Kingdom Keepers(70)

He focused on the single idea: I am light. I am nothing but light. Nothing can stop me if I’m nothing but light. Nothing can harm me if I’m—

Wham!

Reaching the fence at full stride, he was knocked back off his feet and onto the floor. He felt as if he’d been stabbed in the chest.

Maleficent seemed to float, not walk, as she approached. She towered over him. Scowling, the witch raised her arm, about to deliver a spell. Finn clutched the pens and jumped toward her, lightning fast. He thrust the pens in her face. Sparks flew as the pens connected with Maleficent. She flew back and fell to the stone floor.

“Your Grace?” Jez called out.

The witch lay on the stone floor, stunned. The electric fence sputtered.

Finn stepped closer to the fallen witch, the pens held in front of him like a sword. She recoiled, expecting him to strike again.

“Lower the fence!” he instructed Jez. He never took his eyes off Maleficent. She seemed to be gaining her strength back. “Lower the fence, or I’ll do it again,” Finn warned.

The bars of buzzing white lines sparked twice more and then vanished.

“Release Amanda and Charlene,” he told her. When Jez hesitated, he stepped closer to Maleficent. The feeling of cold increased. Her strength was indeed returning. He needed Jez to do this quickly, before her mother came to her senses.

He stabbed at Maleficent with the fistful of pens. A second burst of sparks threw her down again.

“Okay!” Jez exclaimed. She waved her hands. “It’s done.”

Finn backed up and reached the stairway.

A weakened Maleficent lifted her head and said, “We will meet again, young man. We have unfinished business, you and I.”

Finn turned and ran.





31


The kids needed the plans that had been stolen from Finn at One Man’s Dream, and no one had any doubts as to who had taken them. Maleficent would return for the pen—the Stonecutter’s Quill—with a vengeance. Whatever powers the pen and the plans possessed when combined, each side had their reasons for wanting what the other now possessed.

Before he left Mickey’s Not-So-Scary Halloween Party, Finn paid Wayne a visit to explain the night’s events.

“It’s always such a noisy night,” Wayne complained. He looked silly dressed in a pair of pajamas and a plaid robe. He wore Mickey and Minnie Mouse fuzzy slippers.

“We need your help.”

“So it would seem. So it would seem.” Wayne paced his small apartment over the fire station, glancing out the windows occasionally. Finn heard him mutter, “When will they go home?” Then he paced some more. “Two birds with one stone,” he said, now addressing Finn.

“How’s that?” Finn asked, impatient to hook back up with his friends and leave the park.

“I can help you—will help you—but it won’t come without additional risk to us all. She has to be desperate to be bowling fire at your feet. Revealing herself like that.” He studied the pens spread out on the small dining table, where Finn had put them. “You’ll keep all of these, because they’ve obviously come in handy. Tomorrow’s the day. They’ll be expecting you by night, of course, because that’s when you’re usually here. So it can’t be night. It must be day. Furthermore, if you’re to secure the plans, then you must be a boy, not crossed over.”

“But we can touch and hold things when we’re crossed over. I can get those plans back.”

“You can’t do that where I’m sending you,” Wayne countered. “You’ll have to be yourself. The others as well. And you’ll need disguises, or you’ll get caught.” Wayne paused, thinking hard. “Cast-member costumes, you understand? Employees. Each of you. I can help there as well.”

“But why? Where are you sending us?”

“You showed me,” Wayne said. “I might have never figured this out by myself.”

“Showed you what?”

“Where’s the one place that a weakened Maleficent can hide without being questioned?”

“Here in the park.”

“I mean, where in the park?”

“Whatever ride, whatever attraction she’s part of.”

“But that’s the point. She isn’t part of one,” Wayne answered. “Her role is over at the studios. She’s in Fantasmics. That’s all she does here—that one show. She turns herself into the dragon. Maybe in real life as well.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I’m an old man talking to himself, that’s all. Back to the important question: where can she hide in the Magic Kingdom?”

“Out in the open?” Finn guessed.