MANPOWER MUST BE a nagging personnel problem in every culture.
After several strange high-pitched syllables echoed against the distant stone ceiling, any warriors still standing circled the golden chariot. Twelve took up the fallen harness pole to play gazelles and bear the doll-like figures of the royal pair back into the dark safety of the stone-pillar forest.
"Hah!" Shez trumpeted, shaking a fist at the departing troops. "All blood and no guts, you foul vampires! It is an honor to lose your head to my bloodwine vintages. They feed the true pharaohs who will rule in the Afterlife as on earth because they do not ache for the false immortality of bloodsuckers."
He laid an appropriately bloody hand on Bez's shoulder. "Well fought, little brother."
Then he regarded Ric and me. "You both wear the black of Anubis's honored jackal-headed form, so I will call you the Foreign Children of Anubis. I thank you for freeing me for such a long-overdue dinner."
I turned to thank the other descended god on my right. He was gone. I gazed into the stone forest. Many men with terra-cotta-colored skin had vanished there only moments ago. Was our sudden ally a rogue vampire? Could the Royal Pains have rebels in their ranks?
I finally forced myself to turn and walk to the rim of the pit. The red dust was still settling, like ancient earth quieting. No sound from below sounded like claws scrabbling for purchase on a long climb upward.
Ric's hands on my shoulders were bracing. I sensed his shared sorrow descending on me like an invisible cloak.
"Well." Shez came to us. "I have much work here, I see. Of course we must all take ourselves away before the cursed bloodsucking breed regroups and returns."
"You're a bloodsucker too," I pointed out.
"I am a demon lord and a god. I am also a jealous god. No one, not even Pharaoh, should usurp my role. But if you, my friends, wish to kill some scavenger dogs or rabid warriors with the fangs of cats, I will joyously end them all by harvesting their heads for my winepress."
He frowned as he gazed across at the silent herds of human vampire fodder.
"Bez, my little brother of the lion, many of those are your kind. Are we to leave them for future devouring? Granted, I thirst for souls to judge after such long captivity, but these creatures have been preyed upon by their own cannibal kind and there should be some appropriate afterlife for them, although not the fine attendings due a Pharaoh and the high priests and royal figures of our true ancient Egypt before it was corrupted."
"That Shez is certainly long-winded," Ric whispered in my ear.
Gods are probably all that way.
Which made me think of the God of the Old Testament, the devious and nervy biblical lady I was named after, and other interesting things.
First, someone had to get these literally innocent bystanders out of here. Where? They were human but had become a hidden race beyond its time. Though the many dwarfs among them had been easily accepted by the true Egyptians millennia ago, even modern America was still behind that culture in accepting what we delicately called the "differently" abled.
Aren't we all "differently" abled? I sure was, and I didn't know the half of it, because I'd not yet caught up with my CSI autopsy-table double, Lilith.
I glanced at Ric, disconcerted by seeing his bare, silver-iris eye. That would not play well on the Strip. We needed to get him undercover again.
I stared into the pit. I'd saved Quicksilver's life once, in Sunset Park, where I'd adopted him when he faced death within hours at the pound. I would scour this city below-ground and aboveground until I found him.
Or I would come back and sift this noxious pit until I found his ashes and I would make Snow raise him from those ashes, like the dragon Gargouille.
Not that Snow would lift a cuticle for me now, after what I'd let happen to him. Still, I was sure he'd take my soul for vengeful laceration in trade for a favor if he could get it.
Ric stared with me into the pit, then looked across to the miserable figures swaying like penned animals.
"You've done a good job of throwing the evil souls to judgment, Shezmou," he told our ally, "but what about these age-old victims of their immortal hungers? And the few of our modern people who were forced into their same bondage? Can you imagine the hell it must be for these innocent new victims?"
"I need not imagine anything, Foreign Child of Anubis. I know Hell well. Your point is as true as your courage in coming back here."
"These new allies freed you," Bez put in, coming to tug on the larger god's wrist cuff.
"I can do nothing!" Shezmou roared, vexed. "Osiris is my lord and these people, however wronged, have no one available to prepare them properly to journey to the Afterlife."
His anger was also an expression of his powerlessness in this case.
I lifted my face from gazing into the pit. If Quicksilver was down there, dead or not, he was doomed along with all the other genuine humans in the place.
If Osiris wouldn't help them all...
I looked at the pillars.
I thought about my name.
I needed a Samson. Shezmou had pulled down a lot of vampire evil, but the innocent survivors needed to be pulled into paradise.
"Delilah," Ric said.
I could hear the anxiety in his voice. Don't worry, Ric, I thought. At least I'm walking away from the pit for now.
I stopped before Anubis's truly awesome gold-and-black figure. Maybe I could free another god. His jackal head was assuredly canine.
