4

WHERE I MAKE A MONUMENT EXPLODE

“Let’s work on our project today,” Henry said once we got off the school bus. He’d talked about the exhibit for the entire bus ride, writing stuff in his notebook and asking my opinion on everything from how many crocodiles I thought lived in the Nile to whether servants really were buried alive in pyramids. I wasn’t sure why he thought I’d have the answers.

Our project was so far from my mind, I almost laughed aloud. All I could think about was the energy slipping from my scarab heart with every second that passed.

“Not today,” I said. “I have things to do.”

“Things like what?” Henry asked.

Great Amun, he was nosy.

“Just things,” I said. Things like recharging my scarab heart. It was nearly drained. It skipped around in my chest like some kind of dying fish.

“The deadline for the project’s gonna be here before you know it,” Henry said, showing me his notebook where he’d circled “Three Weeks” at the top of the page.

“We have plenty of time,” I said. Anything could happen in three weeks.

Henry didn’t look convinced, but I hurried away, leaving him outside the front of the school, so he couldn’t nag me about it anymore.

I texted Gil to let him know I’d be late so he wouldn’t worry about me, and then tried to decide which obelisk to use for recharging. The Washington Monument was out. It has enough cracks and flaws that sucking energy out of it was like drinking a milk shake through a straw with a hole in it. A better choice—actually a near-perfect example—was one of the five brand-new ones that had been put up in the last year around the District. They were taller than the Capitol building and made my heart jump in anticipation every time I saw them. Horus swore they were the work of Set. Part of Set’s grand plan to take over the world or something ridiculous like that. But Horus was full of conspiracy theories. The government claimed they were memorials to dead heroes. That explanation worked for me. I decided on the obelisk in the middle of Dupont Circle.

I hopped the Metro, even though it was standing-room only. My stomach grumbled, but eating would have to wait until I’d recharged. On a good day, my scarab heart made me feel like I could slay a Tyrannosaurus rex. Right now, I don’t think I could have summoned the energy to squash a bug. My powers were virtually gone.

Invisible energy sizzled in the air around the obelisk. It drew me toward it as I came up from the Metro station. All I could think about was recharging. The obelisk was the perfect collector of immortal energy. My scarab heart leapt in anticipation.

It was rush hour, so the streets were packed with cars and people filled the sidewalks. I crossed the street, barely waiting for the light to change. How had my heart gotten so low? It had to be the anxiety from the field trip. Once I got to the traffic island, I fought to keep from running up to the obelisk because I didn’t want people to think I was strange.

The thing was enormous. So huge, twenty schoolkids could have sat around it and had their picture taken. But there were no schoolkids around today. Only some stinky homeless guy crashed out near the base. There was some sort of black graffiti painted on the obelisk behind him, but I couldn’t see what it said since he was pressed up against the limestone base. I plugged my nose because he smelled like dirty socks, and skirted around him to the other side. The immortal energy called to me. So fresh. So powerful. I couldn’t wait any longer.

I put my hands on the obelisk.

The connection was instant. Raw energy pulsed through my heart, filling it. I devoured it, feeling my powers grow and replenish with every second that passed. It pumped out of my heart and through my arteries, reaching every single part of my body. And then it returned to my heart and collected. Great Osiris, it felt good to be an immortal.

I stepped back, basking in the glory of recharging … and the obelisk exploded.

I flew backward, landing on my butt on the crowded sidewalk. Around me, cars screeched to a halt and started blowing their horns. People screamed and ran away from the traffic circle.

Some woman with a giant flowered purse ran up to me. “Are you okay? Are you hurt?”

No, I wasn’t okay. This had never, in the three thousand years I’d been recharging my heart, happened before.

“I’m fine,” I said, and got to my feet, brushing limestone dust off my jeans and windbreaker.

“You could have been hurt,” she said, clutching her purse so it didn’t get swept away in the crowd. “You could have died.”

“It just surprised me,” I said. “It’s all okay.”

Except it wasn’t all okay. Limestone dust filled the air so thick that I couldn’t even see where the obelisk had been. Mixed in with the dust was black mist putting off the overwhelming scent of sulfur. It was the same odor and the same kind of black mist I’d seen three thousand years ago when I’d been fighting with Horemheb.

