They chose a spot deep within the carving, in the ball of the lion’s foot, drilling slowly, carefully, until Paolo’s patient efforts were finally met by a sudden lack of resistance. For the first time in over two thousand years, the seal on the tomb of Alexander the Great had been broken.
If the very movement of the world seemed to stutter for just an instant, if the tomb itself seemed to take a long, shuddering breath, Amr was the only one who noticed.
This is the beginning of the end. And I am the only one who knows it. They have doomed us all.
He closed his eyes and shook the thought away. He could not afford to lose hope. Not now. There was a plan for this. There had always been a plan for this. And there was still time. They were out there, somewhere—they were out there, and he would find them, wherever they were.
Before it was too late.
2
Roman
Present Day
Roman paused outside the small duplex, his hand resting lightly on the doorknob, refusing to grip it with any real conviction. Refusing to turn it.
The bees might be angry.
Not that standing in the hot Alabama sun was all that appealing. Even in late April, the heat rising off the cigarette-smeared asphalt fell somewhere just shy of egg frying. And the building itself wasn’t much to look at either: a narrow, two-story affair with faded green paint that peeled listlessly from the cracked front window. But it wasn’t the worst place Roman had ever lived.
It wasn’t so dismal as to reach into his soul and tear tiny pieces of him away every time he opened the door.
He had lived in places like that, places that threatened to drown you in your own hopelessness, the constant weight on your chest making it hard to breathe, the constant fear in your belly making it hard to close your eyes at night, listening in the dark to the perpetual scurrying of the wall rats and feeling like maybe they had more of a right to be there than you did yourself.
But this place, with its three tiny upstairs bedrooms and one and a half baths, the extra toilet being a luxury he had once only dreamed of in a family of seven, was no reason in itself not to open the door—no reason not to walk boldly into the small front space that served as a living room and flop down on one of the two squeaky couches, home safe after surviving another day at Grover Cleveland Middle School.
It was just that the house might not be empty.
His mother and Tony wouldn’t be home from work yet. His older sister, Kontessa, had gone to a friend’s house after school, and the two youngest would be at day care. That left his older brother, Marquon, who was fifteen and went to the high school now, so he got out half an hour earlier than Roman. If Marquon was already home, then Roman would be alone with the bees.
Roman took his hand off the doorknob and moved it gingerly toward the black front door itself, testing its heat after the hours of abuse it had taken in the afternoon sun. He jerked his hand away as soon as his fingertips made contact, nervous about being burned, but the surface was only uncomfortable, not scorching. He reached out again and placed both small, brown hands firmly against the plane this time, palms flat, letting his skin get used to the temperature, and then he leaned in slowly until his left ear was resting against the door itself.
At first, he didn’t hear anything at all.
He had just begun to hope that Marquon was out with his friends or maybe had followed some girl home from school, when the TV roared into life, the mad explosion of sound startling him back from the door with a fast shove of his arms. Even several steps away, standing in the small parking space in front of the building, he could still hear the blare of his family’s only television, the buzzing notes of its half-busted speakers rattling the window.
Roman’s shoulders slumped, but there was nothing for it. He would have to go in. His mother had made it perfectly clear that eleven years old was too young, in her opinion, for a boy to be walking twelve blocks to the corner store or hanging around the park by himself. Especially in that neighborhood. Especially a boy as small for his age as Roman. If he didn’t go in, Marquon would tell her that he hadn’t come straight home after school, and after everything that had happened three years ago, Roman had to keep his head down.
If his mother thought for even a moment that he might be causing trouble again, well, she would start screaming and crying and carrying on like a banshee, and then Tony would leave (Roman’s luck being what it was) and next thing you know they’d be out on the street, this time with baby Xavious in diapers, and with Child Protective Services still sniffing around after the last time…
Roman knew he didn’t have a choice. Sighing deeply against the inevitable, he reached out his hand and opened the door.
He tried to do it casually, like he wasn’t scared. Acting nervous around Marquon was like squeezing lighter fluid onto a barbecue. So instead of easing the door open like he wanted to and peeking his way around the edge, he just pushed it wide and walked through it, kicking off his shoes and sparing only the briefest of glances in his brother’s direction.
Marquon was glued to a video game and acted as though he couldn’t care less that his little brother had come home, but Roman knew it was just a ploy. He knew it because the first red bee spiraled slowly up out of his brother’s right ear. It angled toward him, flying only an inch or so in his direction until it stopped, hovering in midair, staring straight at Roman, a silent vanguard of impending doom.
Roman had started seeing strange things around people when he was only four or five years old. He wasn’t clear exactly when it had started because he had had no idea at the time that he was seeing anything unusual. He would tell his mother that a woman in the grocery store had eight arms, or that the preacher on television had a tail like a mermaid, and his mother would either laugh and say, “Boy, you sure do have some imagination!” or would frown and tell him it was about time he started living in the real world, depending on her mood.
In those days, his mother had looked like she lived in the middle of a tornado, just like the one he had seen in The Wizard of Oz, that whirled and thrashed around her with a somewhat greater or lesser promise of destruction from one moment to the next. Lately, though, the wind had finally settled down to a gentle breeze that simply twirled her skirts playfully and ruffled her hair from time to time. Tony seemed to have a lot to do with that, and Roman prayed every night that Tony would stay in the picture so the tornado would never come back.