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“Is that a finger bone?” Constance asked with gruesome delight, scooting closer.

“It’s from a wing, actually,” Ellie corrected her. “It is inscribed with Glagolitic characters—an early Slavic script. I am afraid I haven’t yet been able to translate it. There is some resemblance to modern Cyrillic but…”

“Why are you showing me the bird bone, Eleanora?” Constance cut in.

Ellie gave up her scholarly explanation with a sigh. “Because it does this.”

She made a neat snap of her wrist—a maneuver she had discovered after days of frustrated experimentation inside her cabin on the boat from the Caribbean. The movement was quicker and certainly more elegant than the vigorous shaking that the previous owner of the bone had subjected it to.

The bone—thefirebird arcanum—flared to life, spilling a fierce, moonlike illumination out across the rooftop. Rays of it pierced through the delicate filigree of the meshrabiyeh screens.

“Oh, but this ismarvelous!” Constance said wonderingly.

“The object—thearcanum—that Mr. Jacobs’ masters are seeking here in Egypt isfarmore powerful,” Ellie pressed. “Should it fall into their hands, the consequences for the world could be devastating. I cannot allow that to happen!”

Constance met Ellie’s gaze across the ferocious glare of the bone, her eyes bright with determination. “Then we shall simply have to stop them.”

The words filled Ellie with a surprising sense of relief. She knew that she shouldn’t feel that way about the notion of her friend being exposed to the threat of Mr. Jacobs—but the truth was, the prospect of facing him alone, or even with only Adam at her side, had filled Ellie with dread.

She wouldneedhelp if she was to succeed at this—and Constance was a formidable ally.

But even as she soaked up that mix of both relief and worry, Ellie’s thoughts pulled back to the tangled puzzle of her relationship with Adam Bates. She didn’t realize that she had gone quiet until Constance slipped an arm around her shoulder, giving her a squeeze.

“It will all work out, you know,” she said confidently.

“How?” Ellie demanded as the firebird bone continued to blaze, bright and silent, in her hand.

“I haven’t the foggiest idea,” Constance replied easily. “But it will. You’ll see.”

Ellie tried to let herself be reassured—but still felt as though the future loomed with peril like the rising cloud of a storm.

??

Five

Some fools maintainedthat a sauna couldn’t possibly be refreshing in a hot climate. They’d obviously never felt the pleasure of sweating out the grit of travel and then dumping a cold bucket of water over their heads.

Adam strode from the washroom feeling like a million bucks.

The warm night air kissed his skin as he emerged. It would’ve felt even better if he’d kept his shirt off—but somehow he doubted that Lady Sabita and Kumari Padma shared his somewhat lackadaisical policies when it came to proper dress.

He’d restored the shirt along with his trousers, though both clung to his still-damp skin. His feet remained bare as he stepped out into the soft light of the courtyard.

The fountain splashed gently to his right, the sound mingling with the quiet rustle of breeze-tossed palms and ferns. A few scattered oil lamps had been left out to illuminate the pathways.

Adam’s attention was snagged by the sound of voices from above him.

“Don’t stay up too late,” Constance warned.

His gaze rose to one of the balconies that framed the courtyard, where he saw Constance give Ellie a hug.

“I won’t,” Ellie promised her.

Constance moved away, and Ellie remained behind. She gazed out over the fountain and the palms as though not really seeing any of it. The space between her eyebrows was creased with little furrowed lines—theI’m thinking too muchlook that Adam was coming to recognize.

Without quite realizing he was doing it, he moved toward her, stepping into the lamplight on the path that ran beneath her perch.

He wanted to nudge those worry lines out of her forehead. The scene suggested a perfect way for him to do it.