Tut (9 page)

Colonel Cody snapped his fingers, and shadows cloaked the five shabtis. They couldn't turn invisible or ever change the colors they were painted, but they could bend light around themselves so normal people wouldn't notice them. And I thought being able to grow carnivorous plants was cool.

“Shall we enter first and eliminate the security?” Colonel Cody asked. He raised his hand to snap his fingers again.

“No! We aren't going to kill the guards.” The shabtis did pretty much everything I wanted them to do and sometimes things I didn't. “No one gets killed. Or seriously injured. Okay?”

Colonel Cody lowered his arm. His majors relaxed their stance, but stood ready to move at his next order.

“Okay?” I said again.

Colonel Cody nodded. “Fine. No one gets killed. I swear it on the mummified body of Osiris himself.”

“Or seriously injured,” I added.

“Or seriously injured,” he repeated.

Good. Now that we had that settled, I could break into the library.

“Where's the entrance to this secret room?” I asked.

“The cat referred to a statue,” Colonel Cody said.

Nice lead, except D.C. had more statues than an old dog had warts.

“Which statue?”

“The cat said it would be where the king sits.”

“What king? Osiris?” If Horus hadn't been in such a hurry to head off on his date, he could have told me himself. As far as I knew, there were no statues of Osiris anywhere near the Library of Congress. Or in D.C., for that matter.

Colonel Cody's face turned ashen. “The cat said you would know.”

King. Statue. King. Statue …

I scanned the area, looking for anything that fit. There were a couple of naked women on horses. I diverted my eyes. There were some turtles and snakes and fish. Hardly kingly creatures. And then there was the giant statue of Neptune right in the middle of a fountain.

That was it. Neptune! He was king of the sea. Maybe not a king that Horus would consider an equal, but given the surroundings, he was the closest thing.

I waded in the water and gazed up at the giant statue of Neptune. It stood over twice as tall as me and was carved from a single piece of marble. He commanded the world from the top of a rock and was flanked by two of his minions. I climbed the rock and grabbed the statue's arms and fingers, looking for a lever or something that might reveal an entrance.

Nothing happened.

I prodded at the statue. Still nothing. And then, from under the surface of the dark water, glittering gold caught my eye. I held my breath and put my head under.

Engraved in the base of the statue and etched with gold was the Eye of Horus.

It was the most sacred representation of Horus, symbolizing what he gave up in his eternal fight with Set, or some nonsense like that. I got sick of seeing it everywhere. Horus had it plastered on all sorts of stuff back at the town house, like he was marking his territory. He must be marking his territory here, too.

I pressed my thumb into the eyeball. That was the standard way to open secret passages in tombs. Neptune and his minions slid backward, creating a chasm in the ground.

Water poured into the opening, cascading downward. It gushed by my feet, pulling at the material of my jeans. I held onto the rock base of the statue as the fountain emptied. When it finally all drained, I could see a stairway descending into the darkness.

“So that's how you get in,” someone said.

I whipped around and came face-to-face with Tia.

“You!” I said. “What are you doing here?”

Tia was decked out in a bright-orange workout shirt, cargo pants and, of course, her combat boots. I wondered if she slept with them on. Her orange hair streak matched her shirt, and the number of necklaces she wore had doubled. I was surprised she wasn't hunched over from their weight.

“Why are you following me?” she said, crossing her arms. The sweet aroma of lotus blossoms filled the air, reminding me of perfume girls used to wear back in ancient Egypt.

“Following you! You're following me.” I tried to ignore her scent. It brought back too many memories I kept hidden in the deepest part of my mind. Happy times, back before the priests and Horemheb revolted against me.

“Please. Don't flatter yourself.” Tia started down the staircase.

“What do you think you're doing?” I asked.

“Seeing what's below,” Tia said.

“But…”

“Are you coming or not?” she said.

I followed her inside, and pretty soon the darkness swallowed us. I would've used my scarab heart to light up the passageway if I wasn't trying to keep my immortality a secret. But Tia was more prepared than a Girl Scout. She pulled a flashlight from one of the pockets of her cargo pants and flipped it on.

“You told Henry where I live,” I said. “How do you even know where I live?”

I felt a tug on the leg of my jeans. I didn't dare look. Colonel Cody knew to stay hidden, since the shabtis were under direct orders to hide from mortals. That didn't mean he didn't look for creative ways around those orders.

“I know all sorts of things about you, Tut,” Tia said, making finger quotes when she said my name, causing her multitude of bracelets to jingle.

“Like what?” My scarab heart started to pump blood at the rate of a jackhammer. I needed to get control of myself.

“Well, for starters, you're Tut,” she said. There went the finger quotes again, and with them, a fresh wave of her awesome perfume.

“And you're Tia. So what? You know my name.” I pushed away her lotus blossom scent and kept going. The stairs went on forever. I'd counted over a hundred so far.

“Everyone knows your name,” she said.

Okay, this is the part where my sensors went up. I mean, sure, everyone in the world did know my name—Tutankhamun. But nobody in the world besides Horus and Gil knew that the King Tut from ancient Egypt was actually me.

“You mean like everyone at school?” I said.

Tia laughed out loud. “Yeah, everyone at school—when they read about you in a textbook.”

I sucked in a breath and held it. After three thousand years, I was a master of hidden identities. My spells had never failed.

“I don't know what you're talking about.” I summoned the scent of herbs and started inaudibly intoning the spell I used to hide my identity.

Tia ignored me. “You know, I thought you'd be taller.”

Holy Osiris, I got sick of people calling me short. “I'm only fourteen,” I said, and I kept pushing the spell her way.

