Jewel Of The Nile

Chapter Eight

"Reparo," said the small girl reprovingly, shouldering past him, and tapped the two halves of the postcard with her wand. Draco scowled at the newly reunited halves of the Sphinx, then back at her.

When in doubt, he thought, pull a Snape.

"Did it ever occur to you that I might have done that because I wanted it that way?" he demanded. She arched one silvery eyebrow at him.

"No."

Somehow, Snape generally pulled it off better than that. Draco tried again.

"What makes you think I want company, anyway?"

The girl just wrinkled her nose at this, as if it wasn’t worth a reply, and hopped up to perch on the edge of the library table. It was impossible to guess her age; she could have been anywhere from a tall-for-her-age nine to a diminutive fifteen – or, if you went by the knowing, adult expression on her face, a midget twenty-five. With her waist-length curls, half a shade lighter than his own hair, and her startlingly direct gaze – half boardroom president, half kiddie-porn – she looked vaguely, oddly familiar. Draco peered more closely at her.

"Have we met?"

She arranged her robes into more graceful folds around her knees and tossed her head matter-of-factly. "You’re thinking of my older sister Fleur. I’m Gabrielle."

Ah. Right. I see it now.

"Delacour," Draco murmured, and was rewarded with a cool little nod.

"She’s the pretty one. I’m the smart one."

Gabrielle’s tone conveyed her utter belief that she’d gotten the better end of the bargain. Draco’s lips twitched.

"And the talkative one, too, I see," he offered. She rolled her eyes.

"Well, someone has to keep this conversation going, don’t they? You’re handsome, but you’re not very charming."

Draco hastily turned an incredulous laugh into a cough.

Score one for Junior Barbie, he thought, impressed and just a bit unsettled by what were the undoubtedly clanking brass balls underneath that pristine silk robe. "Princess, if you don’t like it," he drawled, "you can run along back to your teddy bear. No one invited you over here, after all."

He’d expected her to be offended – maybe even hurt – but instead she laughed, a surprisingly rich sound, for coming from such a small body, and nothing at all like what he remembered of Fleur’s silvery high titter.

"That was beastly," she said, sounding as if she approved, and narrowed her gentian-blue veela’s eyes at him. "But you can’t get rid of me that easily. I want to know all about Hogwarts. And about England. I’m going to live there someday, you know."

Really.

Draco frowned. Somehow, despite her excellent English, he couldn’t imagine this aristocratic, gilded little creature in any other setting but this one.

"Why?"

"I own property there," Gabrielle said with more than a touch of satisfaction. "A seaside cottage. My grandfather left it to me when he died."

"Oh." Draco wasn’t quite sure what to say to this. "Ever been there?"

She looked momentarily regretful. "No. But he told me all about it. There’s no beach – just a cliff, and a lot of rocks. He said that ships used to crash there –" this last with a touch of gleeful malevolence. "I’m moving there to live when I graduate from Beauxbatons."

"No college?" Draco inquired, and she tossed her head.

"Oxford. I’ll commute." Her patrician chin lifted a notch. "I already have all the catalogs, you know."

Oxford. Better and better. Draco digested this with a feeling of growing awe; he wished he had his after-school plans this Set In Stone.

Of course, at her age he had – though it hadn’t been college; it had been Joining the Ranks Of The Dark And Glorious Army. And you could see where that had gotten him.

"What will you study?" he asked, just to keep the conversation going – it was the longest social exchange he’d had since his arrival, after all – and Gabrielle looked suddenly defiant.

"Finance," she said firmly. "I want to be an investment banker." She glowered at him for a moment, as if expecting censure; when none seemed forthcoming, she relaxed again.

"I’m quite good at it," she offered. "I already have a portfolio. Bank stock, mostly – Muggle banks, not Gringotts; they don’t trade on the open market. And I can beat my whole dormitory at Monopoly. Fleur won’t even play me anymore; she says I’m ruthless."

She looked delighted with this assessment of herself. Draco, more and more intrigued by the moment, decided to take the bait.

"Monopoly?" he asked, and missed entirely the sharp, predatory gleam in her wide blue eyes.

