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Chapter Text

“Jonathan,” says Evy, walking straight into his living room that evening without so much as a hello. Her voice is saccharine, so sugary that it puts Jonathan’s teeth on edge. “Did you happen to become a bestselling author while Rick and I were in Luxor over summer?”

Jonathan clears his throat, sinks a little lower in his armchair, and lifts yesterday’s edition of The Egyptian Gazette slightly higher, obscuring the blush he knows he can’t control.

“I have no idea how I’m supposed to answer that, dear sister,” he replies, “seeing as I have absolutely no idea what the current bestselling novels are. I have far more important things to occupy myself with, you know.”

The fire crackles accusingly in the grate. From somewhere deep in the underbelly of the house, a clock ticks. Jonathan stares very hard at the sentence King Tut’s Treasury To Be Opened At Last! on page 2 and doesn’t absorb a single word of it.

“It’s just that Rick and I stopped at this dear little bookshop on our way back from the harbour this morning,” she says, standing very close to him indeed, “and we stumbled across a rather elaborate display of a brand new book that, the bookseller assured me, had only been published three or so months ago, but was already on its third printing. He only had a handful of copies left in stock. People had queued up outside to buy a copy the day the second reprint came out. It’s all the rage, apparently. Everyone’s reading it.”

Jonathan swallows. His mouth is suddenly very dry. “Everyone?”

“Everyone,” she affirms.

“A whole display?”

“A very large one. There was a banner.”

“Gosh.” He clears his throat, wets his finger, and turns the page of his newspaper. “Well, I can’t imagine what you think it has to do with me.”

The clock keeps ticking from some other room, which feels like a cruel lie, because time has quite clearly stopped. 

“You know that I do like to unwind after a successful dig with a good novel and a cup of tea or twelve,” says Evy. “So naturally, when I saw this highly acclaimed, bestselling novel about the discovery of an evil mummy in a cursed tomb in the lost city of the dead, I thought it would be the perfect reading material to put my feet up and relax with.”

And then, because Evy, despite being quite the decorous lady to the untrained eye these days, is also an absolute bastard, she reaches into her bag and pulls out a copy of the novel in question, and uses it to crumple down Jonathan’s makeshift newspaper divider so that he has nowhere to hide at all. 

Entirely against his will, he looks at the book in front of him. The Curse of the Deserted Heart is printed across the cover in stark black font, above the rather bold promise that the reader will find within the pages A Tantalising Tale of Love and Adventure Amidst the Dunes of the Lost City That Will Thrill, Chill and Delight You!  

Below that, there’s an illustration of a screaming blonde woman in an impractically low-cut red dress, apparently about to be devoured by a mummy, which looks, to Jonathan’s mind, more like a scarecrow made out of toilet paper. A swarthy man in black, who resembles Zorro almost exactly except for his darker skin, raises his sword aloft menacingly in the background, presumably about to save the bombshell’s life and therefore the day in very heroic fashion. 

He had absolutely no sway in the cover design, of course. He would never have allowed the woman to be a blonde.

“I simply had to buy a copy, you see,” Evy continues. “Especially when I opened up one of the display copies at the bookseller’s urging and realised that one of the principal characters was a librarian named Emmeline. I knew right away that this was going to be the sort of book that I could really—” She pauses, presumably for dramatic effect, a rather American habit that she’s picked up from Rick. “—get into.”

“Really, Evelyn,” he says, more grateful than ever that he’s had quite a lot of practice at keeping his voice steady while his mind performs cartwheels around the truth. “I hardly read novels, you know that. I haven’t the slightest idea why you think any of this would interest me at all.” 

She regards him coolly. Jonathan could swear that the temperature in the room noticeably drops, despite the fire.

“Would you like me to read some to you?” she asks, sweetly. “I’m certain you’ll have at least heard of it. It might refresh your memory.”

His heart twists in his chest and plummets into his small intestine.

“No, no, old mum, really. I must finish reading this—” He flashes his eyes to the nearest column in the newspaper he’s still, for some reason, holding, creased and ruined as it is. “—this piece about the price of fish in Alexandria. It’s edge-of-your-seat stuff.”

Evy pouts, and flops into the wicker armchair directly opposite him, crossing her legs over the left arm.

“Oh, do let me, Jonathan,” she presses. “It’ll be just like the old days, when mother would read us a storybook in front of a roaring fire before bed. Wouldn’t you like that? You always used to. You told me once that, if you ever wrote a book yourself, you hoped that parents across the globe might read it to their children the way our mother read to us.”

And God, if Evy doesn’t know exactly how to win an argument. He’s taught her well. Too well. Her eyes are glinting now with something akin to malice, and Jonathan can’t see a way out of this, beyond leaping into the fireplace and having done with it altogether. 

Some things, he thinks to himself, simply can’t be avoided. If Jonathan Carnahan can’t evade them, then no-one can.

“Go on, then,” he acquiesces, folding the newspaper up into a perfect square and contemplating, very seriously, paper-cutting himself to death with it. “But you ought to know, I really haven't read it—”

She interrupts him by loudly clearing her throat in the manner of an actor clearing their throat on the stage before a grand Shakespearean monologue. “Emmeline tossed her mane of wild, unbrushed hair and stood before the accursed mummy, a creature of absolute darkness and filth, and knew that her time had come,” reads Evy. “She knew that, despite her years of scholarly study and her fascination with useless old things, her love of all things forgotten and crumbling, she had done this. She had brought them all to this dreadful, endless ruin; the ruin of this once thriving and now lost city, the ruin of their own fleeting lives, so small in the face of all those ancient things. How could reading a book have led to this? No harm had ever come from reading a book, after all.”

She pauses. The fire crackles in the grate. Jonathan wishes a spark would catch his trousers and immolate him completely. He’d quite like to be nothing but ash.

“Dreadful pulp, isn't it,” he mumbles.

Evy frowns, an exaggerated thing. “Oh no, not at all. It's really rather good. I must not have read you one of the better bits. Let me find one of the chapters with Joanna. You'll like her much more than boring old Emmeline.” 

“Oh God,” he says faintly, as Evy flips through the book and lands on a page about halfway through. 

“Here, this bit is much more up your alley,” she says, and clears her throat again, tracking the words down the page with her index finger. “Joanna's raven hair fluttered in the arid dark of the desert, an unseen breeze ruffling Abir's ebony robes as he stood next to her, surveying the last resting place of that infernal entity, that immortal being who craved only destruction. Abir’s profile was aquiline, noble, a thing of beauty above a city full of hidden jewels. ‘The creature lingers yet, so you must stay close to me,’ he said, his rich, oaky voice cutting through the silence of the dead city, bringing Joanna’s tender heart to glorious life. She found herself wishing, just for a moment, that he would put his arm around her, draw her as close to him as she needed, or perhaps only wanted, to be. She had never had a heart for diamonds and rubies, despite the reputation she held amongst her shallow-minded peers. The only gold she desired was the heart of a true, brave man. A man like Abir, his muscular form so firm and strong beside her, so very real, and so very utterly not a thing to be craved, or owned.”

“Blimey,” Jonathan manages, after a few moments in which he quite forgets how to breathe. “That's rather racy, isn't it?”

Evy arches one delicate brow. “Rather.”

Evy looks at Jonathan. Jonathan looks, much less willingly, at Evy. She’s wearing her completely unnecessary reading glasses, perched low on the end of her nose, and she peers at him over them. It rather gives the impression that he’s being glared at from a great height.

“It really isn’t my cup of tea, Evy,” he tries. 

“You utter—” She leans forward and swats him ineffectually on the leg with the book, just a little too far out of reach to make any real contact. “I know you wrote it! There are—details in here that only five people know, and one of those people is currently dead for the second and hopefully final time under the ruins of Hamunaptra. And one of them is me, and I certainly didn’t write it, and neither did my fiancé, who I don’t think has read a book in his entire life, and I love him despite that fact, but it does rather take him out of the running in this particular race.”

Jonathan shrugs, and sits up a little straighter in his chair, trying to use the advantage of the inch or so of height that he still has on Evy to convey authority. “That still leaves one other person, apart from me.” 

He feels almost guilty, dropping the poor chap in it like this, but then again, the aforementioned poor chap didn’t seem to feel too guilty about abandoning Jonathan in the sodding desert and riding off by himself into the sunset like some devastating Byronic hero, so Jonathan thinks he’ll probably still be able to sleep tonight.

Evy blinks at him. “Ardeth Bay.” Her voice is flat, unbelieving. “You’re honestly trying to tell me that you think he wrote it?”

Jonathan shrugs. “He could have, couldn’t he? It’s entirely within the realm of possibility. Think about it. He’s an intelligent sort of chap, very voluble, likes his metaphors and his idioms and his proverbs and whatnot. It’s just as likely that he wrote it as I did. Probably even more likely, if you think about it, on account of all the proverbs.”

Evy rolls her eyes, and sits up straighter in her own chair, matching him for height. “Ardeth Bay did not write this, Jonathan,” she says, sighing. “For a start, Rick and I ran into him on the dig in Luxor, and he was rather preoccupied with stopping a rival team from digging up an enchanted amulet which would, in his words, rain ruin down upon all of mankind should it be lifted from the sands. I really don’t think he had the time to sit down and pen a romance novel.”

“I’d really call it more of an adventure novel than a romance,” says Jonathan defensively, before he even thinks about what he’s saying. 

Evy’s eyes widen. “So you have read it!” she crows. “I knew it!”

Oh, arse and buggery.

He sputters and almost falls out of his chair, tries very hard to form what he thinks might even be words. “No—I mean, just based on the bits you’ve read—”

“Jonathan.” 

It’s too late, he knows. The game is up, if it was ever even down to begin with. 

There’s nothing he can do now but save as much face as possible, which is not a challenge he particularly relishes. Especially as his face is currently redder than O’Connell’s back after two days on horseback in the desert.

“Now that I think of it, you’re right. I have picked it up once or twice, on my occasional visits to the library, you know,” he blusters, gamely, but she doesn’t look even remotely moved, and he slumps forward, resting his head on both hands propped up on his knees, knows that he has no choice but to acquiesce. He feels like a very small fish caught at the end of a long line, or perhaps someone’s old boot dredged up from the bottom of the Nile. “All right. Perhaps I’m rather more familiar with it than I’ve let on. But in my defence—”

He waits for a moment. Something usually comes. It doesn’t. Strange.

Evy takes pity on him then and closes the book, dropping it into her knapsack, out of sight. 

“I didn’t even know that you still wrote,” she says, and her voice is a gentle thing now. He almost preferred it when she seemed angry. He knows how to deal with that; people being angry with or around him is, after all, practically his resting state.

“I don’t, not really,” he sighs, and he looks away from her to where the fire burns dark and low in the grate. It’ll need more wood piling on it soon, or it’ll die out. “It was more of a… what was it that Aristotle chap called it? A catharsis. Better out than in, you know. Like a nightmare burp.”

The fire really does need stoking, he thinks. He watches a few paltry orange sparks leap expectantly into the air and fade out before they can land anywhere at all.

“Nightmares,” she says.

He sighs. “Are you really telling me that you’ve had even one good night’s sleep since everything happened?” She has the good grace, at least, to look abashed. “Of course you have,” he says, leaning back. “You have O’Connell, don’t you? I’ll tell you, it’s really not quite the same when you’re stuck here all by yourself.”

If he were to look at her now, he knows exactly what her expression would be, so he doesn’t. He’s seen that little furrow of pity between her brows before, all the times she’s gone to pick him up from some backroom auction and found him with a bloody nose, or smoothed over some unfortunate misunderstanding about an artefact’s veracity, or why, exactly, someone’s wallet had ended up in Jonathan’s pocket. Every time his little sister has slipped, without complaint, into the role of the elder sibling. And now she’s done it again, hasn’t she? Getting engaged before him, finding that person whose arms hold her tight enough to keep the bad dreams at bay. Starting the next chapter of her life and leaving him behind, her big, baby brother, here alone in the house they used to share, with enough bad dreams for them both.

“Jonathan.” 

Evy reaches out and puts her hand on his knee, so tender that it almost feels like she’s pressing her fingers into a bruise, and he can’t stand it. He gets up and goes over to the basket of firewood, selects a log that would really be much better for kindling, and lobs it haphazardly onto the quelling fire, then spends a good minute or so prodding it ineffectively with the poker. 

“Blasted thing’s going out,” he says. His voice sounds thicker than he would like.

He can feel her eyes on him even as he refuses to look, and he has the unnerving feeling that she might, in fact, actually see him, which is something he’s rather hoped to avoid for at least two of the last three decades. Not that he’s ever truly managed it. She’s always been the more observant of the two of them.

“I loved the ending, by the way,” she says. She still sounds soft, in that way he’s never really been able to cope with, but there’s something else there now, too. It isn’t pity. 

The ending. God, of course she’s skipped forward to the ending. She’s always done that, says she hates not knowing how something will end before she begins. 

He thinks about the ending, about the odd fluttering sensation that had fizzled in his chest and settled at the pit of his stomach when he wrote it, the same kind of thrill he’s always had from pick-pocketing someone much taller than him, or blagging his way onto an expedition under someone else’s name and running off with the proceeds, or convincing someone that a particularly lovely piece of glass is, in fact, a rare diamond. The spark of knowledge that he shouldn’t, but he wants to, so he will. Not so much the thrill of taking a risk or of chasing danger as the knowledge that no-one else is quite as good at getting close to a fire without getting burnt as Jonathan is. No-one else has his knack for going right up to the periphery, staring the consequences in the face, and giving them a two-fingered salute.

Well. Until recently, anyway.

Something about that ending had felt less like beating the consequences, and more like surrendering to them entirely. Less taunting fate, and more tempting it.

He pauses his ministrations with the poker and turns around. She’s leaning all her weight on one hand, propped atop the arm of the chair, smiling at him fondly. 

“Really?” he dares.

She nods. “Really. It’s a shame it didn’t end quite that way in real life, if you ask me, but you never know.” She shrugs. “Sometimes we write all the way up to the end, and only then do we realise that the story is still unfolding all around us. Like with our evil mummy friend. He thought he knew how his story was going to end, but we put a bloody great spanner in the works, didn’t we? And then you have to ask, is it really over? What would happen if you were to go back to that bloody desert right now, throw another spanner around and see what happens?” Her grin turns wolfish. “Hypothetically speaking, of course. I’m sure there’s nothing drawing you back to the desert at all.”

Despite his years of practice, he knows that there’s frankly no hope in concealing the furious blush on his face right now. Evy knows him too bloody well, anyway. There’s absolutely no use trying.

Besides, if she’s saying what he thinks she’s saying, then it’s rather more than he’s ever dared hope for, except for blissful ignorance.

“Honestly,” he mutters, trying for casual and ending up in some very odd locale between devastated and grateful. “I’ve never heard such a load of rot in all my life. Stories unfolding around us, my left foot. Are you quite sure you didn’t write that utter pulp?”

Evy smiles again, back to benevolence. “You’re the one who called it pulp, not me.”

“Complete rot, the lot of it,” he says. “I don’t like it one bit.”

“Not that you’ve read it, of course.”

He’s never loved or hated her more. 

When she’s gone, Jonathan pours himself a finger of whisky—not his own finger, certainly, but he’d met a chap on a dig in Thebes last year who’d had absolutely huge hands, perfect for opening ancient chests and tombs and things, and, Jonathan had discovered, much to his own chagrin, for punching people in the temple, and Jonathan’s not ashamed to admit that he’s used that man’s fingers as his whisky metric ever since. He’s earnt it, with all the things he’s bloody been through. Especially today.

Really. Of all the conversations he’s had in that living room of his, this one has to rank amongst the most ridiculous, and that’s truly saying something, he thinks, harking back to the time he’d successfully sold someone a papier-mâché reproduction of a 17th Dynasty faience amulet for enough money to bribe someone to steal two real ones. It had been quite a rigorous negotiation, too. He’d had to throw the carpet out, in the end.

He sits on the end of the bed and pulls off his trousers angrily, balling them up and throwing them down into the corner of the room, then thinking better of it and picking them up, folding them neatly and laying them atop the dresser.

What is it to Evy anyway, he thinks, if he did write the bally thing? She’d been away with O’Connell, hadn’t she, digging up dead people and their prized possessions in the desert and probably smooching her chiselled American fiancé behind campaniform columns when no-one else was looking. And apparently, as he’s just discovered, they’d been with Ardeth too, so the whole bally gang was back together again, weren’t they, without the useless addition of Jonathan. 

Grumbling, he yanks off his socks and throws them into the laundry heap beside the bed. Ardeth had probably turned up on some wild glossy stallion, and tossed back his head of very impressive dark hair, and made some unnervingly profound comment about how the sands of Luxor were, if you thought about it, quite a good metaphor for the sands of time. Only he would have said it in a way that made it sound mystical and ancient. We stand here today as friends, drawn together across the world, on the same sands that kept our ancestors apart. Something like that, probably. The sort of rot that would sound absolutely preposterous on the lips of anyone else, but sounded like poetry on his. And he would have stared off into the middle distance as he said it, and all of the people nearby would have listened, rapt, drawn in by the gravitas of him, like moths to a flame, all desperate to burn up just to be close to him, because that’s the sort of man Ardeth is, which is frankly unethical, when Jonathan thinks about it. No man should have that sort of innate power over others. Isn’t that almost exactly what Ardeth had said about Imhotep?

And then, of course, having arrived and caused everyone within a fifty mile radius to thoroughly swoon, he would have galavanted around, doing a whole series of impractically heroic things with swords and knives and scimitars, unless that was really just another type of sword after all, until the day was well and truly saved. And then he would have gone off to speak to Evy and O’Connell, and they would probably have stayed up all night in one of the dig tents, drinking wine—Ardeth would have had tea, naturally—and eating grapes and thick cut bread, and talking about how much more work they’d all managed to get done in the absence of Jonathan flopping around in the heat like a particularly ungainly fish, ruining everything he touched like some sort of perverse anti-Midas figure.

Well, Jonathan thinks bitterly, he hopes that they had a simply excellent time without him, and yet he simultaneously hopes that they all fell off their horses at least once, preferably in front of a whole group of equestrians.

Thoroughly soaked in misery now, he turns off the lights and crawls under the covers, curling up like a croissant. A dry old croissant, left on the bakery shelf, that not even the most dedicated Parisian wants to buy. 

As he drifts off to sleep, he allows himself to wallow in tonight’s conversation more than he knows he ought to. Certainly, he admits, there are elements of truth to Evy’s accusations. He might be a seasoned liar when it comes to everyone else, but he’s perfectly capable of being honest with himself, especially after dinner. He can accept that there are, perhaps, one or two parts of her accusations which, although they’ve flowered into great untruths, did at least germinate from a seed of truth. They’re mere crumbs of validity, of course, but they’re there. 

So, all right. Perhaps Jonathan had, after quite a few months of tossing and turning at night, staring balefully out of the window at a city that seemed raw and unfamiliar with all that he now knew to be true—namely that the dead didn’t always stay dead, and the living were only living by the sheer luck of the whole bally thing—decided to exorcise the whole blasted debacle from his mind. 

Perhaps there was a kernel of truth in the accusation that he had, in fact, got out of bed just after midnight, on the fourth night in a row when he’d been kept awaken by horrifying visions of shambling corpses reaching blindly out to him with clawing hands, and he had sat himself down at the writing desk in his study, grabbed a ream of paper which he really only kept to hand in order to practice forging various signatures or receipts of payment, and began to write. That he had written and written, of ancient curses and true love thwarted, of gunfire on a steamship and swordfights in the desert, of a naive, doomed gang of Americans and a noble quartet of rescuers, consisting of two British siblings, a deeply unmannered American, and a mysterious desert warrior.

It might even be true that he had written almost solidly for an entire week, only really stopping to grab a hunk of bread and cheese or some port from the pantry, or to snatch a few moments of restless sleep in the chair; that he had, quite shamefully, even dragged a chamberpot in from the spare bedroom so that he didn’t have to stop writing mid-flow; and that by the end of that week, he had slammed the pen down on the desk, held the bundle of paper in both hands, and realised that he had, in fact, written a book.

And then, it could even be said that he had stared at the manuscript he had somehow written, at all the words that had been inside his brain and were now, by some frenzied magic, on a page, a living organ in and of itself but outside of his body, and that he had gone straight to bed and slept through the night for the first time in months, unhaunted by the living dead, or by dreams of being slowly buried alive in the sand.

