❝death is only the beginning.❞
Mara El-Masri's fascination with the long-ago world of ancient Egypt started with the stories her stepfather would tell her when she was a child. Her brother Talib El-Masri is missing, left after their mother's funera...
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☾ ☽
THE CARNAHAN HOME was very rarely this quiet, only ever so when there was no one there. It was the middle of the week, just after eight in the morning, and though typically the place would have been empty at that time, that wasn't the case today. It was an unusual thing, the silence, and Mara was finding it a bit unnerving as she moved things around in the study. She was used to the sounds of her family, her children playing, but there was no one here but her today.
Her study, a small but spacious room in the corner of their house, was golden with the sunlight that came in through the windows. The extra light was fortunate in helping her search for her journal, which she swore she had left in here last night, but thus far she hadn't had much luck. She had been back at the house for about fifteen minutes and for about fourteen of those she had been in here preparing for the new course the day had taken.
Just as her luck turned and she found her journal on the bookshelf, Mara heard the door to the house open and hardly looked up for a second, assuming that it was Alex, now nineteen years old and currently living in their guest room until he found a flat for himself in the city. She stepped over to the rucksack on the chair and put her journal inside, along with her pen and her tools as she turned to grab them from the desk, and found that her assumption was incorrect when she heard footsteps and looked up to see instead it was her husband coming into the room.
Jonathan must have heard her in here when he got home (though she wasn't entirely sure why he was here at the same time she was this morning) and said, "Mara, darling—all right, I know why I'm home at eight in the morning on a weekday." Mara greeted him with a smile and continued to put her things in the bag. He added bemused, "Are you going on a trip?"
"Yes, and you're coming with me," said Mara.
"You know I need more than that."
"The tomb," Mara elaborated as she closed the bag now that all of her things were in it.
The ancient necropolis of Saqqara was a little under an hour's drive away and had been the focus of her studies for years, but in recent months, she had been spending more and more time there with her equipment. Her nephew soon joined her in her excavations when he moved to Cairo and started working at the Museum of Antiquities just as his mother did before him, eager to get some hands-on experience in an archaeological dig even if most of his time was spent at the museum and not in the field much. Unfortunately, there had been a horrid sandstorm about a week ago that cut their excavations short and ran them out of Saqqara until it cleared up.
But the sandstorm, according to Alex (who'd taken the car down to Saqaara early this morning to see for himself), had cleared up entirely now. Things had been calm in the necropolis when he checked, and when Alex told Mara that in her office at the museum, she immediately decided they were to return that very day and finish what they had started, because the previously-undiscovered tomb she had managed to uncover, the thing she had spent years looking for—she believed it to be the tomb of Nefertiri.
