Sadie was passed out next to me, but she looked unharmed. I shook her shoulder, and she grunted. “Ugh.”
In front of us, where the Rosetta Stone had been, stood a smoking, sheared-off pedestal. The floor was blackened in a starburst pattern, except for the glowing blue circle around our father.
He was facing our direction, but he didn’t seem to be looking at us. A bloody cut ran across his scalp. He gripped the boomerang tightly.
I didn’t understand what he was looking at. Then the horrible laughter echoed around the room again, and I realized it was coming from right in front of me.
Something stood between our father and us. At first, I could barely make it out—just a flicker of heat. But as I concentrated, it took on a vague form—the fiery outline of a man.
He was taller than Dad, and his laugh cut through me like a chainsaw.
“Well done,” he said to my father. “Very well done, Julius.”
“You were not summoned!” My father’s voice trembled. He held up the boomerang, but the fiery man flicked one finger, and the stick flew from Dad’s hand, shattering against the wall.
“I am never summoned, Julius,” the man purred. “But when you open a door, you must be prepared for guests to walk through.”
“Back to the Duat!” my father roared. “I have the power of the Great King!”
“Oh, scary,” the fiery man said with amusement. “And even if you knew how to use that power, which you do not, he was never my match. I am the strongest. Now you will share his fate.”
I couldn’t make sense of anything, but I knew that I had to help my dad. I tried to pick up the nearest chunk of stone, but I was so terrified my fingers felt frozen and numb. My hands were useless.
Dad shot me a silent look of warning: Get out. I realized he was intentionally keeping the fiery man’s back to us, hoping Sadie and I would escape unnoticed.
Sadie was still groggy. I managed to drag her behind a column, into the shadows. When she started to protest, I clamped my hand over her mouth. That woke her up. She saw what was happening and stopped fighting.
Alarms blared. Fire circled around the doorways of the gallery. The guards had to be on their way, but I wasn’t sure if that was a good thing for us.
Dad crouched to the floor, keeping his eyes on his enemy, and opened his painted wooden box. He brought out a small rod like a ruler. He muttered something under his breath and the rod elongated into a wooden staff as tall as he was.
Sadie made a squeaking sound. I couldn’t believe my eyes either, but things only got weirder.
Dad threw his staff at the fiery man’s feet, and it changed into an enormous serpent—ten feet long and as big around as I was—with coppery scales and glowing red eyes. It lunged at the fiery man, who effortlessly grabbed the serpent by its neck. The man’s hand burst into white-hot flames, and the snake burned to ashes.
“An old trick, Julius,” the fiery man chided.
My dad glanced at us, silently urging us again to run. Part of me refused to believe any of this was real. Maybe I was unconscious, having a nightmare. Next to me, Sadie picked up a chunk of stone.
“How many?” my dad asked quickly, trying to keep the fiery man’s attention. “How many did I release?”
“Why, all five,” the man said, as if explaining something to a child. “You should know we’re a package deal, Julius. Soon I’ll release even more, and they’ll be very grateful. I shall be named king again.”
“The Demon Days,” my father said. “They’ll stop you before it’s too late.”
The fiery man laughed. “You think the House can stop me? Those old fools can’t even stop arguing among themselves. Now let the story be told anew. And this time you shall never rise!”
The fiery man waved his hand. The blue circle at Dad’s feet went dark. Dad grabbed for his toolbox, but it skittered across the floor.
“Good-bye, Osiris,” the fiery man said. With another flick of his hand, he conjured a glowing coffin around our dad. At first it was transparent, but as our father struggled and pounded on its sides, the coffin became more and more solid—a golden Egyptian sarcophagus inlaid with jewels. My dad caught my eyes one last time, and mouthed the word Run! before the coffin sank into the floor, as if the ground had turned to water.
“Dad!” I screamed.
Sadie threw her stone, but it sailed harmlessly through the fiery man’s head.
He turned, and for one terrible moment, his face appeared in the flames. What I saw made no sense. It was as if someone had superimposed two different faces on top of each other—one almost human, with pale skin, cruel, angular features, and glowing red eyes, the other like an animal with dark fur and sharp fangs. Worse than a dog or a wolf or a lion—some animal I’d never seen before. Those red eyes stared at me, and I knew I was going to die.
Behind me, heavy footsteps echoed on the marble floor of the Great Court. Voices were barking orders. The security guards, maybe the police—but they’d never get here in time.
The fiery man lunged at us. A few inches from my face, something shoved him backward. The air sparked with electricity. The amulet around my neck grew uncomfortably hot.
The fiery man hissed, regarding me more carefully. “So...it’s you.”
The building shook again. At the opposite end of the room, part of the wall exploded in a brilliant flash of light. Two people stepped through the gap—the man and the girl we’d seen at the Needle, their robes swirling around them. Both of them held staffs.
The fiery man snarled. He looked at me one last time and said, “Soon, boy.”
