“I’ll be right back,” I called through Denny Hall’s closing glass door and hurried down the steep stairs on my way to get coffee, careful not to slip. I hugged myself to fend off the damp chill as I made my way along the slick paved pathway. I was antsy and fidgety, so much so that I’d completely forgotten to retrieve my jacket before rushing outside, and a brisk walk through the seemingly constant Seattle drizzle would do my frayed nerves good.
It had just been a nightmare—or daymare, I told myself. It had all been in my head. But I couldn’t help stopping on the sidewalk by the scene of the imaginary crime and staring down at the spot on the asphalt where Dr. Ramirez’s lifeless body had lain what felt like only moments ago.
I blinked, squeezing my eyelids shut in an attempt to block out a memory from a dream that had felt far too real. When I opened my eyes again, my heartbeat tripped over itself, and I screamed, “NO!”
Dr. Ramirez was there. He shouldn’t have been; I’d just left him in the lobby of Denny Hall. He was supposed to be inside the old building, safe and sound and not here. Not in danger. This couldn’t be happening.
He’d just stepped onto the street and was jogging across. At hearing my shout, he paused to look back at me, and not a second later, a speeding station wagon slammed into him.
Dr. Ramirez’s body rolled up onto the hood, his head hitting the windshield with a sickening crack before he slid back down and was dumped on the asphalt. His arm flopped out to the side, landing in a grimy puddle.
“Oh my God! Dr. Ramirez!” I stumbled across the sidewalk and onto the university’s main drag. But I already knew it was too late. I already knew, because I’d dreamed about almost this exact, horrific thing happening mere minutes ago.
I already knew that Dr. Ramirez was dead.
“But there are no guarantees, Meswett.” Dr. Julian Sands, veterinarian to the Nejeret stars, stared down at Rus, the tiny, still-as-stone kitten curled up in near-eternal slumber beside Marcus’s ancient little girl, Tarset. Both were frozen in time, appearing to be statues carved from quartz—Tarset, to prevent her body from giving in to the effects of a lethal poison, and Rus, because it was the only way to bring him with me into the future. “Not in cases like this,” Dr. Sands continued, “because, well, there aren’t any other cases like this.”
“I see.” I crossed my arms and cleared my throat. Disturbed as I’d been all morning by the third recurrence of the unsettling dream about my former graduate advisor being hit by a car—it was a near-exact replay of the first echo I’d ever witnessed, though thankfully it had never truly come to pass—I’d managed to pay attention to the highly esteemed and even more highly recommended vet pretty damn well.
Dr. Sands reached across the corner of the bed of solidified At and touched my shoulder. I made a small, unobtrusive hand gesture by my thigh—a preemptive attempt to keep Nik from taking offence at what he would no doubt perceive as an inappropriate and potentially threatening touch. I caught only the slightest movement from him in my periphery, but his heavy exhale told me he wasn’t pleased that Dr. Sand’s hand was on my shoulder.
Sometimes Nik could be so overprotective that he made Marcus’s efforts to keep me safe look negligent in comparison. Considering my current delicate condition—that I was carrying unborn twins who were fated to restore balance to the universe, otherwise known as ma’at to the Nejerets’ godlier ancestors, and that I was almost constantly on the verge of having a full-on freak-out breakdown worthy of my very own padded room because of said current condition—I didn’t mind so much.
“I’m not suggesting we don’t move forward with little Rus’s transition,” Dr. Sands said, “I’m just saying we should proceed with extreme caution . . . take it slow. Pathogens are tricky, and they evolve quickly—it would be impossible to predict what will and won’t harm him. Any immunity he’s developed so far will be irrelevant. He’ll have to start over from scratch.”
I swallowed, and it sounded obscenely loud in the barren, sterile room. Again, I said, “I see.”