One could even accuse him then of waking up the next morning, feeling calm and refreshed in a way that he hadn’t felt since before he’d learnt that death is not always terminal, and going back to sit at that same old desk he’d called home for the past week, and reading through everything he’d written, and, perhaps most miraculously, not hating it at all. 

And if one were to say that he had then, in a pique of what might, in his defence, have been some sort of sleep inertia, picked up the pen again and changed the protagonist from a devilishly handsome young man named John into a femme-fatale named Joanna, and rewritten the ending so that Joanna did not, in fact, end up simply returning home and vegetating in the old family manor until she dropped dead 30 years later of terminal banality, but instead was swept up on horseback at the very moment at which all hope for further adventure seemed lost, and was carried away in the arms of a certain noble desert warrior to begin a life anew in the desert—well. There may, Jonathan can admit, be some truth to that, too. 

Purely for the narrative arc, of course. 

Every story needs a bit of romance, after all.

When he wakes up the next morning, at the unpleasantly early hour of 11 o’clock, he’s perplexed to find a letter waiting for him. Frowning, he takes the letter opener from the top drawer of the desk, steadfastly refusing to be reminded of the time Ardeth showed him quite an impressive trick he could do with a knife which involved balancing it on the end of his index finger by the blade, and he carefully opens the envelope, pulling out the contents. 

And then he drops it, as though burnt.

There is, quite simply, no possible way that he can have seen the number he thought he saw. 

With trembling fingers, he bends down and picks up the sheath of papers, looking at the front page again. And there it is, that same figure. £700. 

That’s nearly twice what he and Evy paid their parents for the bloody house. He’s seen diamonds sold for less. He’s been beaten black and blue in the backrooms of auction houses for trying to counterfeit a tenth of that.

Hands still shaking, he leafs through the papers and arrives at the main part of correspondence.

Dear Miss Neachann,

Please find enclosed your royalty figure for the first three months of publication of The Curse of the Deserted Heart. This figure may shock you—it certainly surprised us, although pleasantly so!—but be assured that it has been checked and is entirely accurate. Congratulations are therefore in order!

As you may glean from the figure above, your book has rather outperformed our expectations, which were not low by any metric, but were based on similar figures for other books in this genre. However, in light of these quite unprecedented figures, we are writing to you in order to request that you consider revising your contract with us. 

We initially agreed to accept your current novel for publication only, but we would be remiss if we did not now tell you that we are eager to work with you on your next book, and build off the immense popularity and resonance that Deserted Heart has justifiably had. We would, of course, offer a substantially larger advance, and a much greater percentage of royalties, to be negotiated at your discretion. 

We feel that this arrangement would be mutually beneficial, and look forward to receiving your reply. 

Congratulations again!

Warm regards,

Misters. H. Ivory and J. Emerald, Springer Publications

Dazed, he goes to pour himself a restorative cup of tea, but ends up shattering two teacups, spilling half a pint of milk all over the freshly scrubbed tiles, and getting a not-insignificant quantity of tea leaves stuck under his fingernails.

Perhaps Evy hadn’t been exaggerating when she said that everyone was reading it, after all.

It’s not going to be a problem, of course. No-one knows he wrote it. The name he used when he submitted it to the publisher, which has turned out to be one of his more enduring whims, is Valery Neachann, which Evelyn need never know is an anagram of her maiden name.

He changed everyone’s names, so he's covered his arse thoroughly there. Imhotep is Amenhotep, which he has to admit to feeling slightly sorry about, because the real Amenhotep—well, all three of the buggers, as a matter of fact—were presumably quite happy to stay dead, and he does feel somewhat like he’s desecrating their memories. Evelyn has become Emmeline, which, the more he thinks about it, may have been a little too on the nose. Rick O’Connell is Ryan O’Nally, and Jonathan even gave him a grotesque, seeping wart at the end of his nose to further disguise his real identity, which really, he thinks, O’Connell should thank him for. And Ardeth—

Well. Abir isn’t Ardeth, per se, is he? And Joanna isn’t Jonathan. The other characters might be fairly analogous with their real-life counterparts, but he used real artistic license for those two. An astonishing flash of creativity. Certainly, the kernel of truth is there—he didn’t invent a desert warrior entirely off the cuff, after all—but the romance, now that’s all fiction. Joanna is a woman, for Heaven’s sake. She’s clearly completely different to Jonathan, even if she is raven-haired and afraid of the dark and partial to a diamond or two, and 5’10”.

No, that whole part of the book was sprung entirely from his own imagination, and not for wishful thinking, either. It’s just a matter of what sells, he thinks. He simply decided to shoe-horn a bit of romance in to make the book more palatable to the unwashed masses, who won’t read anything unless there’s kissing and caressing and grand declarations of love on horseback in it these days. The fact that he chose to write the romance between Joanna and Abir rather than Emmeline and Ryan—well. Who wants to write a romance about a character based on their sister? Not him. It’s a perfectly rational explanation, and there’s quite a bit of truth in it, too, which helps to sell it.

There is, he reassures himself, teacup clacking against the saucer as he tries to drink from it, absolutely no need for this to be a problem.

Chapter Text

Jonathan arrives at the O’Connells’ house a little after 6 o’clock, as always. He's only missed a week since Evy moved out to live in sin some months ago, and he'd had good reason not to attend that week, given that he'd referred to her new home as her 'love den' twice in one morning and she'd threatened to lace his food with arsenic. Even now, he's quite sure that she wasn't joking.

Their weekly Thursday evening soirée is something of a ritual by now, and although he’s never really fancied himself one for routine, he can reluctantly admit that there’s something to be said for consistency. If he’s honest with himself, he almost relishes the tedium of it, of knowing where he’s supposed to be at a certain time, an odd sort of metric by which to measure his days in the absence of any forthcoming plots or ploys. Not that he’s had much of an appetite for that sort of thing lately anyway. The last time he tried to have an innocent little jape, he’d ended up facing off against an army of the undead and almost getting his sister ritually murdered. Perhaps it’s best he lies low for a while, all things considered.

Although, in the wake of recent revelations, this evening promises—or threatens—to be anything but boring.

He doesn’t have to wait outside for more than half a minute or so before Evy answers the door to him with much the same warm smile as always, although there’s a definite thrum of something else there now; not quite a tension, perhaps, but an anticipation, and he only hopes that it’s not in expectation of another heartfelt conversation like the one they’d had in his parlour. He has very few solid convictions in life, always has, but one core tenet to which he’s faithfully dedicated his life is that no man should be expected to bear his heart and soul more than once a week, and never on Thursdays. 

He shucks off his coat in the hallway and follows Evy through to the dining room, where he sits himself down at the end of the dinner table, opposite O’Connell, feeling rather out of sorts, as though the world has tilted ever so slightly to the left and he’s the only one struggling to remain upright. O’Connell, for his part, hasn’t even deigned to do up the top two buttons of his shirt, which does not bode particularly well for the rest of the evening. 

And then silence falls. 

Evy leaves the room briefly and returns bearing a bread bowl and a plate of some sort of meat, roasted to oblivion, which she serves without so much as a word. The sound of her knife carving it is almost unbearably loud in the absence of any other noise.

Swallowing hard, mouth dry, Jonathan picks up his glass of wine—a rather nice Sémillon Sauvignon Blanc that he’d brought with him to try and smooth things over, which no-one apart from him seems to be drinking, rather rendering the gesture pointless—and then puts it down again, without taking so much as a sniff. 

Across the table, O’Connell stares at him. Jonathan looks up, then immediately looks away again. He can still feel the icy tendrils of O’Connell’s glare on him like a tangible thing, as though the very weight of his displeasure might reach out from across the table and smother Jonathan. He rather wishes it would.

From some distant room, a water pipe clangs ominously, muffled by the labyrinth of hallways in the sprawling house between them. To the right of him, sat between him and O’Connell, Evy placidly cuts up her food, the scraping of her cutlery against porcelain louder than a speeding freight train. O’Connell makes no move to touch his own plate.

It is, frankly, unbearable. Jonathan is not unaccustomed to unfavourable situations: there was, after all, that time in Athens, when he’d pickpocketed a rather foolish fellow who’d turned out to be the son of a very important diplomat, and Jonathan had had to come up with increasingly elaborate and unsuccessful ploys to plant the man’s own possessions back about his person; to say nothing of the week Jonathan had spent trapped in the cargo bay of a barge after sneaking on board to escape a creditor or twelve alongside a deeply unpleasant man named Robert, who chewed tobacco like his very life depended on it and spoke fondly of murder in his sleep; or, of course, the time Jonathan’s traitorous sister had fallen in love with an admittedly dashing American and spent an entire week smooching him on a camel, right in front of Jonathan’s own two blessed eyes, with nothing but sand to look at for respite.

Somehow, this is worse than all of those combined. 

In the absence of wine, Jonathan swallows a mouthful of air, which isn’t even half as fortifying, says a quick prayer to any of the gods he hasn’t thoroughly displeased over the years, and then steels himself for the inevitable. 

“Excellent beef,” he says, rummaging around in his brain for the most blandly decorous thing he can possibly say. “Really rather, erm, bovine.”

“It’s lamb,” says Evy.

“Oh,” says Jonathan. “Rather ovine, then.”

O’Connell scoffs. “Are you sure that’s what you meant to say, Jonathan?” he says. “You didn’t mean to say: O’Nally was, by the blandest definition, a man, although to Joanna’s own mind, he was too dreadfully American to merit the term?”

Evy inhales sharply, and O’Connell tears off a hunk of bread with his teeth, and chews it loudly. Jonathan thinks it might be a metaphor of sorts. Or perhaps a threat. 

O’Connell swallows, and grins, wolfish. “Is that what you meant to say, Jonathan? Is it?”

Were time kinder, it would stop, possibly along with Jonathan’s heart.

“I say, old chap,” says Jonathan, squeezing the stem of his wine glass so tightly that, were he a man of O’Connell’s musculature, he might be afraid that it would break. “I didn’t know you’d read that blasted book, too.”

“Oh, everyone’s read it,” says O’Connell, still smiling in that way he must have learnt during the war, which means that he's not really smiling at all. 

His expression does some not entirely pleasant things to Jonathan’s stomach, and he can feel the hairs on the back of his neck stand up. Not for the first time, he wishes he’d never written that blasted book. Only it had seemed like such a good idea at the time, hadn’t it? To exorcise all those bad dreams, to make something good—something harmless, ridiculous, something that couldn’t maim or haunt—out of the whole awful debacle. It had seemed like such a safe bet. 

No harm ever came from reading a book, he tells himself bitterly. Shame the same can’t be said about writing one.

“Boys,” says Evy, raising both hands in a gesture of placation. “If you’re going to start cocking your legs against the dinner table to mark your territory, do let me know so that I can put some towels down. This is all getting very out of hand.”

“He started it!” Jonathan and O’Connell protest in tandem, then glare at one another. Jonathan can see a little twitch start up in O’Connell’s jaw.

“Play nicely,” chides Evy. 

A good three minutes pass, during which Jonathan chews only one morsel of lamb. Evy is excellent at a great many things—dating sarcophagi in an instant, deciphering Jonathan’s almost illegible attempts at Demotic, having entire conversations with just her eyebrows—but she’s never been a particularly good chef. Still, she seems to have done a rather good job of defusing this particular situation, and for that, he’ll eat a hundred mouthfuls of under-seasoned lamb.

He’s starting to think that he might actually have got away with it after all, that the worst of this evening might really be over, when O’Connell puts down his knife and fork, carefully lines them up next to one another on his plate with perfect geometric precision, and then looks up, fixing Jonathan with the most frightfully insincere smile he’s ever seen outside of an organised crime ring.

“You know, Jonathan, I’m not really a reader, but I couldn’t put that book of yours down,” he says, one eyebrow slightly raised.

Jonathan finally swallows his mouthful of lamb. It sticks halfway down, and he winces. “Is that so?” he manages.

“Oh, yeah.”

“I thought we’d put this to bed,” says Evy.

O’Connell raises his hands, a display of innocence. “I’m complimenting him!”

“You call that a compliment?” she counters. “There’s enough acid in your voice to dissolve a hole straight through the table.”

“That’s just the appreciation,” says O’Connell. “It’s strong stuff.”

She rolls her eyes. “Boys.”

For a few precious, tender moments, there’s silence. Jonathan chews his lamb. O’Connell strokes the handle of his knife. Evy watches them both, eyes narrowed.

Like all good things, it doesn’t last.

“And what do you think our desert friend will make of it?” asks O’Connell, apparently deciding that changing the angle of his attack will be sufficient to mollify Evy, who sighs.

Jonathan frowns. “Who, Imhotep? He’s missed his window to join a book club, really. He’s a bit too dead for that.”

O’Connell rolls his eyes, as though all the weight of the world is upon his shoulders and the gravitational pull is playing havoc with his eyeballs. “Ardeth, idiot.”

He’s picked the ‘idiot’ thing up from Evy, Jonathan notices, which really is just phenomenal. He could definitely do with being called an idiot more. It’ll do wonders for his self-esteem.

“I highly doubt he’ll read it,” says Jonathan, shrugging. “There aren’t a great deal of bookshops in the desert, you know. Besides, I’m not sure he has much time for reading, what with all the galavanting and adventuring and general rescuing he has to do, not to mention the swashbuckling.”

And swishing his robes and looking off into the middle distance in a very dramatic fashion all the while, he mentally adds.

“Oh, he’ll find a way,” says O’Connell, smiling in a toothy way that somehow manages to convey malice rather than joy. It’s a little unnerving just how unsettling some of O’Connell’s affectations can be, considering what a congenial chap he generally is. “He’s more of a bookworm than you might think, even with the swashbuckling. Y'know, he’s read Wuthering Heights.”

Jonathan frowns. “How do you know?” Realising that he’s rather shown his hand by questioning O’Connell about his knowledge of Ardeth’s hobbies, he affects a disinterested sort of moue, which he hopes doesn’t make him look too much like he has dyspepsia. “And besides, that doesn’t mean anything. Everyone and their maiden aunt has read Wuthering Heights.” 

“He got pissed off when one of the Americans funding the dig kept comparing him to Heathcliff,” O’Connell says, and sniffs. “He said his job was to stop people from digging up dead people, not digging them up himself, and definitely not marrying them. And you’re wrong, buddy. I haven’t read Wuthering Heights. I didn’t even know who Heathcliff was until Evy explained that it wasn’t just the name of some weird old manor house in England.”

“Well, that doesn’t count,” says Jonathan. “You’ve hardly read anything.”

O’Connell glares at him, and he looks like he’s about to respond rather vociferously until Evy clears her throat. 

“I think Ardeth would rather like it, actually,” she says, quite unexpectedly. 

Jonathan turns to her, trying not to look or sound even remotely eager. “You do?”

She shrugs, holds her cup of tea up to her lips with both hands, but doesn’t drink from it. “He’s always struck me as the romantic sort. I think it’s the horses, or perhaps the robes, or maybe just his general sort of demeanour. You know what I mean. He’s all…” She frees her left hand from the teacup handle and waves it around, searching for a word, as though she can pluck it from thin air.

“Swooshy,” Jonathan and O’Connell say simultaneously.

“Yes!” she agrees. “That’s exactly it. Swooshy. I was going to say roguish, but I think perhaps swooshy is what I really meant. And accordingly, I rather think that your little book will be right up his alley. A spot of adventure, a dash of danger, and an awful lot of romance.”

“I don’t know what you mean, dear sister,” says Jonathan, swallowing hard, even though he’s not eaten anything in a good 10 minutes. “I have no recollection whatsoever of writing a romance.”

“Oh, really, Jonathan. We’ve been through this before.”

“Joanna leapt into Abir’s arms, and knew, in an instant, that she never wished to leave them,” recites O’Connell, grinning. “I dunno. That’s kinda romantic, in my book. And yours too, very literally.”

Jonathan feels his face flush eight shades of scarlet, and wishes he could blame the wine. He really can’t remember writing anything quite so racy. Had he truly put that into words? Blimey. Hearing it out loud, it sounds so brazen, so bold. So… romantic.

Which is fine, of course. It matters not a whit; it’s just a story, after all, and so what’s the problem if, completely unintentionally, he wrote a few bloody lines of flowery dialogue? What does it matter if, without thinking, he sketched out a brief scene or four in which one character is swept up in the arms of another? Will the world cave in because, in a fervour of awe at the boundless possibilities of fiction, he wrote a whole blessed chapter in which Abir and Joanna had spoken the truth to one another about their very selves, their wants and their fears, all of their desires except, of course, the one truest desire that neither yet had the words to speak, and they had lain, hands almost touching, beneath a desert sky struck breathless by starlight, and then Joanna had shivered, perhaps from the cold and perhaps from something else entirely, and Abir had gallantly offered her his cloak, and she had cast her eyes away, flushing, as he draped it tenderly across her trembling shoulders, and then Abir had spent the next two chapters wearing absolutely nothing above the waist?

It’s not like it had happened in real life, after all. 

But still. If he’d known that anyone would actually have bloody read it, perhaps he might have considered making a few more gestures towards subtlety.

“Rick,” says Evy, chastising.

O’Connell turns to her, wide-eyed, and points at Jonathan, wildly. “He called you a librarian who could coordinate a room full of books in a second, but never learnt to coordinate her limbs, let alone her outfits!” he accuses.

“Yes,” she agrees blithely. “Among other rather unsavoury things, made somewhat more palatable by his excellent turn of phrase, which you seem to have memorised quite impressively, I must say. But what’s done is done, and besides, he did save me from the unhappy girlfriend of an immortal priest, not to mention that he stopped that nasty army of the undead from carving you up like a Sunday roast, so do let’s agree to let bygones be bygones, just for this evening, hmm?”

Jonathan stares at her. There are times when he loves her so much that it feels like a physical pain in his ribs. He wishes there were a way of telling her so without sounding all mushy and dreadful. 

“You’re taking his side?” says O’Connell, incredulous.

“I’m not taking anyone’s side. I’m just trying to eat this rather delicious dinner I’ve so kindly prepared for the two of you, if you’d shut up for long enough to appreciate it.” She reaches out and pats O’Connell on the arm, placatingly. “And besides, darling, I’ve never had a problem with your manhood.”

This, Jonathan decides, is not one of those times.

The rest of the meal passes in a fractious silence, and O’Connell quite admirably manages to summon enough restraint that he only quotes five more times from Jonathan’s book. One quote is even a knowing little reference to Evy’s peculiar habit of summoning everyone into the drawing room after dinner for mints, and he grins at Jonathan briefly over the back of Evy’s head as she stokes the coals in the fireplace. It feels, almost, like a truce. Except that, as Jonathan shrugs his coat on to leave, O’Connell pats him so companionably on the shoulder that he’s going to be bruised for a month.

“Keep writing,” says O’Connell. “It's pretty neat having something else to pester you over. It kinda feels like revenge for the whole pickpocketing thing. Plus, those chapters where Evelyn's character kept making doe eyes at my character gave me flirting material for weeks. You have no idea. Honestly, I should thank you."

“Please don't,” says Jonathan, imagining things he'd rather not. 

“I won't,” says O'Connell. “I'm still planning on ribbing you about it for at least the next decade. Maybe after that I'll send you a fruit basket.” He looks at Jonathan, and, for a moment, Jonathan is deeply concerned that he’s about to elaborate on the flirting material. Instead, O’Connell reaches out and ruffles his hair in a very undignified manner. “And hey, she’s right. He’d like it.”

At this point, the stars must suddenly align as he's graciously rescued by Evy, who takes his arm and leads him out in that terrifying librarian manner of hers which brokers no questions. Jonathan manages to sort out his hair again on his way to the front door, and all is well. Mostly.

When it's just the two of them, Jonathan summons the courage to broach the topic that's been gnawing at him all evening. 

“Did you mean it?” he asks. “About him liking it, I mean.”

To her credit, Evy doesn’t ask him to elaborate. 

“Of course I meant it, you ninny,” she says. “There’s absolutely nothing not to like. It’s charming, funny, and quite wonderfully romantic. I’m sure he’d find it positively delightful.”

“Well.” He looks down at his left wrist, straightens his cuff just for something to do. “Thank you, old mum. That’s very kind of you.”

“I'm not being kind. I'm just telling you the truth." She pauses, purses her lips. "You know, for what it’s worth, that all applies to much more than just your book.”

And then she looks at him with such fondness that he could weep, and he finds that he can’t quite meet her eye. Instead, he clears his throat. 

