A Grimm Warning (The Land of Stories, #3)(69)

“Are you feeling all right, Froggy?” Alex asked him.

“I’ll be just fine,” he said. “I’m a tad dizzy, that’s all. I think the week is catching up to me.”

He walked a little ways away from them, clutching the balcony tightly as he went, but Alex didn’t press the matter. She tried to think of something to talk about that would take Red’s mind off her troubles.

“At least while you’re here I can introduce you to Rook,” Alex told her.

Red nodded but then quickly looked confused. “Sorry—who?” she asked.

Alex sighed. Red had been through such a wringer she couldn’t fault her for not remembering his name.

Emerelda suddenly rushed onto the balcony and went straight to Alex.

“Alex, you need to come with me,” she said in a serious tone.

“Why, what’s wrong?” she asked.

“It’s your grandmother,” Emerelda said. “She’s sick.”

Alex didn’t know what to say to this. As far as she knew, her grandmother had never been sick in her entire life. Could Fairy Godmothers even get sick?

A croaking sound unexpectedly came from the end of the balcony and interrupted her train of thought.

“Would this by chance have anything to do with my current situation?” Froggy asked.

They all turned to look at him by the railing and Red screamed. Without warning or reason, Froggy had transformed back into a frog.





CHAPTER FOURTEEN





THE ARMéE ARRIVES


Conner was spinning through a world of light. It was so bright he could barely see anything. He couldn’t hear the sound of his own voice, either—all he heard was the air rushing around him. Occasionally he saw Bree or Emmerich fly past him. He reached for them but couldn’t reach far enough to catch them. He knew they were in the space between dimensions; he had been here before when he and his sister traveled through the Land of Stories book two years ago. Only it seemed to be taking much longer to arrive than it had the last time.

Conner saw a flash and felt something brush by him as if he were falling through a curtain. The next thing he knew, he was lying on his back looking up at a hazy night sky. He stayed there for a moment and didn’t move, waiting for his senses to catch up with him.

There were two more flashes nearby and he felt thuds on the ground—Bree and Emmerich had landed beside him. Conner sat up to check on his friends and saw that they were as discombobulated as he was.

“Well, now we know the portal is definitely open,” Conner said.

Bree pulled herself up to a seated position. “Is it always this rough getting here?” she said.

“No,” he said. “I don’t know why that was so tough.”

Emmerich was so dizzy he could barely speak. “I don’t think we’re in Hohenschwangau anymore,” he said, and his head bobbed up and down.

Conner got to his feet and looked at the forest around them. The trees were tall and their branches stretched wide into the sky. But they were bare of leaves and almost looked dead. It was foggy so he couldn’t see very far into the distance.

Bree got to her feet, too. “So this is it, huh?” she asked.

“A part of it,” Conner said. “Although I’m not sure where.”

Emmerich tried getting to his feet but kept falling. Conner and Bree dragged him to the closest tree and propped him up against the trunk.

“Will one of you please tell me where I am?” Emmerich asked. “And what happened in Neuschwanstein?”

“I told you it would be cooler than being secret agents,” Bree said playfully.

“We’re in the fairy-tale world, bud,” Conner explained. “We accessed a portal that was hidden inside Neuschwanstein.”

Emmerich looked around the forest with large amazed eyes. “The fairy-tale world?” he said. “As in Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, Rapunzel—”

“They’re all here,” Conner said. “My grandma and sister live here, too. The portal between this world and ours had been blocked for a while but a friend of mine asked me to check if it had been re-opened—and here we are.”

Emmerich had so many questions he didn’t know what to ask first. “Why did your friend ask you to check it?” was the question he chose.

“To make sure some bad people couldn’t get in,” Conner said.

Bree turned her head and looked at the forest around them. “Speaking of, if we got through the portal into the fairy-tale world, doesn’t that mean the French—”

Bright lights abruptly flashed all around them. With each flash, something extremely heavy appeared in midair and crashed to the ground. Bree screamed when she realized most of the objects were human. Conner was afraid something or someone would fall on them and looked for someplace to take cover.

“Hurry! Climb the tree!” he yelled. They helped Emmerich to his feet and the three of them dashed up the tree, climbing as high as they could. From the treetop they got a better view of what was happening. It was as if a lightning storm had swept over the forest and was raining cannons, carriages, horses, swords, long pointed guns, and soldiers.

“It’s the army!” Conner whispered to his friends. “They’re here!”