The Serpent's Shadow

3. We Win a Box Full of Nothing

ON THAT HAPPY NOTE, Sadie hands me the microphone. [Thanks a lot, sis.]

I wish I could tell you that Sadie was wrong about the Fifty-first Nome. I’d love to say we found all the Texas magicians safe and sound. We didn’t. We found nothing except the remnants of a battle: burned ivory wands, a few shattered shabti, scraps of smoldering linen and papyrus. Just like in the attacks on Toronto, Chicago, and Mexico City, the magicians had simply vanished. They’d been vaporized, devoured, or destroyed in some equally horrible way.

At the edge of the crater, one hieroglyph burned in the grass: Isfet, the symbol for Chaos. I had a feeling Apophis had left it there as a calling card.

We were all in shock, but we didn’t have time to mourn our comrades. The mortal authorities would be arriving soon to check out the scene. We had to repair the damage as best we could and remove all traces of magic.

There wasn’t much we could do about the crater. The locals would just have to assume there’d been a gas explosion. (We tended to cause a lot of those.)

We tried to fix the museum and restore the King Tut collection, but it wasn’t as easy as cleaning up the gift shop. Magic can only go so far. So if you go to a King Tut exhibit someday and notice cracks or burn marks on the artifacts, or maybe a statue with its head glued on backward—well, sorry. That was probably our fault.

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?”

He looked like he was about to pass out. Walt would never admit it, but our main healer, Jaz, had told me that his level of pain was almost unbearable all the time now. He was only able to stay on his feet because she kept tattooing pain-relief hieroglyphs on his chest and giving him potions. In spite of that, I’d asked him to come to Dallas with us—another decision that weighed on my heart.

The rest of our crew needed sleep too. Felix’s eyes were puffy from crying. Alyssa looked like she was going into shock.

If we met now, I wouldn’t know what to say. I had no plan. I couldn’t stand in front of the whole nome without breaking down. Not after having caused so many deaths in Dallas.

I glanced at Sadie. We came to a silent agreement.

“We’ll meet tomorrow,” I told the others. “You guys get some sleep. What happened with the Texans…” My voice caught. “Look, I know how you feel. I feel the same way. But it wasn’t your fault.”

I’m not sure they bought it. Felix wiped a tear from his cheek. Alyssa put her arm around him and led him toward the stairwell. Walt gave Sadie a glance I couldn’t interpret—maybe wistfulness or regret—then followed Alyssa downstairs.

“Agh?” Khufu patted the golden cabinet.

“Yeah,” I said. “Could you take it to the library?”

That was the most secure room in the mansion. I didn’t want to take any chances after all we’d sacrificed to save the box. Khufu waddled away with it.

Freak was so tired, he didn’t even make it to his covered roost. He just curled up where he was and started snoring, still attached to the boat. Traveling through the Duat takes a lot out of him.

I undid his harness and scratched his feathery head. “Thanks, buddy. Dream of big fat turkeys.”

He cooed in his sleep.

I turned to Sadie and Bast. “We need to talk.”

It was almost midnight, but the Great Room was still buzzing with activity. Julian, Paul, and a few of the other guys were crashed on the couches, watching the sports channel. The ankle-biters (our three youngest trainees) were coloring pictures on the floor. Chip bags and soda cans littered the coffee table. Shoes were tossed randomly across the snakeskin rug. In the middle of the room, the two-story-tall statue of Thoth, the ibis-headed god of knowledge, loomed over our initiates with his scroll and quill. Somebody had put one of Amos’s old porkpie hats on the statue’s head, so he looked like a bookie taking bets on the football game. One of the ankle-biters had colored the god’s obsidian toes pink and purple with crayons. We’re big on respect here at Brooklyn House.

As Sadie and I came down the stairs, the guys on the couch got to their feet.

“How did it go?” Julian asked. “Walt just came through, but he wouldn’t say—”

“Our team is safe,” I said. “The Fifty-first Nome…not so lucky.”

Julian winced. He knew better than to ask for details in front of the little kids. “Did you find anything helpful?”

“We’re not sure yet,” I admitted.

I wanted to leave it at that, but our youngest ankle-biter, Shelby, toddled over to show me her crayon masterpiece. “I kill a snake,” she announced. “Kill, kill, kill. Bad snake!”

She’d drawn a serpent with a bunch of knives sticking out of its back and X’s in its eyes. If Shelby had made that picture at school, it probably would’ve earned her a trip to the guidance counselor; but here even the littlest ones understood something serious was happening.

