The Serpent’s Curse. Tony Abbott

      New York City

      March 17

      8:56 p.m.

       Twelve hidden relics.

       One ancient time machine.

       A mother, lost.

      Seven minutes before the nasty, pumped-up SUV appeared, Wade Kaplan slumped against his seat in the limousine and scowled silently.

      None of his weary co-passengers had spoken a word since the airport. They needed to. They needed to talk, and then they needed to act, together, all of them—his father, astrophysicist Dr. Roald Kaplan; his whip-sharp cousin Lily; her seriously awesome friend Becca Moore; and his stepbrother—no, his brother—Darrell.

      “Ten minutes, we’ll be in Manhattan,” the driver said, his eyes constantly scanning the road, the mirrors, the side windows. “There are sandwiches in the side compartments. You must be hungry, no?”

      Wade felt someone should respond to the older gentleman who’d met them at the airport, but no one did. They looked at the floor, at their hands, at their reflections in the windows, anywhere but eye to eye. After what seemed like an eternity, when even Wade couldn’t make himself answer, the question faded in the air and died.

      For the last three days, he and his family had come to grips with a terrifying truth. His stepmother, Sara, had been kidnapped by the vicious agents of the Teutonic Order of Ancient Prussia.

      “You can see the skyline coming up,” the driver said, as if it were perfectly all right that no one was speaking.

      Ever since Wade’s uncle Henry had sent a coded message to his father and was then found murdered, Wade and the others had been swept into a hunt for twelve priceless artifacts hidden around the world by the friends of the sixteenth-century astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus—the Guardians.

      The relics were originally part of a machina tempore—an ancient time machine that Copernicus had discovered, rebuilt, journeyed in, and then disassembled when he realized the evil Teutonic Order was after it.

      What did an old time machine have to do with Sara Kaplan?

      The mysterious young leader of the present-day Teutonic Knights, Galina Krause, burned to possess the twelve Copernicus relics and rebuild his machine. No sooner had the children outwitted the Order and discovered Vela—the blue stone now safely tucked into the breast pocket of Wade’s father’s tweed jacket—than the news came to them.

      Sara had vanished.

      Galina’s cryptic words in Guam suddenly made sense. Because the Copernicus legend hinted that Vela would lead to the next relic, Sara would be brought to wherever