along the counters, sipping gratis wine while buying the rare oils and costly perfumes. The combined scents were sublime. Like a Goth shadow I slipped around the end of one counter and into the shop’s rear.
Shezmou was far back in the manufacturing area, laboring by oil-lamp light, working his ancient grape press. The sack that held the grapes or oil seeds he crushed was dyed dark bloodred from centuries of usage. Ancient Egyptians favored red wine and extreme afterlife intervention.
I could easily imagine torn-off human heads inside that sack, being crushed by the steady power of Shezmou’s broad, muscled shoulders as he worked the two wooden poles like opposing oars to twist the sap out of the sack.
The liquid that dripped down today was clear and golden. Olive oil.
I could inhale through my nose again.
Shez gave the sack a final, emptying wrench and stepped back to squint at me. I must be silhouetted by the lamplight at my back.
“Who dares to intrude on Shezmou at his press?”
“Sorry, big guy. I need a quick favor.”
He wiped his palms on a piece of white linen. “The favor of the gods always pours down on the Mighty Delilah like the finest embalming and funerary oils.”
“Really, Almighty Shez, you can stop calling me Mighty. I am a mere pipsqueak compared to your power and nobility. And your customers will find the usage . . . unfitting.”
“What is a pipsqueak?”
“Something insignificant that your sandaled foot could crush like a grape.”
“Or like the heads of the damned.” He grinned with the zest of a proud craftsman.
That had been the dark side of his godly role . . . acting as Osiris’s headsman and using damned heads as twist-off caps to throw into the bottomless pit of the Egyptian underworld.
Right now, I needed to persuade Almighty Shez to be my doorman.
“What then should I call you?” he was asking, polite in the way of demon gods who can grease their skids with your own blood.
“Delilah would do.”
He inclined his head. “So, pipsqueak,” he said instead with relish, “what favor can I perform for you?”
“First, how did you find your new shopgirl?”
“Hastur came to view my product . . . line?”
I nodded. Shez needed to update his ancient formal manner of talking, and get with his new career as entrepreneur.
He spoke on. “She seemed an excellent canvas for the new powdered Jewels of the Nile Eye you encouraged me to create. I wish to impress the emissaries of the other foreign powers when they come to sue me for custom.”
I nodded. The semiprecious stones in the broad Egyptian collar he wore formed a natural palette for a killer eye-shadow collection . . . malachite green, amethyst, lapis-lazuli blue, deep red carnelian. Shezmou was an unemployed god I was responsible for jerking into the twenty-first century. The least I could do was to find him a commercial niche.
“They don’t want to sue you for custom,” I told him. “That could involve legal action. They want to sew up your franchise.”
“I am not sure I wish strangers to sew up anything of mine, including this ‘franchise.’”
“That merely means they . . . pay you tribute, massive tribute, for the honor of selling your unique wares at shops all over the world.”
“Even in Phoenicia?”
“They call that . . . ah, Phoenix now.”
“Nubia?”
“New . . . Newport Beach.”
“Persia.”
“Palm Beach now.”
“The Nile must have risen alarmingly high during my endless imprisonment.”
“The world is completely different, Shez. You’re adapting to it very well. It was smart to hire Hastur. She has the look of a supermodel.”
His tilted his head to question me.
“Ah . . . a queen, as does Grizelle of the Inferno Hotel.”
“Grizelle.” He intoned her name with more than relish. Reverence. “She is the equal of Nefertiti, a word that means ‘the beautiful woman has come’ in my language. And you have also,” he added with a majestic head nod.
Beauty is as beauty does. Grizelle had always kept me in her guard-tiger sites, but I could see that a guy who’d been chained to a pillar for four millennia might respond to the statuesque black shape-shifter in her tall, lithe human form. Not to mention her own goddess attitude.
“I have met with the Gehenna city’s Sandsoozi,” Shez went on. “Apparently Gehenna is a later version of the Egyptian underworld. It is gratifying to encounter one whose ancestors go back a few centuries. I am puzzled that I find the same condition that destroyed the Egyptian royal house for millennia is . . . passable in this Sandsoozi and my esteemed sponsor.”
“It’s
“He samples the latter-day bloodwine my esteemed sponsor is creating and bestowing on his many subjects.”
Shez was living in a dreamworld long gone. His “sponsor,” the now eternal vampiric Howard Hughes, was still a controlling power in Las Vegas, even though few knew of his continued existence. And Sansouci? Throwing back Howard Hughes’s synthetic bloodwine with Shezmou? Nothing good could come of that.
“I’m so happy for you all,” I said to move on. “That’s where I need your assistance, Shez. I must consult your sponsor. Getting to his secret digs atop the Karnak Hotel means going through the hotel’s main attraction floors. I’m not exactly welcome to the current administration.”
When Shez remained politely silent I named names. “I mean the twin reigning pharaohs, Kephron and Kepherati.”
“Those unnaturally eternal betrayers! They remain in the living world as careless consumers of the blood of innocents. Yes, I remember that your companion in freeing me and the blood slaves had recently escaped their lowest unnatural appetites.”
“My companion was Ric, Ric Montoya.”
“A name that rolls off the tongue. And where is your small Anubis?”
That stumped me for a few seconds. Anubis was the god of the dead. Sometimes shown with a jackal or dog head.
“Quicksilver is guarding my, um, chariot.”
“Most wise. Then I will commend you to the protection of my little brother. His position as court entertainer allows him to come and go and be seen in strange company.”
Shez’s traditional Egyptian kohl eyeliner gave him a Captain Jack Sparrow–come-hither-or-run look. He squinted at me as he would a plump grape for the squeezing.
“You look sufficiently unlike yourself when you last visited the Karnak in the skin with silver stars all over it. No guard god will recognize you.”
He referred to the steel-studded impenetrable black bodysuit I’d been given at the Inferno. Star-studded skin sounded much more impressive. I thanked him and left, heading on foot for the Karnak, counting on a raunchy fertility god to get me in, and out again.
Chapter Twenty-six
