Hours later, a sound roused her from her sleep. At first she didn’t know where she was. Then she remembered and glanced at her watch. It read five o’clock.
Footsteps came from the other end of the hallway. She scrambled from her hiding place.
“Hello,” she yelled, certain a security guard or some member of the morning maintenance crew was close by.
She threw her backpack over her shoulder and staggered forward, trying to find whoever it was.
At the next turn, she stopped and listened again.
When she didn’t hear anything, she called out, “I’m locked in. Can you help me?”
She waited. Then a soft thud-thud-thud came from behind her. Even as she tried to find a rational explanation for the sound, a deeper and more primitive part of her awakened and took control. Someone was trying to frighten her. She didn’t believe in ghosts, but human predators did exist.
Without making a sound, she slid around the corner and hid in a dark recess, waiting, the huntress now. When the person passed in front of her, she would see who had been stalking her, without being seen. That knowledge gave her power.
She took another step to the rear of the alcove and bumped into something. She turned around and gazed into the pale blue eyes staring back at her.
Sudi started to run, then realized she was staring at her own reflection in the glass of a darkened display case. She poked her nose closer, feeling foolish. Her heart was still pounding, and fear had left her mouth dry. She wondered vaguely if the odd taste on her tongue was the residue of too much adrenaline.
Her breath fogged the glass, and as she started to write her initials in the steam, an eerie shadow skimmed over her. The air rustled as a woman formed, her hazy image floating in the glass. She wore a helmet, or maybe the headdress was a crown. A golden vulture’s head, entwined with that of a hooded cobra, jutted from the front of the headband. The woman had thick black hair and large wings.
Sudi closed her tired eyes, willing the image to vanish, but when she opened them again, the woman was still there, smiling at Sudi with a kind and loving gaze. Her wings fluttered, and the resulting breeze ruffled Sudi’s hair.
“Go away,” Sudi ordered. This had to be a dream, and moments from now she would awaken and—
“Why is it so hard for you to believe?” the phantom asked.
Sudi wheeled around and faced her hallucination. She took a tentative step forward, then another, and stretched out her hand until her fingertips pressed into warm, soft flesh.
“Listen well, my sister,” the woman said softly. “I looked into my scrying bowl and saw that you will need the story I am going to tell.”
Sudi nodded and blinked, then pinched herself, trying to wake up.
“Re-Atum emerged from the primeval ocean,” the woman began, “and took the form of a Bennubird. Then he flew from the darkness and perched on a rock. When he opened his beak, his cry broke the silence, and with that scream he created what is and what is not to be.”
“And how am I supposed to use this story?” Sudi challenged, not expecting the phantom to answer her.
“As you are dying, you will know,” the woman said. “But still, you must take care when you speak the terrible words of power.”
Sudi nodded and leaned back against the wall, closing her eyes. She just wanted the dream to go away.
“It’s safe for you to leave the museum now,” the woman said.
Sudi opened her eyes again.
The woman was gone.
Sudi had never been so relieved to have a dream end. She grabbed her backpack and ran toward the elevator.
The clay that had been packed against the metal door the night before was gone. She hurriedly pressed the call button, anxious to get out and tell Sara everything that had happened. But as she stepped inside the elevator, she looked at her hands. Her fingernails were filled with dirt.
She didn’t know what Abdel had done to her, but she was determined to prove to herself that the strange things that had been happening to her had nothing to do with magic or ancient forces. As soon as she was safely back in her bedroom, she knew exactly what she was going to do.
Sudi stepped inside her living room and breathed in the aroma of her parents’ morning coffee. She listened as she closed the door behind her. Her parents always watched CNN until they left for work. The silence told her that she had the house to herself until her sisters woke up. She hurried up the stairs to her room, sat on the edge of her bed, and pulled the papyrus from her backpack.
