Vampire Sheikh (9 page)

“The cuffs will disappear when you leave Khepesh,” he told her, casting a spell to make it so.

Then he walked away, doing his best to ignore the lost expression on her face as he left her standing there alone.

J
osslyn recognized a dismissal when she heard one.

It vaguely surprised her, but to be honest, she was so overwhelmed by everything that had happened to her today, along with the incredible news of her parents' still being alive, that Seth-Aziz leaving her was a blessing.

She needed time to absorb it all.

Her head was spinning with questions and confusion, strange physical feelings and a landslide of unfamiliar emotions.

Or maybe it was just loss of blood. She was tired. So damn tired.

She found a towel and dried herself and managed to make it to the bed before she collapsed. Seth, or more likely a servant, had somehow found time to change the sheets before he left. They were now midnight-blue, neatly tucked in, covered by a satiny duvet in a subtle pattern of stars. She crawled under it and rolled herself
in a ball, feeling small and insignificant in the massive bed and the huge, high-ceilinged room.

She slept. And she dreamed of him. Naturally.

Broad-shouldered and handsome as ever, Seth-Aziz was twice as tall as she, and cold as ice as he stared angrily down at her. Malevolence poured off him as he told her over and over in an endless loop that he didn't want to have sex with her.

“All right already!” she cried, slapping her hands over her ears to keep from hearing the disdain in his voice. “You don't want me. I get it, okay?”

She awoke with a lurch and found herself sitting up in bed, her chest heaving with a desperate mix of anguish and mortification, her hands still covering her ears.

There were more candles lit, and a few sconces burned on the walls, making the room much lighter than before. She jerked her hands from her ears and heard her sister's anxious voice. “What the
hell
went on here between you two?” Gemma asked. “I thought you'd never wake up!”

Joss snapped around. Her sister was sitting on the edge of a chair, watching her with worried eyes.

“Gemma!” she cried and reached out for her. With a look of relief, her sister leapt up and onto the bed, and they hugged fiercely. “Oh, Gem! Am I glad to see you!”

“You have no earthly idea. I've been so worried about you, sis! You've slept for hours and hours. Are you okay?” Gemma pulled back, holding her arms, examining her for— “Omigod. He really did it.” Her sister's gaze had fastened on her neck. “Does it hurt? Is it…” Her question broke off, and her eyes darted for a
nanosecond to her own wrist. “Never mind. You don't have to talk about it if you don't want to.” She pulled her into another hug. “Shahin wanted to take me back to the oasis, but I wouldn't go until I saw for myself that you're all right. And I wanted to say I'm sorry for not being able to talk to you earlier. It really was horrible of Seth to put that spell of silence on me, and he's going to hear about it, believe me. But thank God you're finally here with us and out of danger.”

It was always tough to get a word in edgewise when Gemma got on a roll, but that last bit grabbed Joss's attention. “Danger?” she cut in, pulling back. “So you know what happened to me? At the hotel? You
know
that guy?”

Gemma froze in alarm. “Something happened to you? What guy?”

Joss rubbed her hands up and down her bare arms in a sudden chill. Gemma saw it, noted her nakedness and slid off the bed to fetch a dress that was hanging on an armoire across the room while Joss told her about the encounter in the hotel room with Harold Ray. And about his final warning.

“I
knew
the bastard would find you. But don't worry about him,” Gemma assured her, handing her the long, flowing dress. “Seth will protect you from Haru-Re now that you're here.”

Joss wasn't so sure about that. “Haru-Re?” she asked.

“He's a demigod, a vampire like Seth,” Gemma explained. “High priest of the Sun God, Re-Horakhti. His real name is Haru-Re, but he likes being called
Ray.” She rolled her eyes at the double meaning. “How on earth did you get away from him?”

Joss pulled on the dress and told her about the knock at the hotel room door that came in the nick of time, and the copper-colored cat she'd seen in the corridor afterward. It made no sense then, but after today…

“Nephtys,” Gemma declared, blowing out a breath of recognition. “Thank God she found you at the hotel.”

