These are gods who were prayed to, worshipped, feared. Gods who had altars and temples, gods who had priesthoods, gods whose names were whispered and revered and remembered.
Nothing is truly eternal. No one remembers them now.
Do they have an afterlife?
I SPRINT THROUGH THE OPEN DESERT, CLOUDS of dust the jet kicked up billowing behind me. The arid wind clears my sinuses, clears my fuzzy head, fills and focuses me. Ry runs, too, but I’m faster than him and I don’t wait. I can’t.
I make it to the stone steps that lead down to my house, then curse. Ry won’t be able to see them. I turn back but he’s still a hundred yards away, his uneven gait slowing him.
Floods! I rip off my long-sleeved pajama shirt, glad I wore a sports bra, and leave the shirt half in and half out of the entryway. Maybe the half that mysteriously disappears will clue Ry in to my mother’s magical barrier. It’s the best I can do.
I trip down the stone steps and burst through the front door into my empty, empty family room. “Mom!” I scream. “Mom! Dad!” I run through the room, down the hall into the old stone section toward her bedroom.
Someone steps out of the supply room into the hall and I slam into them, falling back. “Nephthys?” If she’s here, my mom’s probably still okay! I made it in time!
She looks shocked to see me. “Child! What are you doing here?”
“My mom’s in trouble! Anubis and Hathor are going to try to kill her!”
Her face, so like my mother’s—but softer, like she’s always a bit out of focus—goes white. “Oh, no.”
“Where is she? We need to tell her.”
“Hathor—I didn’t know—she went down into the tombs. With Isis.”
“No!” I turn back to the other end of the hall, to the door I spent so many years avoiding. The stairs seem to stretch into infinity, into the very bowels of the earth, and I nearly throw myself down them to go faster. The tombs and paintings are a blur as I run, shouting my mother’s name.
Finally, breathless with terror and surrounded only by the silent dead, I burst through into the main chamber, my father’s throne room. His chair is there, with statue-still Ammit in front of it.
Otherwise it’s totally empty.
“MOM!” I scream. I must have missed them. The tombs—one of the tombs—there are so many. I spin around to see Nephthys behind me in the entry.
“I didn’t see them! Did you?”
She cocks her head to the side, her black eyes calm, collected, clearer than I’ve ever seen them. It hits me that, in all my life, I’ve never seen her keep eye contact until now.
“What am I going to do with you?” she asks.
I move to run back into the hall, but she blocks me. I shake my head, desperate. She doesn’t understand how little time we have. “What are you—oh.” My whole body wilts, mirroring my soul. “Not Hathor,” I whisper.
She taps her chin thoughtfully, her eyes never leaving me.
“Why?” My voice is strangled, choked by my failure to figure it out the right way. My failure to protect my mother like she would have protected me.
“You have such spirit, such determination to create your own self free of Isis. Everyone should have that. I should have that. I’ve spent millennia atoning for the sin of wanting more than I was given, more than a powerless, contemptible husband who never loved me, who wouldn’t even stoop to giving me a child. Wanting more for my son, who has as much birthright as Isis’s. We are all forgotten gods, but I will claim what should always have been mine. Chaos created an opening after all this time, and I will end my sister and take her place. I will become Isis.”
“She loves you!”
“Don’t be naive. Isis loves nothing but her own greatness. This whole world is merely her mirror, and if it doesn’t reflect back her own distorted view of her magnificence, she breaks it until it does.”
I stand straighter. “She loves me.”
My aunt waves dismissively. “You are a toy. And I am done here.”
“I don’t understand!” I have to keep her here, talking. If my mother were already dead, Nephthys wouldn’t have sent me down here. There’s still time. “Why did you need Anubis?”
She finally looks away, down the corridor behind her at something I can’t see. “Cursing Isis with everything I had wasn’t enough.” All those times Mom sounded so tired—and talked about how Nephthys was helping her. I feel sick. It should have been me here. I would have helped. I would have known.
That’s not true. I wouldn’t have cared enough to see. But now I do.
