The Chaos of Stars (23 page)

My stomach drops and I stumble back, away from him. Every dream I’ve had screams through my head. What if the threat
wasn’t
in Egypt? What if it was always here? All this time he spent worming his way into my trust, all those times he tried to get me talking about my parents.

All these feelings I was ready to have for him.

No. I stand straight, my spine a steel rod. “I don’t care who you are or how long you’ve been alive or how immortal you think you are. I will
kill
you before I let you hurt my parents.”

His treacherously beautiful face is white with shock. “Please, let me explain, Isadora!”

“Don’t you dare use my name.”

“I’m not Orion! Not the original one, anyway!” He runs his hands through his hair, voice tight with desperation. “He’s long gone. My parents—they named me—my dad knew him and—look, I’m just like you! I’m seventeen!
I’m
not a god. My parents are.”

The impossibly beautiful woman who specializes in love. The man with the limp who works with metal. No wonder they felt familiar. It was because they reminded me of my own family. “Aphrodite and Hephaestus.”

“Yes! And I didn’t mean to lie to you. I’ve waited so long to finally meet you, and I didn’t know how to say it! How do you tell the girl very literally of your dreams that you’re the son of ancient Greek gods?”

“You knew what I was.”

He shrugs guiltily. “Not at first, but I figured it out. When you swore at me in Croatian.”

“How do I know? How do I know any of what you’re saying is the truth? Amun-Re, my mother was right. You really can’t trust the Greeks.” I back away from him, putting more space between us.

“Please, wait. Let me explain! I
was
looking for you. But not for whatever you think I was. I’ve . . . augh, this isn’t how I wanted to tell you. When we talked about dreams, I was serious. I’ve dreamt of you. Every night. For years. I always knew you were out there for me, and every night I’d see you, made of stone, the strongest and most beautiful girl I’d ever seen, and I’d speak to you in poetry and breathe life into the stone until it warmed and colored and you were there, and—” He puts his hands over his face. “I’m screwing this all up. The day I saw you with your hair short, I realized who you were. That was the best day of my life because I’d finally found you. And now . . . This isn’t how it was supposed to go. I’d never hurt you. I
love
you.”

My stone heart crumbles, the dust filling my lungs, choking me and making it impossible to breathe. He’s lied to me this whole time, and now this? “You love me because of stupid dreams? You don’t even know me! I trusted you,
Orion
.” I spit his name like a curse, and it doesn’t taste like hope and potential on my tongue anymore. “I have no idea who or what you are. But I swear to you I meant what I said. If you or any one of your cheap imitation gods comes near my family, I will feed your heart to Ammit the Devourer myself.”

His eyes are a picture of anguish. I pull the stone pieces tighter around my heart. I will not break, not here, not now.

I turn and walk out of the room of my heritage, my past, and leave the boy I wanted to give my reborn future to standing there, alone. Fighting back tears, I run down the stairs, through the main entrance past a shocked Tyler, and out into the night. The park is empty save for the homeless who pepper the sidewalks, already asleep beneath tattered blankets.

I find the huge tree next to the stairs, and climb into the roots, wanting to sink into them. My heart is not stone. My heart is sand and Orion’s cruel tide has washed it away from me, scattered it, lost it.

Hands shaking, I pull out my phone. My mother needs to know about this. She needs to know there are other gods out there, and that they know about us. This must be it, it has to be it. The threat behind everything.

“There you are,” a knife-sharp, guttural voice says, and it’s only then that I finally place the salty, swollen dryness at the back of my throat that has plagued me.

It tastes like an embalmed body smells.

“Anubis,” I whisper, and look up to see his jackal eyes glowing in the dark. “What are you doing here?” I didn’t think anything else could shock me tonight, but the sharp canines Anubis flashes in a smile prove otherwise. “Did my mother send you?”

“Isis doesn’t know I’m here.”

“If she didn’t send you, why are you—”

“Soon enough.” He reaches down and takes my phone, crushing it between his powerful, paw-like hands. “Don’t want you calling Mummy and ruining the surprise. Now, I have been in this soulless country far too long, and tonight I’ll get what I came for. Hathor was wrong—your existence
isn’t
entirely pointless.”

He wraps his hand around my arm, pulling me up so hard I gasp in pain.

“Isadora?”

We both turn. Tyler’s on the bridge, leaning over and squinting down at us in the dark.

“Are you okay?” she asks, her voice tentative.

Anubis squeezes harder, whispering low in my ear. “Do you know what I did to that driver? I embalmed his organs while they were still inside him. If you value your friend’s life, tell her to leave.”

I swallow hard against the panic welling up inside me. I will
not
let Tyler get hurt. “I’m fine.”

“Who is that?”

“My brother,” I stutter. “Half brother.”

“Oh.” She sounds dubious.

“He’s giving me a ride home. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“Okay.” She hesitates. “Good job tonight.”

“Thank you.” I barely manage to push out the words, my throat so dry from Anubis’s smell.

She lingers as if torn for a few achingly long seconds, then waves and walks toward the parking lot. Anubis drags me up the wooden stairs and across the street. I’d gotten so used to being tall here; he towers over me and I feel powerless, like a child.

We circle the museum to the back door. “I know you have a key,” he says.

I don’t bother pretending like I don’t. I’m too busy trying to figure out what he wants. I’d always dismissed him as a slimy lech, but I’d underestimated the cunning beneath his jackal face.

I open the door, and we walk through the now empty museum. A security guard, the one with the goatee and kind eyes, looks up from his chair by the stairs. I smile; it feels like a death mask, but does the job as I see the tension leave his shoulders.

“Forgot my purse.”

He waves us by and then we are in the pitch-black room, my room, where only a few minutes ago Ry broke my heart.

I laugh, a desperate, choking noise.

