The Year of the Great Seventh (24 page)

THE SIREN OF A fire truck woke me up early in the morning, and after that, I hadn’t been able to go back to sleep.

A strong scent of recently baked croissants filled my nostrils. The smell was coming from the corridor, making me wonder whether there was a café somewhere on the fiftieth floor. With five-star hotels, you never knew. They seemed to be designed to make your life as easy as possible.

Driven by curiosity and my rumbling stomach, I peeked outside the door to see where the smell was coming from and to my surprise, I found a silver trolley with breakfast right outside my door.

It wasn’t taking me very long to get used to the royal treatment. Breakfast delivered to your room—what else could you ask for? I suspected Nate had ordered breakfast for me, but I didn’t really care who’d been behind it.

The sky was completely overcast, and by the look of it, another snowstorm could be on its way.

Just gazing around the beautiful hotel suite made the adrenaline pump through my body. I felt like a princess in her enchanted castle. However, unlike in the fairy tales, I wasn’t sure if my prince and I could ever be together for good.

I searched through my clothes, still where I’d left them the previous night, in a pile on the sofa. After much hesitation, I decided to go for a long woolly sweater and a pair of skinny jeans. This probably wasn’t warm enough, but I didn’t have a lot of choices. There was no need for snow clothes in southern California.

After combing straight my long hair, I grabbed my jacket, gloves, and a scarf, and with a glance back at the beautiful view of New York City, I left the room. I couldn’t silence that voice in my mind saying that maybe Nate wasn’t telling me the whole truth. Maybe he just wasn’t that into me.

I had to stop being paranoid. We had bigger things to worry about.

Even though it was still eight in the morning, and I hadn’t agreed to meet Nate until nine o’clock, I was eager to get going. As I suspected Nate was probably already awake, I decided to stop by his room to check on him. When I was about to knock on his door, I pushed the handle down and the door clicked open.

I should be the one reminding Nate to lock the door at night.

Nate’s room was similar to mine. It was surrounded by huge widows, and you could see right into Central Park. The distribution was slightly different. There was a bar with three stools and a fireplace in this room. Right at the end, there was a half-opened double door that I guessed led into the bedroom.

The room was in total silence. I suspected Nate had already gone out. As I had no clue where he could be, I decided to go to the lobby on the thirtieth floor and wait for him as agreed. I didn’t want to seem intrusive. When I was about to turn around, I heard a noise through the double wooden doors. I hesitated for a moment and, without thinking much, went to check where it came from.

I peered through the semi-opened door to find Nate standing in front of a full-size mirror. He was wearing only a pair of jeans, which were down on his hips. His underwear elastic popped over his jeans.

I stood there behind the door, staring at him.

Nate was utterly unaware of my presence.

As Nate turned, I saw a black stain that covered most of his back as if he’d spilt ink over it. White lines spread over the stain like a spider web. White veins throbbed vividly under his skin as if they had a life of their own. Nate looked over his shoulder, surveying carefully the stain in the mirror.

“What are you doing there?” he said, alarmed, as he saw me in the reflection.

Nate grabbed his shirt from the floor and rapidly put it on.

“What was that?” I murmured, confused.

“I told you to meet me in the lobby. What are you doing here?” Nate paced across the room, grabbing his shoes and his jacket, trying to put them all on at the same time. He rifled through his suitcase, looking for something.

“Let’s go. I’ll call a taxi.” Nate stuffed his wallet in the pocket of his jeans and stormed past me, brushing his shoulder against mine.

I was still next to the door, trying to come to terms with what I witnessed.I wasn’t sure what shocked me the most. The stain or Nate’s attitude, pretending I hadn’t seen it.

He walked through the living area to the door of the suite as I stared at him, unable to react. When he realized I wasn’t following behind, he came to a sudden halt.

“Come on! Let’s go!” he said without turning to face me.

“What was that on your back?” I mumbled blankly.

The hypotheses inside my mind swirled out of control. I’d never in my life seen anything like it.

“Nothing,” Nate said cuttingly as he glanced at me over his shoulder.

