“Daphne! Uncle Jake!” Sabrina cried frantically, but quickly spotted them. Daphne had fallen, but Uncle Jake helped her up. Together they studied the wreckage. The man in black had somehow cut the cables.
“He’s diabolical,” Briar said.
“And not in the good way,” Puck replied.
“There’s no way up to the top,” Sabrina said. “They’ll never get to her in time. Goldilocks is up there, alone. He’s going to kill her!”
“If only I could go,” Briar said, reaching into her pocket and removing a small seed. “With one of these I could get Jacob to the top in a flash.”
“Uh, I’m glad you are so excited about gardening, Briar, but we’ve got an emergency on our hands,” Sabrina said.
“No, let me explain. When I was a kid, a witch put a spell on me that said if I ever pricked my finger on a spinning wheel I would die. Well, luckily I had a couple of fairy godmothers and they fixed the spell so I would fall asleep. To keep me safe from wild animals and nutcases, they also created a magical rosebush that covered the castle so no one could get at me. When William Charming managed to cut his way through and woke me up, the first thing I did was cultivate some of the rosebush’s seeds. The seeds grow like crazy, and they seem to understand how I want them to grow, too. They come in handy from time to time. All you need is a handful of dirt.”
“I have a handful of dirt,” Puck said, reaching into his filthy pants pocket. When he pulled out his fist, he had a handful of crumbly soil. A fat earthworm was squiggling in the dirt.
“You carry dirt with you?” Sabrina asked.
“Sure, doesn’t everyone?” Puck replied.
“What good is this going to do? We’re in Ferryport Landing. The trouble is half a world away! Unless I can get out of these handcuffs, Goldilocks is going to die.”
Briar and Sabrina turned their gaze to Puck.
“Listen, I swallowed the key,” he stammered. “We have to let nature take its course.”
Disgusted, Sabrina turned to the mirror. “Mirror, do we have any lock-picking stuff in the Hall of Wonders?”
Mirror’s face appeared. “Starfish, I’m increasingly concerned about your life of crime.”
“Mirror! It’s an emergency!”
Sabrina handed him her set of keys and moments later he returned with a small leather case. Inside were the kind of tools Sabrina had only dreamed about when she and her sister were wards of the state. There were picks of all shapes and sizes, and she tried each one until the handcuff snapped open. Free, she rubbed her sore wrist, and turned to Briar.
“Maybe we should wake your grandmother?” Briar said as she hesitantly handed over her magic seed.
“No time,” Sabrina said, and turned to Puck. “Hand over the dirt.”
Puck did as he was told and Sabrina approached the traveler’s chest.
She knew if she walked down the steps now, she’d wind up outside of the Hotel Thérèse, far from where she needed to be, so she closed the lid and removed the key. “I want to go to the second-floor observation deck of the Eiffel Tower in Paris, France,” she said aloud. Then she inserted the key and opened the lid. Inside she found a completely different set of stairs.
“Be careful,” Briar said. “And tell your uncle to do the same.”
“I will,” Sabrina said as she descended. She hurried down the stairs and into the dark until she found the door, but this one did not have a doorknob. Instead, she found a button. She pushed it and it lit up, but nothing happened. She was considering turning back when the door slid open. She immediately saw her sister and uncle.
Sabrina stepped out, realizing she had just gotten out of the elevators on the second level.
“What are you doing here?” Uncle Jake asked.
“Your girlfriend sent me with some help,” Sabrina said as she hurried her family to the broken elevator shaft. There she took Puck’s dirt and placed it in a heap on the floor. She then took Briar’s crusty brown seed and buried it in the small pile of earth. Then she stood up and dusted herself off.
Before she was finished, a tiny green sprout appeared in the dirt. It grew and grew, becoming plump and fat until it was as thick as a tree trunk and covered in roses. In no time it was as tall as Uncle Jake and had pointy thorns sprouting out of its sides.
“My girlfriend is full of secrets,” Uncle Jake said as the bush rocketed into the air. He grabbed Daphne in his arms and reached out for a branch. “See you at the top, ’Brina.”
A moment later, he was yanked off the ground and sailing skyward as the rosebush grew at an impossible rate. Sabrina grabbed a vine. The strength of the growing bush was incredible. She wondered if her arm might be yanked from the socket, but she held on with all her strength. Sabrina sailed higher and higher and faster and faster until she reached the top of the Eiffel Tower, where the rosebush stopped and the branch eased her gently to the platform.