“Yes.”
“Okay, then, we’ll just have Ahmose find the best path and—” My words were cut off when the cries and moans of the dead became screams. A new kind of panic passed from ghost to ghost until it reached the masses where we stood.
Asten and Ahmose each took hold of one of my hands and began to sprint forward. We’d run out of time. The one word we absolutely did not want to hear was being repeated by every single ghost in a field of thousands.
Reapers.
“Lily! Run!” Asten cried, pulling me through the field. As quickly as we tried to move, I was alarmed when our progress had come to a near halt. The path leading out of the field was cluttered with ghosts prostrating themselves and tearing at the ground as they clawed desperately at their fellows and tried to wrest their feet from the mire that held them.
They grabbed our ankles, their sharp nails pricking my skin. When they caught hold, they hollered desperately, “Save me!” or “Take me with you!” Others cried, “Don’t let them harvest me!” and “Can’t you stop them?” As much as I wished I could do something, I knew there was no way for us to help them. The farther we went, the more violent the ghosts became.
A particularly aggressive specter managed to nearly trip me, causing a snarl to escape from my lips. Ahmose summoned his cudgel and ax, formed from the grains of sand surrounding us, and Asten called forth his bow with a quiver full of diamond-tipped arrows. I pulled my own bow off my back and nocked it with one of the arrows of Isis.
With Ahmose clearing the path ahead and Asten bringing up the rear, there wasn’t much for me to do. Once struck with the cudgel, the ghosts withdrew their arms, nursing various hurts, even though some of them appeared to have wounds much worse than anything Ahmose did to them.
Still, they moaned and cried in terrible anguish, and I suspected it was more than just the pain we inflicted on passing. Several of them bit their fists or quaked with fear, then stared off into the distance.
“Keep going,” Asten said when I paused to look behind us once again. A crazed ghost took advantage of my unmoving position and grabbed my leg, pulling with such force that I stumbled into its arms. At once I was buried in a cocoon of limbs that yanked at my hair and clothing.
I jerked down the row, far from the path Ahmose had found. My bow tumbled off to the side and was left behind while my knives were wrenched from my grip, tossed with indifference to the ground just out of my reach.
Instinctively, my claws emerged and I raked them across the chests, arms, and necks of those who surrounded me, but they pressed even harder, as undeterred by my assault as zombies would have been. I panicked as the image of a snapping pack of hyenas bent on my destruction filled my mind.
Crying out desperately, I pushed and shoved, so frantic to escape that there was nothing of the sphinx or even a lioness in my demeanor. I’d been reduced to a trembling husk of myself, a weakling that could answer their strikes with nothing but tears.
A shadow fell across the pile of bodies, and one by one the assailants disappeared in a cloud of sand that blew across my face. Asten was using one of his diamond-tipped arrows, filling me with relief and a fervent hope. At first I thought he was jabbing it into the skulls of the dead, but after he’d cleared enough of them away, I could see he was targeting their hearts instead.
Some of the ghosts realized what he was doing and they screamed, attempting to scramble away from him or, when that didn’t work, to distract him from the gleaming orbs of their hearts. He let them wrench their bodies as far as their rooted feet allowed them to and then quickly finished off the more aggressive ghosts still in my vicinity. The others nearby were cowering like punished dogs, their arms folded over their stomachs, backs hunched as they drew away from us.
“Are you all right?” Asten asked, crouching down next to me. His eyes flicked over my face and then down my trembling torso. I ached to be held. To be stroked and comforted. Why isn’t he wrapping me in his arms? Asten touched the underside of my chin and lifted my face until our eyes met. Through my eyes alone, I tried to express just how much I needed him, how much I burned for his touch, but I must not have been successful. Again he asked, “Are you hurt, Lily?”
Something inside me shrank and shied away, much like the ghosts around me.
“Yes,” I answered, feeling the confidence and control over my emotions return with each passing moment. “I’ll be okay.”
Asten cocked his head and peered at me as if not trusting my words, but then he nodded and offered his hand. “Come on, then.”
