Authors: Cameron Jace
“If there is a canoe, then it belongs to Skeliman,” Axel whimpered.
“Man up,” Loki said. “It’s empty. Now get in it.”
“I think—“Axel stuttered. “I think I am going to wait here.”
“If you keep stalling, I’ll have to leave you here alone in the dark,” Loki said, ready to row.
“No, I will come with you. But can I ask you something first?” Axel said.
“What?”
“You killed vampires before, right?” Axel asked. “Can I count on that?”
“You can count on me,” Loki said, not really sure he was able to kill the vampire princess. Loki was using a fake-it-until-you-make-it approach. He dragged Axel into the canoe. “I’m not going to fail this time, you hear me?” Loki gritted his teeth.
“Now you’re scaring me, Loki,” Axel said.
Noticing he was losing it, Loki let go of Axel, and started rowing. He couldn’t hear the boys’ and girls’ voices anymore. Rowing across the swamp, he pretended he didn’t hear the many voices of nightly creatures all around. He just rowed, hoping to reach the other side safely. Axel crouched next to him, burying his head under his hood. The cold was increasing substantially.
“This weather is just crazy,” Loki said. “There must be an explanation to it.”
“It’s
her
,” Axel said in a muffled voice. “It’s Snow White. She can manipulate the weather.”
“Are you sure?”
“Everyone knows that vampires can manipulate the weather, making it colder to suit the environment they need to survive. Snow White likes it cold and snowy around her until she feeds. It makes it harder for her enemies to attack her. After she’s fed it starts to snow red. It’s some sort of ritual to her.”
“How do you know more about vampires than I do?”
“If you’ve ever read Bram Stoker’s Dracula, you’ll know that vampires have the ability to manipulate the weather, especially those from the 18
th
century.”
“She’s from the 18
th
century?”
“That’s what I read in the forum. I’ll tell you more about her. If. We. live.”
Loki watched the vapor coming out of Axel’s mouth shaping into letters on the surface of the misty night in front of him. ‘If. We. Live.’
“You saw that? The letters?” Loki said.
“I did,” Axel had already closed his eyes. “Blink, Loki, blink, and it will be gone.”
He blinked once, and the letters were gone. But now there was this sound that scared him. Loki flung his eyes open. The girls were singing again. Those girls he’d first heard when he arrived in Sorrow. He listened to them singing faintly, somewhere in the dark:
Snow White one, Snow White two,
Sorrow was coming out for you.
Snow White three, Snow White four,
Black as night, go lock your door.
Snow White five, Snow White six,
Blood red lips and crucifix
Snow White seven, Snow White eight,
Row your boat, before it’s late,
Snow White Nine, Snow White ten,
The Schloss will get you and what then?
“Can you hear that?” Loki asked Axel.
“Yup,” Axel clutched his lips together, stressing on the letter ‘p’ so hard Loki worried Axel wasn’t going to open up again. His cheeks bubbled up like a balloon, and his face went blue. Loki poked one cheek with his finger. Axel let out a breath with one long
pfoof
.
The mist started to clear, and Loki could see the Black Forest in the distance.
“We’re almost there. Ease up,” Loki said.
“Can you see Big Bad and his friends?” Axel said.
“No,” Loki saw a dense orchard of Juniper Trees blocking the entrance to the forest. “But I can see their empty log boat.”
“They must’ve found the Schloss by now.”
“Maybe,” Loki took a deep breath and dragged Axel behind him into the dark of the forest.
Tingling goose bumps grew on Loki’s skin, and hair prickled on his back. The forest had a presence of its own, an aura of chilling cold and muddy ground that smelled like the crushed bones of the dead buried underneath. It was both fascinating and frightening. Suddenly Loki saw flashes of things that happened here hundreds of years ago. He didn’t know how but he saw a vision of a princess running away from something—or someone. Then the vision vaporized away.
“Are you alright?” Axel worried.
“
Fangtastic
,” Loki replied, as always, too proud to show his fears.
The crawling Juniper Trees blocked the view of the night sky above them. It felt like they were entering a cave made of arching trees.
“Hey, I just remembered something I once read about,” Axel said.
“What now?”
“Those Juniper Trees were mentioned in a Brothers Grimm fairy tale.”