“It’s terribly late,” he says. “I really ought to be going.”

“Yes,” she agrees. “You have quite a lot to think about, don’t you?”

In fact, Jonathan intends to imbibe sufficient quantities of port that he’s incapable of thinking of anything at all the moment he gets home, but he says nothing. Instead, he offers Evy a fragile little smile and a cursory sort of wave, and turns to leave.

“Oh, and Jonathan?” she calls after him. “Dinner will be at yours next time. I’ve had enough of cooking, and frankly, you do rather owe me for convincing Rick not to shoot you on sight.” 

Unsure how to respond to that, Jonathan doffs his imaginary cap and takes his leave, deciding to walk the twenty minutes home. It's a pleasant enough evening, and the three glasses of wine have long since been thoroughly absorbed by the plate of lamb. 

Thinly veiled threats of bodily harm aside, he tells himself, the whole night really hadn't gone too badly. 

The idea of Ardeth reading it is still a horrific, intangible nightmare, of course. Evy can say all she likes about Ardeth liking it, and the thing is that it might even be true—perhaps he really would find himself enthralled by the scenes where Abir fights a horde of mummies, or enraptured with the innocent romance that blossoms in Joanna's heart when they're both on a boat—but none of that really matters, because as soon as Ardeth realises that Jonathan wrote it and what exactly that means, then he won't like it any more, will he? He'll be unnerved at best, and at worst—  

Well. The worst doesn't even bear thinking about. 

Except, of course, that means that the only thing his brain will allow him to do for the entirety of his short walk home is think about it, in excruciating detail nonetheless. 

All right. So perhaps it might be something of a problem, after all. 

And like all problems in Jonathan’s not limited experience, the best thing for him to do is, almost certainly, to ignore it. Preferably with the assistance of more wine.

He really only intends to visit Evy later that week at the museum so that he can sit on her desk in the library and surreptitiously move some papers from one end of it to the other when she’s not looking, because it’s always funny to watch her turn the whole library upside down in search for things that aren’t actually even remotely lost, but when he gets there, he’s confronted with absolute bedlam.

The entire front room of the museum, which is usually empty apart from a few stray tourists looking for something to do on a weekday afternoon in Cairo and somehow missing all of the interesting things, is absolutely packed to the rafters with people. He can scarcely see the floor for the mob. He’s never been fond of numbers outside of a chequebook, but there must be at least a hundred of them here, all milling around, clutching museum pamphlets and handbags and hats. Eyes wide, he stares at the thick throng of bustling people, their voices humming, a constant buzz like a swarm of bees.

A short, blonde woman slightly younger than Jonathan—perhaps ‘slightly’ is pushing it, although he’s always believed that age is entirely subjective—barges past him, shooting him a look of disdain that could curdle milk at ten paces, which seems rather rich considering that he’s done nothing but stand in a doorway.

“Oh, terribly sorry,” says Jonathan, because he has, after all, just pickpocketed quite a fetching pearlescent comb from the front pouch of her satchel. “Bit of a crowd today, isn’t it?”

The woman turns around and glares at him. "Are you trying to stop me from getting the best seat?" she asks. "Because let me tell you, I'll kick you out of the front row if you make it there before me."

Well. Clearly, the best move to ensure his continued safety is to play along. 

"Ah, no," he assures her. "I don't even like seats, you know. God gave us legs, didn't he? I'll just be standing up, I think. At the event that you're talking about, which I will certainly also be attending, but on my own two feet, as God intended."

She narrows her eyes. “Just watch where you’re going,” she says, and she disappears into the crowd. 

Jonathan feels the weight of the comb in his pocket. Mother of pearl, he thinks. Should fetch a few pounds at least.

But more importantly, what the devil is going on?

And why are there people here? The last time the museum was this busy, it was being invaded by Imhotep’s pestilent army of acolytes.

Intrigued, he worms his way through the crowd until he reaches the information desk at the front of the room. Once there, he steps aside, lest someone might think he’s in the queue and ask him a question he can't possibly answer. He has no interest whatsoever in actually joining in whatever this is, after all. He just wants to know what the bloody hell is happening. 

He leans closer to the woman at the front of the queue, who’s gesturing quite vociferously at the curator, a rather nice man named Dr Salah. Jonathan has only really met him once or twice, but nonetheless he holds Dr Salah in rather high esteem, ever since Evy furiously recounted the time he’d left a mummified crocodile on her desk as a little joke. He's a Medjai too, of course, just like Dr Bey had turned out to be, but he’s not even half as enigmatic about it. Jonathan is quite sure he'd spilled all of the secrets that Dr Bey had spent thirty years concealing in his first week here. It’s rather refreshing, even though Jonathan’s not entirely sure why being part of a secret warrior sect descended from the Pharaoh’s bodyguards seems to be a prerequisite for a curator position these days.

“Do you have anything of Amenhotep’s?” the woman asks Dr Salah, looking rather harried. Her eyes are as wide as saucers.

Dr Salah smiles beatifically. “Which one?” he asks in return. “Amenhotep I, Amenhotep II, Amenhotep III—”

“Amenhotep the accursed, immortal creature!” she shrieks, and then, much to Jonathan’s chagrin, she takes a copy of The Curse of the Deserted Heart out from underneath her armpit and waves it in Dr Salah’s face. Jonathan winces. He really can’t escape that bloody book. “I want to know everything there is to know about him!” 

Dr Salah sighs, and gently pushes the book away from his nose. “I’m afraid it’s fiction, my dear,” he says, with all the patience of a saint who grew up with much younger siblings.

She frowns. “But all fiction comes from truth, doesn’t it?”

“Some more than most,” replies Dr Salah. “I’m sorry to say that there’s no accursed, immortal creature in the historical record. Or at least, if there is, we don’t have any artefacts pertaining to the aforementioned scoundrel.”

Jonathan makes a mental note to sneak in one of the rings he’d pilfered during his little scuffle with Imhotep in the burial chamber.

With one last look of disappointment at Dr Salah and his inability to manifest the lost bracelet of Amenhotep, the woman whirls around and storms off, back into the bustling crowd of people, The Curse of the Deserted Heart once more wedged firmly under her arm. Jonathan watches her leave until she’s swallowed up once more by the masses of people peering into glass cabinets and perusing the pamphlets they’re all holding. 

Except, he’s just realised, they’re not pamphlets at all, but little flyers. He can’t make out much of the detail, covered as they all are by people’s grubby little hands and other wads of paper and museum bumf, but nearly everyone in the damned room seems to be in possession of the exact same piece of paper, and that’s not usual at all. Perhaps the museum is putting on some sort of event. A special exhibition, or possibly a raffle. He hopes it’s the latter. He’s always been fond of rigging those. That’s how he won his finest set of glassware, after all.

For a brief, shining moment, curiosity and decorum wage war in his subconscious. As usual, curiosity triumphs, stabbing decorum in the back after convincing it to look the other way, and he peers over the shoulder of the young woman he’d pickpocketed earlier, who's now standing a few feet away from him as he tries to sneak a good look at the flyer in her hands. She notices him lurking, and frowns at him, snatching the papers away from his line of sight, as though she’s caught him reading a particularly salacious diary entry in which she’s detailed her innermost thoughts about the gardener. He averts his gaze and stares at a little scuff of dirt, shaped rather like a jackal’s head, on the tip of his left shoe, trying to ease her suspicion. When he’s counted to ten and dares to look up again, she’s relaxed her hold on the paper, although most of it is now hidden by the draping of her dark blue shawl.

Only one word is still clearly visible on the page. Curse. 

His stomach does a queer sort of lurch, the toast he had for breakfast making its presence known. He’s starting to get a funny feeling about this whole thing, a bit like he’s stepped onto the deck of a boat that seemed thoroughly anchored to start with and then started to sink under his weight.

Because, of course, that one little word is a coincidence. They're not all here because of his book. What a ridiculous notion. Why would they be in this museum because of a book, for a start, and not a bookshop? The gift shop here doesn’t even sell books, except for a particularly dry series of tomes about Diocletian, of all people. It just doesn't make sense.

'Curse' is hardly an uncommon word, after all.

Suddenly, like an angel sent from the very Heavens above, he spots Evy across the room, looking frazzled and carrying something large and cylindrical. It looks like a stack of rolled up papers of some sort, quite possibly posters of some variety, presumably to help drum up even more excitement for whatever this event might be. Waving vaguely in her general direction, he tries in vain to attract her attention. 

Alas, she's otherwise occupied trying to force her way through the ever-increasing crowds, and he resigns himself to the fact that he’ll have to make his way over there himself.

Getting across the room takes a solid five minutes or so, which is frankly ridiculous, given that he distinctly remembers crossing it in about four strides when the fate of the world depended on Evy translating the hieroglyphs at the top of the stairs. When he finally reaches her, Evy looks at him, and immediately looks away again, her face turning even redder. She doesn't so much as nod in acknowledgement of his presence.

This does not bode particularly well, all things considered.

“Afternoon,” he says, trying to suffuse his words with the note of laissez-faire joviality he’d like to think he’s known and revered for. “This is a turn-out for the books, isn't it?”

Hopefully not literally, of course.

“This is all your bloody fault,” she hisses, barging past him. 

Her old brown satchel falls from her shoulder as she elbows her way around him, and he catches it before it empties itself out onto the floorboards. Knowing Evy's luck, she'd only trip over whatever spilled out of it.

“My fault?” he splutters. “What did I do?”

“Oh, blast you, Jonathan,” she says. “We’ve been totally inundated with visitors, thanks to your rotten book—which I’ve since read in its entirety, by the way, and it’s a bloody riot, you utter bastard—and so now we’ve been told that we have to put on this whole bloody charade this weekend. It's absolutely ghastly.”

She takes one of the posters out from underneath her arm and unfurls it pointedly, and Jonathan’s heart sinks until he can feel it in his toes. 

Across the top of the poster, in a bright white font, is splayed the title of his book. The Curse of the Deserted Heart: A Tale of Love and Adventure Amidst the Dunes of the Lost City, it screams. Beneath that, Jonathan is faintly horrified to see that someone from the museum has hastily painted a portrait of a dark-haired desert warrior, with curly black hair and a sardonic grin. His skin is russet, almost the colour of autumn leaves. To the left of the warrior’s face, the poster promises Saturday, June 25th: Readings from the book that brought you here, and lectures about the truth behind the fiction!

Jonathan can do nothing but stare in abject horror as Evy rolls the poster back up again.

“Yes,” she says, apparently understanding his thoughts exactly without him needing to voice them, in that way she always has. “It’s simply hideous, and it’s all your bloody fault.”

Jonathan fidgets with the strap of Evy's satchel. It's soft and well-worn, like everything of Evy's tends to be.

“I don’t see how I can be held responsible for this," he says. 

“You bloody wrote it!”

“Evy, really. I’m not sure that swearing is going to get us anywhere—”

“None of us is going to bloody get anywhere until 7 o’clock this evening,” she replies, curt, “because someone decided to write a bestselling romance novel and ruin all our lives.”

“It’s not a romance novel, and you know full well that it’s not,” he sniffs. “And besides, think of all the money that this will bring to the museum! Really, I’ve done you all quite an enormous favour. They should add my name to the plaque at the front.”

“It’s a free event, you ninny.” She rolls the poster back up and shoves it under her arm again. “So they’re really much more likely to add your name to some sort of hitlist.”

“I’m already on dozens of those,” he scoffs. “Anyway, what’s the plan for this event, then? I don't suppose I should be expecting your barbarian of a fiancé to make an appearance?”

Evy elbows him. “He's not a barbarian, Jonathan. He's American.”

“Oh, please," says Jonathan. "We both know they're the same thing.”

“Yes, well, that barbarian is about, as it happens. Unlike my cad of a brother, he's actually helping.”

“I don't think that's quite fair, old mum. Cads are usually much more charming than me. I'm more of a rogue, if we're going to argue semantics. And anyway, I'm helping! Look, I'm holding your bag.”

He waves the bag around to demonstrate his point. 

“Very kind of you," she says. "And you can put the purse back that you just took out of the side pocket, there's a dear.”

“Just testing your observational skills,” says Jonathan, and does so, a little sheepish. “But more to the point, you still haven’t told me what this cursed event actually is.”

She sighs. “Well, there’s a treasure hunt, for a start. And you can wipe that grin off your face, because the aforementioned treasure is a signed copy of your own blasted book.”

“But I haven’t signed any copies.”

“You’re not the only Carnahan who knows how to forge a signature, you know.” She sniffs. “Then, after the treasure hunt has finished, there’s going to be a reading in the library. Before you ask, no. There won’t be cheese, and there certainly won’t be wine. We spent our entire events budget on getting these hideous posters made, which was a complete waste of money, of course. I can’t even stand to look at them.”

“Yes, they’re absolutely dreadful,” he agrees. The face of Abir will haunt him for months to come, alongside the memories of the tomb. “I presume they’ve roped you into doing the reading, given that you’re the librarian and it’s rather your domain?”

Something dark glints in Evy’s eyes, and then she blinks, and it’s gone. “Unfortunately, yes, for which you will owe me enormously.”

“Bad luck,” he says, trying to sound sympathetic rather than amused. 

As much as Evy loves reading, asking her to read aloud in any language other than Egyptian usually results in quite the hilarious spectacle of blushing and mumbling, and, in her role as older brother, Jonathan fully intends to ensure that he’s there to witness it later. Even if she’ll be reading from the biggest mistake he’s ever made. 

He’s about to taunt her over it some more when, to his left, Susan Cooper appears, and any good humour he felt washes away. 

It’s not that he dislikes Susan Cooper, per se. It’s just that, in the four years that she’s worked at the museum as a guide, he’s not once managed to have a conversation with her that didn’t end in him wanting to rip his own ears off and throw them into the Nile out of mercy. He hasn’t seen her since a few weeks before the whole Imhotep debacle, and he’s reasonably sure that the last conversation they had lasted for approximately 27 hours and consisted entirely of him attempting to explain to her that, no, Rameses was not, in fact, a sheep-headed king, and that any similarities to the English word ‘ram’ were, alas, a coincidence, and probably therefore not the greatest etymological discovery in centuries. 

“Fancy seeing you here!” she says to him by way of greeting. Her red hair is pinned up into an uncharacteristic chignon, and he’s faintly horrified to realise that it’s almost certainly supposed to mimic Joanna’s hair on the cover of his book. 

“Yes, fancy it,” he returns, as though he doesn’t spend at least one day a week here solely to irritate his sister.

Evy, for her part, seems to be getting her revenge on him by leaving all of the speaking up to him. He can’t say that he doesn’t deserve it. 

“They’ve really gone all out, haven’t they? I’ve never seen the place so full!” Susan comments, and Jonathan notices, feeling a little sick to his stomach, that her shoes exactly match the pair that he describes Emmeline wearing on page 34, which is to say, of course, that they’re the exact same pair of shoes that Evy is currently wearing. Which is to say, of course, that they’re hideous.

“Yes, it's all a bit much, isn't it?” he says, hoping that Evy hasn’t noticed. “I'm not sure I understand all the fuss myself.”

Apparently, that’s the wrong thing to say. Her face twitches slightly in that way it always does when she’s about to latch onto entirely the incorrect part of his comment, and he clenches his fists.

“Have you actually read it?” she asks, eyeing him suspiciously. 

Evy snorts, and Jonathan digs his nails into his palms. 

“No, no,” he says. “Not really in my wheelhouse, I’m afraid. Much more of a Herodotus chap, myself.”

Susan frowns. “Don’t you like romance?”

“I’m quite sure it’s an adventure book,” says Jonathan. 

“Not at all,” she replies. “It’s definitely a romance.”

“Well,” says Jonathan. “I am inclined to disagree.”

“But you haven’t read it,” argues Susan. “And as such, I'm not sure you're best qualified to determine if this is all too much, as you put it. It happens to be a truly excellent book. Certainly, the writing quality is patchy on occasion, with some metaphors stretched to the point of snapping, and frankly the treatment of the American characters might start another war, but it's a jolly good read. That's the problem with you men. Always trying to comment on things you don't understand.”

Evy is laughing into the back of her hand now, turning a rather worrying shade of red, and Jonathan is fairly certain that his face has followed suit. 

Seemingly enjoying his reaction, Susan rummages around in her bag and produces, to his horror, a copy of his own book. The prospect of people owning more than one copy, enough to hand out to their casual nemeses in fraught conversation, makes him feel something he can’t quite articulate.

“For your education,” she says, offering it to him. 

Unsure how to respond, Jonathan takes it, aware that his mouth is hanging open but entirely lacking the wherewithal to do anything. She nods at him, gratified, and then, blessedly, vanishes into the crowd.

With her absence, Jonathan begins to feel more human again. 

But still. He’s quite suddenly struck by the idea of people discussing his book; reading it, letting the words percolate like old coffee grounds, having ideas about it. 

Is this what Evy hopes for when she writes those unfathomably tedious articles about Demotic? Is that why she looks so crestfallen each time they’re rejected?

“That was hideous,” he says to her, shuddering. It’s not untrue; no amount of oddly flattering revelations are ever going to soothe the dull ache of the sort of tongue-lashing he’s just been subjected to.

“I rather enjoyed it, actually. That’s the first time I’ve ever been on her side in one of your little displays. Anyway, I really do have quite a good deal to be getting on with, so if you insist on showing up here, then make yourself useful for once,” Evy tells him, and shoves her entire load of posters into his arms, almost pushing him over with the force of it, and snatching her bag back at the same time. He'd rather been hoping she'd forget about that. “Go and hide these godawful posters somewhere, would you? Absolutely anywhere will do. I'm simply sick to the teeth of looking at them.”

“Rightio,” says Jonathan, still a little dazed.

Evy flashes him a curt smile, and, enviably bereft of posters, makes her own exit. 

It takes him longer than usual to find a suitable place to stash the goods. In his defence, he's still ruminating on the notion that his book now exists in some nebulous space entirely outside of himself. It's a frankly bizarre concept. The fact that people have even read the blasted book, let alone thoroughly enjoyed it, still boggles his mind, and Jonathan likes to think that his mind isn't so easily boggled these days.

Eventually, he finds what he's been looking for; a narrow space between two bookshelves, just wide enough for him to cram a wad of paper in the gap. He knows it's technically littering, but Evy did tell him to put them out of sight; she didn't specify that he had to be in the slightest bit tidy about it. Out of sight, out of mind, and so on.

He's just finished surreptitiously wedging the last of the posters into the gap, necessitating doing quite a bit of crumpling, which is more satisfying than it has any right to be, when something tells him to turn around. He's not quite sure what it is; just a feeling, the same sort of intuition he usually gets before spotting someone wearing a very expensive watch, or spying a particularly convincing fake diamond at an auction.

When he sees the figure standing in the doorway, his first thought is that the museum must have brought in a much more talented artist to promote the reading than the one who did the posters, because the face he catches a fleeting glimpse of before it’s drowned out by the scrambling hordes does look, to his untrained eye, almost exactly as he’d pictured Abir when writing him. Tall, dark, noble of profile and lustrous of hair, dressed in black and standing alone in a crowd, somehow a part of it and something entirely separate all at once. 

His second thought is that it’s rather surprising, considering that the book hasn’t really been out that long in the grand scheme of things, for someone to go to all the effort of actually dressing up as Abir, beard and all. Really, the costume is uncanny. Dark robes, a little ragged at the hem from wear; a slate grey scarf, draped over one shoulder in a way that should look haphazard, but manages to look dashing and, dare Jonathan say it, rather bohemian; even the detail of the tattoos, those two unfathomable symbols etched onto cheekbones which should really suffer from the intrusion, but don’t. 

His third thought isn’t really much of a thought at all. More of a visceral urge to vomit, followed swiftly by an even stronger urge to sink all the way through the floorboards and burn himself up at the very core of the planet.

Because of course, of course, there is no talented artist, no dedicated book fan in costume. Only Ardeth Bay, here, at the museum, surrounded by people clutching flyers with unflattering renditions of his own bloody face on the front of them, approximately half an hour before the whole crowd convenes in this very room for a presentation on a book, the plot of which, Jonathan can appreciate, does bear some scant similarities to the past 6 months of Ardeth's life. 

Of course, Ardeth cannot be here. It’s simply not possible. He’s off having adventures and standing ruggedly on the top of sand dunes, silhouetted against devastating sunsets. The fact that he is here is only a temporary hitch in that statement of definitive truth. 

