Rise of the Snake Goddess Read online

  Copyright © 2022 by Jenny Elder Moke

  Designed by Phil Buchanan

  All rights reserved. Published by Hyperion, an imprint of Buena Vista Books, Inc. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. For information address Hyperion, 77 West 66th Street, New York, New York 10023.

  First Edition, June 2022

  FAC-020093-22112

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Moke, Jenny Elder, author.

  Title: Rise of the snake goddess : a Samantha Knox novel / Jenny Elder Moke.

  Description: First edition. • Los Angeles : Hyperion, 2022. • Series: Samantha Knox ; 2 • Audience: Ages 14–18 • Audience: Grades 10–12 • Summary: Samantha Knox goes to the island of Knossos where she discovers the ancient Snake Goddess’s golden girdle that has a magical power.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2021027083 • ISBN 9781368067270 (hardcover) • ISBN 9781368081948 (ebook)

  Subjects: CYAC: Adventure and adventurers—Fiction. • Archaeology—Fiction. • Magic—Fiction. • LCGFT: Action and adventure fiction. • Novels.

  Classification: LCC PZ7.1.M639 Ri 2022 • DDC [Fic]—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021027083

  Visit www.hyperionteens.com

  FOR LILY,

  MY PARTNER IN CRIMES FIGURATIVE AND LITERAL

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Chapter Thirty-six

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  Chapter Forty

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Samantha Knox was not lurking.

  At least, she tried to tell herself she was not lurking. She was simply waiting. But the longer she paced the short stretch of hallway outside Professor Atchinson’s office, the less it felt like waiting and the more it felt like lying in wait. The paper she carried had long since crinkled into a withered white flag more suitable for blowing her nose than for triumphantly presenting to the professor as Sam intended. But it was the content of the paper, not its physical state, that mattered most to her.

  “Professor Atchinson, good afternoon, so good to see you,” Sam rehearsed softly to herself mid-pace. “I know we had a rocky start, sir, what with you kicking me out of your class on the first day of the semester and humiliating me in front of all my peers. You might be thinking I’m here now for revenge, but I assure you, sir, that idea hasn’t occurred to me in months. Hmm, maybe not the most auspicious start.”

  Better not to bring up that awful day, already cemented in Sam’s memory among other such denigrating experiences as falling in the mud pit outside of her schoolroom back in her hometown of Clement, Illinois, or that time she ate with the wrong fork at her best friend’s house and had to be quietly corrected by the serving girl. No, if she wanted to win over the man who held her academic future in his hands, she would have to put aside the past and forge a new future.

  Sam paused, her sensible loafers squeaking as she changed direction physically and mentally. “Professor Atchinson, sir, good afternoon! I am sure you are as excited as all your students are to begin your summer field school at Knossos. I know I am, because I will be one of them! Your students, I mean. For the summer. Because I did it! I made top of the class for first-years. Does that sound like bragging? That might sound like bragging. Professor Atchinson, if you would kindly read this paper for me, you will see…well, now it just sounds like I don’t know how to read for myself.”

  She let out a sigh, slumping against the wall of the empty hallway. It was the end of the spring semester—her first semester at the University of Chicago—and the students had scattered faster than the pollen on the trees outside as soon as final exams were complete. She should have been off celebrating along with the rest of her peers—well, the ones that hadn’t bought into the rumors about her—but instead here she was, certainly not lurking, but perhaps doing an approximation of it.

  Sam fumbled with a little figurine in her pocket, drawing it out to hold it up in the electric lights of the hall. A misshapen lump of metal, nothing more than a bit of mangled tin. The front half of it was crushed and distorted, the back half giving the impression of hind legs. Once upon a time, it had been a toy horse, carried along in her father’s pocket as he fought on the front lines in France, a gift he intended to send home to her. But it had been destroyed along with the rest of her father when a shell hit the hotel where his regiment had been sequestered.

  “Oh, Papa,” she said, petting the lump of tin where the horse’s head would have been, the metal there tarnished and slightly indented from all the times she had invoked its comfort. “I wish you could see me now. At a real university, just like we always dreamed! And top of my class, besides. I know you wouldn’t think I was bragging.”

  There had been a letter sent back along with the horse, half-written and half-burned. Her father had found the trinket buried under rubble, and he’d detailed to her how he had used the tip of his bayonet to excavate it, applying the techniques she had taught him. It had made him feel closer to her, the letter had said, on his own little treasure hunt just like the ones she was always so obsessed with back home.

  He’d had dreams for her, Sam’s father. Dreams she had put away for seven long years after he died. Dreams that hurt too much to have after he was gone. But that all changed six months ago, when a mysterious diary appeared at her shop and sent her on a journey that upended her life. Now all she wanted was to recapture that lost time and do right by her father’s memory. She wanted to make him proud.

  There was only one thing standing in her way, and he should have been done with office hours fifteen minutes ago.

