On the bank of the River Sebu, the hot wind carrying the strangely spiced aroma of the fertile soil, Micaela Tomasi gazed out across the rushing water and the primeval north African landscape, and wondered how such a serene and beautiful location could ever have been home to warring demons. Yet it had. All of the research that the Watchers Council had discovered had guided them to this very place, an hour’s Jeep ride from the walls of Marrakesh.
Dyannah Neville, the sensitive, had drawn a blank while they were in the city. But once they had arrived at the banks of the Sebu, she had closed her eyes, held her fingers out like dowsing rods, and guided them right to the spot.
That had been six days ago. Working as swiftly as possible, the expedition had managed to unearth most of the bizarre tomb that had been buried in the wall of the riverbank. With its large earthen bricks, the tomb seemed quite unlike anything that local peoples would have constructed, instead reminding Micaela of tombs she’d seen in the ruins of some desert civilizations.
As she stood and watched, several of the Watchers Council archaeologists worked carefully trying to open the sealed chamber without damaging the tomb. Watching them work always took her breath away. They were artists, truly. She admired their gracefulness and steady hands, their almost worshipful delicacy.
With a sigh, Micaela strode along the riverbank and picked up a sledgehammer. Gently, she pushed past Dyannah. The nominal leader of this expedition was Trevor Hopkins, who also headed up the Council’s archaeological department. Micaela had once betrayed the Council, so no matter how many times she proved herself in the years since, they would never allow her to actually be in charge of an operation of this scale—which, she had been surprised to discover, was all right with her. It made her the maverick, the one everyone watched carefully, and the first one they turned to when trouble began.
“Trevor?” she said.
He had been brushing carefully at the mortar around the door to the chamber. Now his brow furrowed with a bit of pique at her intrusion. Slowly he and his assistant, Roberto Corelli, glanced back.
By then Micaela had already begun to swing the sledgehammer. Both men swore and dove out of the way. The hammer struck the door and an echo that they could hear outside boomed through the tomb. The door cracked in two. Micaela lifted the sledge again, but Marcus Green—an American Watcher she’d once been involved with—grabbed the handle and held her back.
“What the hell are you doing, Mickey?” Marcus demanded.
She hated when he called her that. Slender as she was, Micaela was tall and fit. She twisted the sledgehammer out of Marcus’s grip and shoved him away, preparing to swing it again.
“No, Micaela, please!” Trevor said. “You mustn’t!”
The white-haired, bespectacled man stepped between her and the tomb just as she began to bring the hammer around. Micaela faltered, stopped herself, and sighed, dropping the sledge to the ground. The relief on Trevor’s face was almost comical. At least a dozen members of the team crowded around now, staring in fascination and horror at both Micaela and the damage she’d done.
“What is wrong with you people?” Micaela demanded. She stared at Trevor a moment, then glanced around at Corelli, Dyannah, Marcus, and the entire crew. “Am I the only one who heard the word ‘apocalypse’ in the briefing we had on this excursion?”
Trevor’s face creased with the air of a scolding parent. “This tomb has lain undisturbed for more than three thousand years. We have an obligation to history, and to the culture of Morocco, to—”
Micaela rolled her eyes. “Spare me.”
“Miss Tomasi!” the older man snapped, and this time she realized his expression was not that of a parent, but an irritated teacher, full of self-important condescension.
“My dear Professor Hopkins,” she said, “I understand and admire the care you take in your work. Truly I do. But we’re not here as archaeologists. We’re here as representatives of the Watchers Council, attempting to avert a supernatural cataclysm. There isn’t time for the niceties and protocols. You can preserve the sanctity of your dig, or you can save the lives of your children and grandchildren.”
A murmuring arose among the members of the expedition team, the tone of which seemed to concur with her.
Reluctantly Trevor stepped aside. When he did, Micaela saw that there was no need for another strike with the sledgehammer. The face of the tomb had been broken in half, and one side had already collapsed. She went and knelt in front of the opening, pulling the earthen bricks out and tossing them behind her in the dirt. She heard one bump down the slope and splash in the river. When that happened, Corelli cursed her in Italian, unaware that she knew the language quite well. Micaela ignored him.
