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All the eyes in the room turned toward her.
In a final, desperate moment of inspiration, Ellie slammed her bleeding arm down onto the night-black stone.
The hissing rose as pain burned through her skin. Pale gray smoke spilled up from the point of contact, thick and rich as a smoldering campfire.
Ellie opened her mouth, drawing in a breath to scream.
It tasted of forest, rain, and night—and then the pain was gone as the world around her went dark.
?
Forty-Three
Sand stung againsther skin. Ellie clutched the trowel and brush in her hands as the storm whipped around her, blurring her view of the brown expanse of the Nile…
Smoke hung over a gray London street. The women around her jostled, screaming, with tears of joy on their faces. Grandmothers and schoolgirls jumped, arm in arm, with the joy of victory. Blood stained the white fabric of their blouses…
Calloused hands traced over her skin as they danced along the length of her thigh. A roughly stubbled jaw brushed against her cheek as she felt the delicious pain of a nibble at her earlobe. She grabbed taut skin and lean muscle. The wildness inside of her rose as the walls crumbled away and everything began to burn…
…and she landed on her back on a floor of cool white tile.
Ellie blinked up at the ceiling of a familiar room.
Over a shelf of fluffy white towels, frosted glass windows filtered the soft afternoon light. A steaming tub frothed with rose-scented bubbles.
She sat up, taking in the clean, comfortable glory of the washroom at the Rio Nuevo Hotel.
“How the devil am I here?” she demanded aloud.
“You aren’t.”
Ellie whirled, scrambling to her feet, and saw the woman with the scar on her cheek standing on the other side of the tub. This time, she was dressed like Mrs. Linares in a brightly colored skirt and vibrant jewelry.
“How areyouhere?” Ellie spluttered.
The woman circled the tub, running a hand along the smooth porcelain rim of it.
“This was the one desire I could break into,” she said distantly as she let her hand fall. “The others were too strong.”
“My desire for… a bath?” Ellie tentatively returned.
The woman’s mouth pulled into a rueful smile that reminded Ellie of an expression Padre Kuyoc might make.
Ellie glanced down at herself. She was still wearing her stolen trousers and one-sleeved shirt. They were covered in cave dirt and bat droppings. So was the rest of her.
She started to reach for her hair, and then thought better of it. She wasn’t sure she wanted to know how bad it was.
The smell wasn’t very nice, either.
“Well,” Ellie conceded as she dropped tiredly into the chair beside the tub. “I suppose that’s fair. But why?” The question blurted out of her. “Why am I seeing you at all?”
The woman sat down on the edge of the tub. She trailed her fingers in the rose-scented bubbles. She was small but strong—beautiful in a way that was easy to overlook.
“The amulet found you,” she replied.
Only ‘amulet’ wasn’t quite right. What the woman said was something else—a word that hummed and whispered at the edge of Ellie’s consciousness.
All of the woman’s words were like that, Ellie realized with a jolt. The ones that came into her mind were only approximations, some of them better than others.
