Read Online The Honey Mummy (Folley & Mallory Adventure Book 3) by E. Catherine Tobler - Free Book Online

pressed for release. She drew in a deep breath in an attempt to calm the jackal, but it did not.
    The hotel, overtaken by the British after their occupation of the city seven years prior, had been outfitted with a system of bell pulls and Eleanor took advantage of hers, calling to have tea sent up, despite the early hour. She couldn’t fathom how she would approach the day ahead without it. She and Cleo were to meet and compare their sketches of the sarcophagi, to see if they might determine who occupied them prior to George Pettigrew’s party.
    But before that…
    Eleanor looked at the small wood box that sat on the bureau. The box was as lovely as the rings within, carefully crafted and hinged with brass, though not remotely connected to the rings prior to having been brought to auction. The rings, much like the Mistral archive in Paris, were without context and Eleanor tried to push this worry to the side. Context might yet come, given the markings upon them, or even the tiny glass and jasper scarab. If she could trace similar artwork to other regions…
    She opened the box to gaze upon the rings, a little nauseated as she beheld them. It was only the memory of sliding Anubis’s rings onto her fingers, she told herself. The memory of having time turn upside down and blood run through her hands. Nothing like that was happening here and now; she remained firmly within her hotel room. She could not quite believe she was faced once again with four ancient rings; had not been able to explain to Mallory what they meant to her—though suspected he knew without a word between them, probably swallowing all of the fuss he actually wanted to make as she acquired them. But how could she let them go? She could not, and he had known as well as she.
    Now, she pressed her finger to the corroded iron ring and wondered that it was here; so very like the ring that had been left in the Paris archive for her. Exactly like it, were she being honest.
    There came a soft knock at the door, and Eleanor crossed to allow the server entry. But as she opened the door, looking forward to the ritual that tea would bring with it—cups, warm tea, and careful pouring that would distance her mind from the whine of the jackal who wanted to run, it was not a server who stood in the hallway, but the dark god Anubis, holding a tea tray set for two. In this moment, he was as the Egyptians had drawn him: the body of a man, the head of a jackal. Both were pitch black, as if he had stepped from a pool of Indian ink.
    Eleanor stepped back in alarm, believing she had finally fallen into a solid asleep while looking at the rings, because Anubis did not deliver tea in the small hours of the morning. But as it had been before, it was now; Anubis strode past her on bare feet and the warmth of him rushed over her, a living and breathing body, absolutely here and present. He was fetid and foul like the earth full of all the dead that had ever been, and she closed the door behind him, lest someone else smell him, though a glance at the hallway proved it empty.
    She had last seen Anubis in Paris, in her very rooms where they had reached an accord as to her continued association with him.
I am not your instrument
, she had told him,
no matter that I carry a jackal within me. I go of my own accord or not at all.
    I would have it so,
he had replied, and Eleanor meant to hold him to that now.
    Anubis placed the tea tray at the foot of the bed and turned to look at Eleanor with his jet eyes. He was clad in a linen
shendyt
, pleated beneath a belt of hammered gold. The linen draped him from waist to knees, leaving the vast expanse of his belly bare. Gold curled up his arms and draped his neck, wide necklaces of gold and lapis echoing the curve and splash of the Nile at sunset. His rings were in their proper places upon his fingers; Eleanor’s attention lingered on them overly long.
    Daughter
.
    She had only ever known him to be calm; even when he had taken the Irvings in hand