“Actually, I don’t think I’m technically an adventurer anymore,” I said as I came closer. A pang went through me at the words. Disobeying the Committee had been the only way to get my parents back, I reminded myself, even if it meant getting fired. Besides, maybe the fact that I wasn’t actually an adventurer would prevent the queen from doing whatever creepy thing she had planned for me.
“No matter,” the queen said. “You are still an adventurer in your heart.”
Or maybe not.
She climbed a couple of stone steps and sat on top of a throne, her dress spreading out around her like a silvery cupcake. I couldn’t believe I was standing face-to-face with the fairy who could very well have taken my parents. I didn’t know whether I should scream at her for ruining my life or flatter her to get as much information as possible. Neither approach felt right.
“How are you enjoying my kingdom? Is it not beautiful?” she asked. Unlike the rest of her golden body, her eyes were dark and dull.
“Straight out of a fairy tale,” I said.
That seemed to make her glow even more brightly. “After my father died, I made this land into what I always knew it could be.” The queen motioned to the film that was still playing silently on the walls.
“A movie?” I said.
“Perfect,” she corrected. “When my father ruled here, the fairies wasted their lives trying to please visitors.” Her smile dimmed. “He made me go with him when I was a girl and shake hands with everyone who walked through those gates. It was disgraceful. I was a princess, and yet he made me act like a commoner. Can you imagine?”
I certainly could imagine what it was like to be a commoner.
“Then, one day, I saw this tale,” she went on, pointing to the movie screen again. “For the first time in my life, I realized what a real princess could be.”
“Couldn’t you be a real princess and still keep the theme park open?” I said.
“Closing the park proved that I was a real princess. More than that: a true queen. Fairies are meant to be magical, beautiful creatures. By getting rid of that foul park, I gave our beauty back to us.”
“Sorry to break it to you,” I said, “but this place is still a theme park. I mean, you have characters wandering around in costumes and everyone treating the elevators like they’re rides. It might not be full of roller coasters, but it’s still an amusement park.”
“Nonsense!” she said. “I will never continue my father’s foolish ways.”
I shrugged. “You already have.”
Bing! “The next mermaid water show is starting in ten minutes,” the announcement chirped.
“See?” I said smugly.
The queen looked ready to explode. Oops. I hadn’t meant to get her all riled up, but I couldn’t just stand there and let her go on kidding herself.
Then she sucked in a long breath and said, “No matter. When my prince finally comes, everything will be perfect.” She closed her eyes and hummed a few notes from none other than “Someday My Prince Will Come.”
I nearly choked. The queen really was crazy. “You know that song is from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, don’t you?” If you were going to have an unhealthy obsession with a movie, you should at least get the details right.
The queen acted like she hadn’t heard me, though she finally stopped humming. Instead, she gazed at a glass display case in the middle of the room that I hadn’t noticed before. Inside was a purple, velvet pillow. And on that pillow was a glass shoe. Instead of the usual glass slipper, this was a glass loafer that had clearly been made for a man.
“Um, is that for your prince?” I said.
The queen nodded. “I have searched through the entire kingdom for the one who fits that shoe, but I have not found him. One day, he will come, and I will finally have a prince to rule at my side.”
I wasn’t sure a future prince would want to put on a shoe that a thousand other guys had tried on. Besides, hadn’t the queen ever heard of online dating?
“Or,” she went on, “if I do not find my prince, then I will conjure him myself. Once I have him by my side, everything will truly be perfect.” The queen’s eyes swung toward me, and I saw the same hungry look on her face that I’d seen on Mahlia’s. “And you will help me make that dream come true, Jenny the Adventurer.”
“What are you talking about?” There was no way I was helping this glowing nutcase.
The queen stood and took a few steps toward me. I could practically feel the light drifting off her glowing skin. It sparkled like magic. Was that why she was all lit up? Was her body literally oozing with power?
“I have a proposal for you,” she said. “It is simple, really. You give me what I want, and I give you what you want.”
My heart clenched. Did she mean…? Were my parents…? I could barely even think the words. “What do you want?” I whispered.
“Oh, nothing much. Only how to find the Committee.”
I laughed. She had to be kidding. “Have you met the Committee? Those old women are insane. Why would you want to be anywhere near them?”
The last trace of the queen’s singsongy voice disappeared. “You have seen them,” she hissed. “You know where they are. And you will tell me.”
“I don’t know anything. Their location is kept a secret. I can’t even get there on my own. And even if I did know, why would I tell you?”
The queen smiled. “Because once you lead me to the Committee, I will return your parents to you.”
Chapter Nine
They were here! They were really here! My parents were in Fairy Land!
I wanted to cartwheel around the room, but I had to keep calm. The queen obviously wanted to negotiate. I couldn’t look too eager or she’d think she’d already won.
“Where are they?” I said. “Why have you been keeping them here all these years?”
The Queen Fairy didn’t answer my question. Instead, she studied me for a long moment. “Will you bring me to the Committee’s location or not?” she finally said.
“I already told you, I don’t know where it is!”
