Conquer the Dark (32 page)

Celeste kept her gaze focused out the window, quietly processing all that she’d seen and learned in such a short time. Azrael had told her that more would be revealed as the great cosmic clock wound down to the planetary alignment of 12/21/12. Time would change as the veil began to open, as planets shifted into place to line up to the galactic center. A day would pass in a flash; hours would zoom by like minutes … she was definitely experiencing that weirdness in sped-up time as new experiences were crammed into her life. How could she absorb and make sense of it all? The only way she could cope was to surrender, to float on the essence of just being.

That’s what she did now, casting her gaze out over the dark-gold landscape on her west side with the Nile on her east as they headed south, and simply let her thoughts flow free like the river.

Slowly impressions flitted through her mind. Memories just outside her grasp teased the edges of it in a game of hide-and-seek. The landscape, as old as time itself, hadn’t been too dramatically changed, except for the modern road. But all around it were markers of civilizations gone by.

Fatigue from the heat and emotional duress tugged at her eyelids and made her head heavy, until she finally surrendered into a nap. Images continued to pass through her mind as the bus struggled and whined in and out of gears.

Then she knew why she’d disliked the camel ride so much. Miles and miles of caravan had brought her from Nubia on an annual family trek to trade in the west.
Celeste felt her body stiffen as the thunder of a thousand horse hooves pounded the earth. Men in blue turbans attacked the caravan—Berbers trading slaves … and she was no longer with her mother or father. Blood soaked the ground. Then everything went dark until the next image entered her mind. She was weeping and standing in Independence Mall? The mental switch was so jarring that it shook her out of her sleep.

Celeste awakened with a start, causing Azrael to turn toward her and take up her hand.

“Are you all right?”

“My mother was from Philae and my father from the village we just left … and only nine of us were in a house in Philae. I was there with people I didn’t know and very powerful men. They didn’t hurt me, just ignored me, and I worked there my entire life. Sometimes I would hear them talk about ideals that didn’t apply to me.” She pulled back her hands and rubbed her palms down her face.

Slow awareness filtered through her bloodstream until the emotions caught up with her colliding thoughts. She’d been sold into slavery. The pain that surrounded her spirit stole her breath for a moment, physically made her slump. To be a human being but not to be treated as human, to have one’s life only considered for the service of others and to be so disregarded as a domestic stock animal …

“Celeste, talk to me,” Azrael whispered, monitoring her body language.

“I was a slave. In Philadelphia.”

He closed his eyes and kissed her forehead. “I know, beloved.”

Tears filled her eyes as outrage filled her heart. “I wish
I had never remembered that part, that incarnation or whatever the hell it is. That era was so …”

“Dark and brutal,” Azrael said, holding her hand.

“Then why did it come back? Why was it necessary to pollute my mind?”

“Because there’s a link. The word
Philae
or
Philly
and
Philadelphia
have been mentioned too many times before we came and once we got here not to take note. Now you are remembering, now that we are near Philae.” He stroked her hair and gently pulled her against him. “I’m sorry you experienced that abomination in one of your soul’s lifetimes.”

She nodded and kept her gaze out the window as she leaned against him. “But if I hadn’t, maybe I wouldn’t have known the people in the village so well.”

“Perhaps … or been received like a returning daughter,” Azrael murmured into her hair. “But there are also gentler ways to learn lessons, Celeste. That is my prayer for you until the end of time—that all your lessons be visited upon you as gently as the ones you’ve taught me. The universe can sometimes be a very hard taskmaster. I don’t want that for you.”

“We have to park and get tickets and walk from here,” Kadeem announced, going into his pocket to pay for the entire bus. When Bath Kol leaned forward with a fan of bills, Kadeem waved him off. “My pocket keeps refilling,” Kadeem said, laughing. “The big man, Azrael—thank you!”

Azrael chuckled and stretched. “You’re welcome.”

“Man, this is no time to be moving like you’re ready to take a nap—we’ve gotta hustle,” Isda said, standing. He
paced two steps in one direction, then paced two back like a caged panther. “I cannot wait until you see this, man!”

