Beauty Never Dies (7 page)

As I unchain Bianca, Loki gets into a fiercer fight with the other man. He bangs the man’s head against the carriage before the man falls semi-conscious to the floor. “You have just been
Avada Kadavarad
, Monsieur. I wish I brought a magic wand with me to this ignorance fest.”

“Monsieur is French, you idiot.” I don’t know why I feel the need to make fun of him. I think his attitude has gotten to me. Maybe I am scared to fail in my mission.

“Sorry,” Loki bowed down to the man in the middle of the smoke. “I don’t speak Italian, but I can speak if you like. Aww.” He kicks the man to sleep one more time and turns back to me. “We have to go back now, princess, or will die in this awfully ignorant dream.”

“No. We have to get her on that boat to Murano first.” I say and pull up Bianca into the carriage. It’s amazing how she trusts me and doesn’t think we’re going to burn her or kill her. “Don’t be afraid. We will help you.” I tell her in Italian.

“Italian much?” Loki wonders, helping her.

“I speak a lot of languages,” I say and hand him a whip. He retunes a suspicious look. “Here?” I can’t let him waist our time commenting silly comments. “Don’t start. You can ride this carriage to the boat, right?”

“Of course, my princess,” He smiles and grabs it. “My apologies for the misunderstanding, Bianca,” He bows his head with respect. I don’t know if he is mocking us. “Anything to get us out this damn dream.”

I close the door of the carriage, listening to Loki hitting some other guys then ride up the Carriage. As he whips the horses forward, he shouts, “Mama Mia!”

Even Bianca laughs.

Bianca thanks me, squeezing my hand tightly. “If you didn’t save me, I would have felt the rage eventually and lost control of my power, and that’s not good.”

“I know,” I nod, noticing that she is pregnant. That is exactly what I am here for. I think my mission will succeed. “We will send you to Murano. This where you will have the baby.”

“Thank you.” She keeps repeating and wanting to kiss my hand. I guess it’s an old Italian gesture of appreciation. I try not to cry as I can’t tell her what’s going to happen to her after she brings the baby to the world.

We arrive at the boat, and she gets on it while Loki keeps urging me that it’s about time to start the ritual to get out of the dream. He says that if we stay too long in the dream, we could stay lost here forever. I don’t tell him that I know about that since this is exactly what happened  to Cinderella.

“Ok,” I say. “Just one more thing,” I turn back to Bianca as she embarks on the boat. “Have you chosen a name for your daughter?”

A broad and full smile arrest her features as she nods. “Cinder.” She says, raising her ash smeared five-finger hands in the air, then she points at the cinder covering her face in a proud way.

I nod cheeringly and let out a sigh. I did it. I have started what I came here for. It’s like putting the first brick in a million-brick wall, but it’s a start. My ancestors, the Brothers Grimm, should be proud.

“I have a slightly better name if I may suggest,” I offer, shouting through the sudden wind which I assume is a sign that the dream is about to end. “Why not name her Cinderella?”

“Cinderella?” Loki estranges me since he didn’t understand the rest of the Italian we spoke. “Now I have to shoot myself.” He mumbles.

“Shut up.” I say to him and turn back, watching her face knotting as she considers my suggestion.

Slowly, she raises her eyes to meet mine. Her face lights up. “Cinderella!” she nods three times and gets on the boat, but then she suddenly turns around and hands me one single, beautiful glass shoe. I understand she has made it herself. I smile, unable to confront her with the fact that she will die giving birth to Cinderella who will live a rough live being an orphan after that. But it had to be done. Many centuries ago, an Evil Queen cursed Cinderella in one of the immortal dreams and buried her deep in it, so long that Cinderella has forgotten who she is. There was no way to bring her back from that deep sleep. I needed to find out in which dream Cinderella’s real mother was buried and help her avoid the imminent death so she eventually gives birth to a new Cinderella. A new Cinderella that will be a huge part in the fairy tale war, which repeats itself every one hundred years. I came here to make sure she is born and deliver her to Murano so the story takes the right, true, and untold start.

It’s not easy to explain to you what and how this all goes, but at least if you read my little entry in this diary, it’s a start for you to ride on a dangerous and great adventure.

I take the glass shoe willingly. It’s a present from a woman in a dream.

“Will I be able to take this with me to the real world?” I ask Loki.

“I don’t think so but we can try,” He says as he pulls me to the returning ritual. Doesn’t this glass slipper look like the seventeen slippers we found next to Bianca’s body in the real world?”

“Yes. It does.”

“Why seventeen slippers?”

“Because Cinderella is about to do something incredibly important for the world when she is seventeen. Every year was marked with a slipper. It’s been predicted in a prophecy. And don’t you ask me about the prophecy now.”

“Incredibly good, or incredibly bad?”

“That depends on her, and the choices she will make. My job was just to connect the dots. To make sure she gets born.”

Looking closely at the glass slipper, I see something shining bright inside, like two glittering mirror eyes staring back at me from behind the thick glass. I flip the slipper upside down and two glass coins fall into the palm of my hand, reflecting sunshine into sharp rays of light in my face.

“Hmm…” I sigh as I prevent my heart from racing.

