Sabrina opened her eyes and saw a monster hunched over her. It was nearly fifteen feet tall, with scaly skin, two black leathery wings, and a massive serpentine tail that lashed back and forth. Its feet and hands were enormous, nearly as big as its body, and its head, at the end of a long, snakelike neck, was nothing but teeth-thousands of jagged fangs, gnashing in her face. A drop of saliva dripped from the creature's mouth and landed on her forehead. It was as hot as molten lava. "JABBERWOCKY!" the monster roared.
Too afraid to move, Sabrina closed her eyes and did the only thing she could. She prayed. Please! Please! Please! Let this be a bad dream!
After a few moments she slowly lifted one eyelid. Unfortunately, the monster was still there.
"Fudge," Sabrina whispered.
"Well, good morning !" a boy's voice called from somewhere in the room.
Sabrina knew its owner. "Puck?"
"Did we wake you? So sorry!"
"Could you get this thing off of me?" asked Sabrina.
"It's gonna cost you."
"What?"
"I figure if I'm going to have to save your butt every time you get into trouble, I might as well be paid for it. The going rate for this kind of job is seven million dollars," Puck said.
"Where am I going to get seven million dollars? I'm eleven years old!"
"And I want all your desserts for the next six months," Puck added.
The monster roared in Sabrina's face. A long, purple tongue darted out of the beast's mouth and roughly licked her face.
"Fine!" Sabrina cried.
Puck leaped into the air, flipping like an Olympic gymnast, and clung to a dusty light fixture hanging from the ceiling above. Gathering momentum, he swung down feet-first into the monster's horrible face. The creature stumbled back and roared. Using its face as a springboard, the nimble boy flipped again and landed on his feet with his hands on his hips. He turned to Sabrina and winked, then pulled her to her feet. "Did you see that landing, Grimm? I want to make sure you get your money's worth."
Sabrina scowled. "How long was I unconscious?" she asked. Her head was still pounding from the smack the beast had given her when she stepped through the portal.
"Long enough for me to get old big-and-ugly here pretty angry," Puck said as the brute recovered and charged at the children at an impossible speed.
Two enormous wings popped out of Puck's back and flapped wildly. Before Sabrina knew it, he had snatched the back of her coat and was pulling her into the air, narrowly avoiding the beast's attack. The Jabberwocky crashed through the wall behind them.
"I've got the big one," Puck said as he set Sabrina back down on the floor. "You take the little one."
Sabrina followed his gaze. In the far corner of the room was a small child wearing a long red cloak that hung to her ankles. She sat on a dirty hospital cot next to the unconscious bodies of two adults, Henry and Veronica Grimm-Sabrina's parents!
How Sabrina had gotten into this particular situation was a long, and almost unbelievable, story. It had started a year and a half ago, when her mother and father mysteriously disappeared. The only clue the police found was a bloodred handprint pressed onto the dashboard of their abandoned car. With nothing else to go on and no next-of-kin to step in as guardians, Sabrina and her little sister, Daphne, were forced into foster care, where things went from bad to worse. The girls were bounced from one foster home to the next, each filled with certifiable lunatics who used the girls as maids, gardeners, and, once, a couple of amateur roofers. By the time their long-lost grandmother finally tracked them down, Sabrina didn't think she could ever trust anyone again. Granny Relda didn't make it easy, either. They hadn't been in the old woman's house ten minutes before she started telling incredible stories about the girls being the last living descendants of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, also known as the Brothers Grimm. Jacob and Wilhelm's book of fairy tales, she claimed, wasn't a collection of bedtime stories but the case files of their detective work investigating unusual crimes. Granny Relda claimed that their new hometown, Ferryport Landing, was filled to the brim with characters straight from fairy tales, who now called themselves "Everafters" and lived side by side with the normal inhabitants of the town, albeit in magical disguises to hide their true identities.