Joss blinked, sitting back on the bed, recalling— “Good grief,” she said. “There was a cat at the tomb, too. It was wearing an amulet around its neck. When Nephtys appeared moments later wearing the same one, I thought I'd started hallucinating.”

Gemma smiled. “It was her, all right. Her Set-animal is a temple cat.”

“Set-animal?” More shape-shifting? The memory of seeing the man, Shahin, change from a hawk to a human sent a shiver down Joss's arms.

“Shape-shifting is part of the deal when you become one of the
shemsu,
an immortal,” Gemma said. “You get to choose the animal you'd like to share your
ba
with.”

Joss knew about the ancient Egyptian belief that each person possessed three different souls: the
ba,
the
ka,
and the
akh.
The
ka
carried one's earthly spirit, or creative spark, while the
ba
was more bound up in the physical, existing in its own body and able to take on any shape it wished as it traveled between the mortal realm and the underworld. As a guide to the living, a person's
ba
directed his words and actions toward
“maât,”
or truth and goodness, keeping him on the path to heaven.
Upon death, the two souls joined to become the
akh
, the person's essence that lived on in the afterlife.

Joss stared at her sister in stark disbelief. So she was saying this stuff was really true? That these people had somehow found a way to harness the powers of their
ba
and… No. It was too incredible. If she didn't know better, she'd think Gemma had gone stark, raving mad.

And yet…she'd seen it with her own eyes. Shahin
had
shifted. How else to explain that?

Gemma waved a hand as if the whole shape-shifting thing were inconsequential. “You'll learn about all that stuff later.” She frowned. “Although I'm not sure how, now that Khepesh no longer has a priestess. That was Nephtys's job. Before she…” For a second, Gemma looked troubled.

“Khepesh?” Joss asked, not about to let her get off-track.

“Here,” Gemma said, indicating their surroundings with an all-encompassing gesture. “Khepesh is the name of our palace. Our
per netjer
.”

Joss didn't miss Gemma's use of the word
our.
Twice.

Joss was also fluent in hieroglyphics, so she knew what
per netjer
meant without asking.
Home of the god.
And the word
Khepesh
bore a complicated circular meaning involving the foreleg of an ox, a type of scimitar, the connotation “strong of arm” and the Great Bear star constellation—known to ancient Egyptians as “the foreleg of Set-Sutekh.” An appropriate name for the abode of the god himself.

If he existed.

Josslyn was more than skeptical when it came to pagan gods, despite the undeniably strange goings on here at Khepesh. She was strictly a one-God kind of person. So were Gemma and Gillian, which was why she couldn't understand what either one of them was doing here. And yet, Joss had definitely seen signs of supernatural goings-on. Heard things that made her believe. Hell, definitely
felt
the power here. How could she deny what her own senses were telling her?

Still, accepting the existence of vampires and shape-shifters in the world was a far cry from attributing that presence to the manifestation of some ancient pagan god. Or even a demigod.

Gemma had obviously accepted it all. But then, she always was a bit woo-woo, like their mother had been.

Joss gazed at her sister, a thousand new questions assaulting her like a hoard of insects—on top of the million questions she already had pinging around in her brain like pinballs.

“Gem,” she said carefully. “What the hell
is
this place? And how did
we
end up here? Seth-Aziz told me Mom and Dad are alive, and Gillian is living with them in some place called Petru. For God's sake, I've just been bitten by a freaking
vampire!
Yet here you sit, looking happier than I've ever seen you. Please, Gem, tell me what's going on here, before my head explodes!”

 

Seth had spent the entire afternoon arguing with the six other members of the Great Council of Khepesh. About how to get Nephtys back. About whether to take the offensive in the war with Haru-Re instead of sitting back and waiting to be attacked. About the council
sticking their noses in where they damn well didn't belong.

The council had actually ordered him to bring Josslyn Haliday to the council chambers so they could speak with her! When he'd told them he'd sent her away to Shahin's oasis, they'd even intimated that he had made a grave error, rebuking him for going against Nephtys's vision of the future and not immediately taking Josslyn as his consort.