“What’s that?” Loki asks. I guess my face exposed my worries. “Do the coins have any significant meaning?”

“It means that the Queen of Sorrow was here.” I answer, looking at the boat sailing away from us with Bianca and the unborn Cinderella on it. I wonder if the Queen is on that boat as well, and if I have been fooled. If the Queen is on that bought, does it mean that Cinderella won't be born again?

“The Queen of what?”

“I mean the Evil Queen. The Snow White Queen.” I say as I notice something else inside of the glass slipper: a dead butterfly. I wonder what this means.

Loki scratches his temples, looking like a decent young boy for a moment. “Snow White Queen? Cinderella? Seriously? So you’re some kind of a Godmother?” He wonders again as I laugh. He looks cute when he is serious. It’s sad that I will have to erase his memory once we go back to the real world. I can’t let him know that much. He doesn’t know who he is and what his role will be in saving the world.

Although I should be erasing his memory completely, I can’t bring myself to it. I will use my powers and erase some of his memories; the dream part in particular.

Although I am prohibited from doing this, I will not erase all of his memories of me. I will make him think that I am just a girl he met in his dreams, and that I don’t exist in real life. I couldn’t bring myself to make him forget about me forever. I wanted to stay a part of him, even if he remembers  me as an imaginary girl he met in a dream.

The Grimm Diaries Prequels #3

Beauty Never Dies

as told by Peter Pan

Dear Diary,

I hate diaries. I’d rather have a food fight with the Lost Boys in Neverland. But since today was awesome, I decided to write down what happened. And diary? You should be honored that the boy who wouldn’t grow up wrote in your pages.

Today, I woke up my love, Sleeping Beauty, from her hundred years of sleep. Some people say she was cursed by a wicked fairy. Others say it was by the Bothers Grimm.
I didn’t care which is which because I missed her so much for the last hundred years.

I didn’t wake her up with a kiss like it was mentioned in these teeny-weeny fairy tale books. I woke her up with the most beautiful ceremony of all. One you did never read about in books.

It wasn’t easy though.

It all started with me standing over Count Dracula’s grave...

Scratching my temples, I was thinking if resurrecting him was the right thing to do. I needed him to wake up Sleeping Beauty. None of us, the fairy tale crowd, ever dared to wake him up. However, I wasn’t scared of him. I am not scared of anyone. I just don’t trust anyone. The night was misty and silent. No wolves howled nearby, as if they were tongue-tied, scared back into their caves in the forest.

“Are you sure you want to do this?” My hunchbacked assistant growled, his yellow eyes gleaming with evil in the middle of the night.

May I introduce you to the hunchback of Notre Damme?

Yes.

He is one of us immortals. After Esmeralda abandoned him, and the folks in Paris gave him a hard time, he decided to stop playing mister nice-guy, and turn into a badass hunchman. Did you hear that?
Badass Hunchman!
Something Marvel Comics never thought about.

“I know what I am doing, Hunchy,” I loved to call him that. It toned down the creepiness that oozed out of his nasty face. “All we have to do is pull out the stake from Dracula’s heart, and the Count will be back to life.”

“If it’s so easy, why didn’t others resurrect him, master?” He growled with that silly, evil grin on his face, showing his crooked, yellow teeth. I should’ve bought him dental braces because his words came out muffled when he talked, but Hunchy would simply eat the braces for lunch.

“Don’t call me Master,” I said. “You’re not Frankenstein. You’re Hunchy, the hunchman,” Hunchy looked puzzled. It wasn’t easy reading his face though. Each facial expression he made was just awful, even it was a happy one. “And to answer your question. No one woke Dracula up because they are all dumb,” I sighed, kneeling down, watching the Count buried in the soil of his coffin. Dracula had a thing for this Transylvanian soil that he couldn’t live without – let alone,
die
without. “Few people know where this grave is located. Actually few people know he is real.”

“Do you think he is going to remember who is?” Hunchy grimaced, rubbing his hands. “Most of us immortals didn’t know when we woke up.”

“That. We’ll have to see,” I said, chewing on a white flower as I pulled the stake out.

Even Hunchy winced at the abrupt rise of Count Dracula from his grave. Dracula floated in the air above us, stretching out his arms sideways, looking pale and menacing in his black and red coat.

The colors of his cape and his pale skin reminded me of Snow White. How didn’t I notice the connection before? Dracula had skin white as snow, wearing a black cape with red lining inside, the exact colors that described the beauty of Snow White. I hate those three colors: white, red, and black. What happened to purple, yellow and the color of stars?

Thinking of Snow White sent a shiver through my spine, and it made me see through the silliness of Dracula’s theatrical act.

“Seen this. Done that,” I said to the flying Count, chewing on the flower. “Can you please just stop, and tone down the act, Count Dracula. This isn't Broadway. This stuff doesn’t scare us anymore. You’re so outdated.”

Hunchy chuckled at my comment. Dracula swooped down as if on an invisible elevator – a good trick, I must say. He took a step toward me and snarled, showing his hundred-year-old yellow fangs. His teeth certainly needed polishing.

“Cut the crap, dude,” I said. “Even Christopher Lee is scarier than you.”