The Thirteenth Fairy

by Melissa de la Cruz

  “Mermaids?” asks Gretel.

  Alistair turns to Filomena. “Wait, you guys don’t have mermaids here, either?”

  Filomena shakes her head and then says, “Nope. Gretel’s right. No mermaids here.”

  Now it’s Alistair who looks skeptical. “But I read something in the guidebook about a place here called SeaWorld. It said there are exhibits of all the largest and most impressive sea creatures. How could there not be a single mermaid?”

  Filomena shrugs, and then says, “We’re taught to believe they don’t exist.”

  “Just like we’re taught that magic doesn’t exist,” Gretel adds wistfully. “It’s sad how many believe it.”

  Alistair huffs under the weight of Gretel’s suitcase. “Jeez, what do you have in this thing? A sleeping ogre?”

  “Oh, no, that’s just my makeup,” she says. “And I packed light!”

  “Okay, I think we’re getting close,” Filomena says as the path opens up to a view of the river below. The entrance to the bridge isn’t much farther.

  “Oh, thank hooligans,” Alistair mumbles, still dragging the luggage with a strenuous effort even though it rolls. “Hey, Gretel, is this your wheelhouse?” he asks, laughing at his own joke before she can even respond. “Get it? Wheels…”

  “Just ignore him,” Filomena suggests to Gretel.

  As they make their way, Jack warns, “Watch your step near the cliffside.” Some pebbles fall down the sheer drop.

  “Thanks, Captain Obvious,” Filomena mumbles, passing by him at a brisk pace and leaving him dumbfounded at the nickname.

  “Huh?” asks Jack.

  She’s nervous and crabby, and for some reason she finds Jack’s cool demeanor irritating right now. Sure, he’s a hero, but come on—all three of them passed the dragons’ challenge. Filomena feels her annoyance rise, and she loses her footing on the cliff, only to have Jack catch her hand.

  “Oh, thanks,” she says, now annoyed with herself instead of him.

  Jack waits for Alistair to catch up. “Did you hear that? Why would she call me Captain Something? She knows my name…”

  Alistair is sweating under the hot sun and doesn’t have the patience to try to make his friend feel better. “I don’t know. Girls are mean. And will you look at the size of this bag? What is makeup? What is she making up for?”

  Filomena and Gretel arrive at the bridge first, but as they approach, they see that it’s blocked by a group of trolls. Trolls who are all too familiar to Filomena.

  Except this time they are literal trolls. With hideous, deformed bodies and sharp teeth. They’re still wearing the Argyle Prep uniforms, the girls in plaid skirts and the boys in chinos and polo shirts.

  “The Alfredos!” Filomena gasps. “I knew it!”

  “How odd that they’re all named Alfredo,” says Gretel thoughtfully.

  Filomena shakes her head, but she’s too agitated to explain. Her suspicions were right! The Fettucine Alfredos are somehow tied to the books. And the Noodle Nuisances aren’t just a group of snotty seventh graders, apparently. They’re literally a group of evil trolls.

  She grabs Gretel from their line of sight, and the two of them hide behind the nearest tree. Filomena holds a finger to her lips and stares at Gretel, motioning for her to be quiet.

  Filomena peers around the tree, glancing at the bridge again to see if it’s really Posy and her nasty group of minions blocking the path to the portal. A brief look confirms her suspicions. Yup. It’s definitely the Penne Posse. The girls are all there—Daisy, Petunia, and Carnation—along with the boys, Tex, Angelo, Lake, and Buck.

  Her middle school bullies are actual trolls. It’s almost too good (or bad) to be true. She turns to Gretel and indicates her high heels. “You might want to take those off,” Filomena whispers.

  “Why?” Gretel whispers back.

  Filomena responds by pointing to herself and to Gretel and then using her pointer and middle fingers to portray a running motion.

  No sooner does she finish conveying this information than they hear the sound of wheels being dragged along the rocky path. She needs to warn Jack and Alistair, but before she can, Alistair spots her, and his voice carries over the canyon.

  Alistair yells, “Hey, girls! Why are you hiding behind that tree?”

  Filomena freezes against the tree, and Gretel quickly doffs her heels. But it’s too late.

