Damned by the Ancients Read online

  INFINITY IN DEATH

  Vienna, 1908

  Gabriele Ziegler is a young art student who becomes infatuated with charismatic archeologist Dr. Emeryk Quintillus. Only too late does she realize his true designs on her. He is obsessed with resurrecting Cleopatra and has retained the famed artist Gustav Klimt to render Gabriele as the Queen of the Nile, using ashes from Cleopatra’s mummy mixed with the paint. The result is a lifelike portrait emitting an aura of unholy evil . . .

  Vienna, 2018

  The Mortimer family has moved into Quintillus’s former home, Villa Dürnstein. In its basement they find an original Klimt masterpiece—a portrait of Cleopatra art scholars never knew existed. But that’s not all that resides within the villa’s vault. Nine-year-old Heidi Mortimer tells her parents that a strange man lives there.

  Quintillus’s desire to be with Cleopatra transcends death. His spirit will not rest until he has brought her back from the netherworld. Even if he has to sacrifice the soul of a child . . .

  Visit us at www.kensingtonbooks.com

  Books by Catherine Cavendish

  Nemesis of the Gods

  Wrath of the Ancients

  Waking the Ancients

  Damned by the Ancients

  Published by Kensington Publishing Corporation

  Damned by the Ancients

  Nemesis of the Gods

  Catherine Cavendish

  LYRICAL UNDERGROUND

  Kensington Publishing Corp.

  www.kensingtonbooks.com

  Contents

  Books by Catherine Cavendish

  Damned by the Ancients

  Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue

  Vienna, 2018

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Berlin, 1900

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Berlin, 1908

  Chapter 15

  Vienna, 1908

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Vienna 2018

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  About the Author

  Wrath of the Ancients

  Prologue

  Part One

  Chapter 1

  Copyright

  To the extent that the image or images on the cover of this book depict a person or persons, such person or persons are merely models, and are not intended to portray any character or characters featured in the book.

  LYRICAL UNDERGROUND BOOKS are published by

  Kensington Publishing Corp.

  119 West 40th Street

  New York, NY 10018

  Copyright © 2018 by Catherine Cavendish

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the Publisher, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.

  All Kensington titles, imprints, and distributed lines are available at special quantity discounts for bulk purchases for sales promotion, premiums, fund-raising, educational, or institutional use.

  Special book excerpts or customized printings can also be created to fit specific needs. For details, write or phone the office of the Kensington Sales Manager: Kensington Publishing Corp., 119 West 40th Street, New York, NY 10018. Attn. Sales Department. Phone: 1-80

  First Electronic Edition: October 2018

  eISBN-13: 978-1-5161-0490-1

  eISBN-10: 1-5161-0490-0

  First Print Edition: October 2018

  ISBN-13: 978-1-5161-0490-1

  ISBN-10: 1-5161-0490-0

  Printed in the United States of America

  Dedication

  To Colin, without whom…

  Acknowledgments

  As always, my grateful thanks go to Julia Kavan, friend, fellow horror author and possessor of the keenest eyes I have ever known. Yet again, she has saved me from the folly of my own ways by casting her experienced gaze over an earlier draft of this story. Huge thanks also to my lovely editor Tera Cuskaden and all at Kensington Publishing, and to Shehanne Moore, Susan Roebuck, Hunter Shea, Russell James, Somer Canon, Erin Al Mehairi, Stuart R. West, J.G. Faherty, J.H. Moncrieff and many other wonderful writers and friends who inspire and encourage me to write better. Thank you for all your support.

  Prologue

  Is this what dying feels like?

  Phil Bancroft ran his tongue over his dry lips. Where did that thought come from? He watched Dee, the woman he loved, touch the tip of the gleaming gold dagger. This was not the homecoming he had expected. He had only just returned from New York and they should be in each other’s arms. Dee had told him Paula took the pills and now she was dead. Poor Paula. Phil wished he could feel remorse for his dead wife. Guilt. Anything. After all, she was an innocent obstacle who had been murdered at his lover’s hands. Her only crime was to have been sole inheritor of her father’s fortune. If that man had not cut his younger daughter—Dee—out of his will, Paula would still be alive today. They could have divorced and gone their separate ways. It was his fault she had to be killed.

  Everything they had wanted was now theirs, but Dee seemed different somehow. Distant. A smile played on her lips, but not her usual lighthearted smile. No, this one was almost…cruel.

  “What are you doing with that, Dee?” he asked, nodding at the dagger.

  She shook her head. “Not Dee. She is gone.”

  Phil held out his hand to take the weapon from her and wondered why his fingers trembled. “Don’t mess around. Give me the dagger before one of us gets hurt.”

  Her smile twisted into a snarl. Surely her eyes weren’t that color? Dark blue. No, violet. Dee has brown eyes.

  The library door burst open and a familiar figure strode in. Stefan Bloch—the estate agent in whose hands the owners of the magnificent Villa Dürnstein had placed responsibility for administering the lease. But he had no business here today.

