Chapter 9
Jessica
Iwoke to find Anubis standing at the window, silhouetted against the Cairo dawn. He was in his jackal form, something he rarely showed anymore, preferring the human glamour when we were together. But there he stood, tall and lean and divine, watching the sun over a city that had forgotten him.
“You came back,” I said, my voice hoarse from crying.
He turned, those golden eyes finding me in the dim light. “I told you I would return. I could not leave things as they were earlier.”
“I booked the flight. I’m leaving tomorrow night.” The words felt like stones in my mouth. “Don’t try to change my mind. It’s not going to. That’s not going to change. Sarah needs me, and I can’t not go.”
“I know. She’s your priority.” He crossed to the bed, shifting smoothly into his human form as he moved, but I saw his real self. “I do not ask you to change your plans. I only ask for the time we have left. However much that is.”
I checked my phone. “Thirty-six hours. A day and a half.”
“Then let us not waste a moment of it.”
We didn’t talk about what happened after. Nor did we discuss the possibility, or impossibility of continuing whatever this was across continents and planes of existence. Instead, we existed together, in the present, holding tight to every second, committing them to memory.
For his first stop, Anubis took me to places no tourist had ever seen.
We started at a temple buried beneath a modern apartment building in Heliopolis, or the City of the Sun.
He led me through a maintenance entrance, down stairs that shouldn’t have existed and into a space that hummed with ancient power.
As we passed the threshold, his glamour disappeared and he was his true jackal self.
The walls were covered in hieroglyphs, pristine and untouched by time, and in the center stood an altar to Ra.
“This was one of my father’s temples,” Anubis said, running his hand along the carved stone.
“Before the new gods came, before the desert consumed the old ways. Priests would gather here at dawn to greet the sun.”
"Your father?”
“In a manner of speaking. The pantheon is complicated. Family trees that make no sense to mortal understanding.” He smiled, but it didn’t reach his eyes. “But yes. Ra was my father, in one version of the story.”
I reached to follow Anubis’s hands across the hieroglyphs, but stopped an inch away from the ancient surface. “May I touch them?”
Anubis laughed, and the sound filled the chamber. “You have learned your lesson. Yes, you may. They are inert.”
I grinned and touched the hieroglyphs, feeling the warmth in the stone despite the underground chill. “Does it hurt? Seeing places like this forgotten?”
“Everything hurts when you live long enough,” he said, his tone pensive. “I learned to carry it.”
“Have you?”
Anubis shrugged. “I have done the best I can.”
From there, we went to Alexandria - a journey that should have taken hours but somehow only took minutes. “How did we get here?” I asked.
“Divine transportation,” Anubis explained.
“You’ve been holding back on me,” I said, poking him in the chest. “We could have toured all of Egypt.”
He nodded. “But then I would have missed out on seeing my home through your eyes.”
“Tell me about this divine transportation.”
He shrugged. “I’m not sure of the mechanics. It works.” We walked along a pier overlooking the harbor. He stopped twenty paces or so away from the center and pointed to the water.
“Cleopatra's palace is down there. Most of it, anyway. The earthquakes claimed it and the sea swallowed what remained. But it still exists, if you know where to look.”
“Can we?” I started to ask.
He smiled. “Yes.”
I don’t know what I expected; some kind of magical underwater breathing spell, maybe, or a bubble of air like in some superhero movies. But Anubis simply took my hand, and the world shifted.
Suddenly we were standing in a palace that shouldn’t exist, water above and around us but not touching us, held back by some invisible force.
It was as if we were in our own forcefield.
The architecture was breathtaking. Columns carved with lotus flowers, mosaics depicting gods and pharaohs, walls painted in colors that still seemed vibrant despite centuries underwater.
“This is an archaeologist’s dream discovery. It’s impossible. How did it survive?” I whispered.
“Most things are impossible, until they happen.” He pressed a kiss to my lips. “No archaeologist can ever know about this place. Humans aren’t ready.”
“Why me?”
“You’re special.” He took my hand. “Let me show you what I remember.”
He led me through rooms that had once housed one of the most powerful women in history, pointing out details. My favorite rooms were the throne room where she’d met Julius Caesar, a garden where she’d walked with Mark Antony, and her private library that had rivaled Alexandria’s famous collection.
