Carter frowned. “This is a whole house, Sadie. Not a saucer.”
“Got it,” I said. “Hi-nehm!”
A gold hieroglyphic symbol flickered to life in my palm.
I held it up and blew it towards the house. The entire outline of Graceland began to glow. The pieces of the door flew back into place and mended themselves. The tattered bits of Elvis clothing disappeared.
“Wow,” Carter said. “Do you think the inside is fixed too?”
“I—” My vision blurred, and my knees buckled. I would’ve knocked my head on the pavement if Carter hadn’t caught me.
“It’s okay,” he said. “You did a lot of magic, Sadie. That was amazing.”
“But we haven’t even found the item Thoth sent us for.”
“Yeah,” Carter said. “Maybe we have.”
He pointed to Elvis’s grave, and I saw it clearly: a memento left behind by some adoring fan—a necklace with a silver loop-topped cross, just like the one on Mum’s T-shirt in my old photograph.
“An ankh,” I said. “The Egyptian symbol for eternal life.”
Carter picked it up. There was a small papyrus scroll attached to the chain.
“What’s this?” he murmured, and unrolled the sheet. He stared at it so hard I thought he’d burn a hole in it.
“What?” I looked over his shoulder.
The painting looked quite ancient. It showed a golden, spotted cat holding a knife in one paw and chopping the head off a snake.
Beneath it, in black marker, someone had written: Keep up the fight!
“That’s vandalism, isn’t it?” I asked. “Marking up an ancient drawing like that? Rather an odd thing to leave for Elvis.”
Carter didn’t seem to hear. “I’ve seen this picture before. It’s in a lot of tombs. Don’t know why it never occurred to me...”
I studied the picture more closely. Something about it did seem rather familiar.
“You know what it means?” I asked.
“It’s the Cat of Ra, fighting the sun god’s main enemy, Apophis.”
“The snake,” I said.
“Yeah, Apophis was—”
“The embodiment of chaos,” I said, remembering what Nut had said.
Carter looked impressed, as well he should have. “Exactly. Apophis was even worse than Set. The Egyptians thought Doomsday would come when Apophis ate the sun and destroyed all of Creation.”
“But...the cat killed it,” I said hopefully.
“The cat had to kill it over and over again,” Carter said. “Like what Thoth said about repeating patterns. The thing is...I asked Dad one time if the cat had a name. And he said nobody knows for sure, but most people assume it’s Sekhmet, this fierce lion goddess. She was called the Eye of Ra because she did his dirty work. He saw an enemy; she killed it.”
“Fine. So?”
“So the cat doesn’t look like Sekhmet. It just occurred to me...”
I finally saw it, and a shiver went down my back. “The Cat of Ra looks exactly like Muffin. It’s Bast.”
Just then the ground rumbled. The memorial fountain began to glow, and a dark doorway opened.
“Come on,” I said. “I’ve got some questions for Thoth. And then I’m going to punch him in the beak.”
Chapter 25. We Win an All-Expenses-Paid Trip to Death
BEING TURNED INTO A LIZARD can really mess up your day. As we stepped through the doorway, I tried to hide it, but I was feeling pretty bad.
You’re probably thinking: Hey, you already turned into a falcon. What’s the big deal? But someone else forcing you into another form—that’s totally different. Imagine yourself in a trash compactor, your entire body smashed into a shape smaller than your hand. It’s painful and it’s humiliating. Your enemy pictures you as a stupid harmless lizard, then imposes their will on you, overpowering your thoughts until you have to be what they want you to be. I guess it could’ve been worse. He could’ve pictured me as a fruit bat, but still...
Of course I felt grateful to Sadie for saving me, but I also felt like a complete loser. It was bad enough that I’d embarrassed myself on the basketball court with a troop of baboons. But I’d also totally failed in battle. Maybe I’d done okay with Leroy, the airport monster, but faced with a couple of magicians (even clay ones), I got turned into a reptile in the first two seconds. How would I stand a chance against Set?
I was shaken out of those thoughts when we emerged from the portal, because we were definitely not in Thoth’s office.
In front of us loomed a life-size glass-and-metal pyramid, almost as big as the ones at Giza. The skyline of downtown Memphis rose up in the distance. At our backs were the banks of the Mississippi River.
The sun was setting, turning the river and the pyramid to gold. On the pyramid’s front steps, next to a twenty-foot-tall pharaoh statue labeled Ramesses the Great, Thoth had set out a picnic with barbecued ribs and brisket, bread and pickles, the works. He was playing his guitar with a portable amp. Khufu stood nearby, covering his ears.
“Oh, good.” Thoth strummed a chord that sounded like the death cry of a sick donkey. “You lived.”
I stared up at the pyramid in amazement. “Where did this come from? You didn’t just...build it, did you?” I remembered my ba trip to Set’s red pyramid, and suddenly pictured gods building monuments all over the U.S.
Thoth chuckled. “I didn’t have to build it. The people of Memphis did that. Humans never really forget Egypt, you know. Every time they build a city on the banks of a river, they remember their heritage, buried deep in their subconscious. This is the Pyramid Arena—sixth largest pyramid in the world. It used to be a sports arena for...what is that game you like, Khufu?”
“Agh!” Khufu said indignantly. And I swear he gave me a dirty look.