Her Kind of Trouble (37 page)

He grabbed me by the waist and yanked me against him—his men still gripping my arms,, holding me captive just in case. He kissed my neck, squeezed one of my breasts through the thin material of my top. His arousal pushed insistently against me, against my belly where I thought, hoped,
knew
Lex's baby waited.

A child created in love. In every beautiful, sacred thing sex could be.

This creature's violence seemed all the more blasphemous, in contrast. Here stood evil.

I turned my head away from his hungry mouth and deliberately caught Lex and Rhys's horrified gazes in the barred shadows. Even Catrina looked less than pleased.

It's okay
, I mouthed firmly, determined to make that true. Then, with a growl, Hani caught my jaw in his hard grip and twisted my face back to him, possessively covered my lips with his slimy, stinking mouth.

Use his force against him, I thought—an old tai chi basic. Instead of fighting, I parted my lips for him, despite a very strong gag reflex.

He thrust in his sluglike tongue, as I'd known he would.

And I bit it. Not nipped. Not pinched. I sank my teeth in hard and deep, like into a piece of tough steak, and tasted hot blood.

He screamed, flailing to strike me in the head to make me let go, but his two henchmen were in the way. Not that I could stand to be this close to him for much longer. I did let go, allowing him to recoil from me.

Then, using the men who held my arms as a brace, I kicked out with both feet. Hani managed to guard against the first kick—it's not as easy to get men where it hurts as you'd think. But the second booted foot hit him squarely where I wanted it to.

We both went down—me because the men who held me hadn't expected to suddenly have my full weight, and Hani because few men can stand after a direct blow to their privates.

Sandy
ground impacted my hip. One of Hani's thugs lost his grip on me as we fell. The other, it was easy to twist free from. In barely a moment, I'd regained my feet and was striding back to the entrance to the pyramid.

Hani's other men stepped quickly back as I passed—maybe due to the violence, maybe due to the Cleopatra eyes and the ankh, or maybe it had something to do with me spitting their leader's blood as I passed them.

I yanked open the gate's grating. "Now," I said to Rhys.

"Yes, ma'am," he said, quickly handing me Asp.

I saw that Lex's hand was under his coat—and I knew what he had. A man who could get a morning-after pill in the Arab Republic of Egypt would have no problem getting hold of a gun.

That he hadn't used it against Phil, that he'd chosen honor over life, was something I'd have to consider when I had more time. For now I stared, just long enough for him to know that I knew, and I mouthed,
Don't
.

His empty hand fell loose to his side. But his glare told me that he wasn't convinced. Well, fine. If Hani killed me, Lex was welcome to shoot him.

"If you gentlemen will take care of the others," I called over my shoulder, as I turned back to Jane Fletcher's ex-husband, "I'm about to give Mr. Rachid a lesson in woman's spirituality."

Particularly the power of the bitch goddess.

Chapter 22

With ten thousand names,
Isis
must have a few that have nothing to do with healing, mercy or compassion.

It was that aspect of her that I channeled now.

Hani staggered to his feet, hunched but desperate, when he saw me stalking at him with my sword. Blood trailed from the corners of his mouth and down his chin, as if he were some kind of vampire sheikh. Not far from us, a camel gargled its disapproval.

Or maybe it was approval. Who could tell, with camels?

"I want you to understand a couple of things," I said grimly. "I really do. First, women are not property."

He lifted one hand and, with a snick, a switchblade appeared to gleam in the torchlight against the darkness. "Hah!"

"I know you think I'm lying, what with me being a witch and all," I continued, lifting Asp so that he could get the full effect of his own weapon's inadequacy. The words, I suspected, were an even more effective weapon. "But face reality, Hani. Whether you want it or not, Jane and Kara are safe in the embassy."

"Not forever," he warned, his voice thick and slurred with blood. "They will come out, and I will kill them."

Now he'd
kill
them? He was upset, wasn't he? And apparently, he only had one brutal way of handling that upset.

"Tala is doing just fine on her own," I reminded him. "And hey, here I am, about to kick your ass. To believe that women aren't independent beings, in the face of this kind of proof, you can't just be a chauvinist. You'd have to be delusional."

Speaking of delusional, he swung at me with his switchblade.

My sword tip caught it and held it, both of us exerting pressure. But I wasn't having to exert very much, with the leverage I had. Good Asp.

"A second thing you should remember," I said, "is that violence begets violence. You think you can beat the world into submission. But haven't you noticed that everything that's gone wrong in your life is a direct result of your trying to hurt someone else?"

"Shut up," he lisped, clearly not getting rule number one. Delusional it was.

When he lunged at me I spun, letting him stumble by. When he tried again, I simply turned again. Now his back was to… interesting! A particularly long shadow was, in fact, an excavation trench.