With a final assurance that I wasn’t hurt, the woman finally scurried away, getting swallowed by the crowd. The police and fire trucks would be here any second. I could already hear the sirens.

By some miracle the homeless guy was still asleep, but I rolled him out of the way so I could get a closer look at the graffiti behind him. I held my breath to keep the smell of singed limestone and the sulfur mist out of my nose. Someone had drawn something on the base of the obelisk: an image of the scepter of Set with some hieroglyphs next to it. Since I knew Egyptian hieroglyphics better than my ABCs, I recognized them the instant I saw them.

Horemheb.

The hair on the back of my neck stood up, and the world slowed down around me. General Horemheb was in Washington, D.C.

It had been almost a hundred years since my tomb had been opened by archaeologist Howard Carter, and in all that time, there wasn’t a sign of my uncle. I’d hoped—okay, actually I’d prayed—that somehow Horemheb had been destroyed when the tomb was opened. That maybe dung beetles had eaten him. Or he’d been buried in a sandstorm. But deep down, I knew better. If I was immortal, he was immortal. It meant you got to live forever. Which was fine for me, but not for my murderous uncle. He didn’t deserve immortality. He didn’t deserve anything but death. And now he was back in my world.

Immortal life was looking up.

*   *   *

“I’m going to kill Horemheb,” I told Horus once I got back to my town house. My scarab heart was pumped full of energy, and the man who’d killed my family had finally surfaced after three thousand years. Revenge was going to be mine.

Horus stared at me from the futon, flipping his tail back and forth.

“And how exactly are you going to do that?” he said.

That was the only problem with my plan: I didn’t have one. Since Horemheb was immortal like me, then there was no way I knew of to actually kill him. The only upside of that was that there was no way for him to kill me, either.

“I’m working on it,” I said.

“Hope you have a direct line to Bes, then, because you’re going to need some luck,” Horus said.

Sadly, praying to the god of luck was my only option at the moment.

I guess this would be a good time to mention that Horus isn’t really a cat. Well he is a cat, but not only a cat. That’s just the form he prefers to stay in most of the time. He’s actually a god, son of Osiris and Isis who, without getting too technical, are the king and queen gods. Oh, and also, Horus can talk. Sometimes too much.

I collapsed on the futon, brushing aside scarab beetle exoskeletons on my way. After three millennia, I knew Horus well enough to know that he had no intention of cleaning up after himself.

“Couldn’t you at least eat the shells?” I asked.

He licked his paw. “Too crunchy.”

I grabbed for a scarab shell, but the leader of the shabtis—I called him Colonel Cody—jumped on my wrist and tore it away. Scarab beetles follow me everywhere, even without me having to summon them. It was all thanks to Osiris. The fact that Horus ate them just made for a win-win situation.

“Please, Great Pharaoh, allow your undeserving servants to do that for you,” Colonel Cody said.

So I let go. Who was I to argue with the shabtis? I’d found the shabtis—or they’d found me—after my tomb was opened back in 1922. I wasn’t sure how I ever lived without them.

Horus licked his paw again. “See, the shabtis will clean up. They’re meant to serve us.”

“Me,” I corrected. “They’re meant to serve me.” After all, they’d come from my tomb.

I want to point something out. I’m not just some egotistical jerk who likes to order people around—even if they are only six inches tall and made of clay. I’d asked the shabtis not to fall on the ground when I spoke. I’d asked them not to threaten to take their own lives if the toilet didn’t get cleaned five seconds after I’d used it. But after years I’d finally come to the conclusion that they had to act this way; the spells written all over them bound them to me forever.

“Is Gil home?” I asked. He’d want to know about this Horemheb thing, too.

“He was,” Horus said. “But then he went out looking for you.” He squashed a beetle between his teeth, squirting the inside into his mouth and tossing the shell back onto the floor.

Gil was the only other immortal I knew of, because I was definitely not counting Horemheb. But unlike me, Gil got lucky and was eighteen forever. Gil lived here and pretended to be my brother and legal guardian, which kept Social Services away.

