Kingdom Keepers II(84)
The giant yeti was awake now, towering over them all, eyes blinking. Finn did not recoil. He could not picture Wayne and the other Imagineers building creatures designed to harm them.
The roller coaster sped closer.
“I will kill you,” Maleficent said, “when you are no longer of use to me.” She bent backward and looked up at the hairy creature above her. “When Lord Chernabog has no further use for you.” She let out a laugh—a bloodcurdling cackle—that for the first time challenged Finn’s DHI status. His feet and hands grew cold, and it took all his will to overcome this poison and return to his full DHI.
The beast had the reaction time of a snake. One moment Finn was standing on the stairs. The next, the yeti had him by the legs and was swinging him overhead.
His legs…not the legs of his DHI. Amanda and Jez jumped out from their hiding places and Jez shouted, “Let him go!”
“Ah!” Maleficent cried out. “If it isn’t the Fairlies.”
Amanda craned forward, her neck thrust out. Maleficent knew way too much.
Finn knew the secret to his own survival was to push away his fear, but being swung at thirty miles an hour over the head of a forty-foot-tall giant proved a difficult challenge.
Maleficent suddenly floated—levitated—off the platform, clearly, nothing she’d planned for herself, for she flailed her legs and arms, dog paddling like a kid struggling to swim for the first time.
“You put me down, child!” she roared.
She hurled a ball of flame at Amanda, who leaned slightly left, allowing the asteroid to pass. It exploded into the Himalayas.
“PUT HIM DOWN!” cried out Amanda, “OR I WILL DROP YOU AS YOU WISH!”
Maleficent moved like a puppet twenty feet to the left. Now there was nothing but a sixty-foot fall to concrete beneath her.
Finn felt the tingling return, and, as it did, the yeti’s hand closed shut through his body—nothing but light. Finn clamored up the beast’s arm toward its massive head. The yeti swiped at him, but again his hand passed through Finn’s DHI, unable to touch him.
He caught a glimpse of Maleficent as she began to transform into a crow. But as she did, Amanda released her and the green-skinned creature fell fifteen feet straight down before stopping in midair.
“You try that again,” Amanda warned, and I’ll drop you before you have the chance.
Maleficent looked down and seemed to consider her odds. Then she looked back at Amanda.
“You harm me, you little tart, and your friend will never see his precious Wayne again!”
With the mention of Wayne, Finn slipped. He fell off the yeti’s shoulder, and the sensation immediately removed his DHI. He slid down the side of the creature, grasping at the matted gray hair and somehow controlling his fall. As he reached the yeti’s leg, it moved. Then the other. The giant’s feet broke free of the platform where it had stood for several years. The entire building shook.
A series of screams was followed by the roller coaster shooting up at them through the darkness. Philby, Maybeck, and Willa zoomed past—backward—and out of sight.
Maybeck waved at Maleficent.
The witch proclaimed: “You will bring me the Stonecutter’s Quill, or you will never see the white-haired man again.”
At that moment, the yeti began to change. The hair was sucked inside its arms, turning the gray skin smooth; the legs and arms shrank, and the neck grew thinner, while the head also lost its hair and sprouted horns. The giant creature had been reduced to a figure much greater than Maleficent, but no longer a thirty-foot-high beast. Horns sprouted, while black webbing formed under the thing’s arms like…bat wings.
Chernabog.
Finn heard the roller coaster slowing in the distance. It would be returning—and when it did, he, Amanda, and Jez needed to be on it.
The pen, Finn realized. The Stonecutter’s Quill was the pen Walt had used to imagine the first plans of the Parks. It had demonstrated great powers the one and only time Finn had seen it used. Powers, he assumed, that could be put to evil use as easily as they had been to good.
A wall of tension formed between Amanda and Maleficent. The witch produced another ball of fire, but this time Amanda levitated it as well. It hovered next to the witch, burning hotly and illuminating her green face.
“You will regret this, little one,” Maleficent muttered, clearly afraid of her own fire. “You are playing with things you know nothing about.”
She grew the head of a vulture. Wings began to sprout.
Amanda released her. Again, Maleficent fell abruptly, before slowly being carried aloft. Evidence of the vulture was gone; the green-skinned fairy hovering over the precipitous fall.