She studied the document looking for the right incantation. She still didn’t accept that she was actually reading the symbols; her mind had only been tricked into believing that she could. Even so, she picked a spell—or what she thought was one—for transforming into the Bennubird.
“Amun-Re, eldest of the gods in the eastern sky, mysterious power of wind…” She paused, surprised by the thin quiver in her voice. She cleared her throat and went on. “Make a path for me to change my earthly khat into that of beloved Bennu. Xu kua. I am glorious. User kua. I am mighty. Neteri kua. I am strong.”
A long minute passed.
Nothing happened.
She grinned, satisfied that she had proven Abdel was a good hypnotist and nothing more. She wondered how long posthypnotic suggestions lasted. She’d google it and get the information after she took her shower. Grabbing clean undies and the ugly green bra her mother had bought on sale, she hurried to the bathroom and claimed it before her sisters woke up. She stripped and climbed under the hot shower spray.
The warm water took away the soreness from sleeping on the museum floor, and as the aches and pains lessened, so did the memory of the night before. She repeated the incantation, making it her own personal rap, a reminder to herself to never let her mind get carried away with fantasy again. She liked the sound the words made and repeated the spell a third time.
“Amun-Re,” she said as she shaved her legs, “eldest of the gods in the eastern sky.”
She soaped her arms and used her pouf as she continued, “Mysterious power of wind, make a path for me to change my earthly khat into that of beloved Bennu.”
“Xu kua,” she picked up the beat and stuck her face in the water. “I am glorious.”
“User kua. I am mighty.”
“Neteri kua. I am strong.”
A pounding on the bathroom door made Sudi start. She turned off the water.
“We know you’re glorious,” Carrie yelled from the hallway.
“Yes, but other people have to use the shower, O mighty one,” Nicole screamed. “How long are you going to take?”
“Out in a sec,” Sudi yelled back and stepped from the tub. She wrapped a towel around her and began drying off.
A sudden sharp pain in her shoulder, however, made her wince. “Ouch.” She rubbed the muscle, trying to work out the pain. Tiny bumps sprouted on her skin. She didn’t need a break-out, not while the weather was still warm and she could wear her halter tops.
She wiped the steam from the mirror and turned to look at her back. Hundreds of red welts spotted her skin. Just her luck. She was probably allergic to something in the museum.
She slipped into her panties and felt a feverish ache in her hip bones. Maybe she was coming down with the flu.
As she hooked her bra, downy feathers floated to the floor. She glanced up at the ceiling, but she saw nothing to explain the feathers encircling her feet.
Then, with a jab of adrenaline, she remembered the incantation she had been reciting.
“Three,” she said in a shaky voice and stared back into the mirror. Didn’t three times have some kind of magical power? People always said the third time’s the charm.
“No,” she screamed as plumage sprouted from her shoulders, neck, and ears. Her lips grew into a daggerlike beak. She opened the bathroom door as her fingers vanished. Long, slender feathers brushed over the brass knob.
She tried to call for her sisters, but a strange bird cry came out instead
. “Awk!”
Her vision started changing. Her eyes moved to either side of her head, and each saw separately. She slammed into the wall, disoriented. She had studied the monocular vision of birds in biology, but this didn’t make sense—she couldn’t be turning into a bird. Things like that just didn’t happen.
She pulled herself up and took one step, then swayed drunkenly as she adjusted to her new body. She tipped off the carpet runner, and her toenails scratched the wood floor. She glanced down. Short, blunt claws had replaced her feet. She stumbled and reached out to balance herself. But instead of arms, wings flapped frantically around her.
“No,” she yelled in an angry tweet and hopped down the hallway to the full-length antique mirror. The reflection of a red-and-gold bird with a two-feathered crest stared back at her. She had long legs and an S-shaped neck.
Then she glanced outside, and for one exhilarating moment she forgot her panic, as she stared at a fanfare of colors that she had never seen before. With her bird vision she was able to see ultraviolet rays.
But her euphoria quickly faded. How was she going to change back into a girl?