“I bet it was a bright and happy Christmas-like tree,” Loki used his Alicorn to make his way through the dense bushes.
“Not at all,” Axel said. “You probably don’t know much about the Brothers Grimm fairy tales. They are full of gore and killings. In this specific fairy tale, the tree was an incarnation of a boy who was murdered by his stepmother and buried in the ground.”
“Really?” Loki noticed that whenever someone told him something about fairy tales lately, they didn’t seem as giddy and happy like he’d always thought of them. He continued walking in silence for a while.
“Hey,” Axel whispered as if not to disturb the trees. “I think something tapped me on my back.”
“Shhh,” Loki said, trying to find his way through the dense trees. His flashlight was hardly lighting the way.
“I am serious,” Axel insisted. “Something touched me.”
“Once we find the castle, we’ll look into this thing that tapped you,” Loki sighed.
“It just happened again,” Axel shivered. “It’s as if many tiny cold hands are tapping on my head and my back.”
“OK, OK, just stop tapping
me
,” Loki said.
“What?” Axel asked. “I didn’t touch you.”
Loki froze in place. He questioned why ghosts would tap him on his back instead of just Booing at him.
Loki turned around. Axel was gazing upward at an unseen sky blocked by the curling branches. Small white snowflakes were dropping all around, passing through the voids between the trees.
“This is a divine warning,” Axel said, wrath from the sky.”
“What?”
“Can’t you see that it only snows behind us, never in front of us? It’s as if the snow is hunting us.”
“Crap.”
“I can’t believe you’re a vampire hunter when you say things like that,” Axel complained. “You sound like someone’s parent, saying there is no boogeyman in the closet. They’re always the first to die for not believing the kids.”
Loki saw eyes staring back at him from behind Axel. He knew they were eyes because they blinked. They were mostly golden; a pair here and there, always pairs. Telling Axel about them would have freaked him out even more.
“Listen,” Axel said, tiptoeing. “I can hear them.”
Loki heard Dee singing with the boys nearby. They sounded officially drunk. Loki thought that it was what kept them from getting scared. Big Bad was singing again:
Snow white sucks the blood. La O la la la
And when she sucks you will die La O la la
“Creative, I must say,” Loki raised an eyebrow, exchanging looks with Axel.
“I got a better one,” Axel said. “
Princess Snow White sucks the blood, ee-i-ee-i-o. She’s gonna waste them all like rats ee-i-ee-i-o.
”
Loki covered Axel’s mouth with his hand, “You’re singing is too loud. They’ll hear us.”
“Ten dollars, Big Bad is the first to die,” Axel said, pulling Loki’s hand away.
Unexpectedly, Axel walked past Loki, fueled with sudden bravery. “You know what?” he said. “If they’re not scared, then I’m not scared.”
Loki guessed this was the result of being scared too long: you get bored from it, and since nothing bad happens you decide to be brave for a change.
Both of them reached the end of the forest and peeked through the last line of trees into an open snowy area.
Dee and her friends trotted farther ahead in the heavy snow, singing, telling jokes, and occasionally swearing about Snow White.
“Looooook!” Axel pointed ahead. “Holy Lord-“Axel shrieked. “Of the rings.”
Loki looked. It was the castle, the Schloss, far ahead beyond the boys and girls. It shined through the night like an enormous jewel, so huge, bigger than the biggest five-star hotel he’d ever seen. It was an immense golden structure, a bit too curvy with too much glass, standing proud in the snow, imposing its presence and causing Loki to take an unconscious step back.
What the tic tac toc is that thing?
The Schloss looked like a fairy tale castle, out of this world, a little curvy like the Taj Mahal, only the architecture was European and a bit gothic.
Loki brushed his eyes to look again at the immense beauty. From a distance, it seemed like it was painted gold. The truth was that it was
made
of gold and glass, and the windows were made of transparent pearls. Loki thought it had a heartbeat of its own, and that the shadows and shades which surrounded it constantly changed. The windows were huge, staring down at him like dead rectangular eyes made of foggy pearls. The white curtains behind the windows fluttered like ghosts dancing and waving at the intruders. Loki had to blink again to make sure he wasn’t imagining this.
