The Witch's Glass

by Holly Grant

  #1 The League of Beastly Dreadfuls

  #2 The League of Beastly Dreadfuls: The Dastardly Deed

  #3 The League of Beastly Dreadfuls: The Witch’s Glass

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2017 by Holly Grant

  Cover art and interior illustrations copyright © 2017 by Josie Portillo

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Random House Children’s Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  Random House and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Visit us on the Web! rhcbooks.com

  Educators and librarians, for a variety of teaching tools, visit us at RHTeachersLibrarians.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

  ISBN 9781101933664 (trade) — ebook ISBN 9781101933688

  Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.

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  NICHOLAS

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Titles

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  1. The Marvelous Flop

  2. Practical Survival

  3. Witch Things

  4. The Glass Conundrum

  5. Snottites

  6. An Untimely Death

  7. Silver-Bound Secrets

  8. In Search of a Magic Door

  9. The Sordid Truth

  10. Witch Lights

  11. En Garde

  12. The Cuckoo’s Secret

  13. The Art of Keeping Secrets

  14. Ambivalence

  15. Clouds

  16. Witch or Watcher?

  17. Metamorphosis

  18. Wishes for Your Heart’s Every Desire (Almost)

  19. The Glimmerglass

  20. Globe-Trotting

  21. The Glass Pond

  22. Witches

  23. Frost

  24. Come Closer, My Pretties

  25. A Witchy Teatime

  26. Fireflies

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  ANASTASIA WAS DREAMING about her father.

  She was back in the McCrumpet house, back on the morning before tragedy had turned her life upside down. Rain spattered the windows, but the kitchen was warm and homey and smelled of waffles. Anastasia had not yet been kidnapped. She was sitting at the table eating marmalade. Mr. McCrumpet had not yet vanished. He was slopping cinnamony batter onto the griddle.

  It should have been a cozy dream. And yet somewhere in the depths of her slumbering brainbox, Anastasia was uneasily aware of the grim events that, in reality, had followed this ordinary breakfast. Dream-Anastasia stared at her flour-dusted father, knowing she wouldn’t see him again for many months. Perhaps she would never see him again. In fact…his face was growing hazy right before her eyes. The harder she looked at Fred McCrumpet, the foggier he became. “Dad!” She blinked—and blinked—

  Anastasia blinked awake, her heart thumping a panicked little tattoo. Sleep still fuzzed her peepers; she blinked again. Something felt different. Something felt wrong. Her bones ached. Her head throbbed. Green and pink shapes wobbled in her vision. Her eyelids stuttered as she strained to focus, the blurs finally crystallizing into a design of roses and briars pricked out in nimble stitches. It was, she realized, the embroidered canopy on her new bed in her new home, thousands of miles away from the McCrumpet abode. But why did the roses look so big, floating above like squashed pink clouds?

  Anastasia swallowed and called to her lady-in-waiting: “SQUEEEEEAK!”

  If she had been possessed of hands, Anastasia would have covered her mouth in shock. However, she now discovered, she didn’t have hands. She had great bulky flaps—wings!—and these she rustled in alarm.

  Anastasia McCrumpet had turned into a bat.

  For the first eleven years of her life, Anastasia played the part of an ordinary child to perfection. She played it so well that even she believed she was utterly average. She had mousy-brown hair and mousy-brown eyes and exactly 127 freckles. Were you to bump into her at the ice cream parlor or the post office or the library, you probably wouldn’t give her a second glance. Anastasia didn’t have what the bigwigs in Hollywood call star quality.

  But all the time she was brushing her teeth, tripping over her shoelaces, and attending to the thousands of other tiny chores that make up a normal human life, a potpourri of secrets simmered in her blood—secrets so secret that even she didn’t know them. However, by age ten and three-quarters, these hidden truths had started bubbling up into her daily existence.

  I wonder, dear Reader, what sort of secrets might be brewing inside you.

  Perhaps the biggest, strangest, most shocking secret of all was that Anastasia McCrumpet, despite all outward appearances, was not entirely human. But you already knew that. After all, how many humans wake up as fuzzy, pointy-eared, moth-craving bats?