Then the entire room erupted in flames. A blast of heat sucked all the air of out my lungs and I crumpled to the floor.
The last thing I remember, the man with the forked beard and the girl in blue were standing over me. I heard the security guards running and shouting, getting closer. The girl crouched over me and drew a long curved knife from her belt.
“We must act quickly,” she told the man.
“Not yet,” he said with some reluctance. His thick accent sounded French. “We must be sure before we destroy them.”
I closed my eyes and drifted into unconsciousness.
Chapter 3. Imprisoned with My Cat
[Give me the bloody mic.]
Hullo. Sadie here. My brother’s a rubbish storyteller. Sorry about that. But now you’ve got me, so all is well.
Let’s see. The explosion. Rosetta Stone in a billion pieces. Fiery evil bloke. Dad boxed in a coffin. Creepy Frenchman and Arab girl with the knife. Us passing out. Right.
So when I woke up, the police were rushing about as you might expect. They separated me from my brother. I didn’t really mind that part. He’s a pain anyway. But they locked me in the curator’s office for ages. And yes, they used our bicycle chain to do it. Cretins.
I was shattered, of course. I’d just been knocked out by a fiery whatever-it-was. I’d watched my dad get packed in a sarcophagus and shot through the floor. I tried to tell the police about all that, but did they care? No.
Worst of all: I had a lingering chill, as if someone was pushing ice-cold needles into the back of my neck. It had started when I looked at those blue glowing words Dad had drawn on the Rosetta Stone and I knew what they meant. A family disease, perhaps? Can knowledge of boring Egyptian stuff be hereditary? With my luck.
Long after my gum had gone stale, a policewoman finally retrieved me from the curator’s office. She asked me no questions. She just trundled me into a police car and took me home. Even then, I wasn’t allowed to explain to Gran and Gramps. The policewoman just tossed me into my room and I waited. And waited.
I don’t like waiting.
I paced the floor. My room was nothing posh, just an attic space with a window and a bed and a desk. There wasn’t much to do. Muffin sniffed my legs and her tail puffed up like a bottlebrush. I suppose she doesn’t fancy the smell of museums. She hissed and disappeared under the bed.
“Thanks a lot,” I muttered.
I opened the door, but the policewoman was standing guard.
“The inspector will be with you in a moment,” she told me. “Please stay inside.”
I could see downstairs—just a glimpse of Gramps pacing the room, wringing his hands, while Carter and a police inspector talked on the sofa. I couldn’t make out what they were saying.
“Could I just use the loo?” I asked the nice officer.
“No.” She closed the door in my face. As if I might rig an explosion in the toilet. Honestly.
I dug out my iPod and scrolled through my playlist. Nothing struck me. I threw it on my bed in disgust. When I’m too distracted for music, that is a very sad thing. I wondered why Carter got to talk to the police first. It wasn’t fair.
I fiddled with the necklace Dad had given me. I’d never been sure what the symbol meant. Carter’s was obviously an eye, but mine looked a bit like an angel, or perhaps a killer alien robot.
Why on earth had Dad asked if I still had it? Of course I still had it. It was the only gift he’d ever given me. Well, apart from Muffin, and with the cat’s attitude, I’m not sure I would call her a proper gift.
Dad had practically abandoned me at age six, after all. The necklace was my one link to him. On good days I would stare at it and remember him fondly. On bad days (which were much more frequent) I would fling it across the room and stomp on it and curse him for not being around, which I found quite therapeutic. But in the end, I always put it back on.
At any rate, during the weirdness at the museum—and I’m not making this up—the necklace got hotter. I nearly took it off, but I couldn’t help wondering if it truly was protecting me somehow.
I’ll make things right, Dad had said, with that guilty look he often gives me.
Well, colossal fail, Dad.
What had he been thinking? I wanted to believe it had all been a bad dream: the glowing hieroglyphs, the snake staff, the coffin. Things like that simply don’t happen. But I knew better. I couldn’t dream anything as horrifying as that fiery man’s face when he’d turned on us. “Soon, boy,” he’d told Carter, as if he intended to track us down. Just the idea made my hands tremble. I also couldn’t help wondering about our stop at Cleopatra’s Needle, how Dad had insisted on seeing it, as if he were steeling his courage, as if what he did at the British Museum had something to do with my mum.
My eyes wandered across my room and fixed on my desk.
No, I thought. Not going to do it.
But I walked over and opened the drawer. I shoved aside a few old mags, my stash of sweets, a stack of maths homework I’d forgotten to hand in, and a few pictures of me and my mates Liz and Emma trying on ridiculous hats in Camden Market. And there at the bottom of it all was the picture of Mum.
Gran and Gramps have loads of pictures. They keep a shrine to Ruby in the hall cupboard—Mum’s childhood artwork, her O-level results, her graduation picture from university, her favorite jewelry. It’s quite mental. I was determined not to be like them, living in the past. I barely remembered Mum, after all, and nothing could change the fact she was dead.