Rameses stood in front of the sarcophagus that held his brother’s sleeping form. Memnon wasn’t going to like being awakened, but there was no avoiding it. Not anymore. A gate had been opened by a vampire, allowing Hunter to return, and motleys were polluting the planet. And that was just the beginning of their problems.
He turned toward Priest. The male was still weak, but this was his duty. Once Memnon was awake, Priest would return to the healing chamber to complete his rejuvenation.
“Begin,” Rameses said with a nod.
The head members of the three families had gathered, as was the custom when pulling the imeut from Osiris’s Sleep, and stood in ceremonial linen kilts around the gold sarcophagus, all of them wearing their cartouches around their necks. A statue of Isis stood at the head of the sarcophagus, and one of Anubis, the lycans’ patron god and ancestor, stood at the foot.
Priest bowed to their god’s likeness, uttered a quiet benediction, then began pouring red wine into a bowl made of gold. Once he finished, he lifted a worn leather pouch from the lip of the tomb, loosened the drawstring, and then sprinkled the contents of gold dust into the bowl. Gold was a powerful metal to the lycans. It conducted energy between realms and helped them heal more quickly from their battle wounds.
Next, Priest pulled a cask of purified water—taken from the Nile River—from inside his robes and added it to the bowl. This created the connection to Memnon’s spirit, which resided beneath the Sphinx, where the spirits of all sleeping lycans resided within Osiris’s chamber until awakened.
Rameses nodded at the others.
Jupiter and Priest’s brother, Wrex, of the McClerran clan joined Dain on one side of the tomblike casket, and the three brothers of the Strauss clan, Reed, Julian, and Barrett, stood on the other. Rameses remained at the foot, overseeing the awakening.
He nodded, and the six lycans on either side of the sarcophagus shifted into their lycan forms, stepped forward in unison, and lifted off the lid, revealing Memnon’s prone form. As they maneuvered the mammoth slab of gold to the side and propped it against its assigned panel in the enclosed tomb, Priest dipped his thumb in the bowl then pressed the tip against Memnon’s forehead and began chanting in their ancient language.
The awakening had begun.
Memnon’s awareness jolted. His soul was being pulled upward, out of Osiris’s Sleep. He traveled through the caverns underneath the Giza Plateau, through Osiris’s tomb below the Sphinx, and then through the Great Sphinx itself, the gateway for his people.
Then he was airborne, whisking through the atmosphere, flying through the maze of gateways connecting one to the next. To his ethereal eye, the paths between the gates looked like glowing roadways creating a crisscrossing web surrounding the planet. Wormholes.
And at each intersection was a portal. A gateway he could pass through in his physical form.
But he wasn’t being called to just any random gateway. He was being called to the compound. His home. Where his clan resided.
Why was he being disturbed? It was too soon for him to awaken. He wasn’t sure how long he’d been asleep, but he knew it hadn’t been fifty years. Not even close.
There would be hell to pay for waking him early.
Memnon had made this journey hundreds of times over thousands of years, and only once had he been pulled from his sleep early: when his brother, Hunter, had lost his ankh.
He had been furious at Hunter’s carelessness. He should have banished him then, but he’d given Hunter another chance. Only to regret the decision later, when Hunter broke their only law and took a vampire mate.
No longer had Memnon been able to look the other way. Lycans didn’t mix with vampires. To do so could end in disaster. There had been no other option than to banish him. A sentence he had hated carrying out. But he couldn’t make exceptions. Not even for his closest friend.
The lycan compound built on the steep, rocky hillside overlooking Moon Lake—how appropriate—came into view. His soul homed in on the chanting calling him back, and he dropped through the three stories of brick, steel, and drywall into the basement tomb, where he took root inside his body.
He was back. Back on the doomed planet known as earth. Where he had yet to find anything worth dying for since the age of the pharaohs. And if there was nothing worth dying for, living became a vast wasteland of emptiness.
Filling his lungs with earthbound oxygen, he opened his eyes. The gold ceiling above him came into focus. It was covered in hieroglyphs that told the history of their people. Of the arrival of the lycans on earth. Of the beastly slaves they’d transported from their prison planet to erect the colossal structures once prolific in Egypt.
This had been their gift to the human colonists who’d been brought here from the various corners of the universe to populate earth in what had become known as the great experiment. The lycans, among other godly races, such as vampires and those who had long since vacated Mount Olympus, had been charged with providing humanity with the means to overcome and survive.
At one time, Memnon had respected and loved the humans he and the other lycans had been meant to protect and nurture. Back then, the mortals had been innocent, wide-eyed, and wondrous, despite having no recollection from where they’d come.
Then the humans found religion. And as their fervor for a new savior developed, they grew absurd, dirty, and vile in their inhumanity. Not just to beasts, but to themselves.