Helping me to my feet, he handed me my spear-knives and my bow with the precious arrows of Isis.
“Asten?”
“Hmm?” he answered, intent on watching the surrounding ghosts.
“Why are they so fixated on me?”
“It must be the heart scarab. As immortals, they can sense things beyond the understanding of a living being. Such a thing as love becomes tangible to us. A physical, heady thing. As the Sons of Egypt, we can manipulate spells to control the unseen but love is unrivaled, uncontrollable, a more powerful spell than anything the gods could fabricate. Perhaps this is why even they fall victim to it.”
I was sorting this out when the ghosts around us fell absolutely dead quiet. We froze and looked around. Every ghost in the field was hunched over with their arms wrapped around their legs and heads tucked down almost between their knees.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
“I’m not sure,” Asten said, placing a hand on my shoulder in a gesture of assurance that a part of me deeply needed to feel.
Whatever was happening, it didn’t bode well for us. We’d already been conspicuous in the field of gray forms, but now that we were standing upright in a nearly flattened field, it quickly became obvious that we would make easy targets. It only took a few seconds for our deepest fears to surface.
“They’re here,” Ahmose declared. The eerie calm was now punctuated with a new sound—a clacking noise that grew in intensity with each passing moment.
There was nowhere to hide.
Ahmose knelt on the ground and murmured a spell, holding his hand out over the sand. After a few seconds he rose. “This way,” he announced. “There’s a large rock over this hill that we can put our backs to.”
As we made our way to the rock, the clacking noise grew, then subsided over and over again. The ghosts around us sank deeper into the mire. I noticed that my own steps became sluggish, my feet sticking, though the soil still looked the same to me.
When I told Asten and Ahmose, they glanced quickly at one another and then Ahmose explained. “It’s the despair. You feel it weighing on your heart. Try to focus on the things that lift your soul.”
“Is it affecting you, too?” I asked.
“Yes. But hearing that the soil feels sticky to you is alarming. It means you’re further along. Are you worried about Amon?” he asked.
“Amon?” The truth was that since descending in Asten’s arms, I’d thought of little else besides him. That’s not right, I thought. I considered my feelings. There did seem to be a kind of dark unhappiness filling my frame that wasn’t normal. I wasn’t the kind of girl to wallow. I got up and did something to fix whatever was bothering me. I wasn’t prone to depression.
If that indeed was despair weighing down my heart, it wasn’t because of Amon. I was reasonably assured that I was taking the right path to save him. I was concerned about him, of course. Saving him was the thing of utmost importance to me and yet, somehow, it wasn’t. There was something else gnawing at the back of my mind. And the more I thought about it, the more foreign the emotion seemed. Like it didn’t belong. I bit my lip, trying to figure it out.
We reached the rock and Asten gave me a long look before stepping close to Ahmose to converse with him quietly. Something hungry and fierce took hold of my being, and then that something shattered and the soles of my shoes sank a full inch into the sand. I panicked, remembering the quicksand that had almost killed me
. That wasn’t going to happen again.
I tried to breathe deeply to calm myself, a focus like Ahmose had said, but my lungs wouldn’t expand. Wrapping my hands around my throat, I closed my eyes and concentrated. It felt hard to swallow, and there was a painful burn stinging my eyes.
Suddenly, my eyes fluttered open. I knew the emotion roiling through my frame. It was heartbreak. That didn’t make sense. Amon was alive. He loved me. Why was my heart hurting like it had when Anubis returned me to New York? The idea that something horrible, something…conclusive had happened to Amon froze the blood in my veins. But I still felt his heart beating steadily where the scarab rested against my skin, so that couldn’t be it.
Ahmose left us briefly to scout for a better position.
“What’s wrong?” Asten asked, concern etched across his handsome face.
“It…it hurts.” It was a guttural proclamation ripped from the hidden depths of my soul.
“What hurts?”