“Did you know Cleopatra?” I asked. “Or did you meet her when you weighed her soul?”
“I met her once. She was,” he paused, “formidable. Intelligent. Ruthless when necessary. The stories make her out to be a seductress, but she was a politician first, a strategist. She played the game better than most men of her era could have dreamed.”
"Did she know? About gods being real?”
“She suspected. The old blood that ran through her veins recognized us, even as the world moved on.” He turned to look at me. “She would have liked you, I think. You have the same steel in your spine.” He looked at me with his cat-like eyes. “For the record, I did not weigh her soul.”
We spent hours in Celopatra’s palace, walking through rooms frozen in time, and I tried to memorize every detail including the way the light filtered through the water.
I clung to the sound of Anubis’s voice as he told me stories about a world long gone.
But most of all, I reveled at the feel of his hand in mine.
That evening, he took me to the Sphinx using his divine transportation method again.
We started at the tourist side, with its crowds and cameras.
He took pictures of me standing there, the evening sun backlighting me in a way that made me look powerful, radiant.
After I’d had enough, he led me around, through barriers that seemed to part for him, to a vantage point behind the great statue.
We climbed, or rather, he climbed and I scrambled after him with less grace, until we stood at the Sphinx’s shoulder, watching the sun set over Giza.
The pyramids rose before us, three mountains of human ambition and a blend of ancient mathematics and some divine intervention, and I finally understood what Anubis had been trying to show me all day.
In his own way, he showed me my place in the world.
From here, they were overwhelming, humbling.
They were a reminder that humans had once built monuments to touch the sky, and somehow succeeded.
“My father helped build these,” Anubis murmured. “Not Ra, my other father, in another version of the story. Osiris. He blessed the foundations, consecrated the burial chambers. I was young then, by divine standards. I thought they would stand forever.”
“They’re still here.”
“Yes. But the people who built them are dust. The pharaohs who commissioned them are forgotten by all but scholars. Even the gods who blessed them have faded.” He looked at me. “That is the nature of forever, Jessica. Everything ends except the ending itself.”
I leaned against him, feeling the solid warmth of his body. “Do you find it depressing? I do.”
“It is honest.”
“Same thing, sometimes.”
He laughed, and the sound carried across the desert. “Yes. I suppose it is.”
We sat there, with him in his jackal form, glamour long gone, with his arm wrapped around me as the sun disappeared and the stars emerged. “They’re the same as I remember,” he said.
I thought about time and its meaning. I’d lived for forty-five years and thought it was long; while he’d lived a hundred times that and he still felt every loss like it was fresh.
“Tell me something,” I said. “In all those years, all those millennia, did you ever love anyone else? Before me?”
He was quiet for so long I thought he wouldn’t answer. When he spoke, his voice was low. “Once. She was a priestess, in the early days when gods walked more freely among mortals. Her name was Merit, and she served in my temple at Abydos. We loved each other as well as a god and mortal could.”
“What happened?”
“She grew old. I did not. She died, as all mortals do, and I guided her soul to the afterlife as was my duty.” His voice was carefully neutral. “I swore then that I would never love a mortal again. That the pain was not worth the joy.”
“But here we are.”
“Here we are,” he agreed. “And I find that even knowing how this ends, even knowing the pain that waits for me on the other side…I would not change a single moment.”
I turned to kiss him, there on the shoulder of the Sphinx, with the pyramids as our witnesses and the desert stretching infinite around us. He kissed me back with a desperation that matched my own, and I felt tears on my cheeks. Mine or his, I couldn’t tell.
He blinked us back to the hotel, and we made love with an intensity that frightened me. It wasn’t the fast, hard pace we’d set before. This was soft, gentle, and passionate.
The golden light manifested stronger than ever before, filling the room until I couldn’t tell where he ended and I began.
I felt the full weight of his divinity pressing against my consciousness.
For a moment I stood in the vast emptiness of the underworld, and saw the endless parade of souls passing through his judgment, and felt the terrible, yet beautiful, burden of being eternal.
Underneath it all, I felt his love for me - profound and fierce and absolutely doomed.
Afterward, as we lay tangled together in the ruins of the hotel sheets, Anubis reached for something on the nightstand. “I have something for you.”