And the thing is—the thing is that Jonathan is man enough to admit that, under usual circumstances, he'd actually be delighted to look up, unsuspecting and entirely caught off guard, to see Ardeth Bay standing nobly in the doorway. It has, in fact, formed the basis of quite a few of his more embarrassing dreams lately, only one of which, blessedly, resulted in Jonathan waking up before dawn to take a very cold shower. 

And he can admit, too, that there have been at least three occasions, perhaps four if he's been really honest with himself, and at least six or possibly even seven if he's going to put himself at gunpoint, on which he's been completely awake, staring out of the window on a train, or in Evy's office, or in the comfort of his own bloody home, and he's found his mind wandering to that very image; footsteps striding purposefully down a hallway, the doors flinging open, and there stands Ardeth, his salvation, resplendent in black, and he doesn't have to say anything, but Jonathan knows that he's here for him, because why else would he be here, in the halls of Jonathan’s imagination? And if he's four sheets to the wind, he can admit that, on the ninth occasion, the fantasy involved even fewer clothes than the eighth.

However, as it turns out, the line between fantasy and nightmare is ever permeable. This, he's fairly certain, falls entirely into the latter camp.

Well. He has two options, now. Either he can hide behind the nearest tourist, like some sort of snivelling coward who can’t face up to his own life, or he can do the decent thing and approach Ardeth, head held high, man to man, and shake his hand, welcome him here the way that he really should, and at least he can rest easy in the knowledge that he confronted the embarrassment and shame; that he was, for once, the bigger, braver man. 

The choice is obvious.

Ducking down low, he shrinks behind a random woman whose skirts are unfashionably and yet conveniently wide. They’re taffeta, rather outmoded and frankly a ridiculous choice of garment for a book reading, but he’s grateful for the woman’s dreadful fashion sense. He curls his arms around himself, making himself as small as possible until he’s certain that he’s concealed himself nicely, and congratulates himself on making the right decision. All he has to do is wait here for a few moments, perhaps a minute or so, until Ardeth turns around, and then Jonathan can make his escape. 

Except that the woman notices him almost immediately, and shrieks. 

“Get away from me, you creep!” she yelps, pulling her skirts closer and darting to the side.

Jonathan scrambles to his feet, flustered. “Terribly sorry. Dropped a pen.”

He looks up, hoping beyond hope that the small commotion has, somehow, passed unnoticed. 

It hasn't. 

Ardeth grins at him from across the room, lifting his left hand in a vague impression of a wave, and Jonathan’s heart does a treacherous little flip. 

He's been well and truly spotted. There really is nothing else to do now except face the metaphorical firing squad.

In truth, a literal firing squad would be less terrifying.

Picking his way through the crowd, he heads over to Ardeth, who has graciously moved out of the way of the others and is now leaning, in an appallingly casual manner, against the doorframe. 

Up close, it's clear that he's trimmed his beard very recently. It only serves to make his jawline look even more ludicrously chiselled than usual, which seems frankly unjust. As if things weren’t bad enough already.

“I say, old chap,” Jonathan manages, patting Ardeth on the shoulder in what he hopes is a companionable sort of way. He can feel his heart hammering a mile a minute, his pulse thudding in his temples. He'd rather be in a temple right now, even one full of evil mummies hellbent on ritually murdering him. “Didn’t expect to see you here! Thought you were off having some sort of jape in the desert, or some such thing.”

Ardeth covers Jonathan’s hand on his shoulder with his own, only briefly, and grins. Jonathan wants to die. If Ardeth spots one of the flyers in someone’s hands, he might yet be lucky enough to do so.

“Yes,” says Ardeth. “I was indeed. I returned just this morning. Although I think that only you would call it a jape. It was much less eventful than last time, fortunately.”

“Lots of sand, I’m sure.”

“Quite a lot, yes.”

Any attempt to distract Ardeth through the medium of fascinating conversation may, it seems, be futile. For some reason, he can’t think of a single thing to say that doesn’t sound either terribly incriminating or like he’s reading it from a conversation card on a cruise ship. Perhaps he’s coming down with some dreadful disease. It would, at the very least, give him a good excuse to disappear for a few months.

As it turns out, it's rather tricky to make conversation with someone after they save your life in dashing, heroic fashion, then disappear for months on end, during which time you write a book in which one of the characters is very, very loosely based on them, and you also fantasise several times about them throwing you over their shoulder and carting you off into the desert on horseback at sunset.

“And now you’re here,” says Jonathan.

“Yes,” Ardeth says again. He stares at Jonathan a little strangely for a moment, then blinks twice in quick succession. It makes sense; Jonathan probably looks like he’s about to puke, in part because truly fears he might. “I had business that brought me to Cairo. Very urgently.”

Thank Christ. Urgent business sounds excellent. It's a way out. An excuse for Ardeth to be literally anywhere but here.

Jonathan claps his hands together. “Well! There’s not much point in hanging about then, is there? I’m sure you’ve got other places to be, what with all that urgent business! I’m sure it’s only getting more urgent with time, too. Goodness, I’m feeling quite anxious on your behalf, old boy. We’d really better get you out of here.”

“It’s already been attended to,” Ardeth assures him, airily. “It was the first thing I did when I came here.”

Curses. Of course it bloody was. Ardeth is nothing if not efficient, after all. Jonathan should really have seen that coming.

“Ah,” says Jonathan, trying not to sound as desperate as he feels. “Well, good. Splendid. That’s excellent news. In that case, I suppose you’re here to see my dear baby sister? I must warn you that her office is very, very far away from here. Practically at the other end of the museum. As a matter of fact, I think she might be out to lunch at the moment. Perhaps we’d better just go and check at the house, see if she’s there. It's halfway across the city, so if we leave now—”

Ardeth shakes his head. “No, I’m not here to see her. And anyway, I already saw her when I arrived, although she looked so busy that I decided not to make my presence known. Perhaps that was rude of me, in hindsight.”

For a moment, Jonathan allows himself to believe that, by some celestial miracle, Ardeth has turned up here just to see him. Except, of course, this isn't one of Jonathan’s daydreams, as evidenced by the fact that they're both fully clothed, and the rest of the day has been a nightmare. There’s absolutely no reason for Ardeth to have thought that Jonathan would be at the museum at all, given that Jonathan doesn’t work here, and indeed spends most of his time skulking about in the back rooms of auction houses. 

Hopefully, Ardeth doesn’t know quite that much, but Jonathan has long since learnt not to assume that Ardeth is unaware of anything.

“Just here to take in dinner and a show, then?”

“Something like that,” Ardeth replies. “It can wait. But more importantly, now that I’m here, I was hoping you could explain…” He trails off, gesticulating nebulously at the foyer surrounding them. “I don’t think there is even a word for this in any language.”

“Oh, don’t you mind any of that.” Jonathan shrugs. “Someone's found some tedious ancient paperwork, I believe. Quite phenomenally boring. Mostly tax receipts, I think. Possibly a few very lengthy letters about the aforementioned taxes. Nothing you'd be interested in, I'm sure.”

"Hmm. I don’t know much about taxes,” Ardeth muses, stroking his beard. “Perhaps it would be interesting to learn. Maybe I should go and look at them, in that case. Do you know where they are? It might be a better use of time than my existing plans, such as they are.”

Jonathan curses; quick thinking, apparently, does not always mean good thinking. If he puts his foot in it any deeper, he’s going to end up like old Winston. “Not at all, old boy. I’ve not the foggiest, which is probably for the best. I'm afraid it would only ruin your Thursday.”

“It’s Saturday,” says Ardeth. 

“There's even less reason to risk it, then!” Jonathan cries. “Saturdays are few and far between. Sometimes it seems to me that whole months pass without a single Saturday in sight. Honestly, old boy, if you're only here to see what all the fuss is about, then I'm afraid you'll be bitterly disappointed. You'd be better off going somewhere more fun, like a nice hat shop, or a cursed tomb.”

“I am having fun.” Ardeth smiles benevolently. “And anyway, I was just joking about the taxes. Not having to know about them is one of the best things about living in a desert.”

“Oh,” says Jonathan, and then, uncomfortably aware that he should almost certainly attempt to speak in polysyllables if he’s going to convince Ardeth that he isn’t entirely a waste of space wrapped in increasingly pinkening human skin, decides to overcompensate enormously, which is, after all, the story of his life. “Well, how the devil was the Luxor dig, old boy? Did you retrieve anything illustrious on your exploits?”

Ardeth blinks at him twice in quick succession, which is probably the closest to surprised that Jonathan has ever seen him look, and that’s including the time they’d been attacked by a horde of rather squeaky undead priests in an underground tomb. In fact, if Jonathan didn't know better, he'd say that Ardeth looks almost wrong-footed.

“Your sister told you I was there?” 

“Oh, she didn’t give me any of the gory details,” Jonathan replies, waving a hand airily, hoping it makes him look nonchalant rather than, as is in fact the case, as though he’s suddenly been filled with rather too much excited energy and has nowhere productive to channel it. “Just that you turned up rather out of the blue and proceeded to dash around rather adventurously. I’m sure she was most put out that you had to leave early, but you know, I don’t suppose there was much point in hanging about if that bloody amulet wasn’t going to turn up, was there?”

“The amulet,” repeats Ardeth. 

“Yes,” says Jonathan. “I’m afraid Evy did mention that part, old boy. The amulet that would rain ruin down upon all of mankind if it were to be lifted from the sands, or something just as horrible. I must say, those bloody Ancient Egyptians had a bit of an obsession with giving things evil curses of frankly impractical power, but I suppose that at least an amulet can’t try and resurrect its dead girlfriend into the body of one’s sister, on account of it not having any siblings, or a girlfriend, most likely.”

“Ah, yes,” says Ardeth, nodding sagely. “The amulet. That was the reason I was there, of course.”

Ardeth looks at Jonathan. Jonathan looks at Ardeth. He can feel a bead of sweat pooling in the hollow of his collarbone beneath his shirt, and he’s not sure he can entirely blame the heat in the room, although he fully intends on doing just that.

“So, presumably we’re all in danger of having ruin rained down upon us imminently,” Jonathan says. “Now that it’s been lifted from the sands, and all.”

“I will have to go back and look for it, I suppose,” says Ardeth, rubbing his beard again. Jonathan tries very hard not to focus on his jawline, and is only partially successful. “Maybe next week. Perhaps the week after, since I would have to do some research as to where it has been taken.”

“Ruin can wait until then, can it?”

“Look at the sky,” says Ardeth, gesturing at the window, at the outside arc of clear blue. “Does it look like rain is coming?”

“I suppose not,” Jonathan allows. 

It’s all rather out of character for Ardeth to be here, chatting about taxes and rain, when the fate of the world might be up in the air. Perhaps Evy had misunderstood the amulet’s curse, or misrepresented it to Jonathan for whatever reason, possibly in an attempt to deter him from attempting to steal it, or perhaps the amulet had turned out to be a dud. He knows nothing, and there’s no point in asking; if he does, he’ll only be fobbed off with some irritating, enigmatic phrase.

He's got enough on his plate without aphorisms.

Still. If Ardeth is happy enough to be embroiled in conversation, then it might just be the opportunity Jonathan needs to embroil him anywhere but here.

“Look, why don’t we just convene elsewhere,” suggests Jonathan. “It’s much too busy in here for a proper chinwag. I can only hear other people’s chins.”

He puts a hand on the small of Ardeth’s back and steers him, perhaps a little more forcefully than custom usually allows, towards a side door at the far end of the room, half hidden in shadow behind a row of bookshelves. He knows from his past reconnoitres that this is the caretaker’s entrance to the museum, leading into a little stone stairwell which opens out onto a small courtyard at the back of the building, where, God willing, Jonathan can make his escape, and Ardeth won’t notice the fact that the entire museum is currently plastered with an awful caricature of his own face. 

Well. Abir’s face. But the similarities might be jarring, nonetheless. 

The door will be locked, of course, but that’s hardly a problem for Jonathan. He keeps one of Evy's old hair pins hidden in a false seam in the cuff of his left jacket sleeve for exactly this sort of situation. It never hurts to be prepared, except for when he forgets that he's prepared and jabs himself in the elbow with it. 

“This way, dear chap,” he says, moving his arm from the small of Ardeth's back, largely for his own sake, and manhandling him by the upper arm instead. “It'll be much quieter out here. Certainly a better pasture for the crops of conversation to, erm, flourish.”

“I think you've mixed your metaphors,” Ardeth points out, but he doesn't seem to be arguing, so Jonathan lets it slide. 

Deftly, Jonathan slips the hairpin out of his cuff, earning a rebuke in the form of a raised eyebrow from Ardeth. 

“I lost my key,” Jonathan lies by way of explanation. “You can lower that eyebrow of yours, thank you very much.”

Ardeth does not lower that eyebrow of his. “I’m merely wondering why you are taking us through a door that I presume was locked for good reason. You seem to have made a habit of unlocking things that should remain locked.”

That stings in a way that it really oughtn't sting, given that it's true. “It's nothing salacious, don’t you fret. I’m not going to pickpocket you in the storeroom.”

“That isn’t what I meant,” says Ardeth.

“Well, stop meaning anything,” says Jonathan, fumbling the lock. “We’re just going outside, that’s all, and I didn’t fancy pushing through all the crowds again. With those robes of yours, someone would certainly trip on them, and then they'd break a leg and you'd feel terrible about it. I'm thoughtfully preventing such a dreadful incident from occurring. You’re welcome.”

He gets the door open after a few moments—really, it shouldn’t have taken him that long at all, but he was rather distracted by wondering what, exactly, Ardeth did mean—and Jonathan gestures for Ardeth to go first. He closes the door behind them, even remembering to lock it just in case someone follows them, which is a tip he’s learnt all too well after his years of subterfuge. For his part, Ardeth just seems bemused rather than concerned, which Jonathan decides to take as a compliment, even though it’s probably just because Ardeth knows full well that he would win in five seconds flat in the case of any altercation, and not because Ardeth actually trusts him. 

They pass through the concrete corridor wordlessly, and if it reminds Jonathan a little of exploring an underground tomb in search of gold, and then in search of something much more important, then he manages not to say anything incriminating.

It can’t even take a minute to get outside, even factoring in the time it takes Jonathan to pick the lock on the external door, but when they’re finally outside, Jonathan takes a deep breath of relatively cool air, and it feels like the first good breath he’s taken all day. Ardeth eyes him a little strangely, and Jonathan winces.

“It was rather crowded in there, don’t you think?” he says. “A little too much like being underground, for my tastes.”

It’s the best sort of lie because, at its heart, it isn’t a lie at all; ever since he came home, small spaces have seemed threatening in a way that they never did before. 

“I understand,” says Ardeth, his voice gentle in a way it often isn’t. “For some weeks after, I found myself more grateful than usual that my people don’t live between the confines of four walls. I woke up more than once to sights I had hoped to forget, and counted stars until I fell asleep again.”

Jonathan looks at Ardeth. Ardeth looks at Jonathan. 

And suddenly, the extent of his deceit looms large, unspools endlessly in front of him, unthreads itself around all the years of his life still to come and ties itself in great knots around them. 

What would there be to lose, really, except for a life that he couldn't have had anyway? Either Ardeth knows the truth and rejects him, or he never knows and just barely tolerates him anyway. 

And doesn’t he deserve to know the truth? To have all the facts to hand, and do what he will with them? 

Either way, he’s going to leave. Does it really, truly matter why?

Ardeth is still looking at him. He can feel the back of his neck begin to sweat. It really is a very, very hot day.

“You know—”

The door behind them crashes open, and Susan sodding Cooper bursts out into the courtyard. 

“Thank god,” she manages, breathing heavily, her hand splayed out over her collarbone. “It's just you. Oh, thank Christ. I thought one of those tourists had found their way into the back passages, pardon my French, and I had images of our collections being ransacked and filtering out into the streets of Cairo via an unlocked caretaker's entrance, and I really truly was about to thoroughly soil myself in front of all those people. But it's fine! It's just you! And—”

She trails off, apparently noticing Ardeth for the first time. For his part, he offers her a very taut smile and a cursory little nod. That's strange, thinks Jonathan. He's usually rather fond of a bow or two, maybe that theatrical little salute of his. Apparently, not today. 

“Oh, gosh, that’s amazing!” she gushes. 

Ardeth frowns. “I don’t follow.”

“It’s quite uncanny,” she says. She peers closer at him, and nods, as though all of her suspicions have been confirmed. “Gosh, the tattoos, too. Really, you look exactly like—”

“Her cousin!” Jonathan blurts out, gesturing erratically behind Ardeth’s turned back. Forget honesty, after all. He just had a brief taste of it, and it didn't sit well on his palate. The last thing he needs is for Susan bloody Cooper to give the game away now, after all his careful, flawless machinations. “That’s what you were going to say, isn’t it? That my good friend Ardeth here is quite the spitting image of your cousin, Kenneth.”

“Erm,” she says, and blinks. Behind Ardeth’s head, Jonathan makes a severing motion with both hands, praying through his teeth that she cottons on and plays along. For the first time in their storied acquaintance, Susan Cooper proves herself an ally. “Yes,” she agrees. “He, erm, looks exactly like my cousin Kenneth. They could be twins.”

Ardeth looks at Jonathan, then back at Susan, at her freckles and her shock of ginger hair, and raises an eyebrow. 

“He’s her cousin by marriage, of course,” says Jonathan.

“Of course,” says Ardeth.

“Twice-removed,” agrees Susan Cooper.

Jonathan resists the urge to smack himself between the eyes. “Yes, yes. Twice-removed by marriage, on her father’s side.” He turns to Susan. “Susan! I meant to tell you, you know. I did some reading on your Rameses theory, the one about the sheep, and imagine my surprise when I came across an old Greek text which hypothesised the exact same thing.”

Finally, she turns away from Ardeth. “Really?”

“Yes,” lies Jonathan. “It’s an old book by, erm, Thucydides. It’s in the archive on the fourth floor, in a blue box right at the back. Inside the museum.”

“Are you sure?” She squints. “Because I looked into it in quite a lot of depth when I was first compiling my paper on it, and I couldn’t find anything—”

“It’s in code.”

“And you could read it?”

Gods, not now, Susan, he thinks. Where is the Susan who saved his skin mere moments ago? He’d rather liked her.

“Of course I could read it,” he says. “It was a code based on, erm, Welsh.”

“Welsh.” Her tone is flat.

“Yes. Cymraeg, you know. And my father was Welsh,” he adds, which is neither true nor untrue, given that he'd been born while his parents were on holiday there and spent a grand total of four hours in the country of his birth. Not that Susan Cooper need know the particulars.

“He was?”

“Oh, as Welsh as they come. From Anglesey, you know, which is about as far away from England as you can get. If we’re to quantify Welshness, he really was at the far end of the scale.”

“Hmm.” Against all odds, she looks as though she may be convinced. “Well. I suppose I could go and look. It would break open the field of etymology, should my theory be proven right. The blue box, you said?”

“At the back,” he affirms. “Everything you said about Rameses, it's all in there. It's really quite spectacular.”

Susan nods, slowly, considering. “Well, you two enjoy yourselves,” she says, and then turns to Ardeth again. “Maybe you could educate him on that book,” she adds, and then, with a slightly unsettling wink, she leaves.

Well. If Jonathan had known that the secret to getting Susan to shut up was to play into her nonsense theories, he might have encouraged her to look into her ideas about Hatshepsut's hat collection all those years ago.

“What book does she mean?” Ardeth asks. 

Luckily, Jonathan has a very quick answer on hand to that one. 

“What book, indeed! The Book of the Dead, of course.” He shrugs. “She was quite put out at the extent of the clean-up operation after Imhotep’s troupe ransacked the museum. I think she’s rather hoping that you might convince me not to get embroiled in matters of the undead again.”

Ardeth laughs. “I would hope that you didn’t need convincing, after last time.”

Around them, the courtyard is still and silent, but comfortably so. They’re outside, away from all the posters and the flyers and the books.

They’re safe.

Relief washes over him like the most decadent bath, all rose petals and oils and other things that leave him feeling oddly sticky.

“Well!” says Jonathan. 

“Well,” says Ardeth. He looks an awful lot like he’s trying not to laugh, which is quite rude, all things considered, especially because he has the nerve to still look good doing it, unlike Jonathan, who usually just manages to look constipated, or like he’s holding in a burp.

“Shouldn’t you be off, then?” Jonathan hints.

Ardeth frowns. “Off?”

“Out of here, you know.”

“Yes, I know what you meant. I just don’t know where I’m supposed to be going.”

