Chapter 26
Ezra dreamed of his brother.
It wasn’t the usual nightmare—mud and blood and eggshell skull.
No, in this version George Ellington was whole.
The young man stood by a river, and he seemed to understand perfectly when Ezra rushed up to him: Biz got lost!
We need to find her! Why was their sister lost?
He couldn’t exactly say. Dreams were like that—all hide-and-seek logic.
Finding George didn’t surprise him nearly as much as it should have.
It felt right. Right in the way that Biz’s absence felt wrong.
The two of them had climbed into a rowboat. Why? Because George said so. He said so with that earnestness he’d always used in their games of make-believe back at Thornhill. Those pinecone wars. That sleeping queen who held the earth together. They’d always seemed true when his brother played along.
This, too, felt more real than Ezra’s other dreams.
There was space to talk.
To be.
“You’ve haunted me.”
George tilted his head at this, a frown appearing where his laughter should be.
“Not a day goes by where I don’t think about your death. How I could have stopped it…”
His brother raised his eyebrows. “Stopped a bullet?”
“Yes,” Ezra told him. “I can do that now. I probably could have done it then too.”
George rubbed the back of his neck, the way he so often did when he was trying to solve a particularly difficult maths problem.
“It didn’t hurt,” he said slowly. “I was always afraid it would. But one moment I was in the trenches, and the next I was here at this river. My death was worse for you, I think.”
Ezra stared out over the waters they rowed through. It didn’t look like any dream he’d ever dreamed before—no, it looked like anima floating past the boat. Countless images wove in and out of the multihued water.
“What—what is this place?” he asked his brother.
“The beginning of what comes next.”
There was a faint throb in both of Ezra’s arms. An almost-memory. He couldn’t quite catch it, couldn’t understand why George was watching him as if he was a grenade with its pin pulled. “What’s that?”
The other young man shook his head. “I’m not entirely sure.
After France, I wasn’t ready to go on. I stayed as close to life as I could, waiting by that gate.
I was far from the only one—our war created millions of ghosts.
All of them died too young. All of them clung to the hope that life might let them back in again…
or at the very least that they might hear a loved one’s voice…
” He let out a soft chuckle. “I used to think séances were absolute bollocks.”
The memory of Rose, with the medallion around her neck and blue scarab latched to her tongue, surged forward. “You spoke to me. You… you asked me to save you…”
They drifted down the river in silence.
“There’s no sun here. No warmth. No new freckles. Remember how we used to count ours at the end of every summer?”
“Lord Blackwood didn’t like me being out in the sun,” Ezra reminded his brother. “He said it made my skin too dark.”
“Really?” George’s lips twitched into a frown as he glanced down at the river. “I don’t remember that.”
“That’s because you were the right son,” Ezra went on.
“You were the real son and I let you die and I could never go home again…” The phantom pain drilled deeper and deeper into his arms. He wanted, very badly, to wake up, but George was not disappearing the way he so often did before.
His dead brother sat in the boat across from him.
This isn’t a dream. It hurts too much. “And now… now Biz is dead too… and I…”
“You aren’t wrong, Ezra.”
“I’m dead,” he croaked.
“No. Well, yes, you are dead, but what I meant is that you aren’t the wrong son. There’s no right or wrong between us, brother. I was the one who stepped in front of that bullet.”
“I couldn’t save Biz.”
“We are saving her.” George picked up the oars and began to steer their boat to a sandy shore where a second abandoned rowboat lay. “And thanks to you, the gate is now open. All of us can find our way home together.”
How? The question scraped Ezra’s mind just like the rocks at the bottom of their boat.
It was all he’d ever wanted, but not even dream logic could make the idea make sense.
Besides, he wasn’t in a dream. He’d died.
He’d bled open the gate to the afterlife while Vincent watched, and unlike George’s death, it had hurt.
It had hurt so fucking bad. How the hell was he supposed to turn something like that around? Where would he even start?
“Ezra!”
A voice rang out across the water—clear as church bells.
Ezra recognized the sound but couldn’t quite believe it. Even as he turned and caught sight of the young woman leaning over the side of the reed boat. Reaching for him.
Celia Sinclair had come back.
Into death.
After him.
Watching her raven-black hair whip past her fierce gaze, Ezra wasn’t exactly sure why he’d expected anything less. Even though his heart had stopped beating minutes ago, he felt a flutter inside his chest.
“Celia? What are you doing here? What—” There was more. Celia wasn’t alone in the longboat. At the prow was a light even bluer than her eyes. Ezra’s heartless chest stuttered again. “Mut.”
“Hekamaat.”
That name. His name. It pierced Ezra to the core. He’d forgotten it… The gray skies of England had blotted it up like cotton balls. Thomas Ellington probably had something to do with that amnesia too. How easy had it been for the seasoned magician to make a little Egyptian boy forget himself?
Everything came rushing back as his mother ran to him.
He’d imagined this moment countless times.
Though Ezra’s many daydreams hadn’t accounted for crow’s feet, or the silver peppered through her hair.
Or the indigo and gold feathers that sprouted from Nour’s arms. She still smelled like sunlight, even under this blank sky.
Her warmth was everything George had lamented—pressing into Ezra’s empty edges, reminding him what it was like to be held.
Read to. Loved. Love even vaster than the desert that once swallowed her.
Ezra clung to his mother; she felt so solid.
