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“Shall what?” Ellie demanded as she fumblingly turned the page.

Constance’s smile curved like a scimitar. “Let you know if I decide to seduce your brother,” she replied dangerously.

??

Sixteen

Ellie followed acat across a softly undulating desert. The empty landscape around her was painted in the orange, peach, and shadowy violet of dusk.

The cat’s gray coat was peppered with black spots like the pelt of a leopard, its body long and sleek with pointed ears. Ellie trudged in its wake as it padded lightly up the shifting sands of a low, sprawling dune.

She crested the rise, and the cat was gone. Instead, a woman stood in the deserted hollow. She was slight in stature but radiated a quiet strength in her simple white gown. Her umber skin glowed warmly in the golden light, framed by braids of thick black hair.

Ellie knew her. She knew the gold-flecked eyes that watched as she approached and the lightning bolt of a scar that marred the surface of her cheek.

She knew the sound of her voice. The blood that had stained her hands. The memory of the face of her lover.

Her name.

“Ixb’ahjun,” Ellie breathed out in surprise. “But I… I haven’t seen you since…”

She trailed off, her throat tightening with guilt at the memory of white pyramids falling with ancient roads and towering forests into a vast black pit.

One that she had opened.

“How are you here?” Ellie caught herself with a lurch of dismay. “Areyou here? Is this just a dream, or…”

The priestess from the other side of the world did not answer. She gazed at Ellie with a quiet knowing, then turned and led her across the desert.

They climbed another dune. On the far side, the flowing sand gave way to a flat, rocky plain.

A long, slender box sat isolated in the center of the open ground, covered in lines of hieroglyphs between accents of shimmering gold.

Ellie recognized it as a coffin.

Ixb’ahjun stopped at the head of it. She looked at Ellie as though waiting.

Ellie slowly approached. The coffin was a typical example of Egyptian New Kingdom royal funerary arts, with a stylized face framed by a striped nemes headdress. Carved arms were crossed over its breast, holding the crook and flail of Egypt.

A gust of wind tugged at Ellie’s skirts, tossing the loose tendrils of her hair. A storm was rising to the north, visible as a dark, obscure haze marring the line of the horizon. The first grains of blowing sand pecked at her skin with a subtle sting.

“She is waiting for you,” Ixb’ahjun declared from her place at the head of the beautiful coffin.

“Who?” Ellie demanded.

“The Stranger,” Ixb’ahjun replied. “The Lady of a Hundred Names.”

The breeze strengthened. The air around Ellie dulled with dust tossed in wild little swirls and eddies.

“But what can I possibly do for her?” Ellie pitched her voice to be heard over the wind as she raised up her arm to protect her eyes.

“Learn.” Ixb’ahjun’s fiery gaze was steady through the growing hiss of the storm. “Remember.”

Ellie opened her mouth to reply—and the desert swept in, blinding her in a maelstrom of burning sand.

?

She woke with a gasp to a thick black night, the weight of Leviticus resting heavily on her chest.