"A game," she said, suddenly casual. "A Muggle board game. My cousins in America sent it to me for my birthday last year." She blinked down at him from her tabletop perch, looking as benign and velvet-pawed as a fluffy Persian kitten. "Want to play?"

Draco hesitated, then shrugged.

He could use a break from studying – and she was an awfully cute kid. Why not play a few rounds, maybe let her win one?

"Sure," he said, starting to roll up his History of Magic essay. "Why not?"

**

In addition to the big desktop computer in her office, Hermione had been issued a sleek little silver laptop for home and school use by the Consortium. So far, she’d been using it mainly for taking notes in class and typing her homework assignments – although figuring out and using the correct keystrokes for the Arabic font was difficult, it was also helping her with the written component of her language course, which made the extra effort worth it.

Now, however – even in the bright light of a Cairo Sunday morning, even with the deliciously hung-over feeling she always got after she’d had an especially good orgasm the night before – the Sekhmet amulet had her sufficiently wigged that a bit of Net research was definitely in order.

Curling up in her double-wide, overstuffed armchair, iced-tea on the table next to her in a sweating glass treated with a Bottomless Charm, she plugged in and logged on. An hour later, she shut down the laptop and leaned back, rubbing her eyes.

As long as she lived, she would never understand the human race.

All the sites she’d found through her search engine had included some version of the Sekhmet creation-myth: Sekhmet, the Eye of Re, the Avenger, had been created and called forth to punish mankind for insubordination against the Sun-God. Somewhere along the way, she’d gotten a little too happy in her work and had begun to slaughter indiscriminately, pausing only to sleep and to lap up the blood she’d left in the morning before beginning anew … and apparently, in the middle of all this, grew so powerful that she couldn’t be stopped, even by the other gods.

So eventually she’d been brought down by trickery: some disputed number of beer barrels (some sites said 500, others 5,000) had been mixed with some sort of red colouring agent (some said desert earth, others said pomegranate juice, others said red ochre), and spread across the earth. Mistaking the stuff for blood, Sekhmet had dutifully lapped it up, gotten herself plastered, and passed out.

Nice.

Not exactly salubrious, Hermione thought, staring at the cool, deceptively inanimate little statue in her hand. Bill had been right – Sekhmet was one creepy little goddess. And yet, she was being worshipped all over the Internet as a symbol of justice, healing and female empowerment … and not, from the looks of things, by real witches, as much as by the sort of people her father referred to routinely as "those damn New-Agers".

Though you could never tell, of course. The Divination groupies back at Hogwarts had studied goddess-cults extensively in their higher-level Runes classes – and, as biased as Hermione was about that subject and its fruit bat of a professor, she had to admit that not all the Divination students were airheads like Parvati and Lavender. Some of the cleverest Ravenclaw witches in her year had been into goddess-worship – and so, Hermione reminded herself, had Lila-the-Ex, the American halfblood who had cursed Bill’s balls with fungus.

Talk about defacing a monument.

Not that she’d seen them, of course.

But she’d like to.

For the love of Quidditch, Granger. Focus.

Okay. Well, whatever. Sekhmet, justice, spirit of healing, mother-goddess, blah blah blah-dy blah – it had gone on for pages and pages. And in the end, just about the only piece of really useful knowledge she’d gleaned from her lengthy road-trip down the Information Superhighway was the location of Sekhmet’s original temple.

Memphis.

Not rock-star, peanut-butter-and-banana-sandwiches, American-South Memphis (just the name of which conjured up lyrics in Hermione’s head: the Mississippi Delta was shining like a National guitar …), but the original Memphis, twenty-four kilometres south of Cairo.

Not that there was much left of it.

In fact: It’s extremely difficult to imagine that a city once stood where there is now only a small museum and some statues in a garden, warned her guidebook.

Still, Hermione thought, it might be worthwhile to check it out, just to see for herself.

( … I’m goin’ to Graceland, Graceland …)

Still humming, she hoisted herself out of the chair, stepped carefully over a snoozing Cleo, and went to hustle up lunch for the two of them in the kitchen.

She’d wait until after dark.

**