Good luck, Isis said. I will await your call.
The image of the goddess rippled and vanished. When I opened my eyes, a square of darkness the size of a doorway hovered in the air.
“Sadie?” Zia asked. “You were silent for so long, I was getting worried.”
“No need.” I tried for a smile. “Isis just likes to talk. Next stop, the Fourth House of the Night.”
I’ll be honest. I never quite understood the difference between the swirling sand portals that magicians can summon with artifacts and the doors of darkness that gods are able to conjure. Perhaps the gods use a more advanced wireless network. Perhaps they simply have better aim.
Whatever the reason, Isis’s portal worked much more reliably than the one I’d created to get to Cairo. It deposited us right in the lobby of Sunny Acres.
As soon as we stepped through, Zia scanned our surroundings and frowned. “Where is everyone?”
Good question. We’d arrived at the correct godly nursing home—the same potted plants, the same massive lobby with windows looking out on the Lake of Fire, the same rows of limestone columns plastered with tacky posters of smiling seniors and mottos like: These Are Your Golden Centuries!
But the nurses’ station was unattended. IV poles were clustered in one corner like they were having a conference. The sofas were empty. The coffee tables were littered with half-played games of checkers and senet. Ugh, I hate senet.
I stared at an empty wheelchair, wondering where its occupant had gone, when suddenly the chair burst into flames, collapsing in a pile of charred leather and half-melted steel.
I stumbled backward. Behind me, Zia held a ball of white-hot fire in her hand. Her eyes were as wild as a cornered animal’s.
“Are you mad?” I yelled. “What are you—?”
She lobbed her second fireball at the nurses’ station. A vase full of daisies exploded in a shower of flaming petals and pottery shards.
“Zia!”
She didn’t seem to hear me. She summoned another fireball and took aim at the sofas.
I should have run for cover. I wasn’t prepared to die saving badly upholstered furniture. Instead, I lunged at her and grabbed her wrist. “Zia, stop it!”
She glared at me with flames in her eyes—and I mean that quite literally. Her irises had become disks of orange fire.
This was terrifying, of course, but I stood my ground. Over the past year I’d got rather used to surprises—what with my cat being a goddess, my brother turning into a falcon, and Felix producing penguins in the fireplace several times a week.
“Zia,” I said firmly. “We can’t burn down the nursing home. What’s got into you?”
A look of confusion passed over her face. She stopped struggling. Her eyes returned to normal.
She stared at the melted wheelchair, then the smoldering remains of the bouquet on the carpet. “Did I—?”
“Decide those daisies needed to die?” I finished. “Yes, you did.”
She extinguished her fireball, which was lucky, as it was starting to bake my face. “I’m sorry,” she muttered. “I—I thought I had it under control.…”
“Under control?” I let go of her hand. “You mean to say you’ve been throwing a lot of random fireballs lately?”
She still looked bewildered, her gaze drifting around the lobby. “N-no…maybe. I’ve been having blackouts. I come to, and I don’t remember what I’ve done.”
“Like just now?”
She nodded. “Amos said…at first he thought it might be a side effect of my time in that tomb.”
Ah, the tomb. For months, Zia had been trapped in a watery sarcophagus while her shabti ran about impersonating her. The Chief Lector Iskandar had thought this would protect the real Zia—from Set? From Apophis? We still weren’t sure. At any rate, it didn’t strike me as the most brilliant idea for a supposedly wise two-thousand-year-old magician to have come up with. During her slumbers, Zia had endured horrible nightmares about her village burning and Apophis destroying the world. I suppose that might lead to some nasty post-traumatic stress.
“You said Amos thought that at first,” I noted. “There’s more to the story, then?”
Zia gazed at the melted wheelchair. The light from outside turned her hair the color of rusted iron.
“He was here,” she murmured. “He was here for eons, trapped.”
I took a moment to process that. “You mean Ra.”
“He was miserable and alone,” she said. “He had been forced to abdicate his throne. He left the mortal world and lost the will to live.”
I stamped out a smoldering daisy on the carpet. “I don’t know, Zia. He looked quite happy when we woke him up, singing and grinning and so on.”
“No.” Zia walked toward the windows, as if drawn by the lovely view of brimstone. “His mind is still sleeping. I’ve spent time with him, Sadie. I’ve watched his expressions while he naps. I’ve heard him whimpering and mumbling. That old body is a cage, a prison. The true Ra is trapped inside.”
She was starting to worry me now. Fireballs I could deal with. Incoherent rambling—not so much.
“I suppose it makes sense you’d have sympathy with Ra,” I ventured. “You’re a fire elementalist. He’s a fiery sort of god. You were trapped in that tomb. Ra was trapped in a nursing home. Perhaps that’s what caused your blackout just now. This place reminded you of your own imprisonment.”
That’s right—Sadie Kane, junior psychologist. And why not? I’d spent enough time diagnosing my crazed mates Liz and Emma back in London.
Zia stared out at the burning lake. I had the feeling that my attempt at therapy might not have been so therapeutic.
“Amos tried to help me,” she said. “He knows what I’m going through. He cast a spell on me to focus my mind, but…” She shook her head. “It’s been getting worse. This is the first day in weeks that I haven’t taken care of Ra, and the more time I spend with him, the fuzzier my thoughts get. When I summon fire now, I have trouble controlling it. Even simple spells I’ve done for years—I channel too much power. If that happens during a blackout…”
I understood why she sounded frightened. Magicians have to be careful with spells. If we channel too much power, we might inadvertently exhaust our reserves. Then the spell would tap directly into the magician’s life force—with unpleasant consequences.
You will need to advise her, Isis had told me. She must learn the path quickly.
An uncomfortable thought began to form. I remembered Ra’s delight when he had first met Zia, the way he’d tried to give her his last remaining scarab beetle. He’d babbled on and on about zebras…possibly meaning Zia. And now Zia was starting to empathize with the old god, even trying to burn down the nursing home where he’d been trapped for so long.
That couldn’t be good. But how could I advise her when I had no idea what was happening?
Isis’s warnings rattled around in my head: The path of the gods was the answer for all the Kanes. Zia was struggling. Amos was still tainted by his time with Set.
“Zia…” I hesitated. “You said Amos knows what you’re going through. Is that why he asked Bast to watch Ra today? To give you time away from the sun god?”
“I—I suppose.”
I tried to steady my breathing. Then I asked the harder question: “In the war room, Amos said he might have to use other means to fight his enemies. He hasn’t…um, he hasn’t been having trouble with Set?”
Zia wouldn’t meet my eyes. “Sadie, I promised him—”
“Oh, gods of Egypt! He’s calling on Set? Trying to channel his power, after all Set did to him? Please, no.”
She didn’t answer, which was an answer in itself.
“He’ll be overwhelmed!” I cried. “If the rebel magicians find out that the Chief Lector is meddling with the god of evil, just as they suspected—”