The Problem Child

by Michael Buckley

  New York Times Best-seller

  Oppenheim Toy Portfolio Platinum Award

  Kirkus Reviews Best Fantasy Book

  A Real Simple magazine “Must-Have”

  “Recommend this to anyone who is craving a bit of

  dark humor rolled up with whimsy and adventure.”

  —School Library Journal

  “Adventure, laughs, and surprises kept me eagerly

  turning the pages.” —R. L. Stine, author of the

  Goosebumps series

  “Kids will love Sabrina and Daphne’s adventures as

  much as I did.” —Sarah Michelle Gellar (Buffy in

  Buffy the Vampire Slayer)

  “Features both a pair of memorable young sleuths

  and a madcap plot.” —Kirkus Reviews, starred review

  ALSO BY MICHAEL BUCKLEY:

  In the Sisters Grimm series:

  BOOK ONE: THE FAIRY-TALE DETECTIVES

  BOOK TWO: THE UNUSUAL SUSPECTS

  BOOK THREE: THE PROBLEM CHILD

  BOOK FOUR: ONCE UPON A CRIME

  BOOK FIVE: MAGIC AND OTHER MISDEMEANORS

  BOOK SIX: TALES FROM THE HOOD

  BOOK SEVEN: THE EVERAFTER WAR

  BOOK EIGHT: THE INSIDE STORY

  In the NERDS series:

  BOOK ONE: NATIONAL ESPIONAGE, RESCUE,

  AND DEFENSE SOCIETY

  BOOK TWO: M IS FOR MAMA’S BOY

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

  The Library of Congress has catalogued the hardcover

  edition under Library of Congress Control Number:

  2006284582

  Consequently, new CIP Data will not be issued for the paperback edition.

  Paperback ISBN 978-0-8109-9359-4

  Originally published in hardcover by Amulet Books in 2006

  Text copyright © 2006 Michael Buckley

  Illustrations copyright © 2006 Peter Ferguson

  Published in 2007 by Amulet Books, an imprint of ABRAMS. All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the publisher. Amulet Books and Amulet Paperbacks are registered trademarks of Harry N. Abrams, Inc.

  Amulet Books are available at special discounts when purchased in quantity for premiums and promotions as well as fundraising or educational use. Special editions can also be created to specification. For details, contact specialmarkets@abramsbooks.com or the address below.

  www.abramsbooks.com

  For the kids,

  Dominic, Kierra, Kiah, Tulia, Siena, and Dan-Dan

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  What can I say to my editor, Susan Van Metre, other than “Bless you”? You made my dream come true and you whipped that dream into shape for others to share. Everyone at Amulet Books was just wonderful, most notably Andrea Colvin and Jason Wells. I’d also like to thank my wife and literary agent, Alison Fargis of The Stonesong Press, for being my inspiration in words and in life. Thanks to Joseph Deasy, whose support, editing, and brainstorming have been the backbone of these stories. Thanks to my personal cheerleaders, Molly Choi and Maureen Falvey, and to Kevin Houser, Christopher Andreoli, and Sherriene Jones Sontag for their incredible generosity toward me in college. I’d also like to thank the Brothers Grimm, Andrew Lang, Hans Christian Andersen, L. Frank Baum, Rudyard Kipling, and the countless others from whom I have generously borrowed; and of course Daisy, who now, unfortunately, is going to get that bath I’ve been threatening for some time.

  HE DESCENDED FROM THE CLOUDS LIKE AN ANGEL, enveloped in a ray of light so brilliant that Sabrina and Daphne had to shield their eyes and look away. When he landed nimbly on the ground and smiled at the group, the light dimmed just enough so that they could see his face. The man he had been just moments before was gone, his flesh replaced by shimmering crystal, his eyes by blazing fires, like two small suns shining down on them all. But when he glanced over at Sabrina, she saw that his transformation hadn’t robbed him of his quirky, mischievous grin. He stepped toward her with extended arms, and she stumbled back in fear. His smile quickly turned to a frown.

