The Serpents Shadow Read online

  Alyssa was surrounded by a dust storm in the shape of a giant man. As she chanted, Geb the earth god lifted his arms and held up the ceiling. The shabti army surrounding her blazed like a wildfire.

  Khufu looked no different in the Duat, but as he leaped around the room evading the Anubis statue, the golden cabinet he was carrying flapped open. Inside was pure darkness—as if it were full of octopus ink.

  I wasn’t sure what that meant, but then I looked at Walt and gasped.

  In the Duat, he was shrouded in flickering gray linen—mummy cloth. His flesh was transparent. His bones were luminous, as if he were a living X-ray.

  His curse, I thought. He’s marked for death.

  Even worse: the criosphinx facing him was the center of the Chaos storm. Tendrils of red lightning arced from its body. Its ram face changed into the head of Apophis, with yellow serpentine eyes and dripping fangs.

  It lunged at Walt, but before it could strike, Walt threw an amulet. Golden chains exploded in the monster’s face, wrapping around its snout. The criosphinx stumbled and thrashed like a dog in a muzzle.

  “Sadie, it’s all right.” Walt’s voice sounded deeper and more confident, as if he were older in the Duat. “Speak your spell. Hurry.”

  The criosphinx flexed its jaws. The gold chains groaned. The other criosphinx had backed Carter against a wall. Felix was on his knees, his purple aura failing in a swirl of dark spirits. Alyssa was losing her battle against the crumbling room as chunks of the ceiling fell around her. The Anubis statue grabbed Khufu’s tail and held him upside down while the baboon howled and wrapped his arms around the gold cabinet.

  Now or never: I had to restore order.

  I channeled the power of Isis, drawing so deeply on my own magic reserves, I could feel my soul start to burn. I forced myself to focus, and I spoke the most powerful of all divine words: “Ma’at.”

  The hieroglyph burned in front of me—small and bright like a miniature sun:

  “Good!” Walt said. “Keep at it!” Somehow he’d managed to pull in the chains and grab the sphinx’s snout. While the creature bore down on him with all its force, Walt’s strange gray aura was spreading across the monster’s body like an infection. The criosphinx hissed and writhed. I caught a whiff of decay like the air from a tomb—so strong that I almost lost my concentration.

  “Sadie,” Walt urged, “maintain the spell!”

  I focused on the hieroglyph. I channeled all my energy into that symbol for order and creation. The word shone brighter. The coils of the serpent burned away like fog in sunlight. The two criosphinxes crumbled to dust. The canopic jars fell and shattered. The Anubis statue dropped Khufu on his head. The army of shabti froze around Alyssa, and her earth magic spread through the room, sealing cracks and shoring up walls.

  I felt Apophis retreating deeper into the Duat, hissing in anger.

  Then I promptly collapsed.

  “I told you she could do it,” said a kindly voice.

  My mother’s voice…but of course that was impossible. She was dead, which meant I spoke with her only occasionally, and only in the Underworld.

  My vision returned, hazy and dim. Two women hovered over me. One was my mum—her blond hair clipped back, her deep blue eyes sparkling with pride. She was transparent, as ghosts tend to be; but her voice was warm and very much alive. “It isn’t the end yet, Sadie. You must carry on.”

  Next to her stood Isis in her white silky gown, her wings of rainbow light flickering behind her. Her hair was glossy black, woven with strands of diamonds. Her face was as beautiful as my mum’s, but more queenly, less warm.

  Don’t misunderstand. I knew from sharing Isis’s thoughts that she cared for me in her own way, but gods are not human. They have trouble thinking of us as more than useful tools or cute pets. To gods, a human life span doesn’t seem much longer than that of the average gerbil.

  “I would not have believed it,” Isis said. “The last magician to summon Ma’at was Hatshepsut herself, and even she could only do it while wearing a fake beard.”

  I had no idea what that meant. I decided I didn’t want to know.

  I tried to move but couldn’t. I felt as if I were floating at the bottom of a bathtub, suspended in warm water, the two women’s faces rippling at me from just above the surface.

