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  My husband and I paid in blood and tears for a new life in the Kingdom of Sorrow. There was no way that we would give up on our lands. If you only knew the sacrifices, I made to save my family and to bring Snow White into this world, you would have sympathized with me.

  But who was I to complain? In your eyes, I was just an evil queen, who wanted to murder her daughter, jealous of her young beauty. I have to admit that beauty does have a lot to do with this story, in an ugly way.

  After dinner with the Reds, I couldn’t take my eyes off their nine-year-old prince. The boy was such a beauty. He shook my hand with such nobility, and talked only when told to. He seemed bored in the presence of the elders though. His beautiful eyes were scanning the castle for the princess.

  I summoned my daughter and introduced her to the prince, wishing cupid would strike his arrow and bind their hearts.

  Snow White came down the stairs, her black hair waving behind her, her skin looking paler than usual. She wasn’t fond of the sun, hiding behind the castle’s thick curtains and Corinthian columns. Daylight was her worst enemy, and candles became her main source of light..

  Still, she stood looking fabulous like a princess should, licking her blood-red lips the moment she laid her eyes on the beautiful prince. It was appetite at first sight.

  When their eyes met, the elders murmured about how beautiful the couple looked together. The sun splayed through the curtains, pronouncing them stars of the gathering. Strangely enough, Snow White didn’t mind the sunlight in the prince’s presence.

  They danced and played together. The prince started chasing her across the castle. Still, Snow White was smarter than him, hiding in the right places, and manipulating him into searching in the wrong directions. When he finally caught her, she distracted him with her doe-eyed smile, and managed to run away again.

  My eyes followed them in the castle. I was worried when I learned that the prince had a restless appetite for girls. However young the Reds were, their men had a reputation of being womanizers. Their charms were irresistible to most girls and women.

  Little did they know that Snow White had an uncanny appetite for beautiful boys at such young age.

  My worries came true when I caught the prince seducing Snow White gently into a dark corner. God only knows what that beautiful, mischievous, nine-year-old had in mind.

  As I parted them, my husband ordered one of his favorite huntsmen, a young boy who was about Snow White’s age. The king trained young peasant boys to become huntsmen. Even though I opposed his decision many times, he assured me that this boy was unique in ways I would later understand. The huntsman boy was not a peasant, but from some far away civilization that used to battle with the demons lurking outside our borders.

  As the crowd hailed outside, we walked out to the balcony, greeting them.

  That was when we heard a most awful scream behind us.

  I tuned back, my heart racing, praying that it wasn’t what I had feared. Sadly, it was, and I was too late.

  I watched the young prince sink to his knees on the floor, his hands glues to his sides. He looked at us for a moment before he collapsed completely on the floor. He was shuddering helplessly as if possessed by demonic spirits, looking like a fish flopping out of water. His eyes turned all white, and he cringed and screamed in pain.

  Then, I understood what was going on. I saw two bite marks on his neck, and red blood trickling down onto the white marble floor.

  I looked for the huntsman boy, but he was gone.

  Tilting my head, I saw my daughter, standing in the middle of the castle’s hall with blood dripping from her lips and dress. She still looked as innocent as white doves, as if she had only overdosed on red cherry-flavored ice cream – which was recently discovered in Europe, and had its first entry as an English word in the Oxford dictionary some years ago.

  Running toward the prince, Snow White seemed astonished by his fainting. It looked like she was wondering why he was hurt when she bit him. As a child, considering her sinister nature, she thought of it as a kiss or something.

  She looked at me with her fangs drawn out, asking me to wash the blood off her, just like any spoiled princess who spilled tea on her dress. I froze in my place, puzzled with what to do. She pleaded as if she was the victim, not the predator.

  The queen of Red started screaming hysterically when she saw Snow White’s fangs. She called my daughter a demon, and flashed a cross at her. Snow White was not affected in any way. Then the queen threw everything she could at her. My husband had to interfere, using his magical powers to hypnotize the king and the queen of Red. Being a master of the dark arts, he would erase their memories later.

  “Take her away from here.” He growled at me, pulling the prince into a private chamber. “I know how to save him.” He locked himself alone with the boy in the room, not wanting us to know how he will do it.

  “What happened to him?” Snow White wondered.

  I pursed my lips shut, preventing myself from screaming at her, and pulled her up the stairs. I had to rinse the blood off her face and change her dress. She tastes the prince’s blood on her hand the way children tongue-lick their dinner plates clean.

  “You can’t do that.” I yelled.

  I wasn’t surprised. I knew what she was a long time ago. I just didn’t want to admit it. Still, my love for her stopped me from raising her properly. I sounded as if I was teaching her dining etiquettes, only mad because she dropped a plate or a spoon while eating.

  “Can’t do what?” She sounded confused.

  “You can’t just bite anyone you want to.” I gritted my teeth.

  “But he’s so yummy mother,” she said, “so yummy. Didn’t you see how cute he is?”

