Sabrina scowled. "How long was I unconscious?" she asked. Her head was still pounding from the smack the beast had given her upon her arrival.
"Long enough for me to get old big-and-ugly here pretty angry," Puck said as the brute recovered and rushed at the children at an impossible speed.
Two enormous pink-streaked wings popped out of Puck's back and fluttered wildly. Before Sabrina knew it, he had snatched the back of her coat and was pulling her into the air, narrowly avoiding the beast's attack. The wall they had just been standing in front of wasn't so lucky. The force of the monster's assault sent it crashing down.
"I've got the big one," Puck said as he set Sabrina back down on the floor. "You take the little one."
Sabrina followed his gaze. In the far corner of the room was a small child wearing a long red cloak that hung to her ankles. She sat on a dirty hospital cot next to the unconscious bodies of two adults, Henry and Veronica Grimm--Sabrina's parents!
How Sabrina had gotten into this particular situation was a long, and almost unbelievable, story. It started a year and a half ago when her mother and father had mysteriously disappeared. The only clue the police had found was a bloodred handprint pressed on the dashboard of their abandoned car. With nothing else to go on and no next-of-kin to step in as guardians, the police were forced to put Sabrina and her six-year-old sister, Daphne, into foster care. That's when things went from bad to worse. The girls were bounced from one foster home to the next, each filled with certifiable lunatics who used Sabrina and Daphne as maids, gardeners, and once, as a couple of amateur roofers. By the time their long-lost grandmother had finally tracked them down, Sabrina didn't think she could ever trust anyone again. Granny Relda didn't make it easy, either. They hadn't been in the old woman's house ten minutes before she started telling incredible stories about the girls being the last living descendents of the Brothers Grimm whose book of fairy tales, she claimed, wasn't a collection of bedtime stories but a history of actual events. Granny Relda also told them that their new hometown, Ferryport Landing, was filled to the brim with characters straight from fairy tales, who now called themselves Everafters and lived side by side with the normal inhabitants of the town, albeit in magical disguises that hid their true identities.
To Sabrina, Granny's stories sounded like the silly ravings of a woman who had forgotten to have her prescriptions filled, but there was a dark side to her story as well. These "Everafters" didn't just live in the town--they were trapped there. Wilhelm, the younger of the Brothers Grimm, had put a spell on the town to prevent the Everafters from leaving and waging war on humans. The spell could only be broken when the last member of the Grimm family died. Sabrina warned her sister that the old woman's stories were nonsense, but when Relda was kidnapped by a two-hundred-foot-tall giant, Sabrina could no longer deny the truth. Luckily, the girls found a way to rescue their grandmother and ever since they had taken on the family responsibility of being fairy-tale detectives, solving the town's most unusual crimes, and going head-to-head with some of its most dangerous residents. As they solved one mystery after another, the girls had started to uncover a disturbing pattern. Every bad guy they had faced was a member of a shadowy group known as the Scarlet Hand, whose mark was a bloodred handprint just like the one the police had found in Sabrina and
Daphne's parents' car! Sabrina knew one day she would come face-to-face with the group's leader and her parents' kidnapper, and now, as she stared at the strange little girl in the red cloak, she was shocked. She had never thought the person behind all her misery would be a child.
Sabrina clenched her hands into fists, ready to fight her parents' captor, only to have a pain shoot through her left arm that nearly knocked her to the floor. It was broken. She shook off the agony and fixed her eyes once more on the child. The little girl was barely as old as Daphne, but her face was the twisted, rage-filled mask of an adult, barely holding back the insanity behind it. Sabrina had seen a man with that expression on the news once. The police had just arrested him for killing five people.
"Get away from my parents," Sabrina demanded as she approached the girl and grabbed her cloak in her good hand.
"This is my mommy and daddy," the little girl shrieked as she jerked away. "I have a baby brother and a kitty-cat, too. When I get my grandma and my puppy, then we can all be a family and play house."
The girl raised her hand. It was covered in what Sabrina hoped was red paint. She turned and pressed it against the wall leaving the all-too-familiar scarlet print. The handprints were everywhere--on the walls, floors, ceilings, windows, even on Sabrina's parents' clothing.