CHAPTER ONE
By the time I was thirteen, I knew that the girl of my dreams was not what anyone would call a sane child. My first hint came on a bright autumn afternoon when Cleopatra Mallawi was helping me rake up mountains of fallen maple leaves from our front yard in Georgetown, Colorado.
At around two o’clock, Cleo took a break to lean on her rake and stare up at the mountain peaks visible through the branches that spread across the blue sky. Straight coal-black hair hung to her shoulders.
“Look, Halloran. A demon.”
My full name is Halloran Justin Stevens, but pretty much everyone, except Cleo, calls me Hal.
After I’d combed blond hair away from my blue eyes, I glanced around the leaf-filled yard. I’ve always been overweight, and exertion really gets to me. My hooked nose was dripping sweat down the front of my denim shirt, so I wiped it on my sleeve. All I saw was another two hours of work.
“I don’t see anything.”
“Oh.” She sounded disappointed. “That’s okay.”
She quietly returned to raking leaves, but I couldn’t take my eyes off the place near the maple where she’d been looking. After a couple of minutes of examining every pile of leaves for hidden claws or fangs, I shrugged and started raking again.
Cleo was definitely the most interesting person in Georgetown. She’d been born in Macedonia, but grew up in Egypt, was fluent in nine languages, and had been orphaned during the revolution that rocked Egypt a few years before. She’d studied ancient Egyptian history—claimed she’d been Queen Cleopatra in a former life—and said she’d personally met a variety of Egyptian gods and demons. Not only that, Cleo had supposedly shot a demon with her father’s pistol at the age of ten. Right after her parents’ deaths, the demons had invaded her home, wearing gas masks, and she’d barely escaped with her life.
Hypnotized by the idea that a demon might be standing there—a demon only Cleo could see—I stopped raking, and asked, “Which demon?”
I’ve won the Colorado Classics Award three times—which is the state record. It’s an award for young ancient history scholars, so I take this stuff seriously.
Cleo turned toward the maple. “A huge one with the head of a crocodile, the front legs of a lion and the hindquarters of a hippopotamus. She is known as Ammut, the Devourer of the Damned. Today she has turquoise skin. She and her earthly priests have kept me from reaching the Island of the Two Flames for over two thousand years.”
The Island of the Two Flames was one version of the ancient Egyptian land of the dead. There were several versions. After all, Ptolemaic Egyptians were way more creative than modern people.
“Where do you see her exactly? Where’s she standing?”
As though the famed demon from the Egyptian Book of the Dead was right there, only a few feet away, dread filled Cleo’s eyes. “She’s leaning against the maple with her arms crossed. Don’t you see her at all, Halloran? Not even her shadow?”
I looked. “No.”
“Well, she sees you. She’s watching you.”
Naturally, my blood had turned to ice.
You have to understand, I’m a true fear fanatic. I’m the happiest when I’m scared to the point of filling my Levis, which was one of the reasons I found Cleo so fascinating. Every time she talked about the demons that chased her, I had spectacular nightmares where I found myself running headlong down the streets of ancient Alexandria with giant lion-headed beasts bounding after me. The honking of horns on the Colorado street outside would metamorphose into court trumpets, the traffic on the Interstate became the roar of cheering crowds, and the shadows of tree branches cast upon my bedroom wall by the moonlight became gnarly demonic arms reaching out for me. Cool stuff.
Even more wonderful for my overactive adolescent imagination were the stories she told about plucking the lyre of Orpheus with her own hands or traveling to Sparta to smooth her fingers over the egg from which Helen of Troy had hatched. Since I was a voracious reader of historical tomes and considered myself to be the future world expert on ancient Rome and Egypt, being around Cleo was as exotic as seeing an alien spaceship land on the football field at Georgetown High. I plagued her to tell me stories about her life, which she did in a quiet dignified voice, only slightly accented. Such stunning wonders filled her long-gone world that I felt this modern age was but a pale reflection, tepid and boring beyond endurance. Which is probably why I play so many ancient world video games.
How she’d gotten to Georgetown was mostly a mystery, though I knew she’d come to live with her aunt and uncle. Apparently, her aunt was the only family she had left in the world. On the fateful day that Aunt Sophia had learned Cleo survived the riots, and her parents were dead, she’d immediately flown to Egypt to pick Cleo up and bring her back to America. Cleo’s uncle, Dr. James Moriarity, taught Egyptian archaeology at Colorado State University in Fort Collins during the school year, but in the summers he excavated sites abroad. That’s where he’d met Cleo’s Aunt Sophia, a woman twenty years his junior, digging in Egypt.
By the time I was sixteen, I was five-nine, weighed two-ten, and was desperately in love with Cleo. We were inseparable. Often, we would lie together on the floor of my bedroom—as we were on this sunny May afternoon—studying maps of Ptolemaic Egypt and role-playing. She was my Cleopatra, and I was her Marcus Antonius.
The most famous lovers in history, their doomed romance was brilliant and passionate, and far more tragic than Romeo and Juliet, because Cleopatra and Antonius were not theatrical inventions. They had lived. And each had died by his or her own hand in 30 BC. Their rulership of ancient Egypt and their battle against Octavian was also one of the most glorious war stories of all time. The fact that Cleopatra and Antonius had suffered a spectacular defeat made them even more interesting to me. Especially Cleopatra. A queen at eighteen, for twenty-two years she ruled the last great Egyptian empire, lost it once, regained it, and—finally—heartbroken and alone, she lost everything.
“Who’s that?” I tapped the image. The map was ringed with artistic sketches of notable people, most of whom I recognized, but not this one.
Cleo tilted her head to study the figure. “That’s Cicero. He was a member of the Roman Senate and a detestable man.” She added, “Antonius despised him as much as I did. He called Cicero the greatest boaster alive.”
In the process of becoming scrupulous intellectuals, we insisted upon historical accuracy, so we refused to say things like Marc Antony or Beirut. It was Marcus Antonius and Berytus. We read aloud the works of Lucan, Plutarch, Appian, Josephus, and Dio, and discovered that none of those ancient authors could be trusted. In fact, when it came to the truth about the lives of Cleopatra and Antonius, there was obviously a secret historical conspiracy to destroy the evidence. Not one authoritative painting or sculpture of Cleopatra existed. Even Cicero’s letters from 44 BC when Julius Caesar and Cleopatra had been together in Rome, were mysteriously missing. Dellius, who’d betrayed Antonius and Cleopatra at the Battle of Actium in 31 BC, had also written a chronicle. But it, too, had vanished. And though Appian had promised to tell more about Cleopatra and Caesar in his vast four-volume history of Egypt, none of those books existed today.