The Amulet of Power - Mike Resnick [1]
Her head still hurt, and her eyes had trouble staying focused. She tried to wiggle her toes. It felt like they were moving. She looked to make sure, and found that she couldn’t see them.
“My feet!” she rasped. “Where are my feet?”
She heard a deep masculine chuckle, and then a hand pulled away what she only then recognized as a bedsheet, revealing her bare feet.
“They were hiding from you,” said an amused voice with a cultivated British accent.
She stared at the owner of the voice. It was the same face she’d seen in the tomb. He was a tall man, a bit on the lean side, tanned from long exposure to the sun. His hair had probably been sandy at one point, but it had been bleached almost white by the sun. She’d been right, back in the tomb: He was handsome, though at the moment he needed a shave and a change of clothes.
“Welcome back to the world. I thought we were going to lose you for a while there. It was quite a trip; I drove you all the way here from Edfu.”
“Where is here?”
“You’re in the Cairo Hospital.”
She stared at him without speaking.
“Where are my manners?” he said. “Allow me to introduce myself. I am Kevin Mason.” He paused. “And you are . . . ?”
“Lara Croft.”
“Lara Croft,” repeated Mason. “I’ve heard of you.”
She continued staring at him, trying to get her brain to function. “Kevin Mason,” she repeated.
“That’s right.”
She frowned. “You can’t be Kevin Mason, the archaeologist. I know him.”
“I’m his son—Kevin Mason Junior.” He smiled. “Just Kevin to my friends.”
“I’ve read all your father’s books,” said Lara. “He’s one of my heroes.”
“He’s one of mine, too,” said Mason. “That’s why I followed in his footsteps. I’m an archaeologist, too.”
She tried to clear the cobwebs from her mind. “You saved my life.”
“Just a stroke of luck. I heard—well, felt is probably the proper word—I felt the tomb collapse. And I had to assume that if it hadn’t collapsed in over two thousand years, there had to be a reason, so I had my men help me open it up.” He stared at her. “You were in a bad way. I don’t think you could have survived another hour trapped in there. I carried you to my car and drove to the Edfu infirmary, but they were having one of their periodic power outages, so I brought you here, to Cairo. You’ve been in hospital for almost five hours now.”
“And when can I get out of here?” asked Lara.
Mason shrugged. “You’ve been banged up pretty thoroughly, and you’ve suffered a severe concussion, but they don’t think anything’s broken. Probably a day or two of bed rest and you’ll be as good as new—though they need to make sure you haven’t done any lasting damage to your lungs by breathing in all that dust.” He smiled.
“Can you find me a mirror?”
“Trust me,” said Mason. “You don’t want to look at yourself. Not right now.”
“Please,” she insisted.
“As you wish,” he said, walking to the bathroom and returning with a mirror that had hung on the wall. “But remember: You’ve been warned.”
Lara took the mirror and studied the face that stared out at her. Both eyes were blackened and almost swollen shut. A roll of cotton had been inserted in her right nostril to keep it from collapsing. Her lips were dry and cracked and covered with crusted blood, her jaw was badly swollen, and her hair was still caked with dust.
“Could be worse,” she muttered, handing the mirror back to him.
“Well, I’ll be damned!” said Mason. “Most women would burst into tears if they looked like that.”
“I’m not most women.”
A nurse entered just then, walked silently to the bed, took Lara’s pulse and temperature, scribbled her readings on a chart, and left.
Lara tried to sit up to better see and converse with the man who had saved her, but the effort produced blinding pains in her skull, and she fell back onto the bed.
“Hey, take it easy,” said Mason. “I told you—you’ve had a major concussion.” He pulled a chair