Two Duck Lake was surrounded by forest, so we had to leave Regent Maximus behind—he said he was afraid of the underbrush (“As if regular-sized trees weren’t scary enough!”) and I didn’t think we needed to chance it, after our fall. Tomas suggested tying him to a stop sign, but I didn’t want him to get eaten by a Grim if there was one here. So we snuck him into one of the crusty out-of-order public restrooms near the picnic tables. He stood obediently next to the sinks with his eyes still tightly closed, muttering to himself. His voice echoed off the tile.
“We’ll be back soon,” I promised him.
If we’re not eaten by a Grim, I thought.
Then I shoved that thought aside and headed into the trees with Tomas.
Here was the thing about woods and me—I really loved animals and nature and all, but, deep down inside, I was from a city. We didn’t have big stretches of trees and leaves and plants and little trickling rivers in Atlanta. We had parks, of course, but you couldn’t really get lost in them because there were paths and signs everywhere.
So I kind of knew that being in the woods, where a Grim was lurking, with a boy who kept stopping to reapply eyedrops—would be kind of scary.
And it was really scary, especially once we couldn’t hear the sounds from the campground anymore. All sense of space and time vanished as we searched for clues.
“What time is it?” I whispered to Tomas, because it was so strangely quiet out here in the middle of nowhere that it seemed wrong to speak too loudly.
He studied his watch. “Ten o’clock.” Then he sneezed for the fifty-third time.
It had taken a long time to coax Regent Maximus to the woods. Less time than walking, by a lot, but not as fast as I had hoped. And we’d spent way longer wandering in the woods.
We only had an hour left.
This was bad. I hadn’t even seen a single black tuft of hair, much less an entire black dog.
“Have we been this way before?” I asked.
Something in the woods crunched in response.
Tomas and I looked at each other, then into the woods. It was bright in here, being the morning and all, but it was still hard to see very far since there were so many leaves.
Tomas sneezed again, then clapped his hands over his nose at the sound of it. His eyes widened. “What if—what if I’m sneezing because it’s close?”
“Tomas, you’ve been sneezing for a half hour—” I stopped. I looked at him, and my jaw dropped. The Guide said that Grims were “stealthy, slinky” animals. Half Ninja Dog, after all.
It was very possible that for the last half hour, the Grim had been following us. I took a deep breath.
“Hello?” I called out into the trees. “Any Grims out there?”
Nothing answered me.
But we did hear a light little crunch sound. Much too light to be a Grim.
I sighed, disappointed. And also a little relieved, because I didn’t want to be eaten.
“Don’t worry, Tomas,” I said. “It’s probably just a squirrel. Come on.”
“I can’t,” Tomas replied, sneezing again.
“Tomas, you can walk and sneeze at the same ti—”
“No, I can’t!” he protested.
I turned around to look and clapped my hand over my mouth.
Tomas was flying.
Okay, he wasn’t flying. He was floating, the way a balloon does when it’s nearly out of helium but has just enough left that you can’t throw it away. His toes skimmed the moss on the forest floor.
“Tomas!” I said. “Get … get down!”
“I’m trying!” he said and kicked his legs like he was running. All that did was send him tumbling forward, spinning head over heels in the air, things cascading from his pockets. He flailed his arms around like a windmill before snatching on to my ponytail to steady himself.
Breathlessly, he gasped, “Thanks, Pip.”
“Don’t mention it.” I winced as he tugged my ponytail harder. “Why are you floating?”
“I told you! I have allergies!”
“What are you allergic to that makes you float?”
Tomas, still floating over my head, ducked to avoid a low tree branch. “I don’t know. Sometimes it’s hard to tell what’s making me have a reaction.”
I pointed at his pockets. “Don’t you have something useful in there?”
“Oh, right! I hope they haven’t fallen out.” With his free hand, he rustled in his pocket and pulled out some allergy capsules, which he swallowed quickly.
“How long do those take?” I asked.
“Fifteen minutes?”
Fifteen minutes is a very long time when you have less than an hour. And we’d lost some time with the floating and catching too. I was afraid to ask Tomas what time it was now.
“We have to keep moving. Just try to stay out of the tree branches, and hold on to my hair. It’s our only chance of finding the Grim so—”
Crunch.
The sound was light, just like the last noise, but now it was much, much closer. Tomas eyed me from the air above my head.
I leaned toward the sound, peering through the leaves.
I saw a patch of black fur!
Jerking backward, I curled my toes in my shoes.
I tried not to think of all of the scary facts about Grims in the Guide.
“Hello!” I said again, this time not in a question voice. “I know you’re there, Grim. My name’s Pip, and I just want to talk with you.”
I could feel Tomas shaking in fear—he was wiggling my ponytail. I couldn’t blame him, especially as I heard more crunching—the Grim was approaching us. Grims must be really stealthy, I thought, for a huge animal like that to sound so light on the forest floor. Now there was more black among the leaves as it got closer, closer—
“Hi,” the Grim said, finally emerging from the trees.
My mouth dropped open. I couldn’t believe it! This was a Grim, all right—a big, black, magical dog, just like the Guide described. But this Grim wasn’t the “size of a full-grown man at the shoulder.” It barely came up to my shoulder.
Because this Grim? It was just a baby!
