Victoria Nelson - Blood Lines Part 3

"Yeah? He looked like he could use some more sleep. What was he muttering as he walked away?"

"It sounded like," PC Trembley frowned, "lions, and tigers, and bears. Oh, my."

Chapter Three.

"Hi, Mom."

"Good morning, dear. How did you know it was me?" Vicki sighed and hiked the towel up more securely under her arms. "I'd just gotten into the shower. Who else could it be?" Her mother had an absolute genius for calling at the worst possible times. Henry had almost died once because of it or,conversely, she'd just missed getting killed because of that same call-Vicki had never quite settled the question to her own satisfaction.

"It's twenty to nine, dear, don't tell me you're just getting up?"

"All right."

There was a long pause while Vicki waited for her mother to work that last comment through. She heard her sigh and I then she heard, faintly in the background, the staccato sound of her nails against the desk.

"You're working for yourself now, Vicki, and that doesn't mean you can lie about all day."

"What if I was up all night on a case?"

"Were you?"

"Actually, no." Vicki put her bare foot up on one of the kitchen chairs and ma.s.saged her calf with the heel of one hand. Yesterday's climb up the tower had begun to make itself felt. "Now, as I was home two weeks ago for Thanks-giving..."Which is going to have to hold you until Christmas . "...to what do I owe the pleasure of this call?"

"Do I have to have a reason to call my only daughter?"

"No, but you usually do."

"Well, no one else is in the office yet..."

"Mom, some day the Life Sciences Department is going to expect you to start paying for these long distance calls."

"Nonsense, Vicki. Queens University has lots of money and it's not like it costs a fortune to call from Kingston to Toronto, so I thought I'd take the opportunity to see how your visit to the eye doctor went."

"Retinitis pigmentosa doesn't get any better, Mom. I still have no night sight and b.u.g.g.e.r all in the way of peripheral vision. What difference does it make how the visit to the eye doctor went?"

"Victoria!"

Vicki sighed and pushed her gla.s.ses up her nose. "Sorry. Nothing's changed."

"Then it hasn't gotten any worse." Her mother's tone acknowledged the apology and agreed to drop the subject. "Have you managed to line up any work?"

She'd finished an insurance fraud case the last week of September. There hadn't been anything since. If she were a better liar... "Nothing yet, Mom."

"Well, what about Michael Celluci? He's still on the force. Can't he find you something?"

"Mother!"

"Or that nice Henry Fitzroy." He'd answered the phone once when she called and she'd been veryimpressed. "He found you something last summer."

"Mother! I don't need them to find me work. I don't need anyone to find me work. I am perfectly capable of finding work on my own.

"Don't grind your teeth, dear. And I know you're perfectly capable of finding work, but... oops, Dr.

Burke just walked in, so I should go. Remember you can always come live with me if you need to."

Vicki managed to hang up without giving in to the urge for violence but only because she knew it would be her phone that suffered and she couldn't afford to buy another new one right now. Her mother could be so... so...Well, I suppose it could be worse. She has a career and a life of her own and she could be after me for grandchildren . She wandered back to the shower, shaking her head at the thought; motherhood had never been a part of her plans.

She'd been ten when her father left, old enough to decide that motherhood had caused most of the problems between her parents. While other children of divorce blamed themselves, she laid the blame squarely where she felt it belonged. Motherhood had turned the young and exciting woman her father had married into someone who had no time for him, and after he left, the need to provide for a child had governed all her choices. Vicki had grown up as fast as she could, her independence granting a mutual independence for her mother-which had never quite been accepted in the spirit in which it was offered.

Vicki sometimes wondered if her mother wouldn't prefer a pink and lacy sort of a daughter who wouldn't mind being fussed over, but she didn't lose any sleep worrying about it, given that her decidedly non-pink and non-lacy att.i.tudes had no effect on her mother's fussing as it was. While proud of the work that Vicki did, she fretted over potential dangers, public opinion, the men in Vicki's life, her eating habits, her eyes, and her caseload.

"Not that my caseload doesn't need fussing over," Vicki admitted, working up a lather on her hair.

Money was beginning to get tight and if something didn't turn up soon...

"Something'll turn up." She rinsed and turned the water off. "Something always does."

"This is absolutely ridiculous! I won't stand for it!" Dr. Rax threw himself down into his desk chair, slamming the upper edge back into the wall. "How dare they keep us out!"

"Calm down, Elias, you'll give yourself an ulcer." Dr. Shane stood in the office doorway, arms crossed.

"It's only until the autopsy comes back and we know for sure it was a heart attack that killed that poor janitor."

"Of course it was a heart attack." Dr Rax rubbed at his eyes. Trapped in a cycle of frighteningly realistic dreams about being buried alive, he'd welcomed the phone call that'd freed him in the early hours of the morning. "The police officer I talked to said you could tell just from looking at him. Said the mummy had probably scared him to death." He snorted, his opinion of anyone who could be scared to death by a piece of history clear.

Dr. Shane frowned. "Mummy...?"

"Oh, for G.o.d's sake, Rachel. You can't have forgotten the baron's little souvenir."