Azrael just shook his head as passengers on the bus came out of their own thoughts to mentally rejoin the group. After a bit of jockeying, Kadeem found a spot, then jumped down from the bus quickly to lend a hand and urge the group forward.

“
Yalla, yalla
… the park will close soon, so we have to hurry to find Daoud’s friend.”

The warning got people moving, and they jogged and power-walked a half mile down a steep asphalt road that plunged into a valley behind a mountain on their left and the jewel-green Nile on their right. Running ahead of them, Isda stood in the middle of the road and held out his hands.

“Do not look to your left until I tell you, all right?”

Laughing, the group grudgingly agreed as they kept their gazes on to the ground.

“Come on, brother, we don’t have time for …” Azrael’s words trailed off as he looked up.

For a few seconds the group came to a complete halt. An entire mountain had been turned into a living temple. Carved into solid granite were four colossal statues of a seated pharaoh. Blazing orange-gold sun painted the sandstone-hued temple in metallic splendor. People looked like ants at the footstones of kings, and adjacent to that temple was a smaller but no less spectacular one with feminine flourishes on it for a queen.

“
Dat
is Ramses the second,” Isda said, taking a bow. “Wait till you see inside the Hypostyle Hall—every room carved from the rock where it stood—they went in
there and carved because what’s inside is bigger than the doors … and they followed such strict mathematics that on his birthday the sun rises on his face! Without fail! Every equinox the sun rises on a different aspect of him when it comes up over the horizon, through the front doors, down the long corridor to the holy of holies, and
bam
.”

“Oh, yeah,” Bath Kol said, nodding as the group pressed on. “Angels definitely had a hand in that.”

“You think?” Aziza said, completely awestruck like everyone else.

“But we must hurry,” Kadeem said, beginning to run.

Following him to the front doors was like running the length of two football stadiums. The ancients definitely did things on a grand scale, and the more Celeste thought about it as she ran, everything they’d built seemed as though it was designed to be seen from an aerial view. Now it was all beginning to make sense. What if a bunch of fallen angels clashing with angels of the Light had been the ancient extraterrestrials the hard-boiled alien-conspiracy theorists were trying to prove existed?

But the stitch in her side and the unrelenting heat made her abandon random musing. By the time they’d reached the massive thirty-foot-high front doors of the temple, she was gulping air to catch her breath.

“Where is the normal key keeper?” Kadeem said, panicking.

A suspicious guard frowned and then regarded the group. Kadeem thrust tickets into his hand with a sizable tip. The guard smiled and produced a two-foot-long brass key in the shape of an ankh and handed it to Celeste with a smile.

The two men exchanged a flurry of Arabic, then the man seemed to recognize that they didn’t want a picture taken at this late hour with the temple’s main-door key, but were looking for the man who normally stood there.

“He is smoking. We must find him and hope he doesn’t leave to go home early,” Kadeem said, jostling them forward past the last of the tourists.

Quickly passing the massive interior columns, Ka-deem became frantic, circled a corridor twice, then dashed back out in the opposite direction.

“He is a good man, a religious man, and respects the temples of the ancestors. If he is smoking, it would not be inside, where the other guards like to take their breaks.”

Crossing the massive courtyard in the opposite direction, Kadeem headed toward the Nile, and a white, hot concrete meditation deck with a series of benches. The small lunch area was fenced in so one could overlook the water without falling in. A lone guard sat in the waning sun with his back toward them staring out at the water. No tourists seemed ready to brave the unshaded Egyptian sun when a naturally stone-cooled temple was just a couple of football-field lengths away.

Kadeem stopped for a second, placed a hand over his heart, then resumed running as he called out, “Muneer! Muneer! It is Kadeem—Daoud’s brother!”

“Kadeem?” The man named Muneer turned, stood, abandoned his weapon on the bench, and flung down his cigarette butt to embrace Kadeem.

After a warm reunion with Muneer in their mother tongue, Kadeem turned to the group behind him and spoke to Muneer in English. “So that my friends understand …
and they are also friends to Daoud. Do not be worried, I was not tricked. These are not bad men. They are angels.”

An expression between pity and despair crossed Muneer’s sad, dark expression. “I miss him, too, Kadeem, but we must not allow wishes to replace reality.” Muneer sighed, then regarded the group with a hard frown. “It is not right to trick a grieving man. Have you no heart?”

