Read Online Kingdom Keepers VII by Ridley Pearson - Free Book Online Page B

would think it had been only a matter of days.
    “It’s Wayne,” Finn whispers harshly, sounding ready to cry.
    “It’s happening,” says Philby.

T HREE FIGURES SKIRT THE LIGHTS , moving between the eighteen-wheel trucks parked side by side, backed into the shipping docks. Heard over the groan of straining gears and hissing air brakes, cicadas shrill in the damp night air. Trucks come and go at a rate of more than one a minute. Weary drivers stroll to and from the dispatcher’s office, some smoking, some yammering in Spanish into cell phones. Nearly all sport tattoos or a potbelly or both.
    The smallest of the three figures, a female form, stops the others, peering out into the painful glare of the bluish arc lights, which blast the loading dock with artificial daylight. The woman shields her eyes from the brilliance as she squints to read the paperwork clipped to the wall behind the open truck. A pair of black leather boots appears from within the truck trailer, shocking her back into the shadows. As the booted man exits into the warehouse through a doorway of hanging plastic slats, another takes his place, pushing a trolley loaded with wire baskets stuffed full of live chickens. The worker is just a boy, seventeen at the oldest, covered in sweat. Stuck to the sweat are chicken feathers. There are more feathers in his black hair; one appears glued to one earlobe like an earring.
    “Boy!” the woman calls softly. The light reveals her skin as dark cocoa, her hair as matted dreadlocks. Tattoos of tears and ancient pictographs adorn her rounded cheeks. As the boy looks around distractedly and spots her, the woman focuses on him intensely.
    Like the twisted, gnarled roots ofAt first he looks confused. He stands still like a doll waiting to be played with. The woman calls him to her with a curling finger. He walks toward her. 4 He moves reluctantly, straining with each step as he abandons his cart of clucking fowl. His hands fly to his throat and begin clawing at his flesh, as if trying to eradicate an impossibly stubborn itch—or to get at some unwanted force within. Suddenly, he collapses. The woman admires her work, and then, with a sharp hiss, extends her hand toward the sufferer. He falls eerily still as she speaks through her cupped hand into his ear. The woman raises her victim to his feet, where he stands, somewhat at attention. His eyes are devoid of any human life or expression. 5
    The boy-doll nods into space like an obedient child, a boy soldier. He returns to the milky plastic curtain that screens the loading dock from the warehouse and pokes his head inside. He comes back out, looking left and right. He nods again.
    The woman struggles to climb up onto the high dock, but the biggest of the three figures hoists her effortlessly, like a mother cat with a kitten. Behind her follows a robed woman, and finally a creature—neither man nor ape. More a bull with giant wings and a gorilla’s body. They hurry into the truck trailer and the boy follows behind with the trolley.
    “The manifest,” says a man’s voice, “lists the destination as Long Beach, south of Los Angeles.”
    * * *
    The voice snaps Finn’s attention away from the flat-panel screen, away from the events on the loading dock that he’s been watching, and back into the luxurious private jet carrying him and the other Keepers from Orlando to Burbank.
    “So, let’s talk about what we know and don’t know,” Brad says.
    “Let’s,” Maybeck quips. Of all the Keepers, Maybeck has the most difficulty with Brad—and the feeling is obviously mutual. Brad tolerates Maybeck’s sarcasm and cynicism for the sake of team harmony and because his bravado at times provides the leadership necessary for the group to tackle dangerous situations. Youthful arrogance has its place.
    “What we know is this: the Evil Queen and Chernabog survived the tunnels. Obviously, Tia Dalma is present as well. Three years ago she performed a ceremony at the temple