The God Collector Page 15

  “Could kill you?” she repeated, trying to keep her breathing steady. Adler’s hair was rumpled, laying in curls of black and gray against his undone collar, and the pulse in his throat was rapid. She swallowed again and pulled her eyes away. “It isn’t that bad. I know I’m not much with the more abstract schools, but a little Klimt never hurt anyone.”

  “Don’t tease,” he said. The words came out rough. “Why did you paint that?”

  He was holding his left hand at an odd angle. Two of the fingers were wrenched, and Theo’s fingernails had left bright-red lines on his skin. She’d hit him hard enough to injure him. His good hand still flexed automatically, and his shoulders were hunched, as if he was prepared to jump at any second. The painting lay where it had fallen, but his gaze kept flicking back toward it.

  “I was angry,” she said as evenly as she could. She blinked, trying to focus as she massaged her arm. He wasn’t making much sense. “You robbed the museum. I needed to do something, and I didn’t have any photographs of you to rip up.”

  His eyes narrowed just a little. “So you do know. How did you find out?”

  “Know what? I just thought it would feel good to get it out of my system!”

  Seth was mirroring her actions, massaging his own injured hand. Her nails had only lightly bloodied him, but her weight had wrenched his fingers slightly, leaving a bloom of bruise spreading across the skin. Not deep bruising, though; the purplish marks were fading at the edges, the swelling of the wrenched joints beginning to subside. Even as she looked, the last of the bruises vanished into the deep-brown skin.

  He stepped back and picked up the painting. Little beads—dried blood?—fell from his hand as he flexed his fingers. The torn streak left by her nails was already gone.

  “Why did you paint me like this?” he said after a long moment. “This worshiping figure. This isn’t me, Theo. It’s chaotic.”

  Chaos. Pieces clicked, and something dropped in her stomach. She thought of her poor little shabtis—all frozen in their poses of work or worship, their limbs stretched out and stiff if age hadn’t broken them off—all gone.

  There were rules for those tiny creations, and there were rules for their painted brethren on tomb walls. All arms and legs had to be visible. The face displayed in profile, no distortion of the form. The body was whole, sacred, and must be untampered with, or disaster could result. So the Egyptians had believed. It was crucial to maintain order and reality in their art, because art, words, religion and magic worked together to hold the line against the forces of chaos. They must have order, or everything would be destroyed.

  The little beads from his hand had bounced far on the smooth hardwood. She picked one up and rolled it between her fingers.

  “You honestly believe that?” Theo said. The little nodule between her fingertips didn’t crumble, and its surface was smooth and matte. “So you tried to burn it? Christ.”

  His hold slipped a little, and the painting slid a few inches through his fingers.

  “I know I’m no Matisse, but you still can’t burn my painting just because you think it’ll bring you bad luck.” There, that sounded sensible of her, didn’t it? “It’s the principle of the thing.”

  “Some things deserve to be burned.” He dropped the painting, kicking it away. The canvas skidded across the room and bumped into the wall. “Burn it. Cut it up. Paint over it. I don’t care. But it can’t stay that way, and it can’t stay here.”

  “Why not? Because you don’t like Art Nouveau? Or are you trying to get me out of here before I realize your blood turns into clay?”

  His eyes widened. “What do you mean?”

  “Art school. I know clay when I feel it.” She crumbled the bead between her fingertips and flicked the dust off. It felt good to say it out loud, even if the words didn’t seem to belong in her life. “Old clay too. Some nice montmorillonite.”

  “My blood—”

  “Your blood turns into clay, Seth.”

  “But it—”

  “It turns into clay.” She met and held his gaze, putting all her anger and confusion and fear into her eyes as if she could pin him to the wall with the force of her stare. Like sticking a butterfly on a card. “At this point, there aren’t a lot of lies you can tell me. So are we going to keep dancing around the issue?”

  Another frozen moment passed, and Seth wavered. His eyes dropped for a moment, and his shoulders hunched. Every muscle seemed to be tensed, creating lines and pools of shadow that washed him out even more.

  “Tell me the truth,” Theo said. Her lips felt numb and the words came out a little slurred, as if they were trying to keep her from getting herself into any more trouble. Mummies, shabtis, curses, robberies, life and death, paintings and blood that turned into clay. “I’m ready to listen. Please, just tell me the truth.”

  He paced a few steps, stopped and glanced back, his fingers twisting reflexively. They were, Theo noted vaguely, completely healed. He swallowed.

  After a long moment, he straightened his back and faced her again as best he could. “It sounds insane,” he said.

  “Which’ll make a nice change from how dull the last few weeks have been.” She kept her gaze fixed on him. He looked like he wanted to run or sink into the ground, and though she wasn’t sure she’d blame him for it, it wouldn’t be happening on her watch. “Tell me the truth,” she repeated softly.

  The dead man in front of her frowned just a little as he struggled to find the words. His lips twisted, the fluid curve flexing.

  “I suppose you could say,” he began slowly, “that I’ve been stretching the truth. I’m not from around here.”

  “I guessed that,” she replied. Her eyes never left his face. “Where are you from?”

