given by the North American consul. She’d had anti-glamourie charms layered all over her court, in case any fey tried to gate crash, I supposed. Therefore, my first look at him had been more than a little disturbing.
I’d had no idea what was wrong with him at the time. But based on what I’d just been told, I assumed that he and his elder Children had been given the prisoner treatment at some point. Maybe by his predecessor, after a failed coup? Not that they had looked this bad. But they had been gaunt and haggard, with sunken, leathery cheeks and hollow eyes. It was bad enough for me to guess that they’d been well on their way to starvation when they . . . fought their way out? Were released after having learned their lesson? Were rescued?
I didn’t know, and it seemed impossible to ask. But it gave me a new respect for the African consul, which was only heightened after we passed through another room that must have once held the prisoners, or ones like them. There were deep scratches on the walls, ceiling, and floor, thousands of them. As if, in their madness, they had tried to claw their way through solid rock.
Even more disturbing was the fact that they hadn’t managed it.
Limestone was fairly soft as rocks went, and the prisoners were vamps. The only scenario I could come up with for why they hadn’t been able to literally move a mountain was that they had already largely atrophied by the time they were entombed here, and were so weak that their best efforts only made scratches. To be so desperate, and yet be unable to get out, knowing the fate that awaited them . . .
I did shudder then.
Ray, I thought suddenly, Ray would have been cussing up a storm right about now and dragging me out of here. Ray was a smart man. I guessed I was less so, because after a brief pause, I followed Hassani into the burial chamber.
It turned out to be a huge room with a gorgeous sarcophagus carved out of the same yellow limestone as everything else, but long as a yacht and taller than my head. It would have fit a giant—or the actual statue of Ra outside, had they folded it up a little. But I didn’t think that was what was in there.
No, I didn’t think that at all.
I guessed Lantern Boy didn’t, either, because he was shaking enough that golden light shimmered around the room like water. It splashed the walls and made the hideous thing festooned above the sarcophagus and draped around the room to also seem to move—and thus making him shake even more. It got bad enough that Hassani took the lantern away and held it up himself, which . . . yeah.
Could have done without that.
“He ruled over the vampires of this land for time out of mind,” Hassani said, his voice hushed. “Before the pyramids were built, he ruled. Before there was an Egypt, he ruled. Before civilization itself, he was here, and he ruled.”
I didn’t say anything. Diplomacy required an answer, but fuck diplomacy. I stared upward and hoped like hell that the cracked and dusty thing up there didn’t fall on me. Or I was gonna do a Ray, I swore to God.
Hassani glanced at me, and a small smile flirted with his lips. “It is a bit much, all at once.”
Yeah, but at least I finally knew what that smell was. It permeated the air, thick and old and musty and horrible. I’d been in some bad places, and smelled some pretty terrible things. But nothing that stuck in my throat, feeling like it was clogging and burning it at the same time, quite like that.
I really envied the vamps their ability to just not breathe.
But worse than the smell was what it was coming from. Papery thin pieces of scale covered skin draped the room like evil bunting. In some cases, there was coil after coil of it, what looked like a hundred layers all rolled up together. In others, those layers had burst apart, like the most God-awful Christmas cracker ever, leaving fluttery ends waving about in the air in abstract shapes yards long, and a foot-deep confetti of smaller pieces on the floor that crunched and crackled horribly underfoot.
I shuddered visibly, and didn’t give a shit.
“After his death, he was brought here, to the seat of his power, to possibly regenerate,” Hassani said. “He