The Passion of Cleopatra (Ramses the Damned 2)

They seemed to work as a single mass, these people.

She was yanked to her feet. Her wrists were bound behind her. A heavy ring snapped closed around her neck. They pushed her out of the cell and into the stone hallway. With the chains, they dragged her up a set of stone steps.

When her bare feet touched the dirt outside, it at first seemed a cold, soft relief. Then she heard the dogs once more, so much louder than before.

A star-filled sky above, but when she tried to look back, the chain attached to the metal collar around her neck was pulled tight. She stumbled forward several steps before finding her balance. Ahead, a tall building rose out of the dark, rolling landscape. Isolated amidst the shadowed hills. The closer they came to it, the more fearsome the baying of these hounds became.

The steel door to the building's first floor was thrown open.

She was shoved through. Empty, this room. Empty with stone walls that made the riot of these fearsome animals all the more loud and overpowering. The sound came through steel bars in one corner of the floor. And when she saw the writhing shadows below, she realized there were many more furious hounds down there than she'd first suspected. So many, their shadows seemed to form an almost-solid mass occasionally pierced by a glint of teeth or a flash of pink gums.

No fear. Show these people no fear. Remember that you are a queen.

They shoved her towards the grate, these immortals. She fell to her knees. The stink of the hounds assaulted her in ceaseless waves. As ceaseless as their hunger, as ceaseless as their strength. She trembled not just from the humiliation but from the stark terror of what might await her should they shove her through.

There were too many of them to subdue. Too many to fight off. And if their hunger was anything like the hunger the elixir had left her with, they would tear into her with abandon. Would they work faster than her body's capacity to heal? Impossible to know this. She still knew so little about her condition, given that her attempt to confront Ramses had ended in this terror.

"Tell me your name." Her captor was forced to shout above the barking dogs.

Again she refused. He shoved her face against the bars. For the first time she saw how little space there was between the grate and the heads of these writhing hounds. A jaw snapped shut only inches from her nose.

"Cleopatra!" she screamed. "I am Cleopatra the Seventh. The last queen of Egypt."

But another string of words formed itself in her mind. Help me, Sibyl Parker. Please. Help me.

At last, he pulled her head away from the grate.

"And so it is true," her captor said. "It is as I suspected when you showed me your fine features."

To her astonishment, he pulled her to her feet, across the floor, and out the door. Before it shut behind her, she saw the other immortals dropping something down into the grate, which suddenly quieted the hounds below. Food.

Once they were outside, this man stood before her as if he were welcoming her to these vast grounds

for the first time, and with pride. But she was still confined. Two immortals flanked her, holding the chains attached to the ring around her neck and the manacles that bound her wrists against the small of her back.

"I attended many of your triumphal parades in Alexandria," he said. "I was a great admirer of yours. Forgive me for not receiving you as I should. But it was not your acquaintance I expected to make this day. We shall dine together, you and I. I'm sure you are as famished as my dogs."

A pretense, this politeness. Perhaps a quieter form of torture.

But did it matter? He had broken her, and he knew it. He was reveling in it. A monster, this man.

"Clean her up and bring her something to wear. Her dress is in tatters. Hardly fit for a queen."

And then he was striding off into the darkness. For the first time, she saw the main house of this vast estate some distance away. The tall windows glowed against the scabbed and barren tree branches. It was a far-grander place than the one from which she'd been abducted. But in its size, she saw only room for even-greater horrors.

34

Cornwall

Sibyl had stopped screaming by the time Ramses and Bektaten burst into the room.

Now she was curled into a ball amidst tangled covers. Ramses was as distressed by her mewling as he'd been by her piercing cries. Apparently she had suffered some sort of seizure. Her water glass was smashed to the floor next to the bed, and there was a large stain on the front of Julie's dress shirt.

Julie took no time to dab at it; she was too busy trying to embrace Sibyl again.

The cat, who had seemed to be guarding Sibyl earlier, was now perched on the mantel over the fireplace, watching the entire scene with human focus.

Aktamu and Enamon stood on either side of the bed. Did they think Sibyl might fly from it and need to be restrained? How severe had this eruption been?