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A woman revived 4,000 years after being poisoned and entombed in ancient Egypt struggles to adapt to a new life in modern-day London. But when long-buried feelings threaten to dismantle her fragile existence, she must learn to shape her own destiny and confront the sins of her past even as she risks the life of the one she’s grown to love. Read a sample!
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"A gripping thriller that crashes the Egypt of the Great Pyramid into modern-day London, with results that are equal measures hilarious, touching, and tragic."
Teppi is a woman with a past—over 4,000 years of it!
Revived by a young researcher after being poisoned and mummified in ancient Egypt, she emerges to discover that culture shock makes the passage of four eons almost insurmountable, nearly dying as she struggles to adapt.
But Teppi is smart, tough, and determined. While much has changed in the world, much more hasn’t, and her instincts give her a toehold on the first step to forming a new life. A woman who literally helped build the Great Pyramid is not so easily defeated! Teppi needs all her hard-earned skills from a harsh past to survive one mishap after another as she masters the confusion of modern-day London with the help of her new friend—an expat from California who’s a fish out of water herself.
But the ancient cycle of birth, life, death, and resurrection has been broken by Teppi’s survival into modern times.
Memories of events that, to her, seem to have happened just yesterday, drive guilt and increasing depression over past mistakes.
When an ancient god reveals a way to atone for the sins of her past, she becomes driven to return to her ancient homeland. Teppi manipulates her new friend’s devotion and pulls them both into the shadowy black market for stolen cultural artifacts, risking everything she’s built in the present and endangering the life of the one she’s grown to love for one last chance at redemption.
Expand to read the first chapter…
I have my lying, cheating, tightfisted ex-husband to thank for the fact that I got the cheapest possible mummification package.
You know, the one where they don’t yank out your brain and vital organs and stuff them into small, ceramic canopic jars. They just sink you into a vat of powdered natron for a couple of lunar cycles until you’re barely dried out enough not to stink. Slap on a few wraps of linen, goop on some resin, and you’ve got the fast-food version of mummification.
It’s really unpleasant. Trust me on this.
For one, natron gets absolutely everywhere and tastes terrible. Swallow a big spoonful of salt mixed with baking soda and you’ll know what I mean. It’s super gross.
But, of course he cheaped out. I know exactly what he was thinking: Why waste a few extra heqats of silver on the old model when you can use it to buy pearls and amethysts for the new, fourteen-year-old replacement wife instead?
You know, the new kitchen girl, the one who was barely older than our daughter. The one who was already proving by her swelling belly that she might be the one to bear him sons.
The whole thing—and by “thing” I mean my attempted murder, just to be clear—was done on a shoestring. Ra only knows what kind of rat poison he put in the (cheap) wine he brought out to toast our fifteen-year wedding anniversary.
Whatever he used, it wasn’t quite enough to kill me, so I’m assuming he scrimped on the amount as well. Or maybe it cost extra for the kill-the-rats version, so he went with the stun-the-rats-until-you-can-mummify-them-alive budget option instead.
Does it sound like I’m bitter?
Well, by the time Cryndoline cracked open the resin-soaked wrappings covering my face, I’d had plenty of time to stew about it. Like, four thousand years, give or take a few centuries. So…yeah, I was maybe just a teensy bit bitter, I suppose.
Whatever. I got over it two millennia ago.
Seriously. I really did.
Anyway, when my life finally restarted, he was long dead and I was just almost dead, lying naked and freezing on a stainless steel table in a gloomy, worn-out laboratory in the basement of the British Museum. I was staring up at Cryndoline’s shocked face, hearing her impressive scream, and wishing I could make my eyelids work.
(They didn’t even bother to close my eyes! That’s just something you do for dead people, right? It’s, like, the very first thing. Remember that if you’re ever mummifying someone.)
It was I was in a dark room at night, staring up at those crazy-bright lanterns—lights, I’ve since learned—and my eyes burned like I was looking directly into the sun.
To be fair to Cryndoline, who was a pretty good sport right from the start, all things considered, I’d screamed first. She’d just rolled up the sleeves of her white lab coat, pulled safety goggles down from her unkempt black afro, snugged them over her medium brown face…
…and started cutting my stomach open with a small power saw, which will really get your attention if you’re not expecting it.
