“There it is!” said Luke, pointing toward the river.

The little wooden boat was lying on its side on the riverbank. Alex looked back over his shoulder as they walked toward it. He couldn’t say exactly how far it had come — or they had come — since they’d first set this thing in the water. All he knew was that the golden light was starting to fade, and the colors swirling in the air were getting darker and more ominous, bloodreds replacing rosy pinks, blues edging toward black. The growls and groans and huffs and wails that had sounded far-off before seemed louder now, closer. Alex didn’t like any of it, and the darkening world wasn’t his only concern. “We need to be careful.” he said as Ren bent down to pick up the boat. “If the boat’s here, the Stung Man could be, too.”

Kneeling in the sand with her hand a few inches from the boat, Ren paused and looked back toward him. “Maybe we got here first,” she said. “Maybe I was wrong.”

As she spoke, Alex saw a large black scorpion scamper up from the little pocket of shade under the boat’s hull. “Ren!” he gasped.

“What?” she said, her fingers just inches from the scorpion’s flexed tail, the curved stinger twisting into position for a strike.

“Scorpion!” shouted Luke.

Ren jumped up and back as the angry arachnid struck out at empty air.

“Where did that come from?” said Ren. “Do you think it’s one of his?”

The first Death Walker had faced a grisly demise from scorpion stings thousands of years earlier, and back in New York, the venomous insects had been a surefire calling card of the Stung Man. But here, in between palm trees and the Nile, the little creepy-crawler seemed to fit right in. “Maybe not?” Alex said hopefully.

“Uh, what about those ones?” she said, her voice suddenly shaky.

Alex turned and saw why. The bank was suddenly dotted with scorpions. Some were large and black and others were small and pale, but all of them were packing potent venom and heading down the bank, their exoskeletons clicking and clacking softly.

“This place is really starting to bug me,” muttered Luke.

Alex grabbed his amulet, planning to clear a path through the arachnid army with a gust of desert wind. Instead, he got a warning. A sharp pulse, like a radar signal bouncing off a mountain, rang in his mind. Alex spun around. And there he was.

“I was hoping we’d meet again,” said the Stung Man. He stood just up the bank, no more than twelve feet away.

“Oh no,” breathed Ren, grabbing for her own amulet.

The Stung Man advanced toward them with long, confident strides, and the scorpions scurrying all around him.

“What happened to his face?” whispered Luke. Alex realized it was his cousin’s first encounter with this Walker and the swollen, discolored flesh of his eternally unhealing wounds. But there was no time for explanation — only action.

Ren raised her hand and delivered a blinding white flash that caught the Stung Man by surprise. He closed his eyes too late and grunted in annoyance.

Meanwhile, Alex delivered a whipping, whistling lance of wind that scattered dirt and scorpions as it cut up from the bank to the line of palm trees. “Go!” he shouted, and the friends took off running toward the tree line. There was nothing to be gained from fighting the Stung Man out in the open, before they’d ever located the Spells, and the only plan that made sense was escape.

As they raced up the bank, Alex pictured the massive stinger that took the place of the Stung Man’s left hand. He could almost feel it shooting forth and piercing his back with its cruel, curved point. He ran faster as Luke whooshed past him in a cheetah-powered blur. Half a step behind him, Ren’s feet slapped dirt. “Come on, come on!” he called over his shoulder.

Luke was at the crest of the bank. Moving at hyper-speed, he had already molded the dark soil of the floodplain into a dozen perfectly round dirt balls. Now he delivered the first one down the slope in a high-kicking baseball pitch.

A dull THOKK! of exploding dirt gave way to an indignant shout from the Walker.

Alex didn’t need to turn around to know that Luke’s first pitch was a strike. Instead, he eyed the fields just beyond his cousin. The grain was higher here, as if unharvested for some time — perfect for hiding three kids!

“Into the field!” he called.

