How It All Goes Down
Muffin Plays with Knives
- Khufu's going crazy. Then Sadie sees two things in the pool attacking their crocodile.
- Carter names them as longnecks, and we see Sadie's incredulous reaction to the monsters: they have sleek spotted bodies like leopards, but also long scaly green necks with cat's heads.
- As they're watching, Philip body slams the terrace, breaking it up and making everything from the pool onward fall down to the ground. He takes the longnecks with him (we hope).
- Carter realizes that he's seen the critters before, and worries about them coming back. He drags Sadie back to the library, and looks up Narmer's Palette (a stone carving showing this ancient Egyptian king, Narmer).
- The back of the carving shows two of the cat-snake monsters. Carter says they're called serpopards, or serpent-leopards.
- Carter remembers back to his vision, when fiery dude had said to send the longnecks after them. He must have been referring to the monsters on their porch. Oh, joy.
- Right then, Khufu bursts in. The monsters are back.
- The monsters sniff around the glass doors of the terrace and poke intently at one of the door handles as though it's about to open—sort of like this—even though it was supposed to be locked and magically protected.
- Khufu picks up Muffin and gives her to Sadie, as though that will help.
- The serpopards begin smashing against the glass, and it starts to break. Crap.
- Khufu throws himself at the serpopards when they enter the house, but they simply toss him over the broken terrace.
- Muffin is still nestled in Sadie's arms, and that's when she remembers that Amos had said that Muffin would protect them.
- So Sadie tells Muffin to protect them. When the serpopards reach them, a blast of dry air knocks away the monsters—and also knocks Sadie and Carter on their butts.
- When Sadie looks to where Muffin had been, she sees a slender woman in a leopard-print gymnast's suit with the same pendant that Muffin had been wearing around her neck.
- The woman tells Sadie that it's about time, and Sadie notices her eyes: yellow with slit black pupils.
- The woman does a flip to evade the serpopards' next strike, flicks knives into her hands, ties the serpopards' necks into knots, and then beheads them with her knives. They turn to sand.
- Then the woman tells Sadie and Carter that they should leave, because worse will be coming. Carter's like: Worse?
- The woman asks Sadie to open a door to the Duat. When Sadie says she doesn't know how, the woman says they'll need more power, something like an obelisk, and suggests one in Central Park.
- Sadie asks what kind of portal she and Carter need. She also asks who this woman is and what relationship she has to Muffin.
- The woman answers that Carter and Sadie need a portal to get them out of danger, and that her name is not Muffin, it's—Bast, Carter breaks in to say, since her pendant is the symbol of Bast, goddess of cats.
- Bast says yep, good guess, Carter, and now let's get outta here while there's still time.