“I don’t…I don’t know,” I whispered, my lips trembling as tears leaked from the corners of my eyes. I shook my head slightly, trying to clear the waves of sadness that seemed to overwhelm me.
With a pained yet resigned expression, Asten put an arm around my shoulder and awkwardly patted my back. A desperate cry escaped from me and I burrowed into his chest, wrapping my arms around his waist. I felt more than heard his sigh as he put his other arm around me, enfolding me completely in his warmth.
“Tell me what ails you, little lioness,” Asten murmured as he rubbed my back in small circles. “What has brought my fierce warrior to this?”
“It’s my sister,” I heard myself say.
Asten leaned back and looked at me with a note of confusion, which only deepened the gorgeous cleft in his chin. “Your sister?” he echoed. “I didn’t know you had one.”
I blinked, and a glistening tear that had been clinging to my eyelashes fell on his shirt. Touching my fingertip to the wet spot, I closed my eyes and then splayed my hand on his muscled chest.
“Do you mean Tia?” he pressed.
Sucking in a deep, cleansing breath, I lifted my head. “No. I don’t mean Tia.” A wave of deep resentment and disappointment filled me. “It’s okay, Asten,” I said with a slight tremor to my voice. “I’ll be fine.”
He gave me a look that said he wasn’t at all sure about that; then Ahmose ran quickly back to our site, shouting, “Here they come!”
The clacking sound that had surfaced since the ghosts went silent increased until it became impossible to tell where it was coming from. We were enveloped by sound, and I was quite confused by it. I wanted to lash out and protect us, but I fought with myself, waiting for Ahmose’s direction. I reached for my bow but halted abruptly with my arm in the air. No! Tia shouted in my mind. Not the bow!
What? I answered back, upset that I could no longer control my arm. Why are you doing this? You want to have a fight about weapons now? The reapers are coming!
I know the reapers are coming, Lily. She almost spat my name. And we’re fighting them on my terms this time. Not yours. Just because I share your body does not mean I share your mind-set all the time.
What is wrong with you? First you ignore me when I try to talk to you and now you’re yelling at me. Do you think you could pick a better time to argue?
I’m not arguing with you. I’m simply telling you how this is going to happen. And we’re using our knives, not the bow.
I struggled for power but quickly learned that Tia was determined and my mind was immobilized by her rebellion. It was Tia, not me, who reached behind our shoulders and took hold of the knives. Tia who twirled them in her hands and pressed her thumb against the nob that elongated the weapons into deadly spears. Planting them into the sand by our feet, she peered into the field, cocking our ears for the source of the clacking noise.
We didn’t need to wait long. Dark shapes circled lazily over the field. They were airborne, and every so often descended at random intervals to harvest a chosen victim. Like grim reapers, the angels of the ghost’s second death held a curved blade of some kind, though it wasn’t nearly as long as the scythe carried by reapers in horror movies. The reapers acted like large birds darting in the field after a kernel of corn or a worm, but the act came to a deafening end with a slicing noise, followed by a quick, bloodcurdling scream.
A moment later a gray, loose-limbed ghost, after having his gleaming heart unceremoniously shoved down his throat, was stuffed matter-of-factly into a bag slung across the robed reaper’s shoulder. That was one thing the legends had gotten right. Reapers did wear black robes, long ones that fluttered in the hellish desert wind. They smelled of desperation and decay.
We remained quiet, ready to fight but hoping to be ignored. I watched the reaping with fascination and wondered what Dr. Hassan would think about this place. Asten and Ahmose stood nearby, weapons clenched in their hands, their breathing ringing in my ears.
Just when we were finally safe to flee, a ghost not too far away, one targeted by a reaper, began waving his hands in our direction and screaming, “Invaders!”
Throwing the seized ghost down as if he were a sack of discarded trash, the reaper turned and looked in our direction. The abandoned ghost, with one remaining leg stuck in the mire, frantically attempted to escape the confines of the field. He wasn’t successful. Within the span of a few moments, another reaper appeared, grabbed hold of the struggling specter, and finished harvesting him, along with his heart.
