“My name is Phoenix; I’m not one.” At least not yet. “I meant the Phoenix. The one who was raised from the dead. The one who carries the Key of Solomon.”
Before the last word had left my mouth, my reflection disappeared and another took its place. I recognized it instantly. The graveyard where I’d first seen my mother. All the graves were tumbled open, the place as still and empty as a postapocalyptic world.
“That’s where she was,” I said. “Where is she?”
“Wait,” the Dagda whispered.
The image wavered but did not disappear. Instead, the focus widened, as if we were a camera and the black smooth liquid the lens. The view pulled back, revealing more and more of the area around the cemetery. To the right stood a sign.
“ ‘Cairo,’ ” I read. “ ‘Population three thousand, one hundred and fifty.’ Seriously?”
I thought Cairo was huge—and in Egypt. Which made the grass and the trees in the foreground as well as the small-town streets spreading into the background a mystery.
“There’s more than one Cairo,” Jimmy said.
I glanced over my shoulder. He’d actually stayed where I’d put him, which I attributed to the Dagda’s presence rather than Sanducci’s obedience.
“How many more?”
“Not sure about other countries—”
“It’s in the U.S.,” I interrupted. I’d seen signs like that a thousand times.
“Well, then.” Jimmy took a breath. “Cairo, Kentucky. West Virginia. Illinois. New York. Georgia.”
I cursed quietly.
“Relax, light’s leader. I’m not a jinn. You get more wishes than three.”
“Jinn?” I cast him a narrow glare. “As in genie?”
“He’s kidding,” Jimmy said.
“Does he know how?”
The Dagda smiled. “I have learned much in all my years beneath the earth. Humor is only one joy of many.”
“So there aren’t any genies?”
“I didn’t say that,” Jimmy murmured. “They just don’t hand out wishes.”
I rubbed my forehead. I really didn’t have the time for this, so I turned back to the caldron. “Which Cairo are we talking about?”
The view in the black water began to pan to the right, slowly, but still it made me dizzy. I couldn’t pull my gaze away even though my stomach rolled. Right before I considered throwing up just to feel better—hey, it worked with a hangover—the picture stopped moving.
Another sign—huge, more like a billboard, with a hokey pyramid, a doofy Sphinx and a stick figure Pharaoh that seemed to be dancing the “King Tut” mambo—appeared.
“ ‘Come to Cairo,’ ” I read. “ ‘A beautiful city along America’s Nile, right at the foot of Little Egypt.’ ” I scowled. “Is this a riddle?”
“It’s Illinois,” Jimmy answered.
I turned. He was still way over there. “You sure?”
“I am a globe-trotting portrait wizard,” he said.
Better and better. He was starting to throw my sarcastic digs back at me.
“You’ve been to Cairo?”
He shook his head. “Cairo, Illinois, with a whopping three thousand souls is not exactly a hotbed of high-profile faces with pockets deep enough to pay my exorbitant, though well-deserved, fee.”
“So, basically, you don’t know dink. You’re guessing.”
“I was in Carbondale—also located in Little Egypt. The top pick in the NBA draft last year came from Southern Illinois University. Macon Talmudge.”
Sounded vaguely familiar, but I wasn’t much of a basketball fan.
“And I suppose the NBA sent you.”
“Of course. But I only took the job because I had to check out a few rumors.”
“Werewolf? Vampire?”
“Egyptian snake demon.”
“Tell me it wasn’t Talmudge.”
Jimmy and I had already been involved with the death of one NBA star—we hadn’t killed him; he’d been one of us—but if we started leaving trails of dead basketball players, we’d wind up locked in a cage without a key. Not that a cage would hold us, but the less hassle the better, and I really didn’t need my picture plastered in every post office from Corpus Christi to Anchorage.
“It wasn’t Talmudge,” Jimmy obliged.
“But the snake demon, you got it?”
Jimmy looked down his nose at me. Of course he’d gotten it.
“I’m sensing a theme here,” I mused. “Egyptian snake demon. Ancient Egyptian shape-shifting firebird. Both found in a place called Little Egypt. Why?”
The Dagda shrugged and spread his massive hands, but I hadn’t been asking him. I lifted a brow in Jimmy’s direction.
“I did some research on the area,” Jimmy said. “The origins of the name are unclear. Some say it started around the Civil War. Illinois was a free state; however, the section that became Little Egypt was given a pass so the saltworks in the region could be mined. People up north began to refer to that part as Egypt.”
“Because they kept slaves.”
“Yeah. Another theory is that the conflux of the Mississippi River—America’s Nile—and the Ohio River creates a basin similar to the Nile Basin. Which is why they named the town on the peninsula where the rivers meet Cairo.”