The Serpent's Shadow (Kane Chronicles #3)(9)

The guards had all disappeared from their stations. We reached the museum foyer, and I saw columns of white smoke outside the glass walls, rising from the sculpture garden.

“No,” I murmured. “No, no.”

We tore across the street. The well-kept lawn was now a crater as big as an Olympic pool. The bottom was littered with melted metal sculptures and chunks of stone. Tunnels that had once led into the Fifty-first Nome’s headquarters had collapsed like a giant anthill some bully had stepped on. Around the rim of the crater were bits of smoking evening wear, smashed plates of tacos, broken champagne glasses, and the shattered staffs of magicians.

Don’t blame yourself for the deaths, my mother had said.

I moved in a daze to the remains of the patio. Half the concrete slab had cracked and slid into the crater. A charred fiddle lay in the mud next to a gleaming bit of silver.

Carter stood next to me. “We—we should search,” he said. “There might be survivors.”

I swallowed back a sob. I wasn’t sure how, but I sensed the truth with absolute certainty. “There aren’t any.”

The Texas magicians had welcomed us and supported us. JD Grissom had shaken my hand and wished me luck before running off to save his wife. But we’d seen the work of Apophis in other nomes. Carter had warned JD: The serpent’s minions don’t leave any survivors.

I knelt down and picked up the gleaming piece of silver—a half-melted Lone Star belt buckle.

“They’re dead,” I said. “All of them.”

C A R T E R

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.