  “I should just knock, shouldn’t I? I am a student with a question after all. Is that not what office hours are for?” Sam marched up to the door, lifting her fist and willing it to knock. Except all it did was hover there, uncertainly.

  “Maybe I’ll give him five more minutes,” Sam said, pacing back toward the opposite wall. She dropped her forehead against the cool stones, shaking her head. “Or maybe you’re just being a coward, Samantha Margaret Knox.”

  Or perhaps she was just hungry. She had elected to skip lunch in the hopes of catching Professor Atchinson after office hours. Her mother had often told her growing up that her stom
ach was more reliable than the dinner bell. And it was certainly ringing all the alarms now, gurgling loudly enough that a passing student gave her a worried glance.

  “Happy end of semester!” she called to the boy as she hastily pulled her forehead off the wall to frown down at her stomach. “Hush, would you? I promise to give you an extra helping of mashed potatoes at dinner if you would just let me talk to the professor without embarrassing me.”

  “Too late for that,” came an obnoxious male voice. Theodore Chapin, one of Professor Atchinson’s graduate students, smirked at her from the doorway of the professor’s office. He played fullback for the University of Chicago football team, and it showed in the massive span of his shoulders and the blunt thickness of his nose that had seen its fair share of breaks.

  “Hello, Theo,” Sam said to the boy, aiming for polite and landing closer to apprehensive. She had grown up around plenty of rude boys in Clement, but Theodore Chapin strained even her patience. Professor Atchinson had a reputation among the undergraduates for dispensing his favor to the students based on their worth to him, and Theo played the perfect heavy. He fell into the role now, crossing his arms and puffing out his chest so that she could hardly see past him into the professor’s office.

  She went up on tiptoe to peer over his shoulder, her hopes that she might have been spared some measure of embarrassment falling as she spotted Professor Atchinson standing just behind him. Still, she forced enthusiasm into her voice. “Professor Atchinson, hello!”

  “Not you again, Miss Knox,” said Professor Atchinson, his British accent lending a knife’s edge to his annoyance. “I thought I made my feelings on your presence perfectly clear the day you attempted to infiltrate my anthropology lecture and sow your chaos among my students.”

  Well, so much for not bringing up the past. Sam cleared her throat of the lump that suddenly formed there, determined not to let it ruin her moment. “I know we started off on the wrong foot, Professor—”

  “The wrong foot,” Professor Atchinson snorted. “As if you did not conspire with Barnaby Wallstone on his harebrained scheme to undo all my tireless work here, traipsing halfway across the world to Dublin with no credentials and no experience and debasing the good name of our program at the University of Chicago.”

  That was not at all what had happened, or even how it happened, but she could hardly make that point to the professor. Sam, Bennett, and Joana had given their official version of what happened in Dublin enough times over—to the authorities in Ireland and those here at home, to the official inquest opened by the school, not to mention in dozens of informal settings to gossip-hungry peers—and she couldn’t claim anything to the contrary without opening herself to more questions that she did not want to answer. So she gritted her teeth, willed the corners of her mouth to lift in a smile, and focused all her energy on the future.

  “I hope we can start fresh—well, start at all, really—this summer during the field school at Knossos.”

  “What could possibly make you think you would be part of my field school?” Atchinson asked with a sniff. “It is for graduate students only, Miss Knox, those handpicked by me for their skills and dedication. Students like Mr. Chapin here, who has earned his position among my elite disciples with hard work and dedication.”

  And kissing up to you every chance he gets, Sam added silently. But the thought must have made itself plain on her features, because Professor Atchinson’s tight expression soured.

  “This is what the prestigious University of Chicago has come to, letting in any riffraff from the cornfields on bloody scholarship,” he muttered, as if to himself but loud enough that Sam and Theo could hear.

  Sam stiffened, her face going red as Theo let out a loud laugh. “Not going to start in with the tears now, are you?” he taunted her. “You’re just like my girl, Evelyn, getting misty-eyed at the thought of a wounded bird.”

  Sam rather thought his girlfriend, Evelyn Hamilton, must get teary-eyed at the prospect of having agreed to date someone like Theodore Chapin. But Evelyn was not her concern today, and her attempts to start anew with Professor Atchinson were about as fresh as curdled milk.

  “I made top of the class,” she blurted out, thrusting the wilted piece of paper at the professor. He eyed it with distaste, and she gave it a little shake. Or maybe that was just her hand shaking with the attempt to keep her frustration at bay. “First among the undergraduates.”

  She waited for her meaning to sink in with him, waited to see it change his opinion of her. When he made no move to respond, her confidence faltered.

  “The…the open position, in the field school,” she continued, glancing between the professor and Theo. “For the undergraduate student who shows the most promise in the field. It’s a tradition. Top of the undergraduate class gets to join the graduate summer field school excavations. Don’t they?”

