Inside Straight

Klaus studied his friend’s face. He is John, and he is not. “Sekhmet, my lady—might I speak with John?”

His eyes narrowed. “If that is your desire.” The words were curt. After a moment, though, the face before him seemed to soften. Klaus was still uncertain. “John?”

A wan smile. “Yes. I was dreaming.”

“A good dream?”

“Kate was in it. Curveball.” He sounded almost himself again, like the boy that Klaus had met on American Hero. Though John was almost two years his elder, somehow Klaus still thought of him as a younger brother, the same way he thought of Kurt and Konrad. “I shouldn’t be dreaming of her, though,” the boy went on. “When two wild cards get together…my mother told me of the risks as soon as I was old enough to understand. That’s why she was always frightened for me whenever I did anything that might have…whenever I did anything.”

“All mothers are fearful for their sons,” said Klaus.

“Not all of them keep a detective agency on retainer as babysitters, though.” John pushed a hand through his hair. “I’m surprised Mom hasn’t sent Jay Ackroyd to bring me back yet.”

“Perhaps you should go back. I did not like the way you looked today. Those bruises …”

“They’re fading.” John picked disconsolately at his bowl of lentils. “Bullets melt when they touch our skin.”

“Ja,” said Klaus, “but that is not to say they do not harm you. If you throw a rat in a canvas sack and beat on it with a club, the sack will not tear, but the rat will still be smashed. The bullets may be smashing you up inside. And if they shoot her lion with some larger round, a cannon or a rocket—”

“She’ll die, and I’ll die with her,” John snapped. “You sound like my mother now. She flies, you know. That’s her power. Bullets don’t bounce off her the way they bounce off you. She can’t shoot balls of fire or stop time or raise the dead, the way my father could. All she can do is fly. When she was my age, she had these claws made, like big steel fingernails, and whenever there was trouble she’d slip them on to fight. She fought the Astronomer and his crazy Masons, she fought the Swarm monsters, she even came to Egypt and fought the Nur’s people, with only wings and claws! I’m her son as much as Fortunato’s. I’m not going to hide away in some monastery for fear of who I am. If I die, I die. I’m staying.”

~ ~ ~

It was morning before Klaus returned to the tent he shared with Bugsy. By the time he had left John Fortune, the gates of the New Temple had been closed and barred for the night, and no amount of argument could persuade Babi and his temple guards to open them again. Klaus could have conjured up his broadsword and slashed apart the gates, just as he had once slashed apart the gates at Neuschwanstein, but he did not wish to offend John’s fellow gods. Instead, he had made his apologies to Jonathan’s bugs, and begged a bed for the night from the temple priests.

With his motorbike as dry as a mummy’s casket, he’d had no choice but to walk back from the New Temple, shoving his way through throngs of desperate refugees intent on going in the opposite direction. The whole camp was in turmoil, and many were leaving, getting away from here as far and fast as they could. The slaughter of the jokers in the Valley of the Kings and the smoke-laced struggle in the Valley of the Queens had become common knowledge. Even Tut and Gamel had heard the tales. When Klaus came trudging up, Tut wanted to know if Lohengrin had killed them all. Gamel was more concerned about the Royal Enfield. Who would pay them now, without a motorbike to watch? “In Aswan, I will buy another motorbike,” Klaus promised. “A big, fast one, all shiny.”

Jonathan was blogging when Klaus entered their tent. “The Crusader returns,” he said, without looking up from his laptop. “The talk is you and Fortune slew the whole Egyptian army.”

“A few soldiers only. More are coming. General Yusuf—”

“—has given the gods their marching orders, I know. I’m writing about it now. It won’t happen, though. Taweret will never abandon the New Temple. You can bet the farm on that.”

“I do not own a farm,” Klaus said, puzzled, “and if the army comes, the New Temple cannot be held.”

“Course not. Which means it’s time for the three of us to follow the Yellow Brick Road to Aswan. Okay, you’re the Tin Woodsman and John’s the not-so-Cowardly Lion, so I suppose that makes me the Scarecrow, but who’s Dorothy? Hey, I’ve got a great name for this tremendous historical event that we’ve all been swept up in. Mao did the Long March, the Cherokee had a Trail of Tears, and now we’ve got… drum-roll, please…the Road of Woe!”

“The Road of Woe?” Klaus made a face.

Jonathan looked crestfallen. “You don’t like it?”

“Is stupid.”

“The Woeful Way? The Terrible Trek?”

“Is more stupid.” Klaus started shoving clothes into his pack. He had a lot of American Hero T-shirts. “John says he will not go.”