The black-robed form watching us drifted closer and straightened his body out in the air. The horrible clacking began as he twisted his head one way and then another. His hood fell back from the motion, and I saw where the noise was coming from. It was the reaper’s jaw.
From Tia I knew the creature was scenting us through the movement of its jawbone. When it opened its mouth, the tongue, a long black muscle, tasted the air. After it drew the organ back into its gaping maw, the jaw clacked a dozen or so times, as if it was chewing up our scent.
The creature looked more buglike than skeletal, but I could see how it might be mistaken for a skeleton. From a distance, the black-and-white patterns of its face slightly resembled a human skull, but the jaw was shaped differently, more like an ant or a wasp.
The clacking mouth wasn’t moving up and down like a human jaw would but instead clapped together horizontally from either side. And it was a wide mouth, much bigger than a creature that size should have. The noise it made as it hovered above the ghosts reminded me of a swarm of hornets. Glowing eyes burned as it studied us.
After a tense moment, the buzzing noise ramped up several degrees and we noted several other reapers closing in on our location fast. Asten must’ve decided that fighting one off now would be better than waiting for a group to attack, so he loosed an arrow. The starlit diamond head found its target and sank into the neck of the reaper. An unholy screech filled the air, and then the creature floated slowly to the ground, roiling in its death throes.
More screeches rose as Asten loosed arrow after arrow. Soon they were close enough to reach by spear, and I threw one and then a second, managing to seriously wound one while killing the other. The creatures swelled in numbers and we were quickly surrounded, fighting hand to hand. I summoned my claws and slashed, continuing to kill. There was something cathartic about being in combat.
All the confusion I’d felt dissipated, and my mind emptied of its worries and errant emotions. Suddenly I found myself in control of my body. While fighting, my limbs moved seamlessly, instinctually. I drew upon the powers of the sphinx and my call was answered. Never before had Tia and I worked together in such a unified manner, and I relished the feeling. With a bare hand, I crushed the windpipe of one reaper while sinking my claws into the heart of another. There was no struggle. No dominance. No uncertainty. We were one, with a connection even stronger than we’d experienced on Cherty’s boat.
The second wave of reapers approached, this time their stingers bared. I fought off
my two attackers easily, but five flew down to surround Ahmose, who had been struck more than once with a reaper’s short scythe. Blood colored the sleeve of his tunic. I smelled its sharp tang in the air, but I could tell his injury wasn’t life-threatening.
I headed toward him, but then Asten was stung in the leg and I wavered. Without thinking, I went to Asten instead, using my claws to remove the stinger from the reaper’s body. I then grabbed the reaper’s robes and smacked his head against a rock until his body went limp. I longed to comfort Asten, but I heard Ahmose’s cry and gritted my teeth.
Feeling like I had no other option left, I nocked one of the precious arrows of Isis, raised my bow, and aimed. The arrow sank deep into the shoulder of a reaper, but the creature responded in a very different manner to my arrows than it did to Asten’s. Instead of screaming or falling when injured, the reaper immediately stopped fighting and came toward me, its injured arm hanging loosely by its side, the arrow still protruding from its body.
The familiar buzzing noise filled the air, the sound so powerful my skin tingled with the vibrations. The other reapers paused, watching the first, and one by one they followed him as he drifted to the ground by my feet. Gradually the sounds made sense and words took form.
“How may we serve the goddess?” said the injured reaper. Neither Asten nor Ahmose seemed to understand him.
“You can stop attacking us, for one thing,” I said, my claws still brandished in a threatening manner.
“We will let you pass,” another said.
“What will we tell the mistress?” an alarmed reaper asked his brothers. “Many have died!”
“She will know!” chimed another. “She will devour us!”
The reaper I’d just injured said, “We will distract her with double the number of hearts and attempt to hide our injuries and our dead.”
“She will discover us!” one lamented in despair.
“It matters not!” the first shouted. “The tears of the goddess call to us. If it means our death, then so be it.”