I nodded, folding my arms across my chest. Nate wasn’t going to get away with it.

“Why are you so stubborn? Why won’t you trust me?” Nate turned around to face me, his hand still on the door handle and his eyes hardening in frustration.

“Because I know you’re hiding something from me. We’re in this together, remember?”

We stood there staring at each other.

Nate knew he was going to get nowhere. Eventually, he brought his gaze down and, taking a step away from the suite door, he reluctantly took his jacket off and started to unbutton his shirt. He dropped the shirt on the floor and spoke without looking at me.

“It started the night at the premiere. I don’t know what it is.”

I walked over to him and stared at the stain with astonishment. It also covered part of his shoulder. The white flaws flickered rapidly beneath his skin. Nate ducked his head down, seemingly embarrassed. I couldn’t hide the appalled look on my face.

I wasn’t sure if I should touch the stain, but plucking up the courage, I slowly moved my hand to Nate’s shoulder. As soon as my hand made contact with his skin, he stiffened. Dragging my finger along his collarbone, I traced the edge of the stain.

Nate finally looked up at me. He carefully observed my reaction.

“It’s really… warm. It’s like it’s boiling…” My voice trailed, unsure of itself.

“Yeah, it’s only where my skin’s black.”

The temperature contrast between his natural skin and the black stain was shocking. Nate slowly brought up his hand, removed my hand from his shoulder, and tucked his fingers around mine.

“It’s been… it’s been growing since the premiere.” Nate’s voice quavered in fear as if by saying it out loud, the stain growing in his body had become a fact.

Nate’s eyes locked on mine as if he hoped I had an explanation.

Questions raced through my mind. What was that horrible thing spreading along Nate’s back? Was it related to his episodes? Was it going to hurt him? What were we going to do?

All of a sudden, one question blotted out the rest. What was going to happen when the mark covered his entire body?

Maybe Nate had been right. Maybe it was best he’d kept it from me. I thought I was about to have a nervous breakdown.

As the days had gone by, I became more certain that we were caught up in something bigger than we could ever have imagined. And I was sure there was no way back. We had to get to the end of it as soon as possible. The pressure was mounting. What if I couldn’t help him?

Shivers ran down my spine when I glanced at his face. I wasn’t the only one filled with nervous fear. Forcing myself to put to use my almost nonexistent acting skills, I composed myself, pretending fear wasn’t taking hold of me. I had to do it for Nate. I was his only chance to get to the bottom of this. I had to stay strong.

I grabbed the shirt from the floor and hurled it at Nate. “Let’s go. We need to get to that obelisk as soon as possible.”

“Thanks, Sophie. I knew you wouldn’t fail me.” Catching me off guard, Nate slipped his arms over my shoulders and gave me a long, tight hug.

The sense of our bodies pressed against each other just made me realize how much I’d missed him the previous night, how much I wanted to be with him for real. I was never going to let anything happen to him. Just the thought of the possibility of losing him made my knees weak.

I’d never been so scared in my entire life. I realized the pressure was on. And by the look of Nate’s back, we didn’t have much time to get to the bottom of this. I needed all my energy to help him, and for that I needed to keep him out of my head.

The image of that horrible black stain invaded my mind. What was happening to Nate? What was taking hold of him?

*

After careering across Central Park South in a taxi, we drove north along Madison Avenue. The taxi dropped us off at the corner of 81
^st
Street and 5
^th
Avenue, right in front of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The obelisk was right behind it.

We ran along the south edge of the Met until we spotted the top of the obelisk appearing in the distance behind the trees. I couldn’t keep up with Nate’s speed. He held my hand, almost dragging me along.

My ears burned from the blistering cold. With my free hand, I slid my scarf up so it covered my ears, but it kept on sliding down.

“Take this.” Nate took off his gray beanie and passed it to me.

There was a lot of snow left from the previous storm, mostly below the trees, and some of it was melting into the concrete path. I tried to dodge around the puddles, but Nate was running through them. His shoes splashed in the water. There weren’t many people in the park. Probably, no one was insane enough to go out in the freezing weather.

