recoiling against the hedge.
“For decades!” Uma choked out. “Someone must have—someone must have brought them back—”
“What monster would bring dwarves back just to kill them?” said Agatha.
Uma looked at her, blank.
“Well, whoever did it is gone,” rasped Tedros, scanning the Woods around them. He bucked up, struggling to act the prince. “I’ll, um, check if any of them are still alive.”
Uma rushed after him. “If so, we must bring them back to the League!”
Agatha stayed behind, gaping at the bodies and bright red puddles. Death everywhere: dwarves … Crypt Keeper … her mother … She spun away, bursting into chills, trying not to connect them. Heaving tight breaths, she focused on the grass under her feet, on her chapped, tingling fingers, until her mind slowed enough for her to think. Who would take all the trouble to bring seven dwarves from different places back to their old home? Who would kill them in cold blood and organize their bodies so precisely? Agatha shook her head, thinking of that horrible scream for help. Who could be so grotesque … so Evil—
Agatha’s heart stopped.
That scream.
High-pitched. Female.
It hadn’t been a dwarf’s.
Slowly Agatha lifted her eyes to Snow White’s cottage, like a moth finding a flame.
Neither her prince nor her teacher noticed her move from the hedges, nor the door creaking in the wind, as they went on from dwarf to dwarf, listening to each small heart.
By the time Tedros heard the silence of the last, Agatha was already inside.
The pink front door shivered and groaned behind her. She’d left it open and she could hear Tedros and Uma in the garden, debating what to do with the bodies. She didn’t know why she hadn’t made Tedros check the house with her; perhaps after their argument in the Woods, she wanted to do something without him … or perhaps she wanted to test if he’d even notice her gone … or perhaps she’d spent so much of the journey acting touchy and weak that she wanted to make up for it … Whatever the reason, here she was, all alone, looking for whoever made that scream.
Agatha opened her eyes. On a breath, she forged deeper into the house.
The living room had a snuggly feel to it, with a sooty fireplace facing big-armed calico chairs, a fluffy red-brown rug made out of hawk feathers, a shelf of gemstones, seashells, and animal eggs beneath a shut, slatted window, and a steep, stumpy wooden staircase in the back corner, barricaded with red velvet rope. Agatha peered at a brass plaque on the wall:
Behind the den, the kitchen was roped off, just like the staircase, but Agatha peeked in to see a dusty, deserted nook, no footprints on the floor or signs of life, except for a few flies milling around a leaky faucet.
“Agatha?” Tedros called outside. “Where are you?”
Agatha sighed, stomach relaxing. The scream must have been one of the dwarves’ after all. She shuddered at such a morbid thought and hustled towards the front door, determined to get to League Headquarters. Whoever this League was, her mother had trusted them to help her. “You must save Sophie as Stefan saved you,” Callis’ voice echoed—
Agatha stopped cold in the foyer.
A creak echoed somewhere upstairs …
Then it went quiet.
Slowly she raised her eyes to the ceiling.
She knew a sensible princess would have called her prince, but instead, she was moving into the den again, slipping off her clumps one by one before she left them on the lambskin chair. She felt her bare toes rake through the feathers of the rug, her eyes pinned on the ceiling until she squeezed under the rope at the rear of the room. She slid up the stairs on her hands and knees like a cat, taking time between steps, so the cricks and cracks of the stairs were camouflaged by the swinging squeaks of the front door.
At the top of the stairs was a narrow hallway with two rooms. Agatha rose up carefully and peeked into the first. Seven small beds lay in a cramped row, as if in an orphanage hall, each neatly made with different colored sheets, matching the tunics of the seven dead bodies outside.
Agatha felt a rush of sadness. Death had been rare to her before last night and now it followed her like a shroud. What was it like to be alive one moment—like her mother, like the Crypt Keeper, like these seven helpers of Good—and then be gone the next? What happens to all your thoughts, your fears, your dreams? What happens to all the love you’ve yet to give? Her body quivered, as if she’d gone too deep, and she was suddenly aware of the stillness around her. Why am I still here? she berated herself, turning around. Tedros would be worried sick by now. Quickly she stepped out of the dwarves’ quarters and leaned over to check the next room—
Agatha grabbed the wall in shock.
In a frost-white bedroom, a frail female’s body lay facedown on the wood floor, her head hidden under the canopied bed. A crystal crown gleamed on its side nearby, as if it’d tumbled off her when she fell. But the dead woman wasn’t what made Agatha gape in horror.
An old crone in black was kneeling next to the body. She had red eyes and a pig nose, a patchwork of stitches, and brown, shriveled flesh flaking off her, just like Red Riding Hood’s wolf and Jack’s giant in the Woods. In her clawlike hand, she clutched a musty storybook, pulled open to its last page: a painting of a prince kissing Snow White back to life, while seven dwarves smiled on blissfully, a dead witch on the ground behind them.
A dead witch that looked just like the old crone holding the storybook.
“That was the old,” the witch purred, leering at the book’s last page …
Before Agatha’s eyes, the painting magically redrew, until the old witch now crouched over Snow White’s dead body instead, the dwarves behind her all slain.
“And this is the new,” the witch grinned.
Agatha’s focus swung back to the corpse half-hidden under the bed … to the royal crown askew … and a deep dread snaked up her spine, remembering something Jack’s giant had said on Necro Ridge …
“Should be out fixin’ our stories like the others.”
“He’ll give us a turn
