"Why did you disturb the boy's sleep before we had time to reclaim him?"

"I… I didn't know you existed, or how important he was. Besides, I thought he was slain for eternity."

"This is a modern age," Kephron lectured me in the same cold tone. "We also have refined our methods of interring and… disinterring. Even long-dead bones may rise-in the proper hands."

It was hard to believe the Egyptians were still after zombies, even skeletal zombies.

"Speaking of proper hands," Kephron added, leaning toward me with almost more lust than he'd shown his consort, "I've heard of bodies recently rising to the surface at Caesar Cicereau's Starlight Lodge."

"You're surprised that bodies were buried out there?"

"Nothing surprises us," they replied as one, like twins.

If Lilith was indeed my twin, and I found her, and we showed any tendency to speak in unison, I'd skip out forever and ever, amen.

If she showed any incestuous tendencies, I'd… I didn't know what I'd do, besides not doing it.

"How did these bodies rise?" Kepherati inquired rather politely.

Sure, like you'd say, "How'd you do that hairstyle? How do you dial 911?"

I'd tried to dial out on my cell phone again, surreptitiously, and it wasn't cooperating. Of course, if I were a cell phone I wouldn't wake up and work in this temple of blocked signals and dedicated necrophilia.

I answered with a question. "How would I know how these bodies rose?"

"You were there," Kephron said.

"There were others present, Beloved," she reminded her consort. "Cicereau's wild werewolves and dozens of the walking, unembalmed dead they call 'zombies' now."

"Kin," he agreed, "but not the quality we seek." His liquid, black-lined gaze returned to me. "You are correct. You were not alone." He eyed his mate again, significantly, as if they had just won the lottery, before he questioned me again.

"And you say you do not know how these zombies rose?

"I was busy trying to stay alive," I answered, trying to be as vague as possible. Who knew what these beings were or wanted?

"An overrated activity when being dead is so much more interesting these days." Kepherati smiled. At least her painted lips lifted slightly at the corners.

I understood I was among an unfashionable minority, totting up in my mind who among my circle I knew for sure was alive: Quicksilver. Ric. Hector Nightwine was iffy, and the CinSims were questionable. Caressa Teagarden was semi-alive. Among my enemies, Cicereau and the werewolves were all too alive. Howard Hughes decidedly was not. Sansouci was lively, but not alive. Snow was an enigma. I didn't know if he was good or evil or just self-serving, much less alive or dead.

"She'd mummify well," Kephron told Kepherati. Their lips met again as they spoke. I almost thought they read each other's lips or breath, if they had any, as much as spoke.

"She would be difficult to reanimate and even more difficult to kill. She has too much of a lust for life," his sister-wife replied. "She would destroy outer and inner wrappings in a silly struggle to remain breathing. She would go to the other side flawed, and thus come back flawed."

Yay for flaws! Irma chirped. For such old sickos in the mud these two are really borrring! Let's ditch this dive.

Easy for you to say, I mentally chirped back. But Irma was right. I was seriously disinterested in hearing more about my forthcoming flaws as a mummy.

"There must be a servant of Anubis involved," Kepherati decreed, eyeing me again.

"Is it the dog that runs with her?" They knew about my daily morning runs in Sunset Park with Quicksilver?

"He is not a desert dog," Kephron said, his straight nose barely wrinkling. "He is thick-furred for the northern wastes and large, like her."

I breathed a sigh of relief for Quicksilver. Wolves used to inhabit desert climes but I was glad to hear the Royal Pains disparage his breed. No dog mummification wanted.

"There were wolves at Starlight Lodge," Kephron went on, musing only to his identical twin, like a man addressing himself in a mirror. "Our sybil serpents-" he waved at the hooded cobras swaying like palms behind the royal pair. For a moment I thought he'd said "civil servants." Maybe that's exactly what they were. And vice versa.

"Our royal spies," he went on, "reported that the desert snakes saw wolves. Some were partly disembodied, like our own ka-sendings on four feet. Perhaps they raised these briefly dead people."

I nodded along with Kephron. If he considered corpses as old as seventy years "briefly dead," I wouldn't argue. If "ka" meant soul in the Egyptian old order, the hyenas were undead too. Nor did I want Kephron working his way around to Ric's presence and identifying him as the force able to uproot the dead.

I figured the more of these icy-hearted Egyptians who stayed lost and forgotten and dead, the better. Their society was obviously formal to a fault. Even lust was ritualized, obvious from the flaunted but oddly sexless genitalia and tattoos.

I'd known nothing about lust, except being the unwilling object of it, whether blood lust or sex lust, until I met Ric, but I knew it was impulsive, untidy, and best taken with generous dollops of love.

I didn't feel the love here in the heart of the ex-Egyptian empire at the Karnak Hotel and casino. In fact, I really thought I ought to be going.

"Your ka-sendings," I mimicked their expression. "Those were the killer hyenas I ran into outside the Dead Zone club?"

"You did not 'run into' them," Kepherati said coldly. "They ran into you. They were sent for you. We wished to interrogate you in ka form. Had you been compliant then, you wouldn't be here walking and talking as a living person. Your northern warrior-dog and your vampire servant and you yourself damaged the temporary bodies of our ka-spirits."

So they'd wanted me dead, a spirit to drain of information and toss aside. They'd underestimated human will. And I'd like to see Sansouci called a "vampire servant" to his face, but it chilled me that they'd known what he was when I'd just discovered it last night.

Speaking of faces, theirs were still glued to each other. No wonder their eyes seemed a trifle crossed, like those of some Siamese cats. Such soul-searching postures left them deaf and blind to actions on the fringe.

I eyed the many polished surfaces of the great chamber. Mirrors in their day had not been glass, but buffed metal. I wondered if my silver mediumship was supple enough to slip through metal as well as silver-backed mirror.

If it wasn't, I risked smashing my atoms on hard bronze, not soft silver.

But I was alone, with no one else to worry about, besides Irma.

Go for it, chickie-baby. These far-too-friendly he-shes creep me out. They won't even notice we've left the room.

I doubted that, but this was probably the best opportunity to try something.

I checked Peter Lorre as Ugarte. He had tuned out like an abandoned hand puppet and stood inert a few feet away. He had led me here and his usefulness was over.

Mine was too, as far as I was concerned.

I glimpsed my own image, small and wee, in the sun disk headdress between the horns of a magnificent statue of Hathor. The goddess was sometimes portrayed with a cow's head; this headdress wasn't on a bovine head, though, but on the usual attractive head an Egyptian woman.

The statue was maybe eleven feet all, even seated in a throne chair. A Royal Uraeus, the hooded cobra, was centered on her forehead. Her white gown was tight and she wore beaded anklets and armbands. The figure's skin was painted a yellowish hue, her jewelry in red, blue and green with gold accents, but the sun disk was the purest, most polished metal surface in the vast chamber and it wasn't gold, but silver for some reason. Then I got it. No, it wasn't a sun disk, but a moon disk. This was a moon goddess.