Poor little thing, she actually thought, tucking his coverlet more tightly around him before leaving the room.

Now that poor little thing wielded more power than anyone else in the world.

Cleopatra had spent every moment of the past year at his mercy, fruitlessly bribing and extracting promises of protection from her neighboring rulers, all the while comforting her husband. Antony was guilt-ridden, blaming himself for the defeat at Actium. Cleopatra did not blame her husband. She was the queen. She should have known better than to do what she’d done in that battle. Funds for the continuing war had seemed the most important thing, and so, when Actium began to look like a defeat, she fled for Alexandria with her gold. Her husband followed her, his ships shielding hers, and this armed Octavian with damning propaganda, painting Antony as loyal to a foreign queen instead of to his home country.

Antony’s Roman troops, some fifty thousand men betrayed by his departure, deserted him, leaving Egypt with a fraction of the legions it had previously commanded, and Octavian declared victory, shouting his triumph from end to end of the world.

Now he came nearly unopposed to the shores of Alexandria, held off only by Antony and his small remaining forces. He thought he’d already won the country.

He had not.

The ritual knife had been sharpened enough to kill without the victim noticing the wound. If the spell failed, however, it would not be Octavian who was killed. Cleopatra would never get close enough to him.

No. If the summoning failed, it would be she who died, and by her own hand. She could not let the Romans take her as their captive, a trophy to parade in the streets of Italy. She and Antony had long since agreed that if the city were taken, they’d both commit suicide. It would be the only honorable course of action left to them.

Where is he? Another jolt of panic ran through Cleopatra. It had been hours since the messenger was sent, hours since Antony should have returned.

She shook herself back to focus. She could not stop to worry. There was no time. Brilliant crimson filled the agate goblet, and Sekhmet would accept it.

She must, or Egypt would fall, and Cleopatra and Antony with her. The queen of Egypt was not ready to die.

Thus far, this war had been fought entirely between mortals.

Things were about to change.

Cleopatra threw her hands into the air as she’d practiced, spinning like the desert winds, calling up the forces that lay stored in the sand. The guttural syllables of the spell twisted, clicking and melting from her mouth, her tongue tasting the bitter words and then flinging them out into the heavens.

The door shook with a frantic pounding. Cleopatra stopped midphrase, the goblet poised over the bared teeth of the icon. Who was brave enough to interrupt the queen? She could think of only one person who would dare, and only one person who also knew how to access the secret passageway that led from the palaces to the mausoleum.