“All those statues in the museum make you look taller,” Tia said. “I have to admit, I like your hair this way. It looks way better than those portraits you see in books.” She stopped walking and pulled a piece of my hair from behind my ear.

I figured I'd died and gone to the Fields of the Blessed right then and there. Amun above, I had to focus. I couldn't go around having people know who I was.

“Who do you think I am, anyway?” I asked. I doubled my spell attempts.

Tia crossed her arms, making the flashlight bounce against the side wall, revealing all sorts of paintings of cats and falcons. “Duh.”

Which didn't answer the question I already knew the answer to.

“What's it like to be immortal, anyway?” she asked.

I balled my hands into fists. “It's not working.”

“What?”

“The spell. You're supposed to forget who I am.” I knew this sounded absurd, but I didn't care. Had Horus giving me power from the
Book of the Dead
done something to my normal Osiris-given spells?

Tia narrowed her eyes. “You're trying to put a spell on me?”

Not the best way to strengthen a relationship, but that had never stopped me in the past.

“Maybe?” I said.

Fire lit up her blue eyes. “Keep your spells to yourself.”

I met her eyes with fire in my own. “Then tell me how you know.”

“You never told me what it's like to be immortal, King Tut,” Tia said.

That was it. I gave up on the spell entirely. And an enormous weight lifted off me. For the first time in forever, I could admit my identity. My life was so much about pretending to be someone else. Someone normal and mortal. But every once in a while, I just wanted to be the real Tut.

I put my hand on the wall and, just to make sure my normal powers still worked, I made moss grow on it, covering the image of a cat that looked a lot like Horus. Really, I could make anything grow out of anywhere. Roses out of bricks. Weeds in people's gardens. My powers worked perfectly, which meant there was nothing wrong with my identity-hiding spells. So why weren't they working on Tia?

“Truthfully?” I said.

“No, I want you to lie,” Tia said. “Of course, truthfully.”

“Okay, truth is that sometimes it gets a little boring, but overall, it's awesome.”

“What do you do with all your time?” she said as we continued downward. Lights flickered far below, like maybe there was an end to our descent. “You've been around for thousands of years, right?”

I still couldn't believe I was really talking about this. It was almost as if I'd been wanting to tell her about my life.

“I do everything,” I said. “All great moments of history—I've witnessed them. The Crusades. The assassination of Julius Caesar. The building of the Great Wall of China.”

“That doesn't sound even kind of boring.” She tilted her head, and I couldn't help but notice the smooth skin of her neck. Great Isis, I was acting like I'd never talked to a girl before. What was wrong with me?

“Sure, when I mention the highlights. But trust me, thirty-three hundred years is a long time. I've had to get pretty creative to keep from going insane.”

“Oh, really?” she said.

I reached back to the wall, but instead of making moss grow, I sprouted a lotus blossom from a crack in the stones. Once the flower reached full bloom, I plucked it and handed it to her. Her eyes widened as she took it, but then she only gave a little shrug. And here I thought it was a pretty cool trick.

“Stop showing off,” she said. But I noticed she tucked the flower behind the orange streak in her hair.

Yes, I was showing off, just a little.

We descended the last few steps until we reached the bottom, ending up in a circular room about the size of my kitchen. Paintings and engravings of Horus covered the walls, showing him in both his falcon and cat forms gloriously ruling over the world. Ahead of us was a closed door with some sort of complex locking mechanism shaped in the eye of Horus. This whole place was like a monument to him. I knew Horus was vain, but this was ridiculous. He was never going to hear the end of it when I got back home.

I had no clue how to get the door open. Ten metal bars interlocked with one another, sealing it shut. My identity had already been blown. I figured there was no harm in announcing my shabtis.

I looked down. “Colonel Cody?”

“It is my deepest honor, Great Pharaoh,” Colonel Cody said, emerging from the shadows.

“Great Pharaoh?” Tia said. “You're kidding me, right?”

I shrugged and tried to act normal, even though my face had to be bright red.

The other four shabtis shifted enough that the light caught their reflection. Then, forming some sort of cheerleading pyramid, with two on the bottom and two in the middle, they made a tower with Colonel Cody at the top.

“Look at them,” Tia said. “They're so cute!”

Cute? They were fierce and awesome.

“Thank you, beautiful mortal girl.” Colonel Cody beamed under her praise.

I'll give him credit for being perceptive.

The shabti majors poked and prodded different parts of the lock until, like some choreographed dance, the long metal bars pulled away, one by one. When the last piece of metal grinded to a halt the door slid open, revealing a tunnel lit with torches on the wall. Tia clicked her flashlight off and stuffed it back in the pocket of her cargo pants.

We started down the long tunnel ahead.

“Now tell me why you're really here,” I said. No way was it some crazy fluke that Tia just happened to be hanging out at the Library of Congress after hours. She was following me.

“Why are you here?” Tia asked. The rubber soles of her combat boots slapped on each step, echoing in the silence while I tried to figure out what to say.

“Research for our project,” I finally said.

“What a coincidence,” Tia said. “Me, too.”

“Yeah, right.”

“You don't believe me? I'm offended, Tut.”

“Be offended all you want,” I said. “And you never told me how you knew who I was.”

Tia kept pace next to me, and I noticed she was about the same height as I was. Maybe I was short. Or maybe she was tall.

“It doesn't matter,” she said.

“Of course it matters.”

“Why?”

There were about a million reasons. I listed them off on my fingers. “Because nobody knows who I am. Because I've never met you before this week. Because everything was just fine until you showed up.”