Magic and Other Misdemeanors

by Michael Buckley

  She joined everyone at the bottom of the stairs. Bunny was saying her farewells, though Granny and Mr. Canis were keeping their distance. She turned and opened the door. Standing on the porch was Snow White. The teacher was so stunned, she dropped a glass carousel she was carrying, cracking it into several pieces.

  “Snow,” Bunny said.

  “Mother,” Snow replied as if in shock.

  “Mother!” the girls shouted in unison.

  “Billy?” Ms. White cried when she noticed Prince Charming through the doorway. She looked back and forth at all of them, confused. “Where have you been?”

  “I’ve been busy,” Charming said coolly. Sabrina was shocked at his attitude, but she knew the prince didn’t want to see Ms. White. He said he was hiding from her to protect her. Being aloof must be part of the plan.

  “I’ve been worried,” Ms. White stammered. “I left messages. I’ve searched for you.”

  “Then you’re a fool,” Charming said. “You think I would want you? You left me at the altar. You humiliated me in front of my family and friends.”

  “Billy!”

  “Go home, Snow. You’re embarrassing yourself.”

  Sabrina expected the teacher to turn and run off in tears, but instead she reached back and socked Charming in the jaw. He stood his ground, but it was obvious he was in pain.

  “You sorry excuse for a man!” Ms. White said. “How could I have been so blind?” Then she turned on Granny Relda. “And you! Now you’re befriending my mother? I thought we were better friends than that. You of all people know what she has done.”

  “Snow, I didn’t—”

  “And you’ve been hiding Billy here all along while I suffered?”

  Granny never got a chance to explain. The lovely woman stormed down the porch steps and raced off in her car before anyone could stop her.

  “Well, that’s another party I’ve ruined,” Bunny muttered. She waved her hand over the broken carousel and it instantly reassembled, looking brand-new. She handed it to Sabrina.

  “Happy birthday, kid.”

  Moments later she got into a beautiful black sports car and sped away.

  Charming walked across the room, picked up his huge full-length magic mirror, and carried it outside.

  “Where are you going?” Granny Relda said. “You don’t have to leave.”

  “I have things to do, Mrs. Grimm,” he said. “And so does your family. You need to make sure Baba Yaga restores her guardians. You must make her understand that she is vulnerable.”

  “That’s not going to be so easy,” Uncle Jake said. “When I gave her back the wand she claimed that my family was now her mortal enemy for lying to her.”

  “She’s moody,” Charming said. “Find a way.” Then he turned to the girls. “I have one more present for you, Sabrina, one to share with your sister. It’s advice. No matter what the cost, save the ones you love. When you look back on me, remember these words. Remember why I did what I had to do.”

  He looked over to Mr. Canis and then back at the girls. “And get that weapon as soon as you can.”

  Sabrina was confused. She wanted to ask him what he meant, but he walked down to the street carrying his mirror and moments later he was gone.

  That night, Sabrina was once again roused from sleep by incessant knocking on the front door. Later she would wonder why she had answered the door at all. It seemed as if every time she opened it, she got a nasty surprise. But it was late, and no one else in her family seemed to have heard the visitor. How could she have known that Nottingham and Mayor Heart would be on the other side? How could she have known that both of them would have bloodred handprints painted on their chests—the mark of the Scarlet Hand?

  “So, you’re with them,” Sabrina said.

  Mayor Heart looked down at the mark. “It is quite an honor to be able to follow the Master. He has great plans for this world.”

  Granny and Uncle Jake joined her at the door.

  “I’ve got good news for you, Relda,” Heart continued. “We’ve decided to let you keep your house—for now. I have a feeling we could have raised the tax to a billion dollars and you would still have found a way to pay it. So, congratulations, you are now the last human family in Ferryport Landing. Unfortunately, I have some bad news as well. You see, I tried to be nice and let you leave on your own. But you refused, so now I have to get mean. Nottingham, arrest Canis!”

  Nottingham took a pair of handcuffs from his pants pocket. “Absolutely!”

  “Your family has hidden behind Canis for decades. He’s been the only thing between you and an angry mob on more than one occasion. I suspect that things will get very unpleasant for you if he isn’t around.”

  “It was my idea to break into the jail and free Wilhelm,” Granny said. “Arrest me instead.”

  “Oh, you think we’re arresting him for a reason. How funny,” Nottingham said with a laugh.

  “You can’t arrest an innocent person,” Sabrina said.

  “Fine!” Nottingham said. “I’m arresting him for murder.”

  “Murder?” Sabrina cried.

  “The Big Bad Wolf murdered a little girl’s grandmother,” Nottingham said. “Perhaps you’ve heard this story?”

  “Red Riding Hood,” Uncle Jake said.

  “Now, where is the old fleabag? If you’re hiding him, I’ll take you all in.”

