There were no dolphins. There was no one. Just an empty theatre.
I stopped. My parents’ shoes kept crunching on the concrete path as they closed the distance between us. I pulled my hands out of my pocket, listening. Patience, Alice. Take a deep breath.
The crunching grew louder. They were taking slow, deliberate steps.
Now!
I spun, raising my fist high and connecting it with my dad’s chin. Crack! My knuckles stung, and as he staggered back I had a terrible thought: what if I’d just made a huge mistake?!
But then he turned back to me and I saw it: right where I’d hit him, his skin was glowing. “That was unwise,” he said.
“Quite,” said my mom, eyes narrowed.
They looked around once, and then their forms began to change just like in a movie. Their hair changed. Their faces readjusted into something sleeker and younger. I recognized them. They were the two young people we had met downtown!
“I should have known,” I said with a wry smile. “Corrupted always dress awful.”
That seemed to take them aback. Good! If they were here to kill me, the least I could do is levy a few snide comments their way.
“I’ll have you know we’re quite fashionable,” said the young man, tossing back his short hair. Fundevogel, that was his name.
“Yeah, for a nineteenth-century carriage driver,” I muttered. I pulled the fountain pen from my pocket, popping off the cap with my thumb. It landed on the ground, rolling toward the edge of the massive pool. “Before I kill you,” I said to Fundevogel, “please be so kind as to remind me where I dropped my pen cap. I don’t want to lose it.”
He smiled, glancing at his sister. They both laughed. “Do you think you can kill us with that?” Lina asked in a raspy voice. She held out one hand. Slowly, her fingers began to elongate. The tips sharpened into a point. “We can turn ourselves into anything. Anything.”
“We followed you all day,” said Fundevogel. “We were sidewalks. We were garbage cans. We were tour guides. We were disgusting little children picking their noses.”
“We were fossils glued to the wall,” Lina continued. She snorted. “A lot of good that did us, though. We were sure you would stop at the dinosaur exhibit. It’s a wonderful exhibit.”
“Been there, done that.” I looked around. The place was still empty. “I’ll shout for help.”
“Go ahead,” Lina said. “Do you think we didn’t plan ahead?” She glanced at her brother, smiling. “The director of the aquarium just so happened to stop by a few moments ago and reserved this place for the next hour. Something about a snap inspection, if I do recall.”
“Oh yes,” Fundevogel said, nodding vigorously. “I heard it myself. All of the staff of the oceanarium heard it. He was quite explicit, Heh, heh, heh.”
I stepped back cautiously, moving my way to the other end of the pool. They followed me slowly, grinning from ear to ear. Literally. Their mouths had lengthened and when their lips parted, my parents’ nice straight teeth had been replaced with sharp fangs. This had bad news written all over it.
“Did you hurt my parents?” I asked, keeping the pen in front of me like a little knife.
Fundevogel laughed. “I sort of got the feeling you were getting a little annoyed by them. Wouldn’t killing them be doing you a favor?”
Anger flushed my face red. “You’d better not have touched a hair on their bodies.”
Lina stepped forward quickly, laughing when I flinched. “I knew you were the hero. Fundevogel didn’t believe it. He said there was no way the hero wouldn’t have seen through our disguises. The hero is always smarter than that, he said. But I could just smell it on you. It’s a rotten stink.”
She was right about one thing: I hadn’t seen a glow at all. My confidence waned a bit. We were almost at the other side of the massive pool and there was nowhere to go. I had to stand and fight, even if my legs felt like jelly and my head felt dizzy. This was for real. There was no hero coming to rescue me. I was the hero.
I knelt down, keeping my eye on them as I set my little hand purse next to the pool. Lina stepped forward, waving one long sharp finger inches from my face. “No, no, no. No drawing. That just wouldn’t be fair.”
“Your rules suck,” I muttered, standing up. “Someone’s got to be watching all this. There’s cameras, I bet. Or something.”