“Anywhere but here, old boy. You don’t want to be stuck hanging about with me, do you?”

“Why not?” He sounds genuinely confused, which perplexes Jonathan in turn. Why would he?

“Because the other two aren’t here, and I don’t need babysitting.”

Ardeth folds his arms. Upsettingly, it makes his shoulders look broader. “Babysitting. Is that what you English people call it?”

“It’s what we call it when you spend time with someone just to prevent them from getting into trouble, yes, especially if you’re put up to it by one’s meddling little sister.”

“I told you before, I haven’t spoken to your sister. Anyway, I don’t think I would be able to prevent you from getting into trouble,” says Ardeth. “I don’t think I would even try. I would rather spend my time doing much simpler things, like fighting great forces of evil from another world, or perhaps counting all the grains of sand in the desert, or even both at once.”

“Ha bloody ha,” says Jonathan. “Very witty. But still, the point stands. I hereby set you free to spend your time in this fair city as you so wish. No need to remain tethered to my side out of duty or pity.”

“I don’t pity you. I like you.”

“Oh.” Jonathan feels himself flush positively crimson, which is exactly the opposite of the debonair image he’d rather be conveying. “Well, thank you. That’s very kind of you.”

“I’m not saying it to be kind. I’m saying it to be honest.”

Jonathan huffs. He and Evy are far too alike sometimes. “If you say so, old chap. The last time I saw you, you were holding me down as O’Connell ripped my shirt off and carved a bug out of my arm. I’m not under any illusion that I’ve made a particularly good impression.”

“The first time I saw you, you shot a man off his horse with one hand, holding a bottle of whisky with the other. You made a formidable impression.” He grins then, a surprisingly brilliant thing for its apparent rarity. Jonathan is uncomfortably aware that he’s probably going to spend an indecent amount of time thinking about it, and an even more indecent amount of time trying to get Ardeth to do it again, if he’s not careful. “And as a matter of fact, the last time I saw you, you were being shoved aside by O’Connell as he threw a stick of dynamite at me, so your impression was not the worst.”

“Oh,” says Jonathan, in lieu of waxing rhapsodic. “Well. That’s all right, then. And you know, you did tell him to throw the dynamite at you, so I'm not sure you can hold that against him.”

He has no idea what to say after that, so he settles for cuffing Ardeth on the arm in a companionable sort of fashion. It turns out to be something of an error, because it reminds Jonathan that Ardeth’s arms are firm in a way that Jonathan’s decidedly are not.

“Still,” says Jonathan, deciding that soldiering on is probably the best distraction from that particular train of thought. “You’d best be off, I should imagine. I’m sure you have an awful lot of Medjai business to be getting up to.”

Ardeth looks at him a little strangely, and Jonathan busies himself inspecting a broken paving slab a few feet away. The courtyard needs weeding again. Typical.

“You are right,” Ardeth says, not sounding entirely pleased about it. “I should probably be going now. All that Medjai business, as you put it, won't sort itself out.”

There’s something apologetic in his voice, almost regretful, which is rather funny, really; it’s not like Jonathan isn’t used to being let down, even though that’s exactly what he’s been hoping for for the past half hour. 

“Of course!” he says, brightly. “Don’t let me intrude upon your plans, old boy. I’m sure I’ll see you around soon enough, anyway.”

“Yes, I expect so,” says Ardeth, slowly. “I’m sure you will turn up to make trouble before long.”

“Only the right kind, I hope,” Jonathan quips.

Ardeth’s eyes widen. Jonathan’s heart skips; did he say the wrong thing? But within a moment, Ardeth has schooled his expression back into its usual, familiar calmness, and bringing it up, even to apologise, feels invasive, so he doesn’t.

“I’m sure,” Ardeth replies, and, with a brief little nod, he turns to leave, and does so.

With Ardeth gone, Jonathan exhales. His lungs feel oddly shaky in a way he hadn’t known lungs could.

So, that's done. He's driven Ardeth off, done the inevitable. All he has to do now, he reasons, is survive the afternoon. 

And, as hilarious as he’d initially thought it would be to watch Evy suffering through a public reading, he’s really not sure he can stomach it now. The prospect of hearing any more about that bloody, cursed book today fills him with dread. No, not even dread; it’s something else. Something that feels like a stone in his shoe. Something he can’t distract or plaster over with laughter. Fear, then. Something sharp, with teeth. But it’s not fear, entirely. Fear, he knows. He’s woken up with it more often than not, recently. 

Not fear, after all. Something more like—

Oh gods. He knows exactly what it is.

That’s why he hadn’t been able to pinpoint the feeling earlier. 

It’s guilt.

He’d mistaken it for shame, hadn’t he? Old, familiar, shame; like an old, well-fitting coat that you could shrug on and off without a thought, but which you always returned to, all the same, because you knew exactly all the ways that it was worn at the elbows and frayed at the hem, all the cosy little folds of it, and because nothing else was even half as comfortable. 

Guilt? That’s a much stranger beast.

Lying to save his own skin is easy. He’s never found it difficult to pay truth a wide berth, or to leave it behind on another continent entirely. If he had a penny for every lie he’s ever told, no matter how small, he’d have enough money to buy up half of Hamunaptra. Lying to himself is even easier; it never fails to amaze him just how willing his brain is to believe its own nonsense. It still knows it’s nonsense, of course, but knowing something and actually dealing with it are two very different things. If it helps him sleep at night, then Jonathan will, he’ll happily admit, lie about pretty much anything. 

Lying to Ardeth, though? That’s the problem. Because when he thinks about it—and he really is thinking about it now, much to his own chagrin—he doesn’t particularly want to lie to Ardeth. He knows all too well that Ardeth is one of those people who values truth and honesty and all that rot, even with his own tendencies towards the enigmatic. Ardeth might skirt around the truth on occasion, speaking riddles around it in that godforsaken way of his, but he’ll never push it to one side, never paint over it with a prettier falsehood.

The problem, when Jonathan gets right to the bloody, beating heart of it, is that Ardeth is a good man, and Jonathan would rather like Ardeth to think that he’s a good man, too. And by lying, both about that sodding book and about the reason he wrote it the way he did in the first place, Jonathan is being anything but. And that is, frankly, untenable, because—well. It’s bad enough, lying to a good man who deserves the truth. It’s even worse when you’re lying to someone you’re in love with, too.

Good gods above. Why does anyone enjoy romances? This is hateful. Why anyone bothered to curse Imhotep with that bloody Hom-Dai thingy, he’ll never know. They should have just let him be in love. It would have been a much crueller fate.

Bugger it. Perhaps he’ll go straight home and drink himself silly until he’s almost as pickled as Imhotep, or maybe he’ll stop off at a bar on the way and thoroughly desiccate himself at someone else’s premises instead, or, if he’s feeling up to it by the time he’s got out of here, maybe he could even go home via Evy’s house, pick the lock, and help himself to the vintage Château d'Yquem he bought for her three Christmases ago, and which he’s fairly certain is still sitting and gathering dust in the wine cellar.

Yes. That’s exactly what he’ll do. And then, when he’s finally ensconced safely on his own chaise-longue, preferably wrapped snugly and sorrowfully in a smoking jacket, or perhaps a quilt, he’ll drink the wine straight from the bottle, and then, gods willing, it’ll be tomorrow, and he’ll be completely incapable of thinking about any of this around a truly scorching hangover.

He feels slightly better now that he has a plan, and a plan that involves a saucy bit of pilfering at that, and, fortified at the prospect, he decides to brave going back inside and exiting through the front door. That way, if Evy gets cross with him for leaving without saying goodbye, he can at least semi-truthfully say that he must have missed her on the way out.

Plans cemented in his mind, he pushes the door open, and heads back inside. He feels better already.

Almost.

Of course, it doesn’t work like that. He’s only just made his way past the library when he hears the familiar sound of books crashing to the floor. 

He sighs. Curse his own deserted heart. This time last year, he wouldn’t have thought twice about walking right past. Now, he thinks about how he'd felt as he watched Evy be kidnapped by that bloody rotten mummy, how the thought of losing her had twisted his stomach into a knot that still hasn't fully untied itself, and he retraces his steps, heads back towards the library. He can stick around for a few more minutes, after all.

Besides, if he helps Evy out now, then perhaps he can cash in that favour he apparently owes and make a good argument against hosting dinner next week. 

“Evy?” he calls, rounding the corner again and poking his head into the library. “Are you buried alive?”

“Afraid not,” says Dr Salah, apologetic. He’s alone in there, surrounded by a stack of upturned chairs. It looks like he’s been trying to carry three at once and found himself overwhelmed by two.

Jonathan isn’t sure if this is better or worse. At least this way he’s spared the inevitable questions about what he’s been up to in the past half hour or so, but Dr Salah isn’t really the kind of person he wants to be stuck in a room with. For a start, the man never knows when to stop talking. Entire civilisations might rise and fall in the time it takes for Dr Salah to get to the point or punchline. And what’s worse, he usually ends up talking about Medjai things, meaning Ardeth things, meaning that, as far as distractions from Ardeth go, he’s a pretty poor one.

Still, Jonathan can’t exactly bugger off now, can he? He's made his own bed, and now he has to lie in it.

This, he tells himself, is why he's avoided generosity for decades. He really needs to get into the habit of selfishness again.

“Do you need a hand in here?” he asks, hoping he doesn’t sound as reluctant as he feels. 

Dr Salah offers him a grateful sort of smile. “That would be excellent, thank you. If you could pull all of the chairs into some sort of semblance of a circle in the middle, it would be a great help. I didn’t quite realise just how many people we were expecting, you know. I do hope there’ll be enough chairs, or I’m afraid there might be some sort of riot, and that really is the last thing we need, especially after that little brouhaha when all the townsfolk developed horrible sores and decided to storm the museum gates in service to an evil undead priest. I tell you, I’m astonished that our reputation recovered after that.”

“I’m sure I can manage a couple of chairs,” says Jonathan, tactfully ignoring the latter part, and he goes to do just that. 

It strikes him, in that moment, that Dr Salah might know rather more about the authorship of the book than he’s letting on, and he really doesn’t want to start that conversation.

The two of them work in a companionable silence, arranging chairs and picking up dropped flyers, of which there are rather more many than it had first appeared when Jonathan offered to help, and when they’ve finally finished, Dr Salah gives Jonathan the task of standing back to survey their handiwork. It looks rather professional, the sort of setting that a real, bonafide author might enjoy on a reading tour, and, for a moment, he allows himself the image. Jonathan Carnahan, famous and successful author, whose book doesn’t have any life-ruining repercussions whatsoever.

Dr Salah nods in approval, and Jonathan breathes a sigh of relief. Not only has he escaped any mention of Ardeth, let alone any discussion of the book’s authorship, but he doesn’t have to carry any more chairs around. Really, that’s more O’Connell’s wheelhouse than his. It might be nice having rippling pectorals and firm biceps and meaty thighs and the such, but gods, at what cost?

“Well, that’s all done,” says Jonathan. “I’ll just be—”

“I don’t suppose you saw the elusive Mister Bay this afternoon, did you?” 

Beneath his breath, Jonathan curses in all the languages he knows, which is eight.

“I did, in fact,” he says, deciding against a bare-faced lie, just in case Dr Salah spied them together earlier in the main room and calls him out on it. “Only very, very briefly, though. We barely said hello. You know how he is. To say he’s a man of few words would be an understatement. Getting a conversation out of him is like trying to draw blood from a stone, or trying to get Evy to wear less dreadful shoes.”

Dr Salah nods in agreement, although what he’s agreeing with, Jonathan isn’t sure. “I hope he'd perked up by the time you saw him. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him look so morose as he did when he came to see me earlier.”

“Morose?” says Jonathan. 

“Yes,” affirms Dr Salah. “Dejected, you know.”

“I’m quite sure I don’t know what he has to feel morose about,” says Jonathan. “Or dejected, for that matter.”

Dr Salah shrugs, and shifts the stack of posters wedged under his arm, clearly settling in for another lengthy conversation. Jonathan steels himself and considers, briefly, faking an ulcer.

“Well,” says Dr Salah. “You didn’t hear it from me, of course, but according to some of the other Medjai who caught up with him on his way back, the Luxor dig didn’t quite go to plan.”

Now that is news. Evy hadn’t mentioned that anything had gone wrong, had she? She’d made it all seem like it had all gone perfectly, that it had been entirely plain-sailing in the absence of Jonathan. 

Maybe that ulcer can wait, after all. Gossip usually triumphs over brevity.

Jonathan tries to sound blandly curious rather than overly eager for a bit of scandal, which he is. “Yes, I heard that someone took the amulet,” he says. "I'm sure it was very vexing. Taxing, even."

Dr Salah frowns. “The amulet?”

“The one that would—how did Evy put it—rain ruin down upon the world if it were ever unearthed, or unsanded, or whatever the proper verb is. I've no idea whose amulet it was, but it was the reason he went to Luxor in the first place, according to her. Something about preventing the amulet from falling into the wrong hands and destroying all of mankind. Rather important business, I should think. Although I must say, he seemed quite all right when I saw him, so perhaps it was less worrisome than he expected.”

Dr Salah's brow remains steadfastly furrowed. “Good heavens," he says. "A cursed amulet? That’s news to me, I must say. I’m quite sure she’s got the wrong end of the stick there. There’s nothing we’re particularly worried about buried at Luxor, you see. No, he went to Luxor looking for something for himself. That’s what he told me. Knowing Ardeth, it wasn’t something quite so shiny as an amulet. As soon as he heard that your sister and that American chap were going to be there, he was off like a shot. Said that wherever they were, the right sort of trouble would be.” Dr Salah scoffs. “As if there’s ever a right sort of trouble, with Miss Carnahan involved. It mostly seems to be knocking shelving units onto priceless yet breakable objects”

That tallies, Jonathan thinks, bitterly. Of course, Ardeth went running when he heard that Evy and O’Connell would be there. They were a little trio back at Hamunpatra, weren’t they? The three musketeers, and Jonathan wasn’t even D’Artagnan. He was barely even a horse.

The treasure is a surprise, though. It really doesn't sound like Ardeth to go after treasure for treasure's sake. Not without, at minimum, some sort of hex.

Still, with treasure comes adventure, and Ardeth is fond of those. It stands to reason that he might have rushed off to Luxor at the promise of some sort of cursed amulet, hoping for excitement, and then came home all dejected when nothing came to pass except a lot of digging and sand in all the wrong places.

“He didn’t find whatever it was that he was after, then.”

“Apparently not.” Dr Salah shrugs. “Still, he seems to have cheered up about it now, which is the main thing. He's quite proficient at sulking, that one. I tell you, you’ve not witnessed anything until you’ve watched that man brood.”

Jonathan really can’t imagine Ardeth sulking, or indeed doing anything beyond the rigid boundaries of dignity and majesty. The image seems truly unfathomable, like O’Connell chewing with his mouth closed.

“I’ve watched him throw himself into a tunnel full of undead priests and then order someone to blow him up,” he replies. “I’m quite sure that compares to a little strop.”

“I do my best to help keep his spirits up, of course,” Dr Salah reassures him, apparently deciding to ignore that last explosive remark. “And the other men, of course. They don't often make it all the way into town, the lot of them. All the British folk keep stealing priceless and cursed artefacts every other month, so the Medjai are kept rather busy these days, but they do send a chap in to town on Fridays to pick up supplies, and I always make sure to send him back with some entertainment as well as all the essentials. Makes life out in the desert a bit less tedious, you know? I think entertainment is an essential, really. Why, I gave Ardeth the supplies today, and I included even more than normal. I'm sure the men will be over the moon with this week's entertainment.”

“Entertainment," repeats Jonathan. From somewhere in the very back of his skull, alarm bells start to ring. 

“Yes. There are no bookshops in the desert, you know,” says Dr Salah. “So whenever one of the men comes into town, I like to lend them a few books, give them some reading material to tide them over. It can be very boring, sitting around in the desert and waiting for someone to rob a tomb. And you know what they say about that, of course.”

“No,” says Jonathan faintly, feeling a little as though he may, in fact, be dead, and that it might be rather for the best if he is.

“That when confronted with a waity tomb, only a weighty tome will do.”

“Right.”

“It’s a pun, you see, on—”

“Yes, no, I see.” Jonathan takes a deep breath in, and reminds himself that none of this is Dr Salah’s fault whatsoever. “So, just as an example, The Curse of the Deserted Heart. That seems quite popular. Did you lend him that one?”

“No, no. I didn't.” Dr Salah smiles. “I couldn't, even if I'd wanted to! It's sold out everywhere, not helped by our little event today, I'm sure.”

Thank goodness for small mercies and poor stock management.

“Well, do you think he'll read it?” asks Jonathan. “If not this week, then some other time?”

Dr Salah frowns. “Oh, I shouldn’t think he'll read it, no.”

Jonathan exhales a breath he hadn’t realised he was holding. “Well, that’s a relief.”

“I’m fairly certain he’s already read it.”

All of the blood drains from Jonathan’s head and pools somewhere at the bottom of his stomach, where it turns to acid.

“I’m sorry. Did you just say that he’s already read it?”

Dr Salah nods. “I can’t be sure, of course.”

“Of course,” says Jonathan, faintly. 

“But yes, I think so.”

“And what makes you think so?” Jonathan asks, admirably resisting the urge to shake him.

Dr Salah shrugs. “Oh, just little things.”

“Do you think you could give an example?” asks Jonathan, trying very, very hard to remain patient, and not to sound like he’s on the verge of fainting.

“Well, it’s just the fact that I didn’t really lend them that many books last time,” says Dr Salah. “The chap they sent on the supply run had a very small bag, and it was half full already, so I could only fit a couple in. The Curse of the Deserted Heart was one of them, because I really don’t think that living miles away in a secluded desert settlement means that they should be forbidden from catching up on all the latest literary sensations, and I gave them the latest Sherlock Holmes as well, and some strange little book about a lighthouse. And to be very honest with you, I only gave them the one about the lighthouse because it’s very, very short and it was small enough to fit in the chap’s bag if I wedged it in between two hard cheeses, but I’ve read that one myself and it almost made me disillusioned with books and lighthouses entirely, so I don’t think they’ll have been queuing up to read that one.”

Well, that’s not too conclusive, Jonathan tells himself. It doesn’t prove a thing. Maybe Ardeth has a secret passion for avant-garde literature about coastal structures; perhaps, while the rest of the Medjai were gleefully passing around the same battered copy of his godforsaken bestselling book, Ardeth was curled up quite happily in a corner, reading about lighthouses, blissfully unaware. It really isn’t outside the realm of possibility.

Perhaps all is not lost, after all. Just temporarily misplaced.

“And of course,” adds Dr Salah, “when he came into the museum just now, I handed him one of the flyers about our reading this evening, because I thought it might be of interest to him, being that he's such a keen reader, and he looked at the drawing on the front of it and said, ‘That’s not how I thought he would look when I read the book.’”

Jonathan’s heart actually stops beating, just for a moment, and then, unfortunately, starts up again. 

He blinks once, twice, but alas. This isn't a dream.

It is, however, an absolute nightmare.

No, it's worse than a nightmare. At least he wakes up from those.

“Right,” he says. “You know, old chap, perhaps you could have led with that piece of information?”

Dr Salah furrows his brow. “Are you all right?” he asks. “You look a bit peaky.”

“I’m fine,” replies Jonathan. He feels weightless, disembodied, floating above it all. “Really. There’s just been a change of plan, that’s all.”

And really. He's fine. He's calm, if anything, although it feels more like nothingness.

The inevitable, once more, has happened. It always does. You can lie around the truth for as long as you like, but eventually, you have to try and get past it, and truth has a way of catching up with you.

Because what's changed, really? Ardeth has always thought he was an idiot. It's just that now he knows he is, and that he's an absolutely besotted idiot to boot.

No wonder he hadn't stuck around earlier. Gods, he must have been itching to leave. And to think that Jonathan had kept him talking about taxes, of all things.

There are things he can do. He'll have to change his name, of course. He has three full sets of fake documents, so it shouldn’t be too much hassle. If he gets out of here immediately, then all he has to do is find out where the devil he's hidden his emergency suitcase with all the diamonds and the disguises in it, and he'll be away in no time at all. There are boats going down the Nile at all hours of every day; it would be the work of a moment to sneak on board, tell them that he's the Duke of some smallholding back in Somerset, or perhaps Anglesey, just for consistency’s sake, and that he has urgent wedding business to attend to in, say, Palestine, and—

“Jonathan?” calls Evy’s voice from somewhere in the next room. It really might as well be coming from the bottom of the Nile, as far as Jonathan’s concerned. “I can hear you in there. I don’t suppose you could pop over here, could you? I've lost my copy of your blasted book, and no-one will lend me theirs.”

