She reached for the doorknob with one hand and rubbed the sleep out of her eyes with the other. When she opened the door she gaped at what she saw. There were three enormous brown bears on the porch, one in a hat and tie, a second in a purple polka-dotted dress, and the third in a Cleveland Indians baseball cap. Two of the bears stood nearly eight feet tall, while the smallest was just a few inches over Sabrina’s height.
Then a fourth person pushed her way to the front. She had freckles across her nose, a bronzed tan, big green eyes, and blond curls the color of precious metal.
“Goldilocks?” Sabrina gasped.
The woman nodded. “Sorry I’m late. I had to pick up a few friends. This town is dangerous, you know.” Goldilocks smiled. “So, I hear someone in this house needs a kiss.”
Michael Buckley is the New York Times bestselling author of the Sisters Grimm and NERDS series. He has also written and developed television shows for many networks. Michael lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his wife, Alison, and his son, Finn.
This book was designed by Melissa Arnst, and art directed by Chad W. Beckerman. It is set in Adobe Garamond, a typeface that is based on those created in the sixteenth century by Claude Garamond. Garamond modeled his typefaces on those created by Venetian printers at the end of the fifteenth century. The modern version used in this book was designed by Robert Slimbach, who studied Garamond’s historic typefaces at the Plantin-Moretus Museum in Antwerp, Belgium.
The capital letters at the beginning of each chapter are set in Daylilies, designed by Judith Sutcliffe. She created the typeface by decorating Goudy Old Style capitals with lilies.
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“This has been a stupid wild-goose chase!” Sabrina exclaimed. “The Master and the Scarlet Hand are probably getting a big laugh out of this right now!”
“Don’t give up hope, Starfish,” Mirror said.
“Give up hope! I haven’t had any hope in two years.”
“Bummer!” Puck said. “Well, maybe whoever is pounding on the door downstairs can wake your dad up.”
“Puck, could you answer it for me?” Granny asked.
“What am I? The butler?”
“I’ll get it,” Sabrina said. She needed to get out of the room. The disappointment was hanging in the air, threatening to suffocate her.
“Freaking out isn’t helping Mom and Dad,” Daphne said as she raced down the stairs after Sabrina. “Exploding in frustration every time we have a setback is, well, annoying.”
Sabrina marched to the door the turned to face her sister. “First of all, you don’t even know the meaning of most of the words in that last sentence. I’ll be angry and upset if I want. I have a right to be angry. My life is horrible.”
Sabrina threw the door open and there, standing on the porch, was a rail-thin woman with a hooked beak of a nose and eyes like tiny black holes. She was dressed entirely in gray. Her handbag was gray. Her hair was gray. When she smiled, her teeth were gray.
“I think it’s about to get a lot worse,” Daphne groaned.
“Hello, girls,” the woman said.
“Ms. Smirt!” Sabrina cried.
“Oh, you remember me. How it warms the heart,” she said as she snatched them by the wrists and dragged them out of the house and across the lawn, where a taxicab was waiting in the driveway.
“Where are you taking us?” Daphne cried, trying and failing to break free from the woman’s iron talons.
“Back to the orphanage,” Smirt snapped. “You don’t belong here. Your grandmother is unfit. She kidnapped you from your foster father.”
Sabrina remembered the last foster father Smirt had sent them to live with. Mr. Greeley was a certifiable lunatic. “He was a serial killer. He attacked us with a crowbar.”
“The father-child bond needs time to develop,” Smirt said as she pushed the girls into the backseat of the taxi.
“You can’t send us back to him,” Daphne shouted.
“Sadly, you are correct. Mr. Greely is unavailable to take you back due to an unfortunate incarceration. But don’t worry. I’ve already found you a new foster family. The father is an amateur knife thrower. He’s eager for some new targets . . . I mean, daughters.”
Smirt slammed the cab’s door shut. She tossed a twenty-dollar bill at the driver. “You got automatic locks on this thing?”
Suddenly, the locks on the doors were set.
“To the train station, please,” Smirt said. “And there’s another twenty in it if you can make the 8:14 to Grand Central.”
The taxi charged out of the driveway and tires squealed as it made a beeline toward the Ferryport Landing train station.
“You can’t take us back to the orphanage,” Sabrina said. “We’re not orphans anymore. We found our mother and father.”
“Such an imagination you have, Sophie,” Smirt said. “There’s really nothing as unattractive in a child as an imagination.”
“My name is Sabrina!”
In no time, the taxi was pulling into the train station. Ms. Smirt pinched the girls on their shoulders and hustled them onto the waiting train. The doors closed before Sabrina and Daphne could make a run for it.