Chapter Seven

He was supposed to be dead—he was always dead, in her memory, in the stories they told about him. He was dead. Jack wounded him, Jack had turned and turned on him and bit him, infection had set in, Ayaan had sanitized him. It was the story of her life, of her origins.

None of it was true. Thank God.

His dead arms went around her in a feeble kind of embrace. She might have been held by a human-shaped agglutination of popsicle sticks and pipe-cleaners. Sarah pressed harder against him, against his woolen shirt that smelled of death and his dry, dry skin that cracked and peeled against her cheek. Disgust, even horror lost out to the feeling, the one, pure feeling that sang in her. She had never felt something so primal and focused before, except maybe the fear of death, and that was old to her, and this was new.

Somewhere in the twelve year gap between their meetings she had lost him, he had turned a corner in her memory and disappeared from view. Now she had made another right, and another, and in the labyrinth their paths had crossed again. Her age—his condition—none of it was particularly important. They were just a father and a daughter, he was still the man who had taken her to meet the Bedouins and let her pet their camels, she was still the child who loved butter pecan ice cream and Arabic-language cartoons from Egypt on Saturday morning.

The scuttling bug-like skull crawled up the wall behind her father, into her field of view, but she just shut her eyes and went back to the place where they were family, a family again, and all the walls between them shifted and rearranged to make paths and routes for them to reach each other.

There was someone else in that maze, someone neither of them could see, and of course it was Helen. Her mother, his wife. Helen who had turned and who was maybe still locked in a bathroom in Nairobi, beating against the door, trying to get out to find something to eat. She was a wispy kind of ghost, a distant presence even in memory, however, and it was easy enough to ignore her rattling her chains somewhere in Sarah’s peripheral vision.

“Sarah,” he breathed, his voice a rustling of old mildew-spotted paper. “You weren’t supposed to see me like this. Ever.” His body convulsed against hers. He was trying to push her away. She let him go, let him slip out from her hug like a piece of ratty cloth falling away. “This is my spider hole. You weren’t supposed to see me this weak.” His eyes flicked away from her for a split second, just as long as it takes the sun to hide behind a cloud. She saw where he looked and shook her head. His shame had made him look at the dead slack on the platform. The one he’d been feeding from when she came in. “I held out for so long. I just went hungry—I thought I could do it.”

The skull moved behind him but they both ignored it. He stared at her. She could hear the word in his mind, as clearly as if she had a telepathic link to him, though she didn’t. The word was “cannibal,” and it made her shake her head again. “He was already dead, and—”

“And I didn’t so much eat him as drain him,” he agreed, a little too quickly. Dekalb lifted one hand creakily and put it against his cheek as if to hide a blush. The color of his face, which was the color of a white concrete sidewalk after a summer rain, did not change. “You can... you can just take their darkness. You can absorb their energy and they fall down. I think they want it, that peace.” He shook his head and she saw his neck was as thin as a length of pipe. “It makes you strong again but it doesn’t diminish the hunger. Nothing ever does. I’m so hungry, pumpkin, you can’t know.”

He kept looking at the corpse. She wanted to tell him it didn’t matter, that she didn’t care. She remembered the lich in Cyprus, and how Osman had needed more than words. She needed to show him. With all her strength she grabbed the corpse’s thin ankles and pulled it, shoved it, heaved it over the edge of the platform. It fell into the dark shaft below with a long-lived series of clanks and bangs and thrumming impacts. Dekalb moved his hand to cover his mouth. He had grown so weak, so thin since she’d last seen him. So used up. Death wasn’t all of it, though, it wasn’t just undeath that made him so pale and attenuated. She heard a narrow scuttling sound behind her and spun on her heel.

The insectile skull with the blue eyes looked up at her from the platform. It sprang into the air, rising a few inches off the floor, and fell back. It wanted her attention.

“Is that Gary?” she said, just a hunch. She couldn’t imagine who else it might be. The two of them were linked so tightly in the story, at least the way Ayaan always told it—Dekalb and Gary, good and evil locked in epic struggle, and Dekalb had only won that battle by sacrificing his own life. Of course in the story Dekalb didn’t come back as a lich and Gary was an enormous and deadly monster who burned away to nothing but ashes. This creature, this human skull was like nothing she’d ever seen before and it worried her. She knew Ayaan would have had a million questions. You never turned your back on the new or unusual, that was one of her rules. As much as Sarah wanted to talk to her father she knew this mystery had to be cleared up first. Sarah turned the crawling skull over with one boot and saw the segmented limbs underneath, hidden like the legs of a horseshoe crab. The legs pedaled madly and she drew her foot back squeamishly, wondering if she should kick the evil thing into the darkness of the shaft. It pistoned on its tiny jointed feet and skittered away from her. She looked back at her father.

He nodded. “He’s not human anymore, I think he’s dead so many times over he’s forgotten what a living human body is like. He’s healing, and he’s growing, in ways I can’t anticipate. He doesn’t seem to be able to just die. I’ve tried everything, I even had the mummies smash him to bits with a sledgehammer. The next day he had put himself back together the way they used to put broken vases back together with superglue. I locked myself in here, I sealed myself away because I needed to watch him. To make sure he didn’t get loose.” He stared at the skull bug then as if it had changed colors. “No, I don’t think that’s appropriate,” he said, and she frowned at him until he looked back at her face. “He and I can communicate, sort of. He wants to talk to you, he—Gary, don’t make me crush you again, or maybe we could boil you in a pot... no. Never. You will never get near her, do you hear me? Never!”

“I’d like to hear what he has to say,” Sarah told Dekalb.

“Oh, alright,” the lich said, his hands at his throat. “I’ll have to translate, though. He doesn’t have any lungs or vocal cords or a tongue or anything, and—”

She stopped him in mid-sentence. “I know a trick,” she told him, thinking of the soapstone in her pocket. She’d speculated often on how it linked her to Ptolemy. “I just need something of his, something close to him. Like a piece of jewelry he always wore, a wedding ring, or a favorite shirt, or—”

One of the mummies—silent and invisible until that moment—glided forward and picked the skull up off the ground. With a casual snap it tore one of the teeth out of Gary’s upper jaw and then dumped the rest of him on the platform. The mummy handed her the long yellow tooth, complete with spiky roots, and stepped back into the shadows.

Sarah bit her lip. “I don’t know if this will work,” she said. She made a fist around the tooth and frowned.

That fucking hurt, you prick, Gary said, using her own internal voice. The words blasted through her mind and made her ears ring in sympathy. Come back here and I’ll bite your goddamned prick off! Or did they already put it in one of those fucking jars? She squinted her eyes and tried to turn down her own mental volume.

It didn’t work. So you’re Sarah, huh? You’re skinnier than I expected. I also thought you’d be white, like your old man. Don’t get me wrong, I’m no racist. I’d gladly take a bite out of you if I just had a mandible to call my own.

She could feel him grinning in her head, his tongue lapping at her grey matter, at the convolutions of her brain. She nearly let go of the tooth. Then she realized she couldn’t, that the buzzing, stinging energy in the tooth had actually paralyzed her hand. She couldn’t let go. She tried to open her mouth to speak and found she couldn’t do that, either.