The Curse of the King (2 page)

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.

D
AD'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.”

“I
T 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.