Jewel Of The Nile

Chapter Twenty-One

Midnight – the witching hour, presumably, though no one ever called it that except for Muggles. Even so, Sybil liked the term – it was poetic.

God – how long had it been since she did this? Ten years, twelve? And yet it had come back to her the other night so easily, her dancing partner of half a decade … as if she’d never left it.

Shed the lined skin, the greying hair. Peel off that sweetly vague persona you’re so tired of, like yesterday’s underwear.

Goodbye, Norma Jean.

And a big fat hello to Marilyn Monroe.

Sybil shook back her pale blonde crop and studied herself in the mirror with a critical eye. Good colour, she decided – hell, it might even be natural, who knows? – but it wasn’t exactly the thing, for what she had to do tonight.

Flamboyant was okay, but she needed a new look.

Something exotic, something different – something to catch his eye. Picking up her wand, she narrowed her eyes in silent visualisation for a moment, then began to tweak that almost-Nordic image in the mirror: more width to the cheekbones, more flare to the slim nose, more pigment in the skin – and more, and more, it wasn’t just a suntan she was after, after all. And then, the small changes – blue eyes to tilting Nefertiti brown, wheat-pale hair to ink-black.

A bit more length in the neck – yes, just like that … and perhaps a trim? Almost a buzz cut, Sybil thought, but not quite – oh, that was nice, indeed, a sleek jet seal’s-head that curved to her skull like another layer of skin.

Killer, it’s a killer face – set off by the simple asceticism of the haircut, as elegant and exotic as a young Phylicia Rashad. And now for the body to match, which was easier – cantilever the hips, lengthen the legs, widen the shoulders, shrink the breasts to sweet little tennis-ball handfuls.

Ah, so.

And swathe the whole racehorse package in luxury and danger – black cigarette pants, black cashmere jumper, English leather half-boots. Chunks of silver gleaming at her ears, bangling her wrists.

Kohl at her eyes. A slick of shine on her lips, Corvette-red and just as fast. A couple of grand in American Express traveler’s cheques, folded neatly into the tiny black-crocodile Judith Leiber handbag.

Perfect, she thought with a last satisfied glance in the mirror; you haven’t lost your touch, Sybbie, even after all this time.

And then rolled her eyes heavenward, as Salazar Slytherin materialised at the foot of her bed with a low wolf whistle.

"Do you mind?"

**

"Not if you don’t," Sal said, and smirked as she sent her bottle of Shalimar whizzing straight through him to bounce harmlessly off her pillows. "Temper, temper," he chided.

Sybil glared at him. "Aren’t you missing Mr. Bean?"

Sal, who had discovered Muggle television within an hour of arriving at Hermione’s flat, had juvenile tastes in entertainment and wasn’t in the least embarrassed about them – her snipe only made him laugh.

"It’s far more interesting finding out what you’re up to, ma femme dangereuse," he noted, unrepentant, and got another perfume-bottle through the forehead for his trouble.

"Voyeurism is creepy, Sal. Cut it out."

He didn’t bother to acknowledge this. "And where are you taking the act tonight, pray tell?"

Sybil studied him speculatively. "I’m going to look for Mikhail." As you very well know. "In Marrakesh."

Sal whistled. "That’s where he is?"

"According to my Location Charm of ten minutes ago." She rubbed irritably at a fleck of tarnish on one of her bangles. "You’ll stay here? Hold down the fort?" At Sal’s nod, her eyes flicked right, toward the wall her bedroom shared with Hermione’s. "The brat’s asleep?"

Sal’s ghostly eyebrows rose. "Just because the two of you don’t get along doesn’t make her a brat," he pointed out mildly. "She has a good heart – she’s just impatient with your act, that’s all." He paused meaningfully. "She’d like the real you a lot better, you know."

Sybil conceded the point with a world-weary shrug and a slight inclination of her head toward the beauty in the mirror.

"Wouldn’t we all?"

**

When it came to travelling in Morocco, Sybil could hold her own.

She’d spent a considerable amount of time in Casablanca – both at the tables and between the sheets (with a nameless member of that elite society to which she had come to refer – in her own head, at least – as the Local Talent). She’d had a few good weekends of roulette in Tangiers. And, though there was no gambling scene to speak of there, she had even once rented a villa in Fés, for a few nights of solitary stargazing from the rooftop terrace.

She had not, however, been to Marrakesh – not, she imagined, that twelve-thirty on a Tuesday morning was the best time for sightseeing.