Over time, they came to see the lycans and all supernatural beings as blasphemous, sinful, even demonic. They destroyed great monuments—some of the lycans’ finest work—including the library at Alexandria. So much history was lost that day. And so many lives.
Memnon now held nothing but disdain for their species. The human experiment had become the human plague. All they seemed capable of was war, as one sect of mortal society preached superiority over another. From the bowels of religious cultism, humanity had grown out of control, infesting the earth with their lust for power and carnage.
If only they knew the truth of their meager place in the universe. They existed by the thinnest of threads on what was now a dying planet that could no longer sustain their catastrophic love affair with greed and destruction.
But he would continue to protect them. He had to. He’d sworn an oath to Anubis.
He inhaled again then slowly exhaled as he pulled himself to a sitting position. Easier said than done after a long hibernation.
His brothers stood around his sarcophagus, looking like the powerful descendants of Anubis they were, stoic and towering. Rameses stood at his feet, his expression stony.
“Why have you awakened me before it’s time?”
“Events require your attention.”
“What events?”
Rameses blinked. It was the only sign of distress he exposed. “Hunter, among others.”
“What about Hunter?” He already knew whatever had happened was not going to please him.
“He’s back.”
Interesting. Memnon climbed out of the sarcophagus, his body stiff, and rose to his full seven foot height. “How did that happen when he no longer possesses his key and was banished to a prison planet, where only one who holds a key can set him free?”
As a testament to his superior fortitude, Rameses kept his gaze coolly locked with Memnon’s. “A vampire found his key and used it.”
Memnon curled his upper lip. Vampires. Not the worst beings on the planet—exceptional to humans, to be sure—but creatures he would rather not contend with for a variety of reasons.
“How did this vampire find Hunter’s ankh when we could not?”
Rameses’s shoulders lifted subtly then fell. “I don’t yet know.”
“Disappointing.”
His brother ignored him. “The vampire managed to open a gate. Hunter came through.”
Not one to dwell on trivialities, Memnon pushed for more. “And have you captured him?”
“No.”
Memnon’s mood soured even further. Being awakened early was bad enough. Awaking to such a show of incompetence was downright insulting. “Why not?”
Rameses shook his head and dropped his gaze, a sign Memnon had come to learn meant his brother was about to lie. “He knows how to evade us.” He lifted his gaze to Memnon’s once more. “And we have other, more urgent matters that need attention.”
Memnon stepped into the robe two of his clan brothers held open for him. He wrapped it around himself, leaving the belt untied. “More urgent than capturing Hunter and sending him back into exile?” This piqued Memnon’s curiosity.
“Mutant werewolves,” Rameses said, not wasting any time. “We call them motleys.”
Memnon’s mind began reconnecting with the minds of his brothers, and, through their memories, he began to see all that had happened while he’d been away, including the rise of this new beast Rameses referred to as a motley.
“Interesting.” They had a new enemy to hunt. How exciting.
Memnon’s stomach rumbled. He would eat, and then he and the heads of the families would meet, and no one would sleep until someone—first—explained how Hunter had returned from exile, and—second—developed a plan to recapture him. He couldn’t let his people think he was weak. There had to be justice for breaking their laws. Then they would discuss these motleys and what was to be done about them. Based on the thoughts coming from Dain and Priest about a vampire alliance, Memnon didn’t think he was going to like what had transpired during his hibernation.
“There’s more,” Rameses said.
Memnon stopped his descent down the gilded stairs, turned his head only halfway around, and burned his black gaze into that of his blood brother out of the corners of his eyes. “Indeed, there is.” He had never liked the feeling of cold irritation rolling down his back.
Rameses didn’t even flinch. “Hunter has a son.”
Clearly, Rameses hoped to gain leniency for Hunter by revealing this bit of information. Memnon knew his brother well. Rameses wanted to find a way to mend fences between him and Hunter, and a son—one not burdened by the sickness that could arise in the child of a lycan-vampire pairing—could be a tremendous asset.
Unfortunately, allowing the child to live would be a sign of weakness and would cast doubt over the law preventing such dalliances.
Rameses’s heart was in the right place, but he had forgotten one thing. Memnon no longer had a heart. It had died with his mate over three millennia ago. And yet, Memnon could still smell the sweet scent of myrrh from her perfume when he thought of her.
“A son? Truly?” Bad, bad Hunter. “How did we not know this when Hunter was banished?”
“Someone has been protecting him.”
“Who?”
“We don’t know. We only found out about him last night.”
Memnon started down the stairs again. “Find out who has been protecting him. Whoever it is knows about us. Bring that person and the boy to me.”
“What are you going to do to him?” Rameses said, his voice holding the barest hint of concern.
Memnon stopped and pivoted to face his blooded brother. Without a doubt, Rameses was the more merciful of the two of them.
Memnon had once been merciful, too, but those days were long gone. There was nothing left inside him but a black heart to match his black eyes.
“I’m going to kill him.”