We were underground, in the basement of the main house in the Heru compound, in a small room on the periphery of Neffe’s intricate home-lab setup, where she and Aset were leading up a team hard at work trying to find a solution to the Tarset problem—how to revive a little girl who’d been poisoned thousands of years ago and frozen in time ever since. Tarset and Rus had been down in this room since we’d returned from the Nejeret Oasis in the Sahara a week earlier. It was a cold space, hardly ideal for a child, and we were all eager to restore Marcus’s little girl—and me my ten-week-going-on-five-thousand-year-old kitten—to life as soon as possible. Or, rather, as soon as was safe.
Dr. Sands was renowned throughout the Nejeret community for being the most experienced and knowledgeable practitioner of animal medicine alive today. He had over a millennium of caring for Nejeret pets under his belt, and he’d traveled halfway across the world to Bainbridge Island to help me with my tiny, out-of-time kitten situation. If anyone would be able to help Rus survive the transition into the modern world, it was this man.
Dr. Sands withdrew his hand from my shoulder and ran his fingers through his dirty blond hair. “Give me a couple days to draw up a plan and put together a full series of vaccinations, Meswett.” He flashed me a brilliant smile, belying the mild uncertainty in his eyes. “I’m confident we’ll have little Rus running around and bothering Thora in no time.”
At the thought of Rus catting around with my older tabby, Thora, I actually managed to return the veterinarian’s smile. I nodded and held my arm out toward the open doorway, where Nik and Dominic stood sentry and Carlisle, Marcus’s “man,” waited with his ever-present smartphone in hand. “Please, make yourself at home in the lab. Neffe won’t mind.”
Dominic snorted.
“Much,” I added. “And just let Carlisle know what you need, and he’ll help make the arrangements.”
“Wonderful,” Dr. Sands said. He started toward Carlisle and the guarded doorway to the lab, but he paused midway and looked at me over his shoulder. “It will be the same for the girl, you know . . . the adjustment to modern pathogens.”
With a slow blink, I redirected my focus to Tarset’s opalescent cherubic face and felt a single tear sneak over the brim of my eyelid and glide down my cheek. Tarset had been poisoned over five thousand years ago, and not only did we not know what Apep-Ankhesenpepi had used to poison the Oasis’s water supply, we didn’t even know if an antidote could be created or if the damage the poison had caused to Tarset’s young body could be reversed. Her suspended state was the only thing keeping her from death. Once we unfroze her, the ancient little girl would be lucky if she survived long enough to worry about modern pathogens. Which was precisely why Neffe had hunted down the best and brightest scientifically minded Nejerets to assist her and Aset in finding a way to save Marcus’s little girl.
“That’s the least of her problems,” I said quietly.
“Aren’t you finished with your consult yet?” Neffe said, brusque as ever. I turned in time to see her brushing past Carlisle and Dr. Sands on her way into the room, what appeared to be a small insulated lunchbox slung over her shoulder. “My team can’t do anything more until we have our samples.” She strode toward me, stopped beside the At bed, and set the insulated container down next to Rus, then met my eyes and winked. “Which means I need your help right now, Nik, so I can get my samples.”
I suppressed a grin. For whatever reason, Neffe loved being a pain in ass. It had taken me a while to pick up on it, but once it became obvious to Neffe that I was on to her, she started to find little ways to let me in on the joke. So far as I could tell, she simply liked to see how far she could push people. Probably because she was bored. Living for several millennia tended to do that to a person.
Nik let out a heavy sigh. “I just don’t know if I’m up to it today.” Due to his unusual circumstances of birth—being born of two Nejerets—Nik had his own minor sheut that, much like the borrowed sheut I’d been carrying for the past couple months, gave him certain powers beyond the normal Nejeret. In Nik’s case, he could manipulate the very fabric of the At, giving it physical form or, as Neffe needed him to do, reverting At particles to their original molecular structure—Nejeret flesh and bone.
I glanced at Nik, taking in his bored expression, his usual hint of a smirk, but I didn’t miss the sparkle of amusement in his too-pale blue eyes. My attention returned to Neffe just in time to catch the tail end of what appeared to be a rather pleased grin.