“You’d think they’d jump at the chance to get rid of them,” he hears O’Connell say.

Another plan turns to sand and falls through the hourglass of Jonathan's good fortune. If he tries to escape now, she’ll see him, and she’ll send O’Connell after him, and there’s absolutely no way Jonathan’s going to be able to outrun him. O’Connell could outrun a bloody horse.

But it’s fine. Everything is splendidly, wonderfully, stupendously fine. It's never been better, in so many ways.

Because he has changed his name, hasn’t he? 

All of these people, these strangers, are here for a reason, after all. 

Jonathan Carnahan might be having just about the worst five minutes of his life, but Valery Neachann is a consummate professional.

Jonathan Carnahan is an absolute idiot who's currently adrift in the wreckage he's made of his own life, but Valery Neachann is a bestselling author. Valery Neachann's words mean something to hundreds of strangers, if not thousands. Valery Neachann took the worst thing that ever happened to her, and she made something brilliant out of it—well, something with stretched metaphors and awful depictions of Americans, but something that people love, nonetheless.

In this moment, Jonathan thinks he'd quite like to be Valery Neachann.

Ardeth might not want Jonathan's truth, but all of the people here do. They don't know it, of course, but that's why they're here. It's just that they think it's Valery Neachann's fiction, and not the truest, most terrifying part of Jonathan's life.

It's nothing like being wanted by the person he actually wants in return, but he can probably stand to listen to Evy read it, he tells himself, if he thinks very, very hard about the fact that Ardeth isn’t here to hear it, after all, and focuses on that single bright spot of relief. If he focuses on the fact that so many people love it, even if the one person he actually wants to love it has buggered off into the desert.

“Coming, Evy,” he sighs, taking out Susan Cooper’s copy of the book, which he’d hidden in the waistband of his trousers so that Ardeth wouldn’t spy it. Fat lot of good that did, in the end. Mulling over his plan in his head once more—should he get the barge that leaves early in the evening, or the one that departs at the dead of night, and should he bribe the port officials with the pearl necklace or the diamond brooch?—he makes his maudlin way over to where Evy's voice came from, which turns out to be the entry hall, and he clears his throat, ready to chastise her for losing her precious signed copy.

And then he stops in his tracks. 

Where the main room had previously been full of people bustling and milling about, someone has set up rows upon rows of chairs, all facing the front, where a cosy velvet armchair has been ceremoniously placed. It has all the appearances of a reading room, but with an audience. Evy is standing next to the armchair, and O’Connell is sitting in the front row a few metres away, arms folded. Every single seat, save for the armchair itself, is filled, every single person eagerly looking right at Jonathan. In fact, the room is so busy that people are standing in little huddles at the back, presumably having missed out on a seat. If he had to guess, he'd say that there's over two hundred people here, easily, much more than even before. And every single one of them is staring right at him.

His heart begins to beat very, very fast.

He doesn't know what's happening, but he has the distinct feeling that he's not going to like it one bit. A chill runs all the way up his spine and takes root at the base of his skull; he finds himself quite unable to move, no matter how much he'd like to.

“Sorry,” Dr Salah whispers from behind him. “I owed her for the crocodile.” 

“Ladies and gentlemen,” Evy announces, and there's that dark glint in her eye again. “Ms Neachann is unfortunately away on urgent business, but I’m delighted to have the pleasure of introducing her publisher’s representative. Here to perform the reading in her place, please welcome Mr Jonathan Carnahan!”

The room bursts into enthusiastic applause, right as Jonathan’s soul leaves his body.

Apparently, things are not wonderfully, stupendously fine after all.

Things have, he decides, been better.

Chapter Text

The whole room stares at Jonathan. The air feels suddenly very close. A shroud of expectation descends over the audience, their faces staring at him, a wash of pale faces and round, dark eyes.

“I,” he says, and then closes his mouth. Swallows hard. Tries again. “Erm, yes. That is to say that yes, I can read.”

He looks desperately at Evy. She looks at him right back, a devilish glint in her eye, and gestures for him to step further forwards, right up to the very front of the hall. O’Connell, for his sins, is sitting in the very front row, arms folded, mouth a displeased moue, presumably to act as some sort of foil for any glorious escape that Jonathan may attempt.

God, it’s a shame that they know him so well.

“The floor is yours,” says Evy, wickedly. 

It really is fascinating, the elasticity of time. Ten seconds is not, as it turns out, an objective fact. The ten seconds Jonathan is currently experiencing seem to be lasting for approximately a century. The fall of Troy must have been quicker. God, but to be at Troy right now would be preferable. He could so easily vanish into the ruins of the sacked city, disappear into the chaos, become just one in a sea of myriad anguished escapees. Hell, he might even be very lucky indeed, and get murdered by a burly Greek. 

Alas, not even an entire millennium would be enough time for Jonathan to come up with an escape plan that doesn't end in Evy frogmarching him right back onto the proverbial stage by his less proverbial ear. Jonathan once managed to escape being locked aboard a sinking cruise ship, after failing to lose a card game against the wrong art smuggler, by picking the lock with a broken comb and some toothpaste, then floating to shore between the heaving bosom of a papier mâché bust of Aphrodite. If Jonathan Carnahan himself can't think of a way out of this particular predicament, then it's because there simply isn't one. 

There’s only one way out of this, and it’s right through. 

Legs shaking, mouth dry, he makes his way over to the chair at the front of the hall, and stands facing the audience. He swallows around a burgeoning lump in his throat, feels the bob of his throat as it catches. The audience is gazing at him, wide-eyed and rapt, hanging onto whatever he's about to say. 

He has no idea what he's about to say.

If he opens his mouth, there's an above zero chance that he'll just vomit all over the front row. All of these people might have come here expecting a bit of excitement, but that, he thinks, might be pushing it. 

"Well," he tries to say, but nothing comes out except for what might be bile.

Come on. Think. Say something. Anything.

Christ. He really has experienced beatings more pleasant than this.

From the back row, someone clears their throat in a very close approximation of a four letter word. 

Perhaps it would be better to sit down. He turns to the armchair behind him, grateful for the temporary respite it provides from staring at a hundred blank faces. The chair is a somewhat putrid green colour, the hue of old moss and dead things and Evy's favourite socks, and it doesn't do much to quell the bile rising at the back of his throat. 

On second thoughts, perhaps he’d better stand. 

What’s that old saying, about dying standing rather than living on one’s knees? Perhaps if he can wrangle some sort of metaphor out of all this, then it won’t be for nothing.

He inhales. Exhales. Thinks, in great detail, about cutting holes in every single one of Evy’s cardigans. Closes his eyes. Turns to where the audience is once more, still staring, the full weight of their impatient glare upon him. He imagines himself at the bottom of a haunted tomb, a scarab burrowing through the meat of his arm, and remembers that things could, in theory, be worse. 

"Hello," he says at last, lifting his hand in what he hopes is an approximation of a wave. "Apologies to you all that Ms Neachann was, erm, otherwise engaged. Would that we were all so lucky!"

His words are met with a stony silence. From the back of the hall, someone coughs again.  

"Right," he says, awkwardly. "Well. I suppose I'd just better read from the bally book, eh?"

"Please do," grumbles a woman from the front row, whose hat very closely resembles some sort of disembodied prehistoric bird.

"Right," he says again, opening the book. Wherever Evy has swanned off to in order to watch his ruin, he sincerely hopes that she’s feeling guilty about all this, although he highly doubts it. "Well. I thought it would be a bit of fun to get your ideas on which bits to read. So, on that note, does anyone have any erudite suggestions? Or perhaps any particular, very short chapters they’d like to hear?"

"He's not very organised, is he?" whispers a young girl to the woman with the dreadful hat.

The woman shushes her child with a flap of her hand. "Read the bit where Joanna and Abir are stargazing, and he compares her eyes to the most brilliant constellations!" she calls out. "Or the bit where she faints at the sight of the creature, and she falls into Abir's sturdy arms and notices how strong he is, and how muscular! Oh! Read the part where she watches him get dressed in his tent, and he takes out that oily salve to dress the wound on his bicep, and—"

“Ooh,” interjects a young woman from a few rows behind. “No, no, read the part where Joanna first spies Abir from across the ruined city, and at once recognises him as her soulmate, her truest love! It’s absolutely divine.”

“No, no,” retorts the middle-aged man beside her, whose moustache is at least four shades darker than his eyebrows. “Not that romantic piffle, Audrey, I can’t stand it. Let the man read one of the parts where Amenhotep is roughing up the bastard American chap with his ancient powers, and teaches him a bloody lesson. I liked those bits.”

Jonathan makes eye contact with O’Connell in the front row. Wordlessly, and without blinking, O’Connell draws his finger across his throat, shaking his head slowly.

Jonathan thinks longingly of the time he once spent having the soles of his feet tickled until he confessed to a crime he didn’t even commit by a halitosis-ridden currency smuggler in a basement in Alexandria. Oh, to be there once more.

Surely, hours have passed. Days. Weeks.

“Erm,” he says, growing increasingly desperate. “How about I open it to a random page, and read from there? That seems to be the fairest way of doing things, in my view.” 

There’s a murmur of agreement from the crowd, and Jonathan opens his copy of the book, flicks through it for a second or two, and lands on page 49. That’s good. Better than good, even. It’s relatively inoffensive. The prose is minimally purple. There’s nothing in it for at least the next page or two that will risk grievously offending Rick and Evy, and there’s only a paragraph or so in which Joanna stares wistfully at Abir’s retreating figure and imagines his arms clasped tight around her waist, which he reckons he can probably skip over without causing a mutiny.

God, he really can’t remember writing this much pining.

Still, if he starts halfway down the page, then he can skip that scene entirely, and he might just make it through the reading without turning so red that someone calls for a doctor. It’ll be fine.  

He can do this. He’s done a thousand more impossible things before breakfast. He can do this, and then it will be over, and he can go home and pickle himself in scotch.

Page 49. Here goes.

He clears his throat, and opens his mouth to start reading.

“Does anyone else have any suggestions?” Evy interjects loudly, quite out of the blue. He honestly had no idea she was even still right behind him. He should have been able to smell the redolent tang of betrayal, this close. “Any individual with a particularly strong inclination towards a particular paragraph? Does anyone possibly wish to intervene here? Anyone at all?”

From his position as front row sentinel, O’Connell heaves a broad sigh.

“Why not read the ending,” he says flatly, intonation hinting for all the world that he’s rehearsed this particular suggestion.

A hum of excited approval buzzes through the room. This, it seems, is a popular request. Jonathan clenches the book very, very tightly, feels the rough edges of the cover digging into the flesh of his palm.

Because he can’t read the ending, of course. Of all the chapters, all the pages, all the sentences, words and syllables in that bloody book, the ending is by far the most impossible to read. 

Because he remembers even now, perhaps perversely more so at this moment than at any other, despite how desperately he'd like to forget it, how it had felt to write that ending. 

How vividly he remembers watching the ink dry on those final words, and the sense of sheer satisfaction that had settled like a warm quilt around him. How it had felt like having, not wanting, for the first time in longer than he could recall at the time. How even the most opulent pieces of baroque art he’s ever rigged himself to win at auction, the most hedonistic, decadent weekends he’s spent in the company of princes and sultans and diamond thieves alike, had hardly compared to the thrill he'd found in allowing himself to write what hadn't happened, what couldn't possibly have happened. He’d written them, and he’d watched the ink dry down, lose its lustre and settle down into the pages, and that had been the closest he’d ever come to having something he’d wanted. 

He wrote those words. He can't possibly read them. 

“Erm,” he says. “No, no, better not, I shouldn’t think. I wouldn’t want to spoil the ending, after all.”

“We’ve all already read it!” cries the same behatted woman as before. “Oh, do read the ending. It’s so romantic!”

Jonathan nearly drops the book. “Yes, well, no-one wants to hear that, do they? You're all here for the adventure, surely—”

"I'm not," an older woman in the front row pipes up. "The romance was the best bit. I loved that part where they were all on camels and Joanna kept thinking about how glossy Abir's hair looked in the moonlight."

"Twaddle," mutters the man with a moustache. "You should read the bit where the American chap is getting pummelled by all the other American chaps. Real edge-of-your-seat stuff, that. Even had me rooting for the Americans."

In truth, that scene is probably some of the worst prose Jonathan has ever written, which is truly saying something, but he's grateful for the specific request. Anything but the ending. 

He looks over to O'Connell, who appears to be quietly seething. It might not be the best move for their brotherly relationship, but needs must. He can smooth it over later with a well-timed bottle of scotch. Probably.

It’s an out. And dear God, he needs one of those right now, along with a cigar and maybe a bottle of port or eight.

Page 32. He remembers it vividly. 

Scrambling to find the right paragraph, he just about allows his heart to continue beating. 

And then he looks at the rest of the audience. 

The woman in the front is slouched in her seat, her mouth downturned and her arms folded sullenly across her chest, as though she already knows that Jonathan’s mind is made up, and it’s entirely allied with the men in the room who don’t want to read anything except for battles and brawls. 

Except that’s not entirely true, because the more his eye roves around the people sitting patiently in anticipation of his reading, the more people he notices looking equally glum at this latest development. A sea of disappointed faces, all staring right at him.

A whole room of people who want that perfect, happy ending too.

For the first time, Jonathan thinks he can put himself outside of the role of the author, into the shoes of the readers, and he sees what they see. Wants what they want, which is, after all, exactly the same as what he wanted when he wrote it. 

It's escapism. A visit into another, better world, one where a spoilt, shallow dilettante goes on a reluctant adventure and is offered the chance of redemption. One where there's hope for a better ending, even for those who've done such an outstanding job of sabotaging their own beginnings, and perhaps their middles, too. One where strife yields joy, unexpected and reciprocal, a fertile ground where a hundred happy tomorrows bloom.

Everyone, it seems, just wants a bit of romance. 

And if the only way he can give it to them is in the form of Abir and Joanna, the story of a romance that cannot, did not and will not happen outside the pages they’ve all devoured and loved, then who is Jonathan to deny them that?

Certainly, he’ll regret it later, when he’s on his fifth snifter of brandy and can’t remember his own name, but for now, just this moment here, it’s quite clear to him that this is the right thing to do. Which is a very strange thought for Jonathan to have in any context beyond coming up with reasons not to do something, but it’s a topsy turvy sort of day.

Anyway, at least Ardeth isn’t here to hear it.

Small mercies, and all that.

He clears his throat, counts to ten, and begins to read. This page, he could practically recite by heart. 

“Abir took Joanna’s delicate hands, clasped them between his own, and looked into her frightened face with his dark, brooding eyes. Were she to take even one step closer, she could breathe the scent of him, the musk of him, and she knew that she would be lost forever, doomed to wanting what she could not have, what she could not even want. She didn’t dare move at all. 

“‘I will keep you safe,’ he promised. ‘Nothing will happen to you, so long as I am here, for all of your life. I will be here as long as you need me. I will not leave you, not now and not tomorrow, and not for all of the days after.’ 

“He reached out and gently touched her jaw, and she shivered. ‘Do you trust me?’ he asked her, and although she longed to answer by throwing her arms around him, clasping him to her and holding him as close as she dared, she simply nodded.”

He takes a deep breath, holds it for a moment, and then turns the page. His hands are trembling. It’s nearly over, thank any god who’s still watching. "'Then it is so,' said Abir. 'You trust me, and I hold your most precious life in my hands. I will treasure it like your finest diamonds, your rarest pearls. Now, come with me, and I will prove to you that your trust is rightly placed.' And so, safe in the knowledge that no harm would ever come to her as long as she was under his protection and in his arms, Joanna followed him, and knew that she would continue to do so for as long as they both lived."

The room around him is still and silent as he closes the book and rests it gently against his thigh. From somewhere near the middle of the room, Jonathan thinks he can hear someone sniffing quietly through tears.

“Oh God, not more romantic piffle,” sulks the man with the moustache.

And he’s done it. It’s over. 

And certainly, he’d still much rather be engaged in fisticuffs with a dead priest’s resurrected girlfriend, but it’s done. He never has to read from this blasted book again.

He can go right back to pretending he never bloody wrote it. What bliss that will be.

“Well,” he says, not really to anyone at all except himself. “That was The Curse of the Deserted Heart, for what it’s worth. Thank you for, erm, your interest. And for not booing me off stage.”

A few scattered claps ring out from various corners of the room, but for the most part, the audience seems rather preoccupied with their tears.

And then applause erupts. A deafening roar of it, like a freight train passing through. Someone even whoops, and then another person joins in, and someone else starts stamping their feet, and it’s all very flattering, but also entirely bizarre.

Should he bow?

He bows. 

The applause rises higher. 

So this is what adulation feels like. At least he can end his authorial career on a high note, he thinks.

He dips into another awkward bow, which almost becomes a curtsey simply due to Jonathan’s terrible lack of balance, and he’s about to make his graceful exit from the whole affair, when Evy comes up from behind him, like the dreadful ghoul that she is, and clamps her hand down firmly on his left shoulder. To everyone else, it probably just looks like a friendly little back pat, but her vice-like grip really is threatening to dislodge Jonathan’s collarbone, and he can’t help but wince.

“Thank you so much, Mr Carnahan,” she says, sweetly, as the applause finally dies down and peters out. “That really was an excellent reading, and I think we can all agree that it perfectly encapsulates so much that we all love about Miss Neachann’s novel.”

Jonathan doesn’t quite dare to turn around. He’s not sure he’d like what he sees in her face right now. Nothing good ever comes of her sounding quite so saccharine.

“I’m glad to hear it,” he says instead.

“And now, I do hope you won’t feel too put upon, Mr Carnahan, but as I’m sure you’ll know, being such a diligent assistant to Miss Neachann as you are, she was supposed to give a short question and answer session after the reading. Given that you appear so very well acquainted with her work, do you think you might be able to step in for us?”

Jonathan has no idea why he’s so often regarded as the black sheep of the family. Evy is clearly the greater bastard.

A reading was bad enough. But questions? How the devil is he supposed to ensure that no-one asks him anything incriminating?

Her hand digs into the meat of his shoulder. There’s nowhere to run. He can barely remain standing. 

“Yes!” he cries, half hissing as her nails threaten to draw blood. “Ouch. Yes.”

At last, she releases him, and claps her hands together in an alarmingly convincing parody of excitement. “Excellent!” she crows. “Excellent. Well, I’ll open up the floor now, shall I?”

Jonathan wishes she would, if only so he could fall through it. He nods dumbly.

“Does anyone have any questions for Mr Carnahan?” she asks sweetly, her hands clasped in front of her, the picture of innocence. 

A sea of arms rises up. Evy looks around the audience, and her eyes settle on one particular figure somewhere near the back of the room. She nods once in their direction, a small smile on her lips, as though Jonathan’s mortification is truly the most fun she’s had in months. It probably is, which doesn’t really say very much about O’Connell’s company, Jonathan thinks. 

“Yes?” she says.

“Is Abir a tender lover?” shrieks a very sweaty woman in the third row.

“Not you,” sighs Evy. 

The woman sinks back into her seat, arms folded, pouting.

“The man at the back,” clarifies Evy. “Is there anything you’d like to ask Mr Carnahan?”

“Yes, thank you,” says a voice that, to his horror, and to something altogether different, Jonathan recognises all too well.

And as soon as Jonathan hears it, his heart turns all the way over in his chest, then stops beating for a full five seconds or so, and then bursts entirely, which is for the best, really. 

Because of course, Ardeth Bay is standing on his own at the back of room, quite apart from Evy and O’Connell, leaning in an uncharacteristically lackadaisical manner, for the second time in as many hours, against a pillar, which, Jonathan can’t help but notice, is an anachronistic combination of papyriform and Doric. Awful. Someone should do it a favour and knock it down, put it out of its misery. Preferably right now. 

If it causes the whole roof to collapse and crush them all to death, then so be it.

Ardeth, who’s read the whole bloody, bastard book. Ardeth, who Jonathan quite clearly and deliberately remembers sending home a good half hour ago. Ardeth, who just heard Jonathan read a whole god forsaken paragraph about—well. There’s only so much denial that even Jonathan can reasonably excuse, at this point. 

