He was the man who controlled Rome, and Rome controlled the world. His enemies were dead, all but her. He had the power in his hands. He would run her through with his sword. Either that, or he’d burn her, a thought that seemed more and more attractive. He’d been childish, imagining that she would set the world aflame. It was his own fears controlling him. What witch could survive a burning? He’d turn her to ash, and let her try to rise from that.

Octavian stood up from Alexander’s tomb and looked down one last time at the shriveled figure lying within. Alexander had been killed at twenty-nine, long before he’d reached his full potential. Octavian was thirty-three. He did not plan to die this day.

“There is more world out there than you knew,” he told Alexander, testing a certainty he did not wholly feel. “More things than you ever dreamt of. I’ve seen the world, and it belongs to me. All of it is mine.”

He turned to march up the stairs. The room echoed with his last exhalation, the dust of empires rising and falling behind him.

“Mine.”

17

They filled the room, arriving from beneath the floor, slipping through impossibly small cracks and portals. They came from above, nearly deafening Cleopatra with their shrill song.

She cringed, her rage gone as quickly as it had arrived. Now she was terrified of the pain that would surely come. They’d tear her skin, and she’d live. They would wound her flesh, and she would remain awake, feeling each ripping movement. Feeling each creature —and she knew them now, not birds but bats— diving toward her heart. Their tiny fangs, their scrabbling claws. Her body, though it was changed, was still hers. It was her only possession, and these were thieves coming to break it apart.

They would find her empty.

Something else was coming, though. She could smell a musky, dry odor. Snakes slithering across the stone, their sleek bodies blending into a rippling surface, roiling as a storming sea. And rats, their skeletons bending against the narrow passages, their fur glittering black, their eyes glowing.

Her subjects.

She laughed, the sound mixing with a sob. Queen of Egypt, in her lost, gilded robes. Naked before her true citizens, she must offer them her last words. Oh, the proclamations she might make, here in the dark.

“Save me,” she whispered. “Your queen commands you.”

She laughed again, feeling hysteria rising. Nothing to calm her here, no wines or potions, no Antony to press his fingertips against her lips. She felt the rasp of snakeskin on her ankle. The brush of leather wings on her face. The lash of a rat’s tail, whipping through her fingers.

This is how it would end, then. This is how it would be, from here until the end of time. The queen and her creatures. Eaten, but not consumed.

A snake pressed its skull beneath her breast, fitting its triangular head under the chain and then flowing over her skin. It slipped up her throat, and appeared before her, its eyes glittering in the dark, gazing at her with what seemed to be intention.