His knuckles turned white on the steering wheel. “Kid.”
“Yeah?”
“I’m glad we had this talk. Now, if you value your teeth—”
“I’ll shut up.”
“That’s good.” Bes put his foot on the brake. “Because I think we’re here.”
The sun was going down at our backs. Everything in front of us was bathed in red light—the sand, the water of the Nile, the hills on the horizon. Even the fronds of the palm trees looked like they were tinged with blood.
Set would love this place, I thought.
There was no sign of civilization—just a few gray herons flying overhead and an occasional splash in the river: maybe fish or a crocodile. I imagined this part of the Nile hadn’t looked too different in the time of the pharaohs.
“Come on,” Bes said. “Bring your stuff.”
Bes didn’t wait for me. When I caught up to him, he was standing on the riverbank, sifting sand through his fingers.
“It’s not just the light,” I realized. “That stuff is really red.”
Bes nodded. “You know why?”
My mom would have said iron oxide or something like that. She’d had a scientific explanation for everything. But something told me Bes wasn’t looking for that kind of answer.
“Red is the color of evil,” I said. “The desert. Chaos. Destruction.”
Bes dusted off his hands. “This was a bad place to build a village.”
I looked around for any sign of a settlement. The red sand stretched in either direction for about a hundred yards. Thick grass and willow trees bordered the area, but the sand itself was completely barren. The way it glittered and shifted under my feet reminded me of the mounds of dried scarab shells in the Duat, holding back Apophis. I really wished I hadn’t thought of that.
“There’s nothing here,” I said. “No ruins. Nothing.”
“Look again.” Bes pointed to the river. Old dead reeds stuck up here and there over an area the size of a soccer field. Then I realized the reeds weren’t reeds—they were decaying boards and wooden poles, the remains of simple dwellings. I walked to the edge of the water. A few feet out, it was calm and shallow enough that I could make out a line of submerged mud bricks: the foundation of a wall slowly dissolving into silt.
“The whole village sank?”
“It was swallowed,” Bes said. “The Nile is trying to wash away the evil that happened here.”
I shivered. The fang wounds on my shoulder started throbbing again. “If it’s such an evil place, why would Iskandar hide Zia here?”
“Good question,” Bes said. “You want to find the answer, you’ll have to wade out there.”
Part of me wanted to run back to the truck. The last time I’d waded into a river—the Rio Grande in El Paso—it hadn’t gone so well. We’d battled the crocodile god Sobek and barely gotten away with our lives. This was the Nile. Gods and monsters would be much stronger here.
“You’re coming too, aren’t you?” I asked Bes.
The corner of his eye twitched. “Running water’s not good for gods. Loosens our connection to the Duat…”
He must have seen the look of desperation on my face.
“Yeah, okay,” he sighed. “I’m right behind you.”
Before I could chicken out, I p
ut one boot in the river and sank up to my ankle.
“Gross.” I waded out, my feet making sounds like a cow chewing gum.