RAVEN: Hey Mad where are you?

MADDIE: In Headmaster Grimm’s office guarding monsters

RAVEN: Um what?

MADDIE: Headmaster Grimm asked Apple to watch the monsters and Apple asked me to help cuz we’re the copresidents of the royal student council. He and the other teachers are off having the talkytalk biz. They’re all what do we do I don’t know there’s monsters in Ever After aah run away. Like that.

RAVEN: When you say monsters what do you mean?

MADDIE: Monsters. Rawr. AAH! You know like the stories. You should come I’ve never met monsters before so cool. Only don’t try to come through the door its locked, no matter how much I sing at it and feed it noodles

To get in through the upper-story window, Raven hitches a ride on the back of her pet dragon.⁴⁶

46 If I had a pet dragon, I’d pretty much always be hitching rides on it.

“Thanks, Nevermore,” says Raven. “Can you get any closer?”

The huge purple dragon hovers outside the office window, inching close enough that her head nearly touches the glass. Raven runs down her pet’s back and onto her head and leaps to the window ledge. She clings to the stones with one hand and knocks frantically.

Maddie opens the window and smiles. “Raven! Come in! This is like a holiday. There should be a We Just Met Monsters Day! We could eat creepy foods and have a dance party in a swamp. Or just a tea party, maybe. Really, a tea party works for any occasion.”

“I’m royally glad you’re here, Raven,” Apple says as Raven hops down into the room. Apple has on her plastered smile, the smile that means, “I’m trying to be cool but really I’m flipping out.” Her grin gets even larger and she adds, “Meet our… guests, Frankie Stein and Draculaura.”

In the corner, two figures stand with their backs against the wall, their faces in shadow.

“Hey, hi, I’m Raven. Raven Queen. Nice to meet you?”

The girls take a couple of tentative steps closer. The light catches their faces. A green-skinned face with one green eye and one blue, stitches around her neck holding on her head. The other pale as the moon, with canine teeth as long as… as long as a…

“Whoa!” says Raven, taking a step back. “Sorry. Sorry, I just didn’t hexpect you. You’re like characters out of a story.”

Apple’s smile stiffens, and she says without moving her lips, “They’re monsters, Raven. Real. Live. Monsters. Isn’t that just… just hexcellent?”

Raven has seen griffins, cockatrices, basilisks, and even the Jabberwock. Some people call trolls and dragons monsters, and they are all over Ever After. But dragons and griffins and trolls and such are real. These girls are make-believe things who walked straight out of a scary story. Raven’s head feels as light as a charmflower seed puff.

“Are… are you…?” Draculaura says, squinting at Raven.

Raven feels a bead of sweat roll down her back, but to keep herself from running away, she takes a cue from Apple and slaps on what she hopes is a comforting smile. Her smile reveals her perfectly normal teeth.

Draculaura sighs with disappointment. “Oh… never mind. I guess not… I just thought… I thought you were like me.”

Raven swallows. Her first day at Ever After High, she couldn’t take a couple of steps out of her room without someone screaming in terror and running away from the Evil Queen’s daughter. “Um, maybe I am,” she says. “What are you like? Lost? I’ve felt lost before.”

“No, no, I mean, you know, I’m a vampire.”

“You’re a…”

Draculaura folds her arms. “Fair warning: If you know what’s good for you, don’t try to stick me in a coffin.”

“What? No way!” Raven exclaims. “Do you know how cool it is to be mistaken for a vampire? Only slightly less cool than actually meeting one.”

“Really?” Draculaura smiles.

“Vampires aren’t real,” Apple says through clenched teeth.

“I know!” Raven laughs. “That’s what makes this so fableous. So, Draculaura, can you turn into a bat?”

“Sure.”

“So. Cool,” Raven says. “I met all kinds of creatures in my mom’s castle when I was a kid, but I thought straight-up bat-vampires were just stories.”

Apple takes a step backward. “Oh! Do you… er… eat… um, red meat?”

“No,” says Draculaura. “But my dad does.”

Apple gasps.

“But he’s trying to quit!” says Draculaura. “Really! It would be much healthier for him if he were vegetarian like me.…”

“A vegetarian vampire?” Raven rubs her hands together with delight. Tiny bits of purple magic spark into the air. “And you?”

Frankie clears her throat and looks back at the dark corner as if wishing she could hunker down there longer, but she says, “I was made. Stitched together in a laboratory. My dad is Frankenstein.”

“No,” says Apple, finally unfreezing her smile. “This. Isn’t. Possible. That is a character in a campfire story. Frankenstein isn’t real.”

“Well, we’re kinda characters in stories,” says Raven.

“But we are not make-believe!” says Apple. “We inherit stories. Just because my mother is Snow White—”

“Waitwaitwait,” says Frankie. “Your mother is Snow White? Like in the Normie fairytale? Poisoned-apple, friendly-with-dwarfs Snow White?”

Apple sniffs. “They prefer dwarves with a v, but yes.”

“That’s impossible,” says Frankie. “That’s just a story.”

“Just a story?” says Apple. “Like you’re just alive?”

“What I mean is, that can’t be true,” says Frankie. “Snow White isn’t a real person.”

Apple pulls out her MirrorPhone. “I assure you she is. I could call her for you if you want.”

