“The place smelled of jasmine and myrrh?”

I nodded.

Kate thought for a long moment. “You said the millionaire’s name was Anapa?”

I nodded. “I checked on it. It’s some sort of small town on the Black Sea in Russia.”

“It’s also in the Tell el-Amarna Tablets,” she said. “In the late 1880s clay tablets were found on the site of an old Egyptian city. The tablets dated to about the fourteenth century BCE. They were probably part of some royal archive, because most of it was pharaohs’ correspondence with foreign rulers.”

“How do you even remember this stuff?”

“Most of the tablets are from Palestine and Babylon,” she said. “It was part of my required education. Anyhow, the tablets are written in Akkadian, and the name Bel Anapa is mentioned. ‘Bel’ meant ‘master’ or ‘lord’ in Akkadian, similar to the Semitic Ba’al.”

“Like the demon Baal?”

Kate grimaced. “Yes. They had this thing where only priests were allowed to say the god’s name, so they just ba’aled their gods. Similar to the way Christians use ‘Lord’ now. So some Greeks ended up thinking that Bel or Ba’al meant a specific god, but it doesn’t: Bel Marduk, Bel Hadad, Bel Anapa, and so on.”

Great. “Which god is Anapa?”

“The Greeks called him Anubis, God of the Dead.”

Whoa.

“The one with the jackal head?” I asked, raising my hands to my head to indicate ears.

Kate nodded.

Okay. No god that had “of the Dead” attached to it could be taken lightly. Hades, Hel, none of them were cuddly puppies.

“He can’t be a god,” I said. “There isn’t enough magic for gods. We’ve established that.” Gods ran on the faith of their worshippers like cars on fuel. The moment the magic receded, their flow of faith was cut off and the gods dematerialized.

“He could be just using the name,” Kate said. “He could be the child of a god.”

I stared at her.

“Saiman is the grandchild of a god,” Kate said. “Anapa could be also.”

I thought of the office in Anapa’s mansion. That otherworldly office no human being could’ve made. “Do you think the knife might be modeled after his fangs?”

“It’s possible.”

“Does Anubis have any sort of helper animals?” I asked. “Like something about five feet tall with the jaws of a crocodile and…”

“Body of a lion? With a mane?” Kate asked.

Damn it. “Okay. Drop it on me.”

“Demon Ammit, the Devourer of the Dead, the Eater of Hearts, the Destroyer of Souls.”

I put my hand over my face.