Carlisle escorted a somewhat confused Dr. Sands out of the room, leaving Nik, Dominic, Neffe, and myself behind.
“If you do not do what she wants, she’ll go out of her way to make your life difficult until you give in,” Dominic said, his French accent making the words sound like even more of a warning. “Trust me, I know.”
Neffe gave me a look that said, “Yeah, he’s probably right,” as well as words ever could.
With a sigh, Nik pushed away from the wall and made his way to the bedside, feet dragging just a bit. “My sheut is at your disposal, princess.”
Neffe closed her eyes for a moment, collecting herself. True, she liked acting the haughty, irritable vixen for fun, but she genuinely had a quicksilver disposition, and Nik’s new favorite nickname for her—princess—was one of her triggers. It didn’t matter that she’d grown up a princess in Middle Kingdom Egypt, the daughter of Queen Hatshepsut, or that her father had been the Nejeret equivalent to a king but had abdicated the figurative throne during Neffe’s adolescence. She hated being called “princess.”
“If you call me that one more time,” Neffe said through clenched teeth, “I will tear that ridiculous ring out of your eyebrow.”
Nik leaned in close to Neffe and whispered, “Promise?”
I could practically see the shiver work its way over her body, could all but sense her sudden discomfort as she sidled closer to me. Nik had that effect on people—whether it was the array of tattoos covering his body from the neck down in various shades of fading gray, his standoffish attitude, or the fact that Re, the godly being who’d once been the father of our kind, resided within his body, most people found him disturbing, Nejeret and human alike. Me? I just liked to think of him as unique.
Nik tossed me a shit-eating grin. He knew the effect he had on Neffe and pretty much everyone else. He liked it.
“So, um . . .” I looked from Nik to Neffe and back. “Should we get started? I know Marcus wanted to catch the ten o’clock ferry, and it’s got to be nearly nine . . .”
“It’s a quarter till,” Dominic offered. I glanced at him, still standing sentry by the doorway, and offered him a small smile and a nod.
“Yes, yes, very well.” Neffe pointed to Tarset’s arm, shrouded in a thin but impervious and unmovable blanket. “Nik, I need you to restore her elbow area, maybe an inch above and an inch below. Then her mouth, just for a moment. That will give me blood, tissue, and saliva samples,” she said, ticking each off on her fingers. “Which will have to be good enough. We can’t risk restoring her vital organs, not even for a second, so be careful.”
Surprised by the sudden heat in her voice, I glanced at Neffe’s face. Her caramel eyes burned with an intensity I’d only seen a time or two before. And then it struck me—this wasn’t just some little girl we were trying to revive, this was her sister. Though Neffe had never actually met Tarset, having been born over a thousand years later, they were sisters. I hadn’t met any of Marcus’s other children in modern times. Honestly, I wasn’t sure if there were any others still living; his past families were a touchy subject for Marcus, and though I’d unearthed a fair bit of his humanity under the stony wall built up by millennia of life and death and love and loss, I still had a colossal amount of chiseling to do. In some ways, Marcus was almost as ensconced in time as little Tarset.
When Nik didn’t respond to Neffe’s cautioning to take care, Neffe made to reach for his arm, but stopped herself short. Instead, she made a fist. “If you’re at all unsure . . .”
“Nik is not entirely confident in his ability to wield his sheut so specifically.” The words had been uttered using Nik’s vocal chords, tongue, and lips, but their cadence and accent hinted at another speaker entirely. One quick glance at Nik’s face, at the open, relaxed expression and the opalescent irises now staring back at me, confirmed it—Nik was no longer in control; Re was. “I will do this for you instead, Neferure.” His lips curved upwards in a smile that looked nothing like Nik’s. “Personally, I’d rather not feel the pain of this ring tearing through our flesh.”
“I—I—” Neffe stammered. “Of—of course not, Great Father.” She cleared her throat. “I wouldn’t have actually . . . I mean, I—”
“It is fine, child,” Re-Nik said, touching Neffe’s arm. “I understand more than you think. Now, shall we begin?”