She rose to the ceiling, and beside her all the glow of Egypt’s treasure was overshadowed. She was the daughter of Ra, Nicolaus had told Cleopatra, created from the sun god’s fiery eye. Her heat shimmered in the air.

“Sekhmet,” Cleopatra whispered, and the goddess roared, the sound rattling the coins and echoing from the walls of the mausoleum.

Where were Cleopatra’s servants? Fallen against the stairs, sleeping as if drugged, guarding the room from intruders. How could they sleep in the presence of this?

Antony slept as well, his skin pale and cold. Dead. A pang of grief stabbed through the queen’s chest, a sudden sense of doom. This was the end of everything, and she’d brought it on herself by thinking she could have everything and pay no price.

“Bring him back,” she ordered Sekhmet. Her fears did not matter. “Bring him back to me. Help me to avenge this.”

Cleopatra lifted her crown from her head. Egypt would belong to the old gods again. Farewell to Isis, farewell to the Greeks and the Romans. She would give the country back to its beginnings, to its lions and crocodiles, to its jackals and falcons and cobras.

The goddess gazed at her, a flicker of amusement in her wide, yellow eyes.

Not enough, she said, or didn’t say. It was known. More would be required. The heart’s blood of the last queen of Egypt, Cleopatra knew suddenly. That would be the sacrifice required to bring him back from the Duat, Egypt’s Underworld.

“Take what you wish,” Cleopatra said, throwing her arms out from her sides, offering her throat, her breasts, and her wrists. She’d survived worse than this. She was surviving it now.

The goddess leapt over the treasure, her teeth bared, her talons extended, and her skin began to shine with the pitiless glare of the noontime sun. Her fingers and limbs smoked, blurring with heat, and Cleopatra steeled herself for the agony that was to come. A burning brand, a sizzling impact, she thought. But this was not to be.

Sekhmet transformed. A tremendous serpent coiled before the queen. It looked deep into Cleopatra, assessing her weaknesses.

Cleopatra was grateful. Serpents were the sacred creatures of her line. They were beautiful things, snakes, and this one was no exception. Its scales were gilded emeralds, the eyes cruel rubies.

Cleopatra glimpsed a flash of diamond fangs as the goddess struck her throat. Still no pain. Only a sense of time stopping, a spinning, the sound of air rushing past. Then her neck burned with a pain that was not pain but a brilliant heat. An overpowering sweetness swept over her.

Cleopatra discovered that her feet were no longer touching the floor. Her body —she felt such tenderness for it now, for this fragile, mortal body— hung from the serpent’s teeth, and as though from miles away, she watched her own skin pale. Her fingers clenched and then released. Her vision filled with the places beyond the night sky, the blue-white shine of the edge of the moon. She was dying, and yet she cared nothing about it, nothing about anything that had ever happened or that would happen in the future.