  I rolled my eyes and held back a smile. That must have been the demonic part in me, wanting to salute her and raise a glass of champagne, for biting a cute prince. A prince she thought was yummy. Don’t all of us girlies like to do that from time to time?

  I struggled, commanding reason to win over, and managed to knot my face, playing angry with her. “That’s no excuse to do that, Shew.”

  “Why?” She whined. Don’t you hate when children ask you why, and you don’t have a persuading answer?

  “You just can’t. Girls should be obedient and follow the rules… without asking why.”

  “But I want more.” She stomped her feet stubbornly. That tinge of gold gleamed in her eyes again. She didn’t understand the darkness she possessed inside her. It was spontaneous and natural to her. She reminded me of myself when I was young and wild, doing whatever I wanted to, only because some inner childish voice told me to.

  What was I to do with her? If she were just a monster, possessed by evil spirits, I might have brought myself to kill her – may be let one of my husband’s older huntsmen do it.

  But she wasn’t that kind of demon or dark entity. She was a beautiful monster, the hardest to kill, yet the hardest to outlive.

  How long would she stay that way? How long before the beautiful cocoon that wrapped around her would split open, and give in to the darkness inside?

  “More. More. More.” She repeated.

  “Stop it.” Finally, I lost control and screamed at her in her face.

  That’s when the light in her face dimmed…

  She jerked her head down, looking at the floor beneath her feet. I could feel her body heating up in my hands. I think I heard a growl from somewhere inside of her, but I wasn’t sure. I kept watching her forehead wrinkling behind strands of black hair, the color of her skin dying slowly into the palest white. Letting go of her hands, I swallowed my shriek, not wanting to sense my fear. I didn’t want to lose control and sovereignty over her. I was her mother, the Queen of Sorrow. No demon, not even my daughter, stands in my way.

  It was a legendary incident for me, and for her. Instantly, I realized that we had become rivals, and only one of us was destined to win.

  “I know what this is all about.” She sighed in that awful, col
orless tone.

  I feared that when she raised her head, I would see those golden, scary eyes of her again. Would they be infected with sorrow like her grandfather?

  Alone with her, I felt that I should have stayed closer to the crowd.

  What would become of her now? What would become of me? I doubted that she would only want to suck the blood from my thumb this time.

  “Did you hear me, mother?” She repeated.

  “I did, darling.” I said reluctantly. “Wh-h-at is it about?”

  Eventually, she raised her head…

  “I think the prince doesn’t like me.” She said, her blue eyes filled with unborn tears.

  I didn’t see any fangs or golden pupils in her face. She was just a seven-year-old girl with blood dripping from her lips, experiencing rejection for the first time in her short life. I was too confused to explain to her that the prince, almost dying from her bite, wasn’t rejecting her. I wanted to teach her that she can’t bite some yummy boy and expect him to giggle and jump rope for her.

  “It’s not that he didn’t like you,” I said, hugging her, letting her smear my royal black dress with blood. “It’s—“

  “What then?” She sobbed. Her skin was cold as ice. “It’s just that you don’t bite someone you like so soon. Things don’t happen that way, Shew. You need to spend a lot of time together first. Get to know each other, and make sure that he wants you to bite him by then.”

  “Really?” She gazed happily into my eyes. “Can I try again, then? I promise I’ll let him spend all the time he wants with me first.”

  That night, I washed her and tucked her in bed, reciting that story about the prince kissing Sleeping Beauty back to life. As she closed her eyes, I wondered whether Sleeping Beauty bit the prince after he kissed her. Maybe the prince’s kiss wasn’t a kiss. Was it a bite?

  In the following years, we managed to keep her away from other children while my husband sent for doctors from all over the world. They sailed from Germany, Transylvania, and Italy, crossing the oceans to solve the mystery and cure her disease. None of them proposed a solution, not even the famous Dutch doctor Frederich Van Helsing. And of course, she bit a couple of them yummy ones.

  Then it was the end of the eighteenth century. Snow White’s curse seemed to spread everywhere. People were turning into what the locals called vampires, which they hunted and killed. The low-life peasants killed any vampire. It didn’t matter if it was a child or an old woman. They ripped out their hearts after staking them and pulling out their livers. It was said that the heart and the liver were the center of the disease. Historians would later describe this era as ‘The Vampire Craze’, a historical event the Brothers Grimm failed to forge – it always bothered me that no one noticed that the Brothers Grimm wrote the fairytale fifteen almost in the middle the notorious vampire craze.

  A gypsy healer told us that my daughter would heal when her soul weighs exactly twenty-one grams, the weight of which malevolent spirits could not bear, and were forced to leave the body. It turned out that the weight of the soul was measured in mysterious ways that I didn’t know of. The soul’s weight was part of the heart’s weight, and could be only measured by weighing the heart with some ancient instrument that I had never heard of before. No heart could be cured before it grew big enough to hold a soul that weighed twenty-one grams inside.

  We were waiting for Snow White’s heart until she became sixteen years old, but even then, things went terribly wