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and magic? Suddenly, a confrontation with a dead body didn’t seem so unlikely.
    The Book of the Ancients’ light flickered and flared, swelling and bathing the passage in an even brighter light, almost to the point of blinding. The coffin’s scraping sound gnawed at my ears and I winced, my heart flip-flopping in my chest when I heard the cumbersome lid land with a clunk on the ground. The scraping sound ceased and the tomb’s light dimmed, leaving Gavin and me standing there in the quiet, musty hole. I swallowed hard and tensed up, waiting for something to pop out at us like a cheesy haunted house display.
    But nothing happened.
    The air was still cold, the space eerily calm.
    Gavin picked up a lantern and took a step forward. “Are you ready?”
    I nodded then waited, not moving a muscle.
    He cautiously stepped forward, the sound of his shoes on the dirt path breaking the piercing silence, and held the lantern up to hover over the stone coffin. Every muscle in his neck and shoulders locked up, the tension in his back visible from where I was standing.
    “Gav? What is it?”
    “Come see for yourself.”
    My eyelids blinked rapidly, my mind unsure whether it wanted to propel my body into forward motion just yet. I fought the fear and took a step in Gavin’s direction, slowly walking up to meet him at the edge of the coffin.
    “It can’t be,” I gasped and stumbled back, covering my mouth with a trembling hand. “That’s not…it can’t be. How?”
    “I don’t know.” Bringing the lantern closer, Gavin illuminated the corpse’s face. Only it wasn’t a corpse. The woman inside didn’t look dead at all. She was flawless. Exotic. Strikingly beautiful.
    She was Samira.

5
    “I told you,” I said, slowly backing up, “something’s not right. Gav, we need to leave. Now.”
    “Leave?” his head swung around to look at me, his lantern still hanging above Samira’s body. The top shook and rattled, his hands just as unsteady as mine. “We can’t go anywhere until we find an explanation for this.”
    “Explanation? There is no explanation for this!”
    Gavin was right, of course. We couldn’t leave. I was just freaking out. But the passage walls—or tomb walls, or whatever the damn Book of the Ancients said they were—were beginning to close in on me, and I couldn’t breathe.
    “We watched her leave. We saw her ourselves,” Gavin whispered, obviously trying to convince himself. “She left with Arianna. There’s no way….no way…”
    “Whatever’s going on, the Book of the Ancients wouldn’t be leading us to this unless there was a reason.” I inhaled sharply, drawing the comfort from that realization deep into my lungs. “Right?”
    “I…I don’t know. I’m still in shock here, give me a second to think this through.”
    I looked warily away from the passageway walls to Gavin’s stunned face and back to the woman lying in the coffin before us. The Book of the Ancients slammed closed with a loud smack, causing us both to jump, but its glow still lingered, keeping the tomb bright and Samira’s body exposed. My eyes raked down every inch of her, from head to toe. She was intimidating and breathtaking, even dead.
    She was dead, right?
    A long-sleeved burgundy velvet dress covered her pale, porcelain skin, the dropped-waist style accentuating her svelte hips. Long, cascading raven curls fanned over her shoulders and chest, their color shiny even in the dim light. Her deep red lips against her ivory skin made her black lashes and eyebrows even more striking.
    And then I noticed her nails.
    “Gav, look at her hands.”
    “Huh?” He shifted a bit, eyeing her arms, which were crossed and draped peacefully over her chest. She was a Gothic sleeping beauty, just waiting to be awakened.
    “Her hands. Look at her nails.” Those dagger-like nails that were such a prominent feature of Samira’s were nowhere to be found. This body’s fingernails were short and natural, well-manicured, with no