Forty-One
S hock blanked Adam’s mind as explosions lit up the ridge like a volley of artillery, the stone heights blazing with fire.
It was impossible, but that hardly mattered. It was happening—which meant that Ellie was in danger.
“Get down!” Adam shouted, tackling her to the stone.
They weren’t the only ones diving for cover. Half the Al-Saboors had hit the ground as well—except for Hobbles and Scarface, the two cousins assigned to guard the prisoners, who had been watching Ellie’s tête-à-tête with Jacobs like a music hall show. They gaped at the fireworks with their cigarettes hanging from their lips, guns limp in their hands.
Jacobs skidded into the lee of a boulder.
“Take cover, you idiots!” he screamed out at the other men. “ Inzil! ”
Hobbles and Scarface finally hit the dirt. A cluster of men from the boat, gathered near the edge of the drop to the canyon, flinched down, and bolted for the path off the ridge.
Jacobs sprinted from his hiding place, darting through the shadows toward the heights where pale streams of smoke now ghosted up into the sky.
Adam wrenched at his hands, trying to break the ropes that bound his wrists by sheer force of desperation. “Get me out of these!”
Zeinab skidded into place behind him, her scalpel glittering in her hand. She sliced through his bindings and Adam threw them aside.
“Yalla,” a rough voice grumbled from behind him.
He whirled, fists ready, and barely held back from throwing a punch at the stout, sun-wrinkled figure who stepped from the shadows.
Adam recognized the smuggler, Umm Waseem. Her clever eyes glittered above the black fall of her niqab.
Zeinab had moved to Ellie, who yanked her hands free of her own ropes with a groan—and a spark of delighted interest.
“You were carrying explosives in your bag!” she declared triumphantly. “I knew it! But what was it? Dynamite? Black powder? TNT, perhaps? You made it look exactly as though someone had put a half-dozen Howitzers on the ridge!”
“I’m sure she’ll tell you all about it later.” Adam hauled Ellie to her feet. “After we get the hell out of here.”
Umm Waseem and Zeinab held a quick exchange before the midwife turned back to the rest of them, her green eyes sharp with urgency.
“She has set more charges on the cliffs,” Zeinab reported. “Enough to bring them down and bury this place.”
Adam’s gaze shot to the forty-foot high crown of stone that framed the depression where they sheltered.
“Definitely TNT,” Ellie concluded in an awed voice.
“That’d bury us,” Adam pointed out flatly.
“Why do you think she hasn’t blown it yet?” Zeinab snapped.
Adam’s ears were still ringing from Umm Waseem’s first round of explosions as he turned to take in their situation.
Julian and Dawson cowered behind a boulder not far from the entrance to the tomb. The Al-Saboors, on the other hand, seemed to have realized they weren’t actually being shot at. Hobbles and Scarface had staggered back to their feet—and were now looking over at their clearly unbound and conspiring prisoners with alarm.
George Bates had berated Adam for his failure to make plans or think through the consequences of his actions. He had done everything he could to burn those words— reckless and ill-considered —into Adam’s heart.
But if there was one bright side to being reckless, it was that it never took Adam long to make a decision when it mattered.
“Go,” he ordered. “All of you—get the hell out of here.”
“All of us? ” Ellie pushed back sharply. “What about you?”
Adam met her gaze. “I’m going to buy you some time.”
Her eyes widened with horrified understanding—and then narrowed with angry determination.
Adam knew what that look meant.
He took hold of her, one hand grabbing her back while the other slid into her hair, forcing her to face him. “No, Ellie,” he said firmly. “Not this time. This time, you let me be the hero.”
There was too much more he wanted to say— needed to say. He didn’t have time for any of it.
All he could do was show her.
Knowing the consequences—and not giving a damn about them—Adam kissed her. He did it hard and fast, catching her to him and aching with how much she meant… how much he needed her.
Then he pushed her back into Constance, who caught her instinctively.
“Take her and get clear of the ridge,” Adam barked.
Ellie opened her mouth to protest, even as Constance stared at him with wide-eyed understanding.
Adam didn’t wait for her to speak. He wasn’t going to listen anyway. Instead, he launched himself at the Al-Saboors.
