Free Underworlds #3: Revenge of the Scorpion King by Tony Abbott Page A

move.
    I didn’t want to do anything.
    Only a few hours before, Sydney, Dana, Jon, and I had been more or less safe in our little town of Pinewood Bluffs.
    I say “more or less,” because we’d been in the process of returning a pair of escaped Cyclopes — the one-eyed giants of Greek mythology — to Hades’ Underworld, whose entrance was under our school. No big deal, right? Once we did that, we were about to go home and call it a day when we spotted Loki slipping away in his sledge.
    We already knew that Loki was cruel, sly, and dangerous. But after the Cyclopes made him a suit of magical armor, he became practically indestructible.
    Loki was now the complete evil package.
    Probably because we were too tired to think straight after wrangling the giants, we decided we couldn’t just let Loki escape. So we stowed away on his sledge.
    Brilliant, huh?
    Not so much. Because before we knew it, we were in the crazy, evil Babylonian Underworld hiding from a big ugly thing .
    “Loki must be after the seven fire monsters of Babylonian mythology,” Dana said, gazing at the city and tapping a finger on her beat-up copy of Bulfinch’s Mythology . “Remember what we heard him say?”
    How could we forget?
    The horned, the clawed, the fanged.
    All of them will join me.
    “ Bulfinch’s doesn’t have any Babylonian stories in it,” Dana said, scanning the margins of the book’s tattered pages, “but luckily, I took lots of notes from my parents’ library.”
    Dana’s parents were in Iceland, on the hunt for something called the Crystal Rune, which Loki needed in his war against Odin.
    “I’m pretty sure that creature is called Fire Serpent,” Dana said, rifling through the pages of her book. “In fact, most of the Babylonian monsters have something to do with fire.”
    Clank! The lion-headed warriors hitched a pair of heavy chains to Loki’s sledge. With a growl from their commander, they dragged the sledge across the sand toward the nearest blue gate.
    The serpent didn’t go with them.
    Jon slumped down the dune and sighed a long, slow breath. “I don’t want to say it, but I think we need to get past the serpent and inside that scary city. We have to stop Loki from collecting more monsters, even if it, you know, kills us, or something.”
    That was a lot of words for Jon. I guess he was nervous. Actually, nervous didn’t cover it. Terrified was more like it. Also crazy. Confused. Exhausted.
    So were the rest of us.
    “Jon, we’ll be all right,” I said.
    “We’d better be,” he said. “I have stuff to do before class on Monday.” He took a deep breath and turned to Dana. “So where is Fire Serpent on the Babylonian scale of creepy?”
    She scanned her scribbled notes. “There’s one called Thornviper. And another known as Mad Dog. There’s also something called Furnace.”
    Sydney sighed. “Nice.”
    At least we had some help.
    We had an old lyre made by the ancient Greek musician Orpheus. I could play it a little, and its notes seemed to do magical things. Maybe more important, Dana had stolen one of Loki’s armored gloves — which was both good and bad. The good part was that she could shoot bolts of lightning from its fingers. The bad part was that it had grown over her hand and wouldn’t come off. Oh, and Loki could sense when the glove was near, which almost gave us away on the sledge. Luckily, I was able to figure out the right notes to play on the lyre, which somehow shielded us.
    Together, my lyre and Dana’s glove had helped us escape a miserable death a few times already. I really hoped they would keep doing that.
    “Fire Serpent on the move,” Sydney whispered.
    We slid to the bottom of the dune and backed away slowly until we heard the quiet lapping of water.
    “If this Underworld is set up like the ancient empire of Babylon,” said Dana, “then this could be the Tigris River —”
    WHOOM!
    Hot green flames suddenly blasted the sand behind us. Fire Serpent leaped over the top