Her smile dropped and her heart pounded loudly. She tried to pull away, but he held on to her tightly.
“Na, ah, ah. I believe you owe me a dance.” His words were like ice.
She pushed against his chest trying to escape, but his hand covered hers, trapping it there.
He gasped. She was touching the spot—the exact spot where the tip of the Erjad knife had broken off.
“So, Mina. Are you happy to see me? Or should I say Elle? Mina suits you much better.”
“I’m never happy to see you,” she muttered, looking over his shoulder at the blank faces of the couples dancing around them.
“Do you have what I want?” He turned her in a circle, making her head spin.
“No,” she lied.
“I told you, don’t lie to me.” His grip tightened around her waist. “The gate never fully closed, you know. It’s faded over time, and I’ve created others. I never could believe that you came from the future. I’ve searched for you for over a hundred years. The Grimm brothers finally gathered the courage to cross over to my world one of your human years later, to try and stop the Reapers. They spoke of you. Even described you down to the dress you were wearing the day you fell from my tower.”
“Was thrown,” she corrected heatedly.
“Thrown—fell. The ending was the same. You disappeared into another world. The brothers said you appeared there, but only for a short time before you vanished into a ball of light. We could only assume you went to the future…and here you are.”
>“I’m so sorry. This is my fault. I pulled power from the Fae plane to help you and I think it’s linked the two worlds. The gate is not closing.”
“What is coming through?” Jacob asked. She would have thought he would be terrified by what he was seeing. Instead he looked eager. Wilhelm crawled from the bed, invigorated, and stood before the portal in his pajamas. He picked up an umbrella and held it in front of him like a sword.
“Fae,” Mina answered.
“Fae? Like in the stories?” Wilhelm looked over to his brother and his face mirrored Jacob’s. Excitement.
“Yes, just like the stories.” The room filled with glowing, moving fireflies and Mina realized that they weren’t little bugs at all. The shoes were sparkling. Her darned slippers chose this moment to send her home. “No, not yet.” She grabbed a pitcher of water and smashed it over the next monstrous hand that tried to crawl through the portal. It looked like a troll’s. The hand quickly jerked back into the gate.
“Wilhelm. Jacob. Listen. There are good and bad Fae on the other side, and Teague will continue to send Reapers here to the human plane to hunt me down. But not only me—all of the Grimms and our kind for future generations.”
Jacob looked to his brother and nodded before he turned to Mina and asked, “What will we need to do?”
“Stop them.” The flickering was coming faster, and they were all retreating into the hospital hallway. “Here, you’ll need this.” Mina pulled the Grimoire from her dress pocket and gave it to Wilhelm. “Use it to capture the Fae within the book.”
“What happens to you?” Wilhelm asked. He tried to reach for her, but she backed away.
“I told you. I’m your granddaughter. I must go home now. But you can help me—by living. Survive today and all of the rest just like this one. Don’t give up.”
Jacob wrapped his hand around his brother’s shoulders and gave him a reassuring hug. “We won’t. We have waited for this adventure for a lifetime. This is after all, a librarian’s dream.”
She didn’t get a chance to tell them how to use the Grimoire before she saw both brothers rush back into the hospital room to battle the Fae that were coming through.
There was only a bright flash of light as she felt herself pulled away…into a bright tunnel.
Chapter 31
Mina’s body was on fire, her joints and every nerve in her zinging with pain. She was back in the parlor where she had left Brody, but the lights were off. The room was empty.
She stood but felt the crunching of glass as the slippers crumbled beneath her feet.
“Ouch,” she cried. She hobbled back over to sit on the sofa to pick the pieces of glass out of her bare feet. The pain only intensified as guilt finally assailed her.
It was her. It had always been her.
Something pressed against her hip and she felt through the dress and pulled out the knife. In the light of the moon, she could see the word Erjad engraved into the blade itself. Erjad—Jared.