  “Squeak! Squeak! Screeee!”

  Anastasia tumbled from the bedstead and onto the floor, landing in a tangle of wings. “Peep!” Her mind twirled in a wild carousel of shock and confusion and fear: It’s happened, just as they said it would….Why does everything hurt so much?…I’m a bat I’m a bat I’m a bat!

  “Princess Anastasia! We’ve come for your morning toilette!”

  CLUNK! CLUMP! STOMPITY-STUMP! Anastasia swiveled her head to glimpse a herd of monstrous silk slippers, buffalo-big, stomping across the marble floor.

  “And I’ve brought something to—why, where is the little twerp?”

  Anastasia’s sensitive bat eardrums amplified the irritation in her aunt Ludowiga’s voice. Even in the midst of her shock and fear, Anastasia cringed. She had two aunts, one good and one bad, and Ludowiga wasn’t the good one.

  “Are you hiding, you silly twit?” Ludowiga demanded. “Show yourself, girl! You’ve already weaseled out of one bath this week—”

  “Squeak!” Anastasia cried.

  “Well, well. What do we have here?” Ludowiga stooped. Her face (enormous—she was bigger than the Statue of Liberty!) lurched into view. “Look who finally metamorphosed.”

  Anastasia let out an unhappy peep.

  “Well?” Ludowiga glowered at her. “Why are you lying on the floor like a senseless banana peel? Get up. Fly!”

  With great effort, Anastasia wriggled her wings.

  Ludowiga gawped, aghast. “Princess! Can’t you fly?”

  But at that moment, in a flash and a twinkling, Anastasia morphed back into a girl.

  “Anastasia!” Baldwin Merrymoon exclaimed, his voice warm with admiration. “Just look at your mustache!”

  Baldwin possessed a beautiful ginger-colored mustache of his own, and he took great joy in its everyday grooming and display. Unlike her uncle, Anastasia had never sported whiskers of any kind. She was, as you will remember, a normal-looking eleven-year-old girl most of the time, and most normal-looking eleven-year-old girls do not have enormous handlebar mustaches sprouting from their upper lips. But this morning, she did.

  “Oh my!” Penny Merrymoon cried, staring as Anastasia slunk into the dining hall. Penny was Anastasia’s good aunt. She was lovely and patient and full of hugs.

  Over the previous three months, Anastasia’s family tree had plopped forth all kinds of heretofore-unknown relatives. Some of them were sweet peaches, like Aunt Penny, and some of them were bad apples, like Ludowiga. Uncle Baldwin was another of these st
range fruits. Fortunately, he was a peach.

  “My darling, did you shift?” Penny asked.

  “Of course she shifted, Penny!” Baldwin said. “Where else would she have gotten that splendid mustache?”

  “When you first start morphing, a bit of animal fluff sometimes sticks to you,” Penny explained to Anastasia. “Back when I was your age, I’d keep a few whiskers after shifting into a mischief of mice. Don’t worry, dear. That mustache will fall out by the end of the day.”

  “Pity,” Baldwin said. “It’s a beauty! If I didn’t have such wonderful mustaches myself, I’d be chartreuse with envy.”

  Anastasia groaned, sitting down at the table. “I don’t want to go to school with a mustache!”

  “There, there,” Penny consoled her. “I’m sure your classmates will understand. They’re all starting to morph as well, you know.”

  Anastasia moped. “I’ve never seen a fifth grader with a mustache. And it’s itchy.”

  “One must suffer for beauty,” Baldwin rhapsodized, patting his own cookie-duster.

  “I am suffering,” Anastasia said. “I feel like I have the flu.”

  “You’re going to ache for a few days. It’s no small feat, shrinking an eleven-year-old girl into a little six-ounce bat body and back again!” Baldwin beamed. “Ah! Your first morph! It’s a landmark event in a Morfo’s life!”

