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"Cleopatra!"
He lunged for her.
She hurled the ring at him, its contents rising in a yellow cloud.
He cried out and threw himself against the opposite wall. When he looked up, he glimpsed her through the veil of yellow powder drifting to the floor; she disappeared around the nearest doorway, bound for the entrance to the house.
He went after her.
In the great drawing room, he caught sight of her as she ran. Impossible to tell what it was she was running towards, for there was no doorway in her path.
"Cleopatra!" he cried.
And she turned in place, met his eyes.
"Set me free, Ramses!" she cried. "You raised me from death with no thought of what I would become. And now I am doomed. There is only one way you can repay me. Set me free!"
*
Seeing that her words had frozen him in place, she turned and ran. He watched, helpless, as she hurled herself through the nearest window. Behind her, the glass fell in great shards between billowing drapes.
If she continued in that direction, the others would not catch her. Julie and Aktamu were on the far side of the property, Julie guarding the spellbound Aktamu, who was guiding the hounds.
Footsteps behind him. Ramses turned. In both arms, Enamon carried the seemingly lifeless body of Saqnos. It was not the dogs who had finally subdued the prime minister, Ramses was sure, but the potion from Enamon's dagger, an injection that would only last for several hours before another had to be given. The great gashes and wounds the dogs had left on his face and hands had already begun to heal.
"I must bring him to the queen before he wakes," Enamon said.
"And so if I pursue her, I do so alone. Is this what you mean to say?"
Without a word, Enamon disappeared through the doorway behind him, his steps confident, as if Saqnos weighed nothing at all.
Ramses stood motionless, staring at the broken window.
How quickly the fight had left him at the first sight of her.
He had not been prepared for her perfect likeness to his lost love. He had not been prepared for her agony and her despair.
Her final plea rent his soul even now.
Who was he to deny this request to live out her days as she saw fit before madness claimed her? Could he find her then? Could he use Sibyl's connection to do it? Would he have the courage and the strength to subdue her amidst her madness, to wall her off in darkness for all time, just as Saqnos had threatened, but for her own good? Or could he release her to the world once and for all?
If there was no peace for her, would there ever be peace for him?
38
They came trotting across the lawn in a single pack. At first they appeared to Julie as a patch of deeper darkness that blotted out the lights of the house behind. Then their individual shapes became visible.
Julie stepped from the car where the silent Aktamu lay half comatose on the black leather seat.
The mission had been completed, certainly, for why else would Aktamu guide these dogs back here to their den?
Julie fell into step behind them from a safe distance, even though there was no chance they would turn on her. Aktamu still held these animals in thrall. Somehow, through the angel blossom, he controlled them, and he could see the world through their eyes. A remarkable thing, for there were fifteen of them in all.
On the long drive to Havilland Park, Julie had deluged Aktamu with questions as to this mystery, as to how he meant to turn Saqnos's hounds against Saqnos through a spell tha
t would render Aktamu himself unable to hear or speak. But Aktamu had no words with which to explain it to her, the workings of the angel blossom, and how he meant to unite somehow with fifteen distinct creatures and guide them through a mystic link. He had assured her repeatedly that he would do it, that once he dropped the meat, heavily laced with the pollen of the angel blossom, through the grating of the pit that held these dogs, they would be his to command.
Julie found it fascinating, marvelous, yet another revelation in the realm of revelations which she now shared with these powerful immortals--a realm so vastly different from her old world that at times she could not gain any perspective on it, no matter how much she tried. She was no longer Julie Stratford, really, and she knew it, and her fragile ties to the London of 1914 were dying most surely with every day.
