Rick Riordan - The Red Pyramid

“I’ll try to change you back,” I told him. “Hopefully I don’t make things worse.”

He made a little croak that didn’t convey much confidence.

I closed my eyes and imagined Carter as he should be: a tall boy of fourteen, badly dressed, very human, very annoying. Carter began to feel heavy in my hands. I put him down and watched as the lizard grew into a vaguely human blob. By the count of three, my brother was lying on his stomach, his sword and pack next to him on the lawn.

He spit grass out of his mouth. “How’d you do that?”

“I don’t know,” I admitted. “You just seemed…wrong.”

“Thanks a lot.” He got up and checked to make sure he had all his fingers. Then he saw the two magicians and his mouth fell open. “What did you do to them?”

“Just tied one up. Knocked one out. Magic.”

“No, I mean…” He faltered, searching for words, then gave up and pointed.

I looked at the magicians and yelped. Wayne wasn’t moving. His eyes and mouth were open, but he wasn’t blinking or breathing. Next to him, Jerrod looked just as frozen. As we watched, their mouths began to glow as if they’d swallowed matches. Two tiny yellow orbs of fire popped out from between their lips and shot into the air, disappearing in the sunlight.

“What-what was that?” I asked. “Are they dead?”

Carter approached them cautiously and put his hand on Wayne’s neck. “It doesn’t even feel like skin. More like rock.”

“No, they were human! I didn’t turn them to rock!”

Carter felt Jerrod’s forehead where I’d whacked him with my wand. “It’s cracked.”

“What?”

Carter picked up his sword. Before I could even scream, he brought the hilt down on Jerrod’s face and the magician’s head cracked into shards like a flowerpot.

“They’re made of clay,” Carter said. “They’re both shabti.”

He kicked Wayne’s arm and I heard it crunch under the twine.

“But they were casting spells,” I said. “And talking. They were real.”

As we watched, the shabti crumbled to dust, leaving nothing behind but my bit of twine, two staffs, and some grungy clothes.

“Thoth was testing us,” Carter said. “Those balls of fire, though…” He frowned as if trying to recall something important.

“Probably the magic that animated them,” I guessed. “Flying back to their master-like a recording of what they did?”

It sounded like a solid theory to me, but Carter seemed awfully troubled. He pointed to the blasted back door of Graceland. “Is the whole house like that?”

“Worse.” I looked at the ruined Elvis jumpsuit under Jerrod’s clothes and scattered rhinestones. Maybe Elvis had no taste, but I still felt bad about trashing the King’s palace. If the place had been important to Dad…Suddenly an idea perked me up. “What was it Amos said, when he repaired that saucer?”

Carter frowned. “This is a whole house, Sadie. Not a saucer.”

“Got it,” I said. “Hi-nehm!”

A gold hieroglyphic symbol flickered to life in my palm.

I held it up and blew it towards the house. The entire outline of Graceland began to glow. The pieces of the door flew back into place and mended themselves. The tattered bits of Elvis clothing disappeared.

“Wow,” Carter said. “Do you think the inside is fixed too?”

“I-” My vision blurred, and my knees buckled. I would’ve knocked my head on the pavement if Carter hadn’t caught me.

“It’s okay,” he said. “You did a lot of magic, Sadie. That was amazing.”

“But we haven’t even found the item Thoth sent us for.”

“Yeah,” Carter said. “Maybe we have.”

He pointed to Elvis’s grave, and I saw it clearly: a memento left behind by some adoring fan-a necklace with a silver loop-topped cross, just like the one on Mum’s T-shirt in my old photograph.

“An ankh,” I said. “The Egyptian symbol for eternal life.”

Carter picked it up. There was a small papyrus scroll attached to the chain.

“What’s this?” he murmured, and unrolled the sheet. He stared at it so hard I thought he’d burn a hole in it.

“What?” I looked over his shoulder.

The painting looked quite ancient. It showed a golden, spotted cat holding a knife in one paw and chopping the head off a snake.

Beneath it, in black marker, someone had written: Keep up the fight!

“That’s vandalism, isn’t it?” I asked. “Marking up an ancient drawing like that? Rather an odd thing to leave for Elvis.”

Carter didn’t seem to hear. “I’ve seen this picture before. It’s in a lot of tombs. Don’t know why it never occurred to me…”

I studied the picture more closely. Something about it did seem rather familiar.

“You know what it means?” I asked.

“It’s the Cat of Ra, fighting the sun god’s main enemy, Apophis.”

“The snake,” I said.

“Yeah, Apophis was-”

“The embodiment of chaos,” I said, remembering what Nut had said.

Carter looked impressed, as well he should have. “Exactly. Apophis was even worse than Set. The Egyptians thought Doomsday would come when Apophis ate the sun and destroyed all of Creation.”

“But…the cat killed it,” I said hopefully.

“The cat had to kill it over and over again,” Carter said. “Like what Thoth said about repeating patterns. The thing is…I asked Dad one time if the cat had a name. And he said nobody knows for sure, but most people assume it’s Sekhmet, this fierce lion goddess. She was called the Eye of Ra because she did his dirty work. He saw an enemy; she killed it.”

“Fine. So?”

“So the cat doesn’t look like Sekhmet. It just occurred to me…”

I finally saw it, and a shiver went down my back. “The Cat of Ra looks exactly like Muffin. It’s Bast.”

Just then the ground rumbled. The memorial fountain began to glow, and a dark doorway opened.

“Come on,” I said. “I’ve got some questions for Thoth. And then I’m going to punch him in the beak.”

C A R T E R

BEING TURNED INTO A LIZARD can really mess up your day. As we stepped through the doorway, I tried to hide it, but I was feeling pretty bad.

You’re probably thinking: Hey, you already turned into a falcon. What’s the big deal? But someone else forcing you into another form-that’s totally different. Imagine yourself in a trash compactor, your entire body smashed into a shape smaller than your hand. It’s painful and it’s humiliating. Your enemy pictures you as a stupid harmless lizard, then imposes their will on you, overpowering your thoughts until you have to be what they want you to be. I guess it could’ve been worse. He could’ve pictured me as a fruit bat, but still…

Of course I felt grateful to Sadie for saving me, but I also felt like a complete loser. It was bad enough that I’d embarrassed myself on the basketball court with a troop of baboons. But I’d also totally failed in battle. Maybe I’d done okay with Leroy, the airport monster, but faced with a couple of magicians (even clay ones), I got turned into a reptile in the first two seconds. How would I stand a chance against Set?

I was shaken out of those thoughts when we emerged from the portal, because we were definitely not in Thoth’s office.

In front of us loomed a life-size glass-and-metal pyramid, almost as big as the ones at Giza. The skyline of downtown Memphis rose up in the distance. At our backs were the banks of the Mississippi River.