“Nope. No Tubes in Kansas except for funnel clouds. When were you in London?”

“A couple of years ago when I was still with the FBI. Some very old bodies that needed finding were buried deep.”

“I bet.”

Apparently our new guide didn’t want us dawdling. Bez did several handsprings past, popping upright to bar our way again.

“I am Bez,” he announced again. “I am only a minor god. Some say I was imported from Nubia, a lesser being, but I am an offspring of the Nubian lion-god.”

“Impressive,” Ric said. “One of Hercules’ twelve labors was to defeat the Nemean lion.”

“I can add to that,” I said. “Samson wore a lion skin and was also said to have defeated a fierce lion, but Delilah-”

“-trimmed his mane,” Ric finished with a grin. “Hey, little big guy,” he said to Bez, “you do realize you’re traveling with the mighty Delilah?”

“Ah, no. Thank you for the warning. One would not wish to lose one’s mane to the mighty Delilah.”

Almost ready to giggle despite our surroundings, I pictured myself carrying oversize shears in my duty belt holster, the kind I’d once found at an estate sale, used at newspapers in hot-lead typesetting days to cut across copy paper with one swipe of giant blades. Delilah Street: the Amazon scissors queen.

A few good slashes to curtail Samson’s God-commanded locks had made the biblical Delilah’s reputation. I intended to slash whatever needed it and a lot more than hair.

Bez was dancing on impatient feet again. “One must not idle. We must pass these unmoving pillars to arrive elsewhere.”

Quicksilver was the first to follow Ric’s sinuous path forward. In several minutes we’d woven between a couple blocks’ worth of lavishly decorated pillars. I was gaining new respect for Ric’s inbred desert survival skills. He must have been hard to capture. Only being outnumbered by hordes of Egyptian vampires probably had accomplished it.

Plus, he’d penetrated the heart of their evil empire, if you hankered to use old movie-serial terms. My first visit here had just brushed the surface. I had no talents the Egyptian vampires could use, so they hadn’t tried that hard to keep me.

In retrospect, I found that rather insulting.

By now the spare stone underground vastness had developed a foul smell. Quicksilver’s black nostrils were flaring with distaste. I recognized the unhappy combined reek of stale meat and fresh excrement.

Ric caught my eye and looked down. The sandy floor had darkened, like the ground of a bull ring, as if with blood.

No. It was damp. With water.

I didn’t hear any fresh-flowing stream like the underground rivers used during the Inferno invasion of the Karnak. We were in a very different section. This was seepage from below.

Bez, who’d paused, gargled distress low in his throat, the feisty lion cub. Quicksilver echoed him.

“We’re near the… encampment,” Ric warned me. “You can smell the human occupation.”

I inhaled deeply. Yes. Blood, shit, and tears. My heart clutched. As a paranormal TV reporter in Wichita, I’d covered a couple of brutal cattle mutilation sites in the boonies.

Cows made such pathetic victims. Large, bulky creatures, they were never built to run away like horses. They’d been fashioned to graze, essentially as helpless against serious, or even supernatural, predators as housecats and backyard dogs.

Why did these harmless animals allow savage mankind to make them into domestic slaves? Into beasts of burden and consumption? I’d never understand what domesticated dogs and cats got from their association with a creature as abusive and bloodthirsty as man, whether up to his one final death… or now, to supernaturally extended lifetimes far beyond the single death allotted ordinary animals and less cannibalistic humans.

What would I give to live?

I knew what I’d give to keep Ric living. Almost anything.

“Almost” was a weasel word. I’d probably give my life, then some trickster supernatural might give me more lives and what would my “sacrifice” have been worth? Caring so deeply about another person was new to a wary woman who’d until now invested emotion only in speechless animals that couldn’t reject her.

Just days ago I’d considered an unwilling kiss the ultimate price to pay in terms of sovereign personal freedom. Now… it wasn’t that simple. Now I knew I could kill as well as kiss.

Quicksilver rubbed his consoling muzzle against my hand. I’d give up a lot before I’d lose him, too, but living life only to stop its inevitable losses didn’t seem to be a winning game after the Millennium Revelation.

“Delilah,” Ric whispered from ahead, his single word slithering between the stone pillars.

I realized I’d let him get out of sight… and Bez too.

Quicksilver and I rushed through the crowded pillars, following the scent of herded humanity. Ric was striding ahead into the stench-ridden air, sure and determined. Quicksilver and his supersensitive nose pushed past me to trot in Ric’s wake.

Thanks to the intense perfumes the ancient Egyptians used, I’d never scented true life in the Karnak Egyptian underground, as Ric had. He didn’t just find and sometimes raise zombies, he knew the scent of the human flesh that had made them, even if it was decaying.

I was also aware we were approaching the place where Ric had been captured before. Quick sure smelled danger, dashing back to circle me, then ahead to Ric, shifting his keen, sky-blue eyes this way and that, hunting imminent enemies.

THE PILLARS ENDED unexpectedly. We stood below overarching stone ceilings dripping icicle-like stalactites down to form mirror-image stalagmites reaching upward, like lacy stone cathedral spires reflected in a lake. They created an outer fence of frozen stone and glittering minerals from the ancient salt sea that once had covered the Nevada desert. They made a shining canopy that turned the everlasting twilight here into an eternal dawn.

I turned in a circle, gazing up in wonder at a Notre Dame cathedral of subterranean stone that offered soaring arches above, now that we’d passed the pillared forest.

In the massive swoop of stone roof my imagination traced giant veined dragon wings. No Seine River flowed nearby, only the tears of the earth falling downward and piling upward to the stone points of the wings, anchored like tents or fey touchpoints on the ground.

When I’d slowly come back down to earth to follow Ric’s stare to level ground, I realized the breathtaking beauty above only made the horror below and ahead of us even more stomach-clenching.

Dark cave mouths yawned open to background a festering crowd of gathered human figures. I saw the crowded, stinking masses prisoner beyond a deep pit. There was nothing ancient or Egyptian about that scene.

On the rim of the pit, caveside, lay gnarly gnawed bones and black-green piles of melting ooze. Picture your refrigerator after a week of disconnection. The stench of rotting meat and vegetation made a Dumpster behind an abandoned food store smell sweet by comparison.

What kept these people where they were? With tentative strides forward, we four finally stood staring down into the apparently bottomless pit separating us from the milling mobs across the way.

I edged closer behind Bez, easily seeing over him.

From the twenty-foot-wide pit that separated the cave dwellers from our party I heard a harsh, scaly stirring deep below. Imagine King Kong dragging his knuckles over an iron mine.

“Viper pit?” I asked no one in particular.

“Not snakes, but other creatures of the Nile banks,” Bez said. “Insect life once teeming near the great river are set on guard here to protect the precious, self-generating food source.”

Knock out the fancy language and you had the Karnak State Fair Cow Barn, only it never emptied out all year ’round and the “moat” was patrolled by creepy-crawlies.