Eyeliner of the Gods

  No one saw as I grabbed the bottles of water and straightened up, moving off to my seat. It took a few minutes to reach it, since I had to detour around where the Germans were trying to scoop up broken plates and spilled food, but at last I made it back to my seat.

  “Here’s your water,” I yelled at Izumi, handing her a bottle. “Boy, this is sure wild, huh?”

  “Very wild,” she agreed, taking a long swig of her water. I sat down and picked up my spoon, stirring the fruit salad, hoping everyone would believe I was eating. Daniel, one of the Copt diggers who sat on my other side, said something, but I couldn’t hear it over the clamor.

  When I leaned over to ask what he had said, a tourist behind me wacked my head with her tray, throwing me forward onto Daniel. My hand hit his just as he was taking a bite of fruit salad.

  “Sorry,” I yelled into his ear, giving the German tourist a glare as she walked on without apologizing.

  “Is not problem,” Daniel said. I grabbed my napkin to wipe the fruit off my hand, but froze into a giant block of Jan as I stared at the object that sat on the tray, hidden by my napkin.

  It was the bracelet. My bracelet. The one I’d just planted on Chloe’s tray.

  “Oh my god, it is cursed,” I whispered, looking it over without touching it. How could it be there? I had just hidden it on Chloe’s tray…Goose bumps rippled down my arm at that thought. It was in the exact same spot on my tray as where I had put it on Chloe’s. Did I need any more proof that it was cursed? Maybe I was wrong in thinking Chloe had put it in my bag the night before. Maybe she had nothing to do with it. Maybe I had triggered some weird Egyptian curse by buying it, and now it was following me, returning to me every time I tried to get rid of it.

  I fought down the urge to run from the tent screaming at the top of my lungs, and quickly covered the bracelet up with my napkin again. What was I going to do with it? How was I going to break the curse? And most important of all, how was I going to get rid of the stupid thing?

  For a second, for a fraction of a second, for one of those nanoseconds that scientists are always flapping their lips about, for an infinitesimally small moment in time the wad of bodies in front of me parted and I looked straight down the tent to where Chloe sat. She had a strange look on her face, part disbelief, part horror as her gaze met mine. Just as she opened her mouth to say something, the moment was lost and the tourists once again moved to block my view.

  “Jan? Is anything wrong?” Izumi asked.

  I jumped at her words, gently bellowed into my ear, and without thinking, grabbed the napkin-covered bracelet and stuffed it in my pants pocket. “No. Sorry. I have to go…uh…pee. Later!”

  I hurried out of there as fast I could (which, considering the tourists, wasn’t very fast at all). Once I managed to get out of the tent, I ran for the shady spot behind the equipment trailer. Seth wasn’t there, which meant he had probably decided to hang out with the fasting workers. That was fine with me—I needed to have time to figure out what I was going to do about the bracelet.

  “I thought you were going to have lunch?” A voice suddenly spoke behind me. For the second time in ten minutes I jumped up and shrieked.

  “What, this is some sort of heart test or something?” I yelled at Seth. “You’re trying to make sure I’m not going to go belly-up just because I’m hanging out with you?”

  “Sorry,” he said, and sat down next to where I’d been standing. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”

  “I thought you were over with your buds?” I glanced around before sitting down. The time had come to teremindll Seth about the bracelet, but I didn’t want any witnesses in case he went psycho on me.

  “I came back to see if you were finished.” He took my hand and rubbed my fingers with his. My legs went all melty again, and I let inner Jan have a few seconds of giggling and feeling giddy just because I had lucked out and snagged the nicest guy in all of Egypt.

  “I didn’t exactly eat,” I said, intending to tell him what happened with the bracelet, but before I could explain, he interrupted me.

  “Jan, I want to say something to you. I admire you for honoring Ramadan. I respect your right to make your own decisions. You’re the smartest girl I know, and I wouldn’t want you to change. I like all of you, every part, including your…uh…” His gaze dipped down to my chest. A wave of heat washed up from my neck as his eyes jerked back up to mine. “I don’t want anything about you to change. All right? No more dieting.”

