She lifted her hand toward him. Her long limbs, her delicate fingers, all of it smeared with red. She cradled something covered in cloth.

“What have you done?” he asked, his voice strangely high and sharp. He was near to swooning, and yet anger tripped up from within him, triumphing over fear. “There were a hundred slaves aboard this ship.”

“Did you think they were people?” she asked. She raised her chin, and there was a trace of the old pride. “They were not treated as people. They were animals on this vessel. The Romans feed them the same food they feed the lions. Less food. I was a queen, and now I am a lion. I was a lion and now I am a slave. I was a slave, and now I am a beast. As a beast, I hunger. Should I not be fed?”

“Where are the rest?” Nicolaus asked.

Cleopatra moved her hand to indicate the hole in the ship’s side. There was, Nicolaus noticed now, a shred of fabric clinging to the splintered wood.

The sharks. Nicolaus understood it suddenly, the mass of silver flesh tracing the route of the vessel.

“If you knew me once, then help me now,” she said.

Nicolaus stepped back. He did not want what she had to give him.

Cleopatra pulled the cloth in her arms aside and revealed the face of a small boy, perhaps four years old. Ashen cheeks, dark, knotted hair.

The child’s eyes opened and he looked at Nicolaus, terrified. The historian snatched him from Cleopatra. The boy was unwounded.

“This was his mother.” She touched a corpse with her fingertips. “My hands were on him, when I realized.”

She opened her fists and revealed long scores in the flesh.

The grief on the monster’s face crippled Nicolaus with guilt. She was not wholly a monster. He could see the Cleopatra he had known, still inside.

“I would not kill a child. You must believe me. She takes my body, and she hungers. I thought I was strong enough to resist her.”

The historian wrestled with his soul. He’d helped to do this. She was here because of him.

Sekhmet cared nothing for gold, nothing for gems. All she desired was blood. Once she began to kill, she could not stop. That was her nature. Cleopatra had killed not of her own volition but because he’d translated that spell, translated it badly, and summoned the goddess with no protections for the summoner.

Had he not, the queen would have been dead and buried these months. Had he not, Nicolaus would never have found himself aboard this vessel, hunted by Romans, a criminal.

“What do you want from me?” he asked.

“My children are in Rome with the emperor. Help me find them. He killed my husband. He killed my son. He killed me.”

“And yet you live.”

“Then you do not know what the living are.”

She grabbed Nicolaus’s hand and placed it on her breast. He tried to pull away from her, but she held him there until he felt the absence of her heartbeat.