Loe raamatut: «The Curse of the King»

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Chapter One: The Wrath of Yappy

Chapter Two: Twerp Perps, Snalp, and the Fat Lady

Chapter Three: The Enemy of Interesting

Chapter Four: The Barry

Chapter Five: Shard Luck

Chapter Six: Aly-Bye

Chapter Seven: Down and out in LA

Chapter Eight: The Humpty Dumpty Project

Chapter Nine: Mausoleum Dream

Chapter Ten: If it Looks Like a Hoax …?

Chapter Eleven: God of Couch Potatoes

Chapter Twelve: Biiiig Trouble

Chapter Thirteen: The Fourth Loculus

Chapter Fourteen: Escape from the Nostril

Chapter Fifteen: The Dream Continued

Chapter Sixteen: A Goat Moment

Chapter Seventeen: Battle on the Mount

Chapter Eighteen: Loser, Loser, Loser

Chapter Nineteen: Deifirtep

Chapter Twenty: In the Matter of Victor Rafael QuiÑones

Chapter Twenty One: Slipping Away

Chapter Twenty Two: Massa Island

Chapter Twenty Three: Good Enough for the Cockroaches

Chapter Twenty Four: The Illusion of Control

Chapter Twenty Five: In Hexad de Heptimus Veritas

Chapter Twenty Six: Lifeline

Chapter Twenty Seven: The Seventh Codex

Chapter Twenty Eight: His Jackness

Chapter Twenty Nine: What’s a Few Million Lives …?

Chapter Thirty: Esiole

Chapter Thirty One: The King of Toast

Chapter Thirty Two: Reunion

Chapter Thirty Three: Preposserous

Chapter Thirty Four: My Sister the Monster

Chapter Thirty Five: Goon Number Seven

Chapter Thirty Six: Pull my Finger

Chapter Thirty Seven: The Meathead Starts Over

Chapter Thirty Eight: Ambush

Chapter Thirty Nine: Fiddle and Bones

Chapter Fourty: The Labyrinth and the Tapestry

Chapter Fourty One: Is not Gorilla

Chapter Fourty Two: The Teflon King

Chapter Fourty Three: Braggart, Traitor, Deserter, Killer?

Chapter Fourty Four: The Sword and the Rift

Chapter Fourty Five: Something Much Wors

Epilogue

About the Publisher

HAVING LESS THAN a year to live doesn’t feel great, but it’s worse when you’re in a cop car that smells of armpits, cigarettes, and dog poop. “Don’t New York City cops ever clean their cars?” Cass Williams mumbled.

I turned my nose to the half-open window. Aly Black was at the other end of the backseat, but Cass was stuck in the middle. Outside, music blared from a nearby apartment window. An old woman walking a Chihuahua eyed us and began yelling something I couldn’t quite make out.

“Okay, what do we do now, Destroyer?” Cass asked.

“‘Jack’ is still my name,” I said.

“‘The Destroyer Shall Rule,’ that was the prophecy,” Aly replied. “And your mom pointed at you.”

“We were invisible! She could have been pointing at …” My voice trailed off. It was after midnight, but the way they were both glaring at me, I felt like I needed sunglasses. I was beginning to think throwing that last Loculus under a train might not have been a great idea. “Look, I’m sorry. I really am. But I had to do it, or everyone would have died. You would have done the same thing!”

Aly sighed. “Yeah, you’re right. It’s just … an adjustment, that’s all. I mean, we had a chance. And now …”

She gave me a sad shrug. We’re dead, is what she didn’t say. A genetic mutation was on target to kill us before the age of fourteen. And I had sabotaged our chance to be cured. Seven Loculi was what we needed. Now one of them was in pieces under a train.

I sank back into the smelly seat. As the car slowed to a stop in front of a squat brick police station, our driver called out, “Home sweet home!”

