The tip of one of the hammerheads broke through the back wall.
“If it doesn’t work, we’ll be dead. Then we won’t be saying anything.” Rexi yanked the voodoo head off by its yellow afro and placed the new head on Hydra’s shoulders.
“Wait for it,” I whispered to Kato. He grasped my hand and squeezed.
The hut shook fiercely, making my shoes click together. Up above, the ceiling started to crack. The walls buckled. Pressure built up in the room, making my head ache and my ears clog. Just when I thought my head would explode, there was a loud pop.
We were no longer in the hut, but pieces of it were strewn all around us. Not only that, but we were surrounded by mountains of, well, junk. Old rockers, bed frames, doors, a giant shoe—all piled high in some kind of warehouse.
“Where are we?” I marveled.
Kato still had his back up against the door, but instead of the door to a wooden hut, it was now heavy, riveted steel. He pulled on the handle and opened it with a loud creak.
Hydra wrapped a purple shawl with clinking coins around her shoulders. “Should I read you your fortune, or perkhaps you might just be taking clue? Ve are in the cloud storage, da?” The new head had more wrinkles than smooth, while her nose and chin looked like a withered squash. She spoke like a native of the Old World, from the times when Grimm was the only Storymaker. They weren’t spoken of in polite conversation, but from everything I’d heard about them, they made Rexi seem like a ray of sunshine.
To emphasize the point, she chucked a dead rat at Rexi, making her drop a pocket watch she’d been looking at. “Little thieves have a tendency to lose little hands.”
I ignored Rexi’s shoplifting attempt and subsequent rodent freak-out to look over Kato’s shoulder and out the front door. The beach was gone. Thankfully, so was the Mimicman and his hammerhead soldiers. The ground had been replaced by white, fluffy clouds. Up above, the sky was dark, but the clouds were backlit from below, like the three suns were shining underneath the clouds. So while it was day down there, it was night up where we were.
“Is it safe to step on?” Kato asked and gently placed one bare foot outside.
“Why don’t you try it? If we don’t hear you plunging to your death, we’ll know it’s safe.” Rexi batted her eyes and gave Kato an innocent, toothy grin.
Kato got a mischievous look on his face. “Watch this,” he whispered and cupped his hands in front of his mouth. He took a deep breath and blew. Snow built up in his hands. When he had enough, he chucked the snowball at the unsuspecting Rexi.
She wiped the snow off her face. “That’s it. The abominable snow boy is going down.” She lowered her spiky blond head like a ram and charged full speed at him. With an oof! he doubled over, clutching his stomach, and fell out the door. He landed on his back, the fluffy clouds holding him up.
I smacked Rexi. “He doesn’t have wings anymore. You could’ve killed him.”
She waved me off. “Nah. I’ve been up here before. I knew it was safe.”
That was news to me. “When?”
“The Emerald Palace has storage up here someplace too.” My face must have shown my surprise, so she continued. “Think about it. You’ve ordered enough stuff from the Castle Shopping Network to clothe every storybook character ever written. Your closet’s big, but not that big. It all has to go someplace.”
She was right. I hadn’t really thought of it before. I guess I hadn’t really thought about a lot of things.
“I think I’m stuck,” Kato called and waved his arms, having trouble getting out of the squishy clouds.
Rexi and I ran outside to get him out.
He grasped both our hands. “You know, we’ve had a rough day. I think you deserve some downtime.”
Instead of pulling him up, on the word down, he yanked us to him. Soon, we were all rolling and playing in the clouds’ banks, making cloud angels. It reminded me of winters in the courtyard when I was a kid, but this was so much better. For one, it wasn’t cold and wet. And for another, I wasn’t playing alone with palace guards standing watch. Aside from the hair and layers of grime, that was one of the biggest changes from the Emerald Palace: I wasn’t alone anymore.
I had friends.
And now that I knew my parents and Verte were still alive somewhere, I was glad I’d stepped out of my Emerald Palace. Seeing the world up close looked a lot different than from my gilded window.
I had a whole new perspective.
Though I still believed in the Storymakers, I’d started to question how much control I had on how this story turned out. Maybe it was me and not the curse that would determine the kind of person I became. The power alone wouldn’t make me evil. It all depended on what I did with it. But that didn’t mean I had to be helpless either, waiting for someone else to solve my problems.