Cinderella Dressed in Ashes ( Book #2 in the Grimm Diaries ) (32 page)

Click. Another channel.

Click. All TV channels sucked she wished she’d never been introduced to that hollow box. She had lived a hundred years without it in the Schloss, and it didn’t feel like she’d missed much.

Shew was lost. Quenching her Dhampir thirst didn’t trouble her much, although she was paling out since she got back from the Dreamworld.

The door banged open upstairs, and Fable came down, walking to the refrigerator. Since she’d been into Loki’s body, she wasn’t feeling good, let alone entering the Dream Temple and crossing the purple light. She was greatly shocked by her experience with Loki trying to kill her in Furry Tell.

Loki tried to kill Shew as well, so she thought the two girls could talk about it, but Fable didn’t want to. Since they came back from the Schloss Fable yesterday, Fable had occupied herself with the silly task of teaching the alphabet to her favorite tarantula—he had only been capable of writing the word ‘dork’ in the past, only because he wanted to madden Axel.

“Concentrate, Bitsy,” she told him as she rearranged the colored alphabet magnet sticking on the refrigerator.

Bitsy didn’t speak, but he was able to crawl on the refrigerator’s surface and arrange the letters. Fable would tell him to write ‘I love flies’ or ‘Axel is a dork’ and he’d crawl vertically on the refrigerator’s surface and arrange those magnetic letters.

“Smart, Bitsy,” Fable cuddled Bitsy in her arms.

Shew let out a feeble smile, listening to Fable.

Then the door to Candy House sprang open and Axel entered with a couple of his nerdy friends. They were holding Shew’s glass coffin and pulling it inside.

One of his friends, wearing over-sized glasses seemed iffed by the weight of whatever was inside the coffin.

“Hang tight, nerdfighter.” Axel encouraged him as they parked the coffin on the wooden floor of the living room. “Hye. Hey. Hellelujah,” Axel hailed, high fiving each of his friends. “No one can know about this,” Axel warned his friends with a serious forefinger. “We don’t capture an extraterrestrial everyday.”

“Sure, Axel,” one of his friends says. “Or the government will haunt us down. I’ve seen it on History channel.”

Shew, sitting on the couch, exchanged glances with Fable standing by the refrigerator. They didn’t quite understand what was in the coffin.

“Sure, boys,” Axel smiled back at them and showed them out. “Just keep your mouth shut and don’t tell anyone I caught an alien,” he closed the door and turned back to Shew and Fable and opened the coffin.

“You told him there is an alien in the coffin?” Fable said, pointing at Loki’s corpse inside it. He was suffering from his coma-like Sleeping Death after Shew had killed him in the Dreamworld. Axel had painted him green, and even had two antennas sticking out of his head.

Shew snapped and came closer, “What did you do to Loki?”

“You convinced your friends Loki is an alien?” Fable said, her mouth wide open.

“It’s not really easy smuggling a corpse around town,” Axel puffed. “Carmen didn’t work, and the two of you are acting like girls out of some sad soap opera. You’re welcome by the way.”

“I need to clean Loki and take care of his corpse right now,” Shew was about to kneel down.

“Wait,” Axel said. “Loki can wait. I have something important to tell you.”

“Not more important that Loki,” Shew said.

“How about I tell you something important about Cerené,” Axel said, knowing Shew would change her mind. “I thought so,” Axel cocked his head. “Now you girls sit on the couch while uncle Axelus the Great solves all puzzles for you. Most of them, actually.”

Hesitantly, Fable and Shew sat down. Axel had been good with his researches so far, so they thought they’d listen to what he had to say.

“Now look, girls,” Axel said, pulling out his most precious books, Loki’s Dreamhunter Guide and J.G.’s diary. “I’ve listened to all you two had to say about the Dreamworld, Cerené, the Queen of Sorrow, the Art, the Clue, Murano, Baba Yaga, the Wall of Thorns and all your blah blah blah.”

“Get to the point, Axel,” Shew sighed.

“The truth is there is no ‘point’,” he said. “Actually, I have no idea what is
really
going on. All I know is that I’m surrounded by fairy tale people, and frankly I enjoy discovering who they are and how they are interconnected to each other and our real world history. Well, most of them are lunatics, but who isn’t—no offence, Shew, but you know you scared the hilly billies out of us in the Schloss.”

