Touch of Fear ▸ House of Anubis [2]

chapter sixty. house of reckoning

☾ ☽

            "And I've really grown up this term," Amber informs her dad over the phone, "like, a lot." I let out a laugh, shaking my head as Fabian glances at her. Leave it to Amber Millington to use her hex to her advantage. "So you see, I really do deserve a raise, Daddy. Of course I'm staying out of trouble."

            Nina runs in again with an aged piece of paper in her hand, which doesn't look much like the notes she just left to get. "Amber, we're in trouble!" she exclaims. She grabs a bucket off the vanity and then gestures to the magazine on my nightstand. "I'll need this. Ashley, you grab that, and both of you, come with me." Confused, I grab the magazine she told me to get and get up, and she takes both my and Amber's wrists before instructing Fabian, "Fabian, hide."

            "What are we doing?" I ask as Nina pulls us into the hallway.

            "Miss Martin," Victor calls as he opens the doors to the corridor, "come here at once!"

            Nina pushes us into the bathroom and responds, "Sorry, Victor, urgent girl talk." She closes the door, leaning against it and dropping the bucket, which has some hair curlers in it. Okay, obviously Nina's done something to have Victor be mad at her.

            "Okay, what's going on?" Amber questions. "I'm in the middle of important negotiations."

            "I just had a run-in with Victor," Nina informs, "and look what he dropped." She holds up the piece of paper she was holding when she ran in. It has the exact same zodiac from the tunnels on it, except this one has all the symbols! The next clues!

            "That's—" I start, pointing at it.

            "The zodiac from the tunnels," Nina confirms. "Yeah. But this one has the symbols we're missing."

            Amber gasps and puts her phone back to her ear. "Can you hold, please, Daddy?"

            There's a knock on the door. "Nina Martin," says Victor's muffled voice, "you have something that belongs to me, and I want it back."

            "Hurry," Nina urges Amber. Amber takes a photo of the complete zodiac with her phone. "Okay, now Ashley, take those curlers and put them in Amber's hair."

            With a quick shrug, I reach down and take a large curler out of the bucket Nina grabbed, realizing her plan. Working fast, I put the curlers in her hair as best I can, trying to at least make it seem like I'm trying to make her hair look like something in the magazine Nina told me to grab, while Victor keeps knocking on the door.

            "Done!" I exclaim, stepping back. Oh, she might kill me when she sees this. "Sorry, Amber."

            Amber takes a deep breath. "What did you do?"

            "You have," Victor orders, "until the count of five to give me back that piece of paper. If you do not, the consequences will be severe. One, two, three, four—"

            I open up the magazine to a random page as Nina opens the door. "Sorry, Victor. Just had to master Amber's look for prom. After all, it's, uh—"

            "It is a very long way off."

            "True, but hey, it's never too early to get ready, right? Anyway, I think we cracked it."

            I push Amber out of the bathroom into the hallway, the big yellow curlers bouncing in her hair. Then I join my roommates, smiling awkwardly as I hold up the magazine. Victor doesn't seem to care and simply takes the zodiac page off Nina's binder and states, "Mine, I think. And if you ever try to pull a stunt like that again—"

            "My bad, Victor," Nina apologizes. "What is it, anyway?"

            Victor glares, pointing a finger at the three of us before leaving the corridor.

            I turn to Amber. "Did you get it?"

            Amber shows us the clear photo of the zodiac on her phone and confirms with a grin, "Yep."

            With that done, we return to our room to find Fabian and talk about the zodiac. But he obviously listened to Nina's order to hide because we can't see him anywhere in here. "Fabian?" Nina asks. On the floor between her bed and the wall, Fabian pokes his head up. We sit down on the bed and Nina shows him the photo on Amber's phone. "Look."

            "This is the chart from the tunnel wall," Fabian realizes. Nina nods. "The Zodiac of Horus," he reads. "That's what it's called."

            "So now that we know what it's called," Nina remarks, "maybe we can finally find some info online about this zodiac."

            "And find out what my Egyptian star sign is," Amber adds. Nina, Fabian, and I throw her identical looks. Amber just pats her hair, scrunching up her nose and going to the mirror to take the curlers out.

—

            I zoom in on the photo, drawing out the zodiac in my sketchbook so that we have at least one physical copy of it. There's not just the zodiac on that paper, there are hieroglyphics beneath and some sort of drawing in the corner that I can't quite make out just yet.

            "So have you heard of the Zodiac of Horus?" Nina asks Fabian, who's been researching on his laptop.

            Fabian sighs and answers, "No. And neither has the internet."

            I tap my pencil against the paper, questioning as I hold the sketchbook up to show them, "What about these hieroglyphics under the chart? Do you think we could translate those?"

            "These symbols predate every known alphabet," Fabian says. That would be a no. There's no Rosetta Stone for those. Not even Anubis, who doesn't know what it says either. "They could contain something vital, and we have way of translating them."

            "Great," Amber says dryly as she brushes her hair. "A zodiac that's not a zodiac. Can't even tell me who to date."

            "What if it's not meant to be a zodiac?" Nina suggests. I glance at her. "What if Robert wanted us to see these pictures as clues?"

            "So he found the ancient zodiac and then chose his reflectors based on the symbols?" Fabian inquires, and she shrugs. I look at the photograph again. "A goblet, sarcophagus, some kind of clock thing—this tells us what the other reflectors are."

            "Or where to find them."

( hey sibunas have an ashley/amber/nina manip for this chapter! one of my fave edits i've ever made which is saying something lol!! )