your specialty, ain’t it?” Janus demanded. “Get to it.”

  She glared at Hubert, who hovered nearby but made no move to intercede, until he flushed guiltily and averted his eyes. Really, he had no discretion whatsoever. He’d obviously been loose with his tongue again for Janus to know anything about
her childhood occupation.

  She jerked away from Janus and Omar with her load of flares and stalked toward the entrance, feeling trapped.

  “Fine,” she muttered, peering into the darkness, her stomach sinking. She liked a bit of adventure in her life, but not the kind that occurred underground.

  “Be careful, Miss Hex,” Omar whispered next to her. “There are many ways to fall and never be found again.”

  She turned her glare onto him. He probably thought he was being helpful, but all he was doing was making her heart sink even lower. How did she keep getting herself tangled up in these ridiculous situations?

  Oh, yeah. Hubert.

  She never should have left her damned ship.

  “And you know this how?” she bit out, wanting Omar to admit to his scheming out loud.

  He paled under his sun-darkened skin, unable to meet her eyes. “Because I’ve been down before with my cousin. Only I came out alive,” he admitted in a whisper, knotting a long rope around his waist and then looping it around her own. “Once we reach the bottom of the chamber, we will be fine. It is the climb down that is dangerous. The shaft is filled with holes.”

  There were so many vulgar jokes she could have made about his particular choice in words, but she doubted he would have appreciated them. She lifted her arms as he wrapped her in a makeshift harness.

  “Those holes are there for a reason, you know,” she hissed. “They were put there to prevent thieves like you from stealing from the dead.”

  Omar raised a single bushy black brow. “Don’t you mean thieves like us, Miss Hex?” he asked.

  She narrowed her eyes at him. So he’d heard of her past as well. “Watch it, Omar. I’m your only way out of this desert, so try not to piss me off any more than you already have. And I am a legitimate businesswoman.”

  She gave Omar credit for not snorting out loud, but she could see his incredulity in the soaring pitch of his brow.

  “Mostly,” she amended, thinking of the various jobs she’d been forced to take on over the past two years that had toed the line of legality—not that there was much law to be had in Egypt to begin with, save what suited the Souk to enforce. “But even I don’t steal from the dead, Omar.”

  With that parting shot, she gave Omar a subtle shove forward. There was no way in hell she was going first.

  Grumbling, Omar crouched down at the opening and clicked on his steam torch. After the device had hummed to life, sending a beam of yellow light down into the shaft, he crawled inside. She waited until the slack line of rope connecting them went taut, then followed him into the gloom with her own torch lighting the way.

  The shaft was even narrower and steeper than she’d expected, and she found herself scooting forward belly-first in places, bracing herself against the pull of gravity. Periodically, Omar would halt their descent, and they would set up the flares Janus had provided them around the rims of the bottomless pits Omar had warned her about.

  Those yawning, black maws sent cold chills down her spine despite the stifling, dusty heat of the shaft. She dropped stones down each of them to gauge their depths, but she never once heard the stones land. The chasms were deep indeed, and at the bottom of one of them, Omar’s own cousin moldered in eternal slumber, more lost to the world than the ancient corpse whose tomb they were about to disturb. The thought was enough to prick even her thick skin.

  After what seemed like hours climbing deeper and deeper into the earth, they reached the end of the tunnel. Omar undid the rope around his waist and disappeared over the edge, and for a moment Hex feared he’d fallen down one of the pits. A second later, his steam torch shone on her from below, followed by the snick and hiss of newly lit flares illuminating the void.

  She scrambled to the edge and looked down. Omar stood a few feet below her on a mound of rubble at the mouth of a large, rectangular corridor stretching out of the reach of the flares and into darkness. In the flickering light, she could just make out shadowy figures decorating the walls nearest them in deep ochres, rich blues, and ghostly whites.

  She whistled in astonishment as she jumped to the chamber floor, dust rising all around her, the smell of ozone even stronger than it had been on the surface. Even the filter provided by her Iron Necklace was no defense against the gritty atmosphere.

  Coughing into her kerchief, she marked Omar’s path with her torch as he began setting the flares along the corridor’s walls, flooding the antechamber with a delicate, flickering light, illuminating the almost otherworldly artwork. She could already tell even in the semi-darkness that the paintings on the walls were in extraordinary condition. They were an archaeological goldmine—alien yet elegant, ancient yet pristine, from a culture lost in time.

