Kingdom Keepers III(10)

The woman.

He peered around one of the marble slabs and checked again. He’d only seen her from a distance at school, and yet…he couldn’t be absolutely certain, and yet…he was seeing her in profile now…and yet….

Something tugged at him, told him to look over at the gate.

Amanda and Jess were just coming through one of the turnstiles.

Had the mystery woman’s entrance been designed to coincide with the arrival of the girls? Had she been following them, only to slip into the park ahead of them?

Finn located the woman again in the crowd. She was with the crowd, walking to the left of Spaceship Earth, the giant golf ball for which Epcot was known. In the few seconds he watched her, she didn’t look back once.

“Hey!” Finn called out as Amanda and Jess approached.

They took no notice of him, continuing along, talking to each other.

He tucked his chin low to keep his face from being recognized, and hurried to catch up.

Coming up from behind, he startled them both.

“Psst! Amanda!”

She spun around and puckered her face dismissively, not recognizing him. Then her expression changed.

“What are you doing here?” she said, aghast. “I thought the whole purpose of our—”

“I didn’t want you guys doing this by yourselves,” he said. “Hey, Jess.”

“Hey there, Finn.”

Jess was exotic looking. He found it difficult to separate what he knew about her from her looks, but the fact was her ability to dream the future seemed to agree with her intense beauty, as if she were a fairy or a witch or some kind of unknown being or alien. Her natural hair color was not natural at all, a shocking white, like a grandmother’s. It had gone that color after Finn had rescued her from the clutches of a spell cast by Maleficent. She hid the white hair by dyeing it, becoming sometimes a brunette, sometimes a redhead. For the past month she had been a strawberry blond, an appealing look that made her seem more outdoorsy and playful than he knew her to be.

“Aren’t you taking a risk by coming here?” Jess said. Her voice revealed no emotion, no judgment. She sounded half asleep, as calm as the waters of the lake they now approached. “Amanda explained your…situation.”

“You two are doing Wayne and all of us a great favor,” Finn said. “I couldn’t let you go alone.”

“So it isn’t that you wanted to hang out with Amanda?” Jess said.

“Jessica!” Amanda snapped, blushing.

“I wanted to hang out with both of you,” Finn answered without missing a beat. He could see he had caught Jess off guard. He suppressed a grin.

“And protect us, I suppose?” Amanda said.

“It’s not like that,” he said.

“No, it’s not,” Amanda said, “because if anyone recognizes you—and they are bound to because that disguise is…pitiful—then you mess us up a lot more than if we were just on our own.”

“So you want me to leave?” he said.

“No,” Jess answered, stealing the moment from Amanda. “She wants to pretend she isn’t thrilled that you took a very big chance by coming here to protect us, and she wants to make it seem like it’s no big deal when we all know that it is a big deal. I, for one, want to thank you. I like it that there are three of us. I feel better that you’re here, and so does Amanda, though she’ll never admit it.”

“I don’t have to admit what isn’t true,” Amanda said.

“There’s a lot of park to cover,” Jess said. “Three people are better than two.”

“It may be more complicated than that,” Finn said. He took each girl by the arm and led them behind a stand selling all kinds of merchandise. They quickly picked up on the fact that he was using the stand as a screen, and that made them both curious to try to look around it and see who or what they were hiding from.

“It’s a woman,” he said. “I’m pretty sure I saw her in front of school this morning.”

“Seriously?” Amanda asked.

“And Maybeck said some woman was lurking around Crazy Glaze. Window-shopping, but less interested in the pottery than the people inside.”

“And she’s here?” Jess said.

Finn nodded. “I saw her enter just before you two. If she is following you, she’s good at it, because she never looked back toward the gates, never gave any indication…and I don’t see how she could have followed me, but I’m not ruling that out either.”

“So what do we do about it?” Jess asked.

Amanda lifted onto her toes to see over the stand, but Finn pulled her back down.