My mind was spinning and I felt a sense of doom rising in me. Some shrieking, distant voice in my mind was insisting that something horrible from the past was repeating itself, swelling out of history into the present like poison gas. The vampiress in the club—surely she was one of the asetem-ankh-astet? The description fit. It rang another bell as welclass="underline" Hadn’t my father described his “white worm-man” in similar terms? The thought made me queasy and I wanted to ask her about it, but I knew she wouldn’t have much patience. And what about Alice? The white vampire I’d spoken with last night hadn’t even liked her, so what was the connection? If the asetem were responsible for Purcell’s disappearance, how was Alice connected? Or was she? She hadn’t been connected to my father or she’d have taunted me with that information long ago.
I chided myself. I wasn’t seeing something. I was letting myself be distracted by my fear and incredulity. I needed to stick to the most immediate question. “Jakob was here before?” I asked.
“I say it; it is so! He has been here several times in two cycles. He did not stink so badly at first, but he began to rot once he touched the wine jars. The corruption sealed in those vessels offends me even yet. What waste of blood! The asetem took them away, but the smell lingered.”
“These wine jars. were they Greek ones? Amphorae?”
“They were the Greek style, but they never came from the clay of Greece. No Greek stores blood in jars such as those.”
“There was blood in the jars? Old blood?”
“No! Corrupted with death and magic but fresh enough. I should have slaughtered them all!” And she gave a roar of fury, snatching at her blades to clang them together over her head. She whirled back to face me, menacing and enraged. “Now you say you seek these things?”
“I don’t. I wanted to know what was in them. I have a bad feeling they’re meant for something terrible, that they have something to do with my past and my father’s, but I don’t know what. And I have a friend here I’m worried about. Someone who shouldn’t have had anything to do with these jars, but I’m starting to wonder. ”
“Who? Which of mine do you care for?”
“His name is Will.”
She shook her dreadlocked mane and growled. “Describe him to me!”
“Tall, talks like me, has silver hair, but he’s young—”
“Gone! He has not come here since he took the letter your Jakob creature brought.”
“The charmed letter? Was for Will?” Cold clutched my chest, strangling the breath in my lungs. My dreams weren’t just dreams: Will was in trouble and it was Purcell who was behind it—Edward’s agent, Edward’s “friend.” Or the asetem who seemed to know Alice and Wygan and white worm-men who’d probably killed Christelle and driven my father to suicide.
I started to bolt, to find Will wherever he was. The goddess snatched my arm, jerking me back around. I should have been able to pull free, but I couldn’t. Sekhmet sliced the palm of my left hand with the tip of her knife, releasing a fine bead of blood. She bent her head and lapped the wound, which closed again as she touched it. Then she narrowed her eyes at me.
“I taste life and death in you, hunter. You are of my charge—a warrior—but you shall have to choose your course yourself. I will not help you this time. You must first prove your worth. I charge you to choose justice. Or I shall see you at the gates of hell and Anubis shall eat your heart. Do not betray me—I am a forgotten god, but not powerless where you go.”
She threw down my hand, spinning me back to face Oxford Street. “Now. Run,” she commanded.
I ran, twisting back only once to look for her, but she’d returned to her plinth above the door, cold stone, black and patient. It wasn’t fear of a god that made me go, or even fear of the past that chilled my bones, but fear for the living. I didn’t understand how it had come about. I was here on Edward’s business and it was Edward’s broken empire that had been used to set this up, I had no doubt. Alice had tried to topple Edward before and it seemed she ought to be the one I found at the core, but the leads somehow came back to me and my father and whatever had happened to him. This was the cycle again, whatever it led to: The asetem had wanted something from my father, so they took Christelle. Now they may have taken Will.
CHAPTER 26
I knew the address of Will’s flat but I didn’t know where it was in this rabbit-warren city. The tail end of rush hour clogged the streets and I fought for every step toward Oxford Circus. I’d I find a place to search my map once I was in the station’s ticket lobby—I’d make one if I had to. There were eddies near the big maps on the wall that I could stand in long enough to find his street, people I could ask to direct me, poor befuddled American that I was. I’d even play the helpless female if I had to. I’m not religious but I do take the words of gods seriously these days. It’s safer.
Will’s flat was on Whitcomb Street, which my map showed as northwest of Trafalgar Square. Two Underground stations were nearby on a line directly from Oxford Circus and another on a different line. Of the three, I chose Piccadilly Circus, since it was only one stop away. I assumed a famous tourist site like Trafalgar Square would be a madhouse at rush hour on a sunny Friday afternoon, so I hoped I was making the right choice by avoiding it to start at the north end of Whitcomb.
I had no idea what the distance was—my maps didn’t seem quite to scale sometimes, though I knew they must be. The twists and turns of London’s thoroughfares and byways made every street seem longer and farther from the previous one. I ground my teeth impatiently while waiting for the train and then standing in the crush.
I shoved my way out of the train on arrival and dashed up the stairs heedless of others and raising a commotion in my wake. I didn’t care. I ran on, two long blocks down Coventry to Whitcomb and south on Whitcomb.
I was nearly all the way to Pall Mall, almost to Trafalgar Square after all, before I spotted the number I wanted and had to turn sharply, cutting across the street, dancing between cars and trucks as irate drivers honked at me, to dive into a gated courtyard on the other side.
The fact that it was commuter hour and I was wearing business clothes worked in my favor; a man in a business suit was just unlocking the gate as I dodged up, panting, “Lost my key.”
He held the gate, smiling. “S’all right. I’m on my third—flatmates keep takin’ ’em.”
“Thank you,” I said, catching my breath. Now I just had to shake him while I looked for Will’s flat. “I just can’t seem to keep track of things,” I added with an inane giggle.
His smile got a little cooler. “Ah. You’re American.”
I nodded.
“I suppose you know the fellas up on the second floor, then?” he asked, looking a little hopeful, but of what I wasn’t sure. Conversation? A date? Maybe it was just his natural expression, but I really didn’t want him to take too much interest in me, since I was sneaking in. “They seem quite nice.”
“You mean Will and Mikey? Oh, yeah. They’re sweet! It’s so nice to hear a voice from home, y’know?” I scratched my nose, then inspected my nails. “Eww! I can’t believe how dirty I get here!” There’s nothing like offhand insults and bad personal hygiene to make someone wish they’d never seen you. Cary used to say the easiest way to get someone to stop looking at you was to pick your nose in public. I hoped I wouldn’t have to go that far.
The man coughed and picked up his briefcase before turning away. “Umm. yes. Gets a bit filthy during tourist season. ”
Left on my own just inside the gate, I only needed to get up to the second floor to reach the Novaks’ flat. I’d gone up one flight and along the corridor for a few feet before I remembered that the British start numbering above the ground floor. What I thought of as the second floor, they called the first. I hurried back to the stairs and up another flight. Then down the hall to number twenty-two.