“You’re saying my sister has power like Mirror?” Daphne said.
“Not like him!” Baba Yaga snapped. “He’s out there somewhere enjoying himself. Her magic is killing her. But yes, they can do the same things. Bah! Enough talk, we’re wasting time.”
“Sorry if you’re on the clock, Old Mother,” Charming said, “but we’re going to sit here until we find a way to help her.”
“There’s a chance she could burn herself out,” Bunny said.
“A slim chance,” Baba Yaga argued. “You do these people an injustice giving them false hope. I’ve seen your handiwork. Even the tiniest splinter is enough to destroy a hundred worlds.”
“What are you talking about?” Puck demanded. “What do you mean burn herself up?”
Bunny sighed. She explained to Sabrina. “If you could use it all up, just give in to its power and let it take you over, you might be able to expel enough so that you run out. You do only have a tiny piece inside.”
“So all you have to do is just get crazy with the magic,” Daphne said.
“OK, we’ve got a plan,” Uncle Jake said. “Just use it all up. Let it all out on him.”
“I can’t. That’s Granny Relda’s body. I might kill her,” Sabrina said. Her words seemed to suck the hope out of the room. “I don’t want to die, but if that’s what’s going to happen anyway, I should do what I can to help Granny, not hurt her. But I need your help getting to him. He’s waiting on Route 9 near the barrier. He’s calling to me. He knows I can see him. He’s demanding I bring him the spell.”
“Then give it to him,” the Scarecrow said.
“Just let him out,” the Lion agreed.
“You don’t understand what he’ll do,” Daphne said as she took the real spell from her pocket.
Sabrina could see the webs and all of their possibilities—she could see the future that Mirror owned. She watched him step outside of town once the barrier fell. She watched him sweep across America, then Europe, Africa, and Asia, sitting on a throne held up by the broken bodies of men and women. She watched the stampede of panicked people running from giants and fiery dragons in the sky. She saw all manner of monster running amok. “Dad, I think you and Mom and Basil and Uncle Jake should leave the town. Take the spell with you. If it’s here, he’ll never stop and he may try to hurt you to get what he wants.”
Canis stepped forward and set a book in front of her. It was the Book of Everafter. “You can’t leave the town.”
“You had the book?” Daphne said. “Why did you take it?”
“I’m sorry to have made you worry about its whereabouts, but I had to have it. I had made some changes and—”
“What kind of changes, Canis?” Bunny said sternly.
“When your grandmother was taken by Mirror, I knew he would be able escape the barrier in her body. I also knew we were powerless to stop him, but the book offered an opportunity. It was an emergency. Something had to be done.”
“What opportunity?” Henry asked.
“I had hoped it would be a temporary solution while I made changes to Mirror in his original story. But every time I wrote a word into Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the story would erase it, like it was protecting itself.”
“The stories don’t like being tampered with,” the Wicked Queen said. “You shouldn’t have been playing with it, old man.”
Canis’s face flashed rage. It was nearly has angry as when the Wolf had control of him. “Who do you think you are, woman? I’m not some retirement-home-bound burden. Wolf or no Wolf, I have been an important part of everything that has happened to this family for twenty years and you will not talk to me like I’m feeble and senile. This kind of nonsense is exactly why I took the book without asking. While you people are trying to wrap your head around what to do with old Mr. Canis, he was working to stop the end of the world!”
Sabrina flipped through the book. At the very end was a short story. She scanned it quickly—there was hardly anything to it—but she spotted her name, and her heart sank.
“He wrote us into the book,” she said, then read aloud.
“‘Once upon a time there was a family called Grimm. They were detectives and lived in a town called Ferryport Landing. Relda, Henry, Veronica, Jacob, Sabrina, Daphne, and Basil were their names. The end.’”
“You turned them into Everafters,” Bunny seethed.
“He did what?” Veronica cried.
“I did what needed to be done. I couldn’t risk the chance that Mirror would just jump out of Relda and into one of you, so right after he took over Relda, I found the book and made you all Everafters. That’s why he can’t get out of town. He’s not inside a human being anymore.”
“So we’re fairy-tale characters now?” Daphne said. “Cool!”
“I thought it would take the fight out of Mirror when he realized he now had no chance to escape, but then Jake appeared with his infernal magic spell, and Mirror had a new goal.”