With heightened anticipation, we stopped in front of the obelisk. I looked for the symbols I knew were carved in it. All of the obelisks from Ancient Egypt had the exact same shape, so if there was anything special about this one, it had to be the symbols on it.

I wiped the tears from the cold out of my eyes. Then I realized that it wasn’t that I couldn’t see them; it was just that they weren’t there. The symbols carved on the different faces had almost disappeared.

The obelisk had been made to endure the dry heat of the arid desert. It seemed exposure to the elements, wind and water, and the temperature extremes of New York perhaps had a significant effect. The stone was heavily eroded.

As we got to the obelisk, we both stared up in confusion. The remains of the symbols were mere scratches on the surface.

Nate’s eyes were fixed upon the obelisk. He was expressionless.

I walked around the obelisk and he followed behind. He was staring at me as if he was trying to read whether this was as serious as it looked. Trying to keep my poker face, I came to a halt in front of the south face. There was almost nothing left of the symbols on this face. It was probably the one that had more exposure to the wind. I didn’t want to tell Nate, but with no symbols, we were certainly not going to get very far.

Nate was at the north face of the obelisk. He stood to one side, hands in pockets. I could see him staring at me as I came toward him. The defeat in his eyes was heartbreaking. I feared he knew what this meant. He leaned over the metal railing, looking lost, then stared at the base of the pedestal. His expression changed.

“Sophie, come over here!” he shouted, unable to suppress his excitement. “It has the drawings of the original symbols.”

There was a metal plaque with the original drawings of the different faces. And to our luck, it also had the translations. Someone had already done the dirty work for us.

We scanned attentively through the text. Both of us were leaning over the railing to get a closer look at the plaque. The letters were small, and the oxidization didn’t make the task of reading it any easier. My eyes widened as if to absorb every letter. Every piece of information could be vital to our search.

The further I advanced through the text, the more I realized it was out of context from everything else we’d found. It was the documentation of the battles won by different pharaohs. I read it twice, waiting for an idea to click, but this was totally unrelated.

“Hey, look at that…,” Nate said, pointing at some text right at the bottom.

I hadn’t realized that there was something written right at the bottom of the plaque. It explained that the obelisk had been engraved thousands of years before Cleopatra’s birth by
Thutmosis III
and
Ramesses II
. This meant that whatever had been written on them had nothing to do with Cleopatra. Maybe whatever Cleopatra’s secret was, it had been passed to her by her ancestors.

I squatted down to read the translation of the obelisk symbols close up. I heard Nate’s shoes crunching on the gravel. I kept on reading, but nothing was clicking. I repeated to myself the prophecy from the Ceasareum, but it didn’t seem to say anything about any battles.

I don’t know what I expected to find.

My main concern at the moment wasn’t that I didn’t have any leads; it was how I was going to break it to Nate. As of now, I had no clue how the obelisk related to the prophecy, and we were obviously working against time.

When I looked at Nate, guilt traveled down my spine like a lightning bolt. He was sitting on a bench, staring into the distance. I knew he’d worked out on his own what was happening.

After reading the obelisk translation one more time, I decided I needed to give it some time. I couldn’t work out the answer.

I went over to Nate. His palms were resting on top of his thighs. He was still, like a statue. He seemed lost in his own thoughts. I sat next to him, and he didn’t acknowledge me.

“It didn’t really reveal anything, did it?” he finally said.

“Not yet, but I know the answer is there. Dad found out that the prophecy was engraved in the door of a temple called the Caesareum. Cleopatra built it for Mark Antony, and the obelisk was reerected next to it.”

I knew the answer was there somewhere. I just had to sit here for a little while and the solution would come to me sooner or later. This is how it always happened.

My gloves didn’t seem to work anymore as I was beginning to feel frostbite in my fingers. But I didn’t care. I was going to stay here for as long as it took.

Nate’s disappointment was obvious as he stared at the obelisk absentmindedly. From the look on his face, I could tell he was quickly losing faith in finding a cure for his condition. I wasn’t going to let that happen. We were going to fight together until the end.