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Eyes?

“Nice underwear!”

Dropping her skirt, she wondered why she’d expected him to be Australian. “Who are you?”

“Lance Benedict!” Tossing the shark aside, he bounded to his feet. “You escaped from her, didn’t you?”

“Who?”

“Meryat!”

“No.” She stepped inside and let the flap fall. “How did you get here?”

“The same way you did, I imagine!”

“Do us both a favor and don’t imagine anything.” Technically, Bystanders couldn’t affect the Otherside, but in all the times she’d taken the elevator to the beach, Claire had never realized it was on the Otherside so…wait. Could there be more than one Otherside? Would that not depend onhow many sides reality started with? And did that not depend on an agreed upon definition of reality?

My head hurts.

“Did she throw you from her dahabeeyah?”

“Her what?” With any luck, there was some variety of painkiller in the first aid kit.

“Her boat. You’re wet! Did she throw you from her boat?”

“Who isshe?”

“Meryat, the reanimated undead! I’m the only one who knows how to stop her!”

Claire looked down at the two aspirins in her hand and realized they were going to be insufficient.“Please, tell me everything from the beginning.”

“In the beginning, only the ocean existed, and on this ocean appeared an egg from which was born the sun-god, Atum. He had four children, Geb and Shu, Tefnut and Nut. Planting their feet on Geb…”

“Lance.”

“Yeah?”

“Skip ahead.”

*

Okay. There was a 3,000-year-old mummy and the archaeologist who’d freed her from her cursed existence in the guest house with Dean and Austin. Given the type of clientele the guest house attracted, this was in no way surprising. A pair of Shriners and their wives, yes. Reanimated Egyptian noblewomen, no.

But Lance believed that Meryat was dangerous, that she would suck dry the lives she came into contact with until she regained her former power, that she would then use that power to take over the world. He also believed that Dr. Rebik was under some kind of mind control that kept him from seeing Meryat as she really was and that the beach was her initial attempt to bury the world under the sands of ancient Egypt.

Just because he was wrong about that last point, did that automatically make him wrong about the rest?

Claire glanced across the cabana at Lance; currently making entries in a PDA he’d pulled from a belt pouch. She wanted to believe he’d spent way, way too much time in the sun, but the fact was that herehe was.

Dean obviously hadn’t believed Lance’s story, or he wouldn’t have sent him on his little elevator ride. As Dean gave pretty much everyone he met the benefit of the doubt, he had to have doubted Lance more than Meryat and Dr. Rebik.

Conclusion; Dean and Austin were in no danger. Lance was merely a Bystander who’d applied a Saturday Afternoon Movie explanation to his first contact with the metaphysical.

And he’d spent way, way too much time in the sun.

Since they knew they were being hunted, she couldn’t come up with a reason for the mummy and Dr. Rebik to stay at the guest house for more than one night. As soon as they were safely away, Dean would be up to retrieve Indiana Lance from his sandcastle of delusion.

Although the thought of seeing Dean made her heart beat faster, and she missed Austin with an almost physical ache, she had to get back to the mall. She’d left an eighteen-month-old cat guarding an Immortal King, her little sister was out scouting the darkside, and, if not stopped, the post-segue owners would not be exaggerating when they advertised the “sale to end all sales.”

If this was the Otherside, then she could lift the stack of extra towels and find a pen and piece of paper tucked beneath them. Holding that image in her mind, she lifted the towels. Three tiny bones, a catnip square, and what looked like the spleen of a small animal. Either Austin had found something to hunt on their last visit, or he was casting auguries again. Either way, she didn’t want to know.

Claire let the towels drop and turned to Lance who was stowing his PDA in its pouch.“I don’t suppose you have a pen and some paper? I need to leave a note.”

“Better!” He crossed the cabana in two long strides, holding out a small black book and a pencil. “When you’re on a dig at Karnak, you need a writing implement you can fix with a knife!”

“Do you have a knife?”

“I have a pencil sharpener.”

“Okay.”

*

She’d entered by water; she’d have to exit by water. Unfortunately, that meant a sudden and total immersion with no thoughts of vicious not-a-squids waiting for her below the surface.

“Where are you going?” Kicking out a fine spray of sand, Lance hurried to catch up.

“To the headlands.”

“Great idea! The high ground will give us a chance to see where Meryat’s hiding. She’s sneaky, but there’s got to be a palace around here somewhere.”

Claire sighed. He was consistently delusional at least.