The Chaos of Stars (25 page)

One day as Amun-Re walked the earth, a snake bit him. But it was no snake he had created, and so he could not name it and remove the poison. Amun-Re, god of the sun, was dying.

A snake. The myths only ever said a snake. But a version written in Isis’s own hand had one key difference—not a snake, but a child of Apep. The snake demon found in the underworld.

The underworld only Osiris and Anubis could freely visit.

“PICK UP!” I SCREAM INTO THE PHONE AS IT rings and rings and rings. Screaming makes my head throb, but I can’t stop. I stumble upstairs, throwing everything out of my drawers as I look for my passport. My hand closes over the small bag of protective amulets my mother sent, the ones that survived Anubis’s destruction of my room. I shove them into the pocket of my flannel pajama pants.

Passport passport where is my passport ANSWER THE PHONE MOTHER ANSWER IT ANSWER IT.

Passport in the nightstand.

She’s not answering the phone.

I pull on a pair of shoes and run down the stairs, this time calling Sirus.

He doesn’t answer, either.

Email she’ll check her email. I write one so fast I’m sure it’s incoherent but it doesn’t matter because she needs to know. I have to know that she knows.

Still the phone cradled against my ear rings and rings and rings. Why isn’t she answering the phone? He can’t be there yet. He still has to fly back to Egypt. Where I need to be, where I should be. The images, so many of them, of my mother being unmade by darkness play on repeat in my pounding head and I can’t let that happen, I won’t let that happen.

Why would Anubis do this? What does he stand to gain by killing my mother? What did he say to me . . . something about Hathor saying I was useless. The hall. They were kissing in the hall.

Hathor. If anyone has a reason to hate my mother and want her dead, it’s Hathor. She must have seduced Anubis and gotten him to work for her. How long has she been planning this, plotting to strike when my mother is most vulnerable?

“ANSWER!” I scream into the phone, then throw it against the wall.

Airport. I’ll go to the airport and get on the next flight to Egypt. It’s a stupid plan, some part of me knows that, but I can’t sit here. Either my mom will check her email or she won’t, but I can’t sit here and wait and wait to see whether or not I’ll have a mother to go home to.

How to get to the airport, though? I laugh bitterly at the irony of staying with a brother who arranges transportation to the airport for a living but having no idea how to do it for myself. Screw it, I’ll drive. I grab the keys to the Mini off the counter and run into the garage, opening it.

The key fits in the ignition, then nothing happens. I put the key in. WHY IS NOTHING HAPPENING? I twist it, and the radio and lights come on, but the engine is still off. “Start! Start!
Why won’t you start?
” I sob, smashing my bloodied palms against the steering wheel.

Even if I get the car started, I literally have no idea how to drive it or how to get to the airport from here. My forehead drops against the steering wheel and I cry because I am powerless and I’ve always been powerless and I hate, hate, hate it. How can I have a happy heart and helping hands when I can’t help the woman who spent her whole life helping me, the woman I spent the last three years hating?

A hand comes down softly on my shoulder and I scream, sitting up straight.

“It’s me! Sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you.” Ry holds out a hand to help me out of the car.

I stare at him. “What are you still doing here?”

“I said I wasn’t going to leave until you told me that Sirus was here and everything was okay. I meant it. I’ve been sitting in my truck researching concussions.”

I take his hand and almost fall getting out of the car. “I need to get to the airport. I have to go to Egypt right now.”

“Why?”

“Because they’re going to kill my mom! Hathor and Anubis are going to kill her, and she’s not answering her phone, and if she dies there will be no one strong enough to bring her back to life.”

“Come on,” he says, grabbing my hand and running with me to his truck. He peels out, dialing his phone. “Mom, we need the Lear. Isadora’s family is in trouble.”

“I don’t know how to buy a plane ticket,” I say, desperation and despair washing over me.

Ry looks at me, the phone still to his ear. “You don’t need to. We’re going to fly you to Egypt. My family has a plane; it’s gassed up and ready for a trip my parents were going to take tomorrow.”

“But—”

“It will take a fraction of the time flying a normal plane would. I’m going to get you there, and we’re going to save your mom. I promise.”

He goes back to the conversation and nods. “Okay, yeah, tell Aunt Iris we need her there now. Thanks, Mom. I love you.” He hangs up, then hands me the phone. “Keep trying your mom.”

“Thank you.” My voice cracks. “Thank you.” I dial the number I now have memorized, then listen, each ring sounding longer and farther away. It rings and rings and rings.

A bump jars me awake. I don’t know where I am or why the whole world is dim and shaking. There are leather seats that look like armchairs, and wood paneling, but it’s narrow and . . .

My mother. The jet. Ry. I rub my eyes, my stomach roiling with motion sickness. The combination of concussion (I will never admit to Tyler that I actually have one) and the sleep-aid pain meds I took has left me utterly disoriented. Ry tried valiantly to keep me awake, but I dropped off several times.

“We’re getting close,” Ry says, opening the shade to look out the window. Another bunch of turbulence makes my teeth rattle.

“Is it always this bumpy?”

He runs a hand through his hair and smiles sheepishly. “Well, we’re getting a little help. Iris, the pilot and my, uh, aunt? She’s married to Zephyrus. He’s kind of the west wind. So he’s been speeding us along.”

I can’t get past how weird it is that he has the same type of family I do. He must have as many crazy stories as as me. I think I’d like to hear them someday.

“Did my mother call?”

“No. I’ve tried calling her every fifteen minutes. No answer.”

I nod, pursing my lips and gritting my teeth.

“Do you have a plan?”

“Get home. Warn my mother. That’s about the extent of it.”

“And if Anubis and Hathor are there?”

I finger the amulets in my pocket, rubbing their contours like I can will the magic toward my mother. “I’ll figure something out.”