  I swallowed back a big lump in my throat and nodded, blinking like mad to keep the tears from spilling over. No one had ever said they liked me the way I was! Could he be any more perfect? “OK. No dieting. But I’m still going to do the fast until Ramadan is over.”

  He groaned.

  “I appreciate what you said, though. I…uh…I like everything about you, too.”

  He leaned forward to kiss me, but I stopped him by putting my fingers over his lips. “No.”

  “No?”

  I traced a finger along the glossy line of his scrunched up eyebrows. “No, as in not now. You have some sort of magic lips that make me forget whatever I was thinking when you kiss me, so no kissing until I’ve said what I want to say.” I bit my lip as I scooted to the side. “It’s about this.”

  He looked at the bracelet as I set it on his knee. “Your bracelet?”

  “It’s not mine,” I said, taking a deep breath to try to calm myself. Just being near him made me feel so many things I didn’t feel with other people, I had a hard time reminding my brain it should spend a little time thinking about things that didn’t involve kissing Seth.

  “It isn’t?” The little gold flecks in the pretty brown part of his eyes sparkled. I leaned closer.

  “No,” I whispered against his lips, a goner. His magic lips won again.

  “Whose is it?” he asked, one of his arms sliding around to my back.

  “Whose is what?” I asked just seconds before I started kissing him. The heat of his mouth and the sweet touch of his tongue drove every thought from my mind but how much I liked kissing him. He pulled me over onto his lap, tipping his head back when I pulled on his pony tail. My fingers slid into the cool silk of his hair, working to untie the leather thong that held it back, slipping through the long black lengths of it when it was freed.

  “I really like your hair,” I murmured against his lips when we came up for air. “It’s very sexy.”

  “I like yours, too,” he said, wrapping a finger around a strand of my hair, pulling it straight and grinning when it snapped back to its normal curl. “It’s red like the setting sun. Fiery. Exotic.”

  “Really? No one has ever thought I was exotic before,” I said, giving him one more little kiss before pushing myself off his lap. He was way too sexy, and if I stayed curled up against him, I’d spend the whole lunch hour kissing him and not talking. “Seth, we have to talk.”

  He rubbed his thumb across my bottom lip. I’m lucky I was sitting down, because if I hadn’t been, my legs would have collapsed. “About you being exotic?”

  I shook my head and took a deep breath in an attempt to get a grip on myself. “No. We have to talk about that.”

  He glanced at the bracelet, now sitting on the ground next to him. “What about it?”

  “You asked me who it belongs to. Well…” I gnawed on my lip for a second, remembering the heat of his mouth on mine. “It belongs to Mr. Massad.”

  Seth just looked at me for a minute; then he nodded. “I should have recognized it from the description. It’s the stolen bracelet, isn’t it, the one Dad calls—”

  “The Handmaiden of Tekhnet, yes.”

  “Oh.” His brows pulled together as he picked it up and gave it a once-over. “But you bought this in Cairo, at Hassan’s shop.”

  “Exactly. Um…Seth, why were you in that shop?”

  He shrugged, handing me back the bracelet. “We always go there. Hassan and Magdi are friends of my father.”

  It was my turn to frown. ?
??Magdi?”

  “The shop is really Magdi’s. Hassan is the old man you saw, Magdi’s father. He helps out at the shop occasionally. Magdi was gone the night we were in Cairo.”

  “Hmm, interesting,” I said, tapping my lips with the bracelet until I realized what I was doing. Ick! Ancient Egyptian germs! Cursed ones at that! Blech!

  “When you said we, you meant you and Cy?”

  “Why are you asking all these questions, Jan?” he asked instead of answering.

  I took another deep breath. “I’m investigating the theft. At first, it was just so I could have a story, but now…” I gave the bracelet a wary look. “I think it wants me to find out who stole it, because…well, because it does seem to be cursed.”

  “How?” he asked, his voice hoarse.

