He’d done a good job with the bats. Dazed heaps littered the pavement, but more still flew round us, biting every bit of exposed skin, and the magicians were closing in.
“I’ll toss you,” Bast said.
“Excuse me?” Carter protested, but she picked him up by his collar and pants and tossed him up the side of the pyramid. He skittered to the top in a very undignified manner and slipped straight through the portal.
“Now you, Sadie,” Bast said. “Come on!”
Before I could move, a man’s voice yelled, “Stop!”
Stupidly, I froze. The voice was so powerful, it was hard not to.
The two magicians were approaching. The taller one spoke in perfect English: “Surrender, Miss Kane, and return our master’s property.”
“Sadie, don’t listen,” Bast warned. “Come here.”
“The cat goddess deceives you,” the magician said. “She abandoned her post. She endangered us all. She will lead you to ruin.”
I could tell he meant it. He was absolutely convinced of what he said
.
I turned to Bast. Her expression had changed. She looked wounded, even grief-stricken.
“What does he mean?” I said. “What did you do wrong?”
“We have to leave,” she warned. “Or they will kill us.”
I looked at the portal. Carter was already through. That decided it. I wasn’t going to be separated from him. As annoying as he was, Carter was the only person I had left. (How is that for depressing?)
“Toss me,” I said.
Bast grabbed me. “See you in America.” Then she chucked me up the side of the pyramid.
I heard the magician roar, “Surrender!” And an explosion rattled the glass next to my head. Then I plunged into the hot vortex of sand.
I woke in a small room with industrial carpeting, gray walls, and metal-framed windows. I felt as if I were inside a high-tech refrigerator. I sat up groggily and discovered I was coated in cold, wet sand.
“Ugh,” I said. “Where are we?”
Carter and Bast stood by the window. Apparently they’d been conscious for a while, because they’d both brushed themselves off.
“You’ve got to see this view,” Carter said.
I got shakily to my feet and nearly fell down again when I saw how high we were.
An entire city spread out below us—I mean far below, well over a hundred meters. I could almost believe we were still in Paris, because a river curved off to our left, and the land was mostly flat. There were white government buildings clustered around networks of parks and circular roads, all spread out under a winter sky. But the light was wrong. It was still afternoon here, so we must’ve traveled west. And as my eyes made their way to the other end of a long rectangular green space, I found myself staring at a mansion that looked oddly familiar.
“Is that...the White House?”
Carter nodded. “You got us to America, all right. Washington, D.C.”
“But we’re sky high!”
Bast chuckled. “You didn’t specify any particular American city, did you?”
“Well...no.”
“So you got the default portal for the U.S.—the largest single source of Egyptian power in North America.”