"I am pleased," Mr. Canis said, though his face didn't reflect his words. The old man did not smile often. "Some of the guests have arrived."
"Oh, dear me," Granny cried. "I'm not even finished cooking--oh, and Puck! Oh dear, Jacob, he could use a hand. He's just on the other side of the door. He can't move."
Uncle Jake stepped through the doorway. A moment later he returned with Puck hoisted on his shoulder, still frozen solid.
"Where should I put him?" Jake asked, smelling the boy. "Oh, mercy! He smells like a septic tank."
"Put him in the shower," Granny said. "The hot water will melt the ice and he could use a bath anyway."
Puck made an angry mumble. Bathing was not one of his favorite pastimes.
"Stop your grumbling," Granny said to the boy. "When you're out of the shower, I'd like you to wear something clean. Perhaps that blue shirt with the cute little alligator on it that I bought for you."
Puck's unpleasant mumbling got louder. "Puck! Wear the shirt!" Granny Relda insisted. "We're having guests."
Daphne's face sprouted an ecstatic smile and she clapped her hands like a child at a birthday party. "The princesses are coming!"
"If you don't need anything, Relda, I believe I'll retire to my room," Mr. Canis said.
"You don't want to join us, old friend?" Granny Relda asked.
Mr. Canis shook his head and shuffled back down the long hallway. He hadn't always been a hairy giant. When the girls had first met him, he seemed like the skinniest old man in the world, but he was changing, and not for the better. His new appearance reminded people that he had a monster called the Big Bad Wolf trapped inside him that was slowly clawing its way out.
The group walked along the hallway to the portal that led back into the real world. They stepped through it into the spare bedroom where Henry and Veronica rested. Uncle Jake carried Puck to the shower while Granny and Daphne rushed off to greet the guests arriving downstairs. Sabrina, however, lingered, sitting down on the bed next to her parents. Henry and Veronica lay quietly, as if they were enjoying an afternoon nap. Sabrina ran her hand across her father's stubbly beard and kissed her mother on the forehead. So far, the family hadn't found anything that could break the spell that kept her parents asleep. Sometimes, in the still of night, Sabrina would wake up in a panic, convinced her parents were somehow conscious, feeling helpless and abandoned. She would creep out of bed and spend an hour or two looking over them, assuring them that she was working as hard as she could on a remedy for their enchanted slumber.
A normal person would have probably been very disturbed by what Sabrina had just seen--a boy with wings, magical doorways, glop grenades, a wolfman, parents trapped under magic spells--but for Sabrina Grimm, it was just another day in Ferryport Landing.
She hadn't always spent her afternoons in such odd surroundings. She had once been a normal girl living in New York City with her little sister, Daphne, and her parents. She remembered there had actually been times when she thought her family was boring. That all changed the night Henry and Veronica disappeared. The police searched high and low for them and found only one clue--the abandoned family car, with a bloodred handprint painted on the dashboard. With no known next of kin, the girls were dumped into an orphanage and then into the foster-care system, where they spent a year and a half bouncing from one certifiable lunatic to the next. They'd lived with paranoid schizophrenics, mean-spirited kids, angry animals, and every other weirdo the state would grant a child.
When they were sent to live with their grandmother, Sabrina was sure the old woman was just another whack-a-doodle. After all, Sabrina and Daphne's grandmother was supposed to be dead. Their father had told them this himself. Of course "Granny Relda," as they eventually called her, didn't help her case much. She had a lot of crazy stories, including one in which the girls were the youngest living descendents of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm--also known as the Brothers Grimm. Granny Relda said the brothers' famous book of fairy tales was actually a history of true events. Along with other writing legends like L. Frank Baum, Rudyard Kipling, and Hans Christian Andersen, they had documented what they witnessed in order to warn the world about magical phenomena. In fact, she claimed, most of these storybook characters, who now preferred to be called Everafters, still lived in their new hometown, Ferryport Landing.
That was the good news. The bad news was every Everafter in town was stuck there--trapped inside a magical bubble set up by their great-great-great-great-great-grandfather Wilhelm Grimm to prevent a war between humans and fairy-tale folk. Worse still, a lot of the Everafters deeply resented their imprisonment and many directed their anger toward the Grimm family.