From the Lion's Gate they doubled back along the same wall on the outside of the Old City, stumbling over the irregular ground. Valerie rushed ahead with the fl ashlight, pushing all thought from her mind.

At the foot of the double gate was a Muslim cemetery surrounded by an iron railing. Valerie cleared it, barely breaking stride. The others followed a minute later, and the three of them ran stumbling among the ancient tombstones.

They found him immediately , at the foot of the wall, the hollow at the back of his skull revealing how he died. Valerie might have felt a twinge of sorrow for him if his death had not also been a murder. She swept the light in a circle around him, her chest aching with dread. But she found no small broken body near him.

"He had her by the arm. She can' t have fallen anywhere else. Or crawled away," Valerie added, sickened by the thought.

Auset rushed among the stones calling her baby's name, sobbing, dropping to her knees, then staggering to the next dark spot.

Valerie saw no point in trying to hold her back.

They were all living the nightmare vision she had seen just hours before.

The shattering thought came to her . Were they forced actors in an ever -recurring tragedy, the casting of the gods' Child from the adversary's walls onto the rock below? Would it always end this way?

Najya leaned over Harry' s body again. "W ait. Look at his right hand, the one that grabbed Nefi . He's holding something else." She pried the object out of his clenched fi ngers and Valerie shone the light on it.The white plaster statue of Venus de Milo glowed up at her . She turned the bottom up and saw her own name. It was the statue that * 207 *

Derek had given her, the one that should have been at the bottom of her backpack at the hotel.

"That's impossible."

Najya took her by the shoulder . "Didn't you say that Nefi was 'under Nekhbet's wing'? Couldn't she have taken her in some way- and left this to tell us where?"

"Take her? How? Snatched her out of mid-air?"

"I don' t know. But she' s a goddess. Can' t they do things like that?"Valerie winced with uncertainty . Could it be that simple? What if they were wrong and Nefi lay somewhere, critically injured, in the darkness? Could they leave her there while they followed some vague promise? Valerie felt madness creeping in. "Where, then?" she almost whined. "What the hell sort of clue is the Venus de Milo? We're in bloody Jerusalem, not Paris."

Auset still scrabbled around in the brush, calling Nefi 's name, choking.

Every sound pierced Valerie's chest like a blade.

Najya clasped Valerie's hand that held the tiny statue. "Listen to me. You said trust is everything. You said that Nekhbet had sworn to protect Nefi 'under her wing.' Isn't this your test then, and not mine? If you trust her and her promise, then the Venus is the message. And if it's not, then we both go back to being atheists."

"All right. All right. So tell me." Valerie's hand was shaking.

"How is Venus the message?"

"This is a long shot, but there is a Venus temple-at least the ruins of one-in Jerusalem."

Auset sat now , her arms around her knees, trembling. "What if she's here some place? A baby's bones are soft. She could still be alive.

I won't leave her. It'll be morning soon. We'll be able to see her."

Valerie looked back and forth between them. Go or wait? Her brain felt torn in two. Finally, she crawled over in front of Auset.

"We were made a promise, and this promise is everything. If it' s true, we'll fi nd Nefi . You were at Dendara. You saw Nekhbet carry Nefi on her wings. That's got to mean something. This is the test for all of * 208 *

Vulture's Kiss us-to remember that night." She paused for a breath and said, with a certainty she did not feel, "Nefi is in the Temple of Venus."

Auset was limp, seemingly incapable of willful response. She covered her face with her hands, her pale fi ngers jutting through the strands of her disheveled hair . "All right," she rasped weakly . "I'll go." Valerie looked toward Najya, who, of all people, had ar gued Nekhbet's case. "And where might that temple be?"

Najya was already on her feet, brushing dirt from her trousers.

"Under the Church of the Holy Sepulchre."

* 209 *

49.

Church of the Sepulchre I can't believe you have the key to the Church of the Sepulchre,"

Valerie said.

Najya stood before the wide wooden door of the portal and tried to fi t an iron key into the lock. "I told you my family' s been part of this city for generations. My father is one of the doorkeepers." The key refused to turn and she yanked it out.