She ran to her sisters’ room, clucking wildly. The twins studied the occult and magic. They even tried to cast spells. Maybe they could save her.
“Nicole! Carrie!” she shouted, but their names came out as sharp, repeated tweets.
She stood in their doorway flapping her wings and shrieking, “Help me!” but only a hysterical chirping noise escaped her beak.
“A bird’s trapped inside,” Carrie said and grabbed a magazine. She swept it toward Sudi. “Help me shoo it out,” she pleaded with Nicole.
“No,” Sudi chirped, and somersaulted backward, becoming even more disoriented than before.
Carrie swung again. The magazine breezed past Sudi. She squawked and ran, spreading her wings for balance as Carrie and Nicole chased her down the stairs. Sudi tripped and rolled down the bottom three steps.
“Open the door,” Carrie shouted.
Nicole sprang past Sudi. Her foot landed on the tip of Sudi’s wing, pressing on the feathers.
“Okay,” Nicole yelled. She flung open the front door.
Sudi jumped outside and stared back at the twins dazedly.
“Fly away,” Carrie said.
Then Nicole slammed the door. The wood tapped the end of Sudi’s long beak.
“Some psychics the two of you turned out to be,” Sudi trilled in an angry arpeggio of peeps. “You don’t even recognize your own sister.”
She perched on the step and tried to hold on to the belief that this was impossible; it had to be a dream or a stress-induced hallucination. At the same time a scary idea came to her. Maybe she’d remain this way until she died. And if that happened, how was she going to convince anyone that she was a girl?
She should have learned the incantation for transforming back before she pronounced the spell to become a bird in the first place. Her chest deflated, and she squawked sadly.
She thought of her parents and felt even sadder. Would they think she had run away?
Suddenly her body tensed, and her avian instincts tore her away from her thoughts. She sensed a predator and cocked her head.
Pie was crouching toward her, back taut, ready to spring.
Sudi screeched and fluttered her wings. She rose, then fell, only to rise again before crashing back on the sidewalk and hitting her beak on the cement with a loud click. She got up again, determined not to die as a meal for her cat, and ran awkwardly, flailing her wings up and down, down and up. The motion took tremendous energy.
Pie pounced.
Sudi yelped and slipped from his claws, and then, amazingly, she took to the sky. She was airborne but afraid to stop flapping. She couldn’t remember if birds continuously waved their wings. She was positive she had watched sparrows glide, but she was too afraid to stop pumping.
On the ground, Pie skulked after her, stalking his easy prey.
Wind rushed around Sudi and took her higher. She skimmed over the treetops, tearing red and yellow leaves from the branches. Then a raucous cry made her look up. A fleet of black birds dived toward her. Glossy feathers were everywhere, smacking against her. She must have flown into their territory.
She reeled, tumbling down, and hit a tree limb. Balancing herself, she perched gracelessly, leaning against the trunk. Her wings ached, her body throbbed, and she felt incredibly hungry. She snapped her beak around a beetle and swallowed it whole before she even had time to stop herself. She felt the bug squirming inside of her. Disgusted, she started to regurgitate it, but a stealthy movement made her glance down. She twisted her head and saw a swatch of yellow-orange cat climbing toward her.
Pie was unrelenting. Sudi made a mental note to feed him more cat food if she survived. He leaped. She jumped and fell from the tree, plummeting down and frantically flapping her wings.
This time the air sucked her up. She spread her feathers and glided upward on the breeze. She soared around the Washington Monument and fought the urge to dive for fish in the Potomac River.
She wondered if strange things were happening to Meri and Dalila. She swooped down and flew over traffic, following the streets to Entre Nous Academy. She didn’t know how she would find Meri once she arrived, but she had to try.
Students were gathered outside the three-story red-brick building, waiting for the school day to begin.
A tall guy pointed up at her. “Look at that bird,” he shouted.
“What kind is it?” another boy asked.
