“Did you ever think for a moment in that tiny little brain of yours that there might be other people who needed this furniture? Mr. Canis? My mother and father? My baby brother?”
“Not to mention me. Hello!” Daphne said as she stretched a cramp out of her back.
“We’re all sleeping on the floor! You owe your lousy life to this family and this is how you repay us?”
“It’s every man for himself now, Grimms,” Pinocchio said, shooing them away like pesky flies.
Sabrina fought the urge to strangle him and nearly lost. Instead, she grabbed him, spun him around, and kicked him in the behind so hard he went flying through the doorway and into the hall. “Get out!”
“You’re evicting me? You wouldn’t!” Pinocchio said, straightening his clothes.
“I can and I will. We have a million major emergencies going on right now: a maniac is possessing my grandmother’s body, my uncle’s girlfriend was just killed, we’re homeless, there are wild things running loose, and I have a worthless sack of nonsense hogging beds and being lazy. Which of those problems is the easiest to solve, puppet boy?”
“I WAS NOT A PUPPET!” Pinocchio shouted, and shoved his sharp little nose into her face. “Fine! What do you require?”
“Go back to wherever you found all this furniture and bring back whatever you find—if you spot a crib, take it to my parents’ room pronto! Then get your stuff out of here. This is going to be my grandmother’s room when we rescue her.”
“I will not be ordered to do manual labor!” the boy said. “That kind of work is done by the uneducated classes.”
“Get moving or when I’m done with you my foot is going to be filled with splinters!”
“I haven’t been made out of wood in centuries,” he grumbled.
“You better change that attitude, pal,” Daphne called after him. “Next time we say jump, you better be in the air when you say ‘how high?’”
Sabrina watched the boy disappear down the hall.
“Did that sound tough?” Daphne asked. “I felt tough.”
“Get your jacket,” Sabrina said.
“Oh, boy! I know that look. You haven’t had that look since we were in the orphanage,” Daphne said, grinning. “You’re thinking about shenanigans!”
“Shenanigans?”
“It’s my new word. It means ‘fun troublemaking,’” Daphne explained.
Sabrina nodded. “We don’t belong at the kids’ table. We’re going to help Dad rescue Granny Relda.”
“Right after you take a shower,” Daphne said.
Sabrina sniffed her glop-covered shirt. “Yes, right after I take a shower.”
inocchio was just the distraction the girls needed. His grumbling and endless whining kept Veronica so occupied the girls were able to stash the Book of Everafter in a safe place and slip out of the portal unseen. As they passed through the surface of the mirror, there was a rush of air, a dramatic drop in temperature, and Sabrina, Daphne, and Elvis found themselves inside a heavy thicket, deep in the Hudson Valley forest. The bushes were the perfect place to hide the door to their magical home, but they were less than convenient when exiting.
The girls pushed free of the thorns and prickly vines and stepped into a chilly splattering of autumn rain. Drops dripped onto Sabrina’s head and trickled down her face and neck, sending tingles straight to her feet. She leaned down and quickly zipped up her sister’s sweatshirt, then did her own.
“It rained like this the day we came to Ferryport Landing,” Daphne said, catching some of the drops on her tongue. Sabrina remembered the gray sky, icy drizzle, and brisk chill that had greeted them when their caseworker Ms. Smirt shoved them down the train platform to meet their grandmother for the first time. She could even recall declaring that she and Daphne weren’t going to stay with a crazy old woman who believed fairy tales were real. Funny how life got in the way of plans. Now she couldn’t imagine her life without Granny Relda. She had to rescue her from Mirror, even if her father tried to stand in the way.
“We have to be patient with them,” Daphne said, seemingly reading her sister’s mind.
“Now you’re on their side?” Sabrina said. “Five seconds ago you were shouting about how unfair they were.”
“When Mom and Dad went to sleep, I was six and you were ten. I was obsessed with princesses—”
“You still are.”
“Don’t interrupt. What I’m saying is, to them, one day we were little girls, and then all of a sudden we weren’t. They need time to catch up.”
“But they need to understand that Granny never treated us like little girls. She would have had us leading the rescue,” Sabrina said.
“Actually, she would have made us stay home too. It was just easier to sneak out when she was in charge.”
Sabrina sighed. She knew Daphne was right, but it was still frustrating. “So are you saying we should go back?”