Cleopatra felt dizzy with starvation and strange knowledge. She could feel every corner of Alexandria, like a creature seeing through the dark to find its prey. She could see things, even as she sat caged in the palace.

Evening fell, shadows dancing over the stones, and the streets of Alexandria lit up with the wildly spent gold of the Romans. Every brothel in the city was busy, and every doctor, too, quelling the poxes that were spreading from whores to soldiers and from soldiers to whores. Goats were being slaughtered for feasting, and bulls were bleeding into basins. A troupe of young men walked below the palace window, drunk and disarrayed, laughing raucously. The smell of blood and lust and anticipation rose through the open windows and filled the room.

Cleopatra could wait no longer. She was caged, yes, but not chained, and suddenly, she felt she could break free. Octavian pretended for the sake of her people’s trust that she was in the palace as his guest, willingly surrendering her throne to him, and now she would take advantage of his error. There were few guards. She would be out.

“Charmian,” she called, making her voice as sweet as mead. “Eiras. Tend your queen.”

They’d fit her out for the night, she told herself, and she’d slip out and leave them. Her cloak dark and rough. Her hair braided as a commoner’s. She’d walk the streets, unseen. Inhale the evening air. That would be enough. Surely that would be enough.

The girls entered the room. They were such pretty things, their throats long above their gowns, their cheeks ablaze, nervous that she’d heard them gossiping. She smiled, pretending she had not.

“What will you have us do?” asked Eiras.

The queen rose from her couch, her body suddenly vibrating.

The girl came closer, a questioning look on her face.

Her expression changed as she saw the queen’s eyes. They were wide and golden, dilated. They were not human.

Cleopatra felt the maid’s shock and saw herself through the girl’s sight. She was a monster. An animal.

She inhaled the girl’s fear as though it were her own. Her body filled with desire, a searing heat, a slashing hunger.

She sprang.

12

Cleopatra’s teeth were on the girl’s throat just as the scream rose from it. The beautiful, unheard sound of Eiras’s voice rippled through the queen, absorbed into her body like music.

Her blood was salty and bright, and the queen’s fingers spread on her servant’s skin, holding her smooth, bronze face. Seventeen, was she? A child. Eiras struggled in her grip, making muted, desperate sounds. Her life was strong. With each movement, Cleopatra drank the girl’s youth, her strength, her ambition. She drank her history, her dreams, her hopes, her jealousies and sorrows.

“Help me,” the girl whispered, and Cleopatra felt the plea traveling from Eiras’s heart and all the way through her lips, the words like teetering boats on a swift-flowing river, before they coursed out of the girl’s body and into Cleopatra herself.