Kingdom Keepers VI (9781423179214) (31 page)

I
N THE BRIGHT SOUTHERN
California sunshine, three young people stood at the rail of Vibe's deck on the
Disney
Dream
—two girls with a boy sandwiched between them. Charlene, Finn, and Willa.

A moveable walkway connected the amidships gangway leading to the terminal, ferrying hundreds of passengers from ship to shore.

A girl with red-streaked hair stood less than five
feet away, also looking out. She'd been aboard the
Dream
when a banged-up white van had pulled up to the ship in Puerto Vallarta. She smiled at the three of them.

A drone blimp advertising the Disney Channel floated in the sky.

“If I didn't know better, I'd say that blimp was following us,” Finn said.

“Oh, no!” Charlene said.

The other two looked at her.

“A kid in the lounge. She said her friend
saw us
on TV
. That it was scary… I thought she was talking about a three sixty-five.”

“But those weren't scary.” Finn looked up at the blimp.

“That's exactly what Charlene said,” Willa said. “What's going on?”

“Two point oh,” Finn said. “Reality TV.”

“W…h…a…t?” Willa looked pale.

“Remember the new contracts they had us sign when they installed the upgrade?”

“A formality,” Willa said. “My mother called it a formality.”

“My parents, too,” Finn said. “But then there's…that.”

He pointed at the blimp.

“They're filming us?”

“They've turned us into a reality TV show.”

“We don't know that!” Charlene said.

“Ah, come on!” Finn said, “We're the real-life
Hunger Games
! It'll be the most popular show
ever
.”

“They would tell us!” Charlene complained.

“And we'd start acting, and they don't want that. They want us as natural as possible.”

“As if this is natural!” Willa said.

“No kidding.” Finn took his eyes off the blimp. “Like it matters. We'll know soon enough.” He pointed out at Los Angeles.

“Well, even if they are filming us, it's not all bad. We've got to focus on the positive,” Willa said, attempting to encourage Finn. “Maleficent could be dead.”

“She
is
dead,” Charlene said.

“No matter if she is or isn't, they'll never find their way out. Chernabog is trapped, maybe drowned. They brought their most evil monster, and we defeated him. Them. We beat the Overtakers, Finn. They're finished.”

“You know what they say about evil,” Finn said in a gravelly, flat voice. “You end it one place, it pops up in another.”

Charlene shot him a disapproving look. Finn's resulting expression of fatigue and sorrow said it would never be over for him.

“They're keeping Dillard on ice,” Charlene said, “you know…”

“He's dead,” Finn said. “I killed him.”

“You shouldn't have told them that,” Willa said, angrily. “That was a stupid thing to do.”

“It's the truth.”

“It's a crime. You'll be deported.”

“Extradited.”

“Whatever! Tia Dalma killed him. Not you.”

“You think a judge'll buy that?”

“We
won
,” Willa said.

“Too great a price,” Finn said.

“There's another possibility.” A new voice.

The three turned. Philby and Maybeck walked out onto the deck. The girls swallowed them in leaping hugs.

“Which is?” Willa asked, linking arms with Philby.

“Since you're all so deeply worried,” Maybeck said, interrupting. “We passed our physicals. No side effects for the second day in a row.”

Finn proposed his theory about the blimp and the reality TV show. Philby just laughed. “You need some rest, man.”

Willa squeezed Philby's hand as the five lined up against the rail, looking out in the far distance at the rather flat Los Angeles skyline.

“What other possibility?” Willa asked Philby.

“You ever heard of plea bargaining?” Philby said.

“I have nothing to bargain with,” said Finn.

“Not you. Tia Dalma.”

“You lost me.”

Philby reached into his pocket and pulled out a crude-looking hand-sewn doll. “This was found on Tia Dalma.”

The doll, dressed clearly as a boy, had a pin stuck in its chest. Charlene gasped.

“What if this represents…what if this is Dillard?” Philby said. “You handled the knife, sure. But what if Tia Dalma handled you?”

Finn rubbed his finger over the head of the imbedded pin.

“What if we offer to let her go in exchange for her removing that pin?”

“Let her go?” Finn was aghast.

“Is that even possible?” Charlene said hopefully.

“What's the one thing we've learned from all of this?” Philby asked.

Maybeck answered. “Anything's possible. Every-thing.”

A flicker of life returned to Finn's dull eyes. “You think? But how? When?”

“Soon,” Philby said. “But if she's released, we need the team full-strength.”

Maybeck said, “We need to relax. We need a cruise!”

They laughed together, all shaking their heads at once.

“We need a couple of days in Disneyland,” Finn said.

No one contradicted him.

“I love Disneyland,” Charlene whispered.

Down the length of Deck 11, a crewman was spraying the ship's deck with a garden hose, working the runoff into a channel drain than ran beneath the railing. He politely moved the five Keepers aside with his spray.

“Hey, there!” an adult voice called from outside the terminal. The kids looked eleven stories down, each spotting a parent, or in Maybeck's case, his aunt Jelly. Finn saw his mother next to Philby's. She was waving frantically, her face filled with joy and excitement, her eyes blue in the bright sun.

Finn covered his face, not wanting the others to see his tears.

The blimp turned toward the ship and sailed closer.

“Let's get out of here,” Philby said.

“Not just yet,” said the crewman, twisting the nozzle shut. The voice was old, but steady. Eerily familiar to all of them.

Wispy white hair escaped the ship's cap he wore. As he lifted his head, the cap gave way to the face beneath its brim, and an all-knowing, white-toothed smile.

In unison, the Keepers gasped.

The Kingdom Keepers series is a team effort, and a complicated one to try to get right. For those Disney enthusiasts who spot mistakes, they're entirely on me. The parks, cruise line, and publisher extend to me every possible resource to try to keep things accurate and exciting.

Special thanks to Disney Cruise Line's Karl Holz, Jodi Bennett, Christiaan Abbott, Sherry Roth, Clayton Lyndsay, and Captain Henry F. Andersson for giving me access to their amazing ships. As always, to Chris Ostrander and his team for the Synergy. To Alex Wright and all the Imagineers, including Joe Lanzisero, for their help with exploring the ships and the Imagineers' vision of how to do things (at sea) differently!

More down to earth, thanks to my editors Genevieve Gagne-Hawes and, at Disney Books, Wendy Lefkon; Dan Conaway and Amy Berkower at Writers House; Matthew Snyder at Creative Artists Agency; Brooke Muschott, my incredibly knowledgable intern; and Nancy Zastrow and Jen Wood for endless help in the office and on the road.