Hunters of Chaos (17 page)

My heart leaped into my throat.
What do I say?

When I got to the office, my stomach sank as I made eye contact with my fellow Wildcats, already seated inside: Lin, Shani, and Doli. I saw the same fear on their faces that must have been on mine. Principal Ferris couldn't possibly know the truth, could she? Or was she about to reveal that she was some sort of ancient god too? That would have sounded laughable a few weeks ago. But last night I'd seen Dr. Logan turn into a jackal-headed demon. Now anything seemed possible.

We sat silently in soft sky-blue chairs in front of the principal's desk while she slapped her hands together and brought them to rest over her face, as if she were praying. Finally she said, “Ladies, do you know why you're here?”

I craned my neck at the other girls. Of course we did. But did she really expect us to say it? I wasn't even sure where I would begin if I tried. We all remained quiet, my foot nervously tapping against the floor until Doli gave me a look that said,
Cut it out!

Principal Ferris sighed. “I thought as much. Well, I know what you girls were up to last night,” she said.

“You do?” Doli replied, her voice shaky. I shot Shani a frightened look. This was it! We were about to be expelled—or worse.

“I do.” The principal smiled. “I know everything that goes on in my school. And what I know right now is that the four of you disobeyed orders to evacuate the museum and put yourselves in a very dangerous position.”

Suddenly it struck me that I could tell Principal Ferris the truth. Part of it, anyway. “We only went back inside because we were looking for Lin.” I glanced at Lin, hoping she could see that I meant what I was about to say. “I was worried about her.”

Lin's eyes softened for a fraction of a second, but she quickly looked away and crossed her arms. “What for? I'd just gone downstairs to find a bathroom that wasn't swarming with women changing gross dirty diapers. But then the lights went out and I got a little lost, that's all.”

Of course that hadn't been all. Her trip to the bathroom had nearly gotten us killed. But Principal Ferris didn't need to know that. “Anyway,” I continued, “when we got to the basement, that's when we found Ms. Benitez and Lin.” I hesitated, feeling guilty that I was about to fudge the truth a bit. “The ceiling was broken when we got there and we could tell Ms. Benitez was hurt. We thought maybe she'd been hit by some falling plaster. So we led her outside where she'd be safe.”

Principal Ferris sighed. “Well, it's commendable that you were trying to help Ms. Benitez and locate your friend. But in the future, leave that to the professionals. No one could have foreseen the building getting struck by lightning and suffering severe damage, but that's what evacuations are for. By disobeying our instructions, you could have been seriously hurt or even killed.”

I breathed out a sigh. She didn't know what I thought she knew. She was right that we hadn't evacuated the building along with everyone else, though. Who had told her? Had Jason said something? Or was she a part of this somehow?

“How is Ms. Benitez?” I asked.

Principal Ferris sighed and she lowered her blue eyes to the floor. “I'm afraid she's in a coma,” she replied. “The doctors are still running tests, but they noticed her heart was beating irregularly and there was significant bruising on her chest. They think she had a heart attack. If what you say is true, perhaps she was hit by a piece of falling debris, and the stress brought on by the lightning strike and then fleeing the building in her weakened state was simply too much for her. The doctors are hopeful for a full recovery, but for now we'll have to wait and see. I'm just grateful that you all left the building when you did. Otherwise, all four of you could have found yourselves in hospital beds alongside Ms. Benitez.”

We nodded in unison. “We're sorry for worrying you, Principal Ferris,” I said. “It won't happen again.”

She gave us as stern a look as she could manage, though beneath that I could see her relief that we were all right. “See that it doesn't,” she said. She stood and gestured toward the door. “Since this period is almost over, you may report to study hall until the bell rings. Please use that time to think about your actions. Remember, ladies: safety first.”

“ ‘Think about your actions,' ” Shani mimicked later as we sat in the study-hall section of the library. “If only she knew! Pretty much all I'll ever be able to think about again is the fact that I transformed into a giant man-eating lion last night. Can you even believe that?”

“Um, yes,” I said. “I was there, remember? We all turned into man-eating cats last night.”

“Yeah,” Shani said. “But I'm a vegetarian!”

There was a pause and then we all burst out laughing. Everyone but Lin. A girl at a nearby table shushed us, but I didn't care. It felt good to laugh after the strangeness of the past couple of days. We couldn't hold back our giggles.

“What do they call a vegetarian who eats men, anyway?” Doli asked.

“A humanitarian?” I offered. We started laughing again, earning more shushes from the next table and the librarian.

“Could you guys keep it down?” Lin hissed. “We don't need everyone hearing you talk about something so crazy.”

“All right, yes, it was crazy,” I said once I'd stopped laughing. I leaned over the table. “But wasn't it also
amazing
? I've never felt that powerful before, like nothing could hurt me.”

“That must be nice,” Lin said, shooting daggers at me with her eyes. I knew she was talking about Jason again. I hadn't had a chance to speak to her alone yet, and she was still clearly carrying the hurt she felt over Jason as if it were one of her designer purses. We would have to talk about it eventually, but I didn't want to make things any more awkward than they already were for Shani and Doli.

“Come on,” I said, gently steering the conversation back to the one thing that still bonded us. “Didn't you feel powerful while you were a tiger?”

“I don't know what you're talking about,” Lin snapped. “Daughters of diplomats and movie stars don't turn into tigers. It's impossible.”

Shani reared back in her chair and made a screeching sound as if she were in a car and had just slammed on the brakes. “What was that, Yang? I
know
you're not saying the whole thing never happened.”

Lin straightened her spine. “Maybe it didn't. How do you know? Maybe we just imagined it.”