“Could you just skip all this mumbo jumbo,” Fable said. “Tell us what you know.”

“Here is what I know,” Axel rubbed his hands. “On my way here with my fellow nerdfighters, members of the awesome Harum Skarum forum, and dear friends of Genius Goblin, I replayed all you told us happened in the dream in my head. I mean I understand that everyone is searching for the Lost Seven, and that the Phoenix is one of them, but some things you said were really strange and needed analyzing.”

“Did that help?” Shew wondered. “Did you come up with a way to bring Cerené back, maybe,” she said out of wishful thinking. She’d left Cerené to sleep for a hundred years.

“The amazing news is I did figure out something even more important,” Axel said. “Everything you told me about Cerené, her Art, that she is glassblower, and her mother didn’t really interest me. However, two things did,” Axel scratched his chin. “Murano and Moutza.”

“What about them?” Shew asked.

“Doing my genius research, I discovered that Moutza is a traditional gesture of insult among Greeks,” Axel explained. “It’s done by extending all fingers of your hand and presenting the palm toward whomever you want to insult.”

“So?” Shew frowned. “It’s probably a coincidence.”

“Not when it was used in older times, reportedly in different regions in Europe in rituals of burning witches by the stake,” Axel’s eyes widened. “Witches who could make fire,” he leaned forward.

“Are you serious?” Shew said.

“Not just that,” Axel continued. “The witch was usually seated on a horse, facing backward, while they smeared her face with something dirty to humiliate her before they’d probably banned her or killed her. You know what that dirty thing was?”

“Blood?” Fable uttered, and Shew started worrying about her.

“Cinder,” Axel said proudly.

“Cinder?” both girls considered. Shew took a moment to comprehend the connection.

“Remember when Cerené told you her mother wanted to call her Cinder or Cinderella?” Axel said. “In J.G.’s diary, he mentions that the Phoenix is also called Cinder—one of her many names. Cinderella was her name inspired by the Phoenix and the way its ashes rose back from after it burned.”

“But what does that mean exactly?” She wondered.

“Like I said, I don’t really have a ‘point’ but I see the connections,” Axel said.

“Which means you have nothing useful to tell us,” Fable sighed.

“Easy on me, sis,” Axel said. “Wait until I tell you about Murano Island.”

“Murano is the island Venetian glassblowers were banned to,” Shew said. “And where Cerené was born. What about it?”

“According to the story by the mysterious Alice Grimm you met—which I am really curious about—, the creator of the mirror hid his clue to control it inside Cerené, right?” Axel said.

“That’s right. A clue that grants its discoverer power of the all splinters in the world,” Shew explained.

“I kept thinking about when this really happened,” Axel said. “I mean for something that created a conflict between the so called forces of good and evil since the beginning of time, how could Cerené be the clue?”

“I don’t understand,” Shew said.

“I mean Cerené is about your age,” Axel said. “The creator couldn’t have made the mirror and the clue in the late 18
^th
century. It must have been since hundreds, if not thousands, years ago. I don’t know what when the beginning of time is exactly.”

Shew felt like hit with a pebble in her face. Axel was right. Cerené was too young to be the clue. But maybe the clue passed through Cerené’s family. Maybe she inherited it from Bianca, and Bianca inherited it from her own mother.

”So I researched this Murano incident when glassblowers had been banned out of Venice for creating too much fire,” Axel said. “It’s a true incident, one of the most important historical events in the history of Venice and glassmaking. But do you even know when this occurred?”

“When?” Fable asked.

“1291,” Axel clapped his hands together. “That’s almost eight hundred years ago.”

“But that’s…” Shew’s face tightened.

“Impossible, I know,” Axel said. “But it isn’t, really. J.G. talks about the mirror in his diary. The creator, in order to make sure the clue never died, needed to create an immortal girl who carried it among centuries. But then, he must have learned that immortal could be killed in their dreams, so he had to make the girl even more eternal and undying that immortals.”

“What would that be,” Fable said. “Nothing is more undying than immortals.”

“Of course there is,” Axel objected. “There is something more eternal and legendary than any immortal you have ever thought of.”

“Spit it out, Alex,” Fable said while Shew thought she’d already known the answer. “What is it?”

“A Phoenix,” Shew answered on Axel’s behalf.

