The Curse of the King (5 page)

“G
ALLUP,
M
C
K
INLEY!”
Cass said, staring out the window of the jet.

“I'm not piloting this plane, Captain Nied is,” Dad replied. “And he's going as fast as he can.”

“That's not what I meant.” Cass gestured to the distant ground below, which was clearly visible even in the dimming sunlight. “That little town near the river? It's called Gallup, New Mexico. Right near the Arizona border. It also happens to be in McKinley County. So it's Gallup, McKinley.”

I took a deep breath. I could barely focus on what Cass what saying. Except for the “Gallup” part. Because my heart was galloping.

“I think it's named for US president William McKinley,” Cass said. “He was shot. But he didn't die right away. He died because no one got to him in time.”

“That's cheerful,” Captain Nied said.

“Cass,” Dad said softly, “we're doing the best we can. We'll get to Aly. She's with the best doctors in Southern California. Dr. Karl has promised me she'll see to her personally.”

Dr. Karl was another college friend of Dad's. She was the head of emergency medicine at St. Dunstan Hospital, where Aly had been taken. I was becoming convinced Dad knew at least half the doctors in the United States. In my left hand I clutched my phone. Before leaving, I'd sent Aly three unanswered texts. There was no cell reception up here, but that didn't stop me from looking at the screen for about the thousandth time.

In my right hand I turned the shard around and around as if it were a magic charm. As if I could somehow massage it to full size. “I wish we were taking her a whole Loculus of Healing.”

“That wouldn't cure her,” Cass said. “Or us. It takes seven of these things to do that.”

“Yeah, but it would buy some time,” I said.

“You and I are feeling fine without a Loculus of Healing,” Cass remarked with a deep sigh. “Why us and not her? Why does she get the bad luck?”

I stopped turning the shard. My hands felt warm. My first thought was body heat.

My second thought was,
Are you
crazy
?

Spoons and forks didn't heat up in your hands when you fiddled with them. Neither did joysticks, worry beads, action figures, whatever.

I handed it to Cass. “Notice anything?”

“Whoa,” Cass said. “Do you have a fever or something?”

“It's warm, right?” I said. “Like, unnaturally warm?”

Cass turned it around curiously. “It looks smaller to me.”

“Cass, what if that heat isn't just heat?” I said. “What if it means something—like, it's active in some way?”

“Like, alive?” Cass said.

“No!” I said. “It's the shell of a Loculus that's existed for thousands of years, right? What if it absorbed some of that healing power? Maybe that's what's keeping you and me from having episodes.”

Cass's eyes were as wide as baseballs. Dad was staring at the shard, too, from the copilot's seat. Together we looked at Captain Nied.

He yanked back the throttle, and the jet began to dive. “Fasten your seat belts, gents. And welcome to LA.”

It is amazing what $200 will do to a Los Angeles cabdriver.

As we twisted and turned through the city streets, palm
trees and white stucco houses zoomed by in a blur. We could see the freeway in the distance, the cars at a total standstill. “Freeway is not free!” the cabdriver said in an accent I couldn't quite figure out. “Is prison for cars!”

No one laughed. We were too busy keeping our stomachs from jumping through our mouths. Dad was on his cell phone with the hospital the whole way.

According to Dr. Karl, Aly was alive, but it wasn't looking good.

As the taxi screeched to a stop in the hospital parking lot, we pushed our way out. I hooked my backpack around my shoulders and sprinted after Dad. He flashed his ID left and right, fast-talking his way past guards. In a moment we were on the fifth floor, barging into the intensive care unit. It was a massive room, echoing with beeps and shouts and lined with curtained-off areas.

A dark-haired woman with huge eyes peered out from behind one of the curtains. “How is she, Cindy?” Dad asked, marching across the room as if he were a regular.

“Breathing,” Dr. Karl said, “but unresponsive. Her fever is spiking around a hundred four.”

I pulled the shard out of my pocket and held tight. I almost didn't recognize Aly. Her skin was ashen, her eyes were only half-open, and her hair was pulled back into a green hospital cap. A breathing tube snaked from her mouth to a machine against the wall, and a tangle of tubes connected her arm
to an IV stand with three different fluids.

Over her head was a screen that showed her heartbeat on a graph.

Aly's mom was holding her daughter's hand. Her face was streaked with tears, and her narrow glasses had slipped down her nose. She looked startled to see us. “Doctor . . . ?”

“Sorry,” Dr. Karl said, “I'm going to have to ask the kids to stay in the waiting room. Standard procedure for intensive care.”

“I have to speak to her,” I insisted.

“She won't hear you,” Aly's mom said. “She's completely unresponsive.”

“Can I just touch her?” I said.

“
Touch
her?” Mrs. Black looked at me as if I were crazy.

“This is way beyond ICU protocol,” Dr. Karl said. “If you don't leave now, I will have to call security—”

BEEP! BEEP! BEEP!

Cass and I jumped back. “Are they coming to get us?” Cass asked.

“It's not a security alarm. It's something to do with Aly!” I said. Aly's monitors were flashing red. Her eyes sprang open and then rolled upward into her head. She let out a choking sound, and her body began to twitch. As three nurses came running from the center of the room, Dr. Karl strapped Aly's arms down.

“What's happening?” I demanded.

“Febrile seizure!” Dr. Karl said.
“Clear the area!”

“But—” I said.

A nurse with a barrel chest and a trim beard pulled me back, and I nearly collided with Cass. As the hospital staff closed in around Aly's bed, we both stumbled back toward the entrance.

“They're killing her, Jack!” Cass said. “Do something!”

I dropped my pack. “I'm going invisible. It's the only way I can get to her.”