  Mr. Canis appeared at the doorway. “I’ll go with you, Nottingham,” he said calmly and stepped out of the house. He had no fear or anger in his face. In fact, he seemed at peace.

  The sheriff slapped his handcuffs on Canis’s huge hands. “You’ve got the right to remain silent—” he started.

  “You’re just giving up?” Sabrina said to Canis. “You could run off. They’d never catch you.”

  “We all have our destinies, little one,” Canis said. “Perhaps I can save everyone from mine.”

  “Whatzgoinon?” Daphne said as she came down the stairs. She was still rubbing the sleep from her eyes.

  Sabrina stepped forward. “You won’t get away with this. We’ll stop you just like we’ve stopped all of the Scarlet Hand. We’ve got a whole family. There are only two of you.”

  “I’m afraid I disagree, child,” a voice said from behind the mayor and Nottingham. Sabrina peered into the dark and saw a mob of Everafters stepping onto their lawn. At their forefront was the Beast, followed by the Frog Prince and his wife. Miss Muffet was one of them, as was her husband, the spider. Tweedledee and Tweedledum were there, accompanied by the Cheshire Cat. There was a sea of ogres, witches, trolls, cyclops, tree gnomes, leprechauns, and dozens of talking animals. There were Everafters Sabrina had seen all over town. Some she had spoken to, others had waited on her at local stores. Glinda the Good Witch stood with them. All had the same red handprint on their chests.

  “You look surprised, Grimms. I was hoping you would be,” Mayor Heart replied.

  “Not surprised,” Sabrina said. “Relieved, now I know which of you are the scum and which aren’t.”

  “Oh, but you haven’t met our latest recruit. Allow me to introduce the newest foot solider in the Scarlet Hand.” The Grimms turned to look.

  “I’m sure you’ll agree he’s just a prince of a guy,” Nottingham added, and the crowd erupted into laughter.

  And then Prince William Charming stepped to the front of the crowd and stood between Mayor Heart and Nottingham. His shirt was marked with a bloodred handprint.

  Michael Buckley is the New York Times bestselling author of the Sisters Grimm and NERDS series. He has also written and developed television shows for many networks. Michael lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his wife, Alison, and his son, Finn.

  This book was designed by Jay Colvin and Vivian Cheng, and art directed by Chad W. Beckerman. It is set in Adobe Garamond, a typeface that is based on those created in the sixteenth century by Claude Garamond. Garamond modeled his typefaces on those created by Venetian printers at the end of the fifteenth century. The modern
version used in this book was designed by Robert Slimbach, who studied Garamond’s historic typefaces at the Plantin-Moretus Museum in Antwerp, Belgium.

  The capital letters at the beginning of each chapter are set in Daylilies, designed by Judith Sutcliffe. She created the typeface by decorating Goudy Old Style capitals with lilies.

  Enjoy this sneak peek at

  Sabrina washed her face and was about to shut off the light and go back to bed when she heard something bubbling in the toilet. The lid was down and she couldn’t see what was causing the noise, but she had her suspicions. Before Puck moved in with the family, he had lived in the woods for a decade. So modern conveniences mesmerized him—none more so than the toilet. He loved to flush it over and over and watch the water swirl down the hole and disappear. For months he was convinced that toilets were some kind of magic, until Uncle Jake explained how indoor plumbing worked. Unfortunately, this knowledge only increased Puck’s interest, and it wasn’t long before he was conducting what he called “scientific research” to discover what could be flushed down the tubes. It started out with a little loose change, but the items quickly grew in size: marbles, wristwatches, doorknobs, balls of yarn, even scoops of butter pecan ice cream swirled and disappeared. Granny finally put an end to it all when she caught Puck trying to flush a beaver he had trapped by the river. Ever since, the toilet had been coughing up Puck’s “experiments.” Last week Sabrina found one of her mittens inside. Now, apparently, something else was making its way to the surface. She bent down and lifted the lid, hoping it was the missing television remote control, which had vanished months ago.

  But it wasn’t the remote control. Instead it was something so shocking she would have nightmares about it the rest of her life and an unnatural fear of toilets in general. Who would expect to lift the toilet lid and find a little man sitting inside?

  “Who goes there?” he said in a squeaky voice. He was no more than a foot tall and wore a tiny green suit, a green bowler hat, and shiny black shoes with bright brass buckles. His long red beard dipped into the toilet water.

  Sabrina shrieked and slammed the toilet lid down on the creature’s head. The little man groaned and shouted a few angry curses, but Sabrina didn’t stick around to hear them. She was already running down the hallway, screaming for her grandmother.

  Granny Relda stumbled out of her room. She was wearing an ankle-length nightgown and a sleeping cap that hid her gray hair. She looked the picture of the perfect grandmother, except, of course, for the sharpened battle-ax she held in her hand.

  “Liebling!” her grandmother cried in a light German accent. Liebling was the German word for sweetheart. “What is going on?”

  “There’s a person in the toilet!” Sabrina said.

