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Ellie couldn’t draw upon that vast well of knowledge at will. If she had been able to, she might at least have tried to write some of it down—for all the good that would do in the complete absence of any surviving physical proof of the city’s existence. She had only little bits and pieces that popped into her mind by way of some bizarre association, like looking at the pattern on a scarf in Jamaica and thinking,yes, that’s rather like the ladies of Tulan used to do it.Or when she tracked the flight of a falcon and found herself calculating auguries using the methods of a civilization that had died two hundred years before she was born.
Those fragments were as frustrating as they were tantalizing. She was the last living resource on a people and a way of life that had shaped the Mesoamerican world… and there was absolutely nothing she coulddoabout it.
Now it looked as though she was going to have to do it all again here in Egypt. Ellie couldn’t possibly allow another powerful arcanum to fall into Dawson and Jacobs’ clutches—or those of whatever organization had hired them.
She knew next to nothing about who pulled the two villains’ strings, but any group that would hire a man as ruthless as Jacobs to do their work for them certainly couldn’t be trusted with the artifact they sought here in Egypt—namely the Staff of Moses, the Biblical relic with the power to turn water to blood and sink the world into an eternal night.
Never mind the plagues of locusts.
Ellie had raced from British Honduras with barely a stop to pick up her valise. She didn’t see how Dawson and Jacobs could possibly have gotten a lead on her—but she had also learned the danger of underestimating the resources at their disposal. She had been on guard for their reappearance from the moment she stepped off the boat in Alexandria. It wasn’t a question of whether Dawson and Jacobs would turn up—butwhen.
Ellie’s only advantage lay in surprise. Dawson and Jacobs had no reason to suspect that she and Adam knew where they were headed next.
That was good—because to defeat them, she was going to need every edge she could scrape together.
“Nice hotel?”
The voice chirped up from beside her with startling volume. Ellie jolted as she looked around for the speaker—and then down.
The words had come from a boy of around eight who stood roughly the height of Ellie’s shoulder, dressed in a skullcap and a galabeya with a tattered hem. His dark hair fell over his eyes, which fixed on her with an intimidating determination.
“Bag carrier? Donkey ride?” the boy pressed forcefully.
“No, thank you,” Ellie replied.
“Pyramid tour? Dancing girls?” the boy tried.
“Dancing girls!” Ellie narrowed her eyes in disapproval.
The boy glared right back at her. “For your gentleman,” he pressed.
Ellie stiffened. “I am sure I don’t know what you mean.”
The boy pointed to the valise at her feet. “That bag is yours,” he said confidently. He shifted his finger to jab at the bag that slouched beside it—a battered, stained canvas rucksack. “Thatbag is not.”
The stray cat by the two pieces of baggage rolled over, stretching out luxuriantly to expose its white and orange belly.
“How do you know?” Ellie challenged crossly.
“It smells like old donkey,” the boy returned authoritatively. “If you carry it, you smell like the donkey too.”
Ellie had to admire the perspicacity of his deduction. The truth was, the bag’s owner was occasionally capable of smelling a little… well, less than perfectly fresh. He had freely admitted as much on more than one occasion, including a memorable morning where he had remedied the situation by cannon-balling into Ellie’s bathing area.
She found herself vividly recalling a splash of water, an excess of bare male skin, and an irrepressible grin.
Trust me, Princess. You’ll be glad I did this.
The memory brought a telling flush to her cheeks.
“That one belongs to my… traveling companion,” she conceded.
“Aywa.” The boy crossed his arms over his chest. “I askhim.”
Ellie’s jaw dropped slightly at the child’s sheer audacity, but her frustration was offset by a grudging note of respect. The little monster was nothing if not determined.
She readied herself to give him a stern talking-to about reinforcing patriarchal notions of a woman’s subservience to whatever man might happen to be a member of her party. Before she could begin, a call from the milling crowd of animals and travelers nearby caught her ear as one of the vendors switched from rapid Masri to simple, practiced English.
“Authentic artifacts! Ancient treasures! Best Egyptian souvenir!”
