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She looked up and held each of our gazes in turn. When she reached Jack and me, she blinked. “Is this true?”
“That you made us swear not to tell you anything about Ptah? Yes,” I answered as Jack shifted uncomfortably next to me.
She nodded slowly, still trying to process, then her eyes flashed back to mine. “Ptah? That’s his name?”
“The ancient Egyptian god of architecture, artisans, and craftsmen,” Wesley said quietly. “He was supposed to be one of the Great Ennead, but Ra took his place when he begged to be allowed to remain on Earth with you.”
Tory looked down at West, who was still on his knees. “Get up,” she ordered.
West did, standing immediately. To my own and, by the looks of it, his complete surprise, she wrapped her arms around his waist, pulling him close. He wrapped his arms around her, wearing a confused look on his face that normally would have made me laugh if it wasn’t for the situation.
“I’m sorry I doubted you,” she murmured. “It’s just...”
“Trust has to be earned, and I haven’t done a good job of that,” West answered. He looked down at her with an expression that made my heart ache. It had been so long since I had seen him like this, open and vulnerable. Despite the potential dangers of Apophis planning something, my heart sang at the feeling that we were nearly there, nearly complete. We were a pride again, and that would make us stronger in the long run.
Tory smiled up at him, even as he let go and took his seat once again. She sat down too, looking around at us all. “Well, I don’t know how to react to this... If I told you not to tell me about him, there must have been a good reason. That being said, he came to me, so I think that’s a good indication I should release you from your promises. Tell me about him, but before that, tell me why I made you promise to keep his existence secret from me.”
I looked over at West, who simply gave me a short nod. I could feel the tension around the table. “During our last lifetime, another group hunted us down. We thought it was a terrorist group at first, targeting West for his earlier involvement before he remembered who he was.”
Tory looked over at West in shock. “You were a terrorist?”
He shook his head. “No, I was involved in a military group that was supposed to be fighting for the good of its people. Over the years I was there, it got more corrupt and more ideological. Eventually, I left. I was already having dreams about you, and I knew there was something calling to me and that I didn’t belong where I was. The problem was, it wasn’t an easy group to leave. Membership was for life. I may have given away certain information to foreign intelligence that stopped several terrorist attacks, and the intelligence service then recruited me and I got pulled into working for them.”
“I was already working for them, and so was Jack, though on different sides of the pond.” I grinned over at Jack. “We finally met you, and you got your memories back. You were still quite young, and we helped bring them about a lot faster. It wasn’t ideal. You were barely eighteen, and it was overwhelming, even more than this time. This is why West insisted you regain them at a normal rate, because rushing you had been damaging last time, which is why we held back a lot.”
Tory looked over at West. “Was it that damaging?”
He nodded. “You remembered everything almost instantly, but it... it kind of wiped away who you had been before. You became who you had been, and the person you were pretty much got erased. You were so confident of your power that you were reckless, and we were too. We thought that knowing everything straightaway made you stronger, but it didn’t, and that was our downfall.”
“It’s our theory that the group that came after us was actually Golden Dawn under a different name, or if it wasn’t them, then another group that Apophis was influencing.”
“Why do you say that?” Tory asked.
“On the ship, I recognised Coulton,” Jasper shared. “Not him exactly, but there was a likeness. I think his father may have been the group leader that came after us last time, or his uncle, whatever. Maybe the priesthood runs in the family, where each son is raised to serve Apophis, taught the secret rituals, then sent after his enemies.”
Tory shivered. “So Coulton’s father possibly came after us last time. What does that have to do with Ptah?”
“They used him as bait,” West murmured quietly. I looked over at him. He was staring down at the table, his eyes vacant. I felt a rush of sympathy for him. Keeping all this from Tory meant he hadn’t had to think about it, and I knew it had hurt him as well.
“Bait? Why? Did they find him first?” Tory inquired, looking over at me when West didn’t answer.
I nodded. “In a manner of speaking. They told us they had him and showed us certain... evidence. As West said before, we were reckless, all of us, confident in your newfound power and eager to get on with completing our pride. We thought we could take on anyone.”
“I take it we couldn’t?” she asked slowly.
I shook my head. “We were lured to a facility in Libya. We thought we had infiltrated it successfully, but it was a trap.”
“They slaughtered us all,” Jack said, his normally cheerful face deadly serious. I felt a cold shiver pass over me as memories flooded back—the sand, the blood, the screams.
Tory looked down, and I could almost see it playing out in her eyes. Memories returned as her face lost its colour, and she gripped the table. “They killed you all in front of me,” she ground out. Tears filled her eyes, and she brushed them angrily away. She looked over at West. He met her gaze, and there was something on his face I couldn’t quite read. “Not you though...”
He shook his head. “No, not me.”
She watched him a moment longer, but he didn’t give anything away. He just watched her as though waiting for her to say something. She shook her head and looked back at me.
“Did they kill Ptah too? I don’t remember him being there, but I can’t see it all yet.”
I shook my head. “We never saw him, never knew if he was there or not. Before you both died, you told West that if we came back to never tell you about Ptah, that the drive to find him had driven us straight into their hands. You believed it was safer if you didn’t know, and then you couldn’t be lured into another trap by him.”
