by Rick Riordan
I felt like I’d just been run over by a tractor. I sat up, dazed, and spit a piece of Rosetta Stone out of my mouth. The gallery was in ruins. Waves of fire rippled in pools along the floor. Giant statues had toppled. Sarcophagi had been knocked off their pedestals. Pieces of the Rosetta Stone had exploded outward with such force that they’d embedded themselves in the columns, the walls, the other exhibits.
Sadie was passed out next to me, but she looked unharmed. I shook her shoulder, and she grunted. “Ugh.”
In front of us, where the Rosetta Stone had been, stood a smoking, sheared-off pedestal. The floor was blackened in a starburst pattern, except for the glowing blue circle around our father.
He was facing our direction, but he didn’t seem to be looking at us. A bloody cut ran across his scalp. He gripped the boomerang tightly.
I didn’t understand what he was looking at. Then the horrible laughter echoed around the room again, and I realized it was coming from right in front of me.
Something stood between our father and us. At first, I could barely make it out—just a flicker of heat. But as I concentrated, it took on a vague form—the fiery outline of a man.
He was taller than Dad, and his laugh cut through me like a chainsaw.
“Well done,” he said to my father. “Very well done, Julius.”
“You were not summoned!” My father’s voice trembled. He held up the boomerang, but the fiery man flicked one finger, and the stick flew from Dad’s hand, shattering against the wall.
“I am never summoned, Julius,” the man purred. “But when you open a door, you must be prepared for guests to walk through.”
“Back to the Duat!” my father roared. “I have the power of the Great King!”
“Oh, scary,” the fiery man said with amusement. “And even if you knew how to use that power, which you do not, he was never my match. I am the strongest. Now you will share his fate.”
I couldn’t make sense of anything, but I knew that I had to help my dad. I tried to pick up the nearest chunk of stone, but I was so terrified my fingers felt frozen and numb. My hands were useless.
Dad shot me a silent look of warning: Get out. I realized he was intentionally keeping the fiery man’s back to us, hoping Sadie and I would escape unnoticed.
Sadie was still groggy. I managed to drag her behind a column, into the shadows. When she started to protest, I clamped my hand over her mouth. That woke her up. She saw what was happening and stopped fighting.
Alarms blared. Fire circled around the doorways of the gallery. The guards had to be on their way, but I wasn’t sure if that was a good thing for us.
Dad crouched to the floor, keeping his eyes on his enemy, and opened his painted wooden box. He brought out a small rod like a ruler. He muttered something under his breath and the rod elongated into a wooden staff as tall as he was.
Sadie made a squeaking sound. I couldn’t believe my eyes either, but things only got weirder.
Dad threw his staff at the fiery man’s feet, and it changed into an enormous serpent—ten feet long and as big around as I was—with coppery scales and glowing red eyes. It lunged at the fiery man, who effortlessly grabbed the serpent by its neck. The man’s hand burst into white-hot flames, and the snake burned to ashes.
“An old trick, Julius,” the fiery man chided.
My dad glanced at us, silently urging us again to run. Part of me refused to believe any of this was real. Maybe I was unconscious, having a nightmare. Next to me, Sadie picked up a chunk of stone.
“How many?” my dad asked quickly, trying to keep the fiery man’s attention. “How many did I release?”
“Why, all five,” the man said, as if explaining something to a child. “You should know we’re a package deal, Julius. Soon I’ll release even more, and they’ll be very grateful. I shall be named king again.”
“The Demon Days,” my father said. “They’ll stop you before it’s too late.”
The fiery man laughed. “You think the House can stop me? Those old fools can’t even stop arguing among themselves. Now let the story be told anew. And this time you shall never rise!”
The fiery man waved his hand. The blue circle at Dad’s feet went dark. Dad grabbed for his toolbox, but it skittered across the floor.
“Good-bye, Osiris,” the fiery man said. With another flick of his hand, he conjured a glowing coffin around our dad. At first it was transparent, but as our father struggled and pounded on its sides, the coffin became more and more solid—a golden Egyptian sarcophagus inlaid with jewels. My dad caught my eyes one last time, and mouthed the word Run! before the coffin sank into the floor, as if the ground had turned to water.