“Really?” Doli regarded her with raised eyebrows. “Did we also imagine the hole in the basement ceiling of the museum? And is Ms. Benitez faking her coma?”

Lin had no response. She stared down at her hands. For a moment I thought she would start rotating them again, checking for orange fur and black stripes. “I just want to forget about it,” she mumbled.

Doli gave her a sympathetic look. “I hear you. Trust me, I'd love to just go back to running track and taking classes, and pretend none of this ever happened. But it's too late for that now. What we saw was real. Anubis is still out there. You heard Ms. Benitez: We're the only ones standing between our world and total destruction.”

“Not to mention those annoying Chaos Spirits,” added Shani with a weak smile.

Doli laughed again, but in a nervous way that told me she was trying hard to hold on to her sanity. I guess we all were. “
Right.
Can't forget those,” she said. “And they know who we are now, which means none of us will be safe until we find a way to capture them again. But where do we start?”

I tapped my pencil against my chin. “I think first we need to know why Mayan and Egyptian gods would be warring with each other in the first place, and why here?”

“Is it because of the temple?” Doli asked.

I shrugged. “Could be.”

There was a pause, then Lin said, “I'm not saying there really was a jackal freak who tried to kill us, but
hypothetically
, if there had been, I might remember him saying, ‘The Brotherhood of Chaos will rise again.' Maybe there's something on the Internet about—”

“Way ahead of you,” said Shani, opening her laptop. “I'm going to Google that now. Ugh, the server is running kind of slow.” While we waited for the Wi-Fi to connect, Shani looked at us somberly. “I just hope that whatever we have to do, we can do it quickly and it won't mess up our future life plans, you know? I mean, I've heard of computer programmers who are so good that people say they're like beasts, but none who actually
is
a beast.”

We all chuckled quietly, not wanting to draw the librarian's attention.

“Finally! Here it is,” said Shani. “Okay, this is odd. That search term led to only one result—a research paper titled ‘The Brotherhood of Chaos: The Secret History and Destructive Global Impact of the Ancient Mystical Order.' Boy, that's a mouthful. OMG! Guess who wrote it?” She turned the laptop toward us so we could see.
Yvette Benitez.

“Click on it,” I said. “Since we can't ask Ms. Benitez anything right now, this could be the next best thing.”

But when Shani tried clicking on the link, she received an error message. “Foiled again.” She sighed. “Says here the paper was removed from the history journal.”

“Does it say why?” I asked.

Shani tapped a few more keys and scanned the screen. “Ah, right here. It's a retraction posted by the journal that published her paper. Let's see . . . blah blah blah ‘research challenged,' yada yada yada ‘paper is widely believed to be a hoax.' Ouch.”

“In other words, no one believed her,” I said.

“Whatever she wrote in that paper must have been pretty out there,” Doli added.

“Let's see,” Shani said, typing in more codes, her fingers flying across the keyboard. “Here we go,” she said. “Page one. Saved forever in the Google cache.”

I leaned over to read the screen:

It has long been held by scholars and archaeologists that ancient civilizations on various continents had no interaction due to geographical constrictions and language barriers. But that theory fails to explain the existence of the mystical order the Brotherhood of Chaos. Symbolized by a stylized cat, the order is mentioned in every major ancient civilization, from the Egyptians and Anasazi to the Mayans and Chinese. It is perhaps an overlooked area of scholarly research because the sole purpose of the Brotherhood was a dark one. They sought to . . .

That was it. The page cut off.

“Aw, come on!” Shani cried, clearly frustrated. “They can't leave us on a cliff-hanger like that.” She furiously typed in more codes, but no matter what she tried, nothing came up. “Huh. Anubis must have a pretty genius tech guy on his team, because someone went to a lot of trouble to make sure that article never saw the light of day again.”

I rested my elbows on the table and raked my fingers through my hair. I felt I was missing something that was right in front of my face. I reread the paragraph and froze when I got to the mention of the stylized cat. “Oh my God,” I said.

“What?” said Doli.

“It says the Brotherhood of Chaos was symbolized by a stylized cat. I actually saw a symbol like that on one of the vases at the temple site. Dr. Logan gave me some song and dance about how the Anasazi worshipped cats. But now that we know who Dr. Logan really was, maybe he was just covering up.” I told them about the Roman coin that Jason had found and how quickly Dr. Logan had snatched it away from us. “He claimed the coin was his, and he dropped it there. But he was clearly lying. What if the temple isn't Anasazi after all—or at least not
just
Anasazi? Then we'd know that the temple was really part of the Brotherhood of Chaos!”

“So the earthquake that exposed it is what started all this?” Lin asked.

“Maybe,” Doli answered. “And that must be why Ms. Benitez invited us all to the museum that night. She must have felt that she had to assemble the Wildcats right away.”

“It happened during that orb ceremony we did in the basement, didn't it?” Shani said. “Did you all feel a tingle go up your arm when you touched your territory?”

We all nodded. “That was the beginning,” I stated matter-of-factly. “That's when we began to change.”

“Fine. Whatever,” Lin whispered. “We know what we are now and that the Brotherhood of Chaos is bad news. The question is, what are
we
supposed to do about it? We can't even control our powers yet.”

“Maybe it's less about making ourselves stronger than it is about making Anubis weaker,” I offered. “Ms. Benitez—Ixchel—told me that he would use the Chaos Spirits to bring death and destruction. But they were trapped by that Mayan vase. That's why he wanted it so badly.”

“Don't forget the cats that were etched into the sides,” Doli said. “This might sound crazy, but maybe they helped to keep the Chaos Spirits contained. Anubis figured if he destroyed the vase, he would destroy the Wildcats, too. But he didn't count on all of us being there so the cats had real bodies to jump into.”