Cassidy Jones and the Seventh Attendant (Cassidy Jones Adventures, Book Three) (7 page)

“So what do we do about Lily and the Kings?”

“We wait for an opportunity.”

~~~

After leaving Emery, I went on my nightly run through the dark alleys and streets of Seattle and came up with a whole slew of other worries. Since Nate and Miriam walked to school with us in the morning, I didn’t have an opportunity to share my concerns with Emery until we entered Queen Anne High School later that morning, where the noise could mask our whispers.

“Why would King break his son out of prison now?” I whispered to Emery. I had concluded that Junior’s dad had hired Lily. Otherwise, how could Junior have contacted her from prison?

When Emery didn’t respond, I glanced up at him. He had switched back into his black-framed glasses, which he had switched out for contacts during Fight Club and laser tag yesterday. Now he exchanged smiles with Anna Slater as she passed, as was their morning ritual. Looking at him, you would think he didn’t have a care in the world.

“Will you stop flirting and answer me? Your mother could be in big trouble.”

“I don’t think King is sending Lily after my mom, if that’s what you’re worried about,” Emery replied, now smiling at Grace Fletcher.

Grace giggled.

“Well, why not? He kidnapped her for Assassin data before.”

“He also discovered that she doesn’t have what he wants.”

“How do you know?” I grumbled, but Emery didn’t hear me. He was too immersed in flirting with pretty Kaitlyn Littleton.

~~~

Emery had managed to get into five of my seven classes when he registered for school last October. However, he couldn’t charm his way into my Spanish and world history classes, which was really too bad for him today. My world history teacher, Mr. Loescher, was taking his classes to the traveling Egyptian Queen Kiya exhibit on display at the Arthur A. Denny Museum of Art and History, or the Denny, as we locals called it.

Queen Kiya’s tomb had been unearthed in the 1970s. Aside from mummies and artifacts, a curse had been discovered etched over the entrance to her tomb:
Death will come swiftly at the hands of the seven attendants to those who disturb the sacred headdress of the queen
—or something along those lines. Apparently the queen had been rather attached to her crown, and upon her death it was laid to rest with her, as were seven guardsmen.

Goose bumps had cropped up on my arms when Mr. Loescher shared that seven men were put to death in order to guard their queen in the afterlife. Morbid, to say the least. He also told us that when the tomb was uncovered hundreds of years later, one of the attendants was missing.

“Maybe the seventh attendant went after some grave robbers and got lost,” Nina Puskara had suggested. Her joke received much laughter, but I thought it was an interesting theory. If mutants were possible, why not an embalmed man coming back to life?

~~~

After lunch period, Mr. Loescher’s students piled into two school buses. Shana Carlos slid into a seat, and Carli sat next to her. Lucretia Burns and I sat behind them.

A slow, steady stream of bodies brushed past us as we four girls chatted. The stream paused, and I felt fingers comb into my hair.

“Hey,” Chad said, giving my hair a tug.

Lucretia’s eyes widened.

Taken aback and mad as a hornet that Chad would
dare
touch my hair, I yanked my head around to glare at him.

The jerk smiled.

“Hey, yourself,” I spat. “Get your hand out of my hair.”

Behind him, bleach-blond Mindy Ames stared at me like I was a piece of gum stuck to the bottom of her shoe. She hated me, as did all of Robin Newton’s remoras. I can understand why Robin didn’t care for me. I had broken her nose, which made her face not so perfect anymore. It was an accident, of course, but tell Robin that. Her minions despised me simply because she did.

“How did that happen?” Chad asked. He was still feigning surprise over my hair being entwined around his gross fingers.

I’d had enough, so I reached behind my head and secured his wrist. Chad smiled like he thought I was playing along. Once I started squeezing his wrist, forcing his fingers to flex, he would change his assessment.

While this was going on, Mindy complained, “You’re holding everyone up, Chad.” She pushed against him.

He exaggerated a sigh and extracted his hand from my hair. “Later, Red,” he said, grazing my cheek with the back of his hand.

Stunned by his brazenness, all I could do was watch him and Mindy move to the back of the bus to sit with the other elitists.
Good thing for you and your nasty fingers I was too appalled to react
, I thought as he plopped down in a seat, grinning at me. Apparently he thought he had won me over.

“Tell me . . .” Carli hooked my face and pulled it around to her. “What was
that
about?”

“Cassidy kicked Chad’s butt,” Shana eagerly answered for me.

I laughed.
Geez, talk about embellishing
.

Carli’s mouth hung open, revealing the blue bands on her lower braces. “You did not tell me this,” she protested. “When? Where?
How
?”

I didn’t need to tell her. Shana did.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” Carli complained again after Shana had given her the scoop.

I shrugged. Frankly, I hadn’t thought about Chad since Fight Club, not with everything else occupying my mind.

“I can’t believe you didn’t know,” Lucretia said to Carli. “Everyone’s talking about it.”

“Makes sense,” I contributed. “Boys are big blabbermouths.”

“I wish you were,” Carli bellyached. “Well, here’s something I bet you don’t know.” She leaned toward me with a smug expression. Lucretia, Shana, and I leaned toward her in turn. “Chad and Robin Newton are going out.”