Luke whipped one more major league dirtball down the slope as Alex and Ren reached the top of the bank and sprinted straight past him. Luke turned and followed, immediately overtaking the others. Their own frantic footsteps mixed with the beat of the Stung Man’s sandals slapping the dirt behind them. As the sound of the Walker’s pursuit grew closer — hoarse shouts and muttered curses mixing with heavy footfalls — Alex tensed up, preparing for the terrible pain of the massive stinger piercing his back.

And then he felt it.

The rough slap of tall sprouts of barley hitting his face as they burst into the field. “Keep going!” he said as the Stung Man roared his disapproval behind them.

Alex crashed through the tall ripe stalks, his vision just a whirl of green and gold and tan. His heart pounded and he gasped for breath, feeling like he was sucking in nearly as much grain and dust as air.

For a few chaotic moments he lost track of the others and panicked. Had Ren fallen? Had Luke been brought down by the stinger? But then he heard Ren. “This is going to be murder on my allergies!” she huffed from right behind him. The crash of stalks laid low in front of him told Alex his cousin was still at full speed.

But if he could hear his friends, so could the Stung Man. “Slow down!” he gasped. “We have to be quiet if we want to lose him.”

The crashing subsided. “Okay,” Ren said softly from beside him.

“Good plan,” said Luke from a few yards ahead.

Alex took the lead as they snaked their way through the field single file. The grain grew taller the deeper they went, and soon even Luke could stand up straight with no fear of being seen.

“Okay,” whispered Alex. “Let’s stop for a second.”

They stood still, catching their breath and listening carefully. The only sound Alex could hear was the wind gently rustling the grain. He took hold of his amulet and searched, but the intense radar signal was gone. All he felt was the same general buzzing hum as before. “I think we lost him,” he said. “I’m not getting any signal from the amulet.”

“None?” said Ren. “Not the Lost Spells, either?”

Alex shook his head. “I think they must be hidden again,” he said. They knew it was a possibility. When The Order had captured the Spells from his mom’s desert hideout, they’d also captured the ancient cloaking spells she’d wrapped them in.

“We’ll never find them now,” said Ren angrily, punctuating the thought with a small sneeze. Choo!

“Not cool,” said Luke.

Had they really come all this way — into another world! — only to come up short? Alex refused to believe it. “Wait,” he said as the three knelt down next to each other in the sea of swaying grain. “We did see the first thing the ibis showed you. And then we ran into the Stung Man.”

“Okay, so what does that mean?” asked Luke.

“We banished him here. But Todtman said that if The Order got the Spells, the Walkers we’d banished would be able to come back,” Alex explained. “So if the Stung Man’s still hanging around here, then maybe it means he’s helping to guard the Spells.”

“Okay, maybe,” said Ren. “But they’re not going to hide the most powerful spells in the world in some field. Remember what else Todtman said, right before we left? ‘Even in the afterlife they will guard their prize closely.’ They wouldn’t just leave them out in the open.”

Alex considered it. “Right … so we’re looking for some kind of building, and we know it’s on this side of the river and that we’re probably pretty close.”

“Not many buildings around here,” said Luke, plucking a stalk of barley from the ground. “It’s not exactly midtown.”

Midtown … Skyscrapers … It gave Alex an idea. He looked up at the sky, cut into sections above him by the waving grain. “We need to get up high and look.”

Ren looked back the way they’d come. “Maybe if we climbed one of those trees by the river?”

“We can’t risk going back,” said Alex. “The Stung Man could still be there.”

Luke eyed the top of the grain. “I might be able to, like, high-jump it,” he mused. “For, like, a second.”

Alex pictured his cousin jack-in-the-boxing up over the fields, getting a quick glimpse at most. Then he had a better idea. Better … and worse. He dropped his head. “Oh, this bites,” he said. He’d seen kids do this at the pool at the YMCA. He’d always been too sick and weak to join in, and the lifeguards always blew their whistles to stop it, anyway. He looked up at his undersized friend. He was so much stronger and healthier since his mom had used the Spells to save him — but he still couldn’t believe what he was about to say.

“What?” said Ren.

Alex sighed. “Do you know what a chicken fight is?”