  “Winthrop.” Penny signaled to one of the white-wigged servants stationed in the dining hall. “Would you please bring some of Dr. Lungwort’s Miracle Fizz? That will make you feel better, Anastasia.” She reached over to squeeze Anastasia’s hand. “How I wish your father could be here. He’d be so proud.”

  After discovering she was a Morfo, Anastasia had dreamed of the glorious day she would shift into another creature. Some Morfolk, like Baldwin, changed into wolves. Some metamorphosed into mice, like Penny. Two of Anastasia’s very best friends, Ollie and Quentin Drybread, turned into shadows. However, most Morfolk, like Anastasia, changed into bats. A Morfling’s first shift was generally the subject of hugs and hoorays. It was better than a birthday.

  Anastasia, however, did not feel like jubilating. She felt as if someone had squished her through an old-fashioned clothes wringer.

  Winthrop whisked back into the dining hall, bearing a domed platter. He removed the dome to reveal a goblet of water and two purple tablets on a saucer. Penny dropped the tablets into the goblet. The water started to fizz.

  “Oh, the fun you’ll have!” Baldwin said. “We’ll take you abovecaves for moonlit flits—”

  “Ahem.” Ludowiga stormed into the dining hall. “Don’t make any grand plans yet, Baldy. The princess can’t fly. I discovered her this morning sprawled on the floor. She lay there and wiggled. And I’ve seen better wiggling in a worm!”

  “We-ell.” Penny hesitated. “The first few shifts are always awkward.”

  “This morning’s performance was beyond awkward, Penny,” Ludowiga snapped. “It was a disaster. It was, quite literally, a flop. It was a parody of proper metamorphosis.”

  “Oh, shove it, Loodie,” Baldwin retorted. “Your wig is a parody of a stupefied poodle.”

  Ludowiga ignored him. “My Saskia flew laps around the palace the first time she metamorphosed. She zigzagged through the corridors like a stunt plane. She did loop-the-loops and barrel rolls and climbing spins and lazy eights. And then she adjourned to her chambers and morphed back into a well-bred girl and put on a charming gabardine gown for the Duchess of Cummerbund’s tea party. It was all entirely dignified.”

  Cheeks flaming, Anastasia slouched lower in her seat. She was now decently clad in her school uniform. However, at the moment of her shift from bat to girl form, she had been buck raving au naturel. She had crouched on the floor in her birthday suit, naked as a jaybird, before Ludowiga and the astonished maids.

  Clothing was a cumbersome point of metamorphosis: one’s duds didn’t morph along with one’s body. This irksome little detail yielded endless opportunities for embarrassment. Morfolk learned to control their morphs over time, but young Morflings’ blood was unruly and mercurial and triggered shifts with neither rhyme nor reason.

  Anastasia suddenly yearned to be one hundred years old. To a Morfo, that was still pretty young. Most Morfolk lived for centuries.

  “Yes,” Ludowiga said, “Saskia’s first morph was a tour de force.”

  Anastasia winced and slugged down Dr. Lungwort’s purple medicine, stifling a belch against the back of her hand. Saskia. Was she doomed to constant comparison with her cousin? She hadn’t even met Saskia until three months earlier, and yet people constantly measured them against each other like specimens in a science experiment. Saskia had beautiful moon-blond hair (Anastasia’s was mouse-brown)! Saskia glided like a swan on a cloud of silk (Anastasia clumped around in galoshes)! Saskia this; Saskia that. It was unbearable.

  “I wonder,” Ludowiga said, narrowing her eyes, “whether Anastasia will ever learn to fly. She is, you will remember, only half Morfo.”

  “Anastasia will be a proper aeronaut in no time,” Baldwin huffed.

  “I certainly hope so. It will shame the Crown if she sprawls on the floor like a dazed rat every time she shifts.” Ludowiga sniffed. She was a big sniffer, Ludowiga. One whuffle of her pinched nose could express anything from disdain to delight. “You know, my Saskia is to dance the role of Vespertina in the Twinkle Toe Ballet’s upcoming production of Dance of the Sugarplum Bat.”

