She was chained to Sekhmet.

If she ever wished to join Antony in the Duat, if she ever wished to die, she’d have to kill her. There was too much Cleopatra did not understand still, too much that was strange. Even as she thought it, she felt the hunger surging through her. Flashes of red. Her blood boiled with fury and resentment. She would find the emperor, if she had to follow him around the world.

If she’d sold her soul, the soul of the last queen of Egypt, if Antony and Caesarion had died, it could not be for nothing.

The Romans would call to the Scarlet Lady, they with their leavings of metal and blood. Cleopatra could smell them now, though she was far away. The followers of this emperor who’d killed so many. This emperor who had murdered her son, whose men had murdered her husband. It would not be possible for Octavian to hide her remaining children from her. She was their mother. When she found them, she would destroy their captors.

She would eat the heart of the man who had forced her to sell her own heart.

She turned quickly from the temple and looked out into the empty desert. Dawn was hours off still. The moon was high and white. Selene, Cleopatra thought. Her daughter’s name and that of the moon as well. Alexander Helios. Ptolemy Philadelphus. Her children were still so small.

The silence had ended with the death of the priestess. Night birds cried, and a wind whipped over the sand.

Outside the temple, a lioness lowered her head to drink from the river. Cleopatra could see the blood on the animal’s mouth from here. She’d been hunting. A gazelle, perhaps. The lioness raised her head and looked toward the temple, yellow eyes ablaze.

So she had no will of her own? The priestess was wrong about that. Cleopatra was a queen of kings. She was stronger than any the goddess had taken in the past.

Caesarion, she thought. Antony.

Once she avenged herself upon the Romans, once she reclaimed her children and made certain that they were safe, she would find a way to separate from the goddess. She was going to Rome, and in Rome she would be born again. She could feel the human wonder that had been her own heart, filled now with teeth and claws.

She would use them.

She shrugged the red-bordered garment from her shoulders and stood for a moment naked beneath the million shining stars of her country. The woman she had been was gone, and in her place was something more.

Cleopatra dropped to her knees and placed her hands in the dirt, stretching her fingers, feeling the glory of her coming form, the grace, the power. Her back arched and her legs gathered beneath her. The tawny fur on her spine rose into a coarse ridge.

Her tail whipped back and forth, and she bounded into the night, across the desert and toward the sea.