  The jig, as they say, is up.

  Posy turns her troll head 180 degrees and spots them immediately.

  “THERE THEY ARE!” she yells in a deep roar.

  There’s no reason for hiding or pretending now.

  “GET THEM!”

  Once more, Filomena and her friends are running for their lives.

  “So much cardio,” says Alistair in between huffs.

  Filomena would laugh if she could, but she’s too focused on getting away.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  KIDNAPPED

  They don’t call him Jack the Giant Stalker because he’s afraid of trolls. Next thing you know, he’ll be running from dwarves! The pint-sized monsters might seem frightening to his friends, but Jack finds them merely irritating. “Get to the bridge!” he bellows. Then adds, “The other way!” since they’re running away from it.

  Filomena stops first and looks back at him, hesitant.

  The last time they were chased by this crew, she kept him from unleashing his magic on them. But there’s no reason to stop him now; they’re not just a bunch of seventh graders. They’re the ogres’ minions.

  “HURRY!” he yells again.

  Filomena understands. “To the bridge!” she orders, pulling on Gretel’s sleeve and turning her around. “Leave the bag!” she screams to Alistair.

  “Nooooo!” Gretel protests. “My makeup!”

  “You don’t need it! You’re beautiful without it!” Filomena argues.

  “You really are!” Alistair agrees, even as he tries to run with the large suitcase.

  They run past Jack, who is standing at the edge of the cliff, his vines slipping out and reaching toward the trolls.

  Alistair trips on a few rocks and falls down hard.

  “Okay, fine! Leave it!” Gretel finally agrees. They run toward the bridge and begin to cross to the other side. But Alistair, ever the gentleman, won’t leave Gretel’s bag and drags it behind him.

  “JACK THE GIANT STALKER,” the troll formerly known as Posy Williamson sneers. “MORE LIKE JACK THE GIANT LOSER!”

  The trolls fan out, wicked smiles on their faces. “We knew you’d try to cross here once we cut down that stupid Heart Tree! You’ll never get back to Never After now! You’ll grow old and die here, just like your stupid mortal friend!”

  “Is that you, Rumpelstiltskin?” Jack says. “Haven’t seen you since Queen Rosanna figured out your name! I thought that stench smelled familiar!”

  Posy looks annoyed. “I’m wearing deodorant!”

  The vines from Jack’s arms uncoil ferociously and attack from above, and soon they’ve looped around each troll and rolled them up like … well, like spaghetti noodles.

  But the trolls unleash their own weapons—garden shears!—and begin to hack at the vines.

  Jack falls to his knees, his vines dripping blood.

  “Jack!” Filomena cries, looking back and seeing him fall.

  She and Gretel and Alistair have almost reached the end of the bridge, and even through the haze, Filomena can see the familiar landscape of Never After ahead.

  “GO!” yells Jack, keeping up the fight as new vines sprout to battle the trolls.

  “No, we’re not leaving without you!” cries Filomena. She removes her Dragon’s Tooth sword from its sheath. “Come on!” she tells the other two.

  “Um, okay?” Gretel says, doing the same.

  Alistair is already running toward the trolls, his dragon sword held high, Gretel’s bag bumping behind him on the rocks. “COME AND GET IT!” he screams.

  Filomena lunges at the trolls, glad for
the karate training her parents made her take when she was in elementary school.

  A few of the trolls focus their attention on the new combatants, and one of them slashes at Gretel’s sweater.

  “YOU ANIMALS! THIS IS DESIGNER!” Gretel yells as she stabs back and disappears into a troll pile.

  Through the smoke and the blood and the yelling, Filomena loses track of her friends, but at last the trolls are choked unconscious by Jack’s vines, and they fall, one by one.

  Jack runs up to her, his vines coiled back around his arms. “You all right?”

  “Yeah. Where are Gretel and Alistair?”

  “I thought they were with you!” says Jack.

  “No!” says Filomena.

  Then they see a group of trolls crossing the bridge, carrying two person-shaped bundles and one large suitcase above their heads.

  Jack snaps his vines and sends them whizzing to catch the trolls, but they disappear into the haze at the end of the span.