"No, of course not..." Except that for a moment, she had. Dr. Rax rubbed at his eyes again; they felt as though bits of sand had jammed up under the lids. "Funny thing is, I knew young Ellis. Talked to him on a number of occasions when I'd stayed late. He had a good mind, all things considered, but not what I'd call much of an imagination and I'd have expected him to take anything he ran into in the workroom in stride." He surprised himself with a dry chuckle. "Unlike Ms.

Taggart."

Although she continued to clean the department offices, Ms. Taggart would not go into the workroom alone since the incident last summer with the mummified head. No one had ever admitted placing the Blue Jays cap on the artifact, but as Dr. Rax had made no real effort to find the culprit and had been more than vocal about the lack of depth in the bull pen, the rest of the department had its suspicions.

"You realize this is only going to encourage her." Dr. Shane sighed. "She'll probably transfer to Geology or somewhere else without bone and we'll lose the best cleaning lady we've ever had. I'll never again be able to leave papers on my desk overnight." Escorting her into the workroom was a small price to pay when measured against the knowledge that Ms. Taggart was the only cleaning lady in the building who never disturbed office work in progress. "Speaking of papers..." She waved a hand at the curator's overloaded desk. "Why don't you use this time as a chance to catch up?"

"The moment we can get back to work..."

"I'll let you know." She pulled the door closed behind her and walked slowly across to her own office, brows drawn down into a worried vee. Her memories of the mummy slid over and around each other as though they'd been run through a blender and she just couldn't believe that for one moment she'd forgotten its existence entirely.Obviously, I've been more affected by that young man's death than I thought .

The ka he had taken in the night told him of wonders greater than even Egypt in all her glory had known. The great pyramids had been dwarfed not by monuments to the glory of kings but by gleaming anthills of metal and gla.s.s built for fat-a.s.sed yuppies. Chariots had been replaced by four cylinder s.h.i.+t-boxes with no more pickup than a sick duck. Although he was unclear on many of the other concepts, beer and bureaucracy, at least, seemed to have endured. He was halfway around the world from the Mother Nile in a country that fought with sticks upon frozen water. Its queen sat in state many leagues away, no longer Osiris incarnate, although he who ruled for her here seemed to think himself some kind of tin-plate, big-chinned G.o.d.

Most importantly, the G.o.ds he had known and who had known him appeared to be no more. No longer would he have to hide from the all-seeing eye of Thoth in the night sky but, more importantly, there were none to replace the priest-wizards who had bound him. The G.o.ds of this new world were weak and had claimed few souls. He would go among them as a lion among the goats, able to feed where he willed.

He recognized that the one known as Reid Ellis had belonged to the lower cla.s.ses, a common laborer, and that the information he had absorbed was tainted by this lack of position. That mattered little, for he had long since chosen the one who would feed him with what he needed-the history of the time that had pa.s.sed and the way to prosper in the time that was now.

The life had also given him strength. Although his physical form remained bound, his ka had been able to wander throughout the minds that knew of him.

And how pitifully little they knew. With each touch, he took bits of the knowledge away; it was knowledge of him after all and thus he could control it. Those with the weakest wills forgot in a single pa.s.sing, the stronger lost memories a piece at a time. Soon, there would be none who knew how to bind him again.

He would be released; he had not touched the one who would ensure it, except to strengthen the bond between them, and he left the other enough to a.s.sist. They would peel the binding spell away and he would rise, magic restored, ready to claim his place in this strange new world.

He would deal with them then.

"Where is everybody?"

"Well, as no one knew when we were going to be allowed back into the workroom, I told them they might as well finish up any paperwork and then head home."

Dr. Rax turned to stare at his a.s.sistant curator.You told them what he wanted to shout .We have the first new mummy in decades and you dismissed my staff ? But somewhere between thought and speech, the words changed. "That seems reasonable. No point in them hanging around with nothing to do." He frowned, confused.

Reaching the door to the workroom, Dr. Shane peeled off the six-inch strip of bright yellow and black police tape that has been pasted over the lock. "I'm glad you agree." She hadn't been sure he would. In fact, now that she thought about it, she wondered how she could have... could have... "And it's not like we'll need them for what we're about to do."

"No..." He had the strangest feeling that they were walking into deadly danger and half expected the door to creak open like a bad special effect.We should get out of here now, while there's still time .

Then they were in the workroom with the mummy and nothing else mattered.

Together they removed the plastic shroud, bundling it carelessly to one side.

"I do feel a bit guilty about young Ellis though," Dr. Shane sighed as she pulled two pairs of cotton work gloves out of the cardboard box markedWear these or die ! "Heart failure might have been the cause, but our mummy certainly contributed to the effect."

"Nonsense." Dr. Rax worked his fingers into the gloves. "As dreadful as it was, as sad as it was, we are in no way responsible for that young man's fears." He picked up a pair of broad-tipped tweezers and bent over the coffin, breathing through his mouth to minimize the almost overpowering smell of cedar.

Very, very gently, he caught hold of the hieroglyphic strip at the point where the winding ended on the mummy's chest. "I think we'll need some solvent. It appears to be attached to the actual wrappings."