To Sabrina, Granny's stories sounded like the silly ravings of a woman who might have forgotten to get her prescriptions filled, but there was a dark side to her story as well. These Everafters didn't just live in the town-they were trapped there. Jacob and Wilhelm had put a spell on the town to prevent the Everafters from leaving and waging war on humans. The spell could be broken only when the last member of the Grimm family died or abandoned the town. Sabrina warned her sister that the old woman's stories were nonsense, but when Relda was kidnapped by a two-hundred-foot-tall giant, Sabrina could no longer deny the truth. Luckily, the girls found a way to rescue their grandmother-and ever since, they had found themselves knee-deep in the family responsibility of being fairy-tale detectives, solving the town's weirdest crimes, and going head-to-head with some of its most dangerous residents.
As they solved one mystery after another, the girls started to uncover a disturbing pattern. Every bad guy they faced was a member of a shadowy group known as the Scarlet Hand, whose mark was a bloodred handprint just like the one the police had found in Sabrina and Daphne's parents' car! Sabrina knew one day she would come face-to-face with the group's leader and her parents' kidnapper, and now, as she stared at the strange little girl in the red cloak, she was shocked. She'd never thought the person behind all her misery would be a child.
Sabrina clenched her fists, ready to fight her parents' captor, only to have a pain shoot through her left arm that nearly knocked her to the floor. It was broken. She shook off the agony and fixed her eyes once more on the child.
The little girl was no older than Daphne, but her face was that of a twisted, rage-filled adult, barely containing the insanity behind her eyes. Sabrina had seen a man with that expression on the news once. The police had arrested him for strangling five people.
"Get away from my parents," Sabrina demanded as she grabbed the little girl's cloak in her good hand.
"This is my mommy and daddy," the little girl shrieked as she jerked away. "I have a baby brother and a kitty, too. When I get my grandma and my puppy, then we can all be a family and play house."
The girl raised her hand. It was covered in what Sabrina hoped was red paint. She turned and pressed it against the wall, leaving an all-too-familiar scarlet print. There were more just like it on the walls, floors, ceilings, and windows.
"I don't need a sister," the girl continued. "But you can stay and play with my kitty." She pointed at the monster, which was swatting at Puck with its enormous clawed hands. The fairy boy leaped out of the way, barely dodging the "kitty's" lightning-fast strikes. It whipped its tail at Puck, missed, then sent a filing cabinet careening across the room. The drawers swung open, and hundreds of yellowing documents spilled out.
"C'mon, ugly, you can do better than that!" Puck crowed just before the Jabberwocky caught him with its long tail and sent him flailing across the room. He crashed against a wall and tumbled to the floor but quickly sprang to his feet and snatched up the little wooden sword he kept in his belt. With a thrust he bonked the beast on the snout.
Sabrina turned back to the little girl.
"Who are you?" she asked.
"You don't want to play, do you?" the girl said as a frown cracked her face. She reached into her pocket and removed a small silver ring, slipped it onto her finger, and held out her hand. A crimson light engulfed her and Sabrina's sleeping parents. "Kitty, we need to find a new playhouse. Burn this one down."
The monster opened its enormous mouth, and a burst of flame shot out. The folding blinds on the dingy windows ignited, and flames crept up the walls, turning the weathered wallpaper to ash. The beast blasted another wall and then another, sending sparks and cinders in all directions. Within seconds the entire room was on fire.
"Who are you?" Sabrina screamed.
"Tell my grandma and my puppy that I'll see them soon. Then we can play," the demented child said in a singsong voice. The world seemed to stretch, as if someone were pulling on the corners of Sabrina's vision, and, in a blink, the strange child vanished into thin air, taking Sabrina's parents with her.
"No!" Sabrina cried, rushing to the empty bed as flames ate at the walls around her. It wasn't long before everything was devoured by fire and smoke. A terrible groan came from above, and a huge section of the ceiling collapsed right on top of the beast. The two children staggered back from the pile of smoldering debris. Puck grabbed Sabrina and dragged her toward an exit as parts of the ceiling rained down around them.
"I think this party is over," he said.
"Wait!" Sabrina shouted. "There could be a clue here to where she took my parents."
"Any clue is kindling now," Puck replied, pulling her down a hallway.
"We can't go!"
"If you get killed, the old lady will never let me hear the end of it."
They passed by open rooms with doors torn off their hinges. Each was full of hospital beds, rusty metal carts, and more sheets of yellowing paper scattered on the floor. In every room she saw more of the horrible red handprints.
What is this place? Sabrina wondered.
