Getting eaten by a giant crocodile was bad enough.
The kid with the glowing sword only made my day worse.
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Maybe I Should introduced myself.
I am Carter Kane—part time it high school freshman, part–time magician, full time worrier about all the Egyptian gods and monsters who are constantly trying to kill me.
Okay, that last part is an exaggeration. Not all the gods want me dead. Just a lot of them—but that kind of goes with the territory, since I'm a magician in the House of Life. We're like the police for Ancient Egyptian supernatural forces, making sure they don't cause too much havoc in the modern world.
Anyway on this particular day I was tracking down a rogue monster on Long Island. Our scryers had been sensing magical disturbances in the area for several weeks. The local news started reporting that a large creature had been sighted in the ponds and marshes near the Montauk Mountain—a creature that was eating the wildlife and scaring the locals. One reporter even called it the Long Island Swamp Monster. When mortals start raising the alarm, you know it's time to check things out.
Normally my sister, Sadie, or some of our other initiates from Brooklyn House would've come with me. But they were all at the First Nome, in Egypt, for a weeklong training session on controlling cheese demons (yes, they're a real thing; believe me, you don't want to know), so I was on my own.
I hitched our flying reed boat to Freak, my pet griffin, and we spent the morning buzzing around the South Shore looking for signs of trouble. If you're wondering why I didn't j just ride on Freak's back, imaging two hummingbird–like wings beating faster and more powerfully than helicopter blades. Unless you want to get shredded, it's really better to ride in the boat.
Freak had a very good nose for magic. After a couple of hours on patrol, he strikes, "FREEEAAAK!" and banked hard to the left, circling over a green marshy inlet between two subdivisions.
"Down there?" I asked.
Freak shivered and squawked, whipping his barbed tail nervously.
I couldn't see much below us—just a brown river glittering in the hot summer air, winding through swamp grass and clumps of gnarled trees until it emptied into Moriches Bay. The area looked a bit like the Nile Delta back in Egypt, except here the wetlands were surrounded on both sides by residential neighborhoods with row after row of gray–roofed houses. Just to the north, a liner of cars inched along the Montauk Highway—vacationers escaping the crowds in the city to enjoy the crowds in the Hamptons.
If there really was a carnivorous swamp monster below us, I wondered how long