  He curses soundly, using a few of those four-letter words Alistair taught him. “Come on. We’ll find them over there.”

  They rush to the other side, and as they pass through the portal, they find the bridge itself has changed and now they’re running along a rickety wooden one staffed by ogres, just as Jack feared.

  Jack pulls Filomena down, and they jump off, tumbling into a ditch underneath while an ogre army marches above them.

  It’s Jack’s turn to shush her.

  Filomena nods, her heart pounding. At last, when the ogres have disappeared around the bend, she and Jack come out of their hiding place and survey the area.

  But there’s no sign of the trolls—or of their friends.

  They’re gone.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  PUB MEAL

  “They can’t have gotten very far,” Filomena says, dusting herself off and getting up. She holds out a hand to help Jack to his feet.

  He takes it gratefully. “Hopefully not.”

  “It’s so strange,” says Filomena. “All my life I thought my parents were exaggerating about child-snatchers and fairy abductions, but here we are and two of our friends have actually been snatched.”

  “We’ll get Alistair and Gretel back.”

  “We have to,” says Filomena. “Why did the trolls take them, anyway? Trolls don’t eat … um … people, do they?”

  “No, trolls are mostly vegetarian.”

  “More like carbo-terian,” says Filomena, remembering their penchant for buttered noodles. “By the way, I keep meaning to tell you they’re not all named Alfredo. It’s a joke I made up for myself. I call them Fettucine Alfredos because that’s all they eat. Noodles with butter and cream.”

  “Pretty much the troll diet,” says Jack.

  “Who knew?” she asks with a wan smile, which he returns. “So do you think they were sent to the school to, uh, keep an eye on me or something?”

  “Yeah,” says Jack. “Someone knew you were there and who you really are.”

  “But who am I?” asks Filomena. “Even I don’t know.”

  “You’re marked by Carabosse. You must be someone important,” says Jack, without looking her in the eye.

  “Nah, I’m nobody,” says Filomena, wishing Jack wouldn’t make such a sour face every time he says the evil fairy’s name. Except, Zera swore her sister wasn’t evil. Filomena doesn’t know what to believe.

  “We’re all nobody and somebody,” says Jack.

  “Okay, fine, but what do you think they want with Gretel and Alistair?”

  “Mmm,” replies Jack with a shrug as he mulls over the question.

  “I guess her dad is rich,” says Filomena. “He could pay a ransom, maybe?”

  “Come on,” says Jack. “Let’s find out if anyone’s seen them.”

  * * *

  They stop the first creature they encounter with a polite “Excuse me? Mr. Gruff?”

  The harried billy goat stops and turns to Jack. “Yes?”

  This is the biggest of the billy goats, Filomena realizes, almost as big as a horse. He’s the famous billy goat who tossed the troll off the bridge.

  “Have you seen a band of trolls leaving the bridge dragging two large bundles?”

  “Trolls?” asks the billy goat. “Hmm. I haven’t seen a troll on the bridge since … well, you know.”

  “They’re small trolls. Dwarfish,” adds Filomena.

  “Oh! Them I might have seen. They went that way,” the goat says, pointing his hoof in the direction of the woods.

  Jack and Filomena shout their thanks and run to where the goat pointed. Jack kneels down in the dirt and inspects the tracks. “They went this way, all right.”

  But the tracks end near the river, and there are no tracks on the other side. Jack and Filomena question every creature they encounter, and look under every rock, inspect every ditch, and scour every treetop, but there’s no sign of their friends.

  As darkness settles over the kingdom, Jack suggests they stop at a nearby village pub to get a bite to eat and to rest for the night. There’s no use looking for Alistair and Gretel in the dark. Unlike in her world, he explains, no decent business is conducted here once the sun has gone down, and they’re sure to be robbed or attacked on the road. While Never After is imbued with magic, it doesn’t have the one thing that makes the night safe in the mortal world: electricity.

  Filomena is grateful. As worried as she is about their friends, her stomach is growling, and she’d like to lie down.

  They make their way through the crowded, noisy establishment and find two seats at a long, empty table.