The main entrance had a great door, the shape of what looked like a whale’s mouth—Loki remembered the gate to the Train of Consequences. The double door looked like it needed an army to pull it open. Although it was shiny, an aura of gloom surrounded it, as if the castle was telepathic, passing on its thoughts to Loki’s brain. In short, Loki was almost sure the castle was alive.
“What the—” Dee stood with an open mouth, amazed by the castle’s appearance. She must’ve seen a detailed version since she was only strides away from it.
From Loki’s point of view, the boys and girls seemed tiny compared with the castle’s size. They looked like Alice in a snowy Wonderland, ready for a magical journey with their hands down at their sides, looking up at the incredibly beautiful façade walking toward it hypnotically.
“That explains why the town’s council wants to use it as a tourist attraction,” Axel said.
“A tourist attraction?”
“I heard that new principal wants to get rid of the vampire princess to turn the castle into a tourist attraction and make the town rich,” Axel said. “If there is no vampire princess inside, this could be the best tourist attraction in the world. It’s the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen. I wonder why no one has photographed it and uploaded it on the forum.”
“To tell you the truth,” Loki said, “I imagined it’d be a dark, scary, abandoned mansion with dirty, blood-spattered walls.”
Dum threw her beer can away and rubbed her eyes, skeptically amazed by the Schloss’s appearance. Dee danced around like a little kid who’d just found Santa Claus’s cabinet of curiosities. Big Bad was eagerly trotting toward the main entrance. Only Donnie was unimpressed. Loki thought that he’d sensed the same dread he felt, that killing the vampire princess was far from easy, and this castle was in no way ordinary.
“Come out, you evil monster,” Donnie shouted provocatively. “She is playing games with us,” he told his friends, then abruptly countered with “I say that’s it for tonight. Let’s go back.”
“What kind of vampire hunter are you?” Dee laughed at Donnie. “You wanted to kill her seconds ago.”
“I still want to,” Donnie said. “But something here isn’t right.”
“What’s with Donnie?” Axel wondered. “How come he’s so scared now?”
“He’s a vampire hunter, and he senses that something is very wrong with this castle,” Loki said. “I can feel it, too.”
Loki wondered if he should summon Donnie and his friends and convince them to turn back. But why would he do that? He didn’t care about anyone, let alone Donnie. He was here to find his way home, and it meant that he had to detach himself emotionally from everyone else. He wasn’t here to know the truth about the vampire Snow White, or to solve a puzzle. He reminded himself that he didn’t like Minikins, Donnie Cricketkiller and Big Bad topped that list.
But I like Axel, even if he’s annoying. And boy, I like Fable so much that I’d adopt her as my sister.
Loki fidgeted at the voice in his head.
I walk alone. I don’t belong to this world. I am from a place called Heaven, and this place is part of a bigger town called Hell. I don’t belong here.
As Loki’s head was about to explode from the conflicting thoughts, he tilted his head casually to the castle’s second floor, looking at the waving ghosts behind the windows.
This time, there were no ghosts.
No curtains.
There was something even scarier. He let out a short squeal.
It was her, Snow White.
He saw the vampire princess up there, behind the pearl-framed glass on the second floor, standing in the middle of the window as if she was the Mona Lisa sitting in her framed portrait, watching her intruders tentatively with a slight smile on her face. She was watching them, surveying their weakness, and sewing their dreadful fate like a spider’s web, seducing them with the power of the Schloss. Except that she was much younger than the Mona Lisa, much scarier in her inanimate silence, observing from above like an eye in the sky, looking right at Loki, straight into his half-angel eyes.
10
Snow White was looking down upon the intruders of the castle in her white dress, a shade darker than her pale skin. Loki couldn’t make out the details of her face, but her hair was as black as the dark night surrounding him. Still, it was a different kind of black; the root of everything dark. There was a red ribbon placed in her hair, making her look like an innocent child. Loki doubted she’d still look childlike when he got closer to her.
He stood speechless. No words dared to leave his throat. His heartbeat slowed down like a train avoiding a catastrophic crash. Time stood still, and flashes came before his eyes again; flashes of her running in the Black Forest. A wild urge ran through Loki, making him want to take a closer look at her. She was like the Schloss, shining beautiful but deadly, like forbidden candy, or a lullaby that sent its listener to eternal sleep.