  “Sadie, listen carefully,” my mother said. “Don’t blame yourself for the deaths. When you make your plan, your father will object. You must convince him. Tell him it’s the only way to save the souls of the dead. Tell him…” Her expression turned grim. “Tell him it’s the only way he’ll see me again. You must succeed, my sweet.”

  I wanted to ask what she meant, but I couldn’t seem to speak.

  Isis touched my forehead. Her fingers were as cold as snow. “We must not tax her any further. Farewell for now, Sadie. The time rapidly approaches when we must join together again. You are strong. Even stronger than your mother. Together we will rule the world.”

  “You mean, Together we will defeat Apophis,” my mother corrected.

  “Of course,” Isis said. “That’s what I meant.”

  Their faces blurred together. They spoke in a single voice: “I love you.”

  A blizzard swept across my eyes. My surroundings changed, and I was standing in a dark graveyard with Anubis. Not the musty old jackal-headed god as he appeared in Egyptian tomb art, but Anubis as I usually saw him—a teenaged boy with warm brown eyes, tousled black hair, and a face that was ridiculously, annoyingly gorgeous. I mean, please—being a god, he had an unfair advantage. He could look like anything he wanted. Why did he always have to appear in this form that twisted my insides to pretzels?

  “Wonderful,” I managed to say. “If you’re here, I must be dead.”

  Anubis smiled. “Not dead, though you came close. That was a risky move.”

  A burning sensation started in my face and worked its way down my neck. I wasn’t sure if it was embarrassment, anger, or delight at seeing him.

  “Where have you been?” I demanded. “Six months, not a word.”

  His smile melted. “They wouldn’t let me see you.”

  “Who wouldn’t let you?”

  “There are rules,” he said. “Even now they’re watching; but you’re close enough to death that I can manage a few moments. I need to tell you: you have the right idea. Look at what isn’t there. It’s the only way you might survive.”

  “Right,” I grumbled. “Thanks for not speaking in riddles.”

  The warm sensation reached my heart. It began to beat, and suddenly I realized I’d been without a heartbeat since I’d passed out. That probably wasn’t good.

  “Sadie, there’s something else.” Anubis’s voice became watery. His image began to fade. “I need to tell you—”

  “Tell me in person,” I said. “None of this ‘death vision’ nonsense.”

  “I can’t. They won’t let me.”

  “You still sound like a little boy. You’re a god, aren’t you? You can bloody well do what you like.”

  Anger smoldered in his eyes. Then, to my surprise, he laughed. “I’d forgotten how irritating you are. I’ll try to visit…briefly. We have something to discuss.” He reached out and brushed the side of my face. “You’re waking now. Good-bye, Sadie.”

  “Don’t leave.” I grasped his hand and held it against my cheek.

  The warmth spread throughout my body. Anubis faded away.

  My eyes flew open. “Don’t leave!”

  My burned hands were bandaged, and I was gripping a hairy baboon paw. Khufu looked down at me, rather confused. “Agh?”

  Oh, fab. I was flirting with a monkey.

  I sat up groggily. Carter and our friends gathered around me. The room hadn’t collapsed, but the entire King Tut exhibit was in ruins. I had a feeling we would not be invited to join the Friends of the Dallas Museum anytime soon.

  “Wh-what happened?” I stammered. “How long—?”

  “You were dead for two minutes,” Carter said,
his voice shaky. “I mean, no heartbeat, Sadie. I thought…I was afraid…”

  He choked up. Poor boy. He really would have been lost without me.

  [Ouch, Carter! Don’t pinch.]

  “You summoned Ma’at,” Alyssa said in amazement. “That’s like…impossible.”

  I suppose it was rather impressive. Using divine words to create an object like an animal or a chair or a sword—that’s hard enough. Summoning an element like fire or water is even trickier. But summoning a concept, like Order—that’s just not done. At the moment, however, I was in too much pain to appreciate my own amazingness. I felt as if I’d just summoned an anvil and dropped it on my head.

  “Lucky try,” I said. “What about the golden cabinet?”

  “Agh!” Khufu gestured proudly to the gilded box, which sat nearby, safe and sound.

  “Good baboon,” I said. “Extra Cheerios for you tonight.”