Lina smiled and shook her head in a sad sort of way. “Dear, dear. Do you know how long we’ve been doing this?”
“Granted, we usually snip the life from our targets well before they’re even aware of our presence,” added Fendevogal, admiring his long, sharp claws. “But that doesn’t mean we’re not good at fighting. We could fight like this, or we could turn into big, bad bears if you prefer.”
I had an idea. It was an awful idea, but it was better than standing there and trying to fight off those long, pointy claws with my little old fountain pen. I slipped off my shoes. “I hope you jerks can swim!” I shouted.
And with that, I jumped right into the pool.
When I surfaced, the siblings were standing at the edge, staring at me with complete surprise.
“That’s right!” I shouted, hoping against hope that someone might hear. “Ten years of swim classes! Try and match these skills!”
“Gladly,” Fendevogel said. They both jumped in, splashing salty water my way. Neither of them surfaced. I kicked myself backward, trying to see what was happening under the water. They were changing, that much I could see. But into what?
“Oh.” I gulped, kicking backward again. The dorsal fins popped out of the water, cutting through it like a hot knife through butter and leaving little bubbles in their wake. As they swam nearer, I could see them more clearly right under the surface.
Sharks. Great white sharks.
They began slowly circling me, testing their prey.
“Yeah,” I muttered. “Great idea, Alice.”
But then a strange thing happened: their tail fins thrashed left and right, splashing water across the surface. They swam strangely, not like how all the sharks on nature channels swam. Their tail fins continued to flap around madly, causing them to bump into each other as they passed. My guess had been right: they knew how to turn into sharks, but they didn’t know how to swim like sharks!
They swam closer. I reached out and stabbed at the nearest one, but its skin was too thick—I couldn’t pierce it! It opened its mouth to snap at me but I dove underwater, jamming it in the eye with my thumb as it passed. “Jam it in the eye,” my dad always said. That was his solution for every single wild animal encounter. His one piece of advice for surviving any attack. And you know what? He was right! The shark retreated, thrashing its tail around and bumping right into its sibling and giving me a chance to surface again for air.
The reprieve was short-lived. The moment they saw me taking a breath, one of them broke away and swam toward me, mouth opening. My heart raced. I took a breath, clutching my fountain pen as tightly as I could, and dove under the water, using both arms to push myself deeper. I saw the shark try to dive lower to catch me, but its pectoral fins wiggled too fast and its tail splashed along the surface. I reached out with my pen as it passed and stabbed as hard as I could, cutting the creature’s belly. A black maw opened and the bright orange burn quickly consumed it, leaving nothing but a few ashes floating in the water.
“Ha!” I shouted. Air bubbles floated to the surface, where the other shark was swimming around in a frenzy. Don’t get too excited yet, Alice … you’re almost out of breath.
The second one had started getting the hang of the whole “swimming with a tail” thing, and dove deeper to make its way toward me. It was getting the hang of its fins too, using them to maneuver so that its giant mouth was aimed right at me. My lungs ached for air, pulling me upward, but I used my arms to keep me deep. I needed to see it coming. If I surfaced, one splash of salty water would blind me. Come on, muscles! Don’t fail me now!
Closer it swam. I felt like it was comi
ng at me in slow motion. A few bubbles of air slipped out of my mouth. Adrenaline raced through my body as if it was sure I couldn’t pull this off. Oh yes I can, I thought. Wait for it … wait until you can see every single row of serrated teeth.
Now! I reached out with my left hand, pressing it firmly against the shark’s nose. It pushed us through the water, its mouth opening even wider in anticipation. The force was incredible! It pushed me through the water with ease. My other hand reached out just inches from its mouth. I let go of the fountain pen and watched it float right down the creature’s gullet.
The mouth closed. It stopped pushing forward and I kicked away from it, surfacing for a quick breath. When I went back under, I could see it thrashing in the water, its tail moving left and right and then quivering as if it was being electrocuted. Underneath its skin, a soft golden glow began to shine through. It thrashed more wildly, snapping its jaws and causing the salty water to begin foaming. A small black hole appeared near its stomach, then grew, expanding quickly and consuming it.