In less than three minutes, she’d done what Trevor would have preferred they take that many days to do. On her knees, she dragged a number of the bricks farther away from the entrance.
“Light,” she said.
Trevor and Corelli both ignored her, almost as if she hadn’t spoken. Unwilling to be a part of what they no doubt thought of as her barbaric assault on the ancient tomb, they watched birds wheeling across the sky. Micaela had a distaste for dramatics, especially from anyone over the age of sixteen, and she didn’t bother trying to hide her disapproval.
Marcus stepped forward and handed her a flashlight.
“Thanks,” she said, and clicked it on.
She shone the light inside the tomb, which seemed remarkably dry considering its proximity to the river. No groundwater had entered. The sepulchre had been built like a brick oven, but over the course of three millennia, she would have expected deterioration. The bricks showed no streaks from seepage, nothing.
Dry as a bone, she thought.
The flashlight picked out the shape of a casket or coffin of some kind. The burial customs of the local populace, circa 1000 BC, involved nothing of the sort, but that did not trouble Micaela. If all of their research was accurate, they had just opened the tomb of Kandida, alternately called the river demon or water djinni. According to legend, the gods had chosen a young girl of Marrakesh to be their instrument. The girl had defeated Kandida and—unable to destroy her corporeal form—instructed the river people how to bury the demon so that she would not rise again.
Micaela had no doubt that this young girl had been a Slayer. Some of the members of the Council disagreed, but she believed they only did so because they would rather be wrong than agree with her.
The sarcophagus inside the tomb looked almost like a tiny ship, its hull made from strips of polished wood that shone as though the last coat had just been applied to the honeyed planks, another element of the tomb that had been impossibly preserved.
She backed away from the entrance, stood, and brushed dirt off of her pants. “Get it out of there.”
Trevor shook his head in disdain. After a moment he came to realize that the entire team was watching him, waiting for a response. He was the leader of the expedition.
“Get on with it,” he said, gesturing toward the tomb. Then he turned his back on the rest of them and went down to the edge of the river, gazing out over the water.
Marcus gestured to a couple of diggers, who came down to join him on the bank of the river. Micaela gave them room, backing away but watching carefully. Her golden hair had begun to come undone from her braid and she reached up to loosen it, letting it spill around her shoulders.
“Micaela,” Dyannah said. Her voice was quiet but carried a power that belied its softness. The mixture of Indian and British ancestry had given her an exotic, ethereal beauty that seemed appropriate for a psychic sensitive.
“What is it?” Micaela asked.
Dyannah shook her head. “I have a bad feeling about this.”
“So do I. In fact, I would rather be almost anywhere else right now. Preferably somewhere with margaritas. But we’re out of options, Dyannah.”
Micaela turned to look at Corelli, who stood by watching the proceedings with his arms crossed in gruff disapproval.
“Besides, Mr. Corelli has assured me that we’ve nothing to be worried about.”
The Italian turned his dark eyes upon her, his right eye twitching with annoyance. Corelli had the effete demeanor of many of his peers, perhaps learned from Trevor Hopkins, but Micaela found him troubling because he was startlingly handsome, like some thirties movie star. It pissed her off that a man that attractive could be so thoroughly unlikable. Looks weren’t everything, of course, but they’d been wasted on him.
“We have been through this many times, Micaela,” Corelli said. “Yes, the research seems to indicate that a Slayer was involved in Kandida’s defeat. Certainly the construction of the tomb has some significance. But I suspect when we have a closer look, we’ll discover sigils and wards etched on the interior that will hold her there. As long as we don’t remove the remains completely from the tomb, and seal it up again quickly thereafter, we’re in no danger.”
Micaela slid her hands into her pockets. “So why is the Maghrebi Ivory buried with her?”
