Unwrapped: An Urban Fantasy Adventure (Werewolves vs. Mummies Book 3) (3 page)

The ape stiffened while the jackal sighed noticeably.

“He has a point. There are two of us.
That
would be unfair.
” The way the jackal said the words made worry crawl across the primordial part of my lizard brain although I couldn’t have told you why.

“Indeed,” the ape replied and reached into the Christmas red sash around his waist to pull out what looked like a solid gold coin. “Want to flip for it?”

“Nah,” the jackal said, leaning back against the wall. “You can do it, unless you don’t want to?” He raised an eyebrow. Were they seriously going to flip a coin to see who could take me on one on one because they had agreed me fighting both were unfair? I glanced at Khufu for confirmation that I wasn’t insane, but the pharaoh was staring at the two of them wide-eyed with fright. Maybe I should back down now?

Instead of replying to his comrade, the ape turned his red eyes on me. “Guess it’s my turn,” he said, gesturing at me with his coin. “You going to change or you want to fight handicapped. I mean, it doesn’t matter since I’m going to win either way, but you know, I don’t want you to say I cheated. I really hate that.” He shifted his feet. “People always claim I cheat.”

“Why would they claim you cheat?” I asked, trying to smile despite the fear swelling in my gut. “Are you a cheater?”

“No, but you’ll see why soon enough.” The ape let out a sad little sigh. “When this is over, hopefully you are honorable enough to realize I beat you fairly. I don’t exactly have high hopes.”

“Um, Thes,” Khufu said, reaching out toward me, but I stepped out of his way and called upon my wolf.

Wepwawet glared at me hard enough to make my inner self wince before rushing forward. My body transformed into its wolfman state as the ape appraised me.

“You’re short,” he said before reaching out and offering me his hand. “Shake?”

“I’m over eight feet tall,” I replied, taking his hand, and as I did so, he squeezed and broke every bone my hand.

“Like I said, short.” He released me. “And you have a weak grip.”

I didn’t scream because I was a badass who was too shocked to believe that’d just happened. Had he really just broken my hand during a handshake? Seriously? I stared down at my paw as the bones writhed back into place and ignored the agony that brought, instead focusing on the warrior in front of me.

“You didn’t cry out,” he said, watching my hand studiously. “Are you used to taking damage because you can heal?” He raised one dark eyebrow, but before I could reply, he continued speaking. “I can see why that makes you over confident. You think you’ll just heal until you win. You won’t, but I see how someone like you,” he gestured at me with his free hand, “wins a lot of battles through endurance. That won’t work with me.”

“Oh?” I asked as my hand snapped back into perfect form, and I dropped back into a fighting stance, my feet sliding out on the sand. I didn’t really have much formal training, what with being a werewolf and all, but I knew how to stand like a badass from watching Bruce Lee movies.

“I am called Menes.” He dropped his spear. It hit the sand with a thud that made me think it must have weighed several hundred pounds, but that was impossible, right? He’d been carrying it with ease. “You may not have heard of me, but if you somehow survive the next oh, three seconds or so, you will remember me forever.”

“Menes, eh?” I asked, trying to ignore how he only expected me to last three seconds.

“It means he who endures,” Menes said, kicking off his sandals and sloughing off his armor, leaving him standing before me bare-chested. His tanned muscles glinted in the sunlight, and I’m not sure how to appropriately describe it. I mean, watching an Iron Man muscle competition when I was little and being amazed at the physical strength of the men. This was like that, all that raw power, but somehow compressed into a sleek frame of a super cut MMA fighter after he had shed every ounce of fat in order to make weight. “No matter what you do to me, I will endure.”

I swallowed as the hair on the back of my neck stood straight up. This guy had dropped his weapons and armor and unlike me, didn’t have claws. He had normal human hands and feet. He could bite me, I supposed, but he didn’t strike me as the type, though I couldn’t have told you why. Still, he seemed menacing. Like he could hit me and I’d just die. Hell, I could kick him in the toe, and the force of it would reverberate through my foot, up through my leg and rupture my heart. Maybe I should rethink this.

Menes raised one hand toward me, leaving his other arm dangling by his side, and curled his fingers toward his chest. “Whenever you are ready, Dunewalker. Come and let me show you a thing or two.”

