A Grimm Legacy (Grimm Tales) (35 page)

"Fragen sie, wer bist du?
Wie bist du hier?" The man addressed the boy, pointing an accusatory finger their direction.

"Vatti wants know, who you are, why you here?" the boy asked in passable English.

"We're sorry, we don't know where we are. Is there a hospital nearby?" Quinn asked again.

"Yes, there." He pointed in a vague direction to
the back of the shop.

The man narrowed his eyes at them and inched closer. He crouched at eye level and slowly reached out,
gently touching one of Andi's curls. Andi held very still, desperate but hopeful.

His eyes fell over her cloak and shoes then stared into her face and asked with wonder, "Aschenputtel?"

“Do you know how boring it is waiting for someone to wake up?"

Fredrick woke to a steady beeping. He twitched his nose, trying to scratch it only to
find a tangle of tubes there. Memories rushed back. He was in the hospital. He picked his head up off the pillow to find his mom, gaunt with a sickly cast to her skin, dozing in a chair by his bed.

"Mom?" His breathing was easier, but his throat felt raspy and dry from little use.

Her eyes opened, and when she smiled at him, he saw more life in her face than he had in months. She leaned over him, the tails of her headscarf tickling his face. Fredrick’s mom smoothed back his hair like she used to do when he was little.

"Welcome back to the land of the living.
”

Fredrick struggled to sit up.
“What are you doing here? You should be lying down.”

“
I’m okay,” she said placing a hand on his shoulder. “How do you feel?"

Fredrick considered lying. He tried not to worry her, but after disappearing for several days, he probably couldn
’t make her any more anxious. “Like I’ve been run over by a truck,” he admitted.

"That would be because you
’ve punctured a lung with one of your broken ribs. I can imagine falling through a mirror will do that.”

Appa
rently, she had met the others.

"You're going to take at least two months to fully heal." She shook her head at him,
still smiling.

"I thought you'd be a more upset,
” Fredrick said hesitantly. “I thought you’d be worse.”

"I wasn
’t feeling well,” she admitted, “but when you’ve got a child missing for over a week that suddenly turns up alive, you count your blessings. There’s no room for anything else.”

There was a knock on the door and Andi poked her head in the room. "He's up," she accused.
“You were supposed to let us know.”

Fredrick
’s mom gave him a sideways look that said she had gotten to know Andi pretty well while he was unconscious. "He just woke up," she explained.

Andi yelled
behind her, "He's up!" and shouldered the door the rest of the way open to wheel Dylan in. Quinn was on her heels with a tall, young man who, Fredrick assumed from his dark skin and the way he stuck like glue to Quinn, must be her older brother.

Dylan's wrist was in a cast and Quinn moved a little more carefully than normal, but they all looked... happy.

"I'll be back." Patting Fredrick's hand, his mom relinquished her chair and left the room.

"You must be Fredrick," Quinn
’s brother said, offering him his hand. "Max. I heard you took good care of Quinn." Max squeezed Quinn's shoulders and she smiled tightly.

Andi flounced in the vacated chair. "We thought you were going to sleep forever, do you know how boring it is waiting for someone to wake up?"

"Where are we?” Fredrick asked.

“
A small town called Triberg," Quinn explained.

Fredrick looked at her
blankly.

"It's in the Black Forest," Andi elaborated.

"We're in Germany?” he asked in disbelief.

"Not just in Germany, but in the place where a lot of the fairy tales originated from,
” Quinn explained.

"What an odd coincidence," Dylan said. Fredrick didn
’t miss his sarcasm.

"What about the man that found us?" Fredrick asked.

"Oh Klaus?” Andi smiled. “He's a sweetheart, really. We've been back to his antique store several times to see him. His son Niklas translates for us."

"He called the ambulance when he realized how badly you were hurt
. You've been sleeping for over twenty-four hours," Quinn said.

"They treated me for a broken wrist and
severe lacerations
from the mirror,” Dylan said pointedly, showing him his gunshot graze.

“
They believed that?” Fredrick asked.

Dylan shrugged
.
“No cops have shown up. All Quinn and Andi had were concussions. We got released ages ago, but we've been waiting for you to wake up."

"You're going to be here for another week. A punctured lung is no laughing matter." Andi wrinkled her nose at him.

"Didn't Klaus call you something odd, Ash-something?" Fredrick asked Andi, foggily remembering the events after crashing through the mirror.

"Aschenputtel? It's basically the German Cinderella,
” Andi said.

Fredrick stole a glance at Max standing close to Quinn. None of this was news to him.

"Apparently," Andi's eyes creased at him laughingly, "that mirror has sat in his antique shop since his great-grandfather's time. And get this—it originally belonged to Jacob Grimm and was sold at auction when he died in 1863. Klaus’s father used to tell him the oddest version of Aschenputtel involving that mirror when he was a child. Instead of marrying the handsome prince, she escaped to another world, stepping through a looking glass dressed in a blue hooded cloak. She had gray eyes and blonde curls."

"His father must have seen your grandmother,
” Fredrick said, catching on.

Andi nodded
. "I assume so. No wonder he looked like he saw a ghost. For him, it was like watching a fairy tale come to life."

"No idea what that's like," Dylan muttered.

"So our parents…?” Fredrick let the question hang.

