"It was a Z! Carved right in the potatoes!" -Carter Kane, Throne of Fire
"Bloody hell," Sadie swore. My sister treated everyone within a ten-foot radius to some—ahem—colorful vocabulary. I glared at her as I covered Felix's ears.
"Sadie! Jeez, give the trainees a wider vocabulary than they need, will you?!" I snapped.
"Drew Tanaka," Sadie spat with venom. The (inexpensive and non-valuable, thankfully) vase next to her exploded with faint heiroglyphs and a tiny mushroom cloud of fire. "Oh, if she wasn't a regular mortal, she'd be a fruit bat by now, maybe a hamster by now!"
She passed someone's boots, probably Julian's, and they spontaneously combusted as well.
"Evil siren, with her puny little mortal mates—no, goons, as you Americans would say," Sadie ranted to seemingly no one.
I snorted, half in laughter and half in disbelief.
"Is there something I'm missing, here?" Sadie hissed, her eyes flashing towards me. Felix backed into me as he tried to get away from the enraged ex-host of Isis.
I rolled my eyes. "There's a lot of things I'm missing, like what the heck Drew could've possibly said to get you so mad, and where on earth you learned the word goons. And aren't sirens Greek mythology?"
"Jinx us, why don't you!" Sadie threw up her hands in exasperation, and then returned to seething. "She insulted Dad, Mum, Walt, and Felix, as well as you and I for being siblings. I have a bloody good reason to be fuming, Carter! Goons, I don't remember, and I frankly don't care."
I understood instantly what she was saying about Dad, it's hard to defend a 'dead' person. But Drew doesn't know that Dad's been...recycled, or that he's risked his life saving the world, or anything about the Egyptian world. So defending Dad—probably calling him a dead-beat and a loser who would never amount to anything—was kind of hard to do, considering that he's, I don't know, the host for the Egyptian god of the dead?!
"Don't you dare call my dad dead-beat and a loser, he set the saving-the-world thing into motion by sacrificing his own life to host the Egyptian god of the dead, Osiris, and even though he only got to see Sadie twice a year, he still loved her!"
Yeah, that'd blow over real well.
Everyone got quiet as Sadie ranted on and on about her dad not being dead-beat—rather hard to contact, yes, but not dead-beat—and that he sacrificed his life to save the world, which Drew could never do as she was far too much of a wuss to do. Maybe she'd like a taste of her own medicine, insulting other people's families. You call Carter and I screwed, and yet you're the one with half a dozen half-siblings following you around like sheep—
"Sadie, come on. The trainees don't need to hear this," I complained.
She glared at me, and Felix tried backing up some more, but only succeeded in ramming his head into my stomach. "She called most of the people in this room stupid with no chance of ever amounting to anything, Carter. You're going to let that go?!"
"I've been called worse," I said mildly. "And besides, she doesn't know us. She's a fake, Sadie, like those plastic dolls you used to drown in the sink before Mom died and Gran got custody of you. And its all the more sweeter that she isn't special enough to know of our world, a world that we a) are trying to save, b) are the numbers one and two on the hit list—and after the several stunts that you and I have pulled in Phoniex and Las Cruces and Cairo and Washington DC, that applies in the mortal world and our world—and c) are helping some of these kids find a new home. We don't know how big of an impact we make on people's lives, Sadie. And besides, when we save the world, and we will, with a heck of a lot of help, we'll have saved Drew's butt as well, assuming we haven't already."
The raging fire in Sadie's eyes dimmed slowly throughout my short speech. I let go of Felix, and he darted towards the library, where the rest of the trainees had taken cover.
"Fine," Sadie grumbled. "I still want to turn her into a fruit bat, though."
I snorted. "If by some minor chance that she does have blood of the pharaohs, you have my permission to turn her into a fruit bat. She annoys me, too."
Sadie was normal for the rest of the day. Then, apparently, it was my turn for drama, at dinner.
Despite the revelence with barbeque and me and Sadie's adventure given to us by Thoth [Yes, Sadie, I know that Thoth is a bird brain], I got chicken, corn, cornbread, and mashed potatoes with gravy.
Normality isn't my thing—
[That's Sadie in the background, yelling that I don't have a thing. Thanks.]
—but I'm fairly sure that a perfect Z carved in mashed potatoes isn't normal.
"Carter! C'mon, move it!" Sadie said impatiently from behind me.
But I was rooted to the spot, and only half-heard her.
Sadie sighed in exasperation and waved her hand in front of my face. I whirled around and grabbed her arms. "Zia," I said breathlessly.
She looked a mixture of confused, slightly frightened, and exasperated. "Carter, what the—?"
[Shut up, Sadie. You know me well enough that— Argh! Never mind!]
I shoved my plate on my table and ran to my room. Walt had made me an enchanted birdbath type thing, so I could scry on other nomes. [No, Sadie. Not spy, scry. Now will you shut up?! Who was stupid enough to give you sugar?!] I'd tried a million times before, and they'd all been blocked and had failed miserably, but maybe Zia was signalling that I could do it now.
"Show me Zia Rashid," I said, looking into the scrying bowl.
The oil rippled, but my reflection didn't change. "Grr!" I pounded my fist on the metal railing so hard it bent.
"Seriously?" Sadie said, frowning. "What the heck inspired you to come up here—in the middle of dinner, no less—and attempt to scry for Zia, again?"
"There was a Z!" I said, waving my hands around in frustration.
She rolled her eyes. "Did it get you anywhere?"
"...No."
"Then forget it, Carter. I didn't see a Z anywhere on the buffet table. I think you are getting rather desperate."
"Did you look in the mashed potatoes?" I demanded.
Sadie looked at me like I'd gone nuts—or rather, as Sadie says, bonkers. "No, but I highly doubt—"
I was gone, out of the room and down the stairs again. The other trainees looked on with avid intrest and slight disbelief as I grabbed the bowl of mashed potatoes, to show Sadie—
"See? No Z. Now go eat, Carter," Sadie said, snickering, "before our initiates think you've officially lost your mind."
"I thought we were already nuts when we decided we were going to save the world from an evil chaos snake that's so out of our league it isn't funny," I grumbled.
"Yes, but we haven't announced to the others, making it official," Sadie said simply.
I resisted the urge to face plant in the table.
A/N:
I'm always open to random little quotes, from the Kane Chronicles, Percy Jackson, Gallager Girls, Maximum Ride, and quite a few others if you ask the right series/books. I love doing background. Maybe give me a minor character to do background on? I'm better at background than futuristic stuff. The person who suggests the quote/character would get that oneshot dedicated to them.
-Winter