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Adam’s world narrowed to a black length of iron—and the face of the woman he loved.
Thoughts cascaded through his mind in the space of a breath. Lazy evening sunsets. Stumbling across a waterfall no one had known was there. Stripping off his shirt to fall into the sea after a long, hard day. The simple, unprepossessing scope of his ambitions—to feel life with every sense, every bone. Let it wash over him like a sudden summer rain, exactly as he found it, without pushing constantly for more, more, more. He wasn’t ready to let that go. Helikedlife.
But something else mattered more. It was all tangled up with the woman two steps away from him—the one who hadn’t even started to show the world everything she was capable of.
Adam wanted to watch those lazy sunsets withher—smoking his cigar while she rattled on about the Khmer empire. Spend afternoons watching the rain fall while he just held her and nobody talked about anything at all.
She needed to see those waterfalls. Learn poker—Adam bet she could bluff like an adorably freckled terror. Feel what it was like to throw yourself into the waves and let them wash over you like a benediction.
Pain could change a person. It could break them. Adam wouldn’t let Ellie get broken.
Even if that meant she’d have to do all of those things without him.
Jacobs dropped the barrel to aim at Ellie’s hip… and Adam got ready to throw his stubborn,recklessbody directly in the way.
Then the glass-tight stillness of the night shattered as Sayyid Al-Ahmed’s voice rang out over the stones in the syllables of a tongue that had been lost for a thousand years.
“Nen ankh rek ty’fy wi. Kheper ir’ek her tah,” Sayyid sang as he lifted the Staff of Moses in his hand. “In kheper wanam’ek san. Tem’tjen!”
Jacobs went still, his finger perfectly balanced on the trigger. Beside Julian, the Al-Saboors cast each other uncertain looks.
Dawson poked his head back out from behind the boulder he’d been cowering under, his jaw dropping.
For a breath after the echo of Sayyid’s words drifted into silence, the ridge froze, an involuntary reverence keeping each of them captive under the sprawling fabric of the night.
Then the shadows began to move.
Scarabs shivered from between the narrow crevices of the rocks. Others poured over the moon-silvered line of the ridge. They came in trickles and clusters, black bodies shining in the far threads of the lamplight.
Two of them flew at Gaps. He dropped his hold on the rifle to smack at them.
Another landed on Julian. He stiffened and swatted at it, dancing back a step.
Dawson flapped his hands furiously as a trio of fat beetles whizzed at his face.
Adam drew in another breath—and the air around him came alive.
The darkness itself rose in a thousand buzzing forms. They filled the air in clouds, swooping over the lamplit ledge.
Sayyid stumbled back as the beetles flashed through the air around him. Julian waved his pistol wildly as he tried to swat at the swarming insects, which only closed in more thickly.
Ears and Scarface shouted, then burst into a sprint—or as much of one as they could manage when they were both limping. They hauled across the ledge toward their former dig site and the path down to the valley.
With a yelp, Beardy followed them, two more of his cousins close on his heels.
The rifle twitched in Jacobs’ grip as he flinched at a pair of scarabs diving toward his face.
Neil still held the flaming sword, raising it over his head like a shield. The insects danced around him, whipping past the place where he and Constance crouched. They clung to Julian instead, peppering his pale suit like dark jewels as he shrieked and danced back.
He dropped the pistol and ran.
Dawson bolted after him, wailing about being left behind.
Jacobs flinched as another scarab landed on the side of his face. Three more clung to his hair. He kept his hands on the rifle—and his eyes on Adam.
But as the last of the Al-Saboors bolted past them, screaming and slapping at the horde of shining black insects that swarmed around their heads, Adam watched a familiar calculation shift through Jacobs’ dark gaze.
Julian’s sword still flamed in Neil’s hand, for all that Neil was staring at it with an expression of mingled awe and terror. Jemmahor had snatched up one of the discarded rifles with an expression of delight.