  “What are you doing?” Sabrina demanded.

  “I’m granting myself a wish,” he answered. “I wanted to be powerful enough to make the people I love happy. I’ve been miserable. Happy is better. You can be happy, too. Wish for something, Sabrina. Anything. I can make it happen.”

  “But look at the cost!” Granny Relda said as she hovered over Mayor Charming’s rapidly aging body. His beloved Snow White lay next to him, reaching with bony, arthritic hands to touch his wrinkled face. Everywhere Sabrina looked, Everafters lay struggling against the sudden onrush of old age. Many were in the final throes of death.

  “Don’t cry for them,” the glittery being said to the old woman. “The Everafters have had their day in the sun and it was a long, long day. With their power I can recreate this world as a paradise where ‘happily ever after’ isn’t just for a bunch of bedtime stories come to life. It’s time for all our dreams to come true!”

  abrina opened her eyes and saw a monster hunched over her. It was nearly fifteen feet tall, with scaly skin, two black leathery wings, and a massive serpentine tail that lashed back and forth. Its feet and hands were enormous, nearly as big as its body, and its head, at the end of a long snakelike neck, was nothing but teeth, thousands of jagged fangs, gnashing in her face. A drop of saliva dripped from the creature’s mouth and landed on her forehead. It was as hot as molten lava. “JABBERWOCKY!”the monster roared.

  Too afraid to move, Sabrina closed her eyes and did the only thing she could. She prayed. Please! Please! Please! Let this be a bad dream!

  After a few moments she slowly lifted one eyelid. Unfortunately, the monster was still there.

  “Fudge,” Sabrina whispered.

  “Well, good morning!” a boy’s voice called from somewhere in the room.

  Sabrina knew its owner. “Puck?”

  “Did we wake you? So sorry!”

  “Could you get this thing off of me?” said Sabrina.

  “It’s gonna cost you.”

  “What?”

  “I figure if I’m going to have to save your butt every time you get into trouble, I might as well be paid for it. The going rate for this kind of job is seven million dollars,” Puck said.

  “Where am I going to get seven million dollars? I’m eleven years old!”

  “And I want all your desserts for the next six months,” Puck added.

  The monster roared in Sabrina’s face. A long, purple tongue darted out of the beast’s mouth and licked her face roughly.

  “Fine!” Sabrina cried.

  Puck leaped into the air, flipping like an Olympic gymnast, and clung to a dusty light fixture hanging from the ceiling above. Gathering momentum, he swung down feet first into the monster’s horrible face. The creature stumbled back and roared. Using the monster’s face as a springboard, the nimble boy flipped again and landed on his feet with his hands on his hips. He turned to Sabrina and flashed her a mischievous grin, then pulled her to her feet. “Did you see that landing, Grimm? I want to make sure you get your money’s worth.”

  Sabrina scowled. “How long was I unconscious?” she asked. Her head was still pounding from the smack the beast had given her upon her arrival.

  “Long enough for me to get old big-and-ugly here pretty angry,” Puck said as the brute recovered and rushed at the children at a
n impossible speed.

  Two enormous pink-streaked wings popped out of Puck’s back and fluttered wildly. Before Sabrina knew it, he had snatched the back of her coat and was pulling her into the air, narrowly avoiding the beast’s attack. The wall they had just been standing in front of wasn’t so lucky. The force of the monster’s assault sent it crashing down.

  “I’ve got the big one,” Puck said as he set Sabrina back down on the floor. “You take the little one.”

  Sabrina followed his gaze. In the far corner of the room was a small child wearing a long red cloak that hung to her ankles. She sat on a dirty hospital cot next to the unconscious bodies of two adults, Henry and Veronica Grimm—Sabrina’s parents!

