❝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 SACRIFICIAL CHAMBER would be just through the next door. There was not a map needed to know that, nor was there a need to look through the arch into the chamber, because Evy was screaming, and Mara heard the sounds of the mummified priests drifting out to where she and O'Connell stood. Jonathan was at the opposite end of the room, the Book of Amun-Ra in hand. When Imhotep realized he was there, it would give O'Connell a chance to rescue Evy.
Mara nervously adjusted her grip on her wooden bow, and she glanced behind her to the hole blasted in the wall by dynamite they had just crawled through. Her father was still in there. There was very little chance he was still alive. It would be his body that remained in the chamber of Horus, still and unbreathing, and not the man she knew.
"Mara," O'Connell's voice said, and she snapped her eyes back to him. His gaze slid downward to the bow. He was seeing that her hands shook. She hardly felt it. Her hands felt numb. Her legs felt numb. "Focus. Are you good to do this?"
There wasn't really a choice, was there? But she had come this far. She had lasted this long, and so she nodded and said, "Yes. I can do this."
O'Connell looked past her to the chamber hardly visible behind them. "Jamil knew what he was doing," he stated, a sympathetic yet serious tone to his voice. "You're more like him than you want to admit."
"Sorry?"
"You have the same mannerisms, ask the same questions, answer questions the same way."
Her mother had always told her the same thing. She always said that Mara had inherited more from her stepfather than she did from her biological father, that Mara and Jamil were a testament as to nature versus nurture. Nurture triumphed over nature. Mara never understood it. She'd always thought she was more like her mother than her father. She had never thought that more than through the events of the past two days.
He was Medjai, a warrior trained from childhood to protect Hamunaptra and stop the High Priest Imhotep from being awakened. He left twenty-two years ago, after he met a woman and her daughter, and yet he returned to it when she was in danger. He had sacrificed himself for this. And she...she was an aspiring Egyptologist who spent the past two years thinking that he had no faith in her aspirations when he was only trying to protect her. She was someone whose hands shook every time she heard a gunshot. How could she be anything like him?
Mara shook her head. "I'm nothing like him. He's far braver than I."
"He has faith in you, and so do I," O'Connell told her sincerely. Faith. Her father had faith in her. And she needed to have faith in herself. "So does Jonathan. You're braver than you think." Did she truly believe that? Maybe not, but he believed it, and that was enough for her. Mara gave him a small, thankful smile, and O'Connell nodded. "Let's go kick some mummy ass, El-Masri."