And then: poof! The cloud of black ash particles quickly dissipated in the water, leaving only the fountain pen as proof the shark ever existed.
I swam to it and grabbed it before it could descend to the bottom of the pool, then swam to the edge and pulled myself out. My lungs ached. My eyes were sore from the salty water. My mouth tasted awful and dry. I lay there for a minute, breathing heavily, wondering what might have happened if the Corrupted siblings had actually known how to swim as sharks.
I’d probably be shark food.
But guess what? They didn’t. You can’t just turn into a shark and expect to know how to use that massive tail fin. Just like you can’t just draw a sword with the magic pen and expect it to work like a sword. Knowledge, as Briar would say, is power.
I hoped he was all right. I hoped my parents were, too.
Finally, I got up, grabbed my purse and the pen cap, stuffing the pen back in my pocket. I turned to the amphitheatre’s empty rows of benches, only they weren’t empty. Not completely. There was one little boy sitting near the top staring at me in slack-jawed awe.
“That,” he said, “was the awesomest thing I’ve ever seen in my whole entire life.”
Chapter 9
“I still don’t understand how you fell in,” Mom said. We were outside of the aquarium, rightfully escorted out following my emergence from the oceanarium. The little assassin siblings had indeed done their job well: there was a sign at the doors clearly stating that an inspection was in progress, and all of the employees at the aquarium swore they’d seen the director order the inspection himself.
So why had I gone in?
“I didn’t see the sign,” I told my mom. Thank god it had warmed up outside or I would have been terribly uncomfortable. My wet feet squished around inside my shoes as we walked through the aquarium parking lot.
“But you fell in!” Mom exclaimed.
Dad chuckled. “Boy, I bet you felt like a klutz.”
“I sure did.”
“Yes but how did you fall in?”
I shrugged, trying to think of a plausible excuse. I guess one downside of being a secret hero was coming up with explanations for weird events. “I thought I saw something in the water.”
“What if it had been a shark?” Mom asked, hysterical. “It would have eaten you! Oh my god, I feel like I’m having a panic attack.”
“OK so why don’t you and Dad go back to the hotel?”
“What?” Mom asked, stopping at our little car. She squinted in the sunlight. “Where are you going?”
“Shopping,” I said simply.
“In your wet clothes?” she called out after me.
I turned around, walking backward toward the city. “I’ll dry off on the walk!”
I gave a wave as their car passed me on the street. I headed into downtown, slipping between some of the tallest buildings in the country. I dried off quickly—well, everything except my hair, which probably looked a little wild given I didn’t have a hair band and the salt water had made it rough and heavy.
I had, at the very least, been allowed to stop by the bathroom before we were kicked out. So my face wasn’t a total wreck. It was just free of makeup, something that used to bother me but not anymore. Now all I was thinking about was the mysterious Corrupted. She had a bunch of giant rat friends that killed helpless guys … but why?
My line of thought changed the moment I passed a couple cute boys on Broadway. They were leaving the Gap just as I was walking by and suddenly we were pretty much walking right next to each other for the rest of the block. They were tall, my age, dressed in the nice sort of way you would expect from someone shopping at a place like the Gap on a Saturday afternoon.
We waited at the red light together, stepping aside for afternoon shoppers crossing the other street. The boys were talking about a baseball game. I had the urge to interrupt them and ask how I could get over to Wrigleyville, which was right where I needed to get to anyway. But when the “Walk” signal appeared, they sped up and hurried across the street. Not giving me a second look.
OK, I thought, turning around and heading back to the Gap. Just because I was a hero doing reconnaissance didn’t mean I had to look like hell. Inside, I grabbed a cute dark blue maxi dress with short cap sleeves and a scooped neckline, transferring my pen to my purse before I went into the changing room.