Scarface hesitated, still thrown by the shock of the explosion and clearly unsure how to react to Adam’s drive at them in the absence of any clear orders from the men supposed to be in charge. Hobbles took an instinctive—and pained—step back, still flinching from his last encounter with Adam at Deir al-Bahari.
That was all the opportunity Adam needed.
Hobbles went down like a cut tree, dropping his rifle to grab the leg Adam had already injured as he howled. Adam whirled to Scarface, driving a fist into his gut. The mercenary fumbled his rifle as the wind came out of him, falling to his knees.
Adam made a grab for the gun, then toppled as someone barreled into him from the side. He rolled to find a thick black beard tickling his nose.
Adam sneezed, and Beardy whipped a dagger from his sleeve. Adam caught his arm as he drove the knife down, grunting with the effort of holding it at bay.
He snapped his head forward, driving it into Beardy’s face.
The Al-Saboor lurched back, clutching his bleeding nose. Adam took the opportunity to shove him off.
Beardy landed on Scarface, who was just staggering to his feet.
Adam scrambled upright. Out of the corner of his eye, he glimpsed Umm Waseem’s stout black-cloaked figure dashing across the ridge with the speed of a house cat. She blew past Ears and Lefty, who both ignored her, busy gaping at Adam instead.
Not that those two bruised Al-Saboors showed any sign of jumping in to help the cousins that he was currently pummeling. They were obviously feeling a little hesitant to join the fray while still nursing the damage from the last couple rounds.
A battle cry sounded from across the ledge. Ralph raced toward Adam, holding a familiar blade up over his head.
That’s my damned machete , Adam thought with a burst of indignation.
Zeinab was halfway across the ridge with Jemmahor in tow. The apprentice skidded to halt, then snatched a rock from the ground and whipped it at the charging Al-Saboor.
Ralph ducked with a yelp, fumbling his knife.
Zeinab grabbed Jemmahor’s arm and hauled her back into a sprint.
Adam lashed out at Scarface with a kick, and he went back down. Then Ralph was on him.
Adam dove under a blow from his own damned blade, taking Ralph in the ribs with his shoulder instead. He swung an arm around the man’s legs, catching them and flipping the skinny thug over his back.
Ralph landed with a stream of curses, and Adam skidded against the ground. Spinning around, he clutched at a handful of sand and whipped it back at Scarface. The mercenary had reclaimed his rifle, but dropped it again to cover his eyes with a scream.
Adam used the breath of time that bought him to look for Ellie—only to find her still lingering by the remnants of their cut ropes as Constance tugged at her arm.
“Come on, Ellie!” she urged.
“Get out of here!” Adam roared.
“I will not leave you!” Ellie shouted back, her voice raw.
Adam wrenched the rifle from Scarface’s hands—and looked up to see that Gaps, stationed by the tomb, had finally noticed the melee. He was darting toward them, his own gun raised.
There was no time for Adam to swing the rifle around and aim.
He threw the gun itself at Gaps instead.
The rifle hit him in the face, and Gaps went down.
Beyond him, Adam picked out Jacobs’ lean figure at the base of the ledge, where he had run to investigate the explosion. He was no longer looking at the crown of rocks above them. His eyes were on Adam. He took in the groaning pile of Al-Saboors at Adam’s feet with a cold glance… before his gaze snapped to Adam’s left.
Adam followed it—and saw a pair of dusty figures stagger out from under the boulder hiding the entrance to the tomb.
Neil’s glasses were skewed, his face smudged with dirt. His waistcoat had lost its buttons. He was holding an actual goddamned sword in his hand—though not in a way that indicated he had any idea what to do with it.
But he was alive.
Beside him stood a bareheaded, battered Sayyid, his beard pale with dust. As he straightened after crawling out from under the boulder, Adam realized he was also carrying something with him.
Wooden stick. Long-eared head. Forked tail.
For a moment, the night seemed to hold its breath. The desert breeze whispered and the stars sprawled overhead… as Sayyid held a legend in his hands.
“Well, hell,” Adam breathed with quiet wonder. “They actually found it.”
“Neil!” Ellie shouted, her voice tight with relief and fear.