She gave me a toothy grin, shaking her crayon like a spear. I stepped back. Shelby might’ve been a kindergartner, but she was already an excellent magician. Her crayons sometimes morphed into weapons, and the things she drew tended to peel off the page—like the red, white, and blue unicorn she had summoned for the Fourth of July.

“Awesome picture, Shelby.” I felt like my heart was being wrapped tight in mummy linen. Like all the littlest kids, Shelby was here with her parents’ consent. The parents understood that the fate of the world was at stake. They knew Brooklyn House was the best and safest place for Shelby to master her powers. Still, what kind of childhood was this for her, channeling magic that would destroy most adults, learning about monsters that would give anybody nightmares?

Julian ruffled Shelby’s hair. “Come on, sweetie. Draw me another picture, okay?”

Shelby said, “Kill?”

Julian steered her away. Sadie, Bast, and I headed to the library.

The heavy oaken doors opened to a staircase that descended into a huge cylindrical room like a well. Painted on the domed ceiling was Nut, the sky goddess, with silver constellations glittering on her dark blue body. The floor was a mosaic of her husband, Geb, the earth god, his body covered with rivers, hills, and deserts.

Even though it was late, our self-appointed librarian, Cleo, still had her four shabti statues at work. The clay men rushed around, dusting shelves, rearranging scrolls, and sorting books in the honeycombed compartments along the walls. Cleo herself sat at the worktable, jotting notes on a papyrus scroll while she talked to Khufu, who squatted on the table in front of her, patting our new antique cabinet and grunting in Baboon, like: Hey, Cleo, wanna buy a gold box?

Cleo wasn’t much in the bravery department, but she had an incredible memory. She could speak six languages, including English, her native Portuguese (she was Brazilian), Ancient Egyptian, and a few words of Baboon. She’d taken it upon herself to create a master index to all our scrolls, and had been gathering more scrolls from all over the world to help us find information on Apophis. It was Cleo who’d found the connection between the serpent’s recent attacks and the scrolls written by the legendary magician Setne.

She was a great help, though sometimes she got exasperated when she had to make room in her library for our school texts, Internet stations, large artifacts, and Bast’s back issues of Cat Fancy magazine.

When Cleo saw us coming down the stairs, she jumped to her feet. “You’re alive!”

“Don’t sound so surprised,” Sadie muttered.

Cleo chewed her lip. “Sorry, I just…I’m glad. Khufu came in alone, so I was worried. He was trying to tell me something about this gold box, but it’s empty. Did you find the Book of Overcoming Apophis?”

“The scroll burned,” I said. “We couldn’t save it.”

Cleo looked like she might scream. “But that was the last copy! How could Apophis destroy something so valuable?”

I wanted to remind Cleo that Apophis was out to destroy the entire world, but I knew she didn’t like to think about that. It made her sick from fear.

Getting outraged about the scroll was more manageable for her. The idea that anybody could destroy a book of any kind made Cleo want to punch Apophis in the face.

One of the shabti jumped onto the table. He tried to stick a scanner label on the golden cabinet, but Cleo shooed the clay man away.

“All of you, back to your places!” She clapped her hands, and the four shabti returned to their pedestals. They reverted to solid clay, though one was still wearing rubber gloves and holding a feather duster, which looked a little odd.

Cleo leaned in and studied the gold box. “There’s nothing inside. Why did you bring it?”

“That’s what Sadie, Bast, and I need to discuss,” I said. “If you don’t mind, Cleo.”

“I don’t mind.” Cleo kept examining the cabinet. Then she realized we were all staring at her. “Oh…you mean privately. Of course.”

She looked a little upset about getting kicked out, but she took Khufu’s hand. “Come on, babuinozinho. We’ll get you a snack.”

“Agh!” Khufu said happily. He adored Cleo, possibly because of her name. For reasons none of us quite understood, Khufu loved things that ended in -O, like avocados, Oreos, and armadillos.

Once Cleo and Khufu were gone, Sadie, Bast, and I gathered around our new acquisition.

The cabinet was shaped like a miniature school locker. The exterior was gold, but it must’ve been a thin layer of foil covering wood, because the whole thing wasn’t very heavy. The sides and top were engraved with hieroglyphs and pictures of the pharaoh and his wife. The front was fitted with latched double doors, which opened to reveal…well, not much of anything. There was a tiny pedestal marked by gold footprints, as if an Ancient Egyptian Barbie doll had once stood there.

