Reign (An Unfortunate Fairy Tale 4)

“Why’d you do that?” Nan asked.

He shrugged his shoulders. “Now they will have to be cleaned.”

“Dork,” Nan rapped his shoulder playfully.

“Sprunk.” Nix answered, his face lighting up.

Nan looked taken aback. “I don’t even know what that is.”

“And you think I know what a dork is?”

“Ha, ha. Very funny. That is exactly something a dork would say.”

“Not only are you a Sprunk, but you’re a Feeter too!”

Her eyes went wide, and she called out in a whiny voice, “Ever?”

Ever held up her hands. “Don’t drag me into this name-calling game, or both of you will lose.”

Just then, Mei entered the hall of the mirrors, rejoining them.

Constance moved to a small door near the floor and gave a slight knock. The door opened, and a little white mouse wearing spectacles and a blue robe stepped out.

“Hello, Constance, Mina, and friends,” the small mouse said in greeting. His high-pitched voice was soft and squeaky. Nan squeezed Mina’s arm in unbidden excitement at seeing the talking mouse. He quickly ran up the closest frame, perched at eye-height for Constance.

“Hello, Baynard. What is our current situation?”

Baynard rubbed his small paws over his eyes and adjusted his glasses. “It’s not good, not looking very good at all. They’re disappearing at random.” He ran across the frame and crawled up a wire to the frame around another mirror. “Our sources say that this one is next.” It happened to be the same mirror that Nan had been looking into earlier. Baynard hopped onto the same ledge as the little brown mouse, who moved over so he could sit by her.

“What’s going on?” Concern gripped Mina. Were the Grimms disappearing?

Constance rubbed her hands together and then pressed them to her lips. “We’re not sure, but once we heard Mina’s concern about her brother, the Guild has been monitoring the other Grimms more closely. We’ve noticed that they are fading.”

Mina’s heart beat a little faster at that word. Fading?

“The watchers seem to have discovered a pattern.”

“What kind of pattern?” Nix asked, moving to get a better view of the mirror everyone was now crowding around.

Baynard nodded his head and looked at a small pad of paper that the brown mouse held up for him to see. “We don’t know for sure that it’s a pattern, but all of our research points to Leonard Grimm as the next one.”

“Next one to do what?” Mina asked, feeling extremely anxious. She wondered what in the world Constance meant by “fading,” but now wasn’t the time to ask. Everyone was busy watching Leonard.

Mina wanted answers, and grew more frustrated by the second. She was bored with watching this distant relative eat his dinner. He had polished off his sausage and was now working on the sauerkraut. He burped, wiped his mouth with a napkin, and then speared another sausage for his plate. He began cutting the sausage and stabbed a piece on his fork.

Mina’s stomach was queasy just watching him eat, and she wanted to turn away, to look anywhere else. But everyone seemed to be waiting for something. So she watched the silver tined meat-bearing instrument head to his mouth and those fat greasy lips.

The fork never reached Leonard’s mouth.

It dropped suddenly to clatter on the blue plate.

The reason it never reached its destination?

The Grimm in question ceased to exist.

Chapter 14