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  Toy Story characters © Disney Enterprises, Inc./Pixar Animation Studios

  Winnie the Pooh characters based on the “Winnie the Pooh” works by A. A. Milne and E. H. Shepard

  If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this “stripped” book.

  Copyright © 2023 by Page One, Inc.

  All rights reserved. Published by Disney • Hyperion, an imprint of Buena Vista Books, Inc. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. For information address Disney • Hyperion, 77 West 66th Street, New York, New York 10023.

  First Hardcover Edition, April 2014

  First Paperback Edition, March 2015

  New Disney • Hyperion Paperback Edition, February 2024

  New Disney • Hyperion eBook Edition, February 2024

  Designed by Joann Hill

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Control Number for Hardcover Edition:

  2014501383

  Paperback ISBN: 978-1-368-04631-2

  eBook ISBN: 978-1-368-06783-6

  Visit www.DisneyBooks.com

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  A Note from the Author

  Epigraph

  About this Book

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  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Preview of Kingdom Keepers: Inheritance: The Shimmer

  About the Author

  This, the final installment of the Kingdom Keepers, is dedicated to all the hardworking Disney Cast Members and Imagineers who provide the rest of us with boundless entertainment in the parks, on the ships, and on our television and movie screens. I also offer a metaphoric tip of my hat to those who are right now dreaming of things yet to come. We can’t wait!

  No dedication would be complete without thanking you, the reader, the Insider, who has come along with me on this ride. What a thrill it has been and continues to be. More to come.

  Ridley

  11/12/13

  St. Louis, Missouri

  Have nothing to do with the fruitless deeds of darkness, but rather expose them.

  —Ephesians 5:11

  ABOUT THIS BOOK

  Somewhere around the time Kingdom Keepers IV: Power Play was published, I was thrilled to discover that the books in the series were being read multiple times—not just twice, but six, nine, even eleven times!

  As a writer, I’m an outliner—I want to know where my story (and the series) is going before I get behind the wheel. Now, I don’t always strictly follow this outline; but if I don’t, I modify it as I go to allow me to reach a satisfactory ending.

  In writing the final book—Kingdom Keepers VII—I faced a difficult decision. Write the novel as outlined, or—and here was the tricky part—seek input from my readers about how the series should end. Eventually, I became obsessed with the idea that Kingdom Keepers like me should be able to direct the conclusion of the series.

  After months of conference calls, emails, and planning, Disney hired an e-book publisher, Coliloquy, to create a free app and website called Kingdom Keepers Insider. The idea was that I would post an outline for a new chapter each week, and Kingdom Keepers Insiders would vote on direction, setting, and character. I would then customize that week’s chapter, post it, and start the process all over again. I also asked Insiders to write in response to specific challenges. If we felt the writing was strong enough, I would edit the excerpt and place it in the novel. My readers would literally help me write the book.

  It worked!

  The first day we opened the Kingdom Keepers Insider app/website, we had 1,000 people register—three times what I expected for the entire run. That week we had more than 700 fiction entries. By day three, we had crossed 5,000 registered users. Ten days in, we passed 16,000. On one Friday night in May, we received more than 1,700 fiction entries responding to my request for help with a certain passage. That is, college, high-school, and middle-school students were staying home to write on a Friday night!

  Soon, we’d reached 50,000 registered users and over 150,000 regular visitors. We had people from all over the world and all fifty states voting on the direction of my outline and submitting writing pieces.

  The result is Kingdom Keepers VII: The Insider. In these pages you will occasionally notice the KK logo. This denotes the start of an Insider’s contribution. The contributed passage is followed (and closed) with a number. At the bottom of the page you’ll see the Insider’s User_Name. Because the Insider environment is anonymous, we didn’t know who these wonderful writers were. Only as the project neared its end did Disney contact the “winners.” Some of these writers and their parents agreed to use their real names, and these are listed at the back of the book.

  Together, we crowdsourced the writing of a novel! It was an exciting, always entertaining, never-a-dull-moment experience that we may repeat on a future project. Thanks to each and every Insider. There were so many incredible writing pieces submitted. The choice was never easy. Everyone who contributed helped “raise the bar” and improve the contributions week to week. It was as if we were engaged in a six-month writing seminar. I hope the Insiders learned as much as I did. Learning as a writer never stops!

  Thank you to my readers, and especially the Insiders, for thrilling to the stories as much as I do, for telling your friends and families about the books, and keeping the Keepers alive! I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it again: I have the best (writers!) readers an author could ask for.

