13

Warning! Meltdown Imminent

A week later, the week before they were scheduled to leave for Lebreima with their grandparents, neither of them had packed a thing. At the end of a very wet and dreary Saturday, Lottica came into the room to find Nick, as usual, perched in front of the laptop.

Neither of them had packed because Nick had withdrawn again. He seemed paralyzed by indecision. Lottica wanted to yell at him, to get a life, or a few lives—at least one she could easily slip in and out of.

More than ever, she felt like a fictional character. Like Cinderella or Snow White with her grandmother taking the role of the cruel stepmother. Plus, she’d discovered a secret treasure, the mysterious Kareima gemstone, and now a seemingly sinister caped villain was stalking them.

It was indeed becoming a strange storybook existence that made Lottica wonder if she was losing touch with reality. Especially since she’d had a bit of a run in with the caped man Nick had warned her about.

That had happened the day after their disastrous talk with their grandparents. Lottica had been walking from the school bus stop back to her grandparents’ house when she noticed him. He stood waiting at her corner in a dark suit with a long black cape. The cape didn’t seem ridiculously out of place on the cool, damp afternoon. Lottica thought it functioned as a reasonable overcoat. It didn’t make him villainous or superhero-like.

The man was tall, with dark, serious eyes. He wore a fedora tightly capping his silver hair, and around his neck hung the striking red gemstone on a thick gold chain that Nick had described. The man, like her grandparents, seemed to belong to a different age. An ancient and regal one.

Lottica did not feel threatened because there were so many kids from the bus roaming about on their way home. As she passed by him, the caped man regarded her quietly. Lottica didn’t say anything, but as she was about to turn a corner, she felt the intensity of his gaze.

And she couldn’t help herself. “Nice cape. Getting ready for Halloween?”

"Kareima lumeinatus de Lebreima," he replied.

Lottica stopped in her tracks. She turned to look back at him. “What did you say?”

"Kareima lumeinatus de Lebreima," he repeated.

Lottica was dumbstruck as the caped man strode to her. Raising the brilliant red stone from around his neck and brandishing it like a sacred talisman, he whispered a heavily accented warning: "Lebreima is no place for you or your brother. Just as it was no place for your parents."

Then he strode away, his black cape flapping like an evil-omened bird.

When she’d told Nick about the encounter that night, he listened intently, but did not get too excited about it, which Lottica found a bit unusual. She’d half expected her brother to tell her to get her stuff together so that they could run away that very night. Instead, but he simply said, "Stay away from him in the future." Then he’d turned back to the laptop.

For the last week, that was what Nick had been like. Come home, log on and almost completely ignore her. That was why Lottica wanted to scream in frustration. In a week, they‘d be leaving for Lebreima. Maybe forever. They should be doing something.

But, they weren’t.

Lottica decided she needed to take more drastic action. She pulled a suitcase from under her bed and plopped it loudly on her bed. She wrenched open a dresser drawer. The near emptiness of it gave her a pang of misgiving. So much had been destroyed in the explosion and fire. So little of it had been replaced. And she wasn’t thinking about her clothes. She wondered how one filled a drawer back up, a suitcase, a twelve-year-old with good feelings and memories?

Lottica slammed the drawer shut. Nick finally looked up from the laptop. "What's going on?"

"I'm not going to Lebreima!" Lottica said fiercely. "We've got a week left and you're just sitting there staring into cyberspace."

"Hey, you stare into outer space for your kicks.”

Lottica concentrated on not going ballistic. She unclenched her fists and turned away to reopen the slammed drawer. She began throwing things into the suitcase.

Nick watched her for a few moments and then said quite casually, "We don't really have time for that now, Lottica."

At his calm, don’t-go-all-crazy-on-me tone, Lottica took the balled up socks she was holding and threw them at him. "Why? Do we have a ton of time to waste? Or are you trying to get as many minutes on the internet before we go to Lebreima where we'll be lucky if they even have wi-fi or cell service? We leave in a week, and you’ve gone all introverted on me."

Nick sighed. “You need to unpack and put the suitcase away. We have real work to do."

"Work? What are you talking about? What do we have to work on?"

He looked at her as if the answer was as obvious as the rain that had been falling all day long and coolly answered, "Our costumes."