Amulet Keepers Read online

  An hour later, descending through light rain into their final approach, they found out.

  Thick drops of something red hit the cockpit windows, staining them pink as it mixed with the wind and water. The engines began to choke on the stuff, and the big plane bucked like a spooked horse. The captain wrestled with the U-shaped yoke, his knuckles turning white as the windows began to turn red.

  “Pull up! Pull up!” shouted the copilot, but Hadley ignored him. There’d be no pulling up now: too late for that. They were landing, one way or the other.

  “As a precaution due to extreme conditions, we have to ask you to prepare for a potential crash landing.” The announcement sounded through the cabin and cut into people’s headphones. A thunderous noise filled the air as questions were shouted and a hundred urgent conversations began. The announcement continued, momentarily drowning it all out: “Please make sure your seat belts are fastened securely and your window shades are closed.”

  Ren had, quite possibly, been the only one paying attention when the flight crew went over emergency procedures pre-flight. Even so, it was hard to remember all the details with her pulse suddenly pounding wildly in her ears. She reached over and flicked down the plastic shade, catching one more glimpse of the rosy morning light.

  She looked at Alex. “This is bad,” she shouted over the frantic voices filling the cabin.

  Alex looked over and agreed wordlessly, his wide-open eyes and slowly bobbing head doing the talking.

  The plane bucked again, sending a flight attendant who’d been trying to demonstrate the crash-landing position into a crash landing on her backside. Half a dozen passengers screamed as if they’d just witnessed a murder.

  Others had already assumed the position, determined to ride this thing out, for better or worse, with their heads between their knees. The burly businessman next to them was sitting bolt upright and releasing odd, high-pitched yelps as he began to hyperventilate.

  “Should we, you know?” shouted Alex. His voice cracked on the last part, giving away his fear. He mimed assuming the crash-landing position, raising both fists up toward his ears and ducking his head down between them.

  Ren felt a sudden, desperate need to know how close they were to the ground. She cracked open the shade, noticing, as if from a distance, that her hands were shaking. In the two-inch gap, she saw a line of red briefly streak across the pink background.

  “Oh, please no,” she murmured. The small sound was swallowed up by the hysteria all around her, but Alex had seen her reaction. He followed her eyes to the window as she reached over and flicked up the shade.

  They both saw it now. The morning light was too rosy — and too dark. Two more long tendrils of red snaked across the surface of the window.

  They’d heard about this: red rain in London. Some people said it was blood; others said it couldn’t possibly be. It had always turned back to regular rain in the end — and the few samples people had managed to collect had turned right back with it.

  Magic, Ren knew, was always hard to pin down.

  BOOOOM!

  A sound like artillery roared from the massive jet engine on the opposite wing. Whatever was falling out there, the plane didn’t like it one bit. The engines on both wings began to groan and shake. A sound like a dying giant filled the cabin.

  “We can’t land in this stuff!” shouted Alex.

  Ren looked down. Through the red haze, she could see the ground now. Rooftops whizzed by below, like a city of dollhouses. The houses ended. The airport was just up ahead, the slick, red runway …

  “We’re about to!” she called back.

  One final announcement rang out, shouted and amplified but barely audible over the commotion: “Crash-landing positions!”

  Ren’s head was swirling with panic and confusion as she buried it in her lap.

  What was falling out there?

  Would it turn back to regular rain?

  The plane was shaking so violently it seemed on the verge of flying apart.

  Would it be too late when it did?

  She laced her fingers behind her head, pictured her parents, and braced for impact.

  The wheels were down and the time was up. Captain Hadley surveyed the scene ahead of him. The wind whipped the red rain across the cockpit windows as he stared at the runway with wide-open, unblinking eyes. The white lines had turned pink and the lights glowed red, but he thought he could see them well enough.

  “What am I looking at?” he yelled into the radio. It wasn’t an idle question. If it was just red rain, that was one thing. He’d landed in rain more times than he could count. But if it was what it looked like …

  “Unclassified meteorological phenomenon,” came the reply.

