Chapter 1
No Thank You
“Merry Christmas.”
I startled as a bulky parcel thudded onto my desk, inches from my eyes, and on top of the paper I’d been grading.
“I don’t celebrate Christmas,” I said, frowning up at Doctor Blake Bryant, who had finished his PhD before me, damn him, and spent the past several months excavating in Saqqara, the bastard, and furthermore had never given me a gift in all the years we’d been in grad school together.
We weren’t quite enemies, but we certainly were not friends. “I didn’t get you anything.”
“Well, you haven’t been anywhere,” he reminded me with a smirk. “It’s a souvenir.”
All right, now this made more sense. Blake was rubbing it in that he’d gotten to conduct an excavation and I hadn’t. The gift was probably something stupid and annoying, like one of those fake artifacts that were palmed off on ignorant tourists.
I didn’t move to open the package; I didn’t want to see his mocking expression.
“Thank you,” I said primly. “If you’ll excuse me, I need to finish my grading now.”
“Of course, grading. Once you defend your dissertation, they give you a TA, you know. Assuming you pass, that is.”
I gritted my teeth. I hadn’t gotten a research grant, which meant I’d been stuck here, teaching, instead of doing fieldwork. Which meant my dissertation was based on other scholars’ texts instead of firsthand experience, which meant that as an archaeologist, I was deeply uncool.
“If only you’d written a stronger grant proposal, eh?” Blake was a master of false sympathy. “But no point in worrying about that post facto. Don’t overdo it. You look like you haven’t left the library all semester.”
I hadn’t left the library all semester, he was right, but I was about to say something rude when I took a closer look at him. Under his tan, he seemed… gray. And there was something off about his eyes.
“Have you been sick?” I asked.
“Me? I’m fine. Fantastic.” His smile went a little strange, crooked as if one side of his face had forgotten he was smiling. “You take care of yourself, Reason. Go home, get some rest. Have a nice Christmas vacation.”
He left before I could remind him, again, that I didn’t celebrate Christmas, or any other holidays. My family believed in strict rationalism.
Maybe that was why ancient religions were so fascinating to me. Their varieties, their similarities, their strange and shadowy landscapes. Worlds made of stories instead of atoms.
My parents didn’t approve of fiction. It was, in their view, a waste of time that could be spent learning facts and useful, practical information.
Which is why I had an undergraduate degree in data science and a minor in anthropology.
They hadn’t forgiven me for becoming an archaeologist instead of choosing a career in applied science.
My only consolation at the moment was that they didn’t expect me to visit for the holidays, since they observed no holy days and spent their limited vacation time at educational seminars, leaving me three weeks free to spend on research, with luck, entirely alone.
Hopefully, Blake wasn’t going to be hanging around the department or, worse, wanting to use the spare desk in my office. He hadn’t been expected back for another month. Why was he here?
It was growing dark outside, and I decided to take my grading home with me.
Most of the students had already left, and the campus was practically deserted.
I told myself I was being sensible about possible muggers in the parking lot—something that did happen from time to time—and not irrationally nervous about being alone in the empty building.
I stacked my files, put Blake’s package on top of them, slung my bookbag over my shoulder, and left.
Back in my dreary but snug apartment, I changed into sweats and made tea. Tea and a sleeve of saltines was an adequate dinner. I promised myself a piece of chocolate when I finished grading, which I was doing while consuming the tea and crackers.
I really was dull.
I finished one class’s grading and uploaded the scores to the university’s database, to be added to my students’ final marks.
Should I do the second set of exams now?
If I didn’t, I’d have to get up early to finish on time, but I was bored, and my eyes were gritty.
I considered the chocolate but decided to save it for tomorrow. I brushed my teeth.
Then I couldn’t ignore Blake’s stupid gag gift any longer. If I went to bed, I would just think about it, and him, with annoyance.
I picked irritably at the tape securing the paper, then flounced to the kitchen to find a pair of scissors, glad no one was here to see me sulking like a teenager.
Inside the box was a spherical pottery vessel with a stone lid held in place by a band of wax. Pressed into the wax was a rectangular stone seal with cuneiform markings. The body of the jar was decorated with squares made of wavy lines inside circles—a common Ubaid-period motif.