“Five bucks says he doesn’t even last three seconds,” the other guard called, leaving me to wonder how he knew what bucks were. I almost asked him about it when I realized something horrible. Khufu wasn’t even taking him up on the bet. That was likely bad.

Well, I’d show them. I could totally last three seconds. Hell, I’d last an eternity because I was going to win.

I charged.

Menes hit me square in the jaw and agony unlike I anything I had ever felt filled the entirety of being. I didn’t even see the attack really so I couldn’t tell you how he hit me. My teeth shattered as I was thrown backward across the dunes like a bloody comet. When I finally hit the ground and skidded far enough across the sand to tear nearly all the flesh from my bones, I couldn’t even see the prison of the gods anymore. Not that it mattered because everything around me faded into darkness.

Chapter 4

“I’m thinking we need a new plan,” both Khufus said as they stood over me and stared down into my face from a few inches away. “One that doesn’t involve you getting your ass handed to you by two of the most distinguished warriors in all of Egyptian history, just saying.”

“Why are there two of you?” I asked, reaching up to rub my eyes and was surprised to see my hands sans fur and claws. I’d reverted to my normal human while unconscious, which wasn’t astoundingly positive. Menes had knocked the wolf right out of me.

“There are not two of me,” Khufu said, grabbing me by the arm and hauling me to my feet with ease thanks to his superhuman mummy strength. “You’re seeing double.” He threw my arm over his shoulder and let me stand there for a moment as I struggled to orient myself. It felt like someone had taken a jackhammer to my brain. And yes, I knew what that felt like. Long story short, don’t go drinking with werewolves who work in construction.

“I think he hit me really hard,” I said before dropping to my knees and retching onto the sand as dizziness swept over me.

Both Khufus leapt back out of the way and glared at me. “Menes knocked you over three miles through the air. You’re lucky you’re not dead.”

“Guess I’m tougher than I look,” I said, resting my head against a reasonably vomit free patch of sand.

“Think about something before you get all cocky about getting your ass beat, Thes. Menes pulled his punch. He didn’t even hit you. That was just the force of the air generated by his punch hitting you. You’re lucky. I don’t think Narmer would have stopped. Now hold still.” Khufu reached forward and rubbed my shoulders, digging his thumbs into my back. I was about to tell him to stop when my nausea abated and my blurry vision faded.

When I looked up, there was only one Khufu. Thank god. The world couldn’t handle two of the mummy. I got slowly to my feet and resisted the urge to find a nice hole to crawl inside and die from embarrassment. I’d just been launched over three miles by a guy who had hit the air so hard it had nearly killed me.

“How could they be so strong?” I asked, brushing the sand on my palms off on my tunic. “I don’t want to toot my own horn here, but I’ve actually fought gods before, and they’ve never hit me so hard I flew miles through the air.”

“They’re tasked with guarding the prison of the gods, you dolt. They have to be stronger than a god to take one down.” Khufu shrugged and began walking away. “I wouldn’t have taken you there at all, but you wouldn’t have listened to me.”

“So you took me there to get my head caved in by supernatural prison guards? On purpose?” I asked somewhat incredulously. “I thought we were friends.”

“Oh, we’re friends now?” Khufu tossed me a smirk over his shoulder.

“I’m not sure,” I replied, fixing him with my best ‘I can’t believe you let me get punched by the Egyptian Superman’ glare.

“Think about it, Thes. You wouldn’t have listened to me if I’d wanted to avoid going straight there. You’d have whined and bitched until I capitulated. I was just saving time by cutting to the chase.” He sighed heavily. “You might say I’ve been to this particular rodeo before.”

“I’m not going to admit you have a point,” I said because he really did. That was probably exactly what would have happened. I’d never quite trusted his judgment even though the pharaoh had shown me time and again, he was so many steps ahead of me, he might as well have been on the roof while I was stuck in the basement. “But I’d like to know what your plan is for going forward.”

“We’re going to find Osiris and ask him very nicely to help us out,” Khufu replied like it was a completely reasonable suggestion. “You can do that, right? Be nice?”

“I thought Anubis said he had disappeared himself a while ago?” I asked, ignoring his barb as I caught up to him. It was no easy task because even though he was walking, I was still kind of out of it.

“Which is why I said
find
. Honestly, Thes, learn to keep up.” The mummy smiled at me, and I wondered if his statement had a double meaning. “It shouldn’t be too hard to find him.”