The bunch of superstitious old goats.

It was an outrage!

He
would decide with whom he would or would not spend the rest of eternity, with no help from his meddling sister
or
the Great Council!

Furthermore, he was
not
being irrational.

He was
not
losing control of his element to call—which happened to be the element of chaos. It was not his fault that everything around them was falling apart at the seams! It was all that damn woman's fault!

And another thing was for
damn
certain. When he decided to take a new consort, his choice of soul mate would
not
be a woman who was a goddamn living magnet for trouble and catastrophe.

By the balls of Mithra!

He ground his jaw. For a man used to maintaining cool, reasonable authority and an even temper at all times, this entire day had been one long nightmare of emotional uproar.

He needed to calm down.

To gather himself.

To figure out a strategy to deal with this newest mess the blasted woman had sent hurling into his life.

Hell. He needed to run.

He stormed into his private rooms, heading straight to his bedroom to change into clothes that wouldn't be—

“By the
gods!
” he gritted out.

There were two women curled on his bed, head to head, one with a mass of auburn curls, the other a tangle of golden tresses. When he burst in like a whirlwind, they shot up with startled faces.

“Seth!” Gemma exclaimed in surprise, reaching for her sister's hand. Josslyn said nothing, but her face flooded with something that looked a lot like mortification.

“What are you two doing here?” he demanded, further irritated by the cheeky woman's use of his name instead of the proper form of address. He lasered in on the blonde. “Why isn't she gone?”

“We were talking,” Gemma said, irritatingly unafraid of him. “Must have lost track of time. Sorry.”

Sorry?

Unperturbed by the thunderous expression he summoned, she lifted Josslyn's wrist. “And what is this all about?” she pointedly asked, referring to the silver bindings that still hung from it. “My sister is not a prisoner, and I was led to believe that you abolished slavery in Khepesh a thousand years ago. Why is she in chains?”

It was a flaming wonder that Shahin put up with the blasted woman.

Seth schooled his knee-jerk impulse to show her exactly
which
of them in the room was the demigod. “I do as I please,” he told her with chilly precision. “And it pleases me to see her bound.”

Gemma's lips pressed together. Josslyn's gaze flipped back and forth between them, unsure whether to be afraid of him or not.

Which gave him just the idea he was seeking.

He stabbed a finger at Gemma. “You. Out.”

Josslyn's uncertainty increased visibly.

“What are you going to do to her?” Gemma asked, suspicion rife in her tone.

In reply he ground out, “I have also abolished public flogging, but I am dangerously close to reinstating it.”

She—wisely—silently lifted her chin and rose with exaggerated dignity from the bed, shook her gown into place and regarded him. “Be nice to her,” she admonished. “My lord,” she added in a belated and not entirely successful show of respect.

“I shall take it under advisement,” he said, glaring at her until she turned to Josslyn and kissed her on the cheek.

“Remember what I told you,” she said quietly. “And don't worry about Seth. He's all bark and no bite.” She realized her mistake and did her best to suppress a smile. “Well. Mostly.”

And then she swept out of the room, head held high.

“Has she always been this trying?” he asked Josslyn when the dust had settled.

“No.” She crossed her arms tightly over her middle, the silver chain jingling musically. “Usually she's a lot worse.”

Seth couldn't decide whether she was joking or not.

He looked at her and hated that he was teetering
dangerously on the edge of being amused by the pair. The only people allowed to make him laugh were Nephtys and Rhys. And on rare occasions Shahin, but not often. The sheikh was even more somber than he.

Seth shook off the unwanted appeal and hardened himself. Then he started to remove his clothes.

She watched him nervously.

“Take off your dress,” he ordered her.

She didn't move. “I—I thought you were finished with me,” she said, her color rising.

He could feel the warmth of her blush all the way across the room. Because her blood flowed in his veins, his own body felt a whisper of whatever hers did. If she cut herself, he would sense her pain. If she felt hunger, or panic, he would know it.