Power. Massive, massive energy.
Still, the power felt familiar. She saw the currents twisting around it, as if suspended and pushed by an upwelling of air. She felt the connections between the rock and the air, the space between both. The power emanating from the chest was something far closer to amnis than any other force she’d felt in the human world.
Ben reached for her hand and knit their fingers together; in the wash of reflected power, Tenzin felt her blood brimming within him, moving in his veins, the life within him battering her with the sudden realization that she was a fool.
An utter fool.
He was already marked by her and she by him. While vampire biology might not have caught up yet, there was no way she could walk away from him. It was as impossible as the object pulsing in front of her eyes.
He was her mate. They would have to deal with it one way or another.
Not the time, Tiny.
She could almost hear the disapprobation in his voice.
Focus, Tenzin.
Daniel was still having trouble speaking. “I mean… That is, the dimensions are… accurate. If it is… You know.”
“I’m not fluent in Old Testament measurement conversions,” Ben said. “But I’ll take your word for it.” He cocked his head. “Those… could be wings. On the top, I mean.”
“The replicas I’ve seen pictures of would indicate—”
“How accurate are the replicas? I mean, are we actually going to believe—?”
“Do you want me to look?” Tenzin reached out her hand, her fingers almost touching the edge of the decorated silk.
“No!”
She wasn’t actually going to poke it, but the panic in their voices was highly amusing. Daniel grabbed her hand inches from the rich gold and purple coverings that draped the chest while Ben grabbed her by the shoulders and physically pulled her against his chest.
“Tenzin, are you nuts?” Ben asked. “Even I know you do not touch that thing!”
“Am I nuts?” She mulled over the question. “I mean… am I tempted to touch the very holy magical object rumored to cause the death of anyone who even looks at it? Yes. Yes, I am. It’s supposed to be covered in gold. I love gold. But will I touch it? No. I may have unusual neural patterns and stilted social skills, but I’m not stupid.” She wasn’t even getting close to that thing. She’d learned long ago that some fires weren’t worth experimenting around.
Daniel could barely speak. “It’s the… Ark of the Covenant. The real… I mean, I always thought—”
Tenzin narrowed her eyes and turned to Daniel. “The Ethiopians have claimed for thousands of years that they hold the Ark. Are you really that surprised?”
“But no one ever saw it.”
“The high priest saw it.”
“But he wouldn’t let anyone check that it was actually there.”
“Of course he wouldn’t. If they looked on it, they would die.” This seemed like very obvious logic to Tenzin. She wasn’t sure quite why Daniel was having such a hard time with it.
“That’s why no one would believe him,” Daniel said. “Because they couldn’t confirm what the priest said.”
“Clearly they had reason.” Tenzin crossed her arms. “If the real Ark is here, it must be a replica in Aksum.”
Daniel blinked. “I mean… Are we even sure…” His hand drifted toward the chest as if pulled by an invisible magnet.
“Sure enough.” Ben grabbed Daniel’s hand and pulled it back.
“But archaeologists—”
“Don’t know everything,” Ben said. “Otherwise this debate clearly would have been over a long time ago.”
“Well.” Tenzin was still staring at it. Oh, she wanted to see it. She was so tempted it was painful. “That definitely explains why King Lalibela told everyone to leave this chamber alone.”
“And they just did it.” Daniel spoke with quiet awe. “For nearly a thousand years.”
“Yeah, until a bunch of foreigners broke into the church and blew those good intentions out of the water,” Ben said. “Speaking of that, we should probably try to ignore that this thing is even here.”
“Good idea.” Forcing her eyes away from the suspiciously shaped chest covered in royal cloth, Tenzin examined the rest of the room.
Though everything was covered in dust, the air did smell fresh, and Tenzin knew Ben was right. This chamber and passageway had an outlet somewhere.
A hint of smoke in the air.
Tenzin turned to the candle Daniel was holding. The scent was no more than traces of a candle, she was certain of it.
But all the same, there was no need to linger.
“That box may be off-limits,” Tenzin said, “but the bone scroll isn’t. If Lalibela stored one secret and powerful object down here, then he may have stored another. Let’s get searching.”
There were more chests to open, but these were definitely older than the ones Ben had described beneath the church of Bêta Merkorios. These were heavy-lidded and made of solid acacia wood, often detailed with bronze rivets.
“The period looks right,” Daniel muttered. “I’ve been studying up on my woodworking.”
“Watching The Repair Shop is not the same as studying up,” Ben muttered as he opened a heavy chest with leather straps that fell apart in his fingers. “Oh my God, didn’t Giovanni say that Lalibela wasn’t known for his wealth?”
Tenzin turned to look at Ben, who was lifting a handful of gold coins from a chest.
“He wasn’t known as a flashy monarch,” Tenzin said. “That didn’t mean he didn’t inherit a lot of wealth.”
“He locked it under a church,” Ben said. “Why?
“Maybe it wasn’t always a church.” Daniel dug his hands into another chest filled with gold coins. “Maybe Sadia was right. This wasn’t a church, it was a treasury. Lalibela consecrated it as a church to keep rivals from his wealth and protect the secret of the Ark.”
“That makes as much sense as anything.” She felt a tug toward a chest on the far edge of the room. “We need to hurry.”
Ben frowned. “Why? We have plenty of night left.”
Tenzin couldn’t tell him, just like she couldn’t tell him why she knelt in front of the single chest in the storeroom that wasn’t marked by some kind of royal seal or marker. There was no lion on this chest, and the box wasn’t finished with brass or bronze, but a series of leather straps that crumbled away when she tried to move them.
Gotcha.
Whispering voices filled her mind as she reached into the chest and withdrew a round object a little over a foot long wrapped in leather.
“Ben.”
Tenzin carefully unwrapped the leather, and her heart gave a hard thump when she saw the faded silk marked with Persian designs.
Embroidered pomegranates marked the edges of the silk while Huma birds chased each other across the blood-red scroll cover.
“Tenzin?”
She carefully unwrapped the silk from the heavy weight in her palm. She could feel the power of it even before she laid eyes on it.
“Tenzin?” He was at her shoulder now. “My God.”