Louise had paused in the doorway at the sight of a weirdly familiar strange boy standing in profile in front of Miss Hamilton’s desk. His focus was on Miss Hamilton, letting Louise stare unnoticed as she tried to figure out where she knew him from. He was as tall as Iggy and slender without seeming weedy. Handsome and obviously rich, he would have been a perfect prince for Elle’s The Little Mermaid.
Prince Charming made her think of Crown Prince Kiss Butt and with a gasp, she realized who the strange boy was. She jerked backwards into Jillian, who’d been trying to convince Nikola to stay in their locker instead of exploring the new landscape.
“What’s—” Jillian started to ask what was wrong and then yelped slightly in surprised as Louise caught her wrist and dragged her down the hall at a half-run. “What’s going on? Where are we going?”
Louise banged open the girls’ restroom door and pulled Jillian and Nikola in with her. Most boys would rather die than go into a girls’ restroom; she was praying that Flying Monkey Five was the same. But he was one of them: kidnappers and killers. “Oh my god! Oh my god!”
“What’s wrong?”
Louise opened her mouth to answer and then thought to check the stalls for anyone who might overhear them. She went down the row, swinging open the doors one after another. The metal doors clanged loudly in the tiled room.
“Lou!” Jillian complained. “You’re scaring me.”
“One of them is here. Flying Monkey Five. He’s in our classroom.”
Jillian gasped and skittered sideways from the doorway looking scared. Louise really wanted her to be the brave one, because if she wasn’t, it meant Louise would have to be the brave one, and she didn’t feel ready to be it.
“What—what is he doing here?” Jillian whispered.
“I don’t know. I don’t know.” Louise paced back in front of the sinks. The mirror reflected back her twin’s fear twice fold. “Esme warned us about the Empire of Evil and he’s one of them. She said that they’re dangerous. He’s probably here to do evil things—like kidnap us or steal Joy or something.” She didn’t want to scare Nikola by adding him to the list of possible targets. It was suspicious, though, that right after they’d saved the last of Esme’s babies that the Flying Monkey showed up.
Jillian went into one of the stalls and shut the door and locked it. She stood in the stall for a minute before asking fearfully, “Do you really think so?”
Louise forced herself to ignore the fear that was jittering through her. “Why else would he suddenly show up at our school?”
Jillian unzipped her pants, pushed them down and sat on the toilet. She was stalling though—she wasn’t actually going pee. “How would anyone know about Joy? And even if they figured out how to open Dufae’s box—which I’m betting it would take them more than a few days to do—how would they know that Dufae or someone else didn’t take the nactka with Joy in it? It has been sitting around locked for nearly three hundred years.”
“I feel weird,” Nikola whimpered. “What is this I feel?”
Louise suspected he was afraid for the first time in his life. She hugged him tightly. “It’s okay. We won’t let anyone take Joy.”
Jillian growled softly in the stall. “We’ve missed something if he’s here. We’ve never been fingerprinted so they couldn’t have found us that way. We never showed up on the museum security system while the chest was at the museum. We erased everything at Dad’s work, so no one should even be able to link us to Esme or Dufae. Even if they did, they couldn’t know that we know anything about unlocking magical boxes.”
“April knows,” Louise said.
“She knows that Esme left us something but we haven’t told her about being elves, or Dufae, or any of that, so she couldn’t have know we were going to take anything from the museum. And why would anyone suspect two nine-year-old girls of robbing a museum with magic?”
“But the Flying Monkey is here.” Louise pointed out since it was undeniable.
“The only reason he’d be here is…” Jillian trailed off.
“Why?” Louise asked.
“I don’t know!” Jillian stood and zipped up her pants. “I was hoping you’d answer the question.”
Jillian came out of the stall and washed her hands.
Nikola glanced back and forth between them. “We’re confused. Who is the Flying Monkey? Is he one of the men with the guns?”
They hadn’t stopped to consider that Ming the Merciless might have robbed their house. It was a frightening thought. “Maybe.”