  How Sabrina had gotten into this particular situation was a long, and almost unbelievable, story. It started a year and a half ago when her mother and father had mysteriously disappeared. The only clue the police had found was a bloodred handprint pressed on the dashboard of their abandoned car. With nothing else to go on and no next-of-kin to step in as guardians, the police were forced to put Sabrina and her six-year-old sister, Daphne, into foster care. That’s when things went from bad to worse. The girls were bounced from one foster home to the next, each filled with certifiable lunatics who used Sabrina and Daphne as maids, gardeners, and once, as a couple of amateur roofers. By the time their long-lost grandmother had finally tracked them down, Sabrina didn’t think she could ever trust anyone again. Granny Relda didn’t make it easy, either. They hadn’t been in the old woman’s house ten minutes before she started telling incredible stories about the girls being the last living descendents of the Brothers Grimm whose book of fairy tales, she claimed, wasn’t a collection of bedtime stories but a history of actual events. Granny Relda also told them that their new hometown, Ferryport Landing, was filled to the brim with characters straight from fairy tales, who now called themselves Everafters and lived side by side with the normal inhabitants of the town, albeit in magical disguises that hid their true identities.

  To Sabrina, Granny’s stories sounded like the silly ravings of a woman who had forgotten to have her prescriptions filled, but there was a dark side to her story as well. These “Everafters” didn’t just live in the town—they were trapped there. Wilhelm, the younger of the Brothers Grimm, had put a spell on the town to prevent the Everafters from leaving and waging war on humans. The spell could only be broken when the last member of the Grimm family died. Sabrina warned her sister that the old woman’s stories were nonsense, but when Relda was kidnapped by a two-hundred-foot-tall giant, Sabrina could no longer deny the truth. Luckily, the girls found a way to rescue their grandmother and ever since they had taken on the family responsibility of being fairy-tale detectives, solving the town’s most unusual crimes, and going head-to-head with some of its most dangerous residents. As they solved one mystery after another, the girls had started to uncover a disturbing pattern. Every bad guy they had faced was a member of a shadowy group known as the Scarlet Hand, whose mark was a bloodred handprint just like the one the police had found in Sabrina and Daphne’s parents’ car! Sabrina knew one day she would come face-to-face with the group’s leader and her parents’ kidnapper, and now, as she stared at the strange little girl in the red cloak, she was shocked. She had never thought the person behind all her misery would be a child.

  Sabrina clenched her hands into fists, ready to fight her parents’ captor, only to have a pain shoot through her left arm that nearly knocked her to the floor. It was broken. She shook off the agony and fixed her eyes once more on the child. The little girl was barely as old as Daphne, but her face was the twisted, rage-filled mask of an adult, barely holding back the insanity behind it. Sabrina had seen a man with that expression on the news once. The police had just arrested him for killing five people.

  “Get away from my parents,” Sabrina demanded as she approached the girl and grabbed her cloak in her good hand.

  “This is my mommy and daddy,” the little girl shrieked as she jerked away. “I have a baby brother and a kitty-cat, too. When I get my grandma and my puppy, then we can all be a family and play house.”

  The girl raised her hand. It was covered in what Sabrina hoped was red paint. She turned and pressed it against the wall leaving the all-too-familiar scarlet print. The handprints were everywhere—on the walls, floors, ceilings, windows, even on Sabrina’s parents’ clothing.

  “I don’t need a sister,” the girl continued. “But you can stay and play with my kitty-cat.”

  She pointed at the monster, which was batting at Puck with its enormous clawed hands. The fairy boy was leaping out of the way of the beast’s every swipe. He couldn’t keep it up for long. The little girl’s “kitty” was lightning fast. It whipped its tail at Puck, barely missing him and sending a dusty filing cabinet careening across the room. The drawers belched open and hundreds of yellowing documents spilled out.

  Sabrina turned back to the little girl.

  “Who are you?” she asked, but the child only smiled and reached into her pocket. She removed a small silver ring and slipped it onto her finger. A crimson light engulfed the little girl and Sabrina’s sleeping parents.

  “Tell my grandma and my puppy that I’m coming and I’ll see them soon. Then we can play,” the demented child said in a sing-song voice. She raised her tiny hands and suddenly the monster stopped fighting. It turned to the girl and its ferocious face became calm.

