He tore across the paved drive and slipped into the back seat.
“What the—” The man’s breath cut off as Wraith’s arm went around his neck. The guy flailed, landing a blow on Wraith’s chin before Wraith wrenched his head between his palms. A second later, Wraith was using his Seminus gift to get inside the dude’s mind and do a little probing.
The man, Valeriu, possessed some impressive mental blocks that hindered Wraith, but not for long. Soon, he learned that Serena had left for Egypt the night before, and that she was supposed to collect some sort of key from a man named Josh in… shit, an hour.
Quickly, Wraith filled Valeriu’s head with new memories, ones that would cover up the fact that he’d been attacked on his own grounds. Once he was done, he put the guy to sleep, so although Valeriu might wonder why he’d fallen asleep behind the wheel, he wouldn’t remember.
Wraith slipped out of the car and sprinted to the nearest Harrowgate. He had to get to that Josh guy. Now he knew that the key to the treasure Serena was hunting was also the key to her.
Serena had always liked Egypt, and Alexandria was her favorite of all Egyptian cities. Known as The Pearl of the Mediterranean, it boasted beautiful residential districts, elegant gardens, and a Mediterranean, rather than Middle Eastern, atmosphere
She’d spent the day trying to locate the first of the two objects she’d come for in an ancient vault beneath the city. Just as the sun began to set, she found it. Its resting place, anyway. Unfortunately, Kom El-Shuqafa’s visiting hours forced her to give up for the day. Val had managed to finagle special access to off-limits areas of the catacombs, but apparently visiting hours were not negotiable.
Besides, if Val was right, she’d need a key to access the vault, and she was already late to meet Josh at her hotel.
She caught a cab, but as usual traffic was a tangle of cars, donkey carts, bikes, and pedestrians. The narrow streets, minor accidents, and non-functioning traffic lights made for extremely slow progress. Ancient Egyptians could have built an entire pyramid in the time it took her taxi to go a single block.
Fed up, starving, and a nervous wreck after watching several pedestrians nearly get run over, she scrambled out of the cab several blocks from her hotel, figuring she could walk faster than the cab could get her there.
Dressed conservatively in tan cargoes and a long-sleeved, white cotton blouse, she didn’t draw much attention, although her blond hair and blue eyes screamed “foreigner.” No woman should walk alone on these streets, but Serena was safer than if she’d been traveling with an entire army of guards.
The uneven, cracked sidewalks posed no problem for her as she walked, caressed by a light breeze off the harbor. All around, shopkeepers and restaurant owners hawked their goods, which ranged from clothing to fresh vegetables to roast pigeon that scented the air with spice as Serena passed.
Ahead, a man approached, his flowing brown dishdasha flapping around his ankles, his white, bucketlike taqiya cap soaking up the evening shadows and the pale lights from the nearby buildings. He walked with his head down, but when he stepped in front of Serena his head came up, and she drew in a startled breath. The man was beautiful. So beautiful it hurt to look at him. He radiated a glow as fierce as the sun’s reflection off the gold dome of the mosque of Sultan Omar Ali Saifuddin, and his features were so perfect he could have been drawn with a camel-hair brush.
“Serena.”
She didn’t stop to think how he knew her name, because his musically lilted voice had mesmerized her. She didn’t recognize the accent, but it sounded familiar in an ancient sort of way.
“Yes,” she breathed, and his lips curved in a smile that turned her brain to mush.
He cast a furtive glance around them, and it was then that she noticed the normally bustling street was deserted. Her self-preservation and survival instincts were rusty from disuse, but now they stirred, as though awakening from a deep, dark sleep. The sensation was strange, but she recognized it for what it was—danger.
Still, she wasn’t afraid. Nothing could touch her. Even so, she automatically brushed her fingers over the pendant beneath her blouse. It was a stupid habit, but one she couldn’t break any more than she could break the enchanted chain from which it hung. Oddly, the necklace felt hot against her skin.
“Hey.”
Another deep male voice came from behind her, and she turned to the newcomer, a man casually dressed in faded jeans and a Guinness T-shirt, with a backpack draped over his shoulder. He was tall, close to six and a half feet, with blond hair that fell nearly to his shoulders and a tattoo that extended from the fingers of his right arm all the way up to his face, where the swirling black pattern stretched from his jawline to his temple.