  Walt frowned. “But the Book of Overcoming Apophis was destroyed. How will a cabinet help us? You said it was some kind of clue…?”

  I found it hard to look at Walt without feeling guilty. My heart had been torn between him and Anubis for months now, and it just wasn’t fair of Anubis to pop into my dreams, looking all hot and immortal, when poor Walt was risking his life to protect me and getting weaker by the day. I remembered how he had looked in the Duat, in his ghostly gray mummy linen.…

  No. I couldn’t think about that. I forced myself to concentrate on the golden cabinet.

  Look at what isn’t there, Anubis had said. Bloody gods and their bloody riddles.

  The face in the wall—Uncle Vinnie—had told me the box would give us a hint about how to defeat Apophis, if I was smart enough to understand it.

  “I’m not sure what it means yet,” I admitted. “If the Texans let us take it back to Brooklyn House…”

  A horrible realization settled over me. There were no more sounds of explosions outside. Just eerie silence.

  “The Texans!” I yelped. “What’s happened to them?”

  Felix and Alyssa bolted for the exit. Carter and Walt helped me to my feet, and we ran after them.

  The guards had all disappeared from their stations. We reached the museum foyer, and I saw columns of white smoke outside the glass walls, rising from the sculpture garden.

  “No,” I murmured. “No, no.”

  We tore across the street. The well-kept lawn was now a crater as big as an Olympic pool. The bottom was littered with melted metal sculptures and chunks of stone. Tunnels that had once led into the Fifty-first Nome’s headquarters had collapsed like a giant anthill some bully had stepped on. Around the rim of the crater were bits of smoking evening wear, smashed plates of tacos, broken champagne glasses, and the shattered staffs of magicians.

  Don’t blame yourself for the deaths, my mother had said.

  I moved in a daze to the remains of the patio. Half the concrete slab had cracked and slid into the crater. A charred fiddle lay in the mud next to a gleaming bit of silver.

  Carter stood next to me. “We—we should search,” he said. “There might be survivors.”

  I swallowed back a sob. I wasn’t sure how, but I sensed the truth with absolute certainty. “There aren’t any.”

  The Texas magicians had welcomed us and supported us. JD Grissom had shaken my hand and wished me luck before running off to save his wife. But we’d seen the work of Apophis in other nomes. Carter had warned JD: The serpent’s minions don’t leave any survivors.

  I knelt down and picked up the gleaming piece of silver—a half-melted Lone Star belt buckle.

  “They’re dead,” I said. “All of them.”

  C A R T E R

  3. We Win a Box Full of Nothing

  ON THAT HAPPY NOTE, Sadie hands me the microphone. [Thanks a lot, sis.]

  I wish I could tell you that Sadie was wrong about the Fifty-first Nome. I’d love to say we found all the Texas magicians safe and sound. We didn’t. We found nothing except the remnants of a battle: burned ivory wands, a few shattered shabti, scraps of smoldering linen and papyrus. Just like in the attacks on Toronto, Chicago, and Mexico City, the magicians had simply vanished. They’d been vaporized, devoured, or destroyed in some equally horrible way.

  At the edge of the crater, one hieroglyph burned in the grass: Isfet, the symbol for Chaos. I had a feeling Apophis had left it there as a calling card.

  We were all in shock, but we didn’t have time to mourn our comrades. The mortal authorities would be arriving soon to check out the scene. We had to repair the damage as best we could and remove all traces of magic.

  There wasn’t much we could do about the crater. The locals would just have to assume there’d been a gas explosion. (We tended to cause a lot of those.)

  We tried to fix the museum and restore the King Tut collection, but it wasn’t as easy as cleaning up the gift shop. Magic can only go so far. So if you go to a King Tut exhibit someday and notice cracks or burn marks on the artifacts, or maybe a statue with its head glued on backward—well, sorry. That was probably our fault.

  As police blocked the streets and cordoned off the blast zone, our team gathered on the museum roof. In better times we might have used an artifact to open a portal to take us back home; but over the last few months, as Apophis had gotten stronger, portals had become too risky to use.

  Instead I whistled for our ride. Freak the griffin glided over from the top of the nearby Fairmont Hotel.

