“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.
“Whoever it is, don’t forget to invite them to move in with us,” Puck said sarcastically. “Don’t forget to show them where the towels are!”
“Freaking out isn’t helping Mom and Dad,” Daphne said as she raced down the stairs after Sabrina. “Everyone wanted Goldilocks to wake up Dad. So it didn’t work. Exploding in frustration every time we have a setback is, well, annoying.”
Sabrina marched to the door, then 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. Greeley 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 and tossed a twenty-dollar bill at the driver. “You got automatic locks in 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 the shoulders and hustled them onto the waiting train. The doors closed before Sabrina and Daphne could make a run for it.
“Find a seat, girls,” the caseworker said as the train rolled out of the station.
“Daphne, don’t worry,” Sabrina whispered as she took her sister’s hand and helped her into a seat. Sabrina had many talents but her greatest was the ability to devise effective escape plans. While she comforted her sister, she studied the exit doors, windows, and even the emergency brake. A daring escape was already coming together when she noticed the complete lack of worry on her little sister’s face.
“I’ve got this one covered,” Daphne said.
“You what?” Sabrina asked.
The little girl put her palm into her mouth and bit down on it.
“What’s going on, Daphne?” Sabrina continued, eyeing the girl suspiciously. Daphne had never plotted an escape. Escaping had been the exclusive domain of Sabrina Grimm for almost two years. What did her little sister have in mind?
“Zip it!” Ms. Smirt snapped before Daphne could explain. “I don’t want to have to sit on this train for two hours with a couple of chatterboxes.” The caseworker snatched a book out of her handbag and flipped it open. Sabrina peered at the title: The Secret.
“Ms. Smirt, have you ever heard of the Brothers Grimm?” Daphne said.
The caseworker scowled and set her book on her lap. “What do you want?”
“I was wondering if you have ever heard of the Brothers Grimm.”
“They wrote the fairy tales,” Ms. Smirt said.
Daphne shook her head. “That’s what most people believe, but it’s not true. The Brothers Grimm didn’t write stories, they wrote down things that really happened. The fairy tales aren’t made-up stories, they’re warnings to the world about Everafters.”
Sabrina was stunned. Daphne was spilling the family’s secret to the worst possible person. They couldn’t trust Smirt any further than they could throw her.