The War between Two Worlds

Chapter 1

Sadie

Hello! This is Sadie Kane. I do hope you remember me. I am, after all the girl who single-handedly destroyed Apophis and saved all of humanity.

[Ouch! Carter, there's no need to hit me!]

That was my brother, Carter, the most annoying boy in the world! Anyway, after Apophis was gone, life returned to normal (well, as normal as a magician's life can be). It has been fun, teaching new initiates, pranking our new "teachers", and going to school (never tell anyone I said that. Ever.)

We have, of course, still had monster sightings, but we can just normally send a couple of the initiates out and deal with it in under ten minutes (yeah, we rock that much.)

[Ouch! Carter, if you're mad at me, don't hit me! It's not proper to hit a girl!]

Sorry about that, just my annoying brother again. So anyway, I'm not here to tell you about the last few months (although I wish I could, because they were amazing!). I'll start this tale at Brooklyn House, quite a while ago.

It was a warm day in late spring. Our school had let us out for the year early because of strange phenomena like exploding geese in the ponds. That was one of our initiates doing. Erika was a newer one, who had only arrived one month ago, and had a knack for making animals explode.

So anyway, I had just woken up, and I was going down to the balcony to get breakfast. A couple ankle-biters were running around trying to tie up a big pink firefly. It was one of Shelby's latest creations. Over the last few months her magic ability has grown very quickly, so she was even able to defeat Felix and his penguins (though he says he was just backed up on homework at the moment).

When I got to the balcony, I found Zia already there, eating a bagel. She smiled as I walked in.

"Good morning, Sadie," she said cheerfully, and I wondered why she was so happy. She was dating my brother, after all.

[Ouch! Okay, that's the final straw! Tas! Now that's more like it!]

I'm very sorry about that. I'm absolutely sure my darling brother will not interrupt us for some time, as he is a little, tied up, at the moment.

So anyway, back to the story.

"Hello Zia," I said back to her. I grabbed some scrambled eggs and a cup of tea from the buffet, and then sat down next to her. We chatted for a while about girl things, like boys, fighting sphinxes, and nail polish. You know normal things.

Finally, when we had both finished, I brought up a question that had been nagging me for months.

"Hey Zia," I said nervously, "I keep getting these strange reports of magic from Long Island. It's starting to creep me out a little. Will you come and check it out with me?"

"Sure," she said in a totally sympathetic way. And with that, we got up and headed back inside.

And, what else do you think we would find, but complete chaos.

Okay, so I guess it wasn't total chaos. That is something much, much worse that I hope never to see again. But what we saw was a close second.

Almost every one of our Initiates were running around screaming, trying to escape one of Shelby's earlier creations, a beautiful rainbow unicorn that just happened to fly, breath fire, shoot lasers out of its eyes, and loved sugar cookies. Her name was Sparkle.

I pulled out my wand and yelled "Ha-tep!" At that moment, Sparkle stopped burning down the house, everyone stopped running, and Khufu stopped stuffing flamingo feathers in his mouth. Have I ever mentioned how much I love magic?

"What is going on in here?" I asked in my I-will-kill-you voice. "Where are the teachers? And what is Sparkle doing down here?"

"Um…" Jaz said in an embarrassed tone. "a few of us older kids walked in on this. We were trying to get everyone under control, but none of us could remember what to do. Sorry about the burnt statues."

"Okay," I said, "but I still have two questions unanswered."

Then one of the newest ankle-biters, Quincy, stepped forward.

"Shelby thought Sparkle could catch Pinkie, so she brought her down," he said in his little voice. "Oh, and the Teachers are lying unconscious on the floor over there." He pointed toward the stairs.

Zia and I rushed over to look at them. They were lying on the ground, covered in ash, and with giant red welts on their heads.

"Really?" I asked the initiates. "These are the eighth teachers we've gone through this month. We're running out of teachers!"

"We're sorry," everyone mumbled at once, and even Sparkle whinnied her apology. Zia and I stood up, and then sent Shelby and a couple of her friends to bring Sparkle back to the roof with Freak. Jaz came over to the unconscious teachers, along with a couple other younger healers, and worked on their wounds.

Everyone else dispersed, heading back to their rooms. Zia and I talked for a little bit, and decided to go on with the plan we had made before. I mean, how much more trouble could a few dozen teenagers get in before this evening? I really hoped we were right.

So, we headed out the door, and decided to take a taxi. We normally traveled through the Duat, or took a ride on Freak, the giant bird thing that lived on our roof (please, don't ask!). but today, we decided to be slightly normal.