Sadie studied the hieroglyphs along the sides of the box. “It’s all about Tut and his queen, wishing them a happy afterlife, blah, blah. There’s a picture of him hunting ducks. Honestly? That was his idea of paradise?”

“I like ducks,” Bast said.

I moved the little doors back and forth on their hinges. “Somehow I don’t think the ducks are important. Whatever was inside here, it’s gone now. Maybe grave robbers took it, or—”

Bast chuckled. “Grave robbers took it. Sure.”

I frowned at her. “What’s so funny?”

She grinned at me, then Sadie, before apparently realizing we didn’t get the joke. “Oh…I see. You actually don’t know what this is. I suppose that makes sense. Not many have survived.”

“Not many what?” I asked.

“Shadow boxes.”

Sadie wrinkled her nose. “Isn’t that a sort of school project? Did one for English once. Deadly boring.”

“I wouldn’t know about school projects,” Bast said haughtily. “That sounds suspiciously like work. But this is an actual shadow box—a box to hold a shadow.”

Bast didn’t sound like she was kidding, but it’s hard to tell with cats.

“It’s in there right now,” she insisted. “Can’t you see it? A little shadowy bit of Tut. Hello, shadow Tut!” She wriggled her fingers at the empty box. “That’s why I laughed when you said grave robbers might have stolen it. Ha! That would be a trick.”

I tried to wrap my mind around this idea. “But…I’ve heard Dad lecture on, like, every possible Egyptian artifact. I never once heard him mention a shadow box.”

“As I told you,” Bast said, “not many have survived. Usually the shadow box was buried far away from the rest of the soul. Tut was quite silly to have it placed in his tomb. Perhaps one of the priests put it there against his orders, out of spite.”

I was totally lost now. To my surprise, Sadie was nodding enthusiastically.

“That must’ve been what Anubis meant,” she said. “Pay attention to what’s not there. When I looked into the Duat, I saw darkness inside the box. And Uncle Vinnie said it was a clue to defeating Apophis.”

I made a “Time out” T with my hands. “Back up. Sadie, where did you see Anubis? And since when do we have an uncle named Vinnie?”

She looked a little embarrassed, but she described her encounter with the face in the wall, then the visions she’d had of our mom and Isis and her godly almost-boyfriend Anubis. I knew my sister’s attention wandered a lot, but even I was impressed by how many mystical side trips she’d managed, just walking through a museum.

“The face in the wall could’ve been a trick,” I said.

“Possibly…but I don’t think so. The face said we would need his help, and we had only two days until something happened to him. He told me this box would show us what we needed. Anubis hinted I was on the right track, saving this cabinet. And Mum…” Sadie faltered. “Mum said this was the only way we’d ever see her again. Something is happening to the spirits of the dead.”

Suddenly I felt like I was back in the Duat, wrapped in freezing fog. I stared at the box, but I still didn’t see anything. “How do shadows tie in to Apophis and spirits of the dead?”

I looked at Bast. She dug her fingernails into the table, using it like a scratching post, the way she does when she’s tense. We go through a lot of tables.

“Bast?” Sadie asked gently.

“Apophis and shadows,” Bast mused. “I’d never considered…” She shook her head. “These are really questions you should ask Thoth. He’s much more knowledgeable than I.”

A memory surfaced. My dad had given a lecture at a university somewhere…Munich, maybe? The students had asked him about the Egyptian concept of the soul, which had multiple parts, and my dad mentioned something about shadows.

Like one hand with five fingers, he’d said. One soul with five parts.

I held up my own fingers, trying to remember. “Five parts of the soul…what are they?”

Bast stayed silent. She looked pretty uncomfortable.

“Carter?” Sadie asked. “What does that have to do—?”

“Just humor me,” I said. “The first part is the ba, right? Our personality.”

“Chicken form,” Sadie said.

Trust Sadie to nickname part of your soul after poultry, but I knew what she meant. The ba could leave the body when we dreamed, or it could come back to the earth as a ghost after we died. When it did, it appeared as a large glowing bird with a human head.

“Yeah,” I said. “Chicken form. Then there’s the ka, the life force that leaves the body when it dies. Then there’s the ib, the heart—”

“The record of good and bad deeds,” Sadie agreed. “That’s the bit they weigh on the scales of justice in the afterlife.”

“And fourth…” I hesitated.

“The ren,” Sadie supplied. “Your secret name.”