  The copilot spat out a reply of his own: “Unclassified, my —”

  “Not now!” barked Hadley, cutting him off. “Eyes on the instruments!”

  The plane touched down with a heavy bang. A sick hiss rose as the wheels met the tarmac and the red liquid. That much speed and power and weight would vaporize water, the captain knew, effectively taking it out of the equation. But this seemed to be a stickier, trickier substance.

  The wheels burned and hissed along the runway, and the plane began to turn. Captain Hadley got a sick, empty feeling in his gut as the big airliner went into a skid.

  He took one last look over at his copilot. The man was folded over in crash-landing position and screaming into his own knees. So Hadley was on his own, then: on his own and in charge of the lives of hundreds. He let out a long, slow breath.

  He had the wings on his collar, and he had the responsibility.

  Instead of a death grip on the control yoke, he forced himself to take a light one as the plane veered to the side. Muscle it and you’ll end up upside down, he told himself. Instead of squinting his eyes half shut, he opened them. Look. Watch.

  He made himself breathe. He made himself think.

  Don’t think of it as water; think of it as mud.

  The massive plane corrected, the nose began to straighten out slightly. Still too much of an angle, still heading toward the edge of the runway, but with every foot that passed, the massive plane slowed just a little more.

  The captain stayed calm. He remembered his training and, against all odds, he brought the big bird home to its nest. The plane came to a halt, slightly sideways and a stone’s throw from the edge of the runway.

  Safe.

  Alex and Ren stumbled up the Jetway on wobbly knees. As soon as they arrived in the terminal, they saw Luke up ahead amid the scrum of passengers and airline personnel. Alex looked out the big glass windows at the rain coming down. Just regular rain now. It had turned over during the plane’s slow taxi to the gate. Outside, the last pinkish reminders of their ordeal were washing away.

  His head was buzzing and his nerves were shot. He jumped slightly as the loudspeaker came on above him. A crisp female voice: “Flight 768 from New York, now arriving.” The shaken passengers stopped to listen. Perhaps there’d be some explanation? “Welcome to London!” the voice concluded brightly.

  Alex turned to Ren and they just shook their heads. Even after weeks of widespread weirdness, the world of the living was still firmly in the denial stage. Ren looked away first, and Alex wondered if part of her was still in that stage, too.

  They caught up with Luke, but a man in an airline uniform was already talking to him. “And of course we are particularly concerned that our first-class passengers not be alarmed by this fluke occurrence,” the man purred in a posh British accent.

  “It’s cool, bro,” said Luke. “I slept through most of it anyway.”

  The man smiled politely, slightly baffled. “You … slept …”

  “What was that stuff?” asked Ren, busting in.

  The man looked over, straightening his red blazer.

  “It was blood, wasn’t it?” said Alex.

  The man looked over at Luke as if to say: You know these two?

  Luke shrugged. “He�
��s my cousin. They were in coach.”

  The man gave a quick nod. That explains it. “We think it was algae,” he said without much conviction.

  “Algae?” said Alex. “Seriously?”

  “Yes,” sniffed the man, “an aerial bloom of red algae. It’s quite common at sea.”

  “It’s quite common in the sea,” corrected Ren.

  The man looked down at her but quickly looked away, as shifty as a dog caught pulling food off the counter. A large Australian standing nearby broke in: “That was no bloomin’ algae!”

  “Come on, let’s go,” said Alex. He knew they weren’t going to get any real information out of this tall red mouthpiece.

  Ren nodded and Luke loped along with them as they left the two men to argue over aerial bloom versus aerial blood.

  Alex looked over at his cousin. Luke was a year and a half older, half a foot taller, and infinitely more muscled. “Did you really sleep through all that?”

  “Most of it.” Luke shrugged. “Killer workout yesterday. Totally wiped. Sorry I missed the algae, though.”

  Alex’s jaw dropped open. “Do you seriously think that was red algae?”

  “That’s what the man said,” said Luke.

  Alex looked over at Ren, expecting her to mirror his disappointment.