I had no idea where we needed to go. I told the driver we were going to a very remote place on Long Island (if there even is one) so I would give him directions along the way. I could always feel if the magical force was getting stronger or weaker, so it just directed me from there.

We ended up on a small road, and that's where the force was the strongest (okay, I'm starting to sound like Yoda [wait, how did I know that? Oh no! my brother is rubbing off on me!])

I told him to let us out there, saying we would find our own way back. Zia gave him a wad of cash, which he took quickly and left.

"Are you sure this is the place?" Zia asked me. "It's just a big valley with strawberry fields at the end."

"This was where the magic felt the strongest!" I told her, slightly annoyed. "Wait, actually, its strongly centered in a long line along here, all the way down to that giant pine tree down there."

"Well, I guess we should explore the area for something." Zia looked slightly annoyed, but we were too good of friends for her to doubt me.

[Stop mumbling Carter! I'll let you go when it's your turn! Jeez, brothers!]

We searched for a while, but found nothing. I considered checking out the valley, but it felt so wrong going into there, like we would just waste our time by checking it. Zia must have been feeling the same way, as she got an uneasy look in her eyes whenever she looked into the field.

At about noon, we decided to give up for that day. There obviously wasn't anything outside of the field, and neither of us wanted to go in. I made a mental note to come back later with more people to help us look.

This time, we traveled through the Duat, so we were much quicker coming back. But, before we got back, Zia spotted a small diner, and we were both starving after a morning of climbing trees and looking through bushes, so we stopped for lunch.

It was a small diner, with only a few tables. But, the food was absolutely divine! It beat Grandma's burnt biscuits by a longshot.

After we finished eating, we went back to Brooklyn House. We came in and saw something that was much better than last time.

The main area was almost empty, besides three ankle-biters who were painting and a few older initiates chatting. There was almost no sign that there was ever any fires, and even the Thoth statue had been cleaned of the makeup a few of the girls had put on it and there was no longer any graffiti on his back.

Zia and I went out to the balcony where we found most of the initiates eating. Everyone was talking kindly to each other, and laughing occasionally. Wow, I thought, who enslaved their minds?

I went up to Carter, who was sitting at the head of the table. He was talking to Walt, which scared me a bit, but I went over bravely-ish.

"Hi Sadie!" Walt said. "Carter was telling me a story of when you were two and you got into a fight with two other babies you were playing with. You almost blasted their heads off! That must have been quite amaz…"

"Carter?" I asked my brother. "I think, in about five minutes, I'm going to turn you into a frog and have Erika explode you."

"Hey!" he protested. "You were the one who went out with my girlfriends for half of the day! You could have at least told us where you were going!"

"Actually, that's what I wanted to talk to you and Walt about," I told them. when they didn't respond, I added, "privately!"

They finally got the message and got up, following us into the library. Cleo, the librarian, was eating lunch at the moment, so we got the area all to ourselves.

"So, what did you want us to know?" Walt asked in a bored tone of voice. I had to fight the urge to punch him in the arm.

"I kept getting reports of unexplained magic from Long Island, so Zia and I went to check it out." The boys started listening intently, which made the story a little harder to tell, as Walt's stare can be unnerving at times.

"We found this big area where the magic seemed to be emanating from. We didn't go into the valley, but searched around the outside, and couldn't find a thing."

"And you're telling this to us because?" Carter asked.

"Because we think there may be something we skipped over," Zia said firmly. "We want to send a larger search part over there tomorrow to see if we could find anything more."

Carter immediately agreed to the idea, and after thinking it over, so did Walt.

"I don't think it would hurt to try," he said, and with that, we all got up and left the room.

"Hey," I said to Walt after we got out. "I was wondering, how in the entire world did you get everyone to be so quiet?"

"Carter promised them next Monday and Tuesday off, so they can do whatever they want," he replied. Then he added, "Our newest teachers quit, saying we were much too hard to handle, and they preferred training monkeys in Africa. Amos will try to find a couple more, but nobody wants the job anymore. He's thinking about coming himself…"

"Oh gods of Egypt no!" I interrupted. "I don't think I could stand that. And I do think we might be able to handle ourselves, as long as we have like, five of us older kids in charge."

"I doubt that would happen, but we can always hope!" he said.

Then, up on the roof, I heard Sparkle and Freak screaming over something.

"Don't worry," I told Walt, "ill handle it." I gave him a quick kiss on the cheek then ran upstairs to find Shelby caught in the middle of a fight between Freak and Sparkle.