The Sisters Grimm: Book Eight: The Inside Story (21 page)

For a split second, Sabrina thought she saw remorse in the little man’s face, but then he polished the lamp against his jacket. There was a strange energy in the air—a building of pressure that pressed against Sabrina’s eardrums. A loud pounding rocked the cavern and then the energy formed itself into a single massive being standing nearly twenty feet tall. Its eyes were furious bonfires. Its skin was green and ghostly. Its arms and chest were thick with stringy muscles, though its lower body remained mist-like and filled with crackling light. The creature looked down at them and snarled, “Who summons me?”

Mirror raised his hand. “That would be me.”

“As my obligation, I must grant you three wishes, but I have been trapped in this lamp for eons. You would be most kind to use one of your wishes to grant me my freedom.”

“You’ll get no such satisfaction from me, genie,” Mirror said.

The genie roared with rage and the temple’s walls shook. Dust fell from the ceiling. Sabrina worried if it might cave in on her.

“Tantrums will not help,” Mirror said, seemingly unfazed. “I released you from the lamp. I am your Master.”

“You intend to change something,” the creature seethed.

“Indeed, and before the Editor arrives with his creatures, I suggest we get to work. From what I understand, the magic in this book is as powerful as the magic of the real world. You possess the same power as your real-life counterpart?”

“I do, until I am revised,” the genie snarled. “You have your wishes for a brief time, Master.”

“I only need a moment. I wish the child and I were in the story of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” Mirror said.

“That story is off-limits,” the genie said. “There are barriers to entrance.”

“Did you not just say you are powerful? In the real world, a genie is beyond limits. It can raise the dead, change the course of rivers, and make the world bow at its master’s feet. Use your powers to remove the barrier,” Mirror commanded. “I want to go there. Do as I command.”

The genie bent over and peered at him with angry eyes. “Very well.” He clapped his hands. There was a mighty explosion and Mirror and the baby boy began to shimmer as if thousands of lightning bugs were crawling under their skin. Soon the light grew so bright that Sabrina could not look. She shielded her eyes until it faded. By then, Mirror and her brother were gone.

“Send us, too,” Daphne said.

The genie shook his proud head. “I cannot. Mirror is my master. He has two more wishes for me to grant. I cannot offer you any help, even though I would truly like to destroy him.”

“We have to get out of here,” Daphne said. “We need to find a door.”

Pinocchio shook his head. “We won’t. The story hasn’t ended. The door will never come.”

Sabrina felt like she had been slapped. “You mean we’re stuck here?”

Pinocchio nodded.

Sabrina leaned against a column and slid to the floor. They had failed. Mirror was changing history and getting whatever it was he set out to do. He would take her brother’s body and use his magic to conquer the world. She remembered the terrible and bleak future she had seen when she and her sister had fallen into a time tear—humans were hunted by dragons and the world was on fire. She had hoped that she and her sister had made enough changes in the present to prevent that future. Now it looked as if it were all in vain.

And then a blast of wind blew her hair back and there were three figures standing over her.

“Why the long face,
liebling
?” Granny Relda said. Sabrina’s mother, Veronica, and her father, Henry, were standing behind her.

Sabrina stood up and rushed into their arms. Daphne did the same. It wasn’t long before all four of the Grimm women were in tears.

“We’re going to have to have a very long talk, young ladies, about rushing headfirst into danger without your family,” Henry scolded. “But first . . .”

He swept the girls into his arms and lifted them off the ground for a huge embrace. Though her father was tall and thin, almost wiry, she had forgotten how strong he could be. “Are you OK? Have you been hurt? Are you hungry?” There were a million questions.

“How did you find us?” Sabrina asked instead of answering.

“After Pinocchio opened all the doors in the Hall of Wonders, the monsters tore through the house. We were worried about your safety and came looking,” Veronica said.

Granny nodded. “I’m afraid that much of our home is destroyed. All that we could salvage was the magic mirror, so we brought it out into the yard and started searching for you three inside the Hall of Wonders. Eventually we found the room with the Book of Everafter. We were examining it when the White Rabbit hopped out of the pages. Your father snatched him up and we took the magic yarn from him. I knew what it was instantly. We have the real one stored in the magical fabrics room—or at least we did. There was a lot of pillaging when the monsters were let out.”

“I had to threaten to turn his feet into key chains, but he eventually told us how he had deserted you,” Veronica said.

“He wasn’t too happy that we tossed him right back into the Book,” Granny said. “But the world does not need two White Rabbits.”

“The world doesn’t need one,” Sabrina added.

“Then we used the yarn to bring us here. Wherever ‘here’ is.”

“We’re in the story of Aladdin, Mom,” Henry said, waving toward the towering genie, who waited patiently. “My biggest question is,” he said, “why did you jump into this book?”

“Mirror is the Master,” Sabrina said. “We followed him in here.”

Granny Relda nearly fainted. “That can’t be possible. Our Mirror?”

“He’s been behind all the troubles in Ferryport Landing. He has helped plot out all the bad stuff that has happened to us. Jack worked for him—Rumpelstiltskin, the Mad Hatter, Mrs. Heart, Nottingham, they are all part of the Scarlet Hand—the group he created!”

Granny Relda looked on the verge of tears.

“And he’s not finished with us,” Sabrina said. “He’s got one more plan. It involves the baby.”

Sabrina looked to her mother. Veronica had kept her secret as long as she could.

“Henry, I don’t know how to tell you this,” Veronica said as she took her husband’s hand into her own. “The night we were abducted, I had an important announcement.”

“The night we were poisoned and put to sleep?”

Veronica nodded. “I was going to tell you that we were going to have a baby.”

Henry blinked. Then he blinked, again. “A baby?”

Veronica nodded.