"A Muslim with the key to a Christian church?"

"It's been that way since the Middle Ages. A Muslim porter locks the great doors at night and opens them again in the morning. The same two families have been doing it for centuries."

"Please...hurry." Wild-eyed and disheveled, Auset rocked from one foot to the other, her hands clenching and unclenching like restless things.

Helpless to assist otherwise, Valerie glanced around the courtyard, surveying the surrounding buildings for signs they might be watched.

All was silent. She directed her attention back to the portal. "It doesn't look much like a church."

Najya chose a second key . "It's really a collection of chapels, sanctuaries, tombs, and shrines. And six different sects maintain them."

The second key head was also too large.

"Damn." She let the second key fall back on the ring and tried a third. "It started with Constantine, who sent his mother Helena to pick a spot for a church. She chose the Temple of Venus, she said, because she found a piece of the True Cross here. A coincidence, of course."

"Please. Can we skip the history lesson and just get inside?" Auset pressed her forehead on the oaken door as if she could will it open.

The key slid into the aperture and Najya turned the lock slowly , exhaling relief. She opened the door , wincing as it creaked at every centimeter.

The interior was dimly lit from bronze lamps that hung in a row of truncated amphorae over a wide stone. The moment they were inside * 210 *

Vulture's Kiss they heard the sound, the musical murmurings of a chant from the western end of the church.

"I was afraid of this," Valerie whispered. "All-night service."

Najya listened for a moment. "It's from the rotunda," she whispered back. "We should be okay. We're going in the opposite direction." She led them to the right, along a dark corridor. Halfway down, they passed a stone formation that jutted up through the fl oor to the ceiling and formed a portion of the church wall.

Valerie stopped and studied the pale, pockmarked formation.

"What's this? A rock in the church?"

Najya stopped next to her . "You are a terrible Catholic. That's Calvary, where they crucifi ed Him."

"Please, can we hurry?" Auset rushed ahead of them, then waited, rocking with impatience for Najya to lead the way again.

"It's that way, around the ambulatory." Najya led them past another dark chapel on the right. A narrow staircase lay just ahead at the foot of the curve.

"We have to go through the chapel of St. Helena right below us.

There's a smaller chapel below that, where she supposedly found the True Cross. Any Roman ruins will be there."

"Maatha tafaalani huna?" a gruff voice called out, startling them all. The speaker stepped into the light, a black-clad, heavily bearded orthodox priest. He switched to English. "What are you doing here in the middle of the night?"

Najya recovered fi rst. She produced a press card, which would have been unreadable in the poor light even if he had accepted it, which he didn' t. She assumed a measured tone, both apologetic and self-confi dent. "Excuse us, Father." She added his ecclesiastical title. "I am Najya Khoury, daughter of Shafi q Khoury ibn Idris, the doorkeeper .

We are doing historical research and were trying not to disturb the service."

The priest was unimpressed. "At 2:30 in the morning, the church is not open for anything but worship. Not for anyone. The doorkeeper knows that. You will have to leave-both of you."

Both? Valerie resisted the urge to look around for Auset. "Uh...we do apologize. Both of us."

"This way." He extended a black silk-encased arm in the direction * 211 *

they had come. "Immediately-or I will call for assistance."

Najya was the consummate professional. "That won't be necessary, Father. We were fi nished anyhow and can show ourselves out. Thank you for your help."

"This way," he repeated the gruff command, urging them ahead of him down the ambulatory to the portal, then out. Behind them, the bolt slid into the great lock with a thud of fi nality.

Valerie leaned against the door . "This nightmare just won' t end.

And poor Auset. She's hiding some place, half mad, and now locked in.

We've got to get back to her somehow."

Najya fi shed out the key ring again and slid one key after another along the metal loop. Finally she held up a small one, half the size of the portal key. "I thought this was here. It' s the key to a maintenance entrance on the other side. It will get us in, but we'll have to get past the service again."