Too solid to be a ghost. He was the one shrinking…
Darkness covered him. But it wasn’t like the darkness that had first harbored the boats. It was more contained, with walls on all sides. Where had his mut gone? And what about George? Celia? Biz???
Was this really a nightmare?
Or was it true death…?
Ezra still couldn’t decide which when a circle of light appeared overhead.
He was tipped, over and out of what he recognized was a canopic jar.
The bigger shock was his body splayed out on the floor below.
Limbs spread-eagled. Eyes open and empty, seeing none of the chaos that unfolded around them.
Nour held her ivory tusk wand in one hand and was beating back ghouls who streamed through the open gate.
Several other Sancts were doing the same.
When Nour called out to them, they began to draw in a defensive circle around Ezra’s body, allowing her the space to finally turn to her son.
“Hekamaat. My love.”
“You’re not dead…” he croaked, trying not to look at his body.
“No.” His mother’s head shook slowly. “But Thomas and I thought it might be easier for you to believe so. He had to hide you while I searched for a way to lift your curse. My curse. It never should have been yours to bear. I thought you would be safe with Thomas… I thought…” Her own gaze slipped to the broken corpse between them, blood still fluting out of both arms. “Forgive me, Hekamaat. I’ve kept you from yourself.
I have failed you for far too long.” She reached out and cupped Ezra’s face.
Just like her hug, he felt his soul coalesce to her touch. “No more.”
Nour knelt down then, using her wand hand to touch the center of the corpse’s unmoving chest, nudging a large golden ankh off his breastbone to the floor. Somehow, she was still cradling ghost-Ezra’s cheek. Her palm felt warm, then warmer, like a campfire at the end of a very long journey.
“You cannot die, Ezra.”
He focused on his mother’s face. The brilliant thereness of it.
Turquoise light glowed brighter and brighter around her temples, but this was nothing compared to Nour’s stare.
Love. A love so very different from what Vincent Cain professed, or even what had begun to bloom between him and Celia.
The love of a mother. A mother who’d lost her only child again and again, who would do anything in her power to bring him back.
She was bringing Ezra back. He could feel his spirit pulling closer to his body, through hers.
“Too much depends on you,” Nour went on. “Your life must hold these stones, and mine shall hold yours.”
It was the strangest thing, being poured back into oneself.
Through your mother’s body, no less. Was this what it felt like to be in a womb?
Shaped, molded, carried, then expelled, spilled into the bright, brazen world?
One blink and all was black. Another, and Ezra was seeing through his own eyes again.
Gasping through his still-cold lips. Nour’s wand pressed into his chest like the tip of some great lion’s claw.
He could see wounds opening all along her arms…
exact mirrors to the bite marks on Ezra’s skin.
Nour was healing his body with her own.
“Don’t,” he gasped, voice breaking. “Please don’t leave me again, Mut.”
She grabbed his hand and placed it over the ivory wand.
The Heka-ib. That was the name Ezra’s uncle had given the instrument—thousands of years ago.
Magic of the Heart. The relic helped channel its wielder’s deepest desires, and right now, his mother wanted nothing more than for Ezra to understand this…
“I’m not.” Her voice grew ragged as blood poured from her arms.
Her grip around the Heka-ib started to loosen, but Ezra’s fingers wove into hers.
He had enough strength to sit up now, to catch his mother as she slumped forward.
He cradled Nour just as she’d held him, twenty-five years ago, surrounded by bloody birth-sheets and pain, so much pain, but it was all worth it, just to have this tiny human in the world.
The power of this memory left Ezra gasping.
There were so many more…
He saw Egypt as it once was. Her temples adorned with living statues, her magic woven through the river, her gods and goddesses moving about in plain sight—sometimes as jackals or falcons, other times on more glorious wings.
He remembered how prayers could be plucked out of the sky, turned into magic that then planted even more prayers.
How the crops grew strong. How his mother and uncle had made it so.
How they’d used their powers to drive back those who would destroy such things…
Even death had bowed to Nour. And it was bowing again, bending backward on itself, into the woman who’d hammered a door into the afterlife.
“Mut,” he managed, pressing her even harder to his chest.
Both hearts were beating faintly.
“I am not leaving you, sah-ee,” she said again, pressing a blood-drenched hand to his chest. “I will be here.”
And yet, her pulse kept slowing.
Ezra’s own was growing stronger. Racing, even.
He squeezed his mother’s body closer, as if he could finally keep her.
All of those brilliant gold and indigo feathers were now sodden with the same blood that stained his shirt.
There was blood, too, on the floor beneath them, only it was flowing backward, returning to Ezra’s mending wounds.
He lifted his eyes toward the gate.
A cloud hovered around it, made up of ghouls being beaten back by the Ageless Ones’ spells.
Even so, Ezra could see that the portal was closing.
He scanned the rest of the chamber frantically, trying to find George and Biz.
Had they been resurrected too? But then he caught sight of his little sister’s body.
A bright blue ankh had been laid across her chest; the relic was not moving. No breathy up or down.
Biz was still dead.
Still, Ezra realized with a growing horror, lost in the afterlife.
“Mut,” he gasped at his mother, her flickering masque. “We can’t shut the gate. Not yet. Biz is—”
But it was too late.
Nour’s eyes emptied.
The rest of her body began to wither, the turquoise light around her temple going dark. The glowing red that formed the gate did the same, leaving solid black stone in its place.