Sudi couldn’t land with everyone watching her. What would happen if she changed back into
a girl? She turned and dived into the narrow alleyway between the school and an office building.
The wind currents changed. Alarm rose inside Sudi. Her concentration flagged, and she dropped straight down, landing hard on the concrete.
She sat up and moaned—a completely human sound. The fall had made her transform back into a girl. In spite of the pain, she stood up and limped toward a line of Dumpsters.
No way she could let anyone see her like this, barefoot and naked except for her undies and the pathetically ugly green bra. She glanced up at the rows of windows in the office building and figured that a dozen or more workers had already seen her. She had no other choice—she opened the lid of a blue Dumpster, stood on a crate, and climbed inside. Settling down in the dark, holding her nose against the putrid smell, she wondered how she was ever going to explain this to her mother.
Pounding footsteps and excited voices caught her attention.
“I know the bird came down here,” a voice said, from outside the metal container.
“Maybe it caught itself and kept on flying,” someone answered.
Sudi winced. Was that Scott’s voice? She cringed, sure that it was.
“It must be here,” a girl’s voice answered, sounding unquestionably like Michelle’s.
Someone started to lift the Dumpster lid. Sudi slid under newspapers and flattened cardboard boxes, but there wasn’t enough trash to hide her, and no way was she going to crawl beneath the slippery garbage at the bottom. She stared up at the widening crack between the container and its cover.
“The bird’s not going to be hiding in the Dumpster,” Scott said. “How could it lift the lid and climb inside?”
The hinged cover fell shut again with a heavy clang of metal.
Sudi sighed and waited in the dark, breathing the stench of spoiled oranges and rotten banana peels. A rustle from something skulking over the trash made her recoil; an animal was in the bin with her. She imagined a rat nibbling on her toes and sat up, wrapping her arms around her legs and hugging her knees against her chest.
When the school bell rang, she stood and timidly lifted the heavy lid, eager to climb out, but first she peeked up at the windows in the office buildings. She had expected to see workers gathered behind the glass, watching intently to see what she would do next, but no one was staring down at her.
She th
rew back the cover. It banged against the wall with an angry rumble. She pulled herself up onto the lip of the metal box, and then eased out onto the crate.
Tears of frustration burned in her eyes as she carefully stepped to the ground. How was she going to get home? Maybe the best thing to do was to face the problem head on: wrap a newspaper around her waist and walk into the main office, lie and claim she didn’t know what had happened to her. She imagined herself on the nightly news—a strange case of amnesia; her mother’s panicked face staring into the camera, explaining to the viewing audience that Sudi had always been a nice girl. She pictured herself standing in her undies while being interviewed and all the guys at school laughing at her hideous green bra. She should have trashed it weeks ago.
Without warning a cat bolted from the Dumpster, startling her. It scampered away, then turned around and came back, meowing at her and rubbing against her ankle. Sudi leaned over and scratched behind its ears, glad that her companion had been a cat and not some long-nosed rat.
“I wish you were a dog,” she whispered. “Then I could send you to find help for me.”
The cat hissed at her and flicked a paw, the hairs on its back standing up in anger as if it had taken offense at her comment about the dog, and then abruptly it scuttled away.
Sudi picked a copy of The Washington Post out of the bin, unfolded it, and used it as a towel to cover herself.
As she started around the corner, the cat with the surly attitude returned, racing toward her. Meri followed after it, furtively glancing around as if she weren’t supposed to be there. She saw Sudi and gasped.
They stared at each other, the cat circling between them.
The white highlighter didn’t hide the blue-gray circles under Meri’s bloodshot eyes, but far worse was the edgy fear that gripped her features. She looked like the victim of some horrible catastrophe who had been found wandering aimlessly around a destroyed neighborhood, not believing the devastation.
“Are you all right?” Sudi asked at last.
“What about you?” Meri answered. “You were that bird, weren’t you?”