  A ghoul with sockets for eyes floats over, an apron around its midriff. “Welcome to Dine, Drink, and Die,” the specter says lifelessly. “What can we get for you this fine evening?”

  “Two large bowls of Something Stew. And two mugs of Riotous Root Beer, good sir. And two rooms at the inn, if you’ve got them.”

  “Excellent,” mourns the ghoul, who disappears.

  Filomena turns to Jack. “Something Stew? Do you even know what’s in it?”

  “No one does. That’s part of what makes it so appetizing.”

  “Okay,” she says, sounding skeptical. But then, anything’s better than the vegan bologna sandwiches from the school cafeteria.

  The ghoul eventually returns, first with their drinks and then with their bowls of stew.

  “Now, that’s a good spirit,” Jack says, flipping the ghoul a gold coin from his pocket.

  The stew, as Jack promised, is delicious. While it isn’t Zera’s bountiful feast, there’s something to be said for eating a mystery meal. Filomena tries to place the ingredients—bone broth for sure, and a variety of vegetables, spices, and … tulips? She can’t quite put a finger on it, but she eats everything.

  “We’ve got to find them,” she says after wiping her mouth.

  “We will, we will,” Jack reassures her. “They can’t have gotten too far. It’s dark now. They’ve had to stop and camp as well.”

  “Okay. But shouldn’t we ask if anyone here has seen them?”

  Jack sighs, then sets down his spoon and leaps atop the bench. “Oi! Has anyone seen a bunch of trolls wandering around here? Dragging two person-shaped bundles?”

  “And a suitcase!” Filomena adds.

  Some pub patrons shake their heads and mutter to themselves, while others ignore Jack completely.

  “Hmm … living or dead?” asks a serving ghoul.

  “Living!” cries Filomena.

  “Can’t say we have,” the ghoul responds, wiping a table down. “Sorry, lads.”

  Jack shrugs, sits back down, and finishes eating. “They’re not going to tell us anything—they’re too scared of the ogres around here. And everyone knows the trolls work for the ogres.”

  “Oh,” says Filomena as they head upstairs to turn in for the night. They have two rooms across the hall from each other.

  She hopes Alistair and Gretel are okay. This is all her fault. The trolls were after he
r, and now her friends are paying for it. She’s never felt so helpless and frustrated.

  Inside her spare but clean room, she looks out the window and up at a lone star in the sky, wishing her heart were as full as her belly.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  ALISTAIR BARTHOLOMEW BARNABY

  Back on the road the next morning, Jack studies the tracks near the river more closely as a pixie flutters by. Filomena waves her down to ask if she’s seen a group of trolls.

  “Trolls?” the pixie repeats. “I don’t think I’ve seen trolls. I did see a lost girl, though.”

  “Gretel!” yelps Filomena.

  “Who is she?” asks the pixie.

  “She’s the Cobbler’s daughter,” Jack explains.

  The fairy gasps. “As in … the Cobbler?! He’s back?”

  “Not quite,” says Jack.

  “Could you please tell us where you last saw her?” Filomena begs. “It’s really important.”

  “Hmm,” the pixie coos, pointing in every direction as she flits above them. “I saw her opposite of west; she was not dressed the best. Perhaps on foot, bare and bloody. Distressed and dirty, though fair even while muddy. Lost but soon to be found, sitting on the ground.”

  With that, she takes off into the sky, soaring with poise and ease. She pauses and yells back to them, “Please tell the Cobbler to make me a pretty new pair of flats if you see him! Pointy and green, to match my wings!”

  Then she shrinks until she vanishes from their sight.

  “I hope Gretel’s okay. Do you think the trolls let her go?” Filomena asks. “It seems so unlikely.”

  “I was wondering the same thing,” Jack replies. “Anyway, the pixie said she saw her opposite of west, which is this way. Let’s go.”

  He turns east and Filomena follows close behind, both all but running as they shout Gretel’s name into the air, listening for an answer in the breeze.

  “Here! I’m over here!” comes Gretel’s unmistakable voice.

  “Gretel!” Filomena exclaims once she sees her friend, who is sprawled on the ground and looks a bit worse for wear. Gretel stands and Filomena hugs her tightly. “Are you okay?”