  Your always,

  Ridley Pearson

  Hailey, Idaho

  Christmas 2013

  In late 2020 I was asked by Disney Books to update the Kingdom Keepers series to reflect changes in the parks and the Disney Cruise Line. Over the next two years I rewrote all seven books, glad to be the recipient of the gift of time. If you are reading this book, it is likely you have already read the six earlier rewritten editions. I hope you enjoy the new twists and turns to the series. It has been such a pleasure to revisit the novels and their characters. I hope you, the reader, feel as I do!

  Yours always,

  Ridley Pearson

  Paris, France

  2022

  1

  SHE HAS BEEN CALLED MANY THINGS: the Black Mamba, Calypso, Tia Dalma.

  The scratching of rat claws on the stone floor beneath her bare feet is accompanied by the disturbing squeals of the rodents as they stream past. Consumed by the darkness of the tunnel, Tia Dalma shuffles forward. Her toes stab ahead into the unseen.

  Her stubby fingers feed twine from the ball she carries. Slowly, she plays out the lifeline. The twine ball grows ever smaller. It is the third such one she has knotted, this to the other, in as many days. She has no idea how long it may take for her captors to realize she has escaped. Some spells last forever.

  The string now stretches at least a third of a mile. It winds through the unmarked turns and dead ends of the Devil’s Labyrinth. Carved from caves by an ancient civilization in what is now Mexico, the interconnecting underground passageways might have linked temples or served as burial grounds. They could have offered a safe place to hide from hurricanes. They may have served as death traps for prisoners. Her torch burned out twenty minutes earlier. Though she cannot see in the dark, Tia Dalma is not without her ways. She has her magic, her visions. She can sense Danger, Desire, and Death—the three Ds.

  A looming sense of menace hangs in the air like a putrid stink. Bad things have happened here. Evil stains these walls. Some would fear such a sensation. Tia Dalma warms at the thought. Evil is her comfort zone.

  She is getting close now.

  A slight breeze, fainter than the breath of a bat, flutters the two mole whiskers on the underside of her chin. It tickles her tattooed eyelids. She senses that somewhere nearby something is alive. It might be wolves, snakes, or dragons. It might be the horrid beast with whom she hopes to make contact. She sniffs the air like a bloodhound. Her anticipation heightens.

  The twine uncoils. The ball spins. A whiff of foul breath sends her heart racing. It lives!

  Not daring to release the twine, she stretches to tickle the dark with her pointed purple nails. If she drops the ball things could get bad quickly. Separated from the certainty of survival, a Cajun queen could go mad in such darkness.

  Once again, the odd odor finds her. It wafts from what feels like a pile of stone. She digs carefully.

  The pile comes apart for her. Her pace quickens.

  She gasps. It is not a stone she holds, but something more like a scale. An extremely large scale. A dragon scale, she realizes.

  Tia Dalma howls like a wolf into the dark. Maleficent once possessed the ability to transfigure herself into a dragon. Tia Dalma may have found the Dark Fairy herself. In her mind’s eye she can see the willful boy, Finn Whitman, who trapped and killed the Dark Fairy in these tunnels. In her heyday, Maleficent had been one of the greatest practitioners of dark magic ever.

  Tia Dalma issues a second haunting cry. It reels through the catacombs as a high-pitched complaint. Tinged with pain, anger, grief, and an agonizing uncertainty, the sound echoes her frustration and grief. There should be others here. The Evil Queen. Chernabog. Tia Dalma has made it her mission to collect these villains and rebuild the Overtakers—a group determined to put an end to everything Disney.

  No battle is without losses. No army survives with all its generals intact. Hope is ephemeral, a wisp of smoke from a dwindling candle. Who needs hope when there is hatred to take its place? she wonders. An attack is planned for later this same night. It is to take place many miles to the north; it is set to bring Disneyland to its knees. With the help of Maleficent, it is certain to succeed.

  She continues moving stones in the dark. She searches the rubble and pulls out a length of bone. Setting it aside, she senses it died a horrible death.

  She keeps digging.

  2

  THROUGH THE GLASS DOORS of the Frank G. Wells Building at Walt Disney Studios, an old man waves.

  The security guard approaching the doors recognizes the face from photos on the walls of this same building. He is a Disney Legend. In the courtyard terrace outside are this man’s palm prints alongside his signature on a ceramic-tile pillar. He worked with Walt Disney himself. He helped to design. He was a founding member of a group that would later be called the Imagineers.

  His hair is white as cotton. His ruddy face is revealed as youthful, his eyes full of whimsy. Bert unlocks the door.

  “Good day, Mr. Kresky,” he says.

  “Please, call me Wayne, Bert.”

  The security man looks down at his own name tag just to make sure Wayne Kresky read the tag and did not somehow know who he was. Against the backdrop of a dark night, Wayne’s image shimmers.