“I told him I was going to be late,” I said. I wasn’t sure why he thought he had to go out looking for me. I’d texted him and everything. “When will he be back?”

Horus scowled. “You think he told me?”

“Not really.” Horus and Gil tolerated each other at best. At worst, they fought over the best ways to protect me—not like I needed protecting.

I looked down at the shabtis. Those not cleaning up the beetle remains stood at attention under the coffee table. “Can you get me a soda?” My throat was parched.

Colonel Cody threw himself to the ground. “Nothing would give me more pleasure.” He snapped his fingers, and two shabtis I called Lieutenant Virgil and Lieutenant Leon ran off to the kitchen. They were painted solid blue and were almost always the ones who brought me drinks or snacks, like that was their specialty.

Since our town house was smaller than my tomb, the two shabtis were back in less than a minute. Lieutenant Virgil balanced a glass full of ice on his blue head, and Lieutenant Leon held a soda. They set the items on the coffee table and returned to their perch below.

“Back to Horemheb,” Horus said. “Tell me about the obelisk.”

“How did you hear—?”

Horus stopped me with a paw in the air. “Tut, seriously, do you think I’m an idiot? I’m a god. What part of that don’t you understand?”

“But it just happened like a half hour ago.”

Horus sighed. “The explosion stunk up the entire city. I can smell Set’s sulfurous stink from miles away.”

I’d smelled the sulfur, too, right after the obelisk blew up. I waited. I knew what was coming next.

“I told you Set was behind the obelisks,” Horus said. He crossed his front paws and looked at me with his eye. And I do mean eye. Set had ripped out his other one ages ago.

“Whatever,” I said. This wasn’t the time for I-told-you-so’s.

A low hiss came from Horus’s throat. “Not whatever, Tut. You need to start listening to me. If you’d believed me when I said the Cult of Set was behind the obelisks, this never would have happened.”

“Stop treating me like a child,” I said.

“Why shouldn’t I?” Horus said. “You’ve been acting like you’re fourteen for the last three millennia.”

I took a sip of my soda. “That’s because I am fourteen.”

“Well, maybe it’s time you grew up.”

“That’s not the point,” I said.

“And what is?” Horus said. “Horemheb? So he’s back. What makes you think you can kill him now? Didn’t you already try that once?”

“This time is going to be different. I feel it inside.” I tried to keep my scarab heart calm inside my chest. “So how can I kill an immortal?”

“You can’t,” Horus said. But he’d stopped moving his tail. Horus never stopped moving his tail. Not even when he slept.

“What aren’t you telling me?” I asked.

“Nothing, Tut,” Horus said. But his tail still wasn’t moving.

“I know you’re lying. You stopped moving your tail and that’s what you always do when you lie.”

“I don’t lie,” Horus said.

“You did just the other day when you were talking to Gil. Remember? He asked you about the beetle shells under his pillow and you told him you had nothing to do with it.”

Horus started flicking his tail back and forth again. “That wasn’t a lie. The shabtis put them there.”

“You told them to.”

“That’s a technicality,” Horus said.

“Still, there is some way to kill an immortal, and you’re not telling me what it is,” I said.

“Why would I not tell you?” To Horus’s credit, his tail only stopped moving for a microsecond.

“I don’t know,” I said. “It seems to me that you’d want Horemheb gone as much as I do. He’s in allegiance with your sworn enemy. Getting rid of Horemheb would be a huge blow to the Cult of Set. Both of our problems could be gone.”

“I don’t have any problems.”

“Right. Set isn’t a problem.”

Horus said nothing.

“He’s a huge problem. You know it. He ripped your eye out. Or did you forget about that little incident?”

Horus’s ears flared back. “I did not forget about that little incident. Nor will I ever forget about how he killed my father. Ever.”

“Then tell me how to kill Horemheb,” I pleaded.

Horus bared his pointy teeth at me. “There is nothing to tell, Tut. And we’re done with this conversation.”

“Whatever.” I stormed out of the room. Horus was a big, fat, kitty liar. His non-answers had told me what I needed to know. There was a way to kill an immortal, and Horus knew what it was. And I was going to find out.