Iggy paused with hand outstretched, a smile tugging at his mouth, as if he wasn’t sure if what she’d said was a joke or not.
“We downloaded a personality and gave him a real name,” Jillian lied. “Say ‘hello,’ Nikola.”
Nikola tilted his head in confusion and then leaned close to Louise to whisper. “We’re so confused. When can we talk?”
Louise glared at Jillian for making things harder. Jillian rolled her eyes, indicating that she had a plan but couldn’t discuss it right now. Louise sighed and patted Nikola, “When we introduce you to someone, you can say ‘hello’ and ‘nice to meet you’ and such.”
Nikola stared at her for a minute and then turned to Iggy. “Hello. Nice to meet you.” He looked back at Louise. “Silly old bear.”
How did she get to be the bad guy in this?
“Do you have your lines memorized?” Jillian changed the subject.
“Yes. I think.” Iggy held up his left hand like it was a hook and waved it. “Spirit that haunts this dark lagoon tonight, dost hear me?”
“Are you talking to us?” Nikola asked.
Louise groaned and pulled him on ahead via the leash. “Why don’t you two practice in private?”
“He wasn’t talking to us?” Nikola whispered.
“No!” Louise whispered.
Flying Monkey Five was in their classroom.
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 Little Mermaid princess.
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 surprise 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 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, the Flying Monkey had 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 known 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.”
Because of the robbery, they had decided to bring everything irreplaceable with them to school, and that included the photographs. Louise dug them out of her backpack and flipped through six pictures. The third photo made her stop with a gasp.
“What is it?” Jillian asked.
Louise held out the photograph of the blindfolded woman. “Is this who I think it is?”
Jillian frowned in concentration. “It might be her. I’m not sure.” She swore. “Our stupid genetic donor! Why give us a photo of a woman and then draw a blindfold on the picture so we can’t recognize her?”
“Who?” Nikola moved so he could see the photo. “Oh, Anna Desmarais.”
“How do you know?” Jillian growled.
“Facial recognition is at ninety-six point three percent. The blindfold doesn’t cover all of the bone structure of the eyes, so the match is positive. We could be a hundred percent sure if we could see the eye fold and retina.”
Jillian snatched the photograph out of Louise’s hand and read the words off the back. “Why did Esme write ‘Queen Gertrude of Denmark’ on this? Why not Anna Desmarais? And why did she use so many literary references? What does Hamlet have to do with Flash Gordon and the Wizard of Oz?”
“Maybe Anna isn’t her real name,” Louise guessed. “Maybe Esme didn’t know anyone’s real names, only that they were using fake names, and guessed that they would change their names again before we would ever meet them.”
“But why then call her father the king of Denmark? Is Edmond Desmarais Neil’s brother? Why would either one of them be king? Wouldn’t this be like Prince Albert and Prince Philip? If you married the queen, you don’t become the king! You stay a prince; your son is the one that becomes the next king.”