Chapter Six

The teeth of the daeodon ripped into Patrick's jacket and shirt and grazed his right shoulder. Patrick winced in pain and ran over to Julie as the daeodon collapsed from exhaustion.

"Are you okay?" asked Julie, placing a hand on Patrick's shoulder.

Patrick nodded. "Just grazed." He removed his ripped jacket and shirt. He was not a muscular individual. He was lean. He then looked down at the daeodon, as did Julie. "It is like part of an incubus. The last and the worst."

"Oh, I hope so." Agreed Julie.

"Nobody will ever believe this but us."

"And I'm fine with that." Julie held on to Patrick's arm. "Shall we be on our way?"

"Walk to Johannesburg?" asked Patrick. "Why not? Maybe we will find someone who can take us there faster on the way."

For three days the two travelled south. They got ever closer to each other, knowing more about the other as the days went by. On the third night, they found themselves caught in a rainstorm and so took shelter in a nearby cavern. With no idea where they even were, Patrick wondered how long it would take for them to reach Johannesburg. Julie wondered as well but as long as they were together it would make the journey better, after all travelling alone can drive a person mad with no one to talk to.

As it rained outside, Patrick and Julie got the closest they had in those three days. They kissed. Tenderly, wordlessly, Patrick drank in the glance of that comely front with all the aches of his goodly adulthood and appreciated her answer. In that hour, Patrick Malone and Julie Chaplin knew the connotation of adoration. Afterwards, they slept with Julie in Patrick's embrace.

Yet a story cannot end in the middle. Thus did a strange cry pervade the air causing Patrick to wake up! An old tribal woman entered the cavern, a healer he presumed but her attire brought an Egyptian priestess more to mind. She looked down upon him and Julie, a strange look in her eyes.

"Red hair! By Nekhbet! A couple of followers of Set!" the woman exclaimed scornfully in a language that Patrick had only heard the guessing of the pronunciation of. The accent was strange.

"Nekhbet?" asked Patrick, groggily. He knew who Set was. Set was the third child of Nut, a goddess who was Lady of the Heavens. According to the tales of Ancient Egypt, Set had been overtaken by evil. He however did not know who Nekhbet was.

"I'd expect a follower of Set not to know the name of our patron goddess!" spat the old woman.

"I am not a follower of Set."

"I'd expect a follower of Set to speak such lies."

Patrick rolled his eyes. "Go away, old woman. We need our sleep and at this point only one of us is getting sleep."

"A priestess of Nekhbet is not to be spoken in such a way!"

"I don't know who Nekhbet is but I know that the Egypt of the Pharaohs is dead." Patrick turned his back on the old woman and held Julie close to him. In her sleep, Julie smiled and held on to Patrick's arms.

The old woman did not bother Patrick anymore. Once he turned away from her she had gone.

When the morning came, the squawking of a vulture awoke the sleeping lovers. It was standing right in front of Julie's face: an Egyptian vulture. Julie opened her eyes to find a bird with white plumage and black flight feathers in the wings standing before her. The bill was slender and long and the tip of the upper mandible hooked. The nostril was nothing more but an elongated horizontal slit. The feathers of the neck were long and formed a hackle. The wing feathers were pointed with the third primary feather being the longest while the tail of the vulture was wedge shaped. The legs were pink with the claws being long and straight and the third and fourth claws being slightly webbed at the base. It was about twenty inches long.

"Hello, what are you?" asked Julie. The vulture responded by squawking and looking at Julie sideways.

Patrick just couldn't help but think about how the vulture resembled his rival among the Egyptology assistants: Elvis Herbert, who claimed to be the reincarnation of Ramses but failed to specify which of the eleven pharaohs by that name he claimed to be the reincarnation of. Ironically, he actually was. Just the reincarnation of the least important Ramses: Ramses VIII, the Ramses who ruled for only one year, the Ramses that the most important of that name, Ramses II, would have deemed an absolute failure.

"An Egyptian vulture." Stated Patrick. The moment he said what the bird was a feeling of dread came over him. The Egyptian Vulture was native to North Africa and they weren't in North Africa.