Quinn glanced at Max
, who tugged her braid and moved quickly out of reach as she tried to swat him. "Well, those were interesting phone calls to make. They basically all jumped on a flight and came straight here."

"They knew!
” Andi fumed “At least, my dad did. Can you believe he sat on something like this his entire life?”

“
How did he find out?” Fredrick asked, intrigued and wondering what his own parents knew.

“
He saw my grandmother disappear under the cloak once when he was about thirteen. Obviously, he wigged out and thought maybe he was going crazy, but after he confronted her about it, she told him the truth.”

“
Not that he believed her,” Dylan reminded her.

“
Of course not. Would you have? But when my mom went screaming out to the barn saying something about me disappearing under a cloak, well, Dad finally believed Grandma.”

“
Even if he didn’t take her at her word, wouldn’t he have kept her cloak someplace safer?” Fredrick asked.

“
He never saw it again after that day. He had no idea it was even in the attic.”

“
What about the rest of our parents?” Fredrick asked, fiddling with the controls to make his hospital bed sit up more.

“
They did
not
believe us,” Quinn said. “And the anger through the phone when I said I was in Germany was
…
intense, to say the least.”

“
Andi’s dad did a lot of talking when they all got here.” Dylan shrugged. "But things didn’t really get better until Quinn’s dad got her grandma on the phone."

"I kept telling them I saw Quinn disappear before my eyes," Max said. "And had about as much luck with them as Quinn did. But
Daad
i
…”

“
We’re not positive what she said to him, but he just said, ‘We’ll talk about this more later’ and hung up. He’s been a lot calmer since.”

“
What about your dad?” Fredrick asked Dylan.

"He was surprisingly reasonable,
” Dylan said, trying to balance his wheelchair on its back wheels. “He listened to what everyone had to say and still seems to be mulling it over.”

"Now they
’re all swapping stories about their parents," Andi said. "Like how tight-lipped they were about their childhoods, and these twisted tales they used to tell, about giants and evil princes..."

"He hasn
’t said as much, but I suspect Dad caught Grandpa talking to fish more than once,” Dylan added. “Before, he might have chalked it up to senility setting in, but now—“

"So we
’re not grounded for life?" Fredrick asked.

“
I don’t know about that,” Andi said, “but mostly, they seem relived. And they’re all getting strangely buddy, buddy. It’s weird.”

Fredrick's mom slipped in quietly,.
"Time to go kids."

“
All of us?” Dylan asked.

“
Yes. Your dad offered everyone a ride back to the airport in his rental van. No one else has the guts to drive on the other side of the road.”

Andi raised her eyebrows at Fredrick
, and he clearly understood her unspoken, ‘I-told-you-so.’

"You
’re leaving?" Fredrick asked.

Dylan rolled his eyes. "Apparently, we have missed a lot of school and there are members of our family who didn't fly to Germany who need living proof that we are, in fact, alive."

"No worries, you're all coming to my house next school break. Mom offered to host and she's already working on convincing your parents it’s a good idea. I believe she said something along the lines of how people who have been through what we’ve been through together should not be kept apart."

Andi bent over and gave Fredrick a kiss on the cheek, laughing as he his face immediately turned red, before rolling Dylan out the door. He raised his good hand in farewell before saying something quietly to Andi that made her laugh. She attempted to muss his hair, but he ducked his head out of her reach and caught her hand in his.

Max slipped out unobtrusively and Quinn stood next to his bed, clasping her hands tightly.

"I'm sorry about Jack."

He nodded at his lap and then looked straight into her dark eyes. "Is the mirror completely smashed?"

“
It's in a million pieces, but I don't know if we could have gotten back that way anyhow,” she said.

"Does my dad know?" he asked.

"No, we left that part out. I thought you should be the one to tell him,” she said
.
“
If
you want to tell him, that is.”

Quinn reached out and tentatively laced her fingers with his. Instinctively, Fredrick almost jerked it back, but
—well—he didn’t really want to.

"Don't forget, my grandmother is still alive. Barely, but she is. I'm going to spend some time with her in India and she
will
be telling me everything she's kept secret for far too long, whether she likes it or not. We'll come up with an idea.” She gave his hand a final squeeze. “In the meantime, try not to worry. Jack has survived there for 200 years. He's not helpless.” She smiled at him softly before following her brother out the door.

His mom came back in and raised an eyebrow at Fredrick. He realized too late he had a stupid grin on his face and quickly rearranged his expression. She sighed happily as she sank in the chair next to him.

"What?" he asked warily, still unsure about her good mood.

"Nothing,
” she said. “These past few days have been unbearable. But having you here, now, safe
…
It's like a nightmare turned into a dream. It hasn't really sunk in yet."

Fredrick stared at his lap and fidgeted with his sheets. He considered how much to tell her, wanting to enlist her help, but not sure she was strong enough for it.

She watched his nervous hands flutter for a minute. “Whatever it is, spit it out,” she said in a tone that brokered no arguments.

Fredrick rubbed the back of neck. He
’d never been able to keep much from his mom.

"There's one more piece of the story the others haven't told. One they left for me,
” he said. He took a deep breath and let it out slowly. "I know where Grandpa is.”

”At some point you’re going to have to stop following me around.”

“
I’ll be quick,” Andi said, heading for the ladies
’
restroom in the middle of the concourse.