Corelli’s upper lip actually curled in a momentary sneer. “I have never met a woman as arrogant as you. Maybe that pleases you. I suspect it does. But you have only guesses, Micaela. They are not logical. You have seen all of the research. In the lore surrounding the Maghrebi Ivory, there is no reference to the amulet having the sort of magic required to restrain or negate the mystic power of a goddess.”
“But we think we can use it to avert an apocalypse?”
Now she was just trying to aggravate him. The more pissed off Corelli became, the more she wanted to kiss him. Not that she would. She’d punch him in the nose first.
“The last time a rip appeared in the membrane between our dimension and the Nargoth Fashi Netherrealm, the amulet both repelled the evil influence leaking through and healed the rift.”
“Four-thousand-year-old hearsay. The truth is, you don’t know what the Maghrebi Ivory was created for, or why it was buried here.”
Corelli scowled. “Based on the fact that the situation with the Nargoth Fashi is precisely the same as described in the legends, I am entirely confident that the amulet’s purpose is to reknit the fabric of the curtain between dimensions, not simply to be some sort of magical sponge. If the Slayer buried it here, she did so to keep it out of the hands of those who might have wished to destroy it. We’ve come here to avert an apocalypse, not create one.”
He spun on one foot and marched away from her.
At the tomb Marcus and the diggers had begun the process of gently sliding the wooden sarcophagus—that odd ship’s hull—to the entrance so that they could open it without actually removing it from its brick enclosure.
Micaela glanced at Dyannah. “Do you believe Corelli?”
“I wish that I could,” the psychic said. “The dread I feel may simply be resonance in this location. It’s not impossible.”
“But you don’t think so.”
“No.” Dyannah reached inside the light cotton shirt she wore and produced a leather thong, at the end of which dangled a small pouch of herbs, dried apples, and a withered sliver of a raven’s heart.
Micaela knew exactly what the pouch contained because she had one exactly like it in the right front pocket of her pants. Dyannah had made it up for her upon request. No matter what Corelli insisted, both of them had decided it was best to take precautions.
“It’s open!” Marcus called.
Trevor turned from the river and marched back toward the tomb without so much as a glance at Micaela.
From their vantage point slightly higher on the riverbank, Micaela and Dyannah could see down over the shoulders of the crouched archaeologists and into the mouth of the tomb. They had set aside the wooden lid of the sarcophagus. Inside the vessel lay a small, withered body, a dried-out husk of a thing. It looked like the remains of a tiny child, burned down to ash in the doomed city of Pompeii.
Trevor pulled on a latex glove and reached down into the gleaming ship. Still its sides gleamed, and the inside of the tomb remained completely dry, the demon of the river deprived of all moisture.
A terrible dread seized Micaela’s heart. But they had a job to do. For all of her doubts, and all of her taunting of Corelli, they were out of options.
With a smile of something like triumph, Trevor lifted the Maghrebi Ivory from the sarcophagus. He held it up for all of them to see. The amulet must have been four or five inches in diameter, a beautiful piece of glittering gold with a disk of pure ivory at its center.
Dyannah screamed.
Micaela glanced at her, followed her terrified gaze, and saw a gigantic, three-taloned hand thrusting up from the river. The water had taken on the shape of the hand, and it reached up the riverbank and into the tomb, knocking Trevor away from the sarcophagus.
The talons thrust down into the wooden ship and raised up the withered husk of the demon, forming a fist around it. The nearly fetal cadaver seemed to absorb the water, and began to grow. The water rushed around it in a maelstrom, and then the demon stood naked on the bank of the River Sebu. Nine feet tall, beautiful, and terrifying to behold, her flesh the color of copper and her hair the flowing blue of the river, Kandida opened her arms, flashing three long talons on each hand, and smiled.
In that moment, Micaela loved her, wanted to go to her, but that was the djinni’s magic.
“Look away,” Dyannah said.
Micaela reached out and took the psychic’s hand, and the two of them embraced, closing their eyes tightly and praying that the wards Dyannah had prepared would protect them.
Then the screaming began.