  “I…uh…OK, this doesn’t make me look very good, but you have to understand that Chloe is the one who started this. If she hadn’t been flirting with you and kissing you, I never would have put it in her bed to begin with.” It took five minutes, but I explained everything that had happened since I found out the bracelet was stolen. “And when I found it under my napkin a few minutes ago… well, what other reason could there be for it materializing there except that it really is cursed, and it wants me to find the person who stole it?”

  He tugged on his lower lip for a second, making me think about how wonderful he tasted. “It just appeared there? No one was around you?”

  “Nope. Seth, how often does Cy go into Magdi’s shop?”

  His brown eyes watched me carefully. “He didn’t steal the bracelet.”

  I patted his arm. “I know he’s your twin and all, but honestly, no one else had a reason to take it—”

  “He didn’t steal it.” He shook his head, then ran one hand through his hair, pulling it back off his face. “I know you don’t like him. I don’t like him very much, but I do know him, Jan, and he wouldn’t steal something. He doesn’t have to—anything he wants, he gets.”

  “Yeah, but you said your parents didn’t have enough money to send you both to college in America. Maybe he wanted something your dad couldn’t afford…” A sudden image rose in my mind, an image of Cy playing a brand new electric guitar. “something like a new guitar.”

  Seth’s warm gaze met mine. He shook his head again. “He didn’t steal the bracelet.”

  “When did he get the guitar? You said last night it was new, didn’t you?”

  “Yes.” He looked away, his jaw tight. “He bought it a few weeks ago, in Cairo.”

  “The day when all of us Dig Egypt! kids arrived?”

  He nodded, refusing to look at me.

  I felt awful about making him realize the truth about Cy, but I had to do it. The bracelet wanted the person who stole it punished. And besides, it might open Seth’s parents’ eyes if they found out their precious couldn’t-do-any-wrong son was a thief.

  “I’m sorry, Seth, I really am,” I said, covering his hand with mine. He looked at me then, his long hair hanging like a silk curtain over his shoulders. “That night in Cairo, after dinne,r I was on the balcony of the hotel, and I saw someone giving Cy a boatload of money.”

  “Who?” he asked, his voice deep with emotion.

  “I don’t know, but afterward, when I was sneaking back into the hotel, I saw one of the two blonde guys you beat up in the alley. It had to be one of them.”

  “You’re wrong about Cy, Jan, and I’m going to prove it.”

  I stood up when Seth did, my heart twisting with pain for him. I just wanted to hold him and keep him from being hurt, but I didn’t know how I could protect him. “How are you going to prove it?”

  “We’re going to ask Cy where he got the money to buy the new guitar,” he answered, taking my hand and hauling me after him toward the Muslim camp.

  Oh, great. Just what I wanted—to confront Cy to his face, where he would say all sorts of mean things to me, and then Seth would hate me, and I’d lose the only guy I really, really liked, and my life would be over, and I wouldn’t get my killer story. I dragged my feet as Seth pulled me toward the Muslim camp. “Couldn’t you talk to him? You know, alone?”

  “No. You need to be there. You need to see for yourself that he’s not guilty.” He stopped and frowned at me. I wanted to kiss his frown. “You want to be a journalist, don’t you? This is the perfect opportunity for you to practice interrogating Cy.”

  “I already did.”

  He tugged me forward so I was walking next to him. “You said he tried to kiss you and you slapped him. You didn’t ask him any questions.”

  “I didn’t have to,” I muttered.

  “Yes, you do, and you know it.”

  I sighed and pinched his arm with my free hand. “Oh, all right, I’m willing to admit that maybe I was sure he did it before the interview, but you can’t deny that what with him taking money from the blonde guy who hit me in Cairo, he sure fits the role of suspect!”

  “You’ll see,” was all Seth said. I clammed up after that as well, figuring that the less I said, the better my chances were of emerging from the whole awful thing with my boyfriend intact.

  Ten minutes later we found Cy. Five seconds after that, Seth punched his brother in the gut.

  “That’s for kissing my girl,” he said calmly.

  Cy grimaced as he rubbed his stomach, but didn’t say anything other than nodding.

  I glanced from him to Seth, surprised that not only would Seth be angry that Cy had tried to kiss me (he didn’t sound mad at all when I told him) but also that Cy wasn’t pissed that Seth had punched him.