  “Well,” she said. “I heard that sometimes, like, frogs and things get sucked up in funnel clouds and then fall back to earth. Maybe …”

  Alex just shook his head. He expected the airline to be in denial, not his friends. They headed for the passport control room. A big sign near the entrance read: UK BORDER.

  “It’s cool that you can have a border in a building,” said Luke. “But I guess you can have a building on a border so …”

  He trailed off and a quick smile flickered across Alex’s face. Family spy or not, he sometimes got a kick out of his cousin.

  “Look at the lines,” said Ren.

  Alex sized them up. “Not too bad.”

  “Exactly,” said Ren, flapping a London guidebook toward him. “The book says they’re usually huge: ‘Pack one snack for the international flight, and another for the passport control lines.’ ”

  “That’s because we’re the only ones daft enough to come here now,” said a voice behind them.

  The three friends turned around and saw an older couple. The man who’d spoken was wearing a sweater vest and a friendly smile. “No offense,” he added.

  “Because of the algae?” said Luke.

  The man and woman both gave him patient looks, trying not to look pitying. “Not just that,” said the man. “Graves been robbed, people gone missing …”

  “Yeah, we heard about some of that,” Alex began, pointing between Ren and himself with one thumb and leaving Luke out of it.

  He was going to say more, but the man’s face clouded over and the smile fell away. “Our little …” he began. “Our little nephew, Robbie …”

  The woman patted her husband on the back and took over. “Our nephew up and vanished. Lives with my sister on Swain’s Lane. We don’t think he’s … like the others … He’s an energetic boy, you know, probably just off on some adventure.”

  Now Alex was the one trying not to look pitying. Before his mom had used the spells, he’d spent most of his life deathly ill. He knew better than almost anyone what it was like to put on a brave face, to pretend things were better than they were.

  “So you’re here to help?”

  “Help look for him!” said the man, stuffing some cheer back into his voice. “Get out there and beat the bushes!”

  Alex hadn’t heard the phrase before, but he liked it. That’s what he was there for, too.

  “Where are your parents, by the way?” said the woman, scanning what was left of the line in front of them. She had her hair up in a bun, wore a floral dress, and looked like everyone’s aunt ever.

  Luke began to say something, but Ren cut him off. “I’m supposed to call them!”

  “Oh, that’s good,” said the woman. “They’ll pick you up?”

  Alex and Ren just smiled. The woman took a quick look at the group: three different shades of hair, three different tones of skin. Alex was half-Egyptian with shaggy black hair and tan skin; Luke looked like a mini Viking; and Ren fell somewhere in between, brown-haired, brown-eyed, and pint-sized.

  “Well,” said the lady, pulling something from her handbag. “If you happen to see our Robbie, at a playground or a McDonald’s or the like …”

  Even before she unfolded the paper, Alex knew it would be a Missing Person flyer. His heart sank when he saw it. In the color photo in the center, the boy’s face was flushed and smiling, and he was holding up a third-place trophy with a soccer ball on top. Alex noticed the blue eyes and light brown hair first. Then he noticed that one of the boy’s eyebrows was a little higher than the other, giving his face a slightly off-kilter look. He looked like the kind of healthy, normal kid Alex had always wanted to be.

  He looked up at the woman, sure of two things: that he would recognize this boy if he saw him, and that he never would see him. Not alive anyway. She pressed the paper toward him, and he couldn’t help but take a step back.

  Ren stepped forward and took it. “We’ll keep an eye out!” she said. She shot Alex a look as she turned to put the paper in her carry-on bag.

  Alex looked down at the tile floor, trying to pull it together. Death, magic, evil … All the things they thought they’d put to rest in New York were here waiting for them in London. The missing boy gave a face to a familiar thought: Is this all my fault, just like New York? Does me being here help — or make things worse?

  He turned to Ren, but she was busy getting her passport and customs form ready. They were at the front of the line.

  He handed the border control agent his passport. The man leaned forward in his chair and looked behind Alex. “You here by yourself, then?” he said, sitting back and eyeballing the passport.

  “With her,” said Alex, pointing to Ren in the next line.

  The man frowned. “Purpose of visit?”

  Alex rattled off the answer he’d prepared: that Dr. Ernst Todtman at the Met had sent them to intern with Dr. Priya Aditi at the British Museum.

  “What kind of doctors?” said the official.

  “Egyptologists,” said Alex.

  The man looked at him carefully, paused, then broke into a broad smile. “Who on earth would make up a story like that?” he said, handing him his passport. “Welcome to the United Kingdom.”

  The last one through, Alex joined the other two.

  “We just crossed the border,” said Luke, still amused by the concept.

  “You’re an international athlete now,” said Alex.

  “Oh yeah!” said Luke, puffing out his broad chest a bit more as the three walked straight into an airport in crisis.

  The long lines they’d expected entering the country were on the other side, desperately trying to leave London. Security lines snaked back and forth, threatening to stretch out the sliding doors. Electronic boards flashed delays and cancellations after the mysterious squall. Raised voices and wailing infants echoed off the terminal’s high ceilings.

  Ren took a modest clump of British bills from her pocket and stopped by an airport kiosk. Alex surveyed the unfamiliar candy choices — Aero, Wispa, Double Decker — as Ren bought a newspaper that had caught her eye.

  She handed it over and Alex read the huge front-page headline for himself: “ROYAL ROBBERY: Crown Jewels Stolen!” Below that, in type only slightly smaller: “A Dozen Priceless Pieces Taken from Tower of London.” Next to it, there was a picture of a massive, jewel-encrusted crown.

  The familiar phrases popped out at Alex as he skimmed the story: “time locks disabled … alarms failed to sound … cameras turned toward the wall.” It was just like the day the Lost Spells had been stolen from the Met. The day the Spells had been stolen and his mom had disappeared.

  He flipped to the next page, and the picture stopped him
cold. It was a hand, in extreme close-up, reaching up to disable one last camera. The hand was wrapped tightly in linen. He understood immediately that it was a mummy. But he’d never seen ancient linen look so clean before …

  He held the paper open for Ren to see. She nodded. Was she thinking the same thing he was? He wanted to ask but …

  “Got to hand it to that guy, huh?” said Luke, leaning in for a look of his own. “Won’t be getting any fingerprints off him!”

  They ignored his joke and exchanged questions with their eyes. Luke noticed. “If I didn’t know better, I’d think you two didn’t always want me around,” he said.

  “That’s crazy,” said Alex as Ren took the paper and stuffed it into her carry-on bag.

  “Well, don’t sweat it, cuz,” said Luke. “I’ll be out of your hair in no time.” He pointed up at a sign that read UNDERGROUND, with a stylized train logo next to it. “Taking the train to the training.”

  They swung by baggage claim on the way out. Ren wrestled her perfectly packed wheelie bag off the carousel, Alex fished a heavy leather suitcase off the belt and grunted as he thunked it to the floor, and Luke plucked a large duffel bag free as if he were lifting a candy bar. Not that he ate candy bars.

  Then the three wheeled, walked, and lugged their way out of the airport. For a while the signs for the trains and ground transport were right next to each other, but eventually the arrows pointed in opposite directions.

  “Where are you two staying, again?” said Luke, holding up his phone, ready to punch in the info. “I’m supposed to ch — I mean, it would be cool to hang out.”

  Alex and Ren exchanged quick glances.

  “Umm, well,” said Alex.

  “Umwell?” said Luke. “Is that, like, a hotel?”

  Alex couldn’t tell if he was joking.

  “Alex Sennefer?” came a gruff voice. “Renata Duran?”

  The friends turned around and saw a very large man with a surprisingly small flat cap pulled down tightly on his large shaved head.

  “Uh, yeah?” said Alex. “That’s us.”

  “Thought it looked like you,” said the man, holding up a piece of paper and looking from it to Alex and Ren. “ ’At’s you, all right.”