“You know how to get there.”
She was right. I did know how. Anthony could take me. Or Dr. Bradley—if he wasn’t with the Committee already. Why wasn’t she asking Anthony to bring her there? Why was she asking me? Then I realized: Anthony didn’t have a gaping hole in his life like I did. The Queen Fairy knew I was willing to do anything to get my family back together.
“How do I know you’re telling the truth?” I said, my excitement dimming. Maybe this was just a trick. “For all I know, you have no clue where my parents are.”
The queen flashed another smile. Then she waved her hand, and the walls displaying Cinderella flickered and went dark. After a second, they began showing something completely different. A dimly lit room, two narrow beds, and on those beds, two sleeping people. A man and a woman.
All I could do was stare. They were older than I remembered, but it was them. My mom and dad.
“Where is that?” I whispered as sudden tears rolled down my cheeks. “Where are you keeping them?”
The fairy shook her head. “Remember, in order to get what you want, first you must give me what I want.” She waved her hand again, and the screens went dark. My parents vanished.
I wiped my face with my fingers, trying to keep down the sobs that were threatening to burst out of me. My parents were alive. They were here. I’d finally found them. But to get them back, I would have to…
“Why do you want to see the Committee so badly?” I said. “I’m not agreeing to anything until you tell me.”
She turned and went to sit back on her throne. Then she studied me, her dark eyes like two black holes in her glowing face. “I want to take their power, and I want them gone.”
I stood totally frozen. This was crazy. I couldn’t lead the Queen
Fairy to the Committee members, not if she was going to suck up their magic like she’d done with the Land of Tales. I wasn’t the Committee’s biggest fan, but without those cranky old women around, things could get pretty chaotic. They were the ones responsible for keeping the magical worlds safe and organized.
But my parents…if I did this one thing, I would have my parents back. Then it would all be over and we could go home and have our lives back, just like I’d been dreaming about for seven years. Whatever the Queen Fairy was doing with my parents, she wasn’t going to let them go without a fight, not after all this time. Maybe agreeing to this was the only way.
“What is your answer?” said the Queen Fairy.
I knew I should say no, that I should laugh in her face at the idea of betraying the Committee. But I couldn’t say a word.
“Perhaps you need a few moments to consider my offer.” The queen snapped her fingers, and two golden cages appeared out of thin air. One cage was filled with dozens of mice of various sizes and colors. The other housed tons of small birds. All of them were dressed in tiny clothes.
What was going on?
“It is time to sing!” the queen announced to the animals.
I was probably imagining things, but it sounded like the mice and birds let out a collective sigh, as if singing was the last thing they wanted to do.
The Queen Fairy started belting out “Someday My Prince Will Come” again, and this time the birds twittered along while the mice chimed in with voices that reminded me of miniature kazoos.
Did the queen think this was going to help me make up my mind about her proposal? If anything, it was just making me even more confused (and giving me a headache). When she started dancing around the room with an imaginary partner, things had gone far enough.
“Stop it!” I yelled. “This isn’t helping!”
The queen let out an impatient sigh and waved her hand. The woodland creatures and their cages instantly disappeared. “Very well. I will give you more time to decide.”
“What if I won’t do it?” I said, my voice cracking.
“Then I will keep you in my kingdom, just as I have kept your parents. None of you will ever see your home again. And I will find some other way to get to the Committee, so your refusal to help me will have been for nothing.”
I thought of Trish, Melissa, and Aunt Evie. What would they do if I never came back? No. It wouldn’t come to that. I’d find a way. I’d get my family and myself home.
But at what price? a small voice in my head asked.
“Go now,” said the Queen Fairy. “You have three days to decide.”
She turned away from me, and I drifted back toward the elevator like my legs were being controlled by someone else.
I had three days.
Chapter Ten
As I waited for the elevator, two of the queen’s fairy bodyguards beside me, I couldn’t get the image of my sleeping parents out of my head. They were really here somewhere. Maybe in this very palace. I could be standing right above their heads. The thought made me want to scream and jump up and down at the same time.
The elevator finally arrived. I expected the leprechaun guards to be inside waiting to take me back to my room, but when the doors slid open, I found myself face-to-face with Ilda the witch. She was still dressed in the hideous sparkly, purple sweater she’d been wearing the last time I saw her, but her gray curls were matted and her orange lipstick was gone, leaving her lips pale and dry.
“Jenny,” she said in a hoarse whisper. “I knew you’d follow me here.”
“Silence,” one of the leprechaun guards said, pushing her out into the hallway. I realized Ilda’s hands were bound in front of her. All that stuff Mahlia had said about Ilda being an honored guest had been a lie. The witch was a prisoner, just like me.
“Where are you taking her?” I said.
Karfum turned to the other guards. “I will stay here with the adventurer. Gold ahead and bring the prisoner to the queen.”
The other leprechauns bowed their heads and pulled Ilda away while the fairy guards followed behind. I felt like I should say something to her, but what? Then the group disappeared around the corner, and she was gone.
“Is she going to be okay?” I asked Karfum. Ilda wasn’t my favorite person in the universe—her mind games drove me insane—but if it weren’t for the information she’d given me, I would have never figured out where my parents had gone.
Karfum sighed and twirled the shamrock between his lips. “The queen has lost patience with the witch. I suspect things will not gold well for her this time.”
“What do you mean?”
A loud Pop! echoed from down the corridor. It was followed by loud, rodentlike squeaking. Uh-oh. I was afraid I knew what had just happened.
Needing to see the truth for myself, I turned and darted down the hall away from Karfum.
“Come back!” he yelled, but I didn’t stop, not even when I heard the Queen’s Guard running after me.
When I rounded the corner and emerged in the queen’s throne room, I saw exactly what I’d been afraid of. In the Queen Fairy’s hand was a small, gray-eared mouse in a tiny, purple sweater.
“What did you do to her?” I demanded just as Karfum caught up to me and grabbed my arm. The fairy guards quickly surrounded us.
“Quiet,” Karfum whispered in my ear. “You’ll only make things worse.”
The queen didn’t even look my way, like I was invisible. Instead, she conjured a golden cage and shoved Ilda inside. The gray-eared mouse tried to make a run for it, but its struggle was pointless. The cage slammed shut and disappeared.
I stood there staring at the empty spot where the cage had been. Then, feeling numb from head to toe, I let Karfum and another guard lead me away.
Ilda had been turned into a singing rodent, and it was my fault. If I hadn’t convinced her to tell me about my parents’ whereabouts, the queen would have never brought her here and punished her for revealing the truth to me.
Part of me knew it was crazy to feel sorry for Ilda when she’d helped the Queen Fairy steal all the magic from the Land of Tales. And yet, I couldn’t help feeling guilty.
I was an adventurer. I was supposed to protect magical creatures, not stand by and watch them be transformed into rodents.
Then again, wasn’t that what I was considering doing if I turned the Committee over to the Queen Fairy? If she had the Committee members under her thumb, she could turn every last magical creature into part of her musical act.
And it would be my fault.
I couldn’t let that happen. But if I didn’t do what the Queen Fairy said, then my only chance to get my parents back could be gone.
Chapter Eleven
After the guards led me back to my room, I sat on the bed staring out the window at the haze. My parents were somewhere in this city. I could almost feel them nearby.
Frustrated, I grabbed a mini-golf ball and chucked it against the wall. It bounced off the bathroom door and sailed into the toilet. Plop!
Oops.
As I sunk back on the bed, it occurred to me that if I could find where the fairies were hiding my mom and dad, maybe I could rescue them before the queen’s deadline and be long gone by the time the three days were up.
In order to find my parents, I first had to get out of my room. I was tempted to try sneaking out through the panels in the closets, but my cuff would go off again. And this time, since the leprechauns wouldn’t have to hurry to get me ready for an audience with the queen, I doubted they’d be so forgiving. Plus, I didn’t exactly want to get zapped again.
Maybe there was another way. Whatever Luken had done to be able to sneak around the palace undetected, I needed to do it too. I crawled into the closet and tried tapping on the back of it a few times to see if he would answer, but there was no sound in the room next door. I’d just have
to wait for him to come back.
As it got darker and darker outside, there was still no sign of Luken.
Chances were, he’d prowl through my room while I was sleeping, on his way to the tunnels. If I set a trap for him, maybe I could get him to help me.
I arranged things around the room until I was sure my trap was ready. Then, with nothing left to do, I got ready for bed.
After what felt like an hour of staring at the ceiling and wondering where my parents were, and what had happened to Dr. Bradley, and if Anthony was okay, I finally managed to fall asleep.
I wasn’t usually a big dreamer, and when I did have dreams, they were full of things like half-troll, half-Pegasus hybrids and other wacky magical creatures that didn’t exist. This time, though, my dream felt like someone was showing me a movie of one of my adventures.
I was in the Land of Speak, the last mission I’d gone on before I found out that my parents had been adventurers (instead of dentists like I’d always thought). I was in the palace, talking to Prince Lamb—a mouthless magical sheep, turned cute human boy—about how to best defeat Klarr, the evil clown sorcerer. There was a sudden Pop! and my best friends, Trish and Melissa, appeared in the middle of the throne room, insisting that Klarr was about to come and attack us. I tried to tell them that they shouldn’t be here, that they were supposed to be in the Land of Tales helping the villagers learn to live without magic, but they wouldn’t listen to me.
As Klarr’s clown car approached the palace, we rushed around gathering everyone we could find to help us fight. All of a sudden, I had the eerie feeling that someone was watching me. When I glanced over my shoulder, there was no one there.
The longer the dream went on, the more it felt like whoever was watching me was actually inside my brain, somehow looking into my thoughts. I had a prickling sensation at the back of my skull that just kept getting worse and worse.
Finally, it got so bad that I couldn’t stand it anymore. “I want to wake up now,” my dream-self said.
My Sort of Fairy Tale Ending Page 4