Her cry echoed across the ridge, bouncing off the high walls of the cliffs that surrounded them.
Julian lurched from behind the shelter of one of the boulders scattered around the tomb entrance, his blond hair in disarray and the sleeve of his khaki jacket torn.
Dawson peered over the top behind him, took in the scene, and promptly dropped from view again.
“Forget the rest of them!” Julian jabbed a finger toward Sayyid as his voice rang out across the ledge. “That Egyptian has my staff!”
Grasping the aged bone hilt at his side, Julian whipped out a sword. The blade caught the moonlight for the space of a breath—and then burst into cold blue flames.
Julian charged at Neil, who flinched back, bringing up the ancient scimitar in his hand more on instinct than out of any real technique.
The blades clashed in a burst of sparks.
Hobbles scrabbled free of the pile of his cousins at Adam’s feet and bolted across the ridge—or hurriedly staggered, rather. Scarface rolled over with a groan, and Ralph lurched to his feet.
Adam yanked his attention from the glowing sword fight to give Ralph another kick, wrenching the machete from his hand.
The hilt fell into his grip in a way that felt beautifully right. Adam smiled—and looked up to see Jacobs running toward him.
“Parry him!” Constance screamed at Neil as Julian made another swipe. “With the sword! You have to—oh bugger it, anyway.”
Constance let go of Ellie and ran toward them.
Julian swung again. The swords locked, and with an expert turn of his wrist, Julian ripped the scimitar from Neil’s grip. The ancient blade clattered to the ground.
Julian raised his flaming sword, his eyes flaring with anger and disdain. “You’re far more trouble than you’re worth, for a bloody scholar!”
He readied himself for a killing blow—and Constance hit him.
She twisted her hands in the back of his coat, shoving a boot between his legs. With a neat and practiced pivot, she swiveled her torso—and flipped Julian over her back.
Jacobs reached Gaps, who stood in the middle of the chaos looking utterly bewildered as he juggled a pair of rifles—his own and the one Adam had recently thrown into his face. Jacobs snatched one of the guns from his grip without so much as a hitch in his pace.
Time slowed. The rifle rose in Jacobs’ hands, moving with expert grace as he pivoted—turning to bring it to bear on Neil.
Adam felt the familiar slick grip of the machete in his hand and made a rapid calculation.
“Hell,” he bit out, and let the knife fly.
Jacobs caught the flashing movement of it out of the corner of his eye. He twisted with the reflexes of a cat, dodging the blade—and losing his shot. Before he could line it up again, Adam hit him like a train.
They both went down as Ellie shouted his name. Adam grabbed the rifle, his hand closing on the barrel where it lay pinned between them as they rolled across the ground. Jacobs wrenched at it, but Adam gritted his teeth and kept his hold—then slammed the heel of his other hand into Jacobs’ chin.
Jacobs’ head snapped back in what Adam knew from personal experience was a dizzying and damned painful blow, but his hold on the gun stayed firm. He shook off the hit, his eyes blazing with fury mere inches from Adam’s face.
Adam saw a cold calculation flicker through them, and Jacobs pulled the trigger.
The crack of the shot roared in Adam’s ear, deafening it. The barrel of the gun flared with heat, burning through the skin of his palm.
Adam roared with pain, forced to snatch his hand away.
Jacobs kicked loose. Adam went sprawling, and Jacobs swung the rifle around to point at Adam, where he lay on the ground.
Adam went still.
So did Jacobs.
By the entrance to the tomb, Julian staggered to his feet. Constance stood between him and Neil in a posture of martial readiness.
Julian’s eyes narrowed at her with furious outrage. “That’s it! This engagement is over!”
“We have never been engaged!” Constance shouted back, exasperated. “What will it take for you to get that through your thick head?”
Julian’s expression chilled, his mouth twisting with obvious viciousness. “This is far less civilized than the sword—but needs must.”
He whipped a pistol from his coat.
Behind Constance, Neil lunged across the ground. His hand closed around the hilt of Julian’s discarded sword.
He swung it up as he scrambled to his feet, pointing it at Julian by Constance’s side.
The sword ignited. Blue flames illuminated the look of utter shock on Neil’s face.