  “Waset.” A pause. “Thebes.”

  She took a deep breath. “I think the question is…when were you from Thebes?”

  He never blinked, but the dark eyes seemed to flinch. “I was born seven years before the ascension of Amenemhat the First.”

  Theo took another breath. She put a hand on the wall, her fingers splaying against the smooth surface. Her brain automatically threw out the information, culled straight from the museum’s exhibition bible. Twelfth Dynasty, right at the beginning of the Middle Kingdom. Circa 1991 BCE, if you believed the most common estimates. Just over four thousand years ago. A time before cavalry or iron weapons.

  It shouldn’t be believable. Hell, some part her couldn’t believe it. If she hadn’t seen what she’d seen in the loft, she would have written the whole thing off as delusion. If not for clay blood and dying men turning to dust. Either it was true, or she was losing her mind.

  But in her life, her brain was all she really had. If she were insane, she wouldn’t even have that. She couldn’t accept that thought.

  “And you…” Theo cleared her throat, “…you’re that mummy?”

  “Was.” He paused for a moment, searching for words. “Old wine in new bottles.”

  “Old soul in new body?”

  “Exactly.”

  “It’s a good story,” she said. “Do you have any proof?”

  Silently, Seth held his hand up for her to examine. She stared at it, searching for any sign of marked skin. But there was nothing. She touched it.

  Her fingers folded around his. The skin was coarse but unmarked, the old scars she’d seen at the party gone as cleanly as if they’d never been there. His hand was warm and strong, with none of the teeth marks she knew she’d left. The webbing and ball of the thumb were whole, despite the skin that had been torn not so long ago. Not even the faint shiny marks of recent healing could be seen.

  “Nothing heals that fast,” she said.

  “You’re right,” Seth said. “Nothing can.”

  “New bottle?”

  “Old wine.”

  “Very old,” Theo murmured. Her eyes
stung, but to her surprise, a bitter smile edged its way across her face. “And to think I was intimidated when I thought you were, what, in your fifties?”

  “We’ll split the difference,” he said softly. “The new body is only thirty.”

  “Really?”

  “I promise.” His thumb traced the side of hers, flesh lightly gliding over flesh. “Young and healthy.”

  She swallowed. “Mr. Adler, are you trying to seduce me?”

  Oh God. Faced with a man who claimed to be more than four millennia old, his long, dark fingers wrapped around hers as he transfixed her with his stare, and the first thing that came to mind was The Graduate? His small grin showed that he had caught her out, and she resisted the urge to slap herself in the face.

  “Are you feeling particularly seduced?” he responded.

  “Not exactly.”

  “Good.” His tone had a twist of wryness. “That would make things awkward.”

  “That’s right, I’m way past thirteen,” she said. “So what were you? A priest, right? Condemned for love?”

  “You’ve been watching too many movies. And for the record—I’ve been wanting to say this since the party—those mummy films are garbage. None of that ever happened.”

  “I know,” she said. “I mean, whoever heard of someone coming back from the dead?”

  Seth stepped back a pace, seemingly gauging her mood. His eyes flickered over her, and Theo’s hand felt chilled with the loss of his touch. She sternly ordered herself to focus and tried to ignore the pounding of her heart.

  “What were you?” she repeated softly. “Tell me, Seth. Please. Give me anything to prove that we’re not both going insane.”

  He let out a slow breath. “I was the son of the governor of the Crocodile District,” he said. “Downriver from Thebes itself. Beautiful land, very fertile. My brother and I became trusted servants of the great Amenemhat. And I had the honor of marrying the pharaoh’s grandniece.”

  Of course. A mummy man had to have some kind of connection to a pharaoh, didn’t he? Nobody ever claimed to be a reincarnated peasant from nowhere. Her bullshit detector pinged. “Right,” she responded. “So was she the great love of your life? You transcended death for her, right? Or are you going to disavow her dramatically?”

  “I didn’t love her,” he said flatly, “because it was a political match. But we were good friends, and she was my wife and the mother of my children. You should know when you’re crossing a line.”

  “Have a heart,” she said. “I’m taking a lot on faith here. Maybe I was wrong and people do heal that fast. I’m just a flaky artist, what do I know about this stuff?”

  Seth looked down, his jaw tensing. “I answered your question, Theo. I told you the truth. Are you satisfied?”

  “No.”

  “No? What else could you want?”

  “Everything,” Theo said. Seth pulled back another pace, his expression openly wary and distrustful.

  “Okay, maybe I didn’t put that right,” she continued quickly. The words stumbled over themselves as they raced out. “I don’t want to blackmail you or steal your magic potion or anything. But if you’re telling the truth, if you really are some kind of…of ancient mummy…” she shook her head, still unable to believe what she was saying, “…then you’re the only person—the only person alive today—who remembers those times. Even if this is a lie or a hallucination or something, it’s such a big one that you can’t expect me to just let it go.” She shivered a little. Colors and textures tumbled through her mind: old gold, cool blue-green, startlingly red ochre painted onto yellow plaster or dabbed into the hollows and crevices of low relief. “You could know…Jesus, so much. Don’t you get how many questions there are?”