Actually, I tried to scream. Thankfully my lungs had started working by that point. Barely, but enough for me to shoot a small geyser of natron powder out of my mouth.
After that, Cryndoline had screamed enough for two people.
But my favorite Egyptologist is a real trooper. She’d been some kind of nurse before deciding she preferred cutting open long-dead people over caring for living ones.
Later, she showed me some detailed pictures of what I looked like at that point. Let’s just say “horrifying” doesn’t even begin to describe it. But one thing I didn’t look was dangerous—or even mobile—so she’d only felt the need to scream for a minute or so before her caregiver instincts kicked in.
Before I knew it, she’d vacuumed out my mouth and nose (and other places), put drops in my eyes, and was dribbling water over my lips and down my throat, all while babbling like an excited kid on Christmas.
She had good instincts right from the start. By which I mean, I was obviously looking a little stressed out, so the first thing she did was lay me in a blissfully warm bath in an old, clawfoot, white porcelain bathtub with gold trim that was probably a stolen—I mean carefully collected with full permission—cultural artifact from a former colony that didn’t need it anymore.
She fussed around a bit, trying to make me comfortable, which was impossible since I was rock-hard and unbending, just a bony, stiff, brown board. Picture trying to fit a fencepost with stick arms crossed over its chest into your bathtub. All she could do was put a folded washcloth under my head where it lay on the rim of the tub.
However, and let me be clear on this point, it was the best bath I’d ever taken. Probably the best bath in the entire history of baths.
(I couldn’t ever get anyone to explain why there’s a functioning bathtub in the basement of the British Museum. Maybe paleontologists need to de-stress after a hard day of losing—sorry, I did it again—I mean curating—other countries’ precious and irretrievable national treasures? Anyway, it’s a real mystery.)
After she had me soaking, blissfully if not comfortably, she’d calmed down enough to introduce herself.
She leaned over from her perch on the side of the tub and gazed down at my (now blinkable) blue eyes with her excited, almond-colored ones and introduced herself.
“So. Where do we start? I’m Cryndoline Masterson, but everyone calls me Cryndi. Weird name, I know, but nothing compared to your na—sorry! I didn’t mean that!”
I, of course, didn’t understand any of this until a good eight months had passed of me learning the Queen’s English like my life depended on it, which it absolutely did. But like a good little doctoral candidate, she diligently filmed everything.
(And if she ever puts any of those early, horror show clips of shriveled, wrinkly, bald me online, she’ll be able get a second Ph.D. in mummy cursing, I swear to Ra and Isis.)
“Anywho, I’m Cryndi Masterson—soon to be Doctor Cryndi Masterson! I mean, I could just trot you out in front of the doctoral review committee, no thesis needed, and…sorry, sorry. Anyway, it’s so nice to meet you and oh my God, you’re totally naked! Um, um…just a minute!”
She raced off and came back with a bottle of something she splashed into the tub and I discovered that even the best bath in recorded history can be improved by adding lavender-scented bubbles.
(But, bubble bath? Somebody must be living in that basement. Seriously.)
“I know there wasn’t much of a nudity taboo during your dynasty, but still, when in Rome…or London, I guess. Ha, ha! Definite nudity taboo; we can’t have you getting arrested for indecent exposure on your first night!”
FYI, Cryndi talks a lot—high-pitched and very fast—when she’s nervous, in case you haven’t picked up on that yet.
Also, she’s usually nervous.
“Oh! Oh! Not that you don’t look great! I mean, considering.” She gestured at my nearly-skeletal body, all four-feet-ten of it. “I know beauty standards were pretty stringent back in your day and you really…um, uh…kept your figure? I guess? Not that I’m objectifying you! Oh, geez, this is so hard.
“But, seriously, you look like you were pretty healthy when you died—or not-died, or whatever—for a being a low-status housewife—I mean matron!—I mean woman!—sorry, sorry, and not low-status, just-fine status….”
Cryndi took a few deep breaths and leaned over me again.