~~~

The Queen Kiya exhibit was super cool. Next to a life-size replica of an Egyptian tomb, the exhibit showcased artifacts recovered from the queen’s tomb: ornate gold necklaces and armlets encrusted with precious stones, a shrine box with figurines depicting the queen, a carved wooden head coming out of a blue lotus representing her divine birth. There were alabaster jars for perfume, beetle rings symbolizing the afterlife, a model of the solar boat transporting her to the afterlife, a slew of shawabty helper statues that looked like mini-mummies, and of course, real mummies, too.

The queen lay in a gilded gold mummy case carved with hieroglyphics. A golden death mask covered her face, and her crown rested on her chest. The crown was stunning, with inlaid emeralds that showcased a large amber stone centered in the golden circlet. Over her coffin hung a translation of the curse.

It said,
They that shall remove the crown will meet a swift death by the hands of seven.

Seven coffins that looked like packing crates were lined up on the other side of Queen Kiya. Each held a mummy, save for the seventh coffin. These mummies were disgusting, obviously not having been wrapped with the care that their queen had been. Ashy-looking decay peeked out from strips of tattered linen, and what had once been flesh was piled around each body like gray sand. It seriously made me want to hurl.

“This is so gross,” I said to my friends.

“They look like something from a horror movie,” remarked Carli.

“Totally,” Lucretia agreed. “You expect them to leap up or something.”

“And grab one of those.” Shana pointed to machetes in a display case.

“Or those.” I aimed my finger at hooks that were used to remove innards.

“Ewww,” the girls said.

Carli announced, “I’m going to the restroom, anyone wanna come with?”

Lucretia and Shana did. I opted out. When my friends left, I moved closer to the case to take a look at the other items. I was examining limestone jars that guts and brains were once stored in when a familiar face caught my attention in the display’s glass. Because it was such a surprise to see him there, it took me a second to place him.

“Mr. Phil–” I started to call out, stepping out into the open. A split-second evaluation of Emery’s dad, and I quickly ducked back behind the display case, squatting down.

I peeked between the falcon and jackal head jars and observed Mr. Phillips through the glass. Dressed in a black leather jacket over a turtleneck and slacks, he leaned casually against the wall near the tomb, his sharp eyes surveying the room. His expression was stony, not friendly in the least. He hardly looked like the same person from yesterday. This Mr. Phillips looked dangerous.

He moved to the tomb’s entrance, unhooked the chain across the closed exhibit, and stepped to the other side. Refastening the chain, he went into the tomb.

To avoid drawing attention, I forced myself to stroll to the tomb’s entrance. Whistling, I glanced around to ensure no one was watching. No one was. Quickly, I ducked under the chain and slipped in behind him. The soles of Mr. Phillips’s dress shoes echoed through the dimly lit tomb; voices droned farther down. I was too stressed to tune them in. Plastering my back against the hieroglyphic-laden wall, I slid down the corridor after Mr. Phillips. At the end was a narrow doorway, giving passage into the Treasure Room. I stopped here.

“Everything secure, Meyer?” asked a man with a French accent.

“Yes,” Mr. Phillips responded.

Meyer?
I thought.
An alias? This can’t be good.