Julian’s jaw dropped. “But you’re nobody!” he exclaimed with wild disbelief. “How can you possibly make it burn!”
“Because he’s worthy, you twit!” Constance shot back.
Closer by, Jacobs’ expression twisted with frustration and rage as he loomed over Adam. “You and your woman have been making my life exceedingly difficult,” he bit out dangerously.
Ellie had reached them. She skidded to a stop a step away, her eyes moving from Jacobs’ rifle to Adam’s face. He could read the naked, desperate fear in her expression.
“Then why didn’t you shoot the pair of us in Luxor when you had the chance?” Adam pushed back.
Jacobs’ jaw was tense. His eyes flashed with a dark, tight fury. “I am starting to wonder about that myself,” he replied in a hiss. “Killing the pair of you might just be worth the consequences.”
The uncharacteristically bald words gave Adam a spark of hope. Something was holding Jacobs back from murdering them. If that was the case, then there might just be a way for Adam to get him and Ellie out of this without any bullet holes… if he could guess just how far Jacobs’ hesitation would extend.
Which was, quite frankly, a complete and terrifying shot in the dark.
“The consequences from your employers, you mean,” Ellie retorted.
Adam suspected Ellie’s taunt was aimed at reminding Jacobs of any orders he might have received to refrain from leaving a trail of bodies behind him… considering that it was most likely Adam’s body that would be at the top of that list.
Jacobs moved his acid glare to her. “You think those soft, entitled dogs have any power over me? ”
“Julian Forster-Mowbray has been reining you in all week,” Ellie shot back deliberately.
The rifle barrel was a tidy black zero hovering less than a foot from Adam’s head. Thirty degrees to the right, and it’d be pointing at Ellie’s head. Which was an increasingly likely outcome if she kept on baiting the man.
“You have no idea what you’re talking about,” Jacobs seethed.
“Then why don’t you enlighten us?” Adam cut in, hoping to recapture his attention. “If it’s not your bosses stopping you, then what is it? Because we know it’s sure as hell not your conscience.”
“Not your employers. Not your conscience.” Ellie murmured the words automatically.
Adam could practically see her mind whirring like a well-tuned clock—and then her eyes went wide with a clear, perfect surprise.
“The Smoking Mirror,” she blurted, the words falling like stones into the night air—and the chaos of the ridge went utterly, perfectly still.
Jacobs looked as though he had been carved from ice. His gaze shifted from Adam to Ellie, pinning her with that same twisted mix of frustration and fury—only now the look was utterly unveiled, exposed against his pale features.
“Your desire—your justice ,” Ellie went on, the words spilling out of her in a torrent of horrified inspiration. “We’re part of it somehow. That’s why you haven’t been able to kill us even though we keep getting in your way.”
Jacobs didn’t answer. He didn’t speak. He was as still and rigid as a statue—and yet Adam could read the truth of Ellie’s words in every tormented line of his body.
“Holy hell,” he breathed out as shock washed over him like a wave.
On the other side of the ridge, Muscles snatched Zeinab up by the waist, forcing the scalpel from her hand with a twist of her arm.
Jemmahor ran at them, throwing rocks and screaming in Coptic, but Ears mustered a burst of courage and tackled the girl, pinning her to the ground.
Gaps fumblingly pointed his remaining rifle at Neil, shouting for him to drop the sword. Constance glared up at Julian from the ground as the pistol shook in his hand.
None of it looked good.
A deeper, wilder rage blackened Jacobs’ eyes. His look hardened—as did his grip on the rifle.
“Maybe I can’t kill you,” he agreed in a tone that snapped with electric tension. “But I think I might like to see just how much I can make you hurt. ”
The gun shifted to Ellie.
Adam’s world narrowed to a black length of iron—and the face of the woman he loved.
Thoughts cascaded through his mind in the space of a breath. Lazy evening sunsets. Stumbling across a waterfall no one had known was there. Stripping off his shirt to fall into the sea after a long, hard day. The simple, unprepossessing scope of his ambitions—to feel life with every sense, every bone. Let it wash over him like a sudden summer rain, exactly as he found it, without pushing constantly for more, more, more. He wasn’t ready to let that go. He liked life.