Nephthys nods toward me, still looking at something else. “We needed the exact venom to kill a god, which Isis had very kindly recorded. Not just any snake. Apep.”
“You can’t,” I whisper, beg.
“I can.” She looks back at me and smiles, but her smile has none of the warmth my mom’s has. “Good-bye, child.”
She turns, and I jump forward to tackle her but another body, lean with cruel sinew and reeking of desiccation, blocks me.
“Your mother is about to deliver her very last mewling whelp,” Anubis says. “And then my mother will deliver them both to the underworld.”
I scream and claw at his face, gouging long trails of crimson before he throws me to the ground. He says a word I don’t know, and it echoes through me and around the room like the sharp crack of thunder from dry heat lightning.
Something moves behind me.
“Meet the lovely demon Ammit.” His teeth cut a vicious smile. “She doesn’t much care for this world, but I’ve woken her especially for you. Now I’ve got some tombs to prepare.”
I stand, trembling, too scared to turn around. With a snarling laugh Anubis walks away, calling over his shoulder, “Try not to upset her stomach.”
I slowly spin to find myself staring at each of Ammit’s sharp, yellowed crocodile teeth, her mouth a gaping black void. Her breath washes over me, and it smells like blood and judgment and death.
Ammit snaps her long, scaled, gray-green mouth shut, turning her head to the side and fixing one huge slit-pupiled yellow eye on my chest directly over my heart. I wish I were wearing a shirt. I wish I were wearing armor.
“Don’t eat it don’t eat it don’t eat it.” I shut my eyes and think of all the times I played around her legs as a child, the picnics I had with my back resting against her strong hippo feet, the desert flowers I’d bring to decorate her with. Shouldn’t she know me?
A voice as old and as hungry as time rings through my head. That is no longer your heart. I devour untrue hearts.
I squeeze my closed eyes so tightly it hurts. My heart is stone. My heart is the desert. My heart is a horizon stretching on forever, sand and sky and empty beautiful perfection.
An untrue heart, she declares, and I feel the warm, sticky breath of death and I never wanted to die and it will hurt and without my heart I can’t be complete in the underworld no matter what my dad does. There will be no afterlife for me.
“Isadora!” Ry’s voice bounces off the walls, and my heart leaps because he called my name. He’s here, and he won’t find this room in the labyrinth of tombs so he’ll be safe, and he can help my mother after I’m dead. I’m flush with relief and holding on to my name as Orion says it, holding on to the bright, steady hope my stars-made-human fills me with.
There is your truth. Her laughter—part lion’s growl, part hippo’s bellow, part crocodile’s hiss—tumbles through my head. I open my eyes, shocked, and she sits down on her hippo haunches.
“You aren’t going to eat me?”
She yawns, and a new view of the teeth that nearly ripped away both my life and afterlife sends me scurrying out of the room and right into Ry’s arms.
“Isadora! In there?” He looks toward the throne room.
“NO! She’ll eat your—” I pause, then roll my eyes. “You’d probably be fine. My mom’s not here. Back upstairs!”
I run down the winding corridor and take the stairs three at a time. “Watch out for Anubis and Nephthys!”
“I thought Hathor.” He gasps from behind me as we come out to the main hallway.
“No! Just—black hair, not pregnant, secretly evil.”
“Got it!”
A growl sounds from the stairs behind. I turn to see Anubis charging up the steps after us. He must have been in one of the side tombs. Ry slams the door shut and braces himself against it, jamming one of his legs against the wall at an angle.
“Go! I’ve got this!”
“Don’t let him touch you! Run if he gets out!” My feet pound on the rug and I slam my shoulder into my mom’s heavy wooden door, exploding into her bedroom.
I take it all in with a glance. My father, calmly at my mother’s bedside, holding her hand. My mother, in bed, her raised knees contoured under a white sheet, her face sweaty and flushed. And Nephthys, bending over a covered woven basket in the corner.
Our eyes meet. Hers flash with the malice of millennia. She snatches the basket and rips off the lid, jerking the basket toward my mom and flinging the long golden demon snake through the air.