  Theo’s smirk only got smirkier, which didn’t bode well for Sam. Professor Atchinson sniffed and straightened, the small motion as dismissive as if he turned his back on her. “That position has been eliminated.”

  Sam lurched a half step forward. “Eliminated? But…how? Why?”

  “The costs would simply be too prohibitive,” the professor said, looking past her at some distant point down the hall. “Were we making our normal excavations at the Kincaid Mounds, perhaps it would have been possible. But we are traveling to Knossos, on Crete, as part of the twenty-fifth anniversary of Sir Arthur Evans’s discovery of the Minoan civilization that built the palace. There are a great many details to consider—passage to Crete, accommodations near the palace, invitations to the gala celebrating the anniversary. The undertaking is great, and we can hardly extend our scholarship considering the added costs of such an endeavor. Perhaps next year, if you can manage such a feat again.”

  “But I earned that spot,” Sam said, her whole body trembling. She couldn’t stand to look at Theo, whose haughty expression practically glowed. Instead, she focused on the professor. “I worked hard for it all semester. I followed all the rules. You can’t just take it away from me now. It’s not fair.”

  Professor Atchinson stepped past Theo to come toe-to-toe with her. He wasn’t an impressive man in appearance—he was small and round, his hair grayed and drawn back sharply along a receding line from his temple, his nose slightly too large for his face. But what he lacked in physical prowess he made up for in presence. He knew how to hold a room’s attention, whether it was a lecture hall filled with students or a boardroom of university trustees. He used that power now on Sam, giving her such a hard stare that she felt she must have shrunk three sizes in one look.

  “What is not fair is that I have to contend with untried, overeager amateurs like you, trampling through my carefully laid plans and disgracing all the hard work I have done. Your kind does not belong here, Miss Knox, no more than a cow would belong in the White House or a chicken on the throne of England. The sooner you learn that your place is not here but out in those cornfields from which you grew, the faster this sinking ship of a department will be righted and set back on course.”

  Desperation sucked at Sam’s shoes, holding her fast when all her wounded pride wanted her to do was run and hide. “That’s not true,” she whispered. “I deserve to be here, same as everyone else.”

  “The only place you deserve to be is in that lunatic asylum alongside Barnaby Wallstone,” snapped Professor Atchinson. “You’ve wasted quite enough of my time, girl, and I have no more of it to spare. Better luck next year. Come along, Theodore.”

  “Better luck,” Theo echoed cruelly, trotting after the professor down the hall and disappearing around the corner, taking all of Sam’s hopes along with them.

  “Arsenic in his tea,” said Joana Steeling, slamming her empty glass down on the bar top for emphasis. Her bright violet dress glowed in the dim light of the Green Mill speakeasy, drawing the attention of several of the young men in their pin-striped suits and spats along with the girls hanging off their arms. Joana
had that effect on a room, that effortless Steeling charm like a magnet. She looked as fantastic as she always did, her dress fresh from next season’s catalogs and her hair styled in short finger curls framing her gorgeous face.

  “Jo, arsenic is a poison,” Sam said glumly, swirling the full contents of her own glass. She wore a gold dress that was the height of fashion six months ago, before she tore the hem climbing out a ship’s porthole window. The hem had been repaired, but the dress was showing signs of wear after being Sam’s only evening attire for the past semester. “It would kill him.”

  “We don’t give him enough to kill him, just enough to make all his weaselly hair fall out,” her best friend said, giving a little wave to the man behind the bar and shaking her empty glass at him.

  Sam frowned. “Does arsenic do that?”

  Joana gave her a determined look. “Let’s find out.”

  “I don’t want to poison him, Jo,” Sam said with a sigh. “I just want him to give me a chance.”

  “The only chance that man will ever give you is a fat one,” Joana said, gracing the barman with a winning Steeling smile. “Another one if you would, Leland. Sam, you know Atchinson’s reputation. Self-thinkers need not apply. If you can’t worship the ground he walks on, you might as well be made of wallpaper for all he’ll see you.”

  “But it’s not fair!” Sam protested, finding a new fount of energy in her outrage. “I earned my place in that field school, same as every top undergrad who came before me. But it’s only me that’s being denied. And I don’t believe it could be about the budget, do you? What difference would one student make among thirty others?”

  Joana took her glass from the barman with a little wink, only wincing slightly as she threw it back in one gulp. “If you want to call his bluff, you could offer to pay your own way.”

  Sam gave her a flat look. “With what money?”

  “You could always ask Daddy for the funds. He’d be pleased as punch to send one of us off on a dig.”

  Sam slumped back over her drink. “I couldn’t ask that of him. He’s already done too much for me. He’s practically paying my room and board here, along with sponsoring my scholarship. Never mind that I can only afford the rest of it because of the money I saved working at the bookshop all those years. Taking any more from him would be egregious.”