Daphne snatched it up in her arms. “Sorry.”
“Have you found anything in all those stories we can use to fight Mirror?”
The little girl shook her head. “There’s a lot of stories—like thousands! I’m still reading.”
“Let’s see if anyone else is having any luck,” Sabrina said, then led Daphne and the big dog into a huge hallway known as the Hall of Wonders.
Massive columns held up a ceiling as high as the sky. Beneath it were hundreds—maybe even thousands—of doors. No one knew for sure. Each opened into its own unique room, and even after many months, the closed doors still sparked the curiosity of Sabrina’s inner detective. The Hall of Wonders was a magical place. She could spend a lifetime exploring it, but now there were more important concerns at hand.
The sisters stopped at a door that opened into a room not much bigger than their own, but its contents were quite a bit more unusual. Mounted on every wall were a number of beautifully ornate, full-length mirrors—twenty-five of them, to be exact. Of the twenty-five, only five were intact. The rest were broken, only their frames remaining, but Sabrina had collected their shards and carefully glued them onto the walls of a room much closer to the Hall’s exit than the original Room of Reflections. When the light hit the fragments just right, it created a dazzling play for the eyes, full of twisted reflections.
Moving the mirrors from their home at the far end of Hall had another advantage: other members of Sabrina’s group could keep an eye on them. At the moment, two people watched the mirrors. The first was an elderly man resting in a chair. He had hair like a lightning strike—white and untamed. His suit was several sizes too big for his thin frame, and his arthritic hands trembled in his lap. His name was Mr. Canis. The second figure was almost his opposite. She was no older than Daphne, with amber curls that spilled down to her shoulders. She wore a red sweatshirt and hand-me-down jeans, and her face was full of possibility and hope. Everyone called her Red.
“You two look tired,” Sabrina said.
“We’re all tired,” Canis said without taking his eyes off the mirrors. He was an old man, and recently his age had been catching up with him fast. He was prone to coughing fits and seemed to wince when he walked. Sabrina was very worried about him.
Red turned to the girls and smiled. “He won’t sleep. He’s been up for days.”
“I will sleep when Mrs. Grimm is safe and sound,” Canis growled, then turned his attention to Daphne. “You two should really lock that book up where it belongs.”
“Geez, the walk to its room is like three hours long. I won’t let anything happen to it. See anything new?” Daphne asked.
“As a matter of fact, yes,” Canis said, gesturing to the five intact mirrors. Instead of reflecting back Sabrina’s image, they revealed a bird’s-eye view of Ferryport Landing. Ugly purple and ebony clouds hovered in the sky—the same clouds that had appeared two days earlier, and now sat over the town, blasting lightning and ear-splitting claps of thunder. “We have found your grandmother. Mirrors, tell them.”
The five mirrors suddenly glowed with otherworldly light. They shimmered and rippled like the surface of a wishing well recovering from a tossed penny, and when they calmed again, Ferryport Landing was gone and four strange faces materialized. In one mirror, a brutal barbarian named Titan appeared; the second showed a seventies-era nightclub owner who went by the name Donovan; the third was a West African with long dreadlocks named Reggie; and the fourth was Fanny, a roller-skating waitress with hair as alarmingly red as a fire engine. The fifth mirror remained empty but continued to glow.
“One of the reasons we couldn’t find her is we were looking in the wrong places. She’s still in Ferryport Landing,” Fanny said. She stood in what looked like an old-fashioned ice-cream shop, complete with red counters and matching stools. Behind her, a milk-shake machine hummed and a jukebox waited for a nickel. Fanny chomped on chewing gum—she never seemed to run out—and could be very sweet, but she had a tendency to spin around on her roller skates from time to time, which made Sabrina dizzy.
“What? How?” Sabrina asked.
“He hasn’t broken through the barrier,” Canis said.
“But—why not? Mirror is in Granny’s human body now. That was his whole plan,” Sabrina said.
“Who cares?” Fanny cheered. “Let’s just be happy Mirror is stuck here in Ferryport Landing with the rest of us.”
“He can’t be thrilled about that,” Daphne said.