“Veronica! We have to get you out of this book. This could be too dangerous. You need to be at home, resting, taking vitamins, other baby stuff like that.”

Veronica shook her head. “This is going to be shocking.”

And then Veronica told Henry about the baby boy that had been born during the two years they had been asleep. She told him about the magic that was used on her that helped Mirror deliver the child and that she herself didn’t know the baby had been born until the night the Scarlet Hand had attacked the fort. She apologized to him for not telling him right away, but she saw he was under pressure, and to keep him safe she decided to wait until some of the chaos in the town subsided. She didn’t need him running off into the night in search of the child.

“And that’s why we’re here,” Daphne said. “Mirror had a nursery hidden in the Hall of Wonders. He’s been taking care of Joshua ever since.”

“Joshua?”

“I’ve been trying to come up with a name for him,” Daphne said.

“I have a son . . . ,” Henry said.

Veronica burst into happy tears, as did Granny Relda.

“You can name him whatever you want,” Daphne said, sheepishly. “None of my ideas have really stuck.”

“I was a big fan of Oohg,” Puck said. “But personally, Puck is a wonderful name for a boy.”

Henry raised an eyebrow.

Daphne’s expression turned serious. “The point is that Mirror has the baby and he brought him into this book. He can use it to change history. If he does . . . something bad is going to happen.”

“Bad in what way?” Granny asked.

Sabrina continued for Daphne. “He’s going to try to steal our brother’s body for himself. He wants to be real, not an Everafter—and not trapped in the Mirror. He’ll have all his powers, and as a human child he can step through Wilhelm’s magic barrier into the real world.”

“And you helped?” Granny said as she turned her attention to Pinocchio. “Your father will not be happy when he hears about this.”

Pinocchio scowled.

Granny Relda reached into her handbag and dug through a dump truck’s worth of makeup, pencils, binoculars, a pad of paper, and eventually a leather-bound book straight from the family’s collection of journals.

“What’s that?” Sabrina said.

“The journal of one Trixie Grimm,” Granny said. “Your great-aunt. She was quite a character—an unrepentant bohemian who spent her time painting and marrying an endless stream of rich men. She walked down the aisle more than a dozen times and traveled the world before taking on the family business. She was a real can-do type. She negotiated a treaty between cyclopes and centaurs, helped Little Bo Peep find her sheep, and most importantly, had some experience inside the pages of the Book of Everafter.”

Granny flipped through the pages. “She wrote extensively about the Book of Everafter and its origins, but most importantly she wrote about how magic linked the Book to actual history. She was integral in creating safety standards to make sure the stories remained unaltered. Even then she knew the Book was dangerous to have lying around so she locked it in a room in the Hall of Wonders. She didn’t even label it. Most of the family didn’t know it even existed.”

“Mirror knew,” Veronica said.

“Well, come along,” Granny Relda said. “We have a baby boy to rescue.”

The old woman whispered into the ball of yarn, “Lead us to the story of Snow White.” It popped and crackled but sat still. “Something seems to be wrong.”

“The Editor told us that story was off-limits,” Daphne said.

“The Editor?” Henry said.

“Yes, the guardian of the Book,” Granny said. “Trixie helped invent him. After the magic messed with the Book, she discovered that someone needed to put the stories back together if they were changed. He is described as the man in charge. I suppose we should pay him a visit. Come along, children.”

“That’s not going to be so easy,” Daphne said. “The only way to get into his library is if he opens the door himself.”

“And we kind of irked him,” Puck said. “He’s very sensitive.”

“So I’ve heard. Trixie writes that she was startled by his bad attitude and suspected there would come a day when he would become difficult. I suppose that’s why she placed this key inside,” Granny Relda reached into her handbag and took out a bright golden key. “It won’t get us into any of the other stories, but Trixie said it would get us into his library. Once we get there we’re just going to have to use our considerable charms to convince him to let us follow Mirror into Snow White’s tale.”

Granny flipped through the Book, read a small passage to herself, and then stuffed the Book back into her handbag. Then she leaned over as if inserting the key into an actual lock. Suddenly, a door appeared in front of her around the key. She opened it and a blast of wind nearly knocked off her bonnet.

After the wind died down, they could hear the familiar sound of pages turning and a fireplace crackling. Granny reached out for the children and hurried everyone in ahead of herself.

“I wish you luck,” Daphne said, turning to the genie.

The creature nodded respectfully as the family disappeared through the portal.

“Well, that was most disagreeable,” Granny Relda said once they stepped into the Editor’s study. She took her journal out of her handbag and jotted a note: “The doors between stories are best traveled with empty stomachs.”

The Editor sat in his leather chair, a single reviser resting at his feet, licking its huge mouth as if it had just finished the last bite of a bucket of fried chicken. When he saw them, the Editor leaped from his chair as if shocked.

“How did you get in here?”

“Allow me to introduce myself,” Granny said, ignoring his question. “My name is Relda Grimm.”

“More Grimms? How many of them are there?” the man said dryly.

Granny ignored the sarcasm. “I believe you know my grandchildren, Sabrina and Daphne, as well as Puck. This is my son, Henry, and my daughter-in-law, Veronica. We are descendants of Trixie Grimm.”

“A most troublesome woman, even if she did have a hand in my creation. She’s very much responsible for many of my personal headaches—and that pesky streak appears to run in the family,” the Editor said, flashing a dark look at the girls.

“Well, hopefully my request will be quick and painless,” Granny replied. “We have need of your services.”

The Editor’s face fell in shock. “You come to me for help? You realize your granddaughters and this poor excuse for a Trickster King have caused me nearly a million times the grief of any Trixie? After making a deal with me, they raised an army of characters who attacked me in my own sanctuary. They attempted to aid them in their quest to escape the Book.”