He looked first at her, then at Mrs. P, who was busily rolling up a small rattan mat and sliding it into her suitcase. “I think that’s an excellent idea. I’ll rest while you’re out. Away from the hotel. Er… seeing the sights.”

Sophea exclaimed at the time. “Criminy, how did it get to be this late? Akbar will be waiting for us in ten minutes. I’ll just take a fast shower before we go, Mrs. P, all right? Be sure to drink all that tea—we don’t need you getting dehydrated while we’re out seeing the pyramids!”

The room seemed strangely empty when she hurried into the bathroom with her bag in hand.

Silence reigned for a few minutes before Mrs. P, sipping noisily at her cup of tea, set it down and observed, “Her exuberance for life is endearing, is it not?”

He got to his feet slowly, feeling as if he were at least two hundred years old, and moved casually toward the door. Sitting on a small table next to it were two key cards. “Did you tell her the truth when you said you knew who her father was?”

Mrs. P cocked her head, and to his surprise, winked. “Perhaps I did, and perhaps I wanted to waken the gel to the truth. Go, now. You cannot be my champion if you are likely to drop from exhaustion. We have many trials ahead of us before I will reach my beau.”

He paused at the door, opened it, and turned back to face Mrs. P, using his body to shield the fact that he was taking one of the key cards. As a distraction in case she noticed the movement of his arm, he asked, “I take it your boyfriend is in the Underworld?”

The wrinkles in her face rearranged themselves into a smile. “Of course. Who else but a denizen of that realm could summon me to him?”

Rowan slid the card into his back pocket and racked his mind through the dusty corridors of past history classes. “Set was the lord of the Egyptian underworld, wasn’t he? No, I lie—it was Osiris. Is that who you think you’re going to meet?”

She wrapped her scrawny arms carefully around her hunched torso. “He has called me home at last. Somehow, he acquired the means, and we will be reunited again. And with my offering, he will be made whole, and will at last take his rightful place in the world.”

Rowan tried to get his tired brain to process that, but it refused. It just outright refused. Instead, he nodded and quietly closed the door, returning to his room where he collapsed on the bed.

But not before setting an alarm for an hour. By that time, Mrs. P’s room should be empty, and he would be able at last to search her things… and Sophea’s. Just in case Mrs. P got clever with hiding places.

Exactly an hour and ten minutes later, he tapped on their door, heard nothing, and quietly opened it.

The room had been torn apart, everything from the bedding to the clothes, even to the cushions on the chairs torn to literal shreds. Little particles of furniture stuffing floated gently in the air, stirred by the quiet rush of coolness from the air conditioner. He surveyed the damage. Even the luggage itself had been destroyed, leaving no doubt that if something had been hidden in a bag lining, or false bottom, it had been discovered.

Rowan closed the door and returned to his room. If he had any hope of getting out of taking a cruise down the Nile, his chances had just dwindled to nothing. Assuming, of course, that whoever had destroyed the room had not found the ring… and suddenly, he was quite confident that it hadn’t been found.

“The old biddy has it on her person,” he said aloud and called down to the front desk to lodge a complaint about the disturbance he heard in Mrs. P’s room. The room clerk promised to send someone up to investigate, after which Rowan, without even taking off his shoes, lay down on the bed and fell asleep in less than five minutes.

Nine

“Hold on, don’t leave yet! We’re coming, we’re coming. We just got held up—oh, thank you. Would you mind helping Mrs. P, please? The dock is a bit uneven. I’ll grab our bags. We were robbed, our stuff totally destroyed. It was horrible! Ack. Sorry, yes, I have money. I’m not trying to run off without paying you.” I dug out a few bills from a pocket where I’d stuffed some money I’d exchanged for Mrs. P and paid off the taxi driver, who had followed yammering about me trying to rob him, when I shoved Mrs. P from the car and made a dash for the boat that was about to pull out from a rickety little dock extending twelve feet into the Nile.

I grabbed the plastic bag with basic accessories that I’d had to fetch from the hotel’s shop—toothbrushes, soap, shampoo, and assorted other necessities—and with a note from the hotel giving me information about the police officer in charge of our case clutched in my sweaty hand, trotted after the crew member who was helping Mrs. P get onto the ship.

“It was a nightmare, a total and complete nightmare. Everything was destroyed. They even squeezed out our toothpaste, and of course, we didn’t find out our things had been violated until we got back from seeing the pyramids, which was half an hour before we were supposed to come here. What? Oh, yes, tickets. Hold this, would you?” I shoved my bag of items at the man in a spotless white captain’s hat and rummaged around in my pockets. “One of them got torn in half, but the people at the reception desk taped it back together. Here we go.”

The captain eyed my less than pristine self (dusty, sweaty, and wrinkled from our trip to the pyramids), pursed his lips, and considered the tickets. He was very Omar Sharif with dark eyes, an impressive mustache, sparkling white naval suit complete with glistening gold braid, and a general air of being the suavest man at the party. He also intimidated the crap out of me, an unreasonable feeling at best, but there was just something about him that seemed almost ruthless.

He looked up from the tickets, taking me in again. If he was the top of the barrel, sartorially speaking, then I was wallowing in the dregs at the bottom. “I see. Welcome to the Wepwawet, Madame. I am Captain Kherty. There was no need for you to rush—Mr. Dakar told us you were delayed and would be along shortly.”

“Oh, he did, did he?” I walked up the brief gangway onto the ship, my mind simultaneously processing the traces of adrenaline resulting from the mad dash to the ship, the thrilled sensation of being on an actual river cruise about to set sail down the exotic Nile, and the on-again, off-again suspicion that Rowan had first used me to get to Mrs. P and then had torn apart our room and belongings.