Kingdom Keepers IV(61)

Philby rolled and shoved his hand into Hugo’s face—the fake green eyes staring back, unflinching and terrifying. Philby couldn’t look at those eyes. He turned away.

Hugo grabbed both of Philby’s wrists, pushing up, trying to get Philby off; Philby pushed back, trying to hold Hugo down. Their arms began to tremble, then to shake.

Light flashed from the computer, the lake alive with fire.

Philby managed to pin Hugo’s left arm with his knee and reach for the computer with his right hand. Hugo rocked side to side attempting to free his arm, and making it impossible for Philby to properly aim his fingers. He missed the Return key three times in a row.

Hugo kneed Philby in the back, freeing his hand, which he used to palm Philby below the chin and propel him back toward the bed.

Hugo jumped up and reached for the Escape key, which would close the current window—Philby’s link with the DHI server.

Philby had bit his lip; he tasted the salty tang of blood in his mouth. He was mad.

Elvis was just standing there on the bed like a spectator. Philby grabbed him and held him just behind the front legs and lunged for Hugo using the same technique his family members used to train Elvis to use his scratching pole. It forced Elvis to extend his front claws—claws that now tore through Hugo’s shirt, leaving eight narrow tracks of blood behind as Philby dragged him down the boy’s back, and then tossed Elvis back onto the bed as Hugo let out a gut-wrenching scream.

Philby spun Hugo around, tripped him, and dumped him to the floor. He stabbed for the Return key.

THIS ACTION CANNOT BE UNDONE

DO YOU WISH PROCEED? Y/N

He hit Y.

The bedroom door burst open. A wrinkly-faced woman with no makeup, an adhesive strip across the bridge of her nose stretching her cheeks, and wearing a pair of pajamas covered with cartoons of Marge Simpson, shouted: “BOYS!”

Both Hugo and Philby stopped cold.

“What in the devil is going on, young man?” Philby’s mom said to him. The next thing she said was, “Elvis?” in a loving and kind voice of pure affection.

Hugo stood up, unlocked the window, threw it open, and dove outside.

Philby watched the bandwidth meter spike in the bottom right corner of the computer screen. The DHI properties of the holograms were being saved back to the DHI server. The Return. The whole process could take anywhere from ten to sixty seconds.

Precious seconds.

“Dell?” his mother said.

“Please, Mom, no!” Philby said, seeing his mother march toward his desk. “Remember what happened to me?” he said in a begging tone. “If you shut my computer, it’ll happen to all three of them—Finn, Willa, and Maybeck. Mom! You don’t want that to happen.”

Shutting the computer, putting it into sleep mode, would send his friends to sleep along with it. Stuck in the Syndrome.

* * *

Finn couldn’t take his eyes off the trembling hands of the Evil Queen held high above her head. She reminded him of a major league pitcher in his windup. She was about to deliver some kind of spitball, sinker spell, that would make the spiders and rattlesnakes look like kids’ stuff. Something nasty.

The flames licked off the lake.

Tears ran down Willa’s face as she mouthed, “Thank you,” to Finn.

The Evil Queen threw her hands at them with a witch’s fury, her lips spouting an incantation.

“Children in peril

Children in fright—”

But she stopped before completing it.

Willa had disappeared.

Finn watched as Maybeck sparkled, became transparent, and vanished.

Finn sat bolt upright in bed. His own bed, at home. Maybeck blinked furiously from his air mattress.

Finn felt something on his leg and threw back the covers.

A rattlesnake.

He screamed a bad word loud enough to be heard two blocks away.

He shook his leg like a maniac. The snake flew up and was caught, dangling from one of the paddles on his ceiling fan.

His father threw open his bedroom door and switched on the light, his mother craning over her husband’s shoulder.

When Finn’s ceiling light switched on, so did the fan.

The snake began circling overhead. The fan gained speed.

“FINN WHITMAN!” his father thundered, glaring at him. His father had run out of patience for the Kingdom Keepers after their earliest adventure. Wanting his son to focus on academics first and sports second, he had little tolerance for Finn’s claims of saving Disney from its villains. Although he appreciated the college money that resulted from his son’s participation in the program, and even secretly enjoyed some of the attention and fame that rubbed off on him for being Finn’s father, this kind of nighttime interruption to his family was exactly what he objected to and found so offensive.