Chapter VI

Katya

I didn't like not knowing where my friends were. Yes, I said friends, even though we only met a couple days ago, what we've been through it was hard not to call them friends.

The ambrosia I ate was finally kicking in and I could sit up straight. I flew over the New Mexican desert, I was thirsty, I had ran out of water hours ago, and food. I tried to get Blackjack to stop but the horse was as stubborn as a mule or he couldn't understand me. An idea came to me, and I cursed myself for not thinking it sooner.

"Med-wah," my voice croaked. The hieroglyph for "Speak" blazed in the air. Blackjack's eyes widened and he tried to fly around it but it vanished.

"What?" I heard Blackjack ask.

"Blackjack, we have to stop. I need water and you need to rest, even for a few minutes."

"No way, Jose," he said.

"I'm not Jose," I said alerting him that I could understand.

"You can hear me?"

"Yeah, now land us at a gas station. I need water and you need rest."

"Sure thing, She-Boss."

"She-Boss?" I asked.

"Yeah, Boss is Boss, and you're She-Boss." Then I remembered that Percy said that's what he called him.

We landed at a Phillips 66.

"Get me doughnuts!" Said Blackjack.

"Sure thing!" I said. Blackjack waited as I went in and bought two bottles of water and two doughnuts for Blackjack with the wad of cash I put in my pack. I went back outside and got back on Blackjack and we took off.

"How did you find me?" I asked Blackjack.

"Boss told me to keep an eye on you, looked like you needed road side assistance."

"You won't tell him what I've been doing will you?"

"Nope, She-Boss."

We crossed over into Arizona and about an hour later I saw something. The Egyptian Queen flying crazily through the sky. I grinned widely.

"Blackjack! Fly over to that boat. I need to get on it. I'll jump off and you can leave. Make sure you're not seen."

"Right," he flew up to the side of the boat and I hopped on.

"See ya, Blackjack!" I yelled after him.

"Katya!" Sadie exclaimed almost letting an unconscious Zia fly off. I hold of a bar for support.

"Carter help your girlfriend, I got this!" I yelled, Carter wasn't happy about me calling Zia his girlfriend, but he looked glad to get rid of the steering job.

I shifted the tiller, I was doing a better job than Carter, but that wasn't saying much. Come on, Katya. You've held the sky. You can do this. I told myself, it wasn't much to go on but I managed to keep in front of the thing following us behind us. Not that it stopped it from hurling flaming balls at us. I tried to veer the boat to the right, but the fireball still grazed the port side.

I looked for a safe place to land but all that was there was subdivisions and office parks.

"Die, enemies of Ra!" Sekhmet yelled. "Perish in agony!"

I took another evasive turn and Zia yelled, "There!"

She pointed towards a well-lit factory complex with trucks, warehouses, and silos. A giant chili pepper was painted on the side of the biggest warehouse, and a floodlit sign read: MAGIC SALSA, INC.

"Oh, please," Sadie said. "It's not really magic! That's just a name."

"No," Zia insisted. "I've got an idea."

"Those Seven Ribbons?" Carter guessed. "The ones you used on Serqet?"

Zia shook her head. "They can only be summoned once a year. But my plan—"

Another arrow blazed past us, only inches from our starboard sign.

"Hang on!" I yanked the tiller and spun the boat upside down just before the arrow exploded. The hull shielded us from the brunt of the blast, but the entire bottom of the ship was now on fire, and we were going down.

With my last bit of control, I aimed the boat toward the roof of the warehouse, and we crashed through, slamming into a huge mound of… something crunchy.

I clawed my way clear of the boat and sat up in a daze. Fortunately, the stuff we'd crashed into was soft. Unfortunately, it was a twenty-foot pile of chili peppers, and the boat had set them on fire. My eyes began to sting, but I knew better than to rub them, because my hands were now covered in chili oil.

"Sadie?" Carter called. "Zia?"

"Help!" Sadie yelled. She was on the other side of the boat, dragging Zia out from under the flaming hull. We managed to pull her free and slide down the pile onto the floor.

The warehouse seemed to be a massive facility for drying peppers, with thirty or forty mountains of chilies and rows of wooden drying racks. The wreckage of our boat filled the air with spicy smoke, and through the hole we'd made in the roof, I could see the blazing figure of Sekhmet descending.