I hung up the dress on the door hook and looked in the mirror. Here I was, the hero. Wrinkled t-shirt. Tight jeans still soggy near the ankles. And then there was the dress: smooth, ankle-length, no place to keep the pen. What if someone else was after me? How would I fight in this?
I tried it on. Hmmmm. OK, so it would be impossible fight while wearing it. But on the other hand, I looked fantastic in it. And shouldn’t I still be allowed to look nice once in awhile?
“I’ll buy it but not wear it,” I decided. I left the dressing room and grabbed an indigo v-neck t-shirt with a beautiful white bird on it and a pair of canvas shorts with pockets deep enough to hide the fountain pen. It would have to do for now … but I was definitely wearing that dress at some point in the near future.
Happy with my look now, I walked another block north, then turned left and walked another block to the bus stop that, according to the handy bus map, would take me north toward Wrigleyville. The bus arrived and I had to stand near the front because it was so crowded. Mostly there were college-age people standing with me, but farther in the back I could see much older people sitting. They looked like people who had just finished a Saturday-morning work shift and were ready to go home and veg out.
If you’ve never worked a Saturday morning shift, you wouldn’t recognize the look. It’s the kind of look you sometimes see on people’s faces in the grocery store in the early evening. They’re the people who got home from a long day of work, looked in the fridge and realized there was nothing to eat.
I got off at the stop right next to Wrigley Field, the baseball stadium surrounded by lots of two- and three-story buildings full of bars and restaurants with big windows that slid open on warm weather days. I passed a comic shop, a clothing shop, and a liquor store, crossing underneath the rusty-looking elevated rail line and making my way another block before I decided to consult my little hand-drawn map in my purse.
Briar’s hand-drawn map, actually. Although how the rabbit could use a pencil so well was beyond my understanding. Still, it was a fairly easy-to-read map; it took me another block north to where a small apartment building sat tucked away from the main street. An empty property full of unkempt grass and waist-high weeds sat on the block as well.
I stopped at the empty property, staring at the apartment across the way. It looked more run-down than the other buildings in the neighborhood, a lot of which were new condo units with sparkling new steel patios and cream-colored concrete and big looming windows. But this apartment building was old, with red bricks that had begun to fall away and old windows that looked drafty.
I walked
around the block as casually as I could, taking the apartment in more closely as I passed. One door on the side. One door on the front. Definitely a foyer of some kind where guests could be buzzed in. Recently mowed lawn. A little flower pot on the concrete patio. Chipped white paint around the windows.
By the time I got back to the other side of the block, I was seriously wondering what else I could do to prepare. What exactly did Briar do when he was conducting “research,” anyway? What more was there to this plan besides bashing the door down and taking out the rats?
I sat down on a little metal bench at the bus stop, waiting for the bus to take me back toward the hotel. My hands found my hair and fumbled with it, trying to magically straighten it out and comb away all of the salt. I would kill for a brush right now, I thought.
Across the street, the northbound bus stopped. I watched it for a moment, then got distracted by the looming L’oreal billboards on the building down the street. When the bus pulled back into traffic again, a single woman was standing at the stop. She was wearing a red bandana over her faded golden hair and a big pair of sunglasses with brown frames that sat heavily on her cheeks. She looked both ways, then leaned down and pulled up her hose underneath her polka-dot dress. She looked both ways again, then began walking across the street.
She was glowing.
It all made sense. Cindy … she was Cinderella! The famed poor daughter who’s discovered by the marvelous prince while her wicked step-sisters cut pieces of their feet off to fit in the mysterious glass slipper.
Slowly, I reached into my pocket for my pen. She was paying no attention to me, swinging a green bag in one hand. As she passed me, I snuck a look inside.
Cleaning products. Windex. Yellow rubber gloves. Cinderella was a maid.
For a moment, I felt sorry for her. Two hundred years and all she’d managed was a low-level cleaning job? Edward was rich! The dwarfs were rich! And Cinderella … was a maid.
The Grimm Chronicles, Vol. 1 Page 20