"Then we'd better hurry."

They crept from column to chapel to column again, trusting in the fervor of the worship service to keep attention away from them as they fl itted along the periphery . Every bend and corner in the church held danger, and they did not dare to use the fl ashlight.

"So now, here we are, back in the corridor where we started, and without Auset," Valerie whispered. "And what if we're wrong? It tears my heart out to think we might have brought her here for nothing, while Nefi is lying outside the walls." She covered her face for a moment.

"Gods. How could it have come to this?"

Najya took her by the arm. "Don' t mourn yet. Down there is the Chapel of St. Helena, and it's even lit." They were on the stone staircase now, and her voice echoed slightly against the stone walls.

At the foot of the stairs they looked up into a large square crypt. Its roof was supported by four inner columns that formed another square at the center. High overhead, small semicircular windows looked out at ground level on three sides. Dozens of bronze amphorae hung on chains from the ceiling, though none gave light. Rather, a soft glow emanated from the massive glass chandelier at the center and from small lamps * 212 *

Vulture's Kiss attached to the two chapels on the eastern side. The fl oor was covered with an elaborate mosaic.

"One more level down-at least." Najya pointed to narrow stone steps that dropped into darkness. She took a turn with the fl ashlight and clicked it on as they descended.

At the bottom, she swept the light beam in a wide curve. It illuminated a roughly cylindrical space carved in bedrock. The rough-hewn rock was covered with Plexiglas panels. Directly across from the stairs was a tiny chapel with a simple Latin altar and, above it, a lar ge bronze statue of a woman holding a cross to her shoulder.

"No chance that's Venus, is there?" Valerie remarked.

"No. More St. Helena, of course. This is the place she's supposed to have found the cross. Grim, isn't it? But this is where it stops." She strode to the near end of the row of Plexiglas panels. "But behind this parti tion is an opening to yet another chamber , maybe several. Archaeologists know that they're here, but the religious groups that control the church aren't interested in excavating them. They're pre-Christian."

Najya was already wedging herself behind the fi rst panel and shining the fl ashlight along the rock ahead of her.

Valerie followed and edged forward in the darkness behind her .

She heard Najya' s sudden intake of breath, then the clattering of the fl ashlight falling on stone. They were engulfed in blackness. "What' s wrong, Najya. Are you all right?" Blindly, she slid along the rock face.

Her right shoulder slid of f the wall into a vertical opening, and she dropped to her knees. She groped helplessly in the darkness until she felt a curved back. Najya was kneeling.

"What is it?"

Valerie bumped her head on the rock, but forced herself to calm, to wait, feeling Najya, seemingly unharmed, under her hands. Then her eyes began to adjust to the darkness, and over Najya's shoulder she could slowly make them out. Finally she heard their voices. Her fear and dread evaporated in an instant, and she too broke into tears of relief and gratitude.

* 213 *

50.

Temple of Venus Valerie found the fl ashlight fi nally, clicked it on, and pointed it toward them. At the center of a circle of broken columns, Auset stood with her arms around both her living child and the one who held her, the ka of Yussif Nabil. On both sides of them, like best men at a wedding, were the kas of Derek and Rekemheb. They turned slowly and gazed unblinking into the light.

Derek had on his dark "church suit," though his clean white shirt was stained at the front with a wide circle of blood. Yussif was in the galabaya he'd worn on the fatal train trip to Luxor and would wear now forever. His face was expressionless, as always, behind his beard, but his eyes glistened with tears. Nefi 's head was on his shoulder , though she slept, and her feet dangled under his forearm in little pink shoes.

Derek laid his cheek on Auset's head and placed a kiss somewhere in her wild hair , then looked again at Valerie. "Hi, sweetie," he said quietly.

"So, it was you after all." Valerie entered the cave-like chamber and embraced him, tingling when her cheek touched his, as from a faint electric charge.

"What did you...? How is it possible...?" she sputtered.

The ka of Derek Ragin chuckled softly and took both of her hands in his. "Calm down, girlfriend. We'll explain everything."