“Now, my friend, if you please,” said the Frenchman.

I ducked through the doorway, crawled behind a long, painted chest, and peered around the edge.

Mr. Phillips, a robust museum guard, and a lithe blond man with the build of a dancer stood in the burial chamber at the back of the room. The security guard handed a thumb drive to the blond man, who slipped it into his overcoat pocket and produced a cell phone. He struck an elegant finger against the keypad and brought the phone to his ear.

“This is Moreau,” he said, then spoke in French. He spun his finger at the security guard. “Your account number, please.”

The security guard recited a string of numbers that Moreau repeated into the phone. While doing this, the security guard glanced uneasily at “Meyer.” It was understandable, considering how menacing Emery’s dad looked.

“
Je vous remercie, Monsieur
,” the Frenchman said, ending the call. He placed the phone back in his pocket and told the security guard, “Your new bank account balance will satisfy you.”

The security guard grinned. “Nice doin’ business with ya.”

Moreau returned the smile, the sort of highbrow smile that said,
I tolerate you because I must.
Mr. Phillips’s face held no expression.

“Good of Queen Kiya to visit the Emerald City,” said the security guard, and swept a ridiculous bow. “Good for me.”

“Good for us all,” agreed Moreau in a pleasant tone. “That is,
if
the security schematics that I have paid handsomely for are what you have guaranteed—”

The guard ceased his celebrating and glanced at the Frenchman.

Moreau added to the threat: “If they are not, then we have a problem. To be precise, you become Mr. Meyer’s problem.”

The security guard stared with fear at the man he knew as Meyer. Mr. Phillips’s mouth turned up into a slow, chilling half-smile. His eyes were heartless.

“It’s all there and up to date,” the guard assured them hastily. In his nervousness, he repeated, “Nice doin’ business with ya, Mr. Moreau.”

“Yes, my friend. It has been a pleasure.”

The guard couldn’t get away fast enough.

As he walked past the chest where I hid, Moreau muttered something in French that I was sure was an insult about the security guard. Then he asked Mr. Phillips, “Have arrangements been made?”

“Assassin data recovery is set for oh-one-hundred hours Wednesday. Drop-off has been confirmed for zero hours on Sunday.”

I caught a gasp.
Assassin? Serena’s Assassin?

“Excellent, Meyer. Shall we?”

The men came out of the burial room. I shrank behind the chest.

“If that cretin has sold me a blank thumb drive, you will put a bullet in his head for me, won’t you, Meyer?”

“With pleasure.”

Moreau chuckled. “And I am not one to deny another man his pleasure, especially—” Moreau abruptly stopped speaking. Their feet stopped moving, too.

I held my breath. I judged them to be on the other side of the chest.

“Did you hear some—” Moreau began, cutting himself short again. I imagined Mr. Phillips flipping a hand up for Moreau to stay silent so he could listen. If he had my hearing, he would have heard my heart crashing into my ribcage.

“Lohan, Brinkley, and Sanchez are assembling,” said Mr. Phillips. The men began walking again. I waited until it sounded like they were halfway down the corridor before releasing my breath.

By the time they exited the tomb, I had a pretty good idea what was going down. Mr. Phillips and Moreau planned to rob the Queen Kiya exhibit on Wednesday at 1:00 a.m., if I was calculating military time correctly. What I couldn’t figure out was what Assassin had to do with the exhibit. And I wasn’t sure whether or not to tell Emery about his dad. The thought made me sick. Was it necessary for him to know that his dad was involved in orchestrating a heist in order to come up with a plan to thwart it? And why was Mr. Phillips after a biological weapon’s data—data that had been destroyed?

Or had it?

What do I do? What do I do?

Emery needed to know about the robbery ASAP, especially since it had something to do with Assassin
.

But he doesn’t need to know his dad is in on it just yet,
I decided.
And he doesn’t need to know his dad is a cold-blooded killer.
Moreau had said as much, and Mr. Phillips’s “with pleasure” confirmed it. Jared and my gut had been right: Mr. Phillips was bad to the bone.

My heart sank at the thought of Emery’s pending devastation. Although he had never come out and said it, I knew he believed his mysterious father was a decent human being. What son wouldn’t?