HELLO!” FRANKIE SAYS, WAVING. SHE IS DOING her best to be exceptionally cheerful, because she knows how she would feel if a couple of people popped out of thin air in front of her. Well, actually, she herself would probably be excited to meet the popper-inners and would ask a lot of questions. But Headmaster Grimm looks how Frankie imagines Normies would react if a monster suddenly appeared in front of them.
Frankie figures it’s best to be exceptionally friendly. So friendly, in fact, that she waves a little too vigorously and her hastily reattached hand pops off at the seams and tumbles to the ground. The headmaster’s eyes widen in horror.
“Oops,” Frankie says. “Sorry.” She nods at her detached hand, and it scampers back to her like a frightened pet.
Headmaster Grimm’s mouth drops open, and Frankie is pretty sure he is about to scream, but someone beats him to it.
“eeeeee!” screeches a high-pitched voice. A tiny girl, no bigger than a thumb, is standing on a flower by Frankie’s feet.
“monsters! monsters!” the tiny girl screams.
“Monsters?” someone asks from the small crowd that’s gathering. Everyone looks Normie normal, except for wearing sort of fancy clothes. Have they interrupted some kind of Normie festival or outdoor play?
“Monsters?” Headmaster Grimm repeats. He laughs uneasily. “There’s no such thing as monsters.”
“Well, um…” Draculaura says, smiling big and doing her best to look friendly.
“Look at her teeth!” someone shouts. “She has fangs!”
“Ooh!” Draculaura pops into bat form. “Oops,” Bat-Drac squeaks, back into girl form. “Sorry. When I get spooked, sometimes I—”
“There… there’s… ahem… no such thing as vampires,” Headmaster Grimm says, all color draining from his face. “Go to class now, students.”
“And that—that thing!”
At the word thing, Frankie fumbles her hand, and it drops back to the ground.
“And there’s no such thing as… as whatever that is,” Headmaster Grimm says, frowning at Frankie as she scrambles to pick up her severed hand.
Several people are still screaming, but many have moved on to angry muttering.
“I’ve read stories about this,” whispers Draculaura. “When Normies go from screaming to muttering, pitchforks and torches are next. We should run.”
“Run where? Where are we?”
“I don’t know,” Draculaura says. “A Normie city?”
“But something’s off,” says Frankie. “They aren’t dressed like any Normies I’ve seen. And that one girl is, like, two inches tall.”
“Well, they aren’t monsters—that’s for sure,” Draculaura says. “Maybe we’re in France.”
“Did I hear someone cry ‘monster’?” calls out a guy about their age who is framed in the doorway of the school. He is tall and athletic looking, with perfectly styled golden hair.
“He seems nice,” Draculaura whispers.
The boy hurriedly unzips his backpack and draws out a gleaming sword. “Present yourself for slaying, foul monster!”
“I take it back,” Drac says. “Not nice. Not nice at all. Back to the running plan.”
“There’s a forest that way,” Frankie says, nodding in the direction of a dark wood that seems the best possible option for a monster habitat.
“Right,” says Drac. “Run.”
They take off at a sprint. Behind them they hear Headmaster Grimm yell, “Mr. Charming! No slaying on school property! Put that sword away right now!”
Frankie runs so hard she nearly bursts at the seams, her jumping gallop trying to keep pace with Draculaura’s speedy gait.
The two girls skid to a stop at the edge of the forest.
“They aren’t chasing,” Frankie says. “Should we—?”
“Go back home?” Draculaura says. “Yes, please. It’s too bright with the sun and too sparkly with the clothes and too sharp with the swords. I don’t know what this Ever After even is.”
A crash sounds from within the forest.
“Is that a good noise or a bad noise?” Frankie asks.
“I’ve got the Skullette,” Draculaura says. “We can go back.”
“Okay,” Frankie says, looking toward the forest sound, “but we worked so hard to get here. We should try to investigate, at least. Maybe that’s a friendly… er… mob?”
“Let’s not risk it.”
“You’re right.”
They both grab the Skullette and shout “Exsto monstrum Dracula!”
Nothing happens. Certainly not the thrust back home to Draculaura’s dad that they were expecting.
“The Skullette isn’t humming,” Frankie says. “Doesn’t it usually output a little energy when we hold it?”
The crashing noise is getting louder. Whatever it is will be upon them soon.
“Let’s try someone else’s name,” Draculaura says. “Ready? One, two…”
“Exsto monstrum Clawdeen Wolf!” they shout.
And nothing happens. Again.
