Chapter 2
Jessica
The tour of the pyramid had been scheduled for late afternoon, a “premium experience” that the hotel concierge recommended with enthusiasm.
Looking back, it should have signaled a part in my brain that he would get a healthy commission.
Our guide, a thin man named Hassan with kind eyes and infinite patience, had been explaining the significance of the Pyramid Texts, the oldest religious writings in the world, he’d said, carved right into these walls.
I’d been listening with my full attention, genuinely interested, when I’d noticed the passage.
It was barely visible, more of a shadow in the stone than an actual opening, tucked behind a group of French tourists taking photos.
Something about the passage pulled at me, the same way the pyramid itself had earlier in the day with an inexplicable magnetism.
The rational part of my brain, the part that had spent twenty years in corporate marketing, and never missed a deadline, had whispered that heading toward it was a bad idea.
But that part of my brain had also stayed married to a man who’d stopped loving me somewhere around year twelve.
I had worked sixty-hour weeks for a company that replaced me with someone cheaper within six months of my “voluntary resignation,” had lived a safe, careful life that had somehow still ended in ruins.
So I ignored it.
The passage had been narrow, the walls pressing in from both sides, covered in hieroglyphs that seemed to writhe in the beam of my phone’s flashlight.
I had to turn sideways to squeeze through, my heart hammering with a mixture of anxiety and excitement.
The air had grown colder as I’d descended, thick with the weight of millennia.
Then I found the chamber.
It was small, barely larger than my walk-in closet back home had been, before it became Vinny’s closet, before the divorce lawyer and the settlement and the division of everything I thought was permanent.
The walls were covered in hieroglyphic carvings more intricate than anything I’d seen so far, lit by some ambient light I couldn’t identify.
I couldn’t see any windows or any visible source for it.
It was a faint, greenish glow that seemed to emanate from the stone itself.
A pedestal rested in the center of the chamber, and a black stone rested on top like a crown jewel.
The stone was black, not gray or dark brown posing as black, but pure black, like a piece of night carved into solid form.
It appeared to be about the size of a softball, covered in hieroglyphs that seemed to shift when I looked directly at them.
And it was humming, not audibly, but I could feel it as a low vibration in my bones, and then in my teeth, before the sensation lodged in the hollow space behind my sternum where something had been missing for longer than I wanted to admit.
My first mistake was leaving the group. Now that I was here, I should have left. Should have backed out of that chamber, found Hassan and the tour, apologized for wandering off. Should have done a lot of things.
Instead, I made mistake number 2. I reached out and touched the stone.
The stone’s cold defied the Egyptian heat. It burned into my hand like frostbite and a jolt of electricity raced up my arm and into my chest. The air had crackled like static before a lightning strike, and the hieroglyphs on the walls had blazed with that eerie green light.
And then he was there.
One moment the chamber had been empty except for me and my spectacularly poor decision-making skills. The next, a man stood before me, having materialized out of thin air, like some sort of special effect in a movie I definitely didn’t buy a ticket for.
He was tall, maybe six-two or six-three, with dark skin that seemed to simultaneously absorb and reflect the green light.
He wore a white linen kilt, golden bands around his biceps and wrists and a broad collar of cold and carnelian spread across his chest. His hair was black, short and a bit shaggy. And his eyes…
His eyes had been what finally broke my brain. They flashed gold, like light reflecting off a cat’s eyes in the dark, but their shape was wrong. The pupils were wrong. They were elongated, vertical, like a jackal’s or a…
He’d started shouting at me in a torrent of words in a language that sounded like nothing I’d ever heard, the tones harsh and fluid at the same time.
His face twisted with rage, one hand raised like he was about to strike me or cast a spell or whatever the hell you did when you appeared out of nowhere in an ancient Egyptian tomb.
I stumbled backward, my shoulder hit the wall, and my phone clattered to the floor. The light from its screen flickered and died.
“I didn’t… I’m sorry… I don’t…” the words tangled in my throat, useless and stupid.
He advanced on me, still shouting, and I pressed myself against the wall hoping I could somehow melt into it. His presence filled the small chamber, overwhelming me. His scent, incense, sand and something metallic, like old copper, made my head swim.