I was too embarrassed to look at her. Last spring she’d saved my life by speaking my secret name, which had basically given her access to my most private thoughts and darkest emotions. Since then she’d been pretty cool about it, but still…that’s not the kind of leverage you want to give your little sister.

The ren was also the part of the soul that our friend Bes had given up for us in our gambling match six months ago with the moon god Khonsu. Now Bes was a hollow shell of a god, sitting in a wheelchair in the Underworld’s divine nursing home.

“Right,” I said. “But the fifth part…” I looked at Bast. “It’s the shadow, isn’t it?”

Sadie frowned. “The shadow? How can a shadow be part of your soul? It’s just a silhouette, isn’t it? A trick of the light.”

Bast held her hand over the table. Her fingers cast a vague shadow over the wood. “You can never be free of your shadow—your sheut. All living beings have them.”

“So do rocks, pencils, and shoes,” Sadie said. “Does that mean they have souls?”

“You know better,” Bast chided. “Living beings are different from rocks…well, most are, anyway. The sheut is not just a physical shadow. It’s a magical projection—the silhouette of the soul.”

“So this box…” I said. “When you say it holds King Tut’s shadow—”

“I mean it holds one fifth of his soul,” Bast confirmed. “It houses the pharaoh’s sheut so it will not be lost in the afterlife.”

My brain felt like it was about to explode. I knew this stuff about shadows must be important, but I didn’t see how. It was like I’d been handed a puzzle piece, but it was for the wrong puzzle.

We’d failed to save the right piece—an irreplaceable scroll that might’ve helped us beat Apophis—and we’d failed to save an entire nome full of friendly magicians. All we had to show from our trip was an empty cabinet decorated with pictures of ducks. I wanted to knock King Tut’s shadow box across the room.

“Lost shadows,” I muttered. “This sounds like that Peter Pan story.”

Bast’s eyes glowed like paper lanterns. “What do you think inspired the story of Peter Pan’s lost shadow? There have been folktales about shadows for centuries, Carter—all handed down since the days of Egypt.”

“But how does that help us?” I demanded. “The Book of Overcoming Apophis would’ve helped us. Now it’s gone!”

Okay, I sounded angry. I was angry.

Remembering my dad’s lectures made me want to be a kid again, traveling the world with him. We’d been through some weird stuff together, but I’d always felt safe and protected. He’d always known what to do. Now all I had left from those days was my suitcase, gathering dust in my closet upstairs.

It wasn’t fair. But I knew what my dad would say about that: Fair means everyone gets what they need. And the only way to get what you need is to make that happen yourself.

Great, Dad. I’m facing an impossible enemy, and what I need in order to defeat him just got destroyed.

Sadie must’ve read my expression. “Carter, we’ll figure it out,” she promised. “Bast, you were about to say something earlier about Apophis and shadows.”

“No, I wasn’t,” Bast murmured.

“Why are you so nervous about this?” I asked. “Do gods have shadows? Does Apophis? If so, how do they work?”

Bast gouged some hieroglyphs in the table with her fingernails. I was pretty sure the message read: DANGER.

“Honestly, children…this is a question for Thoth. Yes, gods have shadows. Of course we do. But—but it’s not something we’re supposed to talk about.”

I’d rarely seen Bast look so agitated. I wasn’t sure why. This was a goddess who’d fought Apophis face-to-face, claw to fang, in a magical prison for thousands of years. Why was she scared of shadows?

“Bast,” I said, “if we can’t figure out a better solution, we’ll have to go with Plan B.”

The goddess winced. Sadie stared dejectedly at the table. Plan B was something only Sadie, Bast, Walt, and I had discussed. Our other initiates didn’t know about it. We hadn’t even told our Uncle Amos. It was that scary.

“I—I would hate that,” Bast said. “But, Carter, I really don’t know the answers. And if you start asking about shadows, you’ll be delving into very dangerous—”

There was a knock on the library doors. Cleo and Khufu appeared at the top of the stairs.

“Sorry to disturb,” Cleo said. “Carter, Khufu just came down from your room. He seems anxious to talk with you.”

“Agh!” Khufu insisted.

Bast translated from baboon-speak. “He says there’s a call for you on the scrying bowl, Carter. A private call.”

As if I weren’t stressed enough already. Only one person would be sending me a scrying vision, and if she was contacting me so late at night, it had to be bad news.

“Meeting adjourned,” I told the others. “See you in the morning.”