I slammed my staff against the stones and shouted, “Washington, D.C.!”

The pyramid shook. For a moment, nothing else happened.

Set seemed to realize what I was doing. He let out a nervous laugh. “Magic one-oh-one, Sadie Kane. You can’t open a portal during the Demon Days!”

“A mortal can’t,” I agreed. “But a goddess of magic can.”

Above us, the air crackled with lightning. The top of the cavern dissolved into a churning vortex of sand as large as the pyramid.

Demons stopped fighting and looked up in horror. Magicians stammered midspell, their faces slack with awe.

The vortex was so powerful that it ripped blocks off the pyramid and sucked them into the sand. And then, like a giant lid, the portal began to descend.

“No!” Set roared. He blasted the portal with flames, then turned on me and hurled stones and lightning, but it was too late. The portal swallowed us all.

The world seemed to flip upside down. For a heartbeat, I wondered if I’d made a terrible miscalculation—if Set’s pyramid would explode in the portal, and I’d spend eternity floating through the Duat as a billion little particles of Sadie sand. Then, with a sonic boom, we appeared in the cold morning air with a brilliant blue sky above us. Spread out below us were the snow-covered fields of the National Mall in Washington, D.C.


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