“She is not missing,” Octavian said. “She is dead and buried.”

The little girl looked at him.

“Then why are you so afraid?” she asked.

21

Cleopatra pulsed with fury and grief, with guilt and despair, and most of all, with rage. Her empty heart was a hornet’s nest.

The Romans had taken both of her loves. She remembered the songs she’d sung to Caesarion in the womb. She remembered the feel of him suckling at her breast. Cleopatra twisted, her body pounding with visions of destruction. Of revenge.

You are mine, said the voice in her head, a whisper now, a voice that sounded like her own.

“I am yours,” Cleopatra said aloud.

She would tear Rome to the ground. She’d make the streets run with blood, pile bodies wherever Octavian walked, in the Forum, in the Circus Maximus. His wife, his generals, his sister, his friends. Would the citizens scream in the streets, saluting their brave emperor, killer of children? She’d fill the temple of the vestal virgins with blood. All the gods of Rome would bow to her. All the leaders of Rome would beg her mercy, and she would not grant it. Antony and Caesarion would be avenged. They would be avenged.

All around her, during the execution, she’d sensed the goddess, felt her bloody smile, heard her rumbling breath, but she couldn’t see her anywhere. As she fell to the ground, as her child was murdered, she’d realized that the goddess was not in the crowd but inside her own body.

Cleopatra could feel her, furious, blinding in her desire. She could not tell what part of these feelings were her own and what part belonged to Sekhmet.

She hungered now, so desperately that had there been blood pooled on the stones, she would have lapped it up. As the stars appeared and she healed from the damage done by the sun, her strength increased. A tongue of fire made its way up her spine, licking at her like a lioness, rasping away any resistance she had left.

Feed, her body commanded, and she would not deny it. There would be no more forgetting what she had done. Her eyes were open now.

There were people sleeping behind easily entered windows, her body told her. There were people drunk in the streets, easily harvested. She stopped herself, with effort.

She did not know enough about what she had become. The sun had thrown her to the earth, weakening her, breaking her power. It was only luck that the Romans hadn’t found her there, lying in the dirt, and brought her back to their prisons.

She must learn what she was. She must understand how to control it. She could not afford to surrender completely, to lose herself in hunger and fury.

It seemed a thousand years ago, those metal bowls, the lighting of incense, the scrolls. Sekhmet’s order, Nicolaus had said. In Thebes, there was a temple to the goddess. Priestesses to the old gods. A place where she might find knowledge.