  “Bully for her,” Baldwin said.

  “Bully, nothing! Saskia’s triumphs bring glory to the royal family. What has this one done to honor us lately?” Ludowiga aimed her nostrils at Anastasia. “You’d better shape up, Princess!” With one final, scornful snort, she sailed from the dining room.

  Baldwin clapped Anastasia on the shoulder. “Don’t let Loodie spoil this momentous occasion. That woman could find fault with anything, even a happy event like your first morph. Think of that, Anastasia: you turned into a bat! That’s something big.”

  “Something marvelous,” Penny agreed.

  “A marvelous flop,” Anastasia said, Ludowiga’s scorn still reverberating in her aching ears.

  “Pshaw. Don’t you start quoting Ludowiga to me! No, my girl, you’re becoming a proper Morfo!” Baldwin enthused. “We need to get you abovecaves and into the moonlight. Moonglow is mother’s milk to Morfolk. I know—let’s go moonlight sledding tomorrow night! The Swiss hills are chock-full of top-notch sledding spots!”

  Anastasia perked up. “Moonlight sledding?”

  “Anastasia can’t go gallivanting through the Swiss hills right now, Baldy!” Penny protested. “CRUD is still hunting her.”

  Anastasia shivered, her memories scrolling back to her recent brush with the Committee for Rubbing-out Unnatural Dreadfuls. It had all started with a ride in a pink station wagon. You must, prudent Reader, keep your eyes peeled for these sinister vehicles! If you happen to see one, peek to see whether a child of perhaps ten or eleven or twelve years of age is sitting in the backseat. Look closely!

  The sad statistical truth is that you are probably-most-definitely spotting the victim of a diabolical kidnapping scheme.

  Now, if you can: get a glimpse into the front seat. That nice lady driving the car? She’s the kidnapper. Even worse, she’s a murderess. She’s one of the most accomplished and dangerous murderesses you could ever meet.

  You are shocked. You are, perhaps, even scandalized. But pink station wagons and sweet-faced murderesses are just one of the thousands of unpleasant facts of life, much like ingrown toenails and tonsillitis and expired milk.

  Not every kidnapper drives a pink station wagon. This particular automobile is the preferred mode of transport for the crème de la crème of kidnappers working with CRUD. Have you heard of it? I suspect not, because CRUD is hush-hush. It needs to be, because CRUD is a villainous society devoted to abducting Morfolk like Anastasia. In CRUD’s perspective, the more Morflings snatched and snuffed, the better. Each kidnapping brings j
oy to the members’ hearts and delight to their souls. The minions of CRUD celebrate squelched children with cake and confetti and cards of congratulations. And CRUD rewards its most successful Watchers with a jolly pink station wagon, the perfect vehicle with which to lure children to their doom.

  So, good Reader, I implore you: no matter what anyone tells you—

  even if—

  especially if—

  she’s a little old lady with rosy cheeks and a purse full of sugarplums—

  NEVER GET INTO A PINK STATION WAGON.

  Anastasia had, and all sorts of ghastliness ensued. And even though she had escaped CRUD and moved halfway across the world, she still had to be careful. CRUD was looking for her, and they had agents in every nook and cranny you could spot on globe or map.

  Fortunately, Anastasia now lived in a village that showed up on neither globe nor map—at least, not any of the globes or maps CRUD Watchers might have at their disposal. This village was, you see, entirely underground.

  “Anastasia should stay in Nowhere Special for now,” Penny said, a fretful little line creasing her brow. “Especially while she’s growing into her morphs. Imagine if she turned into a bat in the middle of Dinkledorf!”

  “Anastasia can’t stay underground forever, you know. That’s no kind of life for a child.” Mischief twitched Baldwin’s mustache. “Besides, the sledding season isn’t going to last much longer. Spring looms nigh, Penny! And I want to go sledding, too.”

  Penny bit her lip. “I’m not sure….”

  “It’s settled,” Baldwin proclaimed. “You can bring your friends, Anastasia. When it comes to moonlight sledding, the more, the merrier!”