His strange pupils dilated, taking in my quivering form and his head tilted. Then, he switched to English.
“You dare?” His deep, resonant voice carried through the chamber. He spoke with an accent I couldn’t place, almost, but not quite British, like someone who’d learned the language from a textbook a thousand years old. “You dare to disturb this seal? To steal from the tomb of -”
“I’m not stealing anything!” I interrupted. My words burst out, high-pitched from my panic. “I’m a tourist! I got lost! I touched a rock. I don’t even know what -”
“A rock?” His eyes flashed again, and I’d seen then that they were golden, not just reflecting light, but made of gold, like molten metal poured into human features.
“You touched my stone! The Binding Stone of Anubis and claim ignorance? What manner of thief sends a woman to do such work? A woman thief to defy Anubis!”
“I’m not a thief! I’m a… I’m a…” What was I? Divorced marketing executive? Empty nester? Woman having a spectacular breakdown on foreign soil? “I’m just a person! A regular person who made a very bad decision about thirty seconds ago!”
“Hmm.” He studied me then, head tilted, those impossible eyes narrowing. Up close, I could see that his features were too perfect, too symmetrical, like someone had carved them rather than grown them with sharp cheekbones, full mouth, and a nose that would have made a classical sculptor weep.
Not human. Definitely not human.
“You are not with the Order,” he said, but it had sounded like a question.
“I don’t know what that is.”
“You are not a priestess of Set.”
“I’m not a priestess of anything. I’m Jessica Thomas from New Jersey. I sell, well, sold… I used to work in marketing. Laundry detergent. I marketed laundry detergent.” Why was I telling him this? Why was I talking at all?
His expression shifted from rage to something more complicated. Confusion, maybe, or concern. “You truly do not know what you have done.”
“No,” I agreed, my voice shaking. “I really, really don’t.”
“You have broken a seal that has held for three thousand years. You have released…” He stopped, his head turning sharply toward the passage I’d come through. “They come. The guardians. They will not be as... measured as I.”
“The guardians?” A noise like stone grinding against stone, came from somewhere deeper in the pyramid. “What guardians? What did I release? What?”
“There is no time.” He grabbed my wrist, his hand solid and warm despite the impossible fact of his existence, and pulled me toward him. “Hold your breath.”
“What? Why?”
The grinding sound grew louder. Closer. And beneath it, something else. Voices, maybe, or howls; it was hard to tell.
“Hold. Your. Breath.”
That was when I’d fainted. It wasn’t like in the movies.
I didn’t fall into a graceful swoon, or have a gentle descent into darkness.
One moment I was staring at a man who absolutely should not exist, and the next I was waking up on cold stone with a splitting headache and the taste of dust in my mouth.
Now I was awake, lying on the stone, staring up at the ceiling of the chamber. The green light had faded to a low glow. The stone pedestal was empty. The man - if he’d been a man, if he’d been real at all - was gone.
I sat up slowly, my head pounding, my mouth dry as the desert outside. My phone was still on the floor, dead. My watch said twenty minutes had passed, which seemed both too long and not long enough for whatever had just happened.
Dehydration. It had to be dehydration or heat exhaustion.
Maybe everything was in my mind like some kind of hallucination brought on by jet lag and stress and the cumulative weight of my forty-five years of poor life choices.
I’d read about people experiencing religious visions in places like this, the power of suggestion combined with environmental factors. That made sense. That was rational.
The grinding sound had stopped. The chamber was silent except for my own ragged breathing.
I managed to get to my feet, using the wall for support. My legs felt like jelly. I needed to find Hassan, find the group, get out of this pyramid and possibly straight to a hospital. Maybe call Megan, tell her the trip was over, and I was coming home.
I’d made it two steps toward the passage when I saw it.
On the floor, right where the man had been standing, was a single object: a golden scarab amulet on a leather cord, still warm to the touch when I picked it up with shaking fingers.
Either it was the most elaborate hallucination in history, or I’d just done something very, very stupid.
I closed my fist around the amulet and started making my way back toward the light. A warm pulse coursed through my hand, and light glimmered around my fist. “Not again,” I groaned as my eyes rolled back into my head.