“Block me, so we don’t panic this whole complex of tourists,” Azrael said to Isda, and stripped off his shirt. Azrael then looked at Kadeem as Muneer moved for his AK-47. The guard had spotted the nine-millimeter Azrael was carrying and had obviously jumped to conclusions. “I hope your man has a strong heart, because we obviously do not have time for Celeste’s gentle preamble. I would just appreciate not getting shot right now.”

Kadeem held his friend’s arm gently to lower it. “Trust me, what you will see is Daoud’s dream. Do not harm these beings sent from Allah.”

Azrael spread his wings. “Yeah … Allah, Yahweh, Jehovah, God, the Source of All That Is, Buddha … the Most High has a lot of names, and we don’t have time to go into all of that at the moment. What we need and would appreciate is your cooperation.”

Kadeem caught his friend as the man covered his heart and his legs gave out. Azrael walked over to him and turned around, giving Muneer a full, close-up view of his wings.

“They’re real.”

Celeste went to Azrael as Isda helped Kadeem sit Muneer down easy on a bench.

“Baby, back off,” she said, touching Azrael’s shoulder.
“I knew we should have brought some water off the bus.”

“Here,” Aziza said, digging in her large, tie-dyed shoulder satchel and producing an unopened bottle of water for Muneer. Who was clearly too terrified to accept it.

The poor man just sat there, looking shell-shocked. His jaw was slack, his limbs floppy, and he seemed to be on the verge of actually passing out.

Azrael retracted his wings and yanked his shirt over his head. “So, are we good?”

“Man, you don’t do subtle, do you?” Bath Kol said with a half smile.

“Not when the sun will set soon,” Azrael replied, glancing at the horizon.

“Our brother’s got a point,” Gavreel said, then sat down beside Muneer, who looked to be on the verge of both weeping and running screaming across the courtyard. “Let me conduct a little peace into his spirit.”

“Make it do what it do, mon,” Isda said as he held Muneer still long enough for Gavreel to grasp his head between his palms.

Slowly but surely Muneer relaxed, then looked up at all the brothers and nodded. He pulled a long metal dogtag chain up and out of his guard’s uniform, and on the end of it was a heavy, beautifully engraved sterling-silver key in the shape of an ankh.

“Daoud saved my son,” Muneer said in a rasp, and finally accepted Aziza’s water. He opened it and took a deep sip, never loosing eye contact with the group. “I promised him that I would never tell where he’d dropped the chest. I don’t know what’s in it. That never mattered to me. I
told him that, just as I am the key keeper for Ramses’s temple, I will be the keeper of the key for him and will guard his treasure—whatever it is—just as well. I never broke my word to my friend. He was like my brother, and I fear the bad men took him and harmed him. Now, seeing an angel, I know this is so.”

Tears wet Muneer’s handsome brown face, and he turned the ornate key over and over in his fingers as though it were a worry bead. “They killed him for what was in there, yes?”

Both Kadeem and Azrael nodded sadly.

Muneer quickly took off the chain and held it out to Kadeem. “Then this was no treasure; it was a curse if it took a good man’s life. I want no more to do with it. I sadly give you, as his next-oldest brother, your inheritance.”

Kadeem closed his fist around the key and briefly shut his eyes. “I don’t fully understand what’s in there, either. But I know it belongs to the angels, not to me. Evil tried to find this and rob this from their temples.” He opened his eyes and Muneer nodded to him, then Kadeem handed Azrael the key. “I don’t know where it is in the Nile. The river runs from Uganda where it begins and flows up the continent all the way to the Mediterranean.”

“I was there with him that day,” Muneer said quietly. “The chest was too heavy to lift alone. We went by sailboat to Philae Island and dropped it in the sacred waters by the restored Temple of Isis. Then he prayed over the water that demons would be blinded to its location forever.” Muneer looked up. “When he said demons, I thought he meant just bad men. When he said angels, I thought
he spoke in … just hopes for goodness and protection to come from above. I never … I …”

“It’s all right,” Celeste said, placing a hand on Muneer’s shoulder. “Neither did I when I first saw one.”