She was a tall, long-faced woman named Officer Wendel. Her partner, Officer Gomez, quickly hauled himself out from the passenger side. He was barely taller than me but twice my width. The car rose an inch or so when he exited. “Your papa’s inside, dude,” he said. “Make nice with him and make sure we don’t see you again.”

“You won’t,” Aly replied.

“Wait!” cried the old woman with the Chihuahua. “Those are devil children!”

Officer Gomez paused, but another cop waved him in. “You go ahead,” he said wearily. “We’ll take care of Mrs. Pimm.”

“I recognize her,” Aly whispered. “She’s the person who shows up in movie credits as Crazy New York City Neighbor.”

As Officer Gomez rushed us inside and down a short, grimy hallway, I eyed my backpack, which was slung over his shoulder. The Loculus of Flight and the Loculus of Invisibility formed two big, round bulges.

He had peeked inside but not too carefully. Which was lucky for us.

Officer Wendel walked ahead and pushed open the door to a waiting room. Dad was sitting on a plastic chair, and he stood slowly. His face was drawn and pale.

“Officers Gomez and Wendel, Washington Heights Precinct,” Gomez said. “We responded to the missing-persons alert. Found them while investigating a commotion up by Grant’s Tomb.”

“Thank you, officers,” Dad said. “What kind of commotion? Are they in trouble?”

“Healthy and unharmed.” Gomez unhooked the pack and set it on a table. “We had reports of noises, people in costume—gone by the time we got there.”

Officer Wendel chuckled. “Well, a few weirdoes in robes near the train tracks, picking up garbage. Guess the party was over. Welcome to New York!”

Dad nodded. “That’s a relief. I—I’ll take them home now.”

He reached for the backpack, but Officer Wendel was already unzipping it and looking inside. “Just a quick examination,” she said with an apologetic look. “Routine.”

“Officer Gomez did it already!” I pointed out.

Before Gomez could respond, a sharp barking noise came from the hallway. The old lady was inside, with her dog. Officer Wendel looked toward the noise.

I reached for the pack, but Wendel pulled it away. She opened my canvas sack and removed the basketball-sized Loculus of Flight. “Nice …” she said.

“A world globe,” I blurted. “We have to … paint the countries onto—”

“What the …?” Officer Wendel’s hand had hit the invisible second Loculus.

“It’s nothing!” Cass blurted out.

“Literally,” Aly added.

Wendel tried to wriggle the Loculus out. “Is this glass?”

“A special kind of glass,” Dad said. “So clear I’ll bet you can’t see it!”

“Wow …” Wendel said. She lifted her hands high, holding up … absolutely nothing. Nothing that the human eye could see, that is. “I can feel it, but I can’t—”

“I am not crazy stop treating me like I’m crazy, I saw them, I tell you—they were floating like birds!” Mrs. Pimm’s voice was rising to a shriek—and I remembered where I’d heard her voice and seen her face.

An open window, a dim light. She had been staring at us as the Shadows from the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus lifted us through the streets. She’d been one of the only people who’d noticed the flurries of darkness, the fact that we were being borne down the street in the invisible arms of Artemisia’s minions.

I darted toward the door and looked out.

Yiiiii! The Chihuahua saw me first. He wriggled out of her arms and skittered down the hallway toward me, baring his teeth.

“There—those are the wicked children!” Now Mrs. Pimm was heading our way, followed by two burly cops. “They were floating above the ground … talking to spirits! Come back here, Yappy!”

I sprang back into the room as Yappy clattered inside, yapping away.

Officer Wendel let go of the backpack. She and Gomez surrounded Yappy, reaching for his collar. Mrs. Pimm began lashing at them with her cane. Two other cops grabbed at her shoulders.

“Where’s the Loculus?” Aly whispered.

There.

I couldn’t see it, but I saw a perfectly rounded indentation in the sack on the table—a logical place where an invisible sphere might be resting. Shoving my hand toward the air above it, I felt a cool, round surface.

Now I could see the Loculus. Which meant I was invisible. “Got it!”