"Cedar gum?"

"I think so."

He continued to apply a gentle pull on the ancient linen while Dr. Shane carefully moistened the end with a solvent-soaked cotton swab.

"It's amazing how little the fabric has deteriorated over the centuries," she observed. "I send a s.h.i.+rt to the dry cleaner twice and it begins to fall apar...!" The hand holding the swab jerked back. "What is it?"

"The chest, where I touched it, it felt warm." She laughed a little nervously, knowing how ridiculous it sounded. "Even through the glove."

Dr. Rax snorted. "Probably the heat from the lights."

"They're fluorescent."

"All right, it was a by-product of the slow and continuing process of decay."

"Felt through the wrapping and the glove?"

"How about pure imagination brought on by misdirected guilt over that janitor?"

She managed a doubting smile. "I suppose I'll settle for that."

"Good. Now, can we get back to work?" Deliberately not touching the body, Dr. Shane stroked on a little more of the solvent. "This is the d.a.m.nedest funereal setup I've ever seen," she muttered. "No Osiran symbols, no tutelary G.o.ddesses, noDed , noThet , no hieroglyphs at all except on this strip." Her brows drew down. "Shouldn't we... shouldn't we be studying the strip before we remove it?"

"It'll be easier to study once it's off."

"Yes, but..." But what? She couldn't seem to hang onto the thought. Suddenly Dr. Rax smiled. "It's lifting. Stand back."

He could feel the end of the linen lifting, each separate hieroglyph a weight of stone rising off his chest. The spell stretched and tore as it was pulled more and more out of alignment. Then, with a silent shriek that cut through bone and blood and sinew, it ripped apart.

He welcomed the pain. It was his first physical sensation in three millennia and a joyous agony.

Nothing came without price and for his freedom, no price was too high. Had his limbs been capable of movement, he would have writhed, but movement would come slowly, over time, and so he could only endure the waves of red that raced the length of his body pus.h.i.+ng all else before them, pounding all else beneath them. He only wished that he could scream.

Finally, the last wave began to ebb, leaving behind it a stinging of nettles in his flesh and the red glow of two eyes in the darkness.

My lord? He should have known that if he survived his G.o.d would have survived as well.

The eyes grew brighter until by their light his ka could see the birdlike head of his G.o.d.

The others are dead, it said.

This confirmed what the taste of the laborer's ka had told him.

There are G.o.ds, but not the ones we knew. Its beak wasn't built for smiling, but it c.o.c.ked its head to one side and he remembered that meant it was pleased. I was wise when I created you; through you I survived. The new G.o.ds have been strong in the past, but they are not now. Few souls aresworn. Build me a temple, gather me acolytes until I am strong enough to make others like you.

We can do what we wish with this world.

Then he was alone again in the darkness.

Nothing held him now except millennia-old fabric already beginning to rot under the pressure of acc.u.mulated time, but he would remain for a little longer where he was. His ka had one more short journey to make and then he would gather his strength before he confronted his... savior.

Build a temple. Gather acolytes. We can do what we wish with this world. Indeed.

He had not really planned beyond gaining his freedom, but it seemed he would have much to do.

Rachel Shane stepped out of the elevator on the ground floor, the rubber soles of her shoes making very little sound against the tile floor. She was worried about Elias. He'd always been an intense man, determined to make the Egyptology Department at the ROM one of the best in the world despite budgets and bureaucrats, but in all the years she'd known him-and they were a good many years, she admitted silently to herself-she'd never seen him this obsessed.

She paused just inside the security door to pull her trench coat closed. Although the looming bulk of the planetarium limited the lines of sight from the staff entrance, water glistened on the pavement between the two buildings. If it wasn't raining at this moment, it had been in the recent past.

Recent past... She thought back to the workroom and the almost dreamlike way they'd unwrapped the linen strip from around the mummy. No doc.u.mentation. No photographs. Not even a notation of the hieroglyphs. It was very stra...

The sudden pain snapped her head forward and exploded red lights behind her eyes. She sagged against the security door, the smooth gla.s.s pulling against the damp skin of her cheek as she fought to stay on her feet.Is it a stroke ? And with that thought came a terrifying vision of complete and utter helplessness, so much worse than death.Oh, G.o.d, I'm too young . She couldn't catch her breath, couldn't remember how her lungs worked, couldn't remember anything but the pain.

As if from a great distance, she saw the guard run for the other side of the door and manage to open it without throwing her to the ground. He slipped an arm around her waist and half guided, half carried her over to a chair. "Dr. Shane? Dr. Shane, are you all right?" She grabbed desperately onto the sound of her name. The pain began to recede, leaving her feeling as though she'd been scoured from within by a wire brush. Nerve endings throbbed and for just an instant a great golden sun blotted out the security area, the guard, everything. "Dr. Shane?"

Then it was gone and the pain was gone as if it had never been. She rubbed at her temples, trying to remember how it had felt, and couldn't. "Should I call an ambulance, Dr. Shane?" An ambulance? That penetrated. "No, thank you, Andrew. I'm fine. Really. Just a little faint." He frowned. "You sure?"