I noticed, with the edge of my attention, that the inner circle of the Comitatus did have a few warrior abilities. They seemed to be taking care of Hani's thugs nicely.

"That's the third thing," I continued. "What goes around, comes around. That's why life shouldn't be a competition, but a partnership. You're a textbook example."

He lunged again, not even listening. I spun again.

Now
my
back was to the trench.

The next time he came at me, I let him crowd me backward, nearer to its drop.
Don't stumble on a rock. Do
not
stumble on a rock
!

"If you hadn't mistreated Jane, she may never have divorced you," I said. "You might have had more children, maybe even a son. Instead, you lost your only daughter. Nobody did that but—"

He thrust at me again. I feinted back farther. One of my booted feet slid in the sand—but I regained my balance.

"—you. As far as that goes, if you hadn't bullied me and Rhys, I might have refused to help Jane and Kara escape. If you hadn't… " I was guessing now, but it felt right. "If you hadn't sent that lawyer to me in jail, to get me to sign the false confession… How much did that bribe cost you, anyway?"

He let out a bestial cry as he swung again. My sword tip, resting on his knuckles, swung with him. Again, I sidestepped, still perched there, balanced on the edge of the trench. It was only ten, maybe twelve feet deep. I could jump if I had to.

I had no intention of having to.

"Well, that money's gone forever. If you hadn't tried to run down Rhys, I wouldn't even be here. And if you hadn't stolen my phone,
Lex
might not be here, and he and I might not have gotten past our own differences. So you're partially responsible for my current happiness. How's
that
for irony?"

"
Silence
!" At least, that's what I think he was saying. His mouth spilled more blood with each attempt at speech; it soaked the front of his shirt like a grisly bib. And his tongue—or what was left of it—must be swelling. "
Shut up
!"

But I kept talking—both because I was figuring some of this out for myself as I spoke, and because I knew that this kind of man found a woman's voice as torturous as anything the Inquisition ever thought up.

A woman's voice saying anything other than what he dictated, anyway.

"One last piece of advice," I continued.

He swung, but my trusty blade followed his, nipping at his knuckles. He swung again, with no better luck.

Eyes increasingly wild, he flipped and then threw the knife—

And somehow, somehow, I dodged it.

Magic. Luck. Both. Neither. It didn't matter.
I dodged it
!

"Next time you decide to protect yourself with a magical symbol," I said, "maybe you should try using one that's not a symbol for the
son of a goddess!"

He bunked—but even he had to see the connection and the sense there. Even people who aren't big on the Egyptian pantheon have often heard about Isis, Osiris—and their son, the falcon-god Horus.

So—
was
the symbol magic, but a magic that didn't work against
Isis
? Or had its only power been that Hani believed in it, and now he did not? Was there a difference?

Either way, that's when he rushed me with a bestial bellow. And the udjat eye did not protect him.

I stepped neatly to one side—
first visible, then invisible
—whacking him with the flat of my blade as he stumbled past me. He vanished over the trench's edge, into the excavation ditch, and was silent.

I panted. Could it be that easy?

In that silence, we all heard the faint throb of an approaching helicopter. Its searchlight, as it sought a place to land, illuminated the ancient House of Osiris in stark highlights and shadows. The walls. The causeways. The tombs. The crumbling pyramids, especially the one looming over us.

And the ditch in which Hani Rachid lay, very still, his head at an improbable angle.

I'll admit, I was surprised to see that Sinbad was dead. I really hadn't set out to kill him.

But I sure as hell didn't feel guilty about it.

Three days later found me on a Zodiac in the sunrise-tinted Alexandrian Harbor, adjusting a dive mask over the hood of my dry suit. Overhead a bird cried—perhaps a kite, I thought, sacred to
Isis
. Rhys was piloting the boat. Catrina would be my diving buddy.

Though the word
buddy
was stretching things considerably.
Guard
was more like it.

"I will not let you take it," she warned, before silencing herself with her regulator.

"Like you could stop me," I countered, before doing the same. Then I glared at Rhys for good measure before Cat and I rolled backward off of opposite sides of the boat, with a splash, into the murky green water of Cleopatra's Palace.

It was early, but we had to move fast before anyone from the project discovered us.

We both made a beeline for the statue of
Isis
.

Back when the private helicopter landed at AbuSir, kicking up enough sand to infuriate Catrina and annoy the camels, I'd had to make a serious choice.

Go with Lex? Or go with the Isis Grail?

Or, Plan C, fight Catrina there and then to get the chalice back? But that would take time I didn't have. So I'd charged her and Rhys with protecting the cup until I got back, and I climbed into the chopper with Lex and Dr. Ken.