The Throne of Fire (Kane Chronicles #2)(43)

Wow. That sounded really selfish. But I suppose it was true. Amazing how many different ways a younger sister can annoy you at once.

Sadie didn’t take her eyes off the stele. “Carter, you have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“You’re not giving the guy a chance,” I insisted. “Whatever’s going on with him, it’s got nothing to do with you.”

“Very reassuring, but that’s not—”

“Besides, Anubis is a god. You don’t honestly think—”

“Carter!” she snapped. My cloaking spell must’ve been sensitive to emotion, because another gold spark whistled and popped from our not-so-invisible cloud. “I wasn’t looking at this stone because of Anubis.”

“You weren’t?”

“No. And I’m certainly not having an argument with you about Walt. Contrary to what you might think, I don’t spend every waking hour thinking about boys.”

“Just most waking hours?”

She rolled her eyes. “Look at the gravestone, birdbrain. It’s got a border around it, like a window frame or—”

“A door,” I said. “It’s a false door. Lots of tombs had those. It was like a symbolic gateway for the dead person’s ba, so it could go back and forth from the Duat.”

Sadie pulled her wand and traced the edges of the stele. “This bloke Ipi was a scribe, which was another word for magician. He could’ve been one of us.”

“So?”

“So maybe that’s why the stone is glowing, Carter. What if this false door’s not false?”

I looked at the stele more closely, but I didn’t see any glow. I thought maybe Sadie was hallucinating from exhaustion or too much potion in her system. Then she touched her wand to the center of the stele and spoke the first command word we’d ever learned: “W’peh.”

Open. A golden hieroglyph burned on the stone:

The grave marker shot out a beam of light like a movie projector. Suddenly, a full-size doorway shimmered in front of us—a rectangular portal showing the hazy image of another room.

I looked at Sadie in amazement. “How did you do that?” I asked. “You’ve never been able to do that before.”

She shrugged as if it were no big deal. “I wasn’t thirteen before. Maybe that’s it.”

“But I’m fourteen!” I protested. “And I still can’t do that.”

“Girls mature earlier.”

I gritted my teeth. I hated the spring months—March, April, May—because until my birthday rolled around in June, Sadie could claim to be only a year younger than me. She always got an attitude after her birthday, as if she’d catch up to me somehow and become my big sister. Talk about a nightmare.

She gestured at the glowing doorway. “After you, brother, dear. You’re the one with the sparkly invisibility cloud.”

Before I could lose my cool, I stepped through the portal.

I almost fell and broke my face. The other side of the portal was a mirror hanging five feet off the floor. I’d stepped onto a fireplace mantel. I caught Sadie as she came through, just in time to keep her from toppling off the ledge.

“Ta,” she whispered. “Someone’s been reading too much Alice Through the Looking Glass.”

I’d thought the Egyptian room was impressive, but it was nothing compared to this ballroom. Coppery geometric designs glittered on the ceiling. The walls were lined with dark green columns and gilded doors. White and gold inlaid marble made a huge octagonal pattern on the floor. With a blazing chandelier above, the golden filigree and green and white polished stone gleamed so brightly, they hurt my eyes.

Then I realized most of the light wasn’t coming from the chandelier. It was coming from the magician casting a spell at the other end of the room. His back was turned, but I could tell it was Vlad Menshikov. Just as Sadie had described, he was a pudgy little man with curly gray hair and a white suit. He stood in a protective circle that pulsed with emerald light. He raised his staff, and the tip burned like a welding torch. To his right, just outside the circle, stood a green vase the size of a grown man. To his left, writhing in glowing chains, was a creature I recognized as a demon. It had a hairy humanoid body with purplish skin, but instead of a head, a giant corkscrew sprouted between its shoulders.

“Mercy!” it screamed in a watery, metallic voice. Don’t ask me how a demon could scream with a corkscrew head—but the sound resonated up the screw like it was a massive tuning fork.

Vlad Menshikov kept chanting. The green vase throbbed with light.

Sadie nudged me and whispered, “Look.”

“Yeah,” I whispered back. “Some kind of summoning ritual.”

“No,” she hissed. “Look there.”

She pointed to our right. In the corner of the room, twenty feet from the fireplace mantel, was an old-fashioned mahogany desk.

Sadie had told me about Anubis’s instructions: We were supposed to find Menshikov’s desk. The next section of the Book of Ra would be in the middle drawer. Could that really be the desk? It seemed too easy. As quietly as we could, Sadie and I climbed off the mantel and crept along the wall. I prayed the invisibility shroud wouldn’t send up any more fireworks.

We were about halfway to the desk when Vlad Menshikov finished his chant. He slammed his staff against the floor, and it stuck there straight up, the tip still burning at a million degrees. He turned his head slightly, and I caught the glint of his white sunglasses. He rummaged in his coat pockets while the big green vase glowed and the demon screamed in his chains.