Of course not. With demons after her, Veritas had cloaked herself from every tracing spell imaginable. He hadn’t married a fool.

He teleported out of there without another word, leaving Crispin and the rest of them behind. Sod his mate’s attempt to protect him. Sod Veritas’s fear for his safety, too. He wasn’t about to lose her by playing it safe.

Don’t go! her pained shout rang again in his mind.

“Don’t fret,” Ian muttered. “I’m coming.”

Chapter 1

Three weeks later

I dropped out of the dark Egyptian sky, landing near a Jeep that stood out like a neon sign against the sea of sand around it. Unlike the famous section of the Valley of the Kings, this stretch on the western edge wasn’t popular with archeologists, tourists, or anyone except criminals.

Lucky for me, my job was hunting criminals.

No one was inside the Jeep, but it was overloaded with what appeared to be ancient Egyptian funerary artifacts. I walked around to the back and saw a small stone slab half pulled back from a hole in the ground. Ah, a hidden tomb. Two distinct voices came from it as well as lots of odd swishing sounds.

Grave robbers. I hated grave robbers.

I pulled out a sharp silver knife and a double-pronged bident made of demon bone. Now, I was armed to fight two out of the three supernatural species that existed. Right before I jumped into the hole, I lit my gaze up with vampire green.

Two men looked up at me in surprise. At first glance, they were normal Middle Eastern men, but then their eyes turned glowing red. Demons. And the ground around them slithered in every direction.

Snakes. I hated those even more than grave robbers.

I landed on the nearest demon, knocking him down while ramming both ends of my bone weapon through his eyes. His eyes burst into flames as death cut his scream short. I yanked the bident out and immediately flew up, leaving the other demon to smack into the wall instead of me. Before I could stab his eyes out, too, he teleported away.

He reappeared on my right, fist flying. I ducked under the punch, then pain exploded in my head from a blow to my left. Damn demons and their ability to teleport.

“You’ll pay for murdering Malfeous,” he snarled before flinging several cobras at me.

Dick!

I fought my urge to shake them off me. Their bites wouldn’t kill me, but he could. I kept both weapons at the ready, spinning in quick circles so he couldn’t sneak up on me again. He reappeared in front of me, swinging one of the tomb’s ancient axes. I threw myself backward, but not in time. My throat burned and blood splashed his face from the deep slice the ax made. When I hit the ground, the impact made new pain erupt in the back of my head.

Good. More pain meant the ax hadn’t cleaved all the way through or I wouldn’t feel anything. Being dead was painless, or so all the ghosts I knew had claimed.

The demon grinned and licked my blood. Then shock replaced his sneer at its taste. “What—?”

I hurled my silver knife into his open mouth, pinning his head to the wall. Then I flew at him, shoving the bone bident into his eyes until I felt the tips hit the wall.

His eyes exploded, smoke and blood pouring out. The sulfur scent choked me, but I shoved the bident in harder. Relief overtook battle exhilaration as he began to shrink into the skeletal state of true death.

I yanked my weapons out and whirled, ready in case any other demons teleported in. After fifteen minutes, I tucked the silver knife into my belt. That wouldn’t kill demons. Only bone of their own brethren would, and now, I had plenty more to make new weapons with.

I tore the arms off the two demons, throwing them out of the hole above me. Then, I began to explore the tomb. Time and dust had faded the paintings and hieroglyphs on the walls, but I saw the falcon-headed god Horus in one scene and the green-skinned god Osiris in another. There were more paintings showing scenes from the life of the deceased. There should have been various personal effects, statues, treasures and other ceremonial items, too, but the tomb’s inner hall had been stripped. That explained the overloaded Jeep.

The seals on the doors of the inner chamber were broken, too. I went inside, angry but not surprised that both artfully painted coffins containing the mummy had been breached. Only the clay jars containing the mummy’s internal organs were left. Then I smelled something unexpected. Fresh blood.

I nudged a mass of cobras aside to reveal the body of a young woman opposite the sarcophagus. Her skin was the same golden bronze as mine and she had long black hair that covered her face. When I brushed it away, I swore.

I’d been tracking her since I’d hacked into all the recent medical records posted online using a program that a hacker friend of mine had created. I was searching for a very specific type of psychosis: people who claimed they came from another time and who had no modern records to prove otherwise.

I winced as I looked at her body. Large gashes covered her torso, but the wounds weren’t sloppy. They were precise, avoiding vital organs or arteries in order to deny her a quick death. Beneath the blood, I saw markings inked onto her body. I rolled her over, revealing more markings hidden beneath her. As soon as I did, dark magic crawled across my skin with the unsettling sensation of dozens of spiders.

A nearby cobra suddenly reared up and struck me in the face. Annoyed, I flung it aside, only to have another one bite my leg. Enough! I grabbed as many as I could and flew out of the tomb. Once outside, I let them go. It took several more trips before I was through, but I was glad to get rid of them. They must have been brought in to add to the poor woman’s terror. Fear was a powerful ingredient in dark magic, and someone had performed a horrific ritual on the slain woman.

I went back to her body, using my clothes to clean her blood off the symbols. I recognized a few, but I didn’t know the others, and I knew a lot of magic. I took out my mobile and snapped pictures of them. Then, I bent down next to her, closed my eyes, and released the hold I had on my deepest senses.

The magic used to perform the ritual hit me first, choking me with a sickeningly familiar taste. Dagon. The smell of her blood, fear, and the sulfur stink from all the demons had been too strong for me to scent my worst enemy before, but I could taste Dagon’s magic now, and it was all I could do not to vomit.

I swallowed hard and pushed past it, searching to see if she had other magic traces within her. Death had left almost nothing behind, but then Dagon’s magic soured my senses again, though far fainter this time.

She’d had some of Dagon’s power deep within her. I knew only one way that could have happened. She’d been telling the truth to the mental-health facility she’d escaped from. She wasn’t from this current time. She was from long before it.

Maybe that’s why she’d been spotted running into this dismal part of the desert. It was a wasteland now, but a few millennia ago, it had been part of a prosperous city, and when people were frightened, they tended to run home.

I sat back with a frustrated sigh. Had Dagon murdered her because she was one of the newly resurrected people who had been freed when the souls Dagon hoarded inside himself had been released? Dagon was spiteful, but there was one thing demons valued even more than payback: power.

I traced the markings again. A lot of power had been siphoned from this woman with her gruesome death. From the look and scent of her body, I’d only missed saving her by hours. Earlier this evening, Dagon might have been right where I now knelt, weakened, unsuspecting and oh-so killable, if I’d only been a little faster getting here . . .