“Dad!” I screamed.
Sadie threw her stone, but it sailed harmlessly through the fiery man’s head.
He turned, and for one terrible moment, his face appeared in the flames. What I saw made no sense. It was as if someone had superimposed two different faces on top of each other—one almost human, with pale skin, cruel, angular features, and glowing red eyes, the other like an animal with dark fur and sharp fangs. Worse than a dog or a wolf or a lion—some animal I’d never seen before. Those red eyes stared at me, and I knew I was going to die.
Behind me, heavy footsteps echoed on the marble floor of the Great Court. Voices were barking orders. The security guards, maybe the police—but they’d never get here in time.
The fiery man lunged at us. A few inches from my face, something shoved him backward. The air sparked with electricity. The amulet around my neck grew uncomfortably hot.
The fiery man hissed, regarding me more carefully. “So...it’s you.”
The building shook again. At the opposite end of the room, part of the wall exploded in a brilliant flash of light. Two people stepped through the gap—the man and the girl we’d seen at the Needle, their robes swirling around them. Both of them held staffs.
The fiery man snarled. He looked at me one last time and said, “Soon, boy.”
Then the entire room erupted in flames. A blast of heat sucked all the air of out my lungs and I crumpled to the floor.
The last thing I remember, the man with the forked beard and the girl in blue were standing over me. I heard the security guards running and shouting, getting closer. The girl crouched over me and drew a long curved knife from her belt.
“We must act quickly,” she told the man.
“Not yet,” he said with some reluctance. His thick accent sounded French. “We must be sure before we destroy them.”
I closed my eyes and drifted into unconsciousness.
S A D I E
3. Imprisoned with My Cat
[Give me the bloody mic.]
Hullo. Sadie here. My brother’s a rubbish storyteller. Sorry about that. But now you’ve got me, so all is well.
Let’s see. The explosion. Rosetta Stone in a billion pieces. Fiery evil bloke. Dad boxed in a coffin. Creepy Frenchman and Arab girl with the knife. Us passing out. Right.
So when I woke up, the police were rushing about as you might expect. They separated me from my brother. I didn’t really mind that part. He’s a pain anyway. But they locked me in the curator’s office for ages. And yes, they used our bicycle chain to do it. Cretins.
I was shattered, of course. I’d just been knocked out by a fiery whatever-it-was. I’d watched my dad get packed in a sarcophagus and shot through the floor. I tried to tell the police about all that, but did they care? No.
Worst of all: I had a lingering chill, as if someone was pushing ice-cold needles into the back of my neck. It had started when I looked at those blue glowing words Dad had drawn on the Rosetta Stone and I knew what they meant. A family disease, perhaps? Can knowledge of boring Egyptian stuff be hereditary? With my luck.
Long after my gum had gone stale, a policewoman finally retrieved me from the curator’s office. She asked me no questions. She just trundled me into a police car and took me home. Even then, I wasn’t allowed to explain to Gran and Gramps. The police
woman just tossed me into my room and I waited. And waited.
I don’t like waiting.
I paced the floor. My room was nothing posh, just an attic space with a window and a bed and a desk. There wasn’t much to do. Muffin sniffed my legs and her tail puffed up like a bottlebrush. I suppose she doesn’t fancy the smell of museums. She hissed and disappeared under the bed.
“Thanks a lot,” I muttered.
I opened the door, but the policewoman was standing guard.
“The inspector will be with you in a moment,” she told me. “Please stay inside.”
I could see downstairs—just a glimpse of Gramps pacing the room, wringing his hands, while Carter and a police inspector talked on the sofa. I couldn’t make out what they were saying.
“Could I just use the loo?” I asked the nice officer.
“No.” She closed the door in my face. As if I might rig an explosion in the toilet. Honestly.
