❝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 TWO DAYS THAT FOLLOWED passed by with a surreal swiftness. Mara and Alex spent much of that time in the tomb, cataloging the treasure for the most part. The burial chamber was left largely untouched by them after confirming that the tomb did belong to Nefertiri; Mara hadn't wanted to do any more work in there until Evy arrived, but she had returned to it today because Evy was due to arrive soon and would be coming straight here with Rick after checking in to a hotel.
While Mara was in the burial chamber and Alex was in one of the annex rooms (the same one they had found those tomb robbers in) with Sarah and Philip, Jonathan was left to wait in the entrance hall at the bottom of the first set of stairs for his sister and her husband. He was meant to greet them and give them the map Mara drew up so that they wouldn't get lost in the tomb before going back to his children, but Evy and Rick were supposed to be here an hour ago and being alone in a dark tomb doing nothing but waiting wasn't exactly what he wanted to be doing right now. Well, at least he wasn't the one alone in a burial chamber with a sarcophagus.
Jonathan was considering leaving the tomb and waiting outside in the tent instead for them, so that at least he had somewhere comfortable to sit down, when he heard a voice call out a hello from behind him and spun around. Evy and Rick were coming down the stairs and Jonathan said, heart pounding in his chest from the brief scare he'd just been put through, "Was it necessary to scare me half to death in a tomb?"
Evy tilted her head at him and asked, "Where's Mara?"
"In the burial chamber," Jonathan answered, offering her the map when she was close enough to take it. "Here's your map."
Rick raised a brow. "There's a map?"
"Mara drew it up. If you don't know where you're going, it's easy to get lost. We're here," Jonathan said as he pointed at the spot on the map that corresponded to where they stood at this moment, and then he moved his finger to the edge of the map where the burial chamber was, "she's there."
Evy looked down at the map and nodded. There was some hint of nerves in her eyes, unusual to see on her but made sense considering the circumstances. They were currently standing in the tomb of her past life, a past life connected to the reawakened mummy they'd had to fight twice. She inquired after taking a breath, "Has she opened the sarcophagus yet?"
"She wanted to wait until you got here."
Evy nodded again, glancing around the entrance hall before stepping past them to go through to the burial chamber. Jonathan took the other map from his pocket, his copy of it, and Rick asked him, "So where's Alex? Is he in the burial chamber with Mara?"