“It just doesn’t make any sense,” Frankie says.

“Well,” Draculaura says, “there is precedent. Normies don’t think my dad is real. Or your dad. Or Clawdeen’s mom. Or us, either, really. But we are. They are. Maybe this is the same kind of thing.”

“We’re the Normies in this situation?” says Frankie.

Draculaura shrugs. “Maybe.”

“Anyone else feel like the whole world’s been turned upside down?” asks Raven.

Apple, Draculaura, and Frankie all raise a hand.

Frankie’s hand falls off. Apple shrieks.

“My dad is the Mad Hatter of Wonderland!” Maddie yells from atop a chair.

“Of course he is,” Frankie says, getting out a needle and thread for the umpteenth time today. “And your mom is probably the Cheshire Cat.”

“Well, not hexactly. She’s Kitty’s mom!”

“Right,” Frankie says, turning to Raven. “So who’s your mother?”

“That’s… a long story.”

“The Evil Queen!” Maddie says helpfully. “The Greatest Evil Ever After Has Ever Known.”

Raven notices that the chair Maddie is standing on is one of five around a table set with teacups, saucers, a steaming teapot, and plates of sandwiches that most definitely weren’t there a few minutes before.

“Whoa, Maddie, where did you get a tea party?”

Maddie laughs so hard she falls to the floor, holding her belly and rolling around. She can barely speak through the laughs. “‘Maddie… where did you get… a tea party’… so funny… best joke ever…”

Half an hour later,⁴⁷ everyone is sitting around the table, drinking cups of fairy blossom tea and chatting. They’ve gotten past the “Wait, fairytales are real?” and “Wait, monster stories are real?” parts of the conversation and are trying to understand how they can be from different worlds that somehow don’t connect.

47 Sorry, I had to take a snack break.

“Hexcept through magic,” says Raven.

“Yes, that’s right!” says Draculaura. “Whatever force pulled us here, it smelled like magic.”

“I didn’t notice any smell,” says Frankie.

“I smell it whenever I turn into a bat,” says Drac. “It’s like after-rain—”

“But also a little, um, tangy?” says Raven.

“Exactly! Like tangy after-rain smell,” says Drac, “but with, like, sprinkles of something sweet—”

“Kinda like a baking cake—”

“Yeah, like a fruity-flavored cake that’s baking in a tangy after-rain oven.”

“Hexactly!”

Raven and Draculaura laugh at the same time.

Also at the same time, Frankie and Apple reach for a crustless cucumber sandwich. Their hands bump.

“Sorry,” Apple whispers back, pulling her hand away quickly. She’s afraid of making Frankie’s hand pop off again.

“It’s okay,” Frankie whispers back, pulling her own hand away just as quickly.

They don’t make eye contact.⁴⁸

48 Awkward!

“Oh wait,” says Raven, her laugh dying. “If magic pulled you here, then… Oh curses, maybe it was my—”

“We don’t know it’s her, Raven,” says Apple.

“That woman was in the library, she did some spell, and then she was gone. What if it was my mom? Where’d she go?”

“You think she switched places with us?” says Draculaura. “What would your mom do if she got to Monster High?”

“Wait, you’re from Monster High?” asks Raven. “Yeah, okay, that makes sense, ’cause she was reading about it just before she disappeared—”

“She’s in mirror prison, Raven,” says Apple.

“Okay, okay.” Raven sighs. “I know I’m not supposed to do this, but… I just need to be sure. Apple, would you mind helping me?”

They plod over to Grimm’s standing mirror. Raven chants a spell, and Apple hacks into the Mirror Network. Once past the security, Raven swipes at the glass and connects to the mirror where her mother is supposedly imprisoned. But the cell is empty.

Raven sits on a chair, her head in her hands. “I’m so sorry.”

“Is it bad that the mirror isn’t working?” Draculaura says. “I totes can’t see my reflection, either. Putting on mascara is tricky, let me tell you.”

“Raven wasn’t trying to see her own reflection in the mirror,” Apple says. “She was trying to see her mother.”

“It’s my fault,” Raven says.

Maddie examines a sandwich. “No, I don’t think so. How could it be your fault that the sandwiches taste like the inside of a hat, Raven? It’s science. When a sandwich sits in a hat for any number of hours, it will naturally absorb the surrounding hatness—”

“No, I mean that Draculaura and Frankie are stuck in Ever After,” says Raven. “It’s my mom. I know it. She did this. I ignored it. I didn’t stop her.”

“Stuck?” says Frankie. “There must be a way to get home.”

“You’re stories to us,” says Apple. “Stories in a book. There’s no Monster High in Ever After.”

“Or in Wonderland, either,” says Maddie with a heavy sigh. “Such a shame. Monsters always make things more interesting.”

“We can’t find your home on a map,” says Apple. “It’s not like you could just walk there. How can we help you get back? How is it even possible that there are multiple worlds at all?”

Raven’s stomach hurts. And it’s probably not from the hat-flavored sandwiches.⁴⁹ When she thought she saw her mother, she should have gone straight to Headmaster Grimm, even if he hasn’t exactly been on Team Raven lately. Even if he might not have believed her. She should have risked it in order to stop her mom. And now these girls are far from home and stuck, perhaps, forever after.

49 Not completely, anyway.