“It’s a good plan,” Oliver rasped, lolling his head back against the Sphinx’s paw. The airship creaked overhead. Less than an hour had passed since Marcus and Allison had fled, yet it felt like days.
Oliver had finished healing Jie, and now she slept. Daniel, Joseph, and I had toted her down the Great Pyramid on a makeshift stretcher of sheets from the airship beds. Then we’d hauled her rung by rung into the cargo hold.
And ever since then, Oliver had been resting. Even now, almost an hour later, his cheeks were much too sallow. His chestnut curls dull—though that might’ve been from all the dust.
I hunkered in the sand beside him, enjoying the airship’s drifting shade. “But we will not know when Marcus returns.” I pursed my lips. “It might be hours. It might be months.”
“Call up a scout. A corpse scout.”
I turned a frown on my demon. “I have no idea how to do something like that.”
“You woke up something before,” Oliver went on. “In Paris.”
As he said that, an image of a teal-carpeted hallway—the Hotel Le Meurice in Paris—filled my brain. And scurrying through it were dead rats and cats and . . .
“Birds,” I whispered.
“Exactly,” Oliver said. “A bird corpse under your control could follow that balloon.”
I chewed my chapped lip, considering where I could possible find a dead bird—or if I had enough power left inside me to raise one.
“I will give you what magic I have,” Oliver murmured, his eyelids fluttering shut.
“Which isn’t much since you can barely stay awake.” Gently, I laid a hand on his forearm. “I . . . I think I understand you now, Oliver.”
“Really?” He snorted and cracked open one eye. “I highly doubt that since I do not even understand me.”
I sighed. “Perhaps, but what I meant is that I cannot in good conscience take any more magic from you.”
“Not in good conscience?” A laugh tickled over our bond. “That’s a first for you.”
I groaned tiredly and shoved to my feet. At least, despite the horrors of the morning, my demon still had his sense of humor.
I offered him my hand, my shadow slinking over his face. “Thank you, Oliver. For everything.”
His eyes flashed, briefly brighter than the sun’s light. “Don’t thank me. Not yet.”
“Then when?” With a grunt, I towed him upright.
He rolled his shoulders and set to brushing the dust off his suit. “How about when you free me? Perhaps then one of us will have sorted out exactly who I am.” His eyebrow rose. “In the meantime, shall we summon a scout?”
I nodded, my jaw setting. Even if he didn’t accept my gratitude, at least he knew he had it. “Help me find a scout, Oliver. Sum veritas.”
Our spell to find a scout was a strange, unexpected success. Rather than raise many animal corpses—as I’d accidentally done in Paris—when I sent out the call Awake!, Oliver helped me focus my magic. Together, we narrowed the necromantic leash from an almost weblike wildness into a single, targeted arrow.
And that arrow found a dead falcon. The magic plunged into the corpse, then with a gentle nudge—Awake—my necromancy latched on tight and sparked the body back into life. Suddenly I felt the falcon—its ragged wings, its ancient rib cage—and I sensed its surroundings of crypt-like darkness and other dead birds. And then, just as suddenly, I had absolute control over the corpse, almost like some extended limb.
So when I commanded the falcon to fly south after Marcus, then south it flew.
But oddest of all, when I finally caught sight of the falcon, it was nothing more than a speck, far to the south and flapping from the distant mounds I had noticed earlier.
“Amazing,” I breathed, watching the black spot vanish—and feeling the necromantic leash connecting us grow taught and thin. “I cannot believe I could reach a corpse so far away.”
“I must admit I’m impressed,” Oliver murmured. “Saqqara is miles south.”
For some reason that name—Saqqara—sounded familiar. But I did not dwell on why. My mind was too consumed by the falcon’s flight. On the fragile line of magic that bound my soul to it.
By the time Oliver and I clambered inside the airship, my falcon had caught up with Marcus’s balloon. And by the time we had the hatch firmly shut and Daniel began gliding south, Marcus was many miles away.
Tourists and Egyptians watched us go. If any of them had seen Marcus and his army, I didn’t know. Some of them must have felt my gust of vicious power. . . . Yet as we flew away, I saw no signs of damage. No fear from our spectators.
I only hoped Marcus and his army remained as unaggressive. I told Joseph as much when I explained what I had done with the falcon corpse—and why. Yet the idea of Marcus acting out of revenge seemed impossible to Joseph. Only after I pointed out the great lengths to which we were willing to stretch for vengeance did the idea seem plausible.
“So we lay the trap,” Joseph mused, scratching the scars on his cheek as he, Daniel, and I bowed over the table of charts. Jie still slept, her face as beautifully serene as when Joseph had draped her in her bunk an hour ago.