“There's no room for you,” Cass said. “If you barge in, they will feel you, Jack. It'll freak everybody out. Total chaos, and it won't be good for her.”

“Any other ideas?” I said.

Cass nodded. “Yeah. I'll distract them. Give me three seconds.”

“What?”

But Cass was already running away, heading toward the table that contained the medical equipment and monitors.

One . . .

I reached into the pack and lifted out the Loculus of Invisibility.

Two . . .

As I stepped forward, the loud beeps stopped. I looked toward the monitors. They were dark. Aly's equipment had shut down completely. Cass was scampering away from the wall socket, where he had pulled out the plugs.

Three!

I heard a shout. Two nurses broke away from Aly, scrambling toward the equipment, leaving her right side wide open. I raced toward her, clutching the Loculus of Invisibility with one hand and the shard with the other. Dr. Karl was injecting something into her left arm, concentrating hard.

Aly's chest was still. She wasn't breathing. I placed the shard on her stomach, just below her ribs.

“The pads—now!” Dr. Karl shouted. “We're losing her!”

“Come on . . .” I said under my breath. “Come on, Aly. You have to live.” Aly's eyes stared upward, green and bright, dancing in the light even in her unconsciousness. I felt like I could talk to her, like she'd answer me back with some kind of geeky joke. I wanted to see her smile.

But there was no reaction. Not a fraction of an inch of movement.

A doctor was racing toward Aly with two pads strapped to his hands. They were going to try to shock her alive. I pressed the shard harder into her abdomen. I guess I was crying, because tears were falling onto her face.

Aly's mom bumped into me and screamed. It wouldn't be much longer before my invisible presence was going to be a big deal.

“We have power!” a voice barked. With a soft whoosh, the monitors fired up and the lights blinked on. The
heartbeat graph showed a long, horizontal, flat line.

Dead. A flat line meant dead.

The doctor placed the pads on either side of Aly's chest but I did not take my hand away—not even when they shot electricity through her, and her body flopped like a rag doll.

It wasn't working.

Aly was ghost white and still. Her chest wasn't moving. As Dr. Karl finally called off the electric shocks, I pressed harder than ever, leaning toward her face.

“I'm . . . I'm so, so sorry,” Dr. Karl said to Aly's mom.

I had failed.

She was the first to die. One of us would be next, then the other. And then there would be none.

I brushed my lips against her cool forehead. “Good-bye, Aly,” I whispered. “I—” The words clogged up in my brain, and I had to force them out. “I love you, dude. Yeah. Just saying.”

I let go of her and walked away toward the center of the room. I felt numb. My eyes focused on nothing.

“Jack?” Cass whispered, wandering toward me, looking all teary and confused. “Where are you?”

I picked up the backpack and slipped the Loculus of Invisibility back inside. As I became visible, I noticed I was next to two doctors who must have seen me materialize out of thin air.

But they hadn't seemed to notice. They were both
staring over my head toward Aly. Gaping.

Cass turned. His jaw dropped. “What the—?”

As I wiped away tears, the first thing I noticed was Aly's mom. She was on the floor, fainted away.

The second thing I noticed was Aly sitting up, staring straight at me.

“You
love
me?” she said.

S
HE WAS ALIVE.

Half of me wanted to jump with joy. The other half wanted to sink down and melt into the linoleum. Dad and Dr. Karl stood by the bed, gaping as if their mouths had been propped open by invisible pencils.

“I heard you say it, Jack McKinley!” Aly laughed as if nothing bad had happened. “You said, ‘I love you'! I heard it!”

My mouth flapped open and shut a couple of times. “The shard . . .” I finally squeaked. “It worked.”

Aly's smile abruptly vanished. She looked around the ICU. “Wait.
Jack? Cass?
What are you doing here? Why am I in a hospital? Why is Mom on the floor?”

I rushed over. Dad and I both lifted Mrs. Black to
her feet. Her eyes puddled with tears. As she hugged her daughter, the place was going nuts. Cass was screaming, pumping his fists. The hospital staff high-fived each other like middle school kids. Dr. Karl looked bewildered. I thought I could see some tears on her cheeks as Aly's mom hugged her, too.

“You are a miracle worker, doctor,” Mrs. Black said. “Thank you.”

“I—I'm not sure what did it,” Dr. Karl said. “I guess . . . the pads?”

Aly pulled me closer. “What happened?” she whispered. “I had an episode, right? And you guys flew out to see me.”

“Um, yeah,” I whispered back.

“So how did the doctor figure out—?” she asked.

“She didn't,” I replied.

“Wait—so
you
did it?” she said. “You saved my life?”

“It's a long story,” I said.

Aly smiled. Her eyes moistened. “Backsies.”

“What?”

“About what you said,” she said, “into my ear . . .”

I felt my face heating up. “That's because I thought you were dead!”

Doofus. Idiot.

She was looking at me like I'd just slapped her. But before either of us could say anything, the crowd of medical people began elbowing me away. Dr. Karl was shouting orders. All
kinds of tubes were being hooked up to Aly's arms.

I backed away, standing with Cass. “Boj emosewa,” he said.

“Thanks,” I said.

I took a deep breath. I felt a million things. Happiness. Relief. Embarrassment. Pride. I could finally feel my body relaxing. That was when I opened my clenched palm and looked at the shard.

It was the size of a quarter.

And the only thing I felt was scared.

“What if it just . . . vanishes?” Cass paced back and forth in our hotel room. Behind him was a huge picture window. The sunset looked like an egg yolk spreading on the Pacific Ocean. “We use up its power, it gets smaller and smaller, and then, poof, it's gone?”