I dug out my iPod and scrolled through my playlist. Nothing struck me. I threw it on my bed in disgust. When I’m too distracted for music, that is a very sad thing. I wondered why Carter got to talk to the police first. It wasn’t fair.
I fiddled with the necklace Dad had given me. I’d never been sure what the symbol meant. Carter’s was obviously an eye, but mine looked a bit like an angel, or perhaps a killer alien robot.
Why on earth had Dad asked if I still had it? Of course I still had it. It was the only gift he’d ever given me. Well, apart from Muffin, and with the cat’s attitude, I’m not sure I would call her a proper gift.
Dad had practically abandoned me at age six, after all. The necklace was my one link to him. On good days I would stare at it and remember him fondly. On bad days (which were much more frequent) I would fling it across the room and stomp on it and curse him for not being around, which I found quite therapeutic. But in the end, I always put it back on.
At any rate, during the weirdness at the museum—and I’m not making this up—the necklace got hotter. I nearly took it off, but I couldn’t help wondering if it truly was protecting me somehow.
I’ll make things right, Dad had said, with that guilty look he often gives me.
Well, colossal fail, Dad.
What had he been thinking? I wanted to believe it had all been a bad dream: the glowing hieroglyphs, the snake staff, the coffin. Things like that simply don’t happen. But I knew better. I couldn’t dream anything as horrifying as that fiery man’s face when he’d turned on us. “Soon, boy,” he’d told Carter, as if he intended to track us down. Just the idea made my hands tremble. I also couldn’t help wondering about our stop at Cleopatra’s Needle, how Dad had insisted on seeing it, as if he were steeling his courage, as if what he did at the British Museum had something to do with my mum.
My eyes wandered across my room and fixed on my desk.
No, I thought. Not going to do it.
But I walked over and opened the drawer. I shoved aside a few old mags, my stash of sweets, a stack of maths homework I’d forgotten to hand in, and a few pictures of me and my mates Liz and Emma trying on ridiculous hats in Camden Market. And there at the bottom of it all was the picture of Mum.
Gran and Gramps have loads of pictures. They keep a shrine to Ruby in the hall cupboard—Mum’s childhood artwork, her O-level results, her graduation picture from university, her favorite jewelry. It’s quite mental. I was determined not to be like them, living in the past. I barely remembered Mum, after all, and nothing could change the fact she was dead.
But I did keep the one picture. It was of Mum and me at our house in Los Angeles, just after I was born. She stood out on the balcony, the Pacific Ocean behind her, holding a wrinkled pudgy lump of baby that would some day grow up to be yours truly. Baby me was not much to look at, but Mum was gorgeous, even in shorts and a tattered T-shirt. Her eyes were deep blue. Her blond hair was clipped back. Her skin was perfect. Quite depressing compared to mine. People always say I look like her, but I couldn’t even get the spot off my chin much less look so mature and beautiful.
[Stop smirking, Carter.]
The photo fascinated me because I hardly remembered our lives together at all. But the main reason I’d kept the photo was because of the symbol on Mum’s T-shirt: one of those life symbols—an ankh.
My dead mother wearing the symbol for life. Nothing could’ve been sadder. But she smiled at the camera as if she knew a secret. As if my dad and she were sharing a private joke.
Something tugged at the back of my mind. That stocky man in the trench coat who’d been arguing with Dad across the street—he’d said something about the Per Ankh.
Had he meant ankh as in the symbol for life, and if so, what was a per? I supposed he didn’t mean pear as in the fruit.
I had an eerie feeling that if I saw the words Per Ankh written in hieroglyphics, I would know what they meant.
I put down the picture of Mum. I picked up a pencil and turned over one of my old homework papers. I wondered what would happen if I tried to draw the words Per Ankh. Would the right design just occur to me?
As I touched pencil to paper, my bedroom door opened. “Miss Kane?”
I whirled and dropped the pencil.
A police inspector stood frowning in my doorway. “What are you doing?”
“Maths,” I said.
