Chapter 19 #2
Unease prickled across Ezra’s skin. The mummified cat still did not twitch.
A rich ray of sunlight glinted off Vincent’s hair as he sauntered around the room, leaning close to look at a tiny faience hippopotamus statue.
This stood next to what looked like a display for an ornamental dagger.
No knife sat there. No ivory wand either.
Ezra tried to remember the last time he’d seen the relic, but everything was beginning to fray, past the moment Thomas Ellington arrived to take him away.
Why hadn’t Lord Blackwood seized the rest of these artifacts?
Why hadn’t the Order looted this place?
The prickly feeling dug deeper into the back of Ezra’s neck.
“This must be what Lord Carnarvon felt like when he stepped into King Tut’s tomb for the first time,” Biz was saying.
Vincent straightened, his eyes finding Ezra’s. “How are you feeling, Bright? Is anything new coming back to you?”
It’s not a tomb.
He wanted to scream.
It was my home.
He wanted to sob. But after what had happened in the fourth pyramid, he was too afraid to let any of these feelings out—especially around Biz. The grief was too deep. And the rage… What if it hurt her again? What if Vincent’s love wasn’t enough to stop him?
Ezra shook his head. He felt slightly drunk—experiencing a strange sort of double vision.
How was it that everything from his childhood was still here?
Still perfect? Solid enough for Celia Sinclair to start sorting through?
The young woman had made herself at home, taking a seat on the floor as she started studying a pile of amulets on the tabliya.
Biz settled next to her, eyes sparkling as they studied each new relic, searching for clues.
Neither of them were wearing gloves.
This was a very Blythe thought.
Then again, this was a very Blythe scene: The other three looked as if they were attending one of the professor’s workshops.
Picking through pieces and holding them up against some oh-so-Western rubric of worth.
Did they even understand what they were doing?
Celia was searching for power. Biz was scanning for gold. And Vincent?
Vincent was still watching him.
Ezra started to pace around the place, unsure of what exactly he was looking for.
The kitchen counters had long ago been cleared of crumbs.
There was no dust on them… Was that because of the drag of the mummy cat’s wrapping?
If so, the dead creature was thorough. There was no dust in his old bedroom either.
The bed had been made and the mosquito net was tucked behind the headboard.
An old clay lamp sat on the nightstand. Beside it was the battered gray book he’d searched all of London’s bookshops for.
He understood, as soon as he opened it, why he’d been unable to find a copy in the barrows of Shoreditch High Street. The words were handwritten. And they weren’t even words. His mother had penned the tales in hieroglyphics.
How had Nour known hieroglyphs?
And how… how hadn’t Ezra known this?
Fresh grief sank beside him as he took a seat on the bed.
Loss—both old and new. Time heals all wounds, some well-meaning governess had once told him, but the longer Ezra Bright lived, the more he understood this wasn’t true.
Not for the young boy forever split in two.
Not for the man who always had to hide, even from those closest to him.
The irony that this had brought Ezra all the way back to his childhood bedroom didn’t escape him.
He split the book open down the middle, taking in the tale his mother had left.
Were this a normal papyrus scroll, it might take weeks to translate properly.
But there was nothing normal about this book.
Stories came back to Ezra one by one as he flipped the pages.
The ivory wand on the riverbank. The brother and the sister stumbling into magic beyond their wildest dreams. Growing wings and lassoing stars.
Futures seen in tears. Men turning into jackals and falcons and felines.
A vast war of shadows and light… His… uncle… dying…
He swallowed as he reached this page, trying to remember the way his mother had recited it. With a lump in her throat? What about tears? Nothing obvious enough for a six-year-old child to mark her grief. To understand that she’d been speaking of the murder of her own brother…
The lords of the dark set a trap for He Who Caught the Sun.
For though his rays were strong and banished much of the dark, their shine only made the sorcerers’ shadows stronger.
They set their shut against his own. This battle was great and vast, so vast that the earth stopped turning.
The sun was held in place. Sand burned hot, and even the river itself began to dry.
He Who Caught the Sun felt himself slipping too. Dusk had to fall. And he with it.
The lords of the dark tore him to pieces beneath the stars.
Stars had stared down on George’s body too. Faint and gasping.
Ezra tried to keep the book in his hands from shaking.
The story didn’t end here…
They claimed his powers as their own and sent the rest of his soul sailing toward the Duat.
His body they left for the jackals. But the first beast to reach his bones did not bite.
She howled. She snarled. She guarded her brother’s corpse from the rest of the scavengers, determined to find a way to save him.
For what the lords of the dark did not know was that much of the sun’s power lies in its ability to rise again. Death would not stop She Who Soars.
The next pages trembled too much for Ezra to read.
He snapped the book shut and buried his face in his hands, trying to gather himself, feeling the solid togetherness of his own skull.
He remembered the rest. His mother had put the pieces of her brother back together again—like Humpty Dumpty.
It had sounded like a nursery rhyme, until now.
All the king’s horses, all the king’s men, all the king’s medals of valor…
“Ezra?” Biz’s voice inched through the doorway. Then it came closer. “Oh, Ezra.” Hands closed around his. There was a firmness to his sister’s grip that he hadn’t expected. “I’m sorry.”
He lifted his face to meet hers and realized, with a start, that his cheeks were wet. He’d been crying. “What are you sorry for, Bitty?”
Despite all of her whirling and twirling with the parasol, his sister’s nose was a rosy pink, her childhood freckles more pronounced than ever.
“I don’t know,” she began sadly. “Everything, I suppose. All those years I thought you were being a proper arse, when really Papa was the one…” Her voice faded as she looked around his old bedroom.
“I can’t imagine someone stealing me away from Thornhill, the way he took you,” she whispered. “You must have been so scared.”
“I was. But when I got to England, I had George. And then there was you. I’m not sorry for that.”
Biz squeezed his hands tighter. “I didn’t understand.”
“I didn’t either.”
And he still didn’t, not entirely. Why had Thomas Ellington left all these treasures behind?
Why had he kept Ezra in the dark when it came to magic?
And, if he knew that the power of resurrection was possible, why hadn’t he said so at that awful breakfast after George’s death?
There were so many pieces that didn’t quite fit.
But he was determined to fix what he could.
Ezra looked back at the frayed gray book in his lap. Could he be a hero, finally? “I’m going to bring our brother back.”
All the blood drained from Biz’s face, leaving her freckles stranded. She had a damn strong grip. Almost viselike. She looked like she wanted to whisper something, but the words were stuck, stuck next to a hope so large it became a second heart.
George.
George, George, George.
They deserved this, didn’t they?
“I heard him,” Ezra went on. “The night you and Vincent got engaged.”
His sister’s fingers tightened.
He noticed that she still hadn’t conjured herself a new ring.
“I stumbled into the Seek and Find. Everett and Hugo were playing with an old Egyptian necklace that let its wearer commune with the dead. Rose ended up with it around her neck, and I heard George’s voice… He knew somehow, that I could save him.”
Biz took a deep breath, as if trying to make more room in her chest. “Did—did he say anything about me?”
“There wasn’t time. Things got ugly.”
His sister’s grip wasn’t quite as tight as Rose’s had been—those nails trying for a topcoat of blood.
But Biz was close enough. Ezra snatched his hands away before they could turn gold.
The young woman crouched by the bed didn’t argue.
She kept staring at her hands, at their bare knuckles, at the way the red lacquer on her nails was finally starting to chip.
“I expect they’ll get ugly again, before this is all through—”
Just then, someone in the parlor let out the sharpest of screams.