Aly sidled close to me. I reached out and grabbed her hand. Just before she disappeared, Cass reached for her, too.

Dad stood there against the wall, looking confused. Now Cass and Aly both had hands on the Loculus, so I let go of Aly and reached toward Dad with my free hand. “If you touch us,” I said softly, “the power transfers.”

He flinched when I took his arm. But it was nothing like the looks on the faces of Mrs. Pimm and the group of police officers. Their jaws were nearly scraping the floor. A cup of coffee lay in a puddle below them.

I could hear Yappy heading for the entrance as fast as his little legs could carry him.

We followed after him, but we didn’t rush.

Even the NYPD can’t stop something they can’t see.

DAD’S DISGUISE WAS a porkpie hat and a fake, glued-on mustache that made him sneeze. Aly’s hair, colored blond with cheap spray-on hair color bought at Penn Station, was bunched into a baseball cap. Cass wore a hoodie and a fake scar on his cheek, and I opted for thick sunglasses, which were now hurting my nose.

Dad and Aly sat on one side of a narrow table, Cass and I on the other. We were the only ones in our little train compartment, which made our disguises kind of ridiculous. At least I thought so.

None of us had been able to sleep. Now the countryside was aglow with the first hints of the morning sun. “We are two hundred forty-nine miles into Pennsylvania, fifty-four point three miles from the Ohio border,” Cass announced.

“Thank you, Mr. GPS,” Aly said.

“Seriously, how can you do that?” I asked. “The angle of the sun?”

“No,” Cass replied, gesturing out the window toward a narrow post that zoomed by. “The mile markers.”

Dad covered his mouth. “Ahh-haaaa-choo!”

“Guys, maybe we can take off the disguises?” Aly said. “I’ve been checking news sites, feeds, social media, and there’s nothing about us.”

“What if we’re America’s Most Wanted?” Cass asked. “What if our pictures are in every post office from here to Paducah?”

Wincing, Dad pulled off his mustache. “Cass, let’s examine that word—wanted. The best way to predict how people will act is knowing what they want. One thing the New York police don’t want is the press to know that four people vanished from under their noses.”

“‘Tonight’s headline: Twerp perps pop from cops! Details at eleven!’” Cass said.

Aly pulled back her newly blond hair into a scrunchie. “When we get to Chicago, I’m washing out this disgusting color.”

“Your hair was blue before this,” Cass remarked.

Aly stuck out her tongue.

“I think it looks nice,” I said, quickly adding, “not that blue wasn’t nice. It was. So was the orange.”

Aly just stared at me bewildered, like I’d just said something in Sanskrit. I turned away. Sometimes I should just keep my mouth shut.

Cass cracked up. “Maybe she can borrow the red coloring from your skin.”

“Once we’re in Chicago, Aly, you’re getting on a plane to Los Angeles,” Dad said. “To see your mom.”

“What am I going to tell her?” Aly asked.

“The truth,” Dad replied. “She has to know everything. And she has to keep what happened to you a secret—”

“She won’t do that!” Aly said. “I mean—I vanished for weeks. She’s going to open a federal investigation!”

Dad shook his head. “Not when she realizes what’s at stake. That there’s still a hope of curing you kids. Our job now is to create an airtight alibi, which we all will use. It has to explain why three kids disappeared and then slipped back weeks later, all at the same time. We have to somehow contain this. People in our hometown are going to ask questions. Yours, too, Aly.”

“So … um …” Cass said uneasily. “How do I figure into these snalp?”

“Snalp?” Dad said.

“Plans,” I translated. “It’s Backwardish. Remember? He uses it when he’s feeling silly. Or nervous.”

“Or deracs,” Cass added.

Dad looked him straight in the eyes. He knew about Cass’s background. Honestly, I couldn’t imagine what Cass was thinking. Mainly because I don’t know what’s it’s like to have two parents in jail on a robbery conviction. What I did know was that he’d be sent back to child services until he was eighteen. Which meant, under our circumstances, forever.