  She doubted Janus or her father would much care about preserving the historical record, however. They were after things that they could carry out and sell to the highest bidder. She would have given more of a damn about their careless destruction of history had she not been there under duress already…and had the ghostly wall paintings not been so horribly unnerving.

  Marked by a wide, wooden lintel inscribed with more intricate hieroglyphs, the entrance to the burial chamber stood at the end of the long chamber, blocked by a seven-foot-tall slab of sandstone cut so precisely the seams of the doorway were nearly invisible.

  “Well, that looks impossible to move,” she murmured.

  “Have faith, Miss Hex,” Omar said, holding up a rock pick with a head the size of her pinkie finger, as if that would solve everything. “Allah will help us if we are patient.”

  She snorted. “Right. Well, good luck with that. I don’t know about Allah, but Janus isn’t exactly known for his patience. In fact, he’s going to be mighty impatient when he sees this.”

  Omar ignored her and began to chip away at the edge of the sandstone experimentally, the ping of metal against stone ricocheting off the walls of the chamber.

  The results were microscopic.

  She crossed her arms and leaned against the slab to watch his exercise in futility, determined to lend as little help as possible. A second later, she leapt away from the stone in surprise, rubbing her singed shoulder.

  “Son of a bitch! It’s boiling hot, Omar.”

  Omar paused in his chipping campaign and placed his palm against the sandstone. A jolt of static electricity flashed like a miniature bolt of lightning when his hand touched the stone, blindingly bright in the dim chamber. He cursed in Arabic and jerked his hand away, giving her a wide-eyed, bewildered look.

  “That’s not normal, is it?” she whispered.

  Before he could answer, a dull thunk sounded, followed by another, and Omar’s eyes grew so wide they were in danger of popping out of their sockets completely. She feared her own eyes were doing no better. The tomb was eerie enough without having to contend with mysterious noises.

  Something about Ancient Egyptian antiquities had always disconcerted her, but being deep underground and surrounded by the stuff really took the cake. If her instincts aboveground had been to walk away, they were now practically shouting at her to run as fast and as far as she could and never look back, her father be damned.

  She turned her torch toward the entrance shaft, half expecting Janus and the others to appear—surely they were the ones who had made the strange noise—but nothing but dust motes danced in the beam of light.

  The thunk came again, and her skin began to crawl as the horrifying truth dawned on her. The sound was much too nearby to be coming from the shaft. In fact, it sounded as if…

  Thunk. Thunk.

  As if it were coming from the other side of the sandstone slab. Which was…which had to be…

  Thunk.

  Impossible.

  Thunk. Thunk.

  A fine shower of debris fell from the lintel atop the doorway, disturbed by the vibrations coming from within the sealed chamber.

  Omar shot her a look of utter terror.

  One more thunk, and she nearly jumped out of her skin.
/>   “It can’t be!” she whispered.

  Omar backed away from the slab, his body literally thrumming with fear. When yet another thunk sounded and the half-rotted lintel fell to the floor in a heap of dust, he dropped his dainty pick, turned around, and fled toward the entrance.

  She couldn’t help but feel that Omar had the right idea with his display of rank cowardice. Things had just become way too bizarre for her liking. She turned and followed him. But before Omar could start scrambling to the surface, he screamed out in horror and collapsed in a heap of robes as beams of light caught him in their crosshairs.

  Hex nearly screamed as well, until she realized it was just the arrival of Janus and the rest of the party. Perhaps the strange sounds had come from them after all.

  She breathed a huge sigh of relief and nearly laughed out loud at her wayward imagination. She’d never thought she’d be glad to see Harlan Janus.

  Janus dropped into the chamber and stared at Omar’s prone form with disgust. The little schemer had flung himself into a corner, whimpering incoherently, arms thrown over his head.

  “What’s wrong with him?” Janus demanded of Hex.

  Hex had no response that didn’t sound completely cracked, so she just shrugged.

  But Janus soon had his answer anyway, and Hex’s momentary relief crumbled. The next thunk from the other side of the burial chamber was so loud that it cut through the din of Janus’s men, and the walls shuddered in its wake. It was enough to freeze even Janus in place. For a few tense seconds, all that could be heard in the suffocating chamber were Omar’s quiet whimpers in the corner.

  Then the thunk came again. Rubble rained down on them from the ancient ceiling, and the sandstone slab scooted forward an inch with a blood-curdling screech.

  A collective gasp arose from the crew of men.

  She saw her father inch his way back toward the exit, clearly anxious to save his own worthless skin while everyone else was distracted. Typical. One of Janus’s men pushed him out of the way, however, and disappeared up the shaft himself.