“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.