“Of course I have plans,” Dad said. “Don’t you y-worr … wy-orr …”

“Yrrow?” Cass said. “As in, worry?”

Dad was already scribbling on a sheet of legal paper. “Exactly,” he said.

“Okay then, I won’t,” Cass said, looking very, very worried.

* * *

“Next station stop, Chicago, Illinois!”

As the conductor’s voice echoed in the train car, the sun burned through the window. Aly and Cass had fallen asleep, and I was almost there, too.

Dad’s eyes were bloodshot as he put the final touches on the list we’d been working on for hours. I read it for about the hundredth time.

“Um,” I said.

Aly sighed. “Complicated.”

“Out of our minds,” Cass added.

“I think we can make it work,” Dad said with a deep breath.

“I like the ‘hardened street tough’ part,” Cass said.

“Now for your story, Aly,” Dad went on. “We need something your mom can jump on board with.”

“Mom and I are no strangers to alibis,” Aly said. “I’ve been working with covert government groups for a long time. We can say I was on a CIA project. Much less complicated than your epic lie.”

Dad removed his porkpie hat and ran his fingers through his steadily graying hair. “One thing you need to know, guys. Your disappearances have been in the news. Luckily for us, the reports have stayed local. Three separate communities, three separate disappearances, three different times. Well, four, including Marco. Now three of you are showing up at once. Up to now, no one has connected the disappearances. That’s our task—containing the stories. Keeping them strictly local news.”

“No publicity,” Aly agreed, “no photos on the web, play it down on social media.”

Dad nodded. “Ask—insist—that your friends not blab about it. For privacy’s sake.”

“I will keep the news away from hardened-street-tough circles,” Cass said.

“Contain, concentrate, commit—that’s the only way we are going to solve this genetic problem,” Dad said.

No one said a word. We were all trying our hardest to avoid the great big fat imaginary elephant in the room—and on its side was an imaginary sign that said HAPPY FOURTEENTH BIRTHDAY crossed out in black with a skull underneath.

“This may be the last time we see each other,” Aly said in a tiny, weak, unAlylike voice.

“I will die before I let that happen to any of you,” Dad replied. His face was grim, his eyes steady and fierce. “And I won’t rest until my company finds a cure.”

“What if they don’t?” I asked.

Dad gave me a steady have-I-ever-let-you-down? look. “You know the McKinley family motto. It ain’t over …”

“Until the fat lady sings.” I couldn’t help smiling. There were about a dozen McKinley family mottoes, and this was one of Dad’s favorites.

“La-la-la,” Aly sang, smiling.

Dad laughed. “Sorry, Aly, you don’t fit the bill.”

Cass, who hadn’t spoken in a long time, finally piped up softly. “Mr. McKinley?” he said. “About number seven on your list …?”

Dad smiled warmly. “That’s the only one we don’t have to worry about. Because it’s the only item that’s one hundred percent true.”

“IT MEANS A soprano,” I said, scrolling through a Wikipedia page on my trusty desktop. We’d been home for ten busy days, buying a bunk bed and a desk and a bike and clothes for Cass, catching up with teachers and friends, telling the alibi over and over a thousand times, buying hair dye to cover up the white lambda shape on the backs of our heads, blah-blah-blah. Today was going to be our first full day in school, and I was nervous. So of course it was a perfect time to procrastinate—like looking up Dad’s odd saying about the singing fat lady.

“I hated that show,” Cass called out from the top bunk.

“What show?” I asked.

“The Sopranos,” Cass said. “My last foster family binge-watched all seventeen years of it. Well, it felt like seventeen.”

“No, I’m talking about ‘the fat lady,’ ” I said. “It means a soprano—like, an opera singer. It’s a way of saying the opera’s not over until the soprano sings her big showstopping tune.”

“Oh,” Cass said. “What if she’s not fat? The show keeps going?”

“It’s a stereotype!” I said.

Cass grunted and sat up, dangling his legs over the side of the bed. “I hate stereotypes, too.”

