Desjardins was literally fuming. His tattered robes still smoked from battle. (Carter says I shouldn’t mention that his pink boxer shorts were showing, but they were!) His staff was aglow, and the whiskers in his beard smoldered. Behind him stood three equally battered magicians, who all looked as if they’d just regained consciousness.
“Oh, good,” I muttered. “You’re alive.”
“You bargained with Set?” Desjardins demanded. “You let him go?”
“We don’t answer to you,” Carter growled. He stepped forward, hand on his sword, but I put out my arm to hold him back.
“Desjardins,” I said as calmly as I could, “Apophis is rising, in case you missed that part. We need the gods. The House of Life has to relearn the old ways.”
“The old ways destroyed us!” he yelled.
A week ago, the look in his eyes would’ve made me tremble. He fairly glowed with rage, and hieroglyphs blazed in the air around him. He was the Chief Lector, and I’d just undone everything the House had worked for since the fall of Egypt. Desjardins was a heartbeat away from turning me into an insect, and the thought should’ve terrified me.
Instead, I looked him in the eye. Right now, I was more powerful than he was. Much more powerful. And I let him know it.
“Pride destroyed you,” I said. “Greed and selfishness and all of that. It’s hard to follow the path of the gods. But it is part of magic. You can’t just shut it down.”
“You are drunk with power,” he snarled. “The gods have possessed you, as they always do. Soon you will forget you are even human. We will fight you and destroy you.” Then he glared at Carter. “And you-I know what Horus would demand. You will never reclaim the throne. With my last breath-”
“Save it,” I said. Then I faced my brother. “You know what we have to do?”
Understanding passed between us. I was surprised how easily I could read him. I thought it might be the influence of the gods, but then I realized it was because we were both Kanes, brother and sister. And Carter, god help me, was also my friend.
“Are you sure?” he asked. “We’re leaving ourselves open.” He glared at Desjardins. “Just one more good smack with the sword?”
“I’m sure, Carter.”
I closed my eyes and focused.
Consider carefully, Isis said. What we’ve done so far is only the beginning of the power we could wield together.
That’s the problem, I said. I’m not ready for that. I’ve got to get there on my own, the hard way.
You are wise for a mortal, Isis said. Very well.
Imagine giving up a fortune in cash. Imagine throwing away the most beautiful diamond necklace in the world. Separating myself from Isis was harder than that, much harder.
But it wasn’t impossible. I know my limits, my mother had said, and now I understood how wise she’d been.
I felt the spirit of the goddess leave me. Part of her flowed into my necklace, but most of her streamed into the Washington Monument, back into the Duat, where Isis would go…somewhere else. Another host? I wasn’t sure.
When I opened my eyes, Carter stood next to me looking grief-stricken, holding his Eye of Horus amulet.
Desjardins was so stunned, he momentarily forgot how to speak English. “Ce n’est pas possible. On ne pourrait pas-”
“Yes, we could,” I said. “We’ve given up the gods of our own free will. And you’ve got a lot to learn about what’s possible.”
Carter threw down his sword. “Desjardins, I’m not after the throne. Not unless I earn it by myself, and that’s going to take time. We’re going to learn the path of the gods. We’re going to teach others. You can waste time trying to destroy us, or you can help.”
The sirens were much closer now. I could see the lights of emergency vehicles coming from several directions, slowly cordoning off the National Mall. We had only minutes before we were surrounded.
Desjardins looked at the magicians behind him, probably gauging how much support he could rally. His brethren looked in awe. One even started to bow to me, then caught himself.
Alone, Desjardins might’ve been able to destroy us. We were just magicians now-very tired magicians, with hardly any formal training.
Desjardins’ nostrils flared. Then he surprised me by lowering his staff. “There has been too much destruction today. But the path of the gods shall remain closed. If you cross the House of Life again…”
He let the threat hang in the air. He slammed his staff down, and with a final burst of energy, the four magicians dissolved into wind and gusted away.
Suddenly I felt exhausted. The terror of what I’d been through began to sink in. We’d survived, but that was little consolation. I missed my parents. I missed them terribly. I wasn’t a goddess anymore. I was just a regular girl, alone with only my brother.
Then Amos groaned and started sitting up. Police cars and sinister-looking black vans blocked the curbs all around us. Sirens blared. A helicopter sliced through the air over the Potomac, closing fast. God only knew what the mortals thought had happened at the Washington Monument, but I didn’t want my face on the nightly news.
“Carter, we have to get out of here,” I said. “Can you summon enough magic to change Amos into something small-a mouse maybe? We can fly him out.”
He nodded, still in a daze. “But Dad…we didn’t…”
He looked around helplessly. I knew how he felt. The pyramid, the throne, the golden coffin-all of it was gone. We’d come so far to rescue our father, only to lose him. And Carter’s first girlfriend lay at his feet in a pile of pottery shards. That probably didn’t help either. (Carter protests that she wasn’t really his girlfriend. Oh, please!)
I couldn’t dwell on it, though. I had to be strong for both of us or we’d end up in prison.
“First things first,” I said. “We have to get Amos to safety.”
“Where?” Carter asked.
There was only one place I could think of.
C A R T E R
41. We Stop the Recording, for Now
I CAN’T BELIEVE SADIE’s GOING TO let me have the last word. Our experience together must’ve really taught her something. Ow, she just hit me. Never mind.
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!”