  “What are you doing here?” The words died on Phil’s lips. The estate agent ignored him, made straight for Dee, and took her in his arms. “What the hell?” Phil lurched forward and grabbed Stefan’s arms. He tried to drag him off the woman who was responding all too passionately.

  Stefan let Dee go and wheeled round, landing a stinging blow to the side of Phil’s head. He staggered and fell hard against the library desk.

  The man and the woman towered over him as he lay sprawled on the floor, his hand checking his jaw for damage.

  Phil stared at them. He no longer knew these people. Oh, they looked the same, but their eyes told a different tale. Dee and Stefan were no longer there. So who were they?

  As if she had read his thoughts, the woman spoke. “You are right to cower before us. The woman you knew as Dee is no longer here. Her spirit has passed over. I, Arsinoe, Queen of Egypt and the Nile, inhabit her body.” She indicated Stefan. “The man who inhabited this body is also gone. My lover, Nebunaten, has been reborn in him, but this body is dying. He needs a healthy host.”

  He heard the words, but they couldn’t be true. Someone was playing a cruel joke. Maybe Paula wasn’t dead after all. Yes, that was it
, she must be behind all this. He scrambled to his feet. “Stop this right now. I don’t know what the hell’s going on here, but if you seriously expect me to believe anything you’ve just told me, you are mistaken. Dee—”

  He watched incredulously as the woman he loved threw back her head and laughed. A horrible, hollow sound. “Still you will not believe. You think your lover killed your wife with pills. She did not. She killed her with this.” She waved the dagger. “And that was the last memory your Dee took with her into the afterlife. With the god Set and goddess Sekhmet to aid me, I took her body, just as Nebunaten took the man’s. Now it is your turn to surrender your earthly form.”

  The blade flashed once. Twice. Blood spurted from two deep wounds in his chest. His limbs grew heavier, as if someone had attached lead weights to them. Everything slowed as he sank to his knees, blood pouring through his hands as he desperately fought, in vain, to stanch the flow. A low growl echoed through his brain. The figure of a cat stood on its hind legs, changing to a half-human form before his rapidly dimming eyes. The woman spoke in a foreign tongue and the man took hold of Phil’s shoulders. Something tugged at his spirit, dragging it out of his body as a dark cloud descended on his mind.

  This is what dying feels like.

  And then he knew no more.

  * * * *

  The cat goddess, in her formidable form of Sekhmet, threw back her glossy head and issued a mighty roar, grew dark, and faded from sight.

  Nebunaten touched Arsinoe’s lips with his finger. “Soon, my love. I feel my life force shifting within this shell.” He slumped, and Arsinoe gently eased him onto a chair. His eyes closed. Soon he would wake again in a new body; the healthy body whose wounds were already showing signs of healing. Sekhmet the goddess had worked her magic.

  * * * *

  In his new body, Nebunaten’s spirit swam into consciousness. With his new eyes, he saw his beloved Arsinoe smiling down at him.

  “It is done,” she said, and raised her lover’s hand to her lips. “I have waited for you for so long.”

  “I never gave up hope,” Nebunaten said, caressing her cheek.

  * * * *

  Arsinoe sighed. To be happy at last. She had all she wanted. Except…

  “Cleopatra, my sister’s spirit, is trapped for now, entwined with that of the woman Paula. She was my murderer and must pay, for all time. Her soul must not be allowed to rest with her precious Mark Antony.”

  Nebunaten stripped off Phil’s blood-soaked shirt and threw it on the floor. Arsinoe stroked his smooth chest, the wounds miraculously healed and invisible. Despite her pleasure at being reunited with him, she frowned.

  “You do not believe she will stay trapped?” her lover said.

  “I do not believe he will give up.”

  Nebunaten nodded questioningly at the body he had so recently vacated. Stefan Bloch’s corpse lay slumped in a chair.

  “No. Not him. The archaeologist. Quintillus. His madness grows, and the gods have helped him before. He will have my sister reborn again.”

  Nebunaten stroked her arm and kissed her neck. “He has always needed your intervention, and you have trapped him in the basement. His spirit cannot travel through walls.”

  “His spirit is strong. It grows stronger.”

  “Then we must leave this place. Make our home elsewhere. Egypt…”

  Arsinoe shook her head. “No. Not Egypt. It is not our home. Not for many centuries.” She decided. “But we will leave. Dispose of this body and go.”

  “Why wait? Let it stay here and rot.”

  Arsinoe shook her head. “No. We will bury him. Tonight, after dark.”

  “What about the two women?”

  “They are not a problem. They’re in the basement, safely behind locked doors. Their bodies will rot there before anyone finds them. No one will go down to that basement again. Only if they are found will we need to return. Only if Quintillus escapes. That will not happen. It cannot happen.”

  * * * *

  Nebunaten hoisted Stefan’s body over his shoulder and carried him out to the bottom of the garden where he had dug a deep pit. Arsinoe followed him and watched. Before long, six feet of earth lay on top of the buried corpse. Nebunaten stood back, satisfied with his labors. He re-laid the turf on top, stamping it down until it was impossible to see where the newly dug earth lay.

  “That body would have failed the man in months,” he said. “Maybe only weeks. The cancer had infested him.”

