The Son of Sobek (Kane Chronicles)

The Son of Sobek (Kane Chronicles)
Rick Riordan



GETTING EATEN BY A GIANT CROCODILE was bad enough.

The kid with the glowing sword only made my day worse.

Maybe I should introduce myself.

I’m Carter Kane—part-time high school freshman, part-time magician, full-time worrier about all the Egyptian gods and monsters who are constantly trying to kill me.

Okay, that last part is an exaggeration. Not all the gods want me dead. Just a lot of them—but that kind of goes with the territory, since I’m a magician in the House of Life. We’re like the police for Ancient Egyptian supernatural forces, making sure they don’t cause too much havoc in the modern world.

Anyway, on this particular day I was tracking down a rogue monster on Long Island. Our scryers had been sensing magical disturbances in the area for several weeks. Then the local news started reporting that a large creature had been sighted in the ponds and marshes near the Montauk Highway—a creature that was eating the wildlife and scaring the locals. One reporter even called it the Long Island Swamp Monster. When mortals start raising the alarm, you know it’s time to check things out.

Normally my sister, Sadie, or some of our other initiates from Brooklyn House would’ve come with me. But they were all at the First Nome, in Egypt, for a weeklong training session on controlling cheese demons (yes, they’re a real thing; believe me, you don’t want to know), so I was on my own.

I hitched our flying reed boat to Freak, my pet griffin, and we spent the morning buzzing around the South Shore looking for signs of trouble. If you’re wondering why I didn’t just ride on Freak’s back, imagine two hummingbird-like wings beating faster and more powerfully than helicopter blades. Unless you want to get shredded, it’s really better to ride in the boat.

Freak had a good nose for magic. After a couple of hours on patrol, he shrieked, “FREEEAAAK!” and banked hard to the left, circling over a green marshy inlet between two subdivisions.

“Down there?” I asked.

Freak shivered and squawked, whipping his barbed tail nervously.

I couldn’t see much below us—just a brown river glittering in the hot summer air, winding through swamp grass and clumps of gnarled trees until it emptied into Moriches Bay. The area looked a bit like the Nile Delta back in Egypt, except here the wetlands were surrounded on both sides by residential neighborhoods with row after row of gray-roofed houses. Just to the north, a line of cars inched along the Montauk Highway—vacationers escaping the crowds in the city to enjoy the crowds in the Hamptons.

If there really was a carnivorous swamp monster below us, I wondered how long it would be before it developed a taste for humans. If that happened…well, it was surrounded by an all-you-can-eat buffet.

“Okay,” I told Freak. “Set me down by the riverbank.”

As soon as I stepped out of the boat, Freak screeched and zoomed into the sky, the boat trailing behind him.

“Hey!” I yelled after him, but it was too late.

Freak is easily spooked. Flesh-eating monsters tend to scare him away. So do fireworks, clowns, and the smell of Sadie’s weird British Ribena drink. (Can’t blame him on that last one. Sadie grew up in London and developed some pretty strange tastes.)

I would have to take care of this monster problem, and then whistle for Freak to pick me up once I was done.

I opened my backpack and checked my supplies: some enchanted rope, my curved ivory wand, a lump of wax for making a magical shabti figurine, my calligraphy set, and a healing potion my friend Jaz had brewed for me a while back. (She knew that I got hurt a lot.)

There was just one more thing I needed.

I concentrated and reached into the Duat. Over the last few months, I’d gotten better at storing emergency provisions in the shadow realm—extra weapons, clean clothes, Fruit by the Foot, and chilled six-packs of root beer—but sticking my hand into a magical dimension still felt weird, like pushing through layers of cold, heavy curtains. I closed my fingers around the hilt of my sword and pulled it out—a heavy khopesh with a blade curved like a question mark. Armed with my sword and wand, I was all set for a stroll through the swamp to look for a hungry monster. Oh, joy!

I waded into the water and immediately sank to my knees. The river bottom felt like congealed stew. With every step, my shoes made such rude noises—suck-plop, suck-plop—that I was glad my sister Sadie wasn’t with me. She never would’ve stopped laughing.

Even worse, making this much noise, I knew I wouldn’t be able to sneak up on any monsters.

Mosquitoes swarmed me. Suddenly I felt nervous and alone.

Could be worse, I told myself. I could be studying cheese demons.

But I couldn’t quite convince myself. In the nearby subdivision, I heard kids shouting and laughing, probably playing some kind of game. I wondered what that would be like—being a normal kid, hanging out with my friends on a summer afternoon.

The idea was so nice, I got distracted. I didn’t notice the ripples in the water until fifty yards ahead of me something broke the surface—a line of leathery, blackish-green bumps. Instantly it submerged again, but I knew what I was dealing with now. I’d seen crocodiles before, and this was a freakishly big one.

I remembered El Paso, the winter before last, when my sister and I had been attacked by the crocodile god Sobek. That wasn’t a good memory.

Sweat trickled down my neck.