  It’s not easy finding a place to stash a griffin, especially when he’s pulling a boat. You can’t just parallel-park something like that and put a few coins in the meter. Besides, Freak tends to get nervous around strangers and swallow them, so I’d settled him on top of the Fairmont with a crate of frozen turkeys to keep him occupied. They have to be frozen. Otherwise he eats them too fast and gets hiccups.

  (Sadie is telling me to hurry up with the story. She says you don’t care about the feeding habits of griffins. Well, excuse me.)

  Anyway, Freak came in for a landing on the museum roof. He was a beautiful monster, if you like psychotic falcon-headed lions. His fur was the color of rust, and as he flew, his giant hummingbird wings sounded like a cross between chain saws and kazoos.

  “FREEAAAK!” Freak cawed.

  “Yeah, buddy,” I agreed. “Let’s get out of here.”

  The boat trailing behind him was an Ancient Egyptian model—shaped like a big canoe made from bundles of papyrus reeds, enchanted by Walt so that it stayed airborne no matter how much weight it carried.

  The first time we’d flown Air Freak, we’d strung the boat underneath Freak’s belly, which hadn’t been very stable. And you couldn’t simply ride on his back, because those high-powered wings would chop you to shreds. So the sleigh-boat was our new solution. It worked great, except when Felix yelled down at the mortals, “Ho, ho, ho, Merry Christmas!”

  Of course, most mortals can’t see magic clearly, so I’m not sure what they thought they saw as we passed overhead. No doubt it caused many of them to adjust their medication.

  We soared into the night sky—the six of us and a small cabinet. I still didn’t understand Sadie’s interest in the golden box, but I trusted her enough to believe it was important.

  I glanced down at the wreckage of the sculpture garden. The smoking crater looked like a ragged mouth, screaming. Fire trucks and police cars had surrounded it with a perimeter of red and white lights. I wondered how many magicians had died in that explosion.

  Freak picked up speed. My eyes stung, but it wasn’t from the wind. I turned so my friends couldn’t see.

  Your leadership is doomed.

  Apophis would say anything to throw us into confusion and make us doubt our cause. Still, his words hit me hard.

  I didn’t like being a leader. I always had to appear confident for the sake of the others, even when I wasn’t.

  I missed having my dad to rely on. I missed Uncle Amos, who’d gone off to Cairo to run the House of Life. As for Sadie, my bossy sister, she a
lways supported me, but she’d made it clear she didn’t want to be an authority figure. Officially, I was in charge of Brooklyn House. Officially, I called the shots. In my mind, that meant if we made mistakes, like getting an entire nome wiped off the face of the earth, then the fault was mine.

  Okay, Sadie would never actually blame me for something like that, but that’s how I felt.

  Everything you tried to build will crumble.…

  It seemed incredible that not even a year had passed since Sadie and I first arrived at Brooklyn House, completely clueless about our heritage and our powers. Now we were running the place—training an army of young magicians to fight Apophis using the path of the gods, a kind of magic that hadn’t been practiced in thousands of years. We’d made so much progress—but judging from how our fight against Apophis had gone tonight, our efforts hadn’t been enough.

  You will lose the ones you love the most.…

  I’d already lost so many people. My mom had died when I was seven. My dad had sacrificed himself to become the host of Osiris last year. Over the summer, many of our allies had fallen to Apophis, or been ambushed and “disappeared” thanks to the rebel magicians who didn’t accept my Uncle Amos as the new Chief Lector.

  Who else could I lose…Sadie?

  No, I’m not being sarcastic. Even though we’d grown up separately for most of our lives—me traveling around with Dad, Sadie living in London with Gran and Gramps—she was still my sister. We’d grown close over the last year. As annoying as she was, I needed her.

  Wow, that’s depressing.

  (And there’s the punch in the arm I was expecting. Ow.)

  Or maybe Apophis meant someone else, like Zia Rashid…

  Our boat rose above the glittering suburbs of Dallas. With a defiant squawk, Freak pulled us into the Duat. Fog swallowed the boat. The temperature dropped to freezing. I felt a familiar tingle in my stomach, as if we were plunging from the top of a roller coaster. Ghostly voices whispered in the mist.