No, better to find Mikhail, close the deal, and have it over with. On the other hand, that could take longer than she’d imagined – instead of Apparating into the quiet little Place de la Liberté, as she’d planned, she’d somehow miscalculated and touched down instead into the very centre of the Djemaa el-Fna, Morocco’s nightly-held equivalent of Venetian Carnaval, of Mardi Gras in New Orleans. And from the looks of things, the party wasn’t going to end anytime soon.

Oops.

Fortunately, the square was sufficiently crowded – and busy – and poorly lit – that one dark-clad woman’s abrupt materialisation from thin air went seemingly unnoticed. Sybil palmed her handbag more securely and stared around her, at the spectacles occurring in all directions: jugglers, storytellers, acrobats, herbalists, groups of swarthy Bedouins and convivial felt-capped locals and khaki-clad tourists, blinking with exhaustion but determined not to miss anything.

Food stalls. Juice bars. Shopkeepers. An old man in a loincloth, singlehandedly peeling the skin from a living cobra with his teeth as the crowd cheered him on.

Sybil turned away from that particular tableau with a grimace – master that trick, she thought, and you could write your own ticket as a performance artist in SoHo – and bumped squarely into an old Berber woman in a brightly-fringed headdress that seemed rather at odds with her lined old face. Her eyes, however, were a brilliant, startling blue.

"Can I help you?" she asked, and Sybil – thankful for the Comprehension Charm she’d muttered before Apparating, shook her head.

"Do I look like I need help?"

The old woman – seemingly unsurprised by Sybil’s easy mastery of her language – considered this somberly.

"Two men wait for you," she said. "One you once knew, and would buy now with gold not your own. But he has sworn his allegiance to another, and he awaits you with murder in his heart."

Mikhail. Sybil wet her lips nervously. "And the other?"

"Runs from what he loves," the old woman said. "Holds answers to questions he doesn’t know. And seeks what he cannot find."

Well, that could be anybody. Sybil, too unsettled to be dismissive, didn’t reply – but the old woman didn’t seem to expect an answer; she was fumbling in a pocket of her voluminous cotton robe, and now held out to Sybil a bit of powder in a twist of paper.

"Love is too dear, and cannot be bought or sold," she said. "What I offer is time – for the slaking of a thirst, and then forgetfulness."

"Time?"

She stepped closer, motioned for Sybil to bend down to her. "Mixed with wine, pleasure," she murmured into Sybil’s ear. "And afterward, questions – whatever you would ask, quickly, before he sleeps – and in the morning, he’ll not remember."

Hm. Potentially useful, that. "Thank you," Sybil said, taking the pinch of powder, and felt a frisson of cold run through her as she tucked it into her bag and strolled on.

Another Seer – and speaking in the kind of riddles she’d mastered but never learned to love, just as her own Eye had seemingly begun to hold out on her. Well, it couldn’t be that hard.

Two men, eh? One you would buy – that had to be Mikhail … Mikhail with the angel face, Mikhail with the talented con-artist’s hands, Mikhail the clever, amoral Durmstrang alumnus, who’d been doing the same thing as Sybil herself fifteen years ago, and a bit more to boot.

Mikhail the halfblood, Mikhail the assassin, Mikhail her on-again-off-again lover, who had taken on wizarding and Muggle contracts alike and fulfilled them with a careless kind of cheerfulness that froze Sybil’s blood. Mikhail, who’d scared her and excited her and had quite possibly been as much in love with her as she with him, though even then Sybil had been smart enough to know that being loved by someone like Mikhail was probably worse than being hated by him.

Mikhail – the other, unspoken, reason that she’d taken Dumbledore’s offer, back in Moscow. And the best ace she had to play against Lucius Malfoy.

But he has sworn his allegiance to another, and awaits you with murder in his heart.

Sybil sat down on the stone edge of one of the marketplace’s chittering fountains and swallowed hard.

If Mikhail had thrown in with Malfoy, Hermione Granger’s life wasn’t worth a Confederate dollar in 1867.

But that still left the other half of the riddle: the other man, seeking what he couldn’t find, throwing away love with both hands.

Waiting for her.

Who could it be? she wondered – and then, as the crowd before her cheered a final time for the snake-skinner and began to drift away, she saw a familiar black-clad figure standing alone in the middle of the marketplace, and felt her throat go dry.

She didn’t know why Severus Snape was in Marrakesh in the middle of the night. But she had the feeling she was about to find out.