My ceiling was quite low, so the inspector had to stoop to come in. He wore a lint-colored suit that matched his gray hair and his ashen face. “Now then, Sadie. I’m Chief Inspector Williams. Let’s have a chat, shall we? Sit down.”
I didn’t sit, and neither did he, which must’ve annoyed him. It’s hard to look in charge when you’re hunched over like Quasimodo.
“Tell me everything, please,” he said, “from the time your father came round to get you.”
“I already told the police at the museum.”
“Again, if you don’t mind.”
So I told him everything. Why not? His left eyebrow crept higher and higher as I told him the strange bits like the glowing letters and serpent staff.
“Well, Sadie,” Inspector Williams said. “You’ve got quite an imagination.”
“I’m not lying, Inspector. And I think your eyebrow is trying to escape.”
He tried to look at his own eyebrows, then scowled. “Now, Sadie, I’m sure this is very hard on you. I understand you want to protect your father’s reputation. But he’s gone now—”
“You mean through the floor in a coffin,” I insisted. “He’s not dead.”
Inspector Williams spread his hands. “Sadie, I’m very sorry. But we must find out why he did this act of...well...”
“Act of what?”
He cleared his throat uncomfortably. “Your father destroyed priceless artifacts and apparently killed himself in the process. We’d very much like to know why.”
I stared at him. “Are you saying my father’s a terrorist? Are you mad?”
“We’ve made calls to some of your father’s associates. I understand his behavior had become erratic since your mother’s death. He’d become withdrawn and obsessive in his studies, spending more and more time in Egypt—”
“He’s a bloody Egyptologist! You should be looking for him, not asking stupid questions!”
“Sadie,” he said, and I could hear in his voice that he was resisting the urge to strangle me. Strangely, I get this a lot from adults. “There are extremist groups in Egypt that object to Egyptian artifacts being kept in other countries’ museums. These people might have approached your father. Perhaps in his state, your father became an easy target for them. If you’ve heard him mention any names—”
I stormed past him to the window. I was so angry I could hardly think. I refused to believe Dad was dead. No, no, no. And a terrorist? Please. Why did adults have to be so thick? They always say “tell the truth,” and when you do, they don’t believe you. What’s the point?
I stared down at the dark street. Suddenly that cold tingly feeling got worse than ever. I focused on the dea
d tree where I’d met Dad earlier. Standing there now, in the dim light of a streetlamp, looking up at me, was the pudgy bloke in the black trench coat and the round glasses and the fedora—the man Dad had called Amos.
I suppose I should’ve felt threatened by an odd man staring up at me in the dark of night. But his expression was full of concern. And he looked so familiar. It was driving me mad that I couldn’t remember why.
Behind me, the inspector cleared his throat. “Sadie, no one blames you for the attack on the museum. We understand you were dragged into this against your will.”
I turned from the window. “Against my will? I chained the curator in his office.”
The inspector’s eyebrow started to creep up again. “Be that as it may, surely you didn’t understand what your father meant to do. Possibly your brother was involved?”
I snorted. “Carter? Please.”
“So you are determined to protect him as well. You consider him a proper brother, do you?”
I couldn’t believe it. I wanted to smack his face. “What’s that supposed to mean? Because he doesn’t look like me?”
The inspector blinked. “I only meant—”
“I know what you meant. Of course he’s my brother!”
Inspector Williams held up his hands apologetically, but I was still seething. As much as Carter annoyed me, I hated it when people assumed we weren’t related, or looked at my father askance when he said the three of us were a family—like we’d done something wrong. Stupid Dr. Martin at the museum. Inspector Williams. It happened every time Dad and Carter and I were together. Every bloody time.
“I’m sorry, Sadie,” the inspector said. “I only want to make sure we separate the innocent from the guilty. It will go much easier for everyone if you cooperate. Any information. Anything your father said. People he might’ve mentioned.”
“Amos,” I blurted out, just to see his reaction. “He met a man named Amos.”
Inspector Williams sighed. “Sadie, he couldn’t have done. Surely you know that. We spoke with Amos not one hour ago, on the phone from his home in New York.”