"O mighty Anubis," I said, adopting Shezmou's formal language. Gods tend to care about such things. "You gentle the soul through embalming and guide it on the long journey of judgment to the Afterlife. Surely, anything still living here deserves gentle judgment."
I heard my companions' feet shuffling nervously behind me. I'm sure they thought me mad, talking to pillars.
"Surely you raged in your stone heart, standing here witnessing the rise of the vampire dynasty for millennia, watching a noble race who worshipped you turn predator and turn your godly figures into crass commercial mockeries high above us.
"O mighty Anubis," I continued, "haven't the cuffs of precious gold around your ankles and wrists and mighty shoulders been chains to keep justice from being done to thousands of loyal Egyptians who've lived the lives of beasts and cattle for centuries?"
I felt the silver familiar sliding back around my brow and growing heavy, much heavier than a Wonder Woman coronet. More like a uraeus on an ass-kicking Egyptian headdress. It was almost too heavy for my neck, but I kept my head held high and sympathized with the longest-reigning queens of England, Victoria and Elizabeth II, for doing this in their eighties.
A figure silently stepped to my right side. I didn't dare turn my burdened head, but out of the corner of my eye the shape was about the height of my earlier silver-arrow shooter.
The blackness I sensed told me it was Ric, and his left iris was still a naked silver from my Resurrection Kiss. Maybe together we still had some resurrection magic. Ancient mythologies shared the same roots, after all.
"O mighty Anubis, I, Delilah, call on you to become my Samson who is Hercules who is the sun god Ra, and to bring this perverted temple down!
"I call on you to sweep all the deserving Egyptian souls in it into the great river on the journey to a long-withheld Afterlife. And I join my freeing silver to your eternal gold so that all foreign human souls-"
It was like dealing with a demon, I sensed you had to say it just right with a god or your soul would wing off to the wrong party.
"-and-" I was about to say "canine," but those oddball attack hyenas might still be around to confuse things since they were a muddled breed and gender already "-so that all foreign human and lupine souls may return to the Land of the Living for their natural, or supernatural, spans."
I almost said "Amen," but bit my tongue.
My hand reached out to meet Ric's. Then I just wished with all my freaking might on Shezmou's double stars.
First came the distant thunder-like being under a major city subway system. Then a shrill whine whispered through the forest of pillars. I felt cold and Ric's hand became ice. All the gold on Anubis's ebony form glowed and then paled to silver.
I heard a roaring rush of water. The stones under my feet began pulsing. Water. Where would water rush?
Dropping Ric's hand, I turned so fast I felt my silver headdress falling, then looping around my shoulders, light as air.
I turned back to the pit. The edges were crumbling and the people in the caves were sinking, but like feathers wafting down.
What had I done? I raced to the pit edge. A flash flood of silvery clear water was rushing through, rising higher, sweeping everything and everyone away.
The pit edges contracted, like a healing stone scar, sealing everything in, mummies and bodies and souls.
"Quicksilver!" What had I done?
I had no time to bewail anything more.
Shezmou grabbed one of my arms, Ric the other. They lifted me off my feet and hustled me into the now quivering pillars.
"Wait for me!" I heard Bez huffing and his quick running steps behind us. But no pattering Quicksilver claws.
The pillars were grinding now, toppling behind us like dominoes. A gray fog of black stone-dust enveloped everything and I had to shut my eyes. How could Ric and Shezmou keep running, except one of them was a god?
Then everything went silent.
RIC'S HAND WAS still squeezing my right arm but my left was free. I opened my gritty eyes to see a glint of sliver. The familiar had morphed into a Wonder Woman coronet-shaped wrist cuff. I blinked at Ric's camouflaged face. The black streaks were now dusty gray.
He touched my bare forehead. "You lost your crown. What we saw down there and what you did were amazing."
I looked around. Dim. Low-ceilinged. Abandoned except for some hulking bulls. No. SUVs.
"We're in the Karnak parking garage," I said. Croaked.
Ric nodded.
"Just us?"
Ric nodded.
"Quicksilver?"
He looked away.
"Shez and Bez?"
He looked back and shrugged.
My eyes were adapting to the low-level light. Three forlorn figures were leaning like dazed winos against a parked Jeep.
"And them?"
"Tourists with amnesia. I've called Kennedy Malloy to fetch them. We need to be long gone. Fast."
I got it. My plan had worked. For a few freaking minutes, I'd been a goddess, or at least a femme fatale.
Now I was... just so damn sorry I'd failed to save another dog. I shook off Ric's supporting hand. I could stand on my own, dammit. I always had.
"I'll probably bruise," I grumbled. "I could get a restraining order on you for that."
He grinned at me. "Hey, Del. We're alive and so are the tourists. Your invocation worked. So maybe that 'lupine' soul is still out there working his way home."
"Or only half of him. I should have also said 'canine' back there, but hyenas are such a confusing breed."
I was being such an ungrateful bitch. It was better than the alternative, and I figured Ric knew that.