“Exactly,” Axel nodded. “Someone who’ll rise again from the ashes if burned. That’s why the creator made the clue a Phoenix so whenever she dies, she rises from the ashes again, and thus the clue lives forever and never dies,” Axel now clapped continuously, congratulating himself. “J.G. mentions here that he suspected that every time the Phoenix died and woke up, she woke up someone new, stripped of her past life’s memories, only very few information lived on with her when she was reborn, but nothing that had to do with whom she was before.”

“Cerené?” Shew wondered. The Slave Maiden, the cinder girl whose every breath she gave was a breath taken from her life? No wonder she didn’t care. Deep inside, she must have felt she can live this over and over again. That’s why she knew so many things Shew didn’t know about. Not only because Charmwill and Bianca talked to her, but because Cerené lived for so long that some knowledge like making glass stuck to her memory.

“The real Cinderella is not that helpless maid who longs to meet the prince in the ball,” Axel said. “Her role in the world is as equal and important as the Chosen One. The sad part is in order for her to protect the world, she’d better not know who she is or she’d start searching for the clue herself. Who knows, maybe if she find it, she’d decided to turn to the dark side.”

“Cerené would never do that,” Shew defended her.

“You of all people should know what darkness can do to people,” Axel said, “Remember the eerie songs you said Cerené sang whenever the world burned around her?”

“Yes,” Shew said. “Strange songs about London, ashes, and burning things.”

“I’m not sure but it looks to me like these are songs about things that had burned all along history and Cerené had been there when it happened,” Axel suggested. “She must have lived around every burning incident in history. The London fire, 1666, I would guess. That’s why she was singing
London Bridge is Falling Down,
which is rumored to have been about the London burning event,” Axel started counting on his fingers. “
Ashes, Ashes
which is part of the ‘Ring Around the Rosies’ nursery rhyme. It is said that this rhyme describes the incidents of the Black Death plague that killed most of the world. The plagued people were burned alive so they wouldn’t spread the disease. Fire, again. Remember when she told you about Le Fenice, the famous Venetian opera? It’s been burned through history as well. My guess is she was one of the burned. Cerené must have even seen when Rome burned, and when—”

“Enough!” Shew said. “Each time you mention her dying I feel like choking. Why should suffer something like that?”

“It’s her destiny, I guess,” Axel shook his shoulders.

“Does that mean, she isn’t dead?” Shew asked Axel. “Does it mean that she will rise again and will not sleep for a hundred years in the Field of Dreams?”

“I honestly don’t know, Shew,” Axel said. “I have so many questions in my head. Like who are the members of Cerené’s stepfamily? Why is she related to every burning incidents in history? Who burned these places, and why was she always there?”

“Which should answer who repeatedly saved me from the Wall of Thorns and Candy House when it burned,” Shew said.

“That’s if whoever saved you was actually saving
you
,” Axel pointed out. “It could be someone who was saving Cerené because she is the Clue, not you.”

“So what now, Axel?” Shew said. “There are too many mysteries, and I need to solve them to get to the Lost Seven before my mother.”

“In order to do so, we need someone to help us get to…” Axel said.

“To Murano,” Shew interrupted, and Axel nodded with approval. “Now that Carmilla knows who Cerené is and where she is from, she will go after her, whether in a Dreamworld or real life.”

“I’d really like to Murano with you,” Fable said. “I hope they have Venetian carnivals there where you wear those fantabuluos masks.”

“I’d like that, too. Never have tasted Venetian food. But I’m afraid that going to Murano isn’t easy at all,” Axel said. “I mean to travel back in time to the incidents in Murano in 1291, we’ll need to find Cerené first and enter her dream like Loki did with Shew…”

“And we have no clue where Cerené is in the Waking World,” Fable agreed.

“And even if we do, we’ll need a Dreamhunter to enter her dream,” Axel said, glancing briefly at the comatose Loki.

“Which we also don’t have,” Fable said.

“This brings us to square one again, where there is only one person who could help us,” Axel said.

“Charmwill Glimmer,” Shew and Fable uttered in the same breath. “He must know of a way to get us there, and I bet he could answer a lot of questions,” Shew said.

“Didn’t Cerené tell you there is a way to resurrect him?” Fable asked Shew.

“She said Charmwill told her his True Name when she met him in the cottage, and that it would help resurrect him if he dies,” Shew answered. “Unfortunately, I didn’t have the time to learn it from her.”