  “A what?”

  Before she could answer, Uncle Jake came out of a room at the end of the hall. He was fully dressed in jeans, leather boots, and a long overcoat with hundreds of little pockets sewn into it. He looked exhausted and in dire need of a shave. “What’s all the hubbub about?”

  “Sabrina says she saw something in the toilet,” Granny Relda explained.

  “I swear I flushed,” Uncle Jake said as he threw up his hands.

  “Not that! A person!” Sabrina shouted. “He spoke to me.”

  “Mom, you’ve really got to cut back on all the spicy food you’ve been feeding the girls,” Uncle Jake said.

  “It’s giving them bad dreams.”

  “It wasn’t a dream!” Sabrina cried.

  Daphne entered the hallway, dragging her blanket behind her. She rubbed the sleep from her eyes with her free hand and looked around grumpily. “Can’t a person get some shut-eye around here?”

  “Sabrina had a bad dream,” Granny Relda explained.

  “I did not!”

  “She says she saw something in the toilet,” Uncle Jake said.

  “I swear I flushed,” Daphne said.

  “Ugh! I’ll show you!” Sabrina said as she pulled her grandmother into the bathroom. She pointed at the toilet, then took a step back. “It’s in there!”

  Granny set her battle-ax on the floor and smiled. “Honestly, Sabrina, I think you’re a little old to be scared of the boogeyman.”

  The old woman lifted the toilet lid. There was the little man, rubbing a red knot on the top of his head and glaring at the crowd.

  “What’s the big idea?” he growled.

  Startled, Granny slammed the lid down just as Sabrina had done. Sabrina, Daphne, and even Uncle Jake cried out in fright and backed out of the bathroom.

  “Now do you believe me?” Sabrina said.

  “Oh, my!” Granny cried. “I’ll never doubt you again!”

  “What should we do, Mom?” Uncle Jake asked the old woman.

  “Elvis!” Granny Relda shouted.

  Seconds later an enormous blur of brown fur barreled up the stairs, knocking a few pictures off the wall as it stampeded into the bathroom and came to a screeching halt. Only then could Sabrina see him properly: Elvis, the family’s two-hundred-pound Great Dane. He barked at the toilet fiercely, snarling and snapping at the lid.

  “Get him, boy!” Daphne ordered.

  “You better surrender!” Uncle Jake shouted at the toilet. “Our dog is very hungry!”

  Just then, another door opened down the hall and a shaggy-haired boy in cloud-covered pajamas stepped into the hallway. He scratched his armpit and let out a tremendous belch. “What’s all the racket out here?”

  “There’s something horrible in the toilet!” Daphne shouted.

  “Yeah, I think I forgot to flush,” Puck said.

  “Not that! A little man,” Granny Relda said.

  “Oh,” Puck said. “That’s just Seamus.”

  “And who is Seamus?” Sabrina demanded.

  “He’s part of your new security detail. Now that Mr. Canis is in jail, the house needs looking after, and to be honest, I’m too busy to do it myself. So I hired you all a team of bodyguards.”

  “Why is he in the toilet?” Uncle Jake pressed.

  “Well, duh! He’s guarding it, of course.”

  “Whatever for?” Granny asked.

  “The toilet is a vulnerable entrance into this house,” Puck explained. “Anything could crawl up the pipes and take a bite out of your—”

  “We get the idea,” Granny Relda interrupted. “What are we going to do when we need to use it?”

  “Seamus takes regular breaks and has lunch every day at noon,” Puck said.

  “This is ridiculous,” Sabrina said. “We don’t need bodyguards and we don’t need you to put some freak in the toilet!”

  Puck frowned. “You should really watch who you’re calling a freak. He’s a leprechaun.”

  Seamus lifted the lid and crawled out of the toilet. He now had two purple lumps on his head and an angry look in his eyes. “I didn’t sign on for this abuse, Puck. I quit!”

  “Quit? You can’t quit,” Puck said. “Who will I get to replace you?”

  “Go find a toilet elf. What do I care?” the leprechaun shouted as he stomped down the hall and between the legs of Uncle Jake, leaving a trail of little wet footprints behind him.

  Puck frowned and turned back to Sabrina. “Now look what you’ve done—you’ve made Seamus quit! Do you know how hard it is to find someone to sit in a toilet all night?”

  “How many more leprechauns are in the house?” Daphne asked, peering behind the shower curtain.

  “That was the only one,” Puck said.

  “Good!” Sabrina said, relieved.

  “But there’s about a dozen trolls, some goblins, a few elves and brownies, and a chupacabra staking out the other vulnerable areas of the house.”

  Sabrina gasped. “There are freaks all over the house?”

  “Again, freak is a really ugly term. It highlights how ignorant you are. This is the twenty-first century, you know,” Puck replied.

  Sabrina clenched her fist. “I’m going to highlight your mouth, pal.”

&nbs
p; To be continued. . .