Meanwhile, the croc was going crazy trying to yank away my sword. My combat avatar started to flicker.
Summoning an avatar is a short-term thing, like sprinting at top speed. You can’t do it for very long, or you’ll collapse. Already I was sweating and breathing hard. My heart raced. My reservoirs of magic were being severely depleted.
“Hurry,” I told Percy.
“Can’t cut it!” he said.
“A clasp,” I said. “There’s gotta be one. ”
As soon as I said that, I spotted it—at the monster’s throat, a golden cartouche encircling the hieroglyphs that spelled SOBEK. “There—on the bottom!”
Percy scrambled down the necklace, climbing it like a net, but at that moment my avatar collapsed. I dropped to the ground, exhausted and dizzy. The only thing that saved my life was that the crocodile had been pulling at my avatar’s sword. When the sword disappeared, the monster lurched backward and stumbled over a Honda.
The mortal kids scattered. One dove under a car, only to have the car disappear—smacked into the air by the croc’s tail.
Percy reached the bottom of the necklace and hung on for dear life. His sword was gone. Probably he’d dropped it.
Meanwhile, the monster regained his footing. The good news: he didn’t seem to notice Percy. The bad news: he definitely noticed me, and he looked mightily torqued off.
I didn’t have the energy to run, much less summon magic to fight. At this point, the mortal kids with their water balloons and rocks had more of a chance of stopping the croc than I did.
In the distance, sirens wailed. Somebody had called the police, which didn’t exactly cheer me up. It just meant more mortals were racing here as fast as they could to volunteer as crocodile snacks.
I backed up to the curb and tried—ridiculously—to stare down the monster. “Stay, boy. ”
The crocodile snorted. His hide shed water like the grossest fountain in the world, making my shoes slosh as I walked. His lamp-yellow eyes filmed over, maybe from happiness. He knew I was done for.
I thrust my hand into my backpack. The only thing I found was a clump of wax. I didn’t have time to build a proper shabti, but I had no better idea. I dropped my pack and started working the wax furiously with both hands, trying to soften it.
“Percy?” I called.
“I can’t unlock the clasp!” he yelled. I didn’t dare take my eyes off the croc’s, but in my peripheral vision I could see Percy pounding his fist against the base of the necklace. “Some kind of magic?”
That was the smartest thing he’d said all afternoon (not that he’d said a lot of smart things to choose from). The clasp was a hieroglyphic cartouche. It would take a magician to figure it out and open it. Whatever and whoever Percy was, he was no magician.
I was still shaping the clump of wax, trying to make it into a figurine, when the crocodile decided to stop savoring the moment and just eat me. As he lunged, I threw my shabti, only half formed, and barked a command word.
Instantly the world’s most deformed hippopotamus sprang to life in midair. It sailed headfirst into the crocodile’s left nostril and lodged there, kicking its stubby back legs.
Not exactly my finest tactical move; but having a hippo shoved up his nose must have been sufficiently distracting. The crocodile hissed and stumbled, shaking his head, as Percy dropped off and rolled away, barely avoiding the crocodile’s stomping feet. He ran to join me at the curb.
I stared in horror as my wax creature, now a living (though very misshapen) hippo, either tried to wriggle free of the croc’s nostril or work its way farther into the reptile’s sinus cavity—I wasn’t sure which.
The crocodile whipped around, and Percy grabbed me just in time, pulling me out of the trampling path.
We jogged to the opposite end of the cul-de-sac, where the mortal kids had gathered. Amazingly, none of them seemed to be hurt. The crocodile kept thrashing and wiping out homes as it tried to clear its nostril.
“You okay?” Percy asked me.
I gasped for air but nodded weakly.
One of the kids offered me his Super Soaker. I waved him off.
“You guys,” Percy told the kids, “you hear those sirens? You’ve got to run down the road and stop the police. Tell them it’s too dangerous up here. Stall them!”
For some reason, the kids listened. Maybe they were just happy to have something to do, but the way Percy spoke, I got the feeling he was used to rallying outnumbered troops. He sounded a bit like Horus—a natural commander.
After the kids raced off, I managed to say, “Good call. ”