“I’m trying really hard, but I’ll try harder, OK? It’s just that, like, twenty minutes ago, you were a number and five sentences in a logbook written by some English dude who carted you back from Egypt 200 years ago.
“I mean, you were you, but all anyone knew about you was…anyway, I’m sorry, and I’ll do better.”
She held out her hand to shake mine, then looked embarrassed and pulled it back.
“I’m Cryndi Masterson and I’m so pleased to make your acquaintance, Ms. Satsohimopltep.”
Yep. That’s right. The cheap jerk even spelled my name wrong on my burial plaque.
* * *
When my spine and hips unfroze, I learned that my lungs and throat were working well enough to produce a real scream.
(I’m calling it a scream but it was more like the gasp of an old, punctured, blacksmith’s bellows.)
The sharp cracking of each of my vertebra snapping loose, followed by the horrible screeching rasp of my loosening pelvis, made the dark, dingy lab sound like a torture chamber. The pain was beyond imagining, far exceeding the capacity of lavender bubbles to soothe.
Cryndi must have sensed exactly what I needed most in that moment of extreme agony. She rushed off again and was back to the bathtub in less than a minute.
“Look! Wine!” She held up a tan, head-sized, masonry jar with a narrow, sealed opening. I could hear liquid sloshing inside. “Or we think it’s wine. It’s got a weird hieroglyph on it. But we’ve been arguing forever about when to pop the cork on this! It’s within two centuries of being your exact vintage!”
She was beaming with excitement. “If ever there was a perfect occasion to bring out the good stuff, this is it!”
The glyph on the jar clearly said “vinegar.”
She dragged over a small metal table and set the jar on it, then carefully pried off the tight-fitting, sealed, clay lid with a screwdriver from the lab tools. She sniffed it and shrugged.
“It doesn’t smell bad. Just, you know…wine-y? Maybe?” She dipped a small paper strip into the liquid and studied it, then did the same with two more. “Good news! It’s not poisonous.”
Cryndi dipped a finger in. “I’m breaking so many protocols, so mum’s the word.” She giggled. “I mean, mummy’s the word? Get it? Oh, but…too soon? Probably too soon. I mean, mummy jokes are kind of an Egyptologist thing, but I’ll try to control myself.”
She licked her finger and grimaced. “I don’t drink, so…maybe this is how aged stuff is supposed to taste? A wine snob might say it’s got a touch of pucker to it, I guess, but whatever, wine keeps forever, right?”
She poured some into a white paper coffee cup, then put the cup to my lips. I braced myself.
A straight shot of pure vinegar, aged to perfect acidic potency for four millennia, burned a trail straight past my tongue—my gag reflex wasn’t functioning yet—and down my throat to my stomach.
It was not pleasant.
But it did do the trick of waking up my esophagus and the first several feet of my digestive tract, although I recommend trying literally everything else first if you ever find yourself in that situation.
Bonus: the half that went down the wrong tube got the ol’ lungs fully functioning. I don’t recommend that, either.
My heartrate picked up from one beat every century or so to something closer to normal and I could feel other organs responding to the shock therapy.
I forced my neck in jerky stages—snap, snap, snap—to turn my face to look directly at Cryndi and rasped out my first words in over four thousand years.
“What in the hell are you thinking?”
(Later, after she figured out what I’d said and brushed up on her hieroglyphics, she apologized profusely.)
She was exultant. “You can talk! Oh my God, I was so afraid you’d be, you know, brain dead. I mean, you might still be a little, uh, confused, let’s say, which would be totally understandable since your brain was basically instant ramen for thousands of years. But a full sentence! Probably!
“And that pronunciation! I have no idea what you’re saying—you might be babbling just like me, ha, ha!—not that you would—but if you can tell me how to properly pronounce Old Kingdom hieroglyphics…we’re talking Nobel Prize in Egyptology. I wish! No such thing but there should be.
“Oh! I hope you’re not illiterate. Not that you would be! But, I know you weren’t a scribe based on…well, based on what was in your tomb, which the records say wasn’t much, to be honest, for one that hadn’t been raided by grave robbers. It was kind of more like a little mummy warehouse.”
