Malik’s muscles slowly unclenched. Act normal. There was no way Karina could possibly know the truth. “You haven’t heard about the river flu or the worsening clan wars?”

Karina shook her head. “The last I’d heard about Eshra, grain exports were low, but otherwise, there’s been nothing new. Is something going on there?”

How much would a privileged boy like Adil know about the devastation happening throughout the mountains? One wrong word, and Malik’s entire charade would be exposed. But this might be the only chance he would ever get to tell his people’s story to someone who had the power to change things for the better.

Malik began to speak and then stopped, unable to find the words to tell the one story that mattered to him more than any other. As she waited for him to continue, Karina placed a hand against the wall.

“You don’t have to tell me if you don’t—”

A large tremor cut her off. There came the crushing grind of stone against stone, and a low growl tore through the air. Alarmed, Malik instinctively reached for Karina’s hand, and she gave it to him.

“What was that?” he whispered.

“I—”

The growl boomed into a roar. A section of the temple wall slid open, and a creature Malik had never seen before slithered out of the opening. The monster swiveled a furred head the size of a cow in their direction, twisting a scaly neck thick as a tree trunk and long like a serpent’s. Rusted necklaces of turquoise and vermilion wreathed its neck, and emeralds glittered in the headdress it wore.

For a second, Malik was too awed to be scared. This was a real serpopard, one of the mythic creatures the Kennouans had believed led the dead to the afterlife. According to the old tales, serpopard venom was so potent that if the creature’s teeth even grazed a human’s skin, they’d be dead within the hour.

The serpopard let out a bellow that shook the world. Snapping back to their senses, Malik and Karina ran.

The beast barreled after them, its enormous body almost too large to fit through the necropolis’s streets. Debris rained down on all sides, and several of the sacrificed slaves crumbled to nothing underneath the serpopard’s paws.

“This way!” Karina screamed, running toward a shop entrance too small for the serpopard to enter. The two of them cowered in a corner as the beast lowered its head to the doorway. A single orange eye the size of Malik’s head blinked at them.

After several tense seconds, the serpopard slunk away, and they both sighed with relief.

BAM!

Rearing its neck back in a whiplike motion, the serpopard rammed its head against the building again and again. Chunks of stone fell from the ceiling, shattering the many pots and dishes littering the ground.

If the serpopard didn’t kill them, then the falling debris surely would. All Malik had was his spirit blade, and it was too small to take down a creature of this magnitude. He couldn’t use his magic either with Karina watching.

While Malik cowered, Karina searched through the pots and pulled out a length of rope. Her eyes flew to the obelisk on the temple’s roof.

“Adil, next time it hits the building, run under it and go left.”

“What about you?”

“Don’t worry about me!”

The serpopard rammed the shop once more. Fear locked Malik’s body in place, but Karina gave him an encouraging push forward. “Now!”

Malik bolted forward and wove between the creature’s legs while Karina ran back toward the temple. Twisting its neck in a loop, the serpopard went after Malik as he sprinted to the market. He ducked under a series of stalls, taking care not to upset the meticulously placed displays, but it was all for nothing as the serpopard barreled through each one. Though the top half of the creature had the speed of a cobra, the bottom half’s weight slowed it down. Malik used this to his advantage, twisting in and out of the serpopard’s biting range like a mouse escaping a cat.

He glanced over his shoulder to see Karina scaling the temple wall, the rope between her teeth and bloody marks on the tile from where she cut her hands in her ascent. Malik silently urged her to climb faster, and then ducked as the serpopard lunged for him once again. Its head smashed into a cart near him, sending sharp bits of wood flying into his face. Malik stumbled but kept running, his energy draining fast.

“Adil!”

Karina had reached the top of the temple and was now dangling the rope down, one end of it tied to the obelisk behind her. Realizing what she needed him to do, Malik dove under the serpopard’s legs. With the last of his strength, he charged to the temple and grabbed the free end of the rope. Once Malik had it securely in his hands, Karina yelled, “Here, you overgrown cat!”

While Karina had the serpopard’s attention, Malik launched himself at the beast. He scrambled up one of its furred legs until he was sprawled across its back. He wrapped the rope several times around the serpopard’s neck and tied it with a slipknot, just like Papa had taught him so many years ago.

“Blessed Adanko, I ask for your protection,” Malik muttered as he jumped from the creature’s back. He landed on the ground with a bone-rattling jolt, but forced himself to run directly in front of the serpopard. Rotten breath washed over him, and Malik silently apologized to Nadia for dying before he could save her.

But instead of pain, there was gagging. The serpopard’s eyes bulged from its head as the makeshift noose tightened around its neck. The obelisk shuddered from the strain of the creature’s lunges, but it held. Foam flew from the ancient beast’s lips, and with one last roar, it crumpled to the ground for the last time.

Malik sank to his knees, tears rolling down his face. He barely registered Karina scrambling down the temple wall.

“We did it!”

She tackled him in a flurry of arms and hair, and they both went flying just a few feet from the serpopard’s still head. Karina’s laughter was infectious, and soon Malik was laughing as well, wild, raucous laughs that hurt his stomach.

“You were incredible!” Malik exclaimed. “With the rope! And the obelisk!”

“And you! Climbing onto its back like that!”

Karina beamed down at him, a look of unbridled joy on her face. It would have been so easy to close the gap between them, to see if they fit together as well as Malik was starting to suspect they would.

“We make a pretty good team, don’t we?” she said softly. Her gaze darkened in an expression he desperately wished to know the meaning of.

“We do,” he whispered.

Karina leaned closer, her hair tickling his nose. Through the daze of having her so close to him, Malik summoned the spirit blade behind her back and held it, as close to the back of her neck as her lips were now to his.

One strike. That’s all it would take. That’s all he . . .

Great Mother help him, he wanted to kiss her.

“Adil,” she whispered, her breath warm against his face. The spirit blade shook in his grasp. “Do you—look out!”

Karina rolled them both over, seconds before the serpopard’s fangs crashed down on the spot where they’d just lain. The spirit blade vanished as the creature’s jaws latched onto the hem of Malik’s shirt, mere inches from his skin. The serpopard’s body twitched several times, but then it went still once and for all.

Malik’s pulse quickened. “My shirt!”

“I’ll buy you a new one.”

Karina pulled a strip of fabric from her dress, wrapped it around her hand, and used it to extract the serpopard’s jaws from Malik’s clothes. One of the creature’s rotten teeth came loose in the process, and Karina stuffed it into her pocket, which was filled with dozens of the red flowers from the top of the temple.

“For research,” explained Karina at Malik’s questioning look. He sensed the lie behind the answer, but didn’t press further. She rose to her feet and threw the serpopard’s corpse a wary glance. “Come on. I don’t want to see what else lives down here.”

The Mark writhed against Malik’s skin, but for now, all he could do was lean against the girl he was meant to kill as they made their way through the golden tomb.

26

Karina

Hours had passed, or at least Karina assumed they had. There was no way of telling how long they’d been down there. The high of their escape from the serpopard quickly morphed to dread as it became clear there was no exit from the tomb.

The necropolis itself was roughly a mile across, judging from how long it took to walk from one end to the other. Both Karina and Adil took care not to disturb anything. However, it had not escaped Karina’s notice that Adil had touched the temple to no effect right before her own touch had released the serpopard, and a shiver ran down her spine at the thought that the pharaohs had found a way to target her family even in death.

Luckily, there was one good thing about their predicament: the blood moon flowers in her pocket. She now had everything she needed to perform the Rite of Resurrection.