“The other gods haven’t found him…” I let my words hang in the air and not because my lungs were burning from the pace.

“I think that might be because they’ve been too busy to look for him effectively, what with the mummy uprising and Apep on the loose. Gods are busy creatures, and what’s more, they don’t really care about each other all that much.” He shrugged. “You should avoid their family dinners, should you ever find yourself invited.”

“So your big plan is for us to just go and find Osiris because the gods haven’t tried hard enough?” I asked, barely resisting the urge to grab him by the shoulders and shake the stupid out of him.

“Unless you have any other bright ideas,” Khufu offered, raising one bushy eyebrow at me. When I shook my head, he continued. “We’re going to start by going to the temple of Osiris and asking them to help us. Since we won’t be concerned about making the pesky mortals bow down and worship our awesomeness, I’m sure they’ll talk to us.”

“And if they don’t?” I asked, remembering how the priests at the temple of Ra hadn’t exactly been forthcoming. Then again, they’d been infinitely more helpful than the priests in Set’s temple, you know, because they’d all been killed.

“Then I give you my permission to eat them.” Khufu grinned. “Unless you don’t think you can beat up some eighty year old priests.” I was about to spout off about how Menes had just gotten lucky, but thought better of it. Something told me that the guy wouldn’t appreciate it, especially since he had made a point of remarking on it beforehand. No, I had no choice but to accept the obvious. That guy had opened up a can of whoop ass on me and there’d been nothing I could do about it.

“You just wait,” I said, chewing on my words. “One of these days I’m going to come upon a monk wandering the desert, and he’s going to teach me all sorts of martial arts. Then I’ll come back here and stomp a mud hole in that guy’s ass.” I jerked my thumb in the direction I hoped the prison of the gods stood.

“You know, Thes,” Khufu said, stopping to look at me with a deathly serious expression on his face. “I could train you.”

I stared at him for a long while, trying to decide if he was joking, but it really didn’t seem like he was. “To fight?” I asked.

“Yes,” he replied, shrugging his massive shoulders. “I
am
a pharaoh. We’re all taught how to fight. In fact, we have the best tutors in the whole land.” Then he dropped into a fighting stance and began shadowboxing at me, circling around me as he bobbed and weaved. “I can teach you how to float like a butterfly and sting like a bee. I trained that other guy, and he turned out okay, so I’m sure I can train you.”

“Other guy?” I asked as Khufu continued to throw punches at a nonexistent bad guy.

“Yeah,” Khufu grinned. “This one time a gorgon broke into Hades tomb of the damned, and I helped stop it. As thanks, I got to spend a few days topside.”

“Is that so?” I asked, arching an eyebrow at the mummy. I had a feeling he was lying, but he didn’t seem like he was. Then again, this was Khufu, all of his stories had to be taken with a heaping bucket of salt.

Khufu stopped shadowboxing and stared off into space like he was remembering a particularly fond memory. “Yeah, I met a young kid while I was out and about. I taught him a few things to keep him from getting beat up.”

“Uh, huh,” I said, walking past him. “Let me know when you have a true story to tell.”

“If you don’t believe me, you could ask him. He might still be alive.” Khufu shrugged.

“Oh? What’s his name?” I asked, half chastising myself for going along with the pharaoh’s obvious delusion. It would be just like him to send me to ask someone who had never heard of him. Then the person would look at me like I was a crazy person while Khufu laughed his butt off.

“Cassius Clay, Jr.” Khufu stared at me so seriously it was unnerving.

“And now I know you’re lying,” I replied, laughing at his audacity. “You honestly expect me to believe that?”

“Go ask him when you get back.” Khufu dared. “Either way, I can still train you.”

“Yeah, I’m good.” I smirked. “I’ll wait for my badass shaolin monk.”

“Suit yourself. But if you come crawling back to me asking for training, I’ll tell you exactly what I told that George Foreman guy.” Khufu grinned at me. “I don’t want a damn grill.”

“And this is exactly why I dislike you beyond words,” I replied, shaking my head as we began walking across the sand toward the temple of Osiris so we could find a god no other gods had been able to locate. It sounded crazy, but so had the idea of Khufu training Muhammad Ali and I’d almost believed that. Almost.