It wasn’t fake.
Or rather, it was a replica, but not the recent, artificially aged tourist-bait I had expected.
The clay container in my hands was over two thousand years old but made in the style of a vessel twice as ancient and not originating in Egypt but in Persia.
Which sort of made sense, because Persian-period Egypt, a few centuries before Christ, was Blake’s area of specialization.
Had the Egyptian artisans of 500 BC been producing fake antiquities of the ancient Middle East to scam collectors?
Had there been collectors then? This wasn’t my field; that I knew something about it was due to Blake’s lectures.
But if it was a genuine antiquity, why would he give it to me?
It was in excellent condition, and I had no need for it.
And Blake didn’t like me. I had thought, when we first met, that he did, but even my socially inept self soon enough caught on to the mockery underlying his flirty-friendliness.
I thought it was his way of harassing those he considered beneath him—or in competition with him—without providing solid material for complaints.
Nothing in our history explained him giving me this artifact.
I traced the Akkadian inscription on the seal. Lagamal. An underworld deity, I thought, something to do with judging the dead. An odd choice for a forgery, as he (or she, depending on the text) was not mentioned in many sources.
I was reaching for a reference book when a loud bang made me jump to my feet.
It was the sound of the apartment door slamming open. I realized, belatedly, that someone had been knocking. I’d been so focused on the object that I hadn’t registered the noise.
My heart hammered. Someone was breaking in—had broken in! What should I do?
For some reason, I looked at the container.
The lid moved.
I felt a cold stab of pure terror. Not the panicked alarm of home invasion but some visceral horror that froze me in place and stopped my breath.
Then a dark-haired man in black leapt between me and the table, shouting something I didn’t understand, grabbed my arm, and dragged me out of the room, out of my apartment into the hallway, and slammed the door shut behind us.
He shoved me against the wall, pinning me with his body and holding my wrists. I was too stunned to resist.
“Look at me,” he ordered.
My eyes went to his without conscious thought. His eyes were a very dark brown, long and slightly narrow—no, the narrowing was his glare—and surrounded by thick black lashes. His gaze was intent and strangely bright, as if a spotlight were focused on his pupils.
We were staring into each other’s eyes from only inches apart, and the way his body pressed against mine was shocking after years without any touch more intimate than a handshake. Yes, shocking was the word; I felt like my body had been shocked awake, vibrating with surprise and fear and desire.
I whimpered.
His grip loosened, although he didn’t move away.
“You’re all right, Dr. Denby,” he said.
“I’m not a doctor. Yet. I haven’t defended my—Wait, how do you know my name? Who are you?”
“I went by your office first, but I was too late.”
“Too late for what?” I asked, alarmed. What if something had happened to my office? All my research was there! My dissertation materials!
He gave me a confused look. “Too late to find you there and prevent you from investigating the container.” He had a slight accent, I noticed now. It reminded me of my month on a dig in Damascus, but it wasn’t Syriac.
“Oh. Yes. My books are fine, right?”
“I didn’t touch anything except your mail, which is how I got your address. You shouldn’t leave that lying around.” He frowned at me, and I felt chastised. “I have a box in my car. Come with me.”
He kept his hand on my arm as he stepped back, but this time I resisted. “Um, no thanks?”
He gave me a small smile. It made his eyes narrow, but differently from before. He had a long, bony face that I wouldn’t have called handsome exactly but… interesting. Attractive.
“I’m just going to fetch something from my car,” he enunciated carefully. “I want you to come because there is danger in your apartment, and I don’t want you to go in without me.”
I realized: “I don’t have the key!”
His smile widened. “I’ll break in again for you. Just two minutes. Come.”
Lacking a clear option, I trailed him down the stairs to the ground floor and out to the street.
I didn’t scream for help, although I suppose I should have.
It probably wouldn’t have accomplished anything other than making him angry.
I wasn’t so sheltered as to expect Good Samaritans to come running.
His car was an innocuous dark gray sedan, a few years old. The box he had mentioned was about two feet square.
He handed it to me once we were again outside my door. It was heavy.
“Lead,” he explained. “It resists contamination.”
“Is that artifact radioactive?” I asked skeptically.
“Not as you mean, but that is a useful way to think of it.”