Newsflash: scribes were stuck-up donkey butts who thought knowing how to draw little pictures of beetles made them Ra’s gift to humankind. Merchants had to know how to read their scribbling if they didn’t want to be ripped off. I reviewed every single contract my worthless, terrible-at-business, illiterate husband ever had drawn up.
Saved him a ton of gold, none of which was apparently used to send me off with any trinkets to bribe my way through the underworld.
(Don’t even get me started on the “mummy warehouse” thing. Nothing he did would surprise me and, seriously, I’ve moved on, so just drop it already.)
“But, hey, it looks like vino agrees with you. Let’s get it all down. Here we go, upsy daisy!” She tipped the paper cup again.
It was powerful motivation to push through the pain of getting all my joints moving so she’d stop. Thankfully, I had barely enough muscle strength to bend them beyond the frozen point, but just moving each one an inch was utterly exhausting.
Two cups later, Cryndi finally set the jar out of the way.
“I’m cutting you off for the night! But that should definitely get your liver’s attention, at the very least.”
She leaned over closer and ran her fingers tenderly over my bare scalp. Her smile faded to a look of concern that was almost motherly.
“Probably enough excitement for your first night, huh?” She looked around the darkened lab space with its workbench and ceiling-high shelves that stretched off into the distance.
“There’s no way in hell I’m leaving you here. You’re not a specimen, which is exactly how you’d be treated. It’s kind of cutthroat, you know, Egyptology. Only so many jobs out there waiting for us. The other two grad students would probably dissect you in an instant to get a tenured research slot at a university.”
She sat back and twisted a few strands of her afro for several seconds. “Now that you can bend a bit, I think I can wrap you up enough to sneak out the back way if I keep your face covered. I mean, you’re flesh and bones, right? You’re not going to trip any detectors looking for artifacts. If anyone asks, you just need to say a couple words and I’ll tell them you’re my friend’s kid from Egypt, all tuckered out. It’s at least 90% true, which is honestly higher than my average, truth wise.”
Cryndi started draining the tub.
“Teppi—if I can call you that—I’ve been in love with ancient Egypt since I was a little girl. I even had black paleontologist Barbie! I could never pull off the cute neck scarf, though. It’s just, to me, ancient Egypt is—I know, I know, life back then for all the non-pharaohs wasn’t all dates and honey, but…” Her eyes grew distant, looking into her past.
“To me, ancient Egypt is kind of magical. I’m obsessed. And, I guess, maybe a bit more willing to believe in magic than the next girl? Maybe one of your gods decided to make a special exception, or Osiris was taking a break when you showed up at the front desk of the underworld.”
Or, Osiris demanded payment and I just had to shrug and he told me to get lost and stop wasting his time.
She leaned down and gently picked me up out of the bathwater as if I was made of tissue paper. Water and bubbles dripped from my wrinkled, brown skin onto the tiled floor of the lab.
Teppi cradled me to her chest like a child. I was transported back in time with memories of sharing my own body’s warmth, just four thousand years and a day ago.
My neck had just enough flexibility to turn my head to look up at her.
Cryndi’s lips were pressed firmly together and a slight scowl wrinkled her forehead. She gazed down at me for long moment before speaking.
“I know this is really, really hard for you. And I don’t know how or why it happened. It’s like some kind of ancient miracle. But…I just want you to know that I’m here for you, and you’re not a specimen to me, and you can trust me.”
A small tear had formed in the corner of her eye.
“You’re a precious and beautiful person and more than anything else, you need a friend. I…really hope you’re OK with that friend being me, because…well, I kind of need a friend, too.”
She tipped her head to wipe a tear off her cheek onto the shoulder of her lab coat and managed a small smile. “Us lonely expats gotta stick together, right?
“Anyway…I want you to know that I’ve got you, and I’m going to keep you safe. I swear that no matter what it takes, I won’t let anything bad happen to you. I might lie a little bit here and there, but I never go back on my word.”
Cryndi gave me one more squeeze before setting me on an old gray blanket to wrap me up.
“Let’s get you home.”