We ran, plowing through another pile of peppers. We hid behind a drying rack, where shelved of peppers made the air burn like hydrochloric acid.

I'm really starting to dislike chili peppers. Sekhmet landed, and the warehouse floor shuddered. Up close, she was even more terrifying. Her skin glowed like liquid gold, and her chest armor and skirt seemed to be woven tiles made from molten lava. Her hair was like a thick lion's mane. Her eyes were feline, but they didn't sparkle like Bast's or betray any kindness or humor. Sekhmet's eyes blazed like her arrows, designed only to seek and destroy. She was beautiful the way an atomic explosion is beautiful.

"I smell blood!" Roared Sekhmet. "I will feast on enemies of Ra until my belly is full!"

"Charming," Sadie whispered. "So Zia… this plan?"

Zia didn't look so well. She was shivering and pale, and seemed to have trouble focusing on us. "When Ra… when he first called Sekhmet to punish humans because they were rebelling against him… she got out of hand."

"Hard to imagine," Carter whispered, as Sekhmet ripped through the burning wreckage of our boat.

"She started killing everyone," Zia said, "not just the wicked. None of the other gods could stop her. She would just kill all day until she was gorged on blood. Then she'd leave until the next day. So the people begged the magicians to come up with a plan, and—"

"You dare hide?" Flames roared as Sekhmet's arrows destroyed pile after pile of dried peppers. "I will roast you alive!"

"Run now," I decided. "Talk later."

Carter and I dragged Zia between us while Sadie led the way. We managed to get out of the warehouse just before the whole place exploded from the heat, billowing a spicy-hot mushroom cloud into the sky. The heat blasted my back, I hate heat. We ran through a parking lot filled with semitrailers and hid behind a six wheeler.

I peeked out from behind the truck, hoping to see Sekhmet wailing and dying in the flames, no such luck. Instead she jumped from the wreckage in the form of a giant lion. Blazing over her head was a disk of fire like a miniature sun.

"The symbol of Ra," Zia whispered.

"Where are you, my tasty morsels?" She opened her maw and breathed a blast of hot air across the parking lot. Wherever her breath touched, the asphalt melted, cars disintegrated into sand, and the parking lot turned into a barren desert.

"How did she do that?" Sadie hissed.

"Her breath creates the deserts," Zia said. "That is the legend."

"Better and better." Carter muttered. We were done for, unless we thought of a plan. So think! I yelled at myself.

"I'll distract her. You two run—"

"No," Zia insisted. "There is another way." She pointed at a row of silos on the other side of the lot. Each one was three stories tall and maybe twenty feet in diameter, with a giant chili pepper painted on the side.

"Petrol tanks?" Sadie asked.

"No," I said. "It's probably salsa."

Sadie stared at me blankly. "Isn't that a type of music?"

"It's a hot sauce," Carter said. "That's what they make here."

Sekhmet breathed in our direction, and the three trailers next to us melted into sand. We scuttled sideways and jumped behind a cinder block. I really did not want to become sand, I hate sand.

"Listen," Zia gasped, her face beading with sweat. I wondered why she was over-heating if she was a fire magician. "When the people needed to stop Sekhmet, they got huge vats of beer and colored them bright red with pomegranate juice."

"Yeah, I remember now," Carter interrupted. "They told Sekhmet it was blood, and she drank until she passed out. Then Ra was able to call her into the heavens. They transformed her into something gentler. A cow goddess or something?"

"Hathor," I said. "That is Sekhmet's other form. The flip side of her personality."

Sadie shook her head in disbelief. "So you're saying we offer to buy Sekhmet a few pints, and she'll turn into a cow."

"Not exactly," Zia said. "But salsa is red, is it not?"

We skirted the factory grounds as Sekhmet chewed up trucks and blasted he swathes of the parking lot to sand.

"I hate this plan," Sadie grumbled behind me.

"Just keep her occupied for a few seconds," Carter said. "And don't die."

"Yeah, that's the hard bit, isn't it?"

"One…" I counted. "Two… three!"

Sadie burst into the open and used her favorite spell: "Ha-di!"

The glyphs blazed over Sekhmet's head.

And everything around her exploded. Trucks burst into pieces. The air shimmered with energy. The ground heaved upward, creating a crater fifty feet deep into which the lioness tumbled.