But something else mattered more. It was all tangled up with the woman two steps away from him—the one who hadn’t even started to show the world everything she was capable of.
Adam wanted to watch those lazy sunsets with her —smoking his cigar while she rattled on about the Khmer empire. Spend afternoons watching the rain fall while he just held her and nobody talked about anything at all.
She needed to see those waterfalls. Learn poker—Adam bet she could bluff like an adorably freckled terror. Feel what it was like to throw yourself into the waves and let them wash over you like a benediction.
Pain could change a person. It could break them. Adam wouldn’t let Ellie get broken.
Even if that meant she’d have to do all of those things without him.
Jacobs dropped the barrel to aim at Ellie’s hip… and Adam got ready to throw his stubborn, reckless body directly in the way.
Then the glass-tight stillness of the night shattered as Sayyid Al-Ahmed’s voice rang out over the stones in the syllables of a tongue that had been lost for a thousand years.
“Nen ankh rek ty’fy wi. Kheper ir’ek her tah,” Sayyid sang as he lifted the Staff of Moses in his hand. “In kheper wanam’ek san. Tem’tjen!”
Jacobs went still, his finger perfectly balanced on the trigger. Beside Julian, the Al-Saboors cast each other uncertain looks.
Dawson poked his head back out from behind the boulder he’d been cowering under, his jaw dropping.
For a breath after the echo of Sayyid’s words drifted into silence, the ridge froze, an involuntary reverence keeping each of them captive under the sprawling fabric of the night.
Then the shadows began to move.
Scarabs shivered from between the narrow crevices of the rocks. Others poured over the moon-silvered line of the ridge. They came in trickles and clusters, black bodies shining in the far threads of the lamplight.
Two of them flew at Gaps. He dropped his hold on the rifle to smack at them.
Another landed on Julian. He stiffened and swatted at it, dancing back a step.
Dawson flapped his hands furiously as a trio of fat beetles whizzed at his face.
Adam drew in another breath—and the air around him came alive.
The darkness itself rose in a thousand buzzing forms. They filled the air in clouds, swooping over the lamplit ledge.
Sayyid stumbled back as the beetles flashed through the air around him. Julian waved his pistol wildly as he tried to swat at the swarming insects, which only closed in more thickly.
Ears and Scarface shouted, then burst into a sprint—or as much of one as they could manage when they were both limping. They hauled across the ledge toward their former dig site and the path down to the valley.
With a yelp, Beardy followed them, two more of his cousins close on his heels.
The rifle twitched in Jacobs’ grip as he flinched at a pair of scarabs diving toward his face.
Neil still held the flaming sword, raising it over his head like a shield. The insects danced around him, whipping past the place where he and Constance crouched. They clung to Julian instead, peppering his pale suit like dark jewels as he shrieked and danced back.
He dropped the pistol and ran.
Dawson bolted after him, wailing about being left behind.
Jacobs flinched as another scarab landed on the side of his face. Three more clung to his hair. He kept his hands on the rifle—and his eyes on Adam.
But as the last of the Al-Saboors bolted past them, screaming and slapping at the horde of shining black insects that swarmed around their heads, Adam watched a familiar calculation shift through Jacobs’ dark gaze.
Julian’s sword still flamed in Neil’s hand, for all that Neil was staring at it with an expression of mingled awe and terror. Jemmahor had snatched up one of the discarded rifles with an expression of delight.
Zeinab grasped Julian’s pistol, her gaze shifting to the place where Jacobs still stood.
Behind all of them cowered Sayyid—ducking down and cursing from the whirling black storm of insects, even though the bugs refrained from coming too close.
But he did not lose his grip on the staff in his hand.
Jacobs gave a dark chuckle. It grew, collapsing into a harsh laugh twisted through with both frustration and an odd, unhappy relief.
His suit crawled with beetles. Black insects clung to his hair.
He tossed the rifle down at Adam’s feet.
“Till next time,” he rasped, and then walked away.
Ellie scrambled up. Adam gripped her, hauling her to his side, and watched with a wary, ready tension as Jacobs crossed to the path off the ridge… only occasionally swatting at the insects that hissed around him as he went.