Since returning, Cass had been a thirteen-year-old curly-haired version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Half the time he was his bouncy self, thanking Dad a zillion times for agreeing to adopt him. The other half he was fixated on our … timetable. Our predicament. Dilemma.

The fact that we were going to die.

There. I said it.

I’ll admit, I hated actually putting that idea into words. I tried not to think of it as a fact. Or even think of it at all. Hey, the fat lady hadn’t sung, right? Dad was trying to keep the show going.

I had to stay positive for Cass and me.

“It’s weird,” Cass murmured.

“What’s weird?” I said.

“G7W,” Cass replied.

“Of course it’s weird,” I said. “It sits in DNA for generations and then, bam—it shows up in people like you and me.”

“No, I mean it forces us all into stereotypes,” Cass said. “That always bothered me. You know, like when P. Beg called us Soldier, Sailor, Tinker, Tailor. It’s like another way of saying Jock, GPS-Guy, Geek, and … whatever Tailor is supposed to be.”

“The one who puts it all together,” I said. “That’s what Bhegad said.”

“He slices … he dices … he figures out ways to find Loculi in ancient settings! But wait, there’s more! Now the new improved Jack is also the Destroyer!” Cass let out a weary laugh. “How does that make any sense? It doesn’t. At first this whole thing seemed so cool—we were going to be superhumans, woo-hoo! But the last few weeks have been like this bad dream. Don’t you wish we could be normal—just kids like everybody else?”

“Cheer up, Cass,” I said, scooping stuff up from my desk. “Normal is the enemy of interesting.”

I dumped my pen, phone, change, and gum into my pockets. The last thing I picked up was the Loculus shard.

It was my good luck charm, I guess. For ten days I’d been carrying it with me all the time. Maybe because it reminded me of my mom. I really did believe that she had dropped it at my feet on purpose, no matter what Cass or Aly thought.

Besides, it really was awesome to look at. It felt smooth and cool to the touch—not like metal exactly, or plastic, but dense and supertough. I held it up to the sun for a quick glance:

“You’ve been wearing that thing out,” Cass said. “It looks like it shrunk.”

“Shrank,” I corrected him.

“Thunk you.” Cass hopped down from the bunk. “Anyway, you’re much more Tailor than Destroyer. That description fits Marco.”

“Now who’s stereotyping?” I said.

Cass giggled. “Somewhere in this world, the Massa are training Marco Ramsay to be the new king of Atlantis, while you, me, and Aly are going off to seventh grade. I think we get the better deal.”

As he disappeared down the hall and into the bathroom, I heard the front doorbell ring—which seemed kind of weird for 6:39 A.M. Dropping the shard into my pocket, I glanced out the window. I saw a white minivan parked at the curb. The van’s sides were emblazoned with the call letters of a local TV station WREE-TV.

Uh-oh. So much for keeping things under the radar.

“Sorry, no interviews.” Dad’s muffled voice echoed upward.

“We think the nation will want to hear this brave story,” a woman’s voice piped up. “It’s got heart, grit, pathos—”

“I appreciate that,” Dad said firmly. “Look, I know your station owner, Morty Reese. He’ll understand as a father, we’d like our privacy.”

The woman’s voice got softer. “If it’s compensation you’re concerned about, we are prepared—”

“Compensation?” Dad shot back with a disbelieving laugh. “Wait. Morty asked you to bribe me?”

“Mr. Reese has your best interests at heart,” the woman said. “This story could lead to awareness of traumatic brain injury. Hospitals will realize they need to increase security—”

“I’m sure Mr. Reese can donate directly to the hospitals if he’s so concerned,” Dad replied. “My private life is not for sale, sorry. Between you and me, he should learn how legitimate news organizations operate.”

“Mr. Reese is an excellent newsman—” the woman protested.

“And I’m an excellent trapeze artist,” Dad shot back. “Thanks but no thanks.”

I heard the door shut firmly.