It was pretty impressive, but I didn't have time to admire the destruction. I ran towards the salsa tanks.

"RRAAAARR!" Sekhmet leaped out of the crater and breathed desert-breath in Sadie's direction. But Sadie was long gone. She ran sideways, ducking behind trailers and releasing a few lengths of magical rope as she fled. The ropes whipped through the air and tangled themselves against the lioness' mouth. They failed, of course, but they worked wonders at annoying the Destroyer.

"Show yourself!" Sekhmet raged. "I will feast on your flesh!"

Perched on the silo, Carter turned from falcon to avatar. His glowing form was so heavy he left foot size holes in the top of the silo.

"Sekhmet!" He yelled.

The lioness whirled and snarled, trying to locate his voice.

"Up here, kitty!" He called.

She spotted him and her ears went back. "Horus?"

"Unless you know another guy with a falcon head."

She padded back and forth uncertainly, then roared in challenge. "Why do you speak to me when I am in my raging form? You know I must destroy everything in my path, even you!"

"If you must," Carter said. "But first, you might like to feast on the blood of your enemies!"

He drove his sword into the tank and salsa gushed out in a chunky red waterfall. I leaped to the next tank and sliced it open. I leaped to the other silo and sliced it open. Carter and I took turns destroying Magic Salsa silos.

"Ha, ha!" Sekhmet loved it. She leaped into the red sauce torrent, rolling in it, lapping it up. "Blood. Lovely blood!"

Apparently lions aren't too bright, or their taste buds aren't very developed, because Sekhmet didn't stop until her stomach was bulging and her mouth literally began to smoke.

"Tangy," she said, stumbling and blinking. "But my eyes hurt. What kind of blood is this? Nubian? Persian?"

"Jalapeño," I said. "Try some more. It gets better."

Her ears were smoking too now as she tried to drink more of the red hot salsa. Her eyes watered and she staggered.

"I…" Steam curled from her mouth. "Hot… hot mouth…"

"Milk is good for that," Carter suggested. "Maybe if you were a cow."

"Trick," Sekhmet groaned. "You… you tricked…"

But her eyes were too heavy. She turned in a circle and collapsed, curling into a ball. Her form twitched and shimmered as her red armor melted into her golden skin, until I was looking down at an enormous sleeping cow.

Carter and I dropped of the silos and stepped carefully around the sleeping goddess. She was making cow snoring sounds, like "Moo-zzz, moo-zzz." Carter waved his hand in front of her face, and when he was convinced she was out cold, he dispelled his avatar. Sadie and Zia emerged from behind a trailer.

"Well," said Sadie, "that was different."

"You two did wonderfully," Zia said to Carter and Sadie, knowing full well that I was not looking for her approval. "But your boat is damaged. How do we get to Phoenix?"

"We?" Sadie said. "I don't recall inviting you."

Zia's face turned salsa red. "Surely you don't still think I led you into a trap?"

"I don't know," Sadie said. "Did you?"

I couldn't believe I was hearing this. Neither could Carter from the look on his face.

"Sadie," his voice sounded dangerously angry. "Lay off. Zia summoned that pillar-of-fire thing. She sacrificed her magic to save us. And she told us how to beat the lioness. We need her."

Sadie stared at Carter. She glanced back and forth between Zia, Carter, and me, probably trying to judge how far she could push things.

"Fine." She crossed her arms and pouted. "But we need to find Amos first."

"No!" Zia said. "That would be a very bad idea."

"Oh, so we can trust you, but not Amos?"

Zia hesitated. I had a feeling that was exactly what she meant. The thing was, why? Amos practically raised me, I knew him better than anyone, he survived Sekhmet, and he was completely trustworthy, unless he wasn't completely himself.

Sadie huffed. "So how do we get to Phoenix? Walk?"

I gazed across the parking lot, where one sixteen-wheeler was still intact. "Come on," I said running towards the truck.

"What are you doing?" Carter asked, as I got in the driver's seat. I leaned down to remove the panel that covered the wires I could use to hotwire the car.

"Get in," I said as the engine revved to life.

"Brilliant!" Sadie exclaimed.

My feet could barely reach the petals but I could still drive. I hit the gas and we sailed west on I-10.

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