A hooded girl leaps from the woods at a dead run. The monster girls scream.45
45 Only because they don’t know this is the friendly Cerise Hood, daughter of Little Red Riding Hood and the Big Bad Wolf.
“Hey, it’s okay. Calm down,” the hooded girl says. “You’re scaring people.”
“We’re scaring people?” Draculaura says. “You’re the one who just leaped at us from a dark forest!”
“Sorry,” Cerise says. “I wasn’t trying to scare you. I just wanted to catch up to you before Headmaster Grimm did.”
“Are you one of them?” Frankie asks. “One of those Normies who were just a hop and a skip from pitchforks and torches?”
The girl removes her hood and smiles. Her teeth are sharp. Pointed ears tipped with tufts of fur poke out from underneath her hair, and her eyes flash yellow.
“I don’t know what Normies are,” says Cerise, “but I don’t think I am one.”
“At last!” Drac relaxes. “A monster! Hey, do you know Clawdeen Wolf?”
“Yeah, is she your cousin, maybe?” says Frankie. “She’s a werewolf, too.”
“I don’t know who Clawdeen is,” Cerise says, looking around nervously. “And I’m not a werewolf. Werewolves are monsters, and monsters aren’t real—” She gives the two monsters a once-over and shakes her head. “That is… I don’t know what’s real. Don’t tell anyone else about my ears, okay? I just wanted you to know that you’re not alone. Don’t worry. Ever After isn’t that weird.”
Just then a giant chicken leaps out of the forest.
At least, Frankie thinks it is a giant chicken at first. It has giant chicken legs. But instead of a giant chicken body, there is a cottage, like the kind an old-school witch might live in.
“I’d better go,” says Cerise, pulling on her hood and slipping into the shadows. “But don’t worry. You’ll be okay!”
A woman who looks remarkably witchy herself perches on the roof. The witch cackles, and Frankie relaxes. Witches feel closer to monster than Normie.
Baba Yaga’s chicken-legged hut struts toward the girls and squats to ground level.
“That is a fangtastic house, ma’am!” Draculaura calls up to Baba Yaga. “Where did you get it?”
The door to the hut swings open, and Headmaster Grimm steps out.
“We need to get you safely back to my office, um… girls,” Headmaster Grimm says. “Into Madam Baba Yaga’s hut now. Try not to be scared of it.”
“Scared?” Draculaura says, leaping into the hut. “This thing is clawesome!”
The floor of the hut sways as it stands on its chicken legs and begins to walk.
Draculaura looks out the window. “I so want one of these chicken houses!”
Baba Yaga sniffs. “This one is mine. You can’t have it.”
“No, of course not. But wait, you said ‘this one.’ Are there more of these somewhere?”
“No,” Baba Yaga says. “Maybe. Which is to say, I am done talking about chicken huts.”
The hut makes its way across the campus, stopping just outside the window of Headmaster Grimm’s office on an upper floor of the building. The hut stands on its clawed toes, its front door opening and lining up with the office window. The foursome climbs through the window into the headmaster’s grand, book-filled office.
“What are you hexactly?” Baba Yaga asks, poking at Frankie. “Flesh golem? Reanimated corpse? Zombie? Homunculus?”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” says Headmaster Grimm. “None of those things exist!”
“I… I’m Frankie,” she says. “Frankie Stein. My father, Frankenstein, made me in his laboratory.”
The color drains from Headmaster Grimm’s face. “That’s preposterous!”
“With what did your father make you? Sugar? Spice? Clay, maybe?” Baba Yaga pinches Frankie’s arm. “Doesn’t feel like clay.…”
“I’m not sure,” Frankie says. “With different pieces. Sewn together.”
“Different pieces of what?” Baba Yaga asks, one eyebrow arching.
“This is all nonsense,” Headmaster Grimm says. “Frankenstein is a character in a campfire tale, a nonstory that is, I might add, forbidden!”
Baba Yaga shrugs. “Flesh golem, then,” she mutters.
Headmaster Grimm ignores the witch. “I don’t allow students to tell monster stories,” he continues. “It makes for sleepless nights, provokes dark ideas, and interferes with Happily Ever Afters. You two will need to stay hidden away here. You’ve already done too much damage.”
Frankie looks around the office. “We have to stay… here? In this room? For how long?”
“Until we can figure out who you really are and what to do with you!”
The headmaster and the witch leave the office. The dead bolt slides into place, locking them in.
“I’m sorry, Drac,” says Frankie. “I’m so sorry. This is one hundred percent my fault.”
“No, it’s okay,” says Draculaura, but she sits in the corner, curled up, her arms around her knees, and nothing about her looks remotely okay.