“No!” I scream, launching myself in front of the bed, hands raised.
The snake, coiled body twisting and fangs wide, comes down.
On my wrist.
19
Here’s the thing about the ancient Egyptians: they were smart. They had a lot of things figured out ages before anyone around them. They built monuments that still stand, that still elicit wonder from all who behold them. Their art continues to fascinate generations later. Their religion was complex and evolved with them.
But sometimes they were so caught up in the business of studying and preparing for the afterlife, they failed to live. Death loomed so heavily in their minds that they stopped being able to see anything but this final mystery, this final aspect of life they couldn’t understand, couldn’t control.
The fear of death can grow so large we let it keep us from living.
Birth and rebirth.
Chaos and order.
Life and death.
Balance.
TIME SLIPS FROM ITS STEADY, ETERNAL STREAM, slowing down like the whoosh, whoosh, whoosh of my heart.
A snake so venomous it can kill a god has its jaws wrapped around my wrist. Why doesn’t it hurt? It really should hurt.
Which is when I realize that its fangs aren’t piercing my skin—one fang is jammed into the jade scarab beetle on my bracelet, stuck there, the broad gold of the bracelet keeping the free fang from my skin. I’m not going to die! I’m not going to die!
The snake writhes, its coiled and scaled body whipping through the air as it tries to free its fang.
“Isadora!” my mother screams. Oh, right. Get the snake off the wrist. I shake my arm wildly around, and the snake loses its grip, sailing through the air and landing with a thud on the floor at the foot of the bed.
It rises, hissing, mouth open impossibly wide. It seems to grow even as I watch, uncoiling and stretching until I’m sure it will grow past the entire room and swallow us all. I have no way to fight this, no way to protect my mother. I reach out my hand and it finds hers.
My father slams his staff onto the snake’s tail. It freezes, drying into dust before my eyes, and then it’s gone.
Nephthys sinks to her knees, eyes glued to the place where the demon snake no longer exists. “No,” she whispers, trembling. “No.” She doesn’t look up, doesn’t look at any of us.
Ry slides in, glancing over his shoulder. “Anubis is out! I couldn’t hold the door anymore so I ran.”
He turns to see the state of the room. Nephthys cowering in the corner. My father with his black skin and mummy wrappings, standing impossibly tall, his staff rippling with power. And my mother in a decidedly awkward position on the bed.
“I’ll just wait in the other corner, then.” Ry sidles along the wall, staring at the floor.
“Isadora? Nephthys? What is going on?” Isis’s voice is strained, her face beaded with sweat. She looks awful, dark shadows under her eyes, her skin sallow beneath its normally rich color. Maybe Nephthys did a better job with the curses than she thought.
There’s a pendant around my mom’s neck. “Did Nephthys make that for you?” I ask. She nods, and I pull it off and throw it across the room. Grabbing one of the true protection amulets from my pocket, I slip it over her head, then, hesitating, I lean over and brush a kiss across her forehead like she used to do for me when I didn’t feel well.
She takes a deep breath, and her eyes sharpen as if the room has come back into focus, though her color is still way off. “Nephthys,” she says, no anger in her voice as she looks at her sister sobbing quietly in the corner. “Dear sister. I am sorry.”
“It was her,” I say. “All along. The dreams—everything—it’s always been her. She’s the black poison that’s been haunting us, threatening to destroy everything!”
“Little Heart.” She smiles at me, and the sun blossoms in my chest. “Thank you. I am so glad you’re here.”
“What about her?” I glare at my aunt. “What are you going to do to her?”
“Nothing.”
My jaw drops. “But—she—Mom, she tried to kill you! She tried to kill me, too!”
I tighten my fists. Nephthys deserves to die. No one as twisted and bitter as she is should have eternal life. It’s a waste, and it’s not fair.
For the briefest second I see black curling and pressing against the edge of my vision, but when I blink it’s gone. My rage dies like a smothered fire. I won’t feed that blackness. I wouldn’t let it have my mother’s soul; I won’t let it have mine, either.