Anyway, I’m glad she told that last part. I think she understood it better than I did. And the whole thing about Zia not being Zia and Dad not getting rescued...that was pretty hard to deal with.
If anybody felt worse than I did, it was Amos. I had just enough magic to turn myself into a falcon and him into a hamster (hey, I was rushed!), but a few miles from the National Mall, he started struggling to change back. Sadie and I were forced to land outside a train station, where Amos turned back into a human and curled into a shivering ball. We tried to talk to him, but he could barely complete a sentence.
Finally we got him into the station. We let him sleep on a bench while Sadie and I warmed up and watched the news.
According to Channel 5, the whole city of Washington was under lockdown. There’d been reports of explosions and weird lights at the Washington Monument, but all the cameras could show us was a big square of melted snow on the mall, which kind of made for boring video. Experts came on and talked about terrorism, but eventually it became clear that there’d been no permanent damage—just a bunch of scary lights. After a while, the media started speculating about freak storm activity or a rare southern appearance of the Northern Lights. Within an hour, the authorities opened up the city.
I wished we had Bast with us, because Amos was in no shape to be our chaperone; but we managed to buy tickets for our “sick” uncle and ourselves as far as New York.
I slept on the way, the amulet of Horus clutched in my hand.
We got back to Brooklyn at sunset.
We found the mansion burned out, which we’d expected, but we had nowhere else to go. I knew we’d made the right choice when we guided Amos through the doorway and heard a familiar, “Agh! Agh!”
“Khufu!” Sadie cried.
The baboon tackled her in a hug and climbed onto her shoulders. He picked at her hair, seeing if she’d brought him any good bugs to eat. Then he jumped off and grabbed a half-melted basketball. He grunted at me insistently, pointing to a makeshift basket he’d made out of some burned beams and a laundry basket. It was a gesture of forgiveness, I realized. He had forgiven me for sucking at his favorite game, and he was offering lessons. Looking around, I realized that he’d tried to clean up in his own baboon way, too. He’d dusted off the one surviving sofa, stacked Cheerios boxes in the fireplace, and even put a dish of water and fresh food out for Muffin, who was curled up asleep on a little pillow. In the clearest part of the living room, under an intact section of roof, Khufu had made three separate mounds of pillows and sheets—sleeping places for us.
I got a lump in my throat. Se
eing the care that he’d taken getting ready for us, I couldn’t imagine a better welcome home present.
“Khufu,” I said, “you are one freaking awesome baboon.”
“Agh!” he said, pointing to the basketball.
“You want to school me?” I said. “Yeah, I deserve it. Just give us a second to...”
My smile melted when I saw Amos.
He’d drifted over to the ruined statue of Thoth. The god’s cracked ibis head lay at his feet. His hands had broken off, and his tablet and stylus lay shattered on the ground. Amos stared at the headless god—the patron of magicians—and I could guess what he was thinking. A bad omen for a homecoming.
“It’s okay,” I told him. “We’re going to make it right.”
If Amos heard me, he gave no sign. He drifted over to the couch and plopped down, putting his head in his hands.
Sadie glanced at me uneasily. Then she looked around at the blackened walls, the crumbling ceilings, the charred remains of the furniture.
“Well,” she said, trying to sound upbeat. “How about I play basketball with Khufu, and you can clean the house?”
Even with magic, it took us several weeks to put the house back in order. That was just to make it livable. It was hard without Isis and Horus helping, but we could still do magic. It just took a lot more concentration and a lot more time. Every day, I went to sleep feeling as if I’d done twelve hours of hard labor; but eventually we got the walls and ceilings repaired, and cleaned up the debris until the house no longer smelled of smoke. We even managed to fix the terrace and the pool. We brought Amos out to watch as we released the wax crocodile figurine into the water, and Philip of Macedonia sprang to life.
Amos almost smiled when he saw that. Then he sank into a chair on the terrace and stared desolately at the Manhattan skyline.
I began to wonder if he would ever be the same. He’d lost too much weight. His face looked haggard. Most days he wore his bathrobe and didn’t even bother to comb his hair.
“He was taken over by Set,” Sadie told me one morning, when I mentioned how worried I was. “Do you have any idea how violating that is? His will was broken. He doubts himself and...Well, it may be a long time....”
We tried to lose ourselves in work. We repaired the statue of Thoth, and fixed the broken shabti in the library. I was better at grunt work—moving blocks of stone or heaving ceiling beams into place. Sadie was better at fine details, like repairing the hieroglyphic seals on the doors. Once, she really impressed me by imagining her bedroom just as it had been and speaking the joining spell, hi-nehm. Pieces of furniture flew together out of the debris, and boom!: instant repair job. Of course, Sadie passed out for twelve hours afterward, but still...pretty cool. Slowly but surely, the mansion began to feel like home.
At night I would sleep with my head on a charmed headrest, which mostly kept my ba from drifting off; but sometimes I still had strange visions—the red pyramid, the serpent in the sky, or the face of my father as he was trapped in Set’s coffin. Once I thought I heard Zia’s voice trying to tell me something from far away, but I couldn’t make out the words.
Sadie and I kept our amulets locked in a box in the library. Every morning I would sneak down to make sure they were still there. I would find them glowing, warm to the touch, and I would be tempted—very tempted—to put on the Eye of Horus. But I knew I couldn’t. The power was too addictive, too dangerous. I’d achieved a balance with Horus once, under extreme circumstances, but I knew it would be too easy to get overwhelmed if I tried it again. I had to train first, become a more powerful magician, before I would be ready to tap that much power.
One night at dinner, we had a visitor.
Amos had gone to bed early, as he usually did. Khufu was inside watching ESPN with Muffin on his lap. Sadie and I sat exhausted on the deck overlooking the river. Philip of Macedonia floated silently in his pool. Except for the hum of the city, the night was quiet.