  “I need a few minutes in the Archives,” Wayne says.

  “Of course. Yes, sir,” Bert says, unsure what to call the legend.

  Wayne’s face shows no emotion. The shimmering bothers Bert. Why doesn’t the man look normal? he wonders.

  Just then, a string of specks appears over the terrace. They look like snowflakes. But this is Southern California. Fireflies? Hummingbirds?

  The flying things grow large as they come closer. Darker, too. Wayne secures his foot to block the front door.

  “Sir, if you don’t mind, the air-conditioning. I’ll just close that behind you.”

  Wayne looks like someone hit his pause button. And those dots in the sky are not snowflakes. They are not hummingbirds, either. Definitely not fireflies.

  They are brooms. Brooms with buckets hanging from their handles. But the brooms aren’t flying by themselves. They are being held by ghosts. Behind the ghosts, demons and monsters—hollow-eyed, horrid creatures risen from graveyards.

  They arrive too quickly. A demon hovers over the security guard. It looks like a two-thousand-year-old mummy. The demon points the bony nub of one long, skeletal finger at Bert, who suddenly shrinks and moans.

  Bert reaches to grab hold of Wayne Kresky, but his hand swipes through the man.

  It’s not a man at all. Not Wayne Kresky. The man keeping the door open is nothing but a hologram.

  3

  WHY DOES SENIOR PROM HAVE to be held at Disney World? Finn Whitman wonders. In every other way, the evening is perfect. The hotel ballroom is decked out with life-size photographs of high-school seniors set to graduate in three weeks. Colorful crepe-paper streamers and a mirror ball add to the blue and gold lasers that blast from each corner of the cavernous room. A pair of DJs are playing music that evokes massive cheers as the thumping rhythms run nonstop.

  Finn is dancing with Amanda Lockhart. Truth be told, he doesn’t hear the music very well. He feels more like he is a planet and Amanda is the sun. He spins. She throws him glances that cause the heat to rise. Four whole hours of perfection. Whoever came up with the concept of a prom night should be sainted.

  Amanda’s arms clasp Finn around his neck. He holds her waist. They aren’t glued together the way some of the kids dancing are. Instead, there’s a sliver of distance between them. It feels magnetic.

  “This is fun,” Amanda says. She can be the queen of understatement.

  “Not really,” Finn says. He feels her body. A cloud of confusion hangs between them. Amanda seems ready to push away. He speaks in a whisper. “It goes way beyond ‘fun.’ More like ‘amazing.’”

  Amanda pulls closer. For an instant, they hug.

  “Thank you,” she whispers. Her breath, so close to his ear, sends chills down his spine. “I like that you said that.”

  Amanda and her closest friend, Jess, have earned full college scholarships from the Walt Disney Company. So have Finn and the other high-school students who make up the Kingdom Keepers. By serving as models for Disney hologram park guides, Finn, Philby, Willa, Charlene, and Maybeck ended up in position to try to protect the Disney parks from the dark magic of the Disney villains. They have become famous for their efforts.

  Kingdom Keepers is their nickname from the Internet. As Disney Hosts Interactive, the five are park guides by day and an elite attack squad by night. Within a week or two, that will all come to an end. College is not so far off, meaning the end of the Kingdom Keepers.

  Though Amanda and Jess are not official Keepers, they have unusual abilities that help the cause.

  It has been two months since Finn’s neighborhood friend, Dillard Cole, was killed by Maleficent in the Mexican jungle. Since that dark day, not a single night has passed that Finn hasn’t dreamed of that awful moment. He can’t help but feel responsible for Dillard’s death, though at the time there was nothing he could have done to prevent it from happening.

  After his return from Mexico, Finn’s parents made him go to counseling. It helped. But nothing would remove the recurring nightmares.

  “Can you believe how long we’ve known each other?” Finn asks, and then feels stupid.

  “We’ve been friends for a long time,” Amanda says softly. “Sometimes it doesn’t exactly feel like we’re just friends. But I know what you’re saying.” She giggles softly. Finn cannot think how to respond. He wills the slow song to keep playing.

  “Truth is, we’re more than just friends, Finn,” she says. “You know it. I know it.”

  “We are. I do.” He worries she might hear how strongly his heart is beating. It might give away his own feelings.

  “I think we’ve kept it like this because to lose our friendship would hurt. It isn’t worth what we might gain by being—you know?”

  “Boyfriend and girlfriend,” he says.

  “Yeah, that,” she says.

  She can’t look at him. He says, “It could ruin things, right?”

  “Totally,” she says. She doesn’t sound like she means it.

 

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