  “Did you just come here to do that, or was there something else you wanted?” Cy asked, sitting down on a blanket that was laid over the bare ground inside the tent.

  Seth gestured toward the blanket. I sat down as well, wishing I had my notebook with me so I could make notes. I scooted closer to Seth when he plopped down on the edge of the blanket. “Where did you get the money to buy your new guitar?”

  Cy’s eyebrows rose. “Why do you care?”

  It was weird sitting between the two of them. They looked so much alike, except now Seth’s hair was loose, while Cy’s was pulled back in a braid. Cy wore a muscle tee like Seth’s, but in red. His black jeans were the same as his brother’s though.

  “Jan thinks you’re the person who stole that bracelet Dad said was missing.”

  “Hey!” I smacked Seth on the arm.

  “You do think that,” he said, giving me a frown (what else was new?).

  “Yeah, but you could have said that a lot nicer. Like by not including my name!”

  “Jan, the whole reason we’re here is because of you.”

  “I don’t care; you could have said that better!”

  Cy laughed, interrupting our argument. “You have it good, don’t you, little brother?”

  Seth glared at him as I asked, “Have what?”

  Cy grinned at me. Seth’s cheeks turned a dusky red.

  “Oh!” I said, my own face turning red as I looked down at my hands. I was delighted and embarrassed at the same time by the thought of Seth being in love with me. It was a wonderful feeling, one I wanted to hug to myself and think about, but first I had to break Seth’s heart by proving to him that his brother was a rat.

  “Are you going to answer the question?” Seth asked.

  “I will, but I don’t have to,” Cy told him. He turned to me, the smile still lurking in his eyes. “I was paid for delivering something to a shop in Cairo. I used that money to buy the Strat.”

  “What did you deliver?” I asked, wondering if he was telling the truth.

  He shrugged. “I have no idea. It was fairly small, though.”

  Seth glanced at me, the gold flecks in his dark eyes shining brightly. “Something small like a bracelet?”

  “It might have been the bracelet,” Cy said slowly, the smile fading from his eyes as he thought about it. He glanced at his brother. “Do you think it could have been?”

  “Who did you de
liver the package for?” I asked, my mind whirling around. If it wasn’t Cy, who was the thief?

  “Dag.”

  I blinked a couple of times, my brain obviously in need of oxygen. “Dag?”

  Seth reached for my hand, his fingers stroking mine as he narrowed his eyes at his brother. “Dag? Are you sure?”

  Cy nodded. “She said she didn’t have time to deliver it because she had to meet everyone at the airport. I figured it was one of her necklaces.”

  “Necklaces?” I asked, feeling a lot like a parrot.

  Both guys nodded, but it was Cy who answered. “She makes bead necklaces and sells them to tourist shops. Or at least that’s what she told us.”

  “Oh,” I said, starting to believe him at last.

  “Didn’t you even look at what was in the package?” Seth asked, his fingers gentle on mine even though his voice was filled with disgust.

  “Are you kidding? Why would I want to look at a bunch of ugly necklaces?” Cy made a face. “Not everyone is as suspicious as you are, little brother.”

  “It would have been better if you had been,” Seth growled.

  “What, and have people sticking snakes in my bed because they think I’m evil? No, thank you. One evil god in the family is enough.”

  “How did you know about the snake?” Seth asked, his fingers stilled, his dark eyes narrowed as they glared at his brother. “I didn’t tell anyone but Jan about it.”

  I rubbed the top of his hand with my thumb. “And I didn’t tell anyone.”

  Cy smiled and spread his hands wide. “It was just a joke, Seth. The snake wouldn’t have hurt you—Zahi milked the venom from it before we put it in your room.”

  Seth said something that was probably swearing in Arabic as he lunged forward toward his brother.

  “Wait!” I yelled as the two guys started rolling around the floor punching at each other. I jumped to my feet and kicked Cy on the leg. Hard. “We don’t have time for this. If Dag is the one who gave Cy the bracelet to sell, that means she’s the thief, but we’ll need to find more proof.”