It’s only after a good ten seconds have passed that Jonathan remembers that he does, in fact, have a tongue, and that therefore he really ought to use it.

“Erm,” he says, which he thinks might answer another question entirely. It’s difficult to tell if he’s turned bright red or ghostly white; at any rate, it does feel rather as though he doesn’t have any blood at all. “Do you have a question?”

“Yes,” confirms Ardeth. He looks very solemn, but that’s probably just his face; Jonathan can count on the fingers of half a hand the times he’s seen Ardeth crack a smile. It must be very contemplative work, being so noble and handsome. “In fact, I have two questions. Firstly, I was wondering if you had any ideas on what Abir might have been thinking in that scene, the one you just read. We hear Joanna’s thoughts, but Abir's own desires remain a mystery. Do you think Joanna herself knows what Abir is thinking, and, if so, what does she believe his thoughts to be?"

God, but it’s a good question. If this were, say, a book club, Jonathan would be absolutely delighted to get into such nitty gritty detail about his own work.

Unfortunately, a question about the romantic feelings of a character based very minutely on Jonathan, posed by the very man that said character’s love interest is at least partially inspired by, in a room full of people who are absolutely baying for lust and romance, is rather more uncomfortable.

Although. The fact that Ardeth is even here at all, having read the stupid book, and asking a question—this question, of all? 

Jonathan has no idea what it means. 

But it does, evidently, mean something. 

If only people were as easy to decipher as an errant hieroglyph.

His collar feels very tight all of a sudden, and he loosens it with his finger.

“I,” replies Jonathan. He clears his throat and tries again. "Well. I think that one needs to remember that Abir isn't exactly the most voluble of men. Of characters, even, given that he’s not a real man at all, of course. It's rather tricky to discern exactly what he may be thinking at any given time, because he doesn't exactly come out and say it, does he? It's all aphorisms and prophecies and thinly veiled references to ancient texts, peppered with the occasional wry comment about imperialism. I don't think I can entirely be blamed for not knowing exactly what's going on in his head. Nor can Joanna, of course. I don't think she knows, either."

A knowing murmur ripples around the room. It’s utterly hateful. The audience between them is rapt.

If Jonathan didn’t know Ardeth’s face quite as well as he does, he might miss the very small smile currently spreading across it. For better or worse, he’s spent far too much time imagining what this particular smile looks like for it to pass him by.

"Do you think it's possible," says Ardeth, into the approving silence, "that Abir believes he has little need to say exactly how he feels, because, in his mind, he has already shown it? That perhaps he has assumed his feelings were clear from his actions, rather than his words? That was my interpretation, at least. It seemed very much to me that his feelings were on the page just as clearly as hers. They were just written between the lines."

Jonathan shifts the entirety of his weight from his left foot to his right. Someone really ought to open a window.

"I suppose it's entirely possible," he allows. "But then, I would argue that I don't think poor Joanna really knows what those feelings between the lines are, or even if there are any feelings there at all, between those other lines. That's what she's thinking, I suppose. Quite simply, one never knows if one should be reading between the lines if they don't know what page they're on in the first place, do they? It seems to me that Joanna believes they might even be reading from different books altogether."

For a few moments, Ardeth looks at him. The rest of the room can go and rot, for all Jonathan cares.

"I see," says Ardeth. "I understand what you're saying, I think. Perhaps it is unfair for me to expect that Joanna would know what is not written, or said."

“Oh, no,” says Jonathan. “Not unfair, not really. I suppose one could just as easily make the argument that Joanna could have compared books, as it were.”

Ardeth’s mouth quirks upwards in a very small smile. “As it were, yes.”

“And was that your second question?”

“No, not quite,” replies Ardeth. “If I may ask another—”

“Don’t stop on our account,” grumbles the behatted woman, brow furrowed. 

“—I would ask this,” says Ardeth, ignoring her entirely. “What do you think happens after the final page? By which I mean, in the excerpt you just read, it ends just at the moment Abir and Joanna finally give voice to their feelings. They each know how the other feels, and that their own feelings are not unreturned. What do you think happens after?”

Jonathan pauses. “I think they’re happy,” he says. “And beyond that, you know, I really couldn’t tell you.”

“I think so too,” says Ardeth.

Really, what more could Jonathan ask for? For Joanna and Abir to have some measure of happiness, whatever that looks like, off the page. To go entirely off-book and like the look of the lines after all.

“Well,” he says, after far too long has passed. “I hope that answers your question.”

“I believe it does, yes. Thank you.”

From across a room filled with people who must think that Ardeth is simply the biggest fan of Valery Neachann in the whole hemisphere, or perhaps just a very dedicated literary critic, Ardeth looks at him, and Jonathan looks right back. 

And for just a brief, fleeting moment, Jonathan allows himself to guard the delicate flame of hope that it really might just be all right.

“I think they embrace tenderly and with vigour,” chimes in the Behatted Woman.

"Do you think that Amenhotep's name might be a reference to early Christian prayer?" pipes up Susan Cooper from the third row.

It's going to be a long half hour. 

By the time all the questions are done, Jonathan feels exactly like a wet towel that’s been wrung out and left to dry on the side of a dirty kitchen sink. There’s no sign of Ardeth at all; presumably he slipped out to go and die of boredom halfway through the third question about why Emmeline would choose O’Nally when Abir was right there, or perhaps the sixth time someone raised their hand with more of a comment than a question. Honestly, if he’d lost track of Ardeth about an hour earlier, he’d probably be much more put out about it than he is now. As it is, he’s still suffused with quite a lovely warm glow, which he fully intends to bask in for the next few hours at the very least. 

He’s not usually an optimist in any situation where he can’t rig the card deck in his favour or bribe someone into making things go the way he wants them to, but there are a couple of things he knows about Ardeth, and he’s about as sure as he’s ever been that he doesn’t need to worry about being abandoned right now. For one thing, Ardeth has never been anything but thoroughly dependable. With the single exception of that one time he buggered off and left Jonathan to his own devices in a desert, with no-one but his sister and future brother-in-law for dreadful, inappropriate company, Ardeth has made it rather clear that he’s not usually one to wander off when he’s still required.

For another thing, he’s quite obviously read the book, and liked it. He’s absolutely going to want an autograph.

So, when Jonathan finally manages to extricate himself from the small crowd that keeps forming around him on his way out of the museum, fudging off a few people with the promise that he’ll pass on their addresses to Ms Neachann, and certainly she’ll be pleased to hear that they’ve named their firstborn daughter Joanna in her honour, he’s only a tiny bit perplexed to find himself confronted on the museum steps not by the object of his mortifying affection, nor, blessedly, by his evil sister, but by O’Connell, who would doubtless be just as evil if he gave enough of a damn about Jonathan to bother.

“Oh, not you,” sighs Jonathan, shielding his eyes from the glaring sun, which has the audacity to blare down upon them all even in the late evening, low in the sky as it is. “I really hoped you’d be too ashamed to show your face, after what you two just pulled.”

O’Connell cuffs him on the arm, but there’s no real heat behind it. It’s lukewarm at best. “If anything, you should be thanking us. I’m not sure we’re the ones who’ve pulled anything.”

He can feel himself blushing furiously, and he shoves O'Connell's hand from his shoulder. “Yes, well, if you’d get out of my way, that would be an enormous help. Even if my sister put you up to it, I don’t appreciate your meddling, you know.”

“Meddling,” scoffs O’Connell, shaking his head. “Pal, this wasn’t meddling. It was mercy. For us, mostly.”

“I have no idea what you mean,” lies Jonathan.

“Of course you don’t.”

“Anyway, why are you here? Surely your duties as guard dog are over by now.”

O’Connell glares at him. “Not everything is about you, you know,” he says. “I’m waiting for your sister, not you. Some of us were big boys back in Hamunaptra, and have the handbag to prove it. Apparently she had to go to the bathroom half an hour ago, and I guess she got distracted by something in cuneiform on the way back.” 

It’s only then that Jonathan realises O’Connell has been laden with Evy’s dreadful brown satchel. Now that, he thinks, is domestic bliss: to love someone enough that you’ll carry whatever they ask of you, even if it’s scuffed leather and full of textbooks. 

“If you’d rather just burn it, I won’t tell her,” says Jonathan. “You could get her a new one, one which looks less like she dug it out of a pauper’s tomb.”

The eye roll he gets from O’Connell in response is not entirely unwarranted. “Anyway, what are you doing here? The whole point was that you’d finally stop moping around and pining. Go get him, tiger," says O'Connell, slapping Jonathan between the shoulder blades so firmly that he stumbles.

Jonathan steadies himself, both physically and emotionally. The former, he finds, is much less taxing.

"I shall do no such thing," he replies. "We're going to have a very civilised conversation about what just occurred, and about what we both hope might occur in the future, that's all."

O’Connell snorts, and makes to clap him on the back again. Jonathan nimbly dodges it. Americans, and their apparently primal need for physical contact. Maiden aunts have touched him less at weddings.

"You're in for a real disappointment if that's how you think it's gonna go. Ten bucks says you don't last ten minutes before you're both—"

"Yes, yes, all right,” he interrupts, holding up both hands. “There's really no need for you to finish that sentence. Wager accepted."

"But you don't even know what I was gonna say."

Jonathan wrinkles his nose. "I assure you, I do. And frankly, thinking about you saying it only makes me think of you doing it, and with my sister, of all people, which is the very last image I need in my head for the conversation I'm about to have. To tell you the truth, you've just lost yourself ten pounds, because there's absolutely no way on God's green Earth that I'll be in the mood to do that with the images you've gone and put in my mind. So, thank you very much, and goodbye."

He takes his leave at that, and he can hear O’Connell chuckling to himself all the way down the block, which does not exactly fill him with mirth. Honestly, the nerve of the man to laugh at Jonathan, like he’s the sad sap out of the two of them, when O’Connell is the one who’s been waiting outside a museum like a glorified baggage cart for the past half hour.

He stops walking just around the back corner of the museum, and wipes the sheen of sweat from his brow. God, but it’s sweltering. The back of the museum is all hidden in glorious shade, cool and dark, and exactly the right sort of place for a chap to be loitering if he wanted to avoid keeling over from heatstroke whilst waiting for, say, an accidentally famous author to emerge, so that they could engage in a fruitful and productive conversation about matters of literature. 

Jonathan peers around the wall. Nothing. He looks at the ground, behind the little wall that hides a small, covered patio. No-one. 

There’s no sign of Ardeth at all. 

Which is, all things considered, not ideal.

By the time he’s got home, he’s run through just about every possible scenario in his head, as well as at least six impossible ones. 

Perhaps Ardeth received news of that amulet from the Luxor dig, and, in true Medjai fashion, he immediately rode off into the sunset atop a gleaming stallion, ebony locks flowing nobly in the desert breeze, invigorated by his quest to save the world. Dr Salah might not have been aware of any such amulet, but then Ardeth is an enigma wrapped in a riddle and tied with a bow of mystery. Perhaps he just never told Dr Salah about it.

Or perhaps he’s fallen down some sort of misplaced manhole cover, the sort they’d ended up using to escape from that plague horde a few months ago, and he’s currently in dreadful, mortal peril. Or he became distracted by a particularly enticing scent from one of the local shawarma sellers near the museum, and he’s at this very moment sitting on some bench somewhere in the centre of the city, chewing idly on a kofta or two, entirely unaware of the passage of time. Or he’s helping a little old lady cross the road, and she’s telling him her life story, and it’s been a very, very long life. Or he’s chosen exactly the wrong moment to toss his hair, and he’s blinded someone by the astonishing lustre of it, and he’s currently offering medical assistance.

Or perhaps, a little voice in Jonathan’s head is whispering, he’s decided that Jonathan isn’t worth the bother, after all; that he’s really a very silly little man, and a silly little man with very poor pectoral definition at that, and really not the sort of chap that merits consideration in any context outside of getting unfortunately trapped together in a cursed tomb.

He sighs. It really would be just his luck. And to top it all off, it’s so hot outside that he really does think he might be melting. Maybe that explains it. Maybe Ardeth is, right at this very moment, currently in liquid form, oozing down the streets of Cairo.

He shudders. The heat always gets to him.

It takes him a few moments to find his house keys in his breast pocket, buried as they are beneath a brand new mother-of-pearl comb and a hatpin, and so, when he finally manages to unlock his front door and let himself in, he’s never been more ready for a lie down and a glass of something very cold and even more alcoholic.

The key clicks in the lock, and Jonathan breathes a sigh of sweet, blessed relief. He’s home. At last. 

He’s not expecting for Ardeth to be here at all. 

Which is why he almost faints when he walks into his living room, only to see a very familiar figure, clad in black, reclining on his couch, reading a book. 

“Jesus Christ,” he yelps, clutching a hand to his heart. “Oh, for the love of Horus, warn a chap!”

“Sorry,” grins Ardeth, not looking in the least bit apologetic. He puts down the book he’s presumably stolen from Jonathan’s own good bookshelf, and doesn’t even bother with a bookmark. “I assumed that you were probably used to people appearing inside your house without warning. Am I wrong?”

Jonathan checks his pulse. Still beating, somehow. As reassuring as it is that Ardeth hasn’t actually just disappeared off into the desert again, he can’t say that he wouldn’t have appreciated a warning. He might at least have combed his hair, had he known, or changed into a set of clothes which aren't sweat-stained at both armpits, or tried very hard to become another person entirely, someone capable of having this conversation without looking like he'd rather be sick. 

“Not wrong, dear chap,” he says, shucking off his coat and throwing it rather more decadently than he feels across the back of a wicker chair. “Although usually, if someone turns up in my living room without warning, they’re here to steal something I’ve already stolen fair and square, or, failing that, to beat me to a bloody pulp on my own carpet. I do hope that’s not what’s happening here.”

Ardeth tilts his head. He looks endearingly naive, which is hilarious given that this is one of the few times Jonathan has seen him without a machine gun strapped to his chest. 

“You’ve lived a very strange life,” says Ardeth.

Feeling brave, he dares to take a few steps in Ardeth’s direction, fully intending to flop down on the chair opposite, then chickens out and ends up leaning with his hip against the side table instead. It’s rather sharp, and he regrets it immediately, but, in the interests of appearing debonair and insouciant, decides to just put up with it.

“You really don’t know the half of it,” he says.

“How does the affair in Hamunaptra compare?”

Jonathan congratulates himself on only flushing very slightly at Ardeth saying the word ‘affair’. “Quite genuinely, it isn’t even in the top ten of bizarre things that have happened to me this year.”

“It’s all ripe for your novels, I would think.”

“Ah. Yes. About that…” He clears his throat. The side table is now digging quite determinedly into his hip. He’s going to end up with bruises there, and not for any of the fun reasons. “I really must apologise for it all, old boy. You see, I quite assumed you wouldn’t read it.”

Ardeth unfurls his arms and drapes one along the back of the couch. If it were anybody else, Jonathan would assume that he was doing it just to show off the fact that he has actual biceps. 

“Of course I have read it,” says Ardeth. “All of the Medjai have read it. Except for Rahim, but that’s because he only likes to read books about horses.”

“That must limit his reading pool quite a lot,” says Jonathan, feeling a little dazed, and still unfortunately thinking about the biceps. 

Ardeth laughs. “You would be surprised.”

“I suppose he could read Black Beauty. And I seem to recall some of the Brontës earlier work being rather, erm, equine.”

Dear goodness, Ardeth really has to stop him soon, or he’s going to spend the next hour of his life talking about literary horses.

Instead, Ardeth stands up from the couch, and crosses the room between them, standing next to Jonathan, although he does have the good sense not to wedge himself against the side table. Instead, he turns his attention to the small array of ornaments arranged haphazardly along it. 

He runs his hands over the little carapace of a silver tortoise shell, which Jonathan is pretty sure was featured in the Lost and Found section of The Egyptian Gazette last month. His fingers are very long, and Jonathan swallows very hard. Delicately, he picks up a little turquoise ushabti figure, and turns it over in his palm. It’s one of Jonathan’s very few legitimate finds, and he’d been rather proud of himself when he’d seen it glinting out of the sands on his first dig in Luxor.

Admittedly, the little hole drilled into the bottom of the ushabti figure, which now hides six tiny diamonds stolen from the safe box of a minor German prince, is less legitimate.

Ardeth tips out the diamonds, counts them, counts them again, then rolls his eyes and puts them back inside the ushabti figure.

Jonathan resolutely does not say a single word.

“I liked Wuthering Heights,” Ardeth says softly, finally appearing to have come to a decision about how to steer the conversation away from fictional horses. “And your book too, of course. It was very—” He pauses, clearly trying to find the exact right word. “Well. It was a version of events which I think I would have vastly preferred to the original."

"All of it?" asks Jonathan, because, even in the wake of the revelations of the past hour or so, it still doesn't feel quite real that he's actually having the conversation that he appears, despite it all, to be somehow having.

“Not all of it, no. Not the part where I spent half the novel bare-chested and running around in the midday sun. I would have been dead of heatstroke in two days, and then how would we be having this conversation now?”

“In my defence, it’s not a desert survival manual,” sniffs Jonathan. “I think you can allow me some small measure of sartorial creative licence.”

“And the part just before the end, where Joanna escaped the collapsing tomb with a sack full of treasure,” muses Ardeth. He picks up a small terracotta potsherd, which Jonathan admittedly only keeps on display because stealing it from The British Museum had been very difficult indeed, and runs his fingers along the edges, smoothed by the centuries. “It seemed unfortunate that, when Joanna had at last realised the true value of gold and how little she really needed it, she later found herself so rich in gold and jewels at the very end, just by sheer fluke.”

“Ah. Yes. That would have been dreadful, if that had happened.” says Jonathan. The side table, which is inlaid with Calacatta marble and which he’d only managed to purchase with the proceeds of Beni’s sack of stolen treasures from Hamunaptra, is really making mincemeat of his upper thigh. He clears his throat. “I suppose that you preferred the parts where Abir waved his sword around and did a whole manner of heroic things.”

Ardeth really is very close now. It’s more disconcerting than it has any right to be, not least because, now that he’s close enough to study properly, Jonathan can see that he has a few grey strands of hair at his temple. How ridiculous, that an objective flaw should only make him somehow more attractive. Jonathan sorely expects that he himself is ageing like milk.

“You know, I was expecting an adventure novel,” says Ardeth. “But when I read it, I realised it was more of a romance.”

“Yes, well,” says Jonathan, because there’s really no use denying the inevitable up to a point. He clears his throat. He really must do something about Ardeth’s dreadful proximity, before he does something that makes himself look even more stupid. “I say, old boy, how about a nice cup of tea?”

“I think you would get heatstroke.”

“Good point,” sighs Jonathan. “Well. Rather than talk about that ridiculous book—because I have to admit, dear chap, I’ve had quite my fill of it today—why don’t you tell me why, exactly, you’ve broken into my house?”

That gets Ardeth’s attention. Finally, he stops fidgeting with all of Jonathan’s most hard-won possessions, and fixes Jonathan with the full weight of his gaze. 

“It’s very simple,” says Ardeth. “As I said. I like you.”

It doesn’t make any more sense, hearing it here, not least because liking someone is not usually a precursor for breaking into someone’s own blessed home.

“The thing is, old chap, I'm just not entirely sure why you would.”

Ardeth shrugs, like it's the easiest question on God's green Earth to answer. “You are a good man.”

“Ah. I'm afraid not, no. I once pick-pocketed an orphan, you know. I didn’t know he was an orphan before I pickpocketed him, of course, I'm not evil, but I only returned his empty wallet, even after I found out. So you see, I'm afraid you may be labouring under a misapprehension here.”

“I don't think so,” says Ardeth. “Perhaps if I had said that I liked you because you were so precise with your words, then yes, you would have a point. But I did not say that, and the fact is that you did let O'Connell strap you to the wing of a plane so that you could save your sister from an evil creature of untold power. A bad person would have refused. Even a good coward would have said no.”

“Yes,” agrees Jonathan, somewhat weakly. “Lost my bloody wallet somewhere in the desert, too. It was full of someone else's money.”

“I didn't say you were a saint,” Ardeth points out. “And anyway, quite beside all that, there’s also the part I mentioned earlier, when you shot that man off the horse with a bottle of whisky in your other hand, and in the interests of honesty, I should tell you that it was very distracting, especially given that the fate of the world was at stake. In fact, it was so distracting that I left your camp much earlier than I should have, and then I lost track of time, and by the time I returned, you had all awoken the immortal creature and we were all in mortal peril.”

