Chapter 9

CHAPTER 9 Jonah Wizard stood very, very still. He was posing at Madame Tussauds, where everyone who'd been anyone for the past two hundred years had been immortalized as a wax statue. Actually, Jonah was impersonating a wax statue, since the one they were making of him wasn't quite finished yet. Madame Tussauds had just opened for the day, and the room was beginning to fill up with people exclaiming, "They look so real!" In a few minutes, Jonah would move. He'd start with something small, maybe a raised eyebrow. Then he'd segue into some sweet dance move. Music would fill the room, and he'd start singing. Everyone would scream with delight and crowd around. Maybe some of the girls would even faint. Normally, this was the kind of thing Jonah loved. The music, the adoring fans— it was what he lived for. But today… today, he hated it. Today, he wasn't doing this just to thrill his fans

or to promote his music, TV show, energy drinks, pop-up books, or clothing line. Or anything else in the vast, sprawling Jonah Wizard entertainment empire. Today he was just a distraction— a sideshow. While he was singing and dancing and sucking up all the attention in the entire building, his mother planned to pluck out a hint she believed was hidden in the shoe of the William Shakespeare wax statue only a few rooms away. And, just in case that didn't work, she had canisters of poison gas with her. She had grenades. She had a gun. Someone could get hurt, Jonah thought. Someone could be killed. Maybe even some of my fans, because of me. And there was nothing Jonah could do about it. Jonah's mother was blackmailing him. Blackmailing him to stay in the Clue hunt— and do it her way. She'd been livid that he hadn't emerged from the Globe with any leads. "Apparently, you don't care enough about winning the biggest prize in history," she'd said,

glaring at him. "Apparently, you need more incentive." "No, Mom, I tried at the Globe," he'd protested. "It's just— we're not Lucians. I thought of a better way to win, a more Janus way— I could tell you—" "It didn't work, did it? I don't want to hear anything about plans like that," Cora said. She favored him with a thin, heartless smile. "I know what will work." And then she'd called the police herself. She'd driven Jonah to the police station to stand in a lineup and be picked out by witnesses from the Globe. "You see your choices now, don't you?" she'd asked. "You do what I want. Or you go to prison." Thinking about it now, Jonah had to work very hard to keep still. He couldn't really imagine being sent to prison. But Jonah's dad had spelled out exactly what a little bad PR, uncorrected, could do to Jonah's life: TV show—canceled.

Concert dates— canceled. Recording contract— canceled. Trademark T-shirts— put on the 75 percent off sale racks. Maybe even yanked off the shelves and burned because nobody wanted them. Jonah couldn't bear the thought of nobody wanting his T-shirts, his music, his TV show… not wanting him. But if Jonah did what his mother said, his parents would fix everything. Prevent all those possible disasters. Across the room, Jonah's mother winked at him— his cue. Jonah raised an eyebrow, and a girl staring him right in the face jumped back and shrieked. Jonah started dancing and singing, and everything went exactly as he expected: the screams, the fans' delight, the instant enormous crowd, even the fainting girls. So bizarre. It all felt wrong. Even without Mom having to resort to the poison gas, the grenades, the gun. Afterward, Jonah slid into the limo waiting

outside Madame Tussauds. For perhaps the first time in his life, he didn't even glance out at the crowd as the car pulled away from the curb. "I know Mom called you. Did you take care of everything?" he asked his dad. Broderick kept his head bent over his BlackBerry. "Little problem," he said. "One witness won't recant. Won't change her story at all." "Pay her off," Jonah said. Finally, Broderick looked at his son. "She says she doesn't want our money," he said. "Everybody wants money," Jonah replied, a bit of his old confidence returning. "Offer her more." For a moment, he almost felt close to his father because he knew they would be thinking the same thing: Neither of them had ever met anybody who didn't want money. But Broderick was shaking his head. "She won't take anything," he said. "But— she said she would meet with you if we wanted. To talk about it." "Oh—one of those," Jonah said. He laughed,

and he didn't even have to try to make it sound normal. "Yo, why didn't you say so?" It was just another fan, someone who thought the chance to meet him was worth more than any amount of money. He could respect that. Right now, that was exactly what he needed. Half an hour later, they pulled up in front of a drab hotel. "You might want to really turn on the charm," Broderick said, with a look Jonah couldn't quite identify. "I know," Jonah said coldly. "It'll be off the chain. Like always." He strode out of the car, up the cracked sidewalk. At the front desk, Broderick said, "My son is supposed to be meeting one of your guests in, ah, your sitting room?" The worker pointed to a broken-down collection of chairs. Jonah whirled around. "Yo, yo, yo, my homie—"