“What’s funny?” Anubis snaps, looking for a light switch.

“Guess I should have let him read his stupid poem.” Because whatever else the Greek liar is, he never made my soul clench with cold, salt-dried terror the way Anubis is. I can feel the tendrils of darkness seeping off him, clutching at me.

“Where are the lights?” he growls. His jaw snaps as he bites off the end of the sentence.

I lean down and flick them on. “You can’t take any of it. Touch anything, and an alarm will go off.” I’d briefly considered setting off an alarm myself, but I don’t want the security guard to get hurt. He doesn’t deserve it.

It’s obvious now that Anubis has been after something in this room the whole time. The break-in at Sirus’s house, the attack on the driver, the eyes I felt watching me—he was waiting for his chance to access my mother’s artifacts. I have no idea why. He’s been in our Abydos home countless times, and junk like this is all over the place.

“I don’t need to take it.” He drags me over to the largest fresco, the one of my mother and Horus with the sun god. And then he stares at it, searches it like he would devour it with his eyes.

“What are you looking for?” I try to see what he’s seeing.

A low growl sounds at the back of his throat, and his hand tightens on my skin, now stinging and cracked with dryness.

I don’t ask anything else.

Why
this
fresco? Why leave his base of power in Egypt to stare at this one dumb painting that tells a story everyone knows? I look from the image of my mother, to falcon-headed Horus, to prone Amun-Re. There’s nothing there!

Then I notice Anubis’s lips are moving ever so slightly, as though he’s trying to read. I’m looking at the wrong part of the picture. The glyphs that surround the figures—the ones only I can read, because only I know how to translate my mother’s writing.

This is the story of my mother learning the most powerful god’s name, written by Isis herself. Chaos. He’s here to figure out Amun-Re’s true name. And if someone like Anubis could control the sun god . . .

“Here,” he says, jabbing his finger at the beginning of the writing. “Read it.”

“I can’t.”

“Don’t try to lie to me. You can live a long time with just your heart and lungs working, but it will hurt very, very much.” He leans in so close I can feel his breath leeching the moisture from my skin. I am actually cracking under his gaze. “You can read your mother’s writing. Read it.”

I don’t want to die. Not here, not like this. Not in a way that will leave my soul without a path back to my father.

Oh, Dad. I’m sorry.

I look up at the fresco. “It’s . . . it’s just the story. You already know it.”

“Read every word.”

Trembling, I start at the beginning. “Isis protected Horus, keeping him safe from the wrath of Set. But cunning Isis knew that hiding Horus would not be enough. She wanted the true name of Amun-Re, god of the sun, god of the gods. Only by wielding it together would Horus be ready to challenge Set for Egypt. She lured Amun-Re from the sky, where a child of—I don’t know this word.”

“Sound it out,” he says, gripping my arm so hard that I’ve lost all feeling in my hand.

“Ah-pep. Where a child of Ah-pep waited to bite him. Amun-Re, poisoned and dying, implored Isis to use her magic and save him. She would not until he had given his true name to her son.”

“Where is that? Where are you reading?”

I point to the section of text. He narrows his eyes, then leans back, a satisfied sneer curling his thin lips. “That’s all I needed.”

“What do you need that for? You know that story! Amun-Re, the snake, the name.” I stare, desperate, at what I’ve just read. He must see something I don’t, something hidden in my mother’s words.

He spins me around and marches me out of the room. I wish prayer worked, because I don’t have even that hope now.

“My stuff. You ripped up my stuff. And you took Sirus’s scrapbook.”

“I didn’t anticipate them valuing Isis’s things so highly. Imagine my disappointment when it wasn’t stored at your brother’s home. I’d hoped at the very least you had a key for your mother’s inane scrawlings, but no. I’ve had to wait all this time.”

He squeezes my arm as we leave the room. “I like you. You see what an insufferable worm your mother is. And you’ve finally given me what I’ve needed all these aching ages.” He nods pleasantly at the security guard and I stumble numbly beside him as we leave the museum.

He takes me down the stairs and into the canyon. It’s dark, darker than it should be, low clouds blotting out the stars that used to watch over me.

I
refuse
to die under a cloudy sky. I pretend to trip, throwing myself into a sprawling heap on the ground. Anubis’s hand on my arm nearly rips it from its socket, and my shoulder smashes painfully into the dirt as a sharp rock cuts my knee.

Anubis growls, his vocal cords shifting from human to something more raw, lower.

“Sorry,” I whimper, closing my hands over the rock as I push myself back up. I stand, and before he can fix his grip, I smash the rock into the side of his head and run as fast as I can for the beginning of the canyon and the stairs.

I’m almost there when hands push me from behind. My own momentum propels me forward, the asphalt at the bottom of the stairs shredding my palms before my head slams into and bounces off the lowest step. Lights explode in my vision and I can’t see past the pain bouncing around my skull.

“Did you think you could get away from me, you stupid, mortal child?” His voice is a tortured nightmare imitation of a person. “I am a
god
.”

“Only in Egypt,” Ry says, and my vision clears in time to see Anubis look up, his face twisted in rage, just as a fist smashes into his jaw. He reels backward, snarling, then a hissing noise cuts through the night, and my eyes and nose burn.

Anubis’s scream turns into a high-pitched, desperate animal whine as he paws at his eyes, spinning in circles.

“Come on!” Tyler says, pulling me up. My head swims and I trip on the stairs. Ry’s arm is immediately around me, and the three of us run from dry, crackling, salty death, still howling in the canyon behind us.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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Amun-Re sits at the head of the pantheon of gods. He is without beginning or end, having created himself out of the nothing. He is the god of the sun, the god of creation, so powerful that he is King of the Gods. His names are endless, his titles infinite, but only one name is secret. Only one name allows those who know it to claim a position next to his throne.