  “His spirit is free now.”

  “His soul has flown across the desert.”

  Above their heads a large white bird soared into the sky; its feathers turned to gray as it flew out of sight.

  Nebunaten took Arsinoe’s hand. “Tomorrow, we will leave this place, and our lives will begin.”

  * * * *

  In the basement of the Villa Dürnstein, shadows moved in the dim light penetrating through the old, long-disused kitchen windows. A tall figure, dressed in a black jacket that reached to his knees, sat at an old pine table. On his head he wore a stovepipe hat, and his long black hair trailed across his shoulders. His gray, wrinkled hands reached into his jacket and removed his pocket watch. He studied it for a moment before returning it. He touched his face, with its neatly trimmed beard, feeling the scaly, almost mummified skin.

  I will find you, my queen, my beloved Cleopatra. You have seen, death cannot separate us. You will come back to me and the gods will reunite us as we were meant to be. This time it will be forever.

  A distant noise interrupted his thoughts. He cocked his head to listen. Footsteps. Adult. One person. No, two…and someone running. A child. They had a child with them. He heard girlish laughter. A smile spread across his dead face.

  A new family.

  Vienna, 2018

  Chapter 1

  “That’s the last of them.” Yvonne Mortimer breathed a sigh of relief and sank onto the couch, grateful for the deep cushions that cocooned her aching limbs. “I don’t care if I never see a cardboard box ever again.”

  Ryan, her husband, rewarded her hard work with her favorite expression. The one where his eyes sparkled in the wake of a smile, emphasizing the high cheekbones that were her favorite feature of his. Well, one of them, at least.

  “I’ll open that champagne,” he said, planting a kiss on her forehead. “You’ve earned it. The bottle should be well chilled by now.”

  He left her alone in the sumptuous library and she looked up at the richly illustrated ceiling. Cleopatra’s entry into Tarsus painted by Gustav Klimt. There she sat in her golden barge, her splendid white gown floating around her. That must have cost a bundle. All that gold leaf. All those people on the banks of the river—or was it the sea? Geography had never been Yvonne’s strongest subject at school. Whatever it was, there were plenty of sightseers, all exquisitely detailed. There were some slaves, by their costumes…and over there a young woman in a flowing scarlet gown, holding back some reeds that were obscuring her view. The serpentine bracelet on her arm gleamed with yet more gold leaf.

  Ryan reappeared, bearing champagne flutes and an ice bucket containing an opened bottle of Bollinger.

  “Here you go,” he said, handing her a glass of frantically fizzing wine.

  “To us,” Yvonne said, raising her glass.

  “To us.”

  They clinked glasses.

  “Can I have some?” Their nine-year-old, with bright blue eyes and shining gold hair, stood framed in the doorway.

  “No,” Yvonne said. “But you can have some lemonade.”

  “No. Almdudler,” the little girl cried, running to her mother for a hug.

  Yvonne laughed. They had only been in Vienna a matter of weeks and already their daughter was being influenced by the local TV commercials. The alpine cry of “Almdudler!” had become a particular favorite, though one taste of th
e distinctive fizzy, herbal drink had been quite enough for Yvonne. Over the top of her daughter’s head, she said, “You’ve started something now, ever since you bought her a bottle yesterday. She loves it. Sorry, sweetheart, we’ll have to get some from the supermarket when we go shopping tomorrow.”

  Her daughter released herself from her mother’s arms and pouted.

  Ryan tried to grab her hand but she pulled away. “Now, Heidi, don’t behave like a spoiled child. You’re a big girl now. You can have lemonade today and Almdudler tomorrow. Okay?”

  Heidi seemed to consider this for a moment before a bright smile returned to her face. “Okay, Dad. As long as you don’t forget.”

  “Promise. High five?” Heidi smacked her small hand into his much bigger one and laughed the tinkling sound that always tugged at Yvonne’s heart.

  They had almost lost Heidi to meningitis when she was eighteen months old. She had made a full recovery, but only after months of anxiety when her development had to be carefully monitored for any signs of lasting effects. Yvonne thanked whatever deity might be listening that they had been spared the fate of so many parents. Heidi had grown into a happy, healthy child with a lively imagination and quick wit. Toward the end of August she would start in grade four at the International School here in Vienna and, with excellent school reports behind her, the future looked bright for their miracle child.

  Yvonne joined Ryan and Heidi in the kitchen. “I’ve always wanted plenty of space to cook in,” she said, stroking the granite counter. “Weird about that basement though, isn’t it? I wonder what’s down there.” She strolled up to the strong, stainless steel door. “Who padlocks a locked and bolted door?”

  Ryan placed the bottle of lemonade he had been pouring for Heidi back in the fridge. “Who wears a belt and braces? But some people do, you know. Some men at least.”

  “Suspenders,” Yvonne said, absently, as she peered closely at the locks.

  “What?”

  Yvonne turned her head toward him. “They call braces suspenders in the States. You’ll be working with a lot of Americans here. They won’t understand you. Oh, and if you’re using a pencil, don’t ask for a rubber.”