and plunged her hand down under his leather belt to the root of his sex.
He moaned against her. She felt him gathering up her skirts. Then suddenly his hand stopped. His whole body stiffened. Awkwardly she turned her head; he was staring down at her naked leg, her foot.
He was staring at the great strip of bloody bone exposed in her leg, at the fan of bones in her foot.
"Jesus Christ!" he whispered. He drew back from her against the wall. "Jesus Christ!"
A low growl of rage and hurt broke from her. "Take your eyes off me!" she screamed in Latin. "Turn your eyes away from me! You will not look at me in disgust."
She sobbed as she grabbed his head with both hands and banged it against the stone wall. "You will die for this!" she spit at him. And then the twist, the simple little twist. And he was dead, too.
That was all that was required, and now there was blessed silence and his body lying there, like the body of the other, with the money showing under his sagging coat.
Her wounds could not kill her. The blast of heat from the one called Henry had not killed her; the blast which made the horrible, unbearable noise. But all it took to kill them was this.
She looked out of the opening of the shaft, down over the dark ocher sands towards the soft lights of the Mena House. Again, she heard the music, so sweet, drifting on the cool air.
Always cool at night, the desert. And almost dark, wasn't it? Tiny stars above in the azure sky. She felt a strange moment of peace. Nice to walk alone, away from them in the desert.
But Lord Rutherford. The medicine. Almost dark.
She bent down now, took the American's money. She thought of the beautiful yellow motor car. Ah, that would take her back to where she'd come from very swiftly. And now it was hers all alone.
Suddenly she was laughing, thrilled by the prospect. She rushed down the side of the pyramid, dropping easily from one stone block to the one below it; so much strength now, and then she ran towards the car.
Simple. Press the electric starter button. Then push the "gas pedal." At once it began to roar. Then forward on the stick, as she had seen him do it, as she depressed the other pedal, and miracle of miracles, she was racing forward, giving a mad turn to the wheel.
She drove in a great circle before the Mena House. A few terrified Arabs scurried out of her path. She hit the throbbing "horn," as he had called it. It frightened their camels.
Then she made for the road, pulling the stick back again to make it go faster, then shoving it forwards, just as she had seen him do.
When she came to the metal pathway, she stopped. She clutched the wheel, trembling. But no sound came from the great empty reaches of the desert to right and left. And ahead lay the lights of Cairo, such a sweet spectacle under the paling, star-filled sky.
" 'Celeste Aida!' " she sang as she started up and raced forward once more.
*
"You asked for our help," Julie said. "You asked for our forgiveness. Now I want you to listen to me."
"Yes, I want to," Ramses said in a heartfelt voice, but he was puzzled. "Julie, it is she ... beyond question."
"The body, yes," Julie responded. "It was hers, without doubt. But the being who lives now? No. It is not the same woman you once loved. That woman, wherever she is, has no consciousness now of what is happening to this body."
"Julie, she knew me! She recognized me!"
"Ramses, the brain in that body knew you. But think about what you are saying. Think about the implications. The implications are everything, Ramses. Our intellects--our souls, if you will--they don't reside in the flesh, slumbering for centuries as our bodies rot. Either they go on to higher realms or they cease to exist altogether. The Cleopatra you loved ceased to exist in that body the day it died."
He stared at her, trying to grasp this.
"Sire, I think there is wisdom here," Samir said. But he too was confused. "The Earl says that she knows who she is."
"She knows who she is supposed to be," Julie said. "The cells! They are there, revitalized, and possibly some memory is encoded within them. But this thing is a monstrous twin of your lost love. How can it be more than that?"
"This could be true," Samir murmured. "If you do what the Earl suggests--if you give her more of the drug, you may only be revitalizing a ... a demon."
"This is beyond my understanding!" Ramses confessed. "It is Cleopatra!"
Julie shook her head. "Ramses, my father has been dead no more than two months. There was no autopsy performed on his remains. The only embalming done upon him was the age-old miracle of the Egyptian heat and desert dryness. He lies, intact, in a crypt here in Egypt. But do you think I'd take this elixir, if I had it in my hands, and raise him from the dead?"