He looks like he wants to say something else, then he nods. “Okay.”

I wish I were still asleep. Sitting here in the air, doing nothing while my mother could be dying right now, could already be dead . . . “Can we go any faster?”

“Not without risking the whole jet falling apart.”

I grab fistfuls of my hair and pull, so frustrated and scared I feel like I am fraying apart at the edges.

“I’m sorry.” His voice is so utterly sincere that another piece of my stone heart flakes off, stabbing into my ribs. I was stupid to think he’d hurt me or my family. Whatever else I know or don’t know about him, I know that at least.

“Don’t be sorry. You’ve already helped me so much. I’d probably still be on a layover somewhere, if I’d even figured out how to get to the airport. You . . . you were there for me. Again. Thank you.” I stare at the ceiling to avoid his eyes.

“I will always be here to help you however I can.” There’s a long pause. “Since I have you pretty much captive, I want to explain some things. I know it’s a bad time, but it might be my only time, and I need you to understand.”

I slump lower into the leather chair, more an armchair than an airplane seat. “I can’t do this right now.”

“You don’t have to do anything. Just listen. You don’t have to respond, or answer I’m sorry that I didn’t tell you about my parents. I promise that everything else was true and real, and I’m only seventeen and not a god and never will be. I should have told you sooner, and I should have realized that it might not be a happy revelation for you. When I figured out you were the same as me, it made everything feel even more right, but it was stupid and selfish of me to assume you’d feel the same way about it. Oh! I forgot.” He gets up and, holding on to seats and the wall to stay steady in the wildly bumpy air, opens a small fridge and pulls out a Coke.

“Bribery?” I take it anyway, desperately needing sugar and caffeine. My mother was right—it is
so
addicting. Of course she was right. Oh, Mom. Be okay.

“You know, the poem said all of this a lot better. I even betrayed Calliope and went with Erato as my muse so I could make it lyric poetry instead of epic. Calliope was pissed, too. Um. So.” His long, olive fingers pick nervously at the dress pants he’s still wearing from last night. “I guess we’re kind of opposites, because you’ve spent the last few years determined to love no one, and I’ve spent the last few years determined to find you.”

I want to yell at him, to tell him dreams are a perfectly awful way to make life decisions, until I remember my strange obsession with Orion. Not the one next to me, but the stars, and the way they made me feel safe and loved when I didn’t have anything else. The way that feeling seemed to jump to Ry against my will.

“It’s stupid to fall in love with someone because of dreams,” I finally say.

“But that’s just it! I didn’t fall in love with you because of the dreams. All the dreams told me was that you were out there, somewhere. They made me look for you. And then I found you, and I didn’t fall in love with you.”

What the crap? I raise an eyebrow at him, and he grins.

“I didn’t
fall
in love with you. I walked into love with you, with my eyes wide open, choosing to take every step along the way. I do believe in fate and destiny, but I also believe we are only fated to do the things that we’d choose anyway. And I’d choose you; in a hundred lifetimes, in a hundred worlds, in any version of reality, I’d find you and I’d choose you.”

I can’t look at his eyes, because they are too blue, too sincere, with too much flooding in, and I cannot swim. “I don’t know. I can’t—you don’t even know me; you shouldn’t love me. I’m mean and I’m cold and I don’t know if I even can love someone else yet, or if I want to, and—”

“Isadora.” The floods and crashing waves quiet. “You are not mean or cold. You’re strong and funny and smart and beautiful. And okay, maybe sometimes you are a little bit mean, but like you said, it’s a fine line between confident and arrogant, and someone has to help me walk it, right? I’ve found my path, and I’m going to stay on it. I wanted you to know how I feel, and also to know that it’s okay to feel however you feel because I’m a very, very patient person.”

“What if I decide my
destiny
is someone else?”

“Then that’s your decision and I would respect that. Also I know a whole lot of gods to smite whoever it is you choose instead of me.”

“You—”

“Kidding! Totally kidding. Mostly kidding. Okay, not really kidding.”

I laugh, and it hurts my head but it frees a little bit of the pain in my chest. “Can we finish talking about this after I save my mother?”

“Absolutely.” He leans back, smiling and obviously relieved. “That went better than I thought. You didn’t yell at me. But for the record, the poem had some really amazing imagery with the desert and the ocean and flowers waiting to bloom.”

“That probably would have gotten you yelled at.”

“Prepare for landing,” a cheery voice crackles over the intercom. “There’s no runway here, so it might be rough.”

Not as rough as what I’ll face after we land. I buckle my seat belt and start praying to every god I can think of that my mother is still okay.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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Wadjet, goddess of lower Egypt. Neper, god of grain. Montu, god of war. Taweret, goddess of home and childbirth. Baba, god of aggression and virility. Khonsu, god of the moon. Tayet, goddess of weaving. Sia, god of divine knowledge. Shay, god of destiny.

These are gods who were prayed to, worshipped, feared. Gods who had altars and temples, gods who had priesthoods, gods whose names were whispered and revered and remembered.

Nothing is truly eternal. No one remembers them now.

Do they have an afterlife?

I SPRINT THROUGH THE OPEN DESERT, CLOUDS
of dust the jet kicked up billowing behind me. The arid wind clears my sinuses, clears my fuzzy head, fills and focuses me. Ry runs, too, but I’m faster than him and I don’t wait. I can’t.

I make it to the stone steps that lead down to my house, then curse. Ry won’t be able to see them. I turn back but he’s still a hundred yards away, his uneven gait slowing him.

Floods! I rip off my long-sleeved pajama shirt, glad I wore a sports bra, and leave the shirt half in and half out of the entryway. Maybe the half that mysteriously disappears will clue Ry in to my mother’s magical barrier. It’s the best I can do.