  “Kitty, we need to find a new playhouse. Burn this one down.” The little girl giggled and then the world seemed to stretch, as if someone were pulling on the corner of Sabrina’s vision, and, in a blink, the strange child vanished into thin air, taking Sabrina’s parents with her.

  “No!” Sabrina cried and rushed to the empty bed.

  The monster opened its enormous mouth and a burst of flame shot out. The folding blinds on the dingy windows ignited and flames crept up the walls, turning the weathered wallpaper into ash. The beast blasted another wall and then another, sending sparks and cinders in all directions. Within seconds the entire room was on fire.

  “Sabrina, duck!” Puck shouted.

  Sabrina did as she was told, just as the monster’s molten spray shot out inches above her head. It roared in frustration and smacked Puck with its long tail, sending him flailing across the room where he crashed against a wall and tumbled to the floor. His shirt caught on fire and Sabrina rushed to him, patting out the flames before the boy was burned. Puck crawled to his feet once more and stepped between Sabrina and the monster, which stood over them, jaws dripping. The boy snatched up the little wooden sword he kept in his belt and bonked the beast on the snout. “C’mon, ugly. I’m just getting started.”

  But before Puck could take another swing at the hulking thing, a terrible groaning sound came from above and a huge section of the ceiling collapsed right on top of the beast. The two children staggered back from the pile of smoldering debris that now stood where the creature had been. Puck grabbed Sabrina and dragged her to safety as what was left of the ceiling rained down around them.

  “I think this party is over,” he said.

  “Wait!” Sabrina shouted. “There could be a clue here to where she took my parents.”

  “Any clue is kindling now,” Puck said pulling her down a hallway. “If you get killed, the old lady will never let me hear the end of it.”

  They passed by open rooms with doors torn off their hinges. Inside, Sabrina saw hospital beds, rusty metal carts, and more sheets of yellowing paper scattered on the floor. Everywhere was the horrible red handprint.

  What is this place? Sabrina wondered.

  The children rushed on through the choking, black smoke until they found a door with the word Exit over it. When Puck forced it open, a blast of icy wind nearly knocked them both down and blew snow in their faces, blinding them. Puck shielded his eyes with his hands and peered between his fingers.

  “We’re in the mountains, I think,” he shouted

  “Can you fly us out of here?�
�� Sabrina said.

  “The wind is too strong.” Puck helped her out the door, wrapping his arm around her and guiding her through the snowdrifts.

  They’d barely taken a dozen steps when the wall of the building exploded behind them, sending brick and mortar flying in every direction. Into the gaping hole stepped the massive, scaly foot of the creature. Its head followed, whipping around on the monster’s long neck as its fiery eyes searched for the children. When it spotted them it let out a prehistoric roar that sent snow tumbling from nearby trees.

  The children raced away, darting into the woods. The leafless trees provided few hiding places and no protection from the brutal wind, which felt like little razor blades cutting Sabrina’s face. Their only choice was to keep running. She and Puck scrambled up some rocks to a clearing at the top of a steep hill. It was a dead end. In front of them was a four-hundred-foot drop to the Hudson Valley below. The whole town of Ferryport Landing was laid out before them. If Sabrina hadn’t been sure they were going to die, she would have thought the view was rather nice.

  “Puck, I . . .”

  The boy turned to her. “I know what you are going to say and I think it’s an excellent idea. I’ll leave you here and save myself.”

  “That’s not what I was going to say at all!” Sabrina shouted. “I was going to ask you if you had any ideas for getting us out of this.”

  “Grimm, you usually handle the running and crying part.”

  Sabrina looked down the steep hill. It was covered in snow. “If only we had a sled,” she mumbled.

  Puck’s eyes lit up. He turned around and got down on his hands and knees.

  “What are you doing?” Sabrina asked.

  “Climb on my back,” Puck insisted. “I’ve got an idea.”

  Sabrina was all too familiar with Puck’s “ideas.” They usually ended in a trip to the emergency room, but with the monster lumbering up the rocky hillside behind them, there were few options.