The children rushed on through the choking black smoke until they found a door that led outside. Puck forced it open, and a blast of icy wind nearly knocked them down. Snow blew into their faces, temporarily blinding them.
"We're in the mountains, I think!" he shouted.
"Can you fly us out of here?" Sabrina asked.
"The wind is too strong," Puck said, wrapping his arm around her and guiding her through the snowdrifts.
They'd barely taken a dozen steps when the wall surrounding the building exploded behind them, sending brick and mortar flying in every direction. Through the gaping hole stepped the massive, scaly foot of the Jabberwocky. Its head followed, whipping around on its long neck as its fiery eyes searched for the children. When it spotted them, it let out a roar that sent snow tumbling from nearby trees.
The children raced away, darting down a steep embankment and into the woods. The leafless trees provided few hiding places and less protection from the brutal wind, which felt like little razor blades cutting Sabrina's face. Their only chance was to keep running. She and Puck scrambled down some rocks to a clearing, but it ended with a four-hundred-foot drop to the Hudson Valley below.
"Puck, I…"
The boy turned to her. "I know what you are going to say, and I think it's an excellent idea. I'll leave you here and save myself."
"That's not what I was going to say at all!" Sabrina shouted. "I was going to ask you if you had any ideas for getting us out of this."
"Not a one. Grimm, you usually handle the running and crying part."
"If only we had a sled," she mumbled as she looked down the steep, snowy hill.
Puck's eyes lit up. He turned around and got down on his hands and knees.
"What are you doing?" Sabrina asked.
"Climb on my back," Puck insisted. "I've got an idea."
Sabrina was all too familiar with Puck's "ideas." They usually ended in a trip to the emergency room-but with the monster lumbering down the rocky hillside behind them, there were few alternative options.
Sabrina sat on the boy's back with a leg on each side of him.
"OK, what now?"
"Grab my tusk."
"Grab your what?"
Puck turned his head toward her. His face had transformed into that of a walrus. He had two long tusks protruding from his mouth and a mustache of thick, bristly hair. His nose had vanished into his oily black face, and his eyes were large and brown. Sabrina cringed but reached around with her good arm and grabbed firmly onto one of his tusks.
"Please don't do this," she whimpered. "This is such a bad idea."
"The only bad ideas are the ones never tried," Puck said as his body began to puff up. Layers of blubber inflated under Sabrina. Puck's shirt disappeared, replaced by a super-slippery skin. "Keep your hands and feet inside the ride until it comes to a complete stop," he shouted. "Here we go!"
Puck leaped forward just as the beast reached the clearing, and his slick walrus body rocketed down the steep slope toward town. They zipped between trees and bounced over jutting rocks. Sabrina turned back, confident the monster wouldn't follow them on this desperate flight, only to see it plowing down the hill after them, knocking over trees as if they weren't even there.
"JABBERWOCKY!"
They shot down the bank of a frozen stream, ramping off a rocky outcropping and soaring into the air, and fell for what seemed like forever. They hit the ground hard, narrowly missing the spiky branches of an oak tree. Sabrina, clutching her broken arm and gasping for air, turned again to mark the monster's progress. It, too, had used the rocky ramp and sailed into the air. Flapping its wings, it soared higher and higher; then a strong wind knocked it off course, and it slammed hard against the mountainside. Moments later, Sabrina lost sight of it completely, though she could still hear it braying in the distance.
"I think we lost it! We're safe!" she cried, just as the ground leveled off. Unfortunately, they didn't slow down. In fact, they continued zipping along as a four-lane highway of speeding cars appeared in front of them. They zoomed into traffic, spinning several times as they tried to avoid a pickup truck. The startled driver slammed on his brakes. Tires squealed and bumpers crunched. Shrill horns filled the air, but the children kept going. On the other side of the road was another steep hill, and they whipped down it, heading right for a ramshackle old barn. Its doors were wide open, and they slid inside, crashing at last into the far wall of an empty stable.
"Personally, I think I earned every penny of that seven million dollars!" Puck said, laughing so hard that he rolled over onto his fat, blubbery side. Giggling, he transformed back into his true form-an annoying eleven-year-old boy.
