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 always 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.
Just when I started to think we were lost, my dizziness passed. The fog cleared. We were back on the East Coast, sailing over New York Harbor toward the nighttime lights of the Brooklyn waterfront and home.
The headquarters of the Twenty-first Nome perched on the shoreline near the Williamsburg Bridge. Regular mortals wouldn’t see anything but a huge dilapidated warehouse in the middle of an industrial yard, but to magicians, Brooklyn House was as obvious as a lighthouse—a five-story mansion of limestone blocks and steel-framed glass rising from the top of the warehouse, glowing with yellow and green lights.
Freak landed on the roof, where the cat goddess Bast was waiting for us.
“My kittens are alive!” She took my arms and looked me over for wounds, then did the same to Sadie. She tutted disapprovingly as she examined Sadie’s bandaged hands.
Bast’s luminous feline eyes were a little unsettling. Her long black hair was tied back in a braid, and her acrobatic bodysuit changed patterns as she moved—by turns tiger stripes, leopard spots, or calico. As much as I loved and trusted her, she made me a little nervous when she did her “mother cat” inspections. She kept knives up her sleeves—deadly iron blades that could slip into her hands with the flick of her wrists—and I was always afraid she might make a mistake, pat me on the cheek, and end up decapitating me. At least she didn’t try to pick us up by the scruffs of our necks or give us a bath.
“What happened?” she asked. “Everyone is safe?”
Sadie took a shaky breath. “Well…”
We told her about the destruction of the Texas nome.
Bast growled deep in her throat. Her hair poofed out, but the braid held it down so her scalp looked like a heated pan of Jiffy Pop popcorn. “I should’ve been there,” she said. “I could have helped!”
“You couldn’t,” I said. “The museum was too well protected.”
Gods are almost never able to enter magicians’ territory in their physical forms. Magicians have spent millennia developing enchanted wards to keep them out. We’d had enough trouble reworking the wards on Brooklyn House to give Bast access without opening ourselves up to attacks by less friendly gods.
Taking Bast to the Dallas Museum would’ve been like trying to get a bazooka through airport security—if not totally impossible, then at least pretty darn slow and difficult. Besides, Bast was our last line of defense for Brooklyn House. We needed her to protect our home base and our initiates. Twice before, our enemies had almost destroyed the mansion. We didn’t want there to be a third time.
Bast’s bodysuit turned pure black, as it tended to do when she was moody. “Still, I’d never forgive myself if you…” She glanced at our tired, frightened crew. “Well, at least you’re back safe. What’s the next step?”
Walt stumbled. Alyssa and Felix caught him.
“I’m fine,” he insisted, though he clearly wasn’t. “Carter, I can get everyone together if you want. A meeting on the terrace?”