  His expression was unreadable. “Questions?”

  “How you lived. What you did. What you believed.” She swallowed. “How you’re here.”

  “I believed in the gods that watched over us all. But how I’m here…that was my brother’s work.” He shook his head. “He was a great priest, one of the greatest I ever knew. He made the shabtis for me.”

  “Is that…” she began.

  Seth nodded, his eyes dark. “He wrote a prayer to say over them, and another to cut into them. ‘Words spoken by the son of Merenptah. This is a vessel for him, and will become as him through his will. A savior of the ka, a form to cast the sheut’—”

  “—a home for the ba,” Theo whispered. Nobody outside of the department knew about those inscriptions. It was just a battered line of hieroglyphics, pieced together from the few remaining marks on dozens of statuettes, but the professors had been incredibly excited about it. Nothing had been published yet; they were quietly planning a study of it and its potential impact on the modern view of funerary customs. There was no way he could know it. Unless…

  “I believe you,” she said. Finally. It felt like a weight had been lifted, and she breathed out, terrified and exhilarated at the same time. She believed him. She accepted, somehow, that the dark-eyed man standing in front of her was something that she knew shouldn’t exist. It scared her, but it freed her. The worst had happened; what could be stranger?

  “You believe me?” he asked, his voice oddly uneven.

  “I believe you,” Theo repeated. “You’re not normal.” Another smile began to appear in spite of herself. “And I just won a prize for understatement.”

  “I’ll admit, I’ve never been called ‘not normal’ before,” Seth said, “I think. I don’t remember it all.”

  “Well, you know me,” she said, wrapping her arms a little more closely around herself. The cold of the gallery seemed to press in around her. “I always was pretty good at saying the wrong thing.”

  “I don’t know about that,” he replied with a smile of his own. “‘I believe you’ was pretty good.”

  Against all odds, she found herself smiling back at him. A warm feeling settled in her chest, along with a twinge of nervousness. Motion, pure motion, was there if she could grab it. He was only a foot from her now, his hand still near hers, a flush in his face, coloring his high cheekbones. The light brought out the cool blue-black highlights in the coal-colored hair, and his smile was almost challenging.

  She didn’t feel like it had quite sunk in yet, but his strange confession and the fascinating, odd, terrifying moment of healing meant it was impossible to ignore. But, somehow, it was a relief too. It helped, just a little, to know that there really had been a reason for him to do what he did.

  “So you wanted the artifacts so you could stay alive,” she said quickly. Focus, Theo.

  “A vessel for him, and will become as him,” Seth recited. The words had a rolling, sonorous quality, like a chant in church. “My tomb was robbed in the 1880s, while I was in India. I set up the trust as a cover and spent years tracking down everything.”

  “And that night in the loft—” she was proud her voice faltered only a little, “—you breathed on one of the shabtis before you sent it down the shaft. You died upstairs—”

  “And came to life downstairs.”

  A man dying of tuberculosis enlists his brother, the priest, to create fake bodies for him. Something to hold his soul in the real world. An ancient Egyptian man does this, knowing well that his entire world is constructed around the eventuality of death, and that he was going against every rule his universe is based on. Order versus chaos, and trying to hide from the afterlife was the absolute essence of chaos.

  “So when you found them,” she said, “you thought you had to steal them back. Them and your mummy.”

  He flinched, just a little, at the mention of the mummy. She saw a flicker of apprehension in his gaze, and she knew she was on the right track.

  “You need the mummy,” Theo continued. Seth didn’t say anything, but he couldn’t hide the look in his eyes. “The body is the home of the soul and must be preserved
. As long as it exists, the soul can continue.” Her head shot up. “That’s why you took it!” she burst out. “I told you it was going to be used in the study—”

  “And perhaps dissected,” Seth said flatly. “I might not be wearing it anymore, but I still have a certain fondness for it.”

  “You said you didn’t want to do it that night,” she said. Seth relaxed a fraction, but his gaze was still fixed on her, both cautious and defensive. He seemed to be waiting to see which way she’d jump.

  Theo stepped back, running a hand through her hair and breathing deeply. “This is big,” she said, half to herself. Putting it into words was hard, but with every word that she added to it, it took on a little more solidity in her mind. “This is…this is something so big I can’t even say how big it is. I can’t—I mean, I can’t make you give them back. Not now.”

  The words felt strange. To admit straight out that she wanted to let someone keep something they’d taken from the museum, it burned, though these were definitely extraordinary circumstances. She didn’t see people come back from the dead every day, after all. At that thought, she let out a short bark of laughter, drawing an odd look from Seth Adler.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “But this wasn’t what I planned on when I went to art school.”

  “It wasn’t what I planned on when I took my commission from the Minister of War,” Seth responded dryly. “Though at the time, my concern was mainly with making the family look good.”

  “You must have been scared,” she said suddenly.

  He raised his head slightly, lips parting a little.

  “To try and make yourself some kind of magic body.”

  Seth looked down. “Terrified,” he said. “I thought I was cursed.” His voice was hoarse. “I prayed every day. For a year. All that happened was that the aches got worse and my family began to collect my burial goods.”