head down onto Gabbie’s spine and started to yell at the top of his lungs.
“Spider’s juice, Grawl, I haven’t even lifted off yet!” Gabbie scolded.
“I know that! I’m just getting ready,” he returned.
“Whatever!” she returned. Touching the tip of the broomstick, the two rocketed off the rooftop and immediately took a sharp nosedive to the streets below. Both Gabbie and Grawl yelled during the plummet until the broom shook forcefully and turned upward, back into the sky. As Gabbie and Grawl headed toward their school, Gabbie spotted her grandmother entering the airspace. They nearly collided.
“Sorry, Grandmamma!” Gabbie called over her shoulder.
“Have a good day, you two!” Grandmamma called back as she landed atop the Del Toro home.
Oversight
Abigail Del Toro flipped open the window that led out to the second story of the home. The blond-haired woman in sleek black, the one Gabbie had seen last night, was there.
“You need to be more careful,” Abigail told her in a direct tone. “Gabbie saw you last night.” Abigail handed the other woman a parcel wrapped in black tape.
“I’m sorry for that,” the woman replied, taking the parcel. “I’ve been more distracted than normal.” Her voice gave her away as being much younger than her height and bearing would indicate.
“Very well. We appreciate your oversight,” Abigail said.
“He’s due for liberty today, isn’t that right?”
“Yes,” Abigail said, “though I would keep a low profile. All eyes are on him these days. And despite your cloaking, you’d be a valuable target.”
“I understand,” the woman said. “Thanks for the meal.”
She alighted her broom as Abigail heaved a deep sigh.
Work Study
Gabbie rolled her eyes in exasperation. “Grawl, that’s not how the story goes, you know that!”
“What’s wrong with a little dramatic license every now and again?”
“It would be fine if you didn’t change up everything!”
“You’re just mad because I beat your boy toy to the final punch.”
“I am not. And he’s not a boy toy!”
Grawl snorted in derision.
“Do you want to go again?” Gabbie asked, her eyes flashing. “Your defenses are getting better, Grawl. You’re learning to use less brute force and be more agile.”
“The keys are still too small for my fingers,” he complained. “They should make these controllers in troll size."
“You’re probably right about that,” Gabbie agreed, regarding his huge hands.
“Anyway, it’s getting late, Gabbie, and I’ve still got the whole south lawn to get done.”
Grawl’s job as part of the work-study program was to care for the elaborately manicured lawns of Ghoul School. It was a natural thing. As a troll, Grawl had special life-affirming abilities when it came to the earth, a fact not often known about trolls. Gabbie was assigned parlor and indoor work, polishing and vacuuming. She could use her witchly powers, but it would be charged against her magical cache. Every witch- and warlock-in-training was given a cache of how often and how much they could use their powers. Any excess was taken from their stewardship, though it could be made up with extra credit. Students who were older and further along in their training tended to have larger caches. As a troll, and without magical powers per se, Grawl did not have a cache. Most of the time, Gabbie went about her chores without the assist of magic. These days she found that she needed to hold onto all the magic about herself that she could.
Gabbie paused the game on the image of her hero and hard crush, Joel Aubrey Franklin, a teenaged mortal boy from the Other Side who had been involved in heroic actions last Halloween, Gabbie’s favorite day of the year.
“You’re right,” Gabbie agreed, turning off the console linked to the huge screen in the recreation room of the school. “Until next time, dear husband,” she said jokingly, blowing a kiss to Joel’s image.
“You are so nuts about that guy,” Grawl teased as the two of them rearranged their chairs and tidied up their space. “Isn’t he a mortal?”
Gabbie, Grawl and the other inhabitants of Ghoulsville had little use for the outside mortal world. She had heard that there was a time when Ghoulsville customs were more widespread than they were now. But as the mortal world’s influence grew, so did its borders, confining the once-expansive Ghoul Kingdom (as it was known then) into a small crescent of land that was kept separate from the Other Side by a magical foggy barrier. This barrier would thin and weaken around Halloween, allowing for interchange between the two worlds; then with the coming of All Saints’ Day, the barrier would increase once again.
“Now Grawl,” Gabbie said, reaching up and tucking an unruly strand of her long, wavy, black and brown hair behind her ear. “you of all people know that the fact that Joel’s mortal doesn’t mean anything.”
Grawl just grunted in reply.
Gabbie paused for a minute, daydreaming about Joel Aubrey Franklin’s handsome face and determined manner. She and all of the students of Ghoul School had heard of how he had deposed the powerful werewolf Ian Samuels last Halloween at the Sinner’s Well. Once the first dailies had come out about that victory and she had seen him firsthand, she had to admit that she had been absolutely taken with the teenager from the Other Side. The year before that, this same Joel had defeated the ultra-wicked renegade goblin Googamond when he went wild on Halloween and tried to make the day last forever. For Gabbie that wasn’t really a bad idea, though she could understand how it might be problematic for mortals.
Joel’s exploits had been so well received that a video game had been fashioned of his and Ian’s last battle for the Forever Kingdom Amulet outside the Barbary mansion. Grawl liked to change how things went, but everyone knew that Joel had defeated Ian, and it would have been cool if the story would have ended there. However, Ian had escaped from the holding cell in the House of Ghouls, along with a few other criminals, including the nefarious Googamond.
Space being what it was in their region of the Netherworld, there wasn’t a lot of room to keep those villains nestled away proper and away from the school, as Gabbie’s mother said they should have been.
Gabbie guessed that was why things had been a little more intense than normal at both the House of Ghouls and at Ghoul School, with those two criminals on the loose. Not to mention that the recent Pumpkin Hill Plunder and resulting arrest of her father and his students, her brother Efrian’s disappearance, and the horrible murder of their principal Barnabas Croft made for trying times in Ghoulsville. But Gabbie had faith that her Aunt Zeldabub would make things right.
“Say, what’s that you’re doing?” she asked Grawl, who was swiping under his arms and across his chest with a small package