“Oh,” says Jonathan. The room suddenly feels very small, and it’s ridiculous that Ardeth should be standing this close. "Sorry about that."

“You see, I turned up at the museum with a plan,” says Ardeth. “I had thought it through in almost painful detail, and I was quite certain it was going to work, because I read your book and it seemed as though we were on the same page, no pun intended. And then I got here, and it seemed like you couldn't wait to be rid of me. No matter how many times I tried to bring it around to talking about your book, and what I had read in it, you would get a look on your face like you had eaten some bad lamb, and change the topic to the first thing on your mind. I started to think that maybe I had got it all wrong. Maybe you really had just written a good piece of fiction, something that the public would want to read, and not something that you wanted me to read in particular. So I left, because it seemed like that was what you wanted me to do.”

“But you came back,” says Jonathan, still not sure that he quite believes it. 

“Yes," says Ardeth. "You see, I realised that I had forgotten something important. An irreconcilable truth. Something that I could not ignore for a moment longer, and which, the more I thought about it, brought everything out of the darkness and into the light.”

“And what's that?”

“That you're an idiot,” says Ardeth. 

“Ah,” says Jonathan. “Yes, that’s fair enough, I suppose.”

“I truly didn’t realise that you would even entertain the notion that I hadn’t read it. Everyone has read it!”

“But you live in a desert,” Jonathan points out. “There are no bookshops there! How was I supposed to know you’d even heard of it, let alone read the bally thing?”

“I don’t live under a rock,” Ardeth counters. “Certainly, the nearest bookshop is four days’ ride away on horseback, and that’s if you do Rahim a favour and manage to borrow one of the good horses, but I do talk to people, on occasion. Where did you think we get our food? Our clothes? Our information about which group of white people is digging up which cursed artefact?”

“I suppose,” says Jonathan, “that I tried not to think about it altogether too much. Don't take it personally. I try not to think about a lot of things, especially things that demand any thought at all.”

“Anyway, what I mean is that I thought you knew that I would have read it. So, I arrived at the museum, where I expected that you would want to see me, because I had read your book, and it seemed as though I would not exactly be an unwelcome presence, and that you might have something to say to me. Something that I wanted to hear. But then, when you saw me, it appeared that I was wrong. Every time I tried to talk to you, you kept trying to convince me to leave, and it seemed as though you wanted to talk about anything except for your book. Even taxes, and I know enough about you to know that you really would usually rather talk about any other subject except taxes. So, all I could think was that you knew I had read your book, and that by turning up, I had—what’s the phrase?—got the wrong end of the stick, and that you were simply too embarrassed to tell me, and you were dropping all of those hints out of kindness. That you had written the book the way you wrote it simply because you knew that it would sell, and not because of anything real.”

His confession finished, Ardeth looks at him, expectant, and clasps his hands behind his back, as though preventing himself from reaching out.

“Oh,” says Jonathan, because he’s really not sure what else he can say to that. Clearly, he does have to say something, however. Fumbling awkwardly, wishing that he had even half the grace of Ardeth—heck, even half the grace of O’Connell, who had at least had the suave ability to steal a toolkit for Evy, even if he had dreadfully fumbled the actual act of giving it to her—Jonathan reaches out and pats Ardeth on the elbow. “No, dear chap. No, that’s not it at all. Quite the opposite, really. You see, I quite thought that you would find the book—and, by extension, me—thoroughly detestable, if you ever read it. Truly, I had visions of you seeking me out and doing dreadful things to me with a scimitar in an alleyway, or going back to Hamunaptra and raising our undead friend from the grave so that he could pelt me with locusts and then desiccate me to death.”

"If I were to do dreadful things to you in an alleyway, it would not be with a scimitar," says Ardeth. "Hopefully, you wouldn't find them too dreadful, either."

Jonathan’s mouth suddenly feels very dry. It’s probably not a sign of good health that he can suddenly feel his pulse in his fingertips.

"You know," he says. "I'm starting to think we really might be on the same page, after all."

“I don’t think there’s any other page,” says Ardeth.

The kiss, when it happens, is nothing like the way Jonathan wrote it, and he really must admit that it’s for the best. For all of his imaginative prowess, he really couldn’t have written anything like this. One moment, he’s standing as upright as ever, and the next he finds himself hanging onto a pair of very firm, broad shoulders, clinging on for dear life, mouth thoroughly occupied, and with no real idea where to put his hands.

Who needs to be thoroughly smooched to within an inch of their lives on horseback, he thinks, somewhat dazed and still keenly aware of the way the side table is digging a bruise into the bone of his hip, when you can be thoroughly smooched to within an inch of your life in your own home? Much more convenient. Less chance of being interrupted by an ill-timed whinny. 

He shifts his leg, manages somehow to angle his hip just ever so slightly so that the side table isn’t eating through his flesh any more, and decides that the best place for his hands is probably exactly where they are.

He’s rather enjoying the experience of being thoroughly ravished in a way that would only be printed by a very different sort of publisher altogether, when a thought flashes through his admittedly addled brain, and he wrenches himself out of Ardeth’s grasp. Ardeth, for his part, steps back smoothly, without protest. His hair is sticking up in every possible direction, and his robe has fallen off his left shoulder.

“Hang on,” says Jonathan, slightly breathless, wiping his mouth. “What about the amulet?”

The stare he receives in response is entirely blank. “What are you talking about?”

“The amulet!” cries Jonathan. “The cursed amulet at Luxor! The one that will rain ruin down upon the world should it be lifted from—”

“You’re an idiot,” says Ardeth, matter-of-factly, and then neither of them says very much at all for the next three hours.

“So,” asks Jonathan, much later. “What did you think?”

Ardeth raises an eyebrow. The bedsheets are preserving his modesty, but the whole scene is quite wonderfully indecent. “Why? Did you want to compare notes?”

“Not about that! About the book, of course!” cries Jonathan, feeling himself flush crimson. He pulls the sheets up to his chin. The cotton is cool and soothing against his poor, abused skin. “You were perfectly clear on how you felt about, erm, the past three hours—”

“Five,” interjects Ardeth, looking deservedly smug.

Jonathan checks the little clock on the bedside table. “Oh yes, so it is. Well, you can be honest about the book now. It’s all out in the open, isn’t it? Tell me what you really think. You don’t need to try and win me over any more. I think it’s safe to say that you’ve been thoroughly victorious on that front.”

Ardeth falls silent. One of his outstretched arms is tapping an incoherent rhythm along the headboard. 

“The prose was so purple that you should really have had it printed on lavender paper,” he says, eventually. 

“Yes,” sighs Jonathan. “I thought so, too. It was practically lilac at the end.”

“And there were three adverbs that I had to look up in the dictionary,” adds Ardeth. “They weren’t there.”

“I did tell them that I didn’t think ‘planifier’ was a real word.”

“And the whole of the middle section, where Emmeline is kidnapped by Amenhotep and Joanna must convince the roguish O’Nally to stop eating something called a corn-dog for long enough to join the rescue effort, did seem to last for three chapters, but then, when I went back to it, it turned out that it was only four pages.”

“Pacing isn’t really my forte, it must be said.”

“I did worry that your relationship with your brother-in-law-to-be might suffer for that part.”

Jonathan waves a hand airily. “O’Connell is a perfectly decent chap, but he’s not got much going on between the ears, has he? I’m quite sure you could stand him upright next to a picturesque scene, stare into his ear, and use him as a telescope. I doubt he even knew it was about him until Evy told him.”

Ardeth doesn’t comment on that. “And of course, I did have to question the motivations for Joanna and Abir, when they sat down upon a rocky outcrop and had a lengthy discussion about the merits of marriage while Joanna’s sister was about to be ritually sacrificed.”

“In my defence, I do think that was actually a rather illuminating bit of character work.” He pauses. “For Joanna, at least.”

Ardeth has the good grace not to argue it. “But apart from that, I really did enjoy it.”

“Oh, well that’s all right then.” Jonathan shifts on the mattress. Either it’s showing its age, much like Jonathan these days, or he’s forgotten to move his hoard of ill-gotten rubies, and they're currently pressing determinedly against the small of his back. 

“I did,” Ardeth insists. “With the exception of those three errant adverbs—”

“I think they’re actually French, you know.”

“—I found your writing to be very…” He trails off, presumably trying to come up with a word that won’t make Jonathan flounce off. “Very elaborate,” he settles on. “Poetic, at times. And more importantly, I could tell immediately that you wrote it.”

“How so?”

Ardeth’s hand stops drumming its errant beat along the headboard, and finds its way to Jonathan’s own hand, where he laces their fingers together. He has a very small cut, half-healed, just beneath the knuckle of his thumb.

“There was a full inventory of the treasure of Amenhotep’s tomb,” Ardeth replies. “It was extremely detailed. The valuations were accurate to the penny.”

“You know, the publisher originally wanted me to put that at the end,” says Jonathan. “Like a sort of appendix, I suppose. I had to really fight them for the ending it has now.”

Feeling brave, he dares to run his thumb over Ardeth’s knuckles. In response, Ardeth holds his hand more tightly. The writerly part of Jonathan's brain sees it quite clearly for the metaphor it probably is, but his base instincts just like the way it feels.

“I thought it was a very good ending,” says Ardeth. “Every story needs some romance.”

4 months later

Jonathan will never be a morning person. He just won’t. Mornings are for other people: impetuous, contemptible people who have yet to discover the sheer unbridled hedonism of a good lie-in, and, as a general rule, he wants nothing whatsoever to do with them. As a matter of fact, he’s always firmly believed that morning people are some of the most terrifying creatures on the planet, and even the discovery of shambling, undead corpses hellbent on world destruction hasn’t swayed that conviction. 

So, it’s certainly not for the love of the sunrise over Cairo that he’s awake before noon. 

The problem is that no-one on God’s green Earth is flawless. Not even Ardeth, as it turns out, who is, alas, the exact sort of person who believes that waking up after the sun has already started to rise is a hideous sin, rather than one of life's greatest pleasures.

Jonathan tolerates it, of course. He’s always considered himself a benevolent sort of chap, thoroughly hospitable and charitable and, more importantly, not the type of person likely to turn down the offer a cup of coffee made just the way he likes it, even if it’s being offered at 6 o’clock in the infernal morning, and especially if it follows half an hour of very strenuous and otherwise thoroughly satiating activity.

Despite the recent spate of early starts, he's been pleasantly surprised by domesticity thus far. It really does have a fair few things to recommend it. For one thing, his awful nightmares have all but stopped, not least because the first time he woke up thrashing and shouting in the middle of the night, Ardeth had hurled a throwing knife at the wall in response, apparently in his sleep, and although they've both agreed that keeping knives in the bedroom is now out of bounds, Jonathan's not stupid enough to think that Ardeth's pillow is really just very pointy. For another thing, he's much more often accosted for a lengthy session of heavy petting nowadays than a heavyweight boxing match in an alleyway with a disgruntled gold smuggler, and although there's something to be said for that kind of excitement, Jonathan doesn't really miss it.

He pads down the hallway, yawning and stretching in a vain attempt to uncrick his lower spine. Alas, it’s the curse of a writer; he’s starting to think that his vertebrae are slowly being replaced with little packets of gravel. Which is fine, probably. He’d like to think that his days of being chased by undead priests in tombs are over, and he’s recently come to the grudging realisation that he’s almost certainly never going to be able to weasel his way onto another archaeological dig under a pseudonym and escape with all the artefacts ever again, because Ardeth will undoubtedly look at him with grave disappointment, no pun intended, and Jonathan knows that his poor, pathetic heart wouldn’t be able to take it. So, does he really even need a spine? He’s always managed without one before.

He picks up the post and flicks through the envelopes. At the top is a postcard from Evy. It doesn’t say an awful lot; she’s having a wonderful time in Alexandria, Rick (and Jonathan really does need to start thinking of him by his first name) has bought her a rather tasteful new knapsack, with just enough space for her favourite three translations of Sosates, and, oh, by the way, they’re considering bringing the wedding forward by two months, if he and Ardeth are able to attend. 

Jonathan rolls his eyes, and tucks it to the back of the pile. Honestly. No pregnancy announcement yet. It’s frankly a little offensive that she seems to think that Jonathan hasn’t noticed. Still, the longer she tries to hide it, the more fun he can have inviting her over and plying her with a series of increasingly expensive wines that she has to come up with elaborate reasons to refuse, so he’s not altogether too put out at the omission.

The rest of the pile is deeply uninteresting, mostly bills and the odd gushing letter of adoration forwarded from his publisher, after being thoroughly inspected for locks of hair and illicit bribes and promises of firstborns and the such, but there, tucked in between a request for a donation to save the cats of Angora and a letter from Jonathan’s third alma mater, is an envelope with a familiar pseudonym on the front. Immediately, Jonathan discards the pile in a scattered heap on the front doorstep, opening the single interesting envelope with one finger and reading its contents on his way back to the bedroom.

Dear Miss Neachann,

We are delighted to once more enclose your royalty statement for the most recent month of sales of The Curse of the Deserted Heart. The amount due to you this month will be £410, for sales through the past four calendar weeks. Further congratulations are in order!

You may note that sales have remained far from consistent since we first agreed to publish your work. On the contrary—they have in fact risen for the fifth consecutive month! We hope to appear anything but presumptuous when we tell you that this is, frankly, a most unusual development. It is not altogether strange for a book to sell well in its first few months of publication, but the exponentially increasing sales figures for your work, even five months after publication, are most out of the ordinary, and speak not only to the popular appeal of Deserted Heart, but to your enormous future potential.

As we wrote to you in our previous missive, we had always expected your book to do well; we would, of course, have declined to publish it had we not the utmost faith in its success. However, we would be remiss not to tell you that, in light of the popularity that Deserted Heart has deservedly enjoyed, we are now more keen than ever to help shepherd your future endeavours into the world. 

We would therefore like to arrange a meeting with you, if you are amenable, to discuss a potential contract for books two, three and four in the Deserted Heart series, as we believe this would be a mutually beneficial arrangement for both parties. Of course, our terms are highly negotiable, and we believe them to be very competitive indeed. 

With warmest regards and hopeful expectations,

Misters. H. Ivory and J. Emerald, Springer Publications

He finishes reading it right at the doorway to his bedroom, and flops down onto the bed, folding his legs at the ankle. 

Ardeth looks up at him, his attention finally diverted from staring at whatever fascinating thing he’s found upon Jonathan’s ceiling. 

"Did you receive any interesting correspondence?" he asks. 

"Oh, just a little hullo from my publisher," replies Jonathan, waving the letter.

Ardeth hums, and pats the few inches of space between them. Taking the hint, Jonathan shifts closer, and Ardeth slings his arm around Jonathan’s shoulder. 

"What did they have to say?" asks Ardeth, once Jonathan has made himself comfortable.

"Well," says Jonathan. "They're quite keen for me to write that second book as quickly as possible, which is a little bit terrifying, you know. I'm not sure I even have any ideas for the sequel. I didn't exactly have to come up with the first one all on my own. I hate to compliment that dusty old creature, but you have to admit, he did offer a well of inspiration."

"I think I can help with that," says Ardeth. He leans over Jonathan and picks up the newspaper from his bedside table, unfolds and opens it, and points to the headline on page two. King Tut's Treasury: Discoveries of Wealth Untold, it reads. 

Jonathan scans the rest of the article briefly. 

"Ah, yes," he recalls. "I read about that the other day. It'll be quite the dig, won't it? I'm sure they'll find some real treasures there. And some artefacts of great historical import, of course. Probably gold ones, encrusted with lots of jewels, not that that's relevant. Why, are you suggesting that I base the next book on that? Write something dreadful about poor Tut’s mummy?"

"Not exactly. I will be there, as a matter of fact," replies Ardeth. "There is a certain sceptre buried there that the Medjai have been guarding for centuries. I will be the one responsible for ensuring that it doesn't fall into the wrong hands. Or any hands at all, preferably, as it could resurrect the army of Set if it's wielded by a man who is evil at heart, which is unfortunately a common attribute amongst glorified grave robbers." He pauses, and pats Jonathan on the back. "Present company excepted, of course."

Jonathan decides to ignore the accusation of grave robbery, not least because it's a fair cop, and tries to ignore the burgeoning feeling of discomfort. "Ah. So you'll be buggering off again then, I suppose. That's quite all right, old boy. You must want your space, naturally. I'll be here when you get back, of course. Unless you'd rather I not be! I can arrange to be elsewhere at very short notice, maybe Sudan, it's something of a skill—"

"I'm asking you to come with me," says Ardeth. "Perhaps it would inspire your muse."

Jonathan’s mouth snaps shut, then hangs open again. Surely Ardeth isn't asking what he seems to be asking. A little jaunt to one of the most highly anticipated digs of the century? It might even be worth the two weeks on a camel that it'll take to get there. 

"The thing is," says Jonathan, deciding to hedge his bets, "as much as I appreciate your offer of a little adventure to get the old creative juices flowing, I think the publisher is rather hoping for more of a romance novel this time around.”

Ardeth looks at him, one eyebrow raised, and deftly steals the letter from Jonathan’s publisher right out of his hand. It’s terrible. He’s picked up far too many bad habits already, not least an unexpected fondness for adding sugar to his tea; he certainly doesn’t need to add theft to the list.

“Well,” Jonathan adds. “Even more of a romance novel, that is.”

Ardeth reaches out and pulls Jonathan closer. 

"I think that can be arranged," he says.

Dear subscriber to Paranormal Paramours,

As you are such a valued subscriber to our periodical, we are delighted to be able to offer you a sneak preview of the highly anticipated sequel to the bestselling The Curse of the Deserted Heart! Therefore, please find enclosed the opening paragraphs of The Warrior's Wife: a Romance of the Dunes that will Titillate and Thrill You! for your early perusal, as an expression of heartfelt gratitude from ourselves.

Publication is scheduled for Spring, 1928. To mark this illustrious occasion, there will be a book launch with cheese and wine, to be held at the Cairo Museum of Antiquities, with the date to be confirmed within the coming weeks.

We hope that you enjoy the following excerpt, and we hope to meet you in Cairo!

Chapter 1: Bliss in the Valley of the Kings

The sands of the desert glowed gold, like an ancient brooch or sceptre, turned to dust and scattered as far as the eye could see. Joanna could hardly bear the heat; she could feel the sweat at her brow, the sheen of it thick all over her. 

Abir did not suffer thus. A man used to the heat, he bore it with no complaint, and had simply removed all of his outer clothing, save a loose black sarong, to accommodate. 

Joanna herself found it difficult to complain, seated as she was behind the noble warrior astride his steed, in full view of his glorious shoulders. How impossible to fathom; that only half a year had passed of their love, and they still had so many more before them. 

As if sensing her maudlin thoughts, Abir turned to face her. His profile was outlined starkly against the brilliant, blinding sun. The sheen of his flesh seemed to glow, so that Joanna almost felt the need to shield her eyes from the beauty of it. He was an Adonis, an Eros, some great Greek statue made real, and hers alone, and forever. 

“Are you well?” Abir asked her. 

Joanna hardly knew how to reply. “I am well enough,” she said, after a while. “It is only the heat, that’s all.”

“We will rest a while,” said Abir. 

He dismounted in a quick, fluid motion that set Joanna’s heart aflutter, remembering the way he had held her last night. His face soft and kind, he reached out his hand and helped her down behind him. As she dismounted, she felt her foot catch in the stirrup, and lost her balance momentarily. Only Abir’s strong, muscular arms around her delicate waist kept her from falling into the sand. 

She felt herself blush, and this time it was not the heat. Often, she found herself wondering why this man, who moved with such grace and elegance, tolerated her, even in her clumsiness. 

“Careful,” he told her, smiling. For reasons Joanna could not discern, far from finding her ungainliness to be tedious, it seemed only to endear her to him further.

“It is so very hard to be careful, is it not, when the very sun itself seems to be waging a war upon our flesh?” She took off her fashionable, expensive hat and began to fan herself with it. It made not a whit of difference in the still, thick air. “I had thought the journey to the tombs would be shorter. If only I had known to expect such relentless heat, I should have towed along a bath full of ice behind us, and we should have travelled in far greater comfort.”

Abir heaved a sigh, although his irritation appeared fleeting in the face of his tender smile. His bare pectorals gleamed. “Tomorrow, my love, we shall be at our destination, and there shall be cold baths, and wine, and anything else your heart desires.”

Joanna smiled softly. Little did he know, she had that already.