jabbing it into the skulls of the dead, but after he’d cleared enough of them away, I could see he was targeting their hearts instead.
Some of the ghosts realized what he was doing and they screamed, attempting to scramble away from him or, when that didn’t work, to distract him from the gleaming orbs of their hearts. He let them wrench their bodies as far as their rooted feet allowed them to and then quickly finished off the more aggressive ghosts still in my vicinity. The others nearby were cowering like punished dogs, their arms folded over their stomachs, backs hunched as they drew away from us.
“Are you all right?” Asten asked, crouching down next to me. His eyes flicked over my face and then down my trembling torso. I ached to be held. To be stroked and comforted. Why isn’t he wrapping me in his arms? Asten touched the underside of my chin and lifted my face until our eyes met. Through my eyes alone, I tried to express just how much I needed him, how much I burned for his touch, but I must not have been successful. Again he asked, “Are you hurt, Lily?”
Something inside me shrank and shied away, much like the ghosts around me.
“Yes,” I answered, feeling the confidence and control over my emotions return with each passing moment. “I’ll be okay.”
Asten cocked his head and peered at me as if not trusting my words, but then he nodded and offered his hand. “Come on, then.”
Helping me to my feet, he handed me my spear-knives and my bow with the precious arrows of Isis.
“Asten?”
“Hmm?” he answered, intent on watching the surrounding ghosts.
“Why are they so fixated on me?”
“It must be the heart scarab. As immortals, they can sense things beyond the understanding of a living being. Such a thing as love becomes tangible to us. A physical, heady thing. As the Sons of Egypt, we can manipulate spells to control the unseen but love is unrivaled, uncontrollable, a more powerful spell than anything the gods could fabricate. Perhaps this is why even they fall victim to it.”
I was sorting this out when the ghosts around us fell absolutely dead quiet. We froze and looked around. Every ghost in the field was hunched over with their arms wrapped around their legs and heads tucked down almost between their knees.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
“I’m not sure,” Asten said, placing a hand on my shoulder in a gesture of assurance that a part of me deeply needed to feel.
Whatever was happening, it didn’t bode well for us. We’d already been conspicuous in the field of gray forms, but now that we were standing upright in a nearly flattened field, it quickly became obvious that we would make easy targets. It only took a few seconds for our deepest fears to surface.
“They’re here,” Ahmose declared. The eerie calm was now punctuated with a new sound—a clacking noise that grew in intensity with each passing moment.
There was nowhere to hide.
Ahmose knelt on the ground and murmured a spell, holding his hand out over the sand. After a few seconds he rose. “This way,” he announced. “There’s a large rock over this hill that we can put our backs to.”
As we made our way to the rock, the clacking noise grew, then subsided over and over again. The ghosts around us sank deeper into the mire. I noticed that my own steps became sluggish, my feet sticking, though the soil still looked the same to me.
When I told Asten and Ahmose, they glanced quickly at one another and then Ahmose explained. “It’s the despair. You feel it weighing on your heart. Try to focus on the things that lift your soul.”
“Is it affecting you, too?” I asked.
“Yes. But hearing that the soil feels sticky to you is alarming. It means you’re further along. Are you worried about Amon?” he asked.
“Amon?” The truth was that since descending in Asten’s arms, I’d thought of little else besides him. That’s not right, I thought. I considered my feelings. There did seem to be a kind of dark unhappiness filling my frame that wasn’t normal. I wasn’t the kind of girl to wallow. I got up and did something to fix whatever was bothering me. I wasn’t prone to depression.
If that indeed was despair weighing down my heart, it wasn’t because of Amon. I was reasonably assured that I was taking the right path to save him. I was concerned about him, of course. Saving