I was no Lash La Rue or Indiana Jones, but my instinctively lifting my arms to repel the odious menace sent out coiling ripples of thick silver “snake” chain that tangled in stubby crocodile legs and caught in their brittle ridged scales.

I was lassoing lethal luggage. Each spasmodic jerk of my arms spun a zombie croc over the pit edge behind us.

The hissing and scrabbling below met falling crocodiles. Up bellowed a powdered red fog of beetle shells and mummified crocodile scales like a steam engine pouring out smoke.

Near the pillars, Quicksilver jumped atop a twelve-foot-long running croc. His snapping jaws seized the dried skin behind its long-snouted head.

Quick’s four clawed feet dug in as his weight pushed off the thing’s back. The creature skidded straight for the pit, massive tail lashing as I captured it with a silver whip coil so Quick could leap free of the powerful club.

Bez crouched to grab the baby crocs under two feet long by the tail and fling them into the instant garbage disposal behind us, now seething with the death and disintegrating agonies of small, live beetles and huge mummified predatory Nile crocodiles, two species once sacred to the Egyptians.

Crocodile rodeo one wild ride at a time wasn’t going to stem the lethal tide or keep us from plummeting into the rift with our scaly attackers.

I thought about Ric, then I felt powerful hands curl around my shoulders from behind, bracing me.

I glanced back in gratitude, or farewell, to discover Shezmou behind me. I started to wrest away but he lifted me by the shoulders and set me aside.

He set me aside.

Hell, no!

Just then I felt someone else behind me and hands slide down my arms to my hands, covering them.

Ric.

I glanced over my shoulder again and gasped. The battle had dislodged the contact lens I’d installed to hide his postresurrection silver iris. It was not only fully revealed, but the white of that eye had gone bloodshot.

His hands tightened on mine until I thought the bones would crush. I looked down. His fingertips were oozing blood onto mine and down along the silver whips, which were expanding and twining into a net-I remembered my silver familiar morphing into a net scarf during that wild Corvette ride-suspended above the solid carpet of writhing crocodile mummies.

That giant net settled on them like a cape. Where it touched, mummified corpses turned to powder, to carnelian dust. As new oncoming crocs rushed over it, they too disintegrated into a cloud of rising dust.

I also remembered it took drops of Ric’s blood to raise a zombie, and now, apparently, to kill them.

A CHORUS OF coughs behind us proved that this literally poisonous cloud had also enveloped the weakened captives. I was most concerned by powdery contaminants puffing up from the pit as disintegrating crocodile mummies met and smashed beetle shells.

Some beetle varieties did carry toxins. Although flesh-eating beetles were guiltless that way, we were likely inhaling their dried excrement too. Aw, nice.

I checked Ric’s face, imagining what millennia-old dust formed of crushed insect carapaces and reptile scales would feel like lodged behind a contact lens. Burning hell. Luckily, the action must have jolted out Ric’s sole contact lens without his ever being aware I’d made sure he wore one. I’d have to update him on that at the first opportunity.

Shez and Bez, being gods in demigod form, were apparently immune to mortal reflexes like coughing and tearing up. Quicksilver, now a Redcoat from head to tail-tip, barked out hoarse canine coughs.

Meanwhile, the wondrous carpet of chain my silver familiar had spun, augmented by Ric’s strange new silver vision, lay powdered red too. The pattern reminded me, with a chill, of Sylphia’s enwebbing prison spun to contain Loretta Cicereau in Madrigal’s magical mirror. Right now one pissed-off werewolf mobster’s daughter wasn’t my immediate worry.

As the last dust settled, the silver links disappeared along with any trace of the mummified crocs.

Ric’s hands were clutching what had changed from silver whip butts in my hands to Wonder Woman wrist cuffs above them. The blood around his nails and knuckles had dried and was flaking off. It was as if everything here must ultimately desiccate and die.

He cupped a hand over his silver left eye.

“God, Delilah! A dagger of ice-cold glass stabbed my eye, then some barrier flew away, small and dark, like a crow’s wing in the corner of my vision.”

An ice-dagger in his Brimstone Kiss-altered eye? My anxious girly heart fixated on the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale where the Ice Queen thrusts a sharp cold hook into a boy’s heart and that icy control grows in him until he rejects his childhood friend and true-love-in-waiting…

God, girl, Irma kicked in, I’m all for true love and mineral powder bronzer, but get us out of this sandstorm of dried ick pronto!

“Ric, you just lost a contact lens I installed when you were unconscious at the Inferno. Um… it’s cosmetically necessary. I’ll explain later.”

Twenty feet away, Quicksilver braced his feet and shook himself from ears to tail. More red dust rained onto the stone floor to dissipate into motes. Quick had recovered his cool, northern colors of gray fur and blue eyes.

Bez dusted off chubby hands, making us cough again. “Good work. That was like the elder days, Shez, when we gods weren’t all living by rules cast in stone and hieroglyphs.”

“Indeed,” Shez agreed. “I cannot wait to resume my old role, though, toward these new-style and decadent ruling Egyptians. They relish my bloodwine and scented balms and perfumes but have neglected to worship my other role as a winepress of sinful souls, where I stood as Lord of the Blood beside Osiris, as his chosen headsman.”

Ric and I checked each other’s understanding and pulse rate, wary of our associate’s new blood-lusty attitude. Almost everyone with a smattering of Egyptian knowledge knew Osiris was the God of the Dead. His “headsman” must be a pretty bad fellow. What had I let loose on the Karnak and Las Vegas?

“A ‘winepress of sinful souls’?” Ric asked Shez, getting to the nitty-gritty.

“So it is written in the ancient texts now known as the Book of the Dead,” Bez explained with reverence. “He”-pointing to Shez-“is to be worshipped and dreaded. He is the Lord of the Blood. When evil souls try to slip into the Afterlife he slaughters them, wrenches off their heads, and throws them like grapes into the press to make bloodwine for the pharaohs.”

Ric had gone silent. For once I didn’t want to break the tension with a quip.

“It is written,” Bez went on like any true believer quoting from a holy book, “that he rules in the night of the burning damned, and of the overthrow of the wicked at the Block, and of the slaughter of souls. It is he, Shezmou, the headsman of Osiris, who cuts them up, Shezmou who has boiled their pieces in his blazing cauldrons so that Unas can eat their words of power, can consume their spirits. Unas is mighty, but Shezmou is the Lord of the Slaughter.”

I had no idea who this Unas was, and from what little I’d learned of the Egyptian pantheon, they’d had three thousand years to fine-tune an enormous number of gods and functions.

So I didn’t doubt that Shez, exacting winemaker and perfume connoisseur, had a dark side I’d never want to meet in person.

Also, though, I figured Ric and I could sure use it now.