overtook battle exhilaration as he began to shrink into the skeletal state of true death.
I yanked my weapons out and whirled, ready in case any other demons teleported in. After fifteen minutes, I tucked the silver knife into my belt. That wouldn’t kill demons. Only bone of their own brethren would, and now, I had plenty more to make new weapons with.
I tore the arms off the two demons, throwing them out of the hole above me. Then, I began to explore the tomb. Time and dust had faded the paintings and hieroglyphs on the walls, but I saw the falcon-headed god Horus in one scene and the green-skinned god Osiris in another. There were more paintings showing scenes from the life of the deceased. There should have been various personal effects, statues, treasures and other ceremonial items, too, but the tomb’s inner hall had been stripped. That explained the overloaded Jeep.
The seals on the doors of the inner chamber were broken, too. I went inside, angry but not surprised that both artfully painted coffins containing the mummy had been breached. Only the clay jars containing the mummy’s internal organs were left. Then I smelled something unexpected. Fresh blood.
I nudged a mass of cobras aside to reveal the body of a young woman opposite the sarcophagus. Her skin was the same golden bronze as mine and she had long black hair that covered her face. When I brushed it away, I swore.
I’d been tracking her since I’d hacked into all the recent medical records posted online using a program that a hacker friend of mine had created. I was searching for a very specific type of psychosis: people who claimed they came from another time and who had no modern records to prove otherwise.
I winced as I looked at her body. Large gashes covered her torso, but the wounds weren’t sloppy. They were precise, avoiding vital organs or arteries in order to deny her a quick death. Beneath the blood, I saw markings inked onto her body. I rolled her over, revealing more markings hidden beneath her. As soon as I did, dark magic crawled across my skin with the unsettling sensation of dozens of spiders.
A nearby cobra suddenly reared up and struck me in the face. Annoyed, I flung it aside, only to have another one bite my leg. Enough! I grabbed as many as I could and flew out of the tomb. Once outside, I let them go. It took several more trips before I was through, but I was glad to get rid of them. They must have been brought in to add to the poor woman’s terror. Fear was a powerful ingredient in dark magic, and someone had performed a horrific ritual on the slain woman.
I went back to her body, using my clothes to clean her blood off the symbols. I recognized a few, but I didn’t know the others, and I knew a lot of magic. I took out my mobile and snapped pictures of them. Then, I bent down next to her, closed my eyes, and released the hold I had on my deepest senses.
The magic used to perform the ritual hit me first, choking me with a sickeningly familiar taste. Dagon. The smell of her blood, fear, and the sulfur stink from all the demons had been too strong for me to scent my worst enemy before, but I could taste Dagon’s magic now, and it was all I could do not to vomit.
I swallowed hard and pushed past it, searching to see if she had other magic traces within her. Death had left almost nothing behind, but then Dagon’s magic soured my senses again, though far fainter this time.
She’d had some of Dagon’s power deep within her. I knew only one way that could have happened. She’d been telling the truth to the mental-health facility she’d escaped from. She wasn’t from this current time. She was from long before it.
Maybe that’s why she’d been spotted running into this dismal part of the desert. It was a wasteland now, but a few millennia ago, it had been part of a prosperous city, and when people were frightened, they tended to run home.
I sat back with a frustrated sigh. Had Dagon murdered her because she was one of the newly resurrected people who had been freed when the souls Dagon hoarded inside himself had been released? Dagon was spiteful, but there was one thing demons valued even more than payback: power.