Sabrina's head hurt too much for her to be angry at his recklessness. She was exhausted, and her arm felt as if it were ready to fall off. She gazed around the barn. A few bales of hay sat in the corner, and an old plow lay rusting on the ground. High on the wall, several windows were wide open, allowing the snowstorm to blow inside. It was freezing, but at least they were out of the wind.
Puck must have heard her teeth chattering, because he did something so un-Puck-like, Sabrina couldn't believe it. He got up, sat down behind her, and let his enormous fairy wings sprout from his back. Then he wrapped them around her to keep the bitter cold away. It was the first truly nice thing the so-called Trickster King had ever done for her. Instinctively she wanted to tease him for this rare moment of compassion, but she bit her tongue. Knowing Puck, he'd storm off and she'd die an ice cube.
"What was that thing?" she asked.
"It's called a Jabberwocky," Puck said. "Two tons of teeth, tail, and terror. From what I've heard, they're impossible to kill. But don't worry, Grimm: It's gone. It had its share of the Trickster King for one day."
"We need to get help," Sabrina said, shivering.
"I'm on it," Puck said. He reached into his pocket, pulled out a small wooden flute, and blew a couple of high-pitched notes. Within seconds, a swarm of little lights flooded through the open windows and surrounded the children. They looked like fireflies, but Sabrina knew better. They were Puck's pixie servants-or, as he called them, his minions-and they did whatever Puck asked of them, especially if it was mischief. They buzzed around their boy leader and waited for instructions.
"Go get the old lady," Puck said to them. "And bring me something to start a fire."
The pixies buzzed and darted out through the barn windows. Moments later, a wave of them returned carrying tree limbs and dead leaves. They arranged these in a pile in front of the children, then zipped away again. Soon, a second swarm returned carrying a single bottle of root beer, which they gently placed in Puck's hands.
"You have served me well, minions," he said, unscrewing the top and tossing it into a corner of the barn. He chugged the whole drink and tossed the bottle aside. He wiped his mouth on his sleeve.
"Was that refreshing? I'd hate for you to be thirsty. Maybe you would like a sandwich, too," Sabrina snarled.
"Keep your pants on," the boy said. "I'm trying to keep you from turning into a Grimmsicle."
He unfolded his wings, stood up, and leaned over the pile of timber. His eyes were watering, apparently from all the gassy soda, and suddenly he opened his mouth wide and belched. The burp was deep and guttural and, much to Sabrina's surprise, accompanied by a fireball that shot out of his mouth and ignited the firewood.
"I didn't know you could do that," she said.
"Oh, I'm full of surprises," the boy said proudly as a rumbling sound came from his belly. "Want to see what I can do out the other end?"
The little pixies buzzed and twittered. To Sabrina it sounded as if they were encouraging him.
"Uh, no thanks," she said, edging closer to the fire.
"Suit yourself," he said, then turned to his small servants.
The little lights let out a disappointed sound and zipped away. When they were gone, Puck wrapped his huge fairy wings around Sabrina again.
"I'm sorry we couldn't save your parents," he whispered.
Sabrina wanted to cry. She had been so close to rescuing Henry and Veronica, and they had slipped through her fingers. How was she supposed to fight the little girl in the red cloak, who obviously had magical abilities and controlled a hulking freak with a zillion teeth? Sabrina was just an ordinary eleven-year-old girl. She was powerless. She looked over her shoulder at Puck. He was a fairy-a creature of pure magic. Puck could turn into all kinds of animals, he could fly, he had pixie servants, and now, apparently, even his obnoxious bad habits were useful. The boy was overflowing with power, and it gave him a fearlessness Sabrina envied.
"I'd prefer it if we kept the heroics to ourselves," he said now, interrupting her thoughts. "The last thing I need is you yapping to everyone in town about me being a hero. I am most definitely not a hero. I'm a villain…"
"Of the worst kind," said Sabrina, finishing the boy's sentence.
"And don't you forget it!"
"How could I?" Sabrina asked, her voice sounding thick in her own ears. She was suddenly exhausted. "You tell me every ten minutes."
Puck didn't respond, and for a long moment the children were silent.
"Go to sleep, Grimm. I won't let anything bad happen to you," Puck said.
"And how much does that cost?"
"Don't worry. I'll put it on your tab," he replied.