Page 34 of Her Dark Powers

“But surely he’d have found his way back to me anyway like you all did, right?”

“Ptah has never been one of us,” Wesley replied.

“He doesn’t reincarnate?” Tory asked, looking confused.

Wesley shook his head. “Not that we know of. He was supposed to. He was blessed by the Ennead like the rest of us, and he was supposed to be reborn each time, but he disappeared. Vanished. We spent centuries searching for him, but there was never any trace. You even searched Amenti.”

“Amenti?”

“The underworld. Gods can pass into the underworld if they pay the gates’ price. You didn’t stay long, you are always at risk down there, so you moved as quietly and as quickly as possible, but there was no sign of him, and no one you met had seen him for thousands of years.”

“So something happened to him? Maybe he was killed...”

“Gods can’t be killed. I mean, there was your knife, but Ptah was incredibly powerful, and you have to remember, that knife was created only to kill you if we couldn’t subdue you after your... um... rampage.”

“So if it’s unlikely he was killed permanently, and he was supposed to reincarnate with us, then where is he? I got the feeling he still wanted... to be with me,” she said, a flush of pink colouring her cheeks.

“We don’t know,” I answered. “That trap was the first we’d heard anything about him in thousands of years, and they had proof—jewellery that West had given him.”

She looked over at West. “You gave my husband jewellery? Why? Oh...” Her eyes widened and dropped. “Were you and him... like Zayn and Jasper?”

It was what we needed to break the tension, and the rest of us fell about laughing as West turned a deep shade of tomato red. He turned to glare at us before he turned back to Tory.

“No, we weren’t like that. We were like brothers. I would do anything for him, and him for me. There was a relationship of deep respect and admiration between us.” He glared back at Jack who seemed to have developed the hiccups.

“Oh, I see. Sorry,” Tory murmured, but she couldn’t keep the grin off her face as she watched us all giggle. “I just... assumed...”

“Mmm,” West hummed.

“Anyway...” Jasper said, a grin still plastered on his face. “Yeah, we hadn’t heard anything for so long, and it was like all our hopes returned at once. It made us more reckless, and we rushed in. This revelation of yours, that you’ve somehow been in contact with him... We need to keep calm and not go rushing off half-cocked like last time.”

“To be fair, I have no idea where we’d go rushing off to,” Tory admitted. “I have no idea where we were, all I remember is the desert and the hills or maybe mountains in the background. But if we’ve heard nothing for so long, how was he able to contact me? And where is he? What’s stopping him from finding me? He said I had to find him, had to release him...” She trailed off and stood up.

I watched her wander over to the window and stare out into the garden. A quiet miaow came from the ground, and I saw Kitty Cat winding around her ankles. She reached down and picked him up. He snuggled down in her arms, and she stroked him as she stared out into the grey morning. We all fell quiet, not really knowing what to say next. West looked like he was about to say something when she suddenly turned, her dark eyes falling on Jasper.

“You told me the ritual Coulton did on that sarcophagus... It’s only known to priests of Apophis, yes?”

Jasper nodded. “Yeah, pretty sure. It’s dark magic the rest of us don’t usually mess with. Why?”

“Coulton told me that there was no point in just killing and burying me, because I’d just come back to life in another body. Even burying me alive wouldn’t trap me inside, hence the sarcophagus. When I saw Ptah in my dreams, he said he could finally reach me... I was inside the sarcophagus when he managed it...”

“Where’s your mind running to, beautiful one?” I asked, intrigued but not following.

“Wesley, you once told me something about sympathetic magic, like with the eyes on that jar Onuris enchanted... I know this sounds a bit far-fetched, but what if the same thing happened with me and Ptah? What if Ptah is trapped inside one of those sarcophagi, and he could only reach me when I was trapped inside one as well? It would explain why he never reincarnated, and if the cult of Apophis has been hiding him this whole time, it would also explain how they had evidence of his existence...”

My mouth dropped open, and I looked at Jasper, whose dumbfounded expression would be laughable if I hadn’t been feeling the same way.

Tory looked around at us. “Am I way off? I mean, I don’t know as much as you guys yet, but it just seemed... plausible. Coulton said it would stop me from reincarnating in a different body and prevent me from dying, so what if they did the same thing to Ptah?”

Jasper swung his eyes slowly around to mine. “How in all the world did I miss that?”

I grinned. “I don’t know, but I guess that’s why she’s the goddess and we’re the lowly priests.”

Jasper looked back at her. “I think you might have something there, Tory. I don’t know how I missed it, but I think you’ve hit it right on. Of course, there may be one way of telling... Can you describe Ptah? How did he look in your dreams? If you have no concrete memories of him yet, then you’ll only know him from that dream.”

She thought for a moment. “He was tall, taller than West, but with a slimmer build. Strong though. Dark skin, almost completely black, but there were blue and green lights shining across it, like coloured highlights. That sounds crazy, but his skin was a very, very dark blue green, so dark it was almost black. His hair was short, but curly and black, and he had a beard that he braided...”

I smiled at her, warmth spreading through my body at the burgeoning hope that maybe, just maybe we could find him again. I looked around the table and saw the expressions on the faces of the other priests—the hope that they hardly dared believe in and the fear that it would lead to another slaughter.

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