The Chalice of Immortality (8 page)

Back at the hotel, Nick checked on his father. He still looked very, very sick. Nick wound up the music box and let it play, hoping that wherever his father was in the in-between world of the spell, he could hear it and be comforted.

As the music box softly played, Nick started thinking about the clouds he saw in Liberace's room. Why would a Magickeeper do such a thing? Ever since he'd arrived to live with his Russian family, all the Magickeepers had made it very clear that ordinary humans should never see their magic revealed. Suddenly, Nick experienced a flash of insight.

After he came to live at the Winter Palace, he tried to remember if he'd ever had visions or sensations of magic before. Sometimes, as a little kid, he used to get a feeling when something good was going to happen—like if he was going to hit a home run or nail a nollie on his skateboard. But that wasn't the same thing.

Sometimes, when he was a kid, he also would get a feeling in the pit of his stomach when something bad was going to happen. The first time he did an ollie on his skateboard, he had a very,
very
bad feeling he was going to fall flat on his face—and he was right. And just before he broke his arm while riding his board, he had a feeling he was going to smack the pavement. He also had a recurring bad feeling on report card days. But that wasn't the same thing as Gazing either.

Gazing meant he could see the past, the present, and the future. But most of the time, it was a jumble. He once told Isabella it was as if someone had made a movie. Then they had cut up the film, thrown the pieces up in the air like in a game of 52 Pickup, and spliced them all together again so the movie was a mess. The final film made no sense. It was out of order. That was what Gazing was like. Theo said he had to Gaze without expectation, with a pure heart and only good intentions, in order to see truly and accurately.

Sometimes, when Shadowkeepers were involved, Gazing gave Nick a horrible headache or made him feel sick to his stomach—so sick he couldn't breathe. But other times, he just felt dizzy or confused. This was one of those times.

Nick put his hands on the bed and concentrated. Then he felt himself flying. He was in the clouds.

They weren't painted clouds like those in Magickeeper murals. They were real clouds. He heard a loud noise—he was in a propeller plane, he decided, noisy, like one of Howard Hughes's old planes. Nick tried to steady himself, but the plane was…spinning? Clouds were swirling by him, faster and faster. He felt cold, and his teeth started chattering.

He swooped through the clouds. “Whoa!” he called out. “What's going on?” His stomach did flip-flops like he was on a roller coaster.

Spinning, spinning, spinning. Something was wrong. The plane was nose-diving. Spinning, spinning. Nick fell to his knees. He wanted this vision to stop, but he needed it to go on, because he was certain it had to do with the chalice.

And then—he saw a scarf fluttering. A white scarf, fluttering in the wind.

Nick blinked his eyes, and as fast as the vision had come to him, it stopped. He was back in his bedroom with his father. He was so dizzy that he had to wait a minute before trying to walk. Finally, his head stopped swirling.

“I'll be back, Dad,” he whispered as he left the room and ran down the hall.

“Damian!” he called out. “Damian!” He looked in one room and then another before heading straight to Damian's study and bursting through the door.

His cousin looked up from a book he was reading. “What is it? Is it your father?”

Nick shook his head. “I had a vision. I know who has the chalice! Or at least, I
think
I do.”

“Who?”

“Well, that's the thing. I don't know her name. But it was a woman I saw in Lady Daphne's shop. Both times I was in the shop, I felt someone staring at me. This woman—she was very…mysterious. She always wore a white scarf wrapped around her neck—kind of old-fashioned, I guess. And I always
felt
her staring at me. I can't explain it, but you know what I mean. I just knew. I saw a scarf—her scarf—in my vision. She knows something, Damian.”

He paused for a breath, realizing he had said it all in one burst.

“Oh, and she was…she has something to do with
clouds
. Airplanes.”

Damian narrowed his eyes. “A jet?”

“No. This was different. The planes in the clouds were like stunt planes. I heard propellers. I felt the air on my face. The scarf floated in the air, Damian.”

His cousin pointed an index finger toward his bookshelves. A book plucked itself from the shelf and floated through the air like a lazy leaf drifting in autumn. It landed on his desk and opened itself to a blank page. Damian uttered something, and ink began seeping out of the air onto the page like an oil spill before coming together in letters, and then a photograph.

“Is
this
the woman from the shop?”

Nick stared down. The woman had short, sandy-blond hair, freckles, a slight gap in her smile, and the same tanned, wind-burned skin of the woman from Lady Daphne's. Nick nodded, amazed. “I mean, she looks younger there, but that's her. Who is she?”

“This, Nick, is Amelia Earhart—her disappearance is only one of the greatest mysteries in history. We must go see Theo. He'll find her in one of his crystal balls. Come. We have no time to spare.”

***

The Hawaiian Islands, March 18, 1937

Amelia Earhart stared dejectedly out the window of her hotel. The waters off the coast of Hawaii were a shade of blue that she had admired from the sky with a longing she could not quite describe.

She sighed. Her Lockheed Electra was going to need repairs and modifications, and for now, she would have to settle for a view of the beautiful waters from land. The waves swirled with white before crashing against coral rocks in a pounding surf over and over. Grass in a rich emerald shade covered the hotel lawn like a carpet. Palm trees swayed in the breeze. But here she was, behind a window, and she could only
see
the breeze, not feel it.

She walked away from the window and sat down on her bed. If she told the truth to herself, she felt like a prisoner in a glass house. A bird in a cage.

An adventurer at heart, the female aviator had become less a pilot in some ways and more an icon.

To pay for her flights and her planes, she endorsed suitcases. She had been involved with choosing their design—she wasn't going to endorse just anything! She also had a clothing line. Young ladies aspired to look like her, dress like her. She had the angular, lean looks of a tomboy, and she dressed simply and effectively, with clean lines. Now, Amelia Earhart was a “look.” Wherever she went, people recognized her and wanted her autograph. She couldn't recall the last time she had been in public and not found herself approached by throngs of people.

Her husband, publisher G. P. Putnam, was brilliant. She gave him that. He was the one to line up these deals that enabled her to get her plane in the air. He was a master manager. And their marriage, admittedly a mixture of business and convenience, had turned into a fond and loving bond. He had ensured her celebrity status, which meant her flights into the history books were now well funded. She no longer had to worry about being unable to afford to fly. She had flown across the Atlantic Ocean, in fact, and across North America—and back again. She had accomplished things that women of her generation could now hope to do, instead of being confined to kitchens and households. Amelia liked to think that somewhere, on farms or in small towns, little girls who wanted to fly planes could believe now that they could—that the skies and the air and the freedom they afforded were possible.

But all of this came with a price. And increasingly, her celebrity status made Amelia feel like the price was her soul.

She felt as if she had no escape.

She flopped back on the bed and stared at the ceiling. She shut her eyes. There was nothing like being in the sky, like piloting a plane through clouds and sky. Nothing like it at all.

Flying was a gift. Over her years in the air, she had seen the sun rising on the ocean and flocks of birds taking flight from shore. She had seen the seas capped with white waves, and the mosaic of green and blue changing colors over reefs.

She had seen a whale breaching on the horizon. She had seen fields of corn and wheat stretching for miles across the middle of America, and she finally understood what the song meant by “amber waves of grain.” She had watched America's heartlands undulate with the movement of crops in the wind. She had felt the absolute
freedom
of the skies. It was where she was happiest.

Amelia heard a knock on her hotel room door. She got up and opened it, greeting her navigator, Fred Noonan.

“Any news?” she asked.

He shook his head, grim-faced. “At least two more days, Amelia.”

“Darn it all!” she snapped. She saw the circles beneath his eyes and immediately wished she had bit her tongue. “I'm sorry, Fred. I know it's not your fault. It's just so frustrating. I know you're just as upset as I am. Are you hungry, Fred? Shall we go downstairs for dinner?”

He nodded, and the two of them went down to the dining room. It was very late—the kitchen was almost closing—and at their request, they were shown to a table at the very back of the restaurant where they could eat in relative anonymity.

After their meals were brought, Amelia picked at her food, pushing it around with her fork. “I hate being grounded.”

“Me, too.”

Amelia suddenly looked him in the eyes. “Do you ever wish for simpler times, Fred? When flying was just flying?”

He nodded. “More than you can know, Amelia. More than you can know.”

“I miss the days when I was anonymous.”

They sat there, the two of them, and Amelia was certain Fred understood how
trapped
she felt. She watched as busboys went home. She and Fred paid their bill, and Fred said, “Since we clearly won't be taking off tomorrow, shall we have a nightcap?”

She nodded, and the two of them walked into the hotel bar. The bartender grinned at them. “I know who you are,” he said. He reached out a hand across the bar. “My name is Goga.” He shook hands with Amelia and Fred.

“Goga?” Amelia asked. “That's an unusual name.”

“It is a good Russian name.” He smiled. “But I tell
most
people my name is Greg. And I hide my accent.”

“I rather like your accent,” she said. She and Fred ordered drinks.

“I know what troubles you both.”

Fred laughed. “Ah, you fancy yourself a mind reader! Well, the whole island knows we're grounded here for repairs on our plane.”

“No.” Goga looked all around. The bar was completely empty. “I mean your
real
troubles. The troubles in your heart.” Goga tapped his chest.

“So you
are
a mind reader, then,” Amelia teased.

“Yes.” He said it plainly, and Amelia was startled. This man was serious.

“You,” he nodded at Fred, “wish you could run away from your second marriage. Wish you could fly all the time. Wish you didn't need money so desperately. And you,” he nodded toward Amelia, “you wish to escape the trickiest thing in the world—the one thing that is impossible to escape.”

“What's that?”

“You wish to escape
yourself
. Not the real Amelia. Not the girlhood Amelia, who loved to read and play the banjo. You wish to escape the Amelia who is owned by the world. You wish to just fly.”

Amelia looked at the Russian. He had magnetic blue eyes, and he was very, very solemn in his pronouncements. It was as if he had really looked into her heart and soul.

“I can help you,” he said in a firm voice.

“How can you do that?” she whispered, fascinated—and a little frightened—by the conversation.

“What if I said I could make you disappear? Make you and your plane invisible so you could spend the rest of your life flying? And no one would know. You could go where you wanted with complete freedom. You, Amelia, could go and hunt for another whale breaching on the horizon.” She jumped slightly, startled that Goga really
did
seem to know her thoughts.

Fred looked at the man suspiciously. “You must be nipping at the bottle, Goga.”

“I never touch the stuff.”

Suddenly, Goga disappeared. One minute, he was there with Amelia and Fred. The next, he was gone.

“Where did he go?” Fred asked.

Goga rematerialized on the other side of the darkened room.

“Here I am.”

Amelia turned her head in the direction of the voice and stared at Goga. “How…how…?”

But the words had barely escaped her lips when he reappeared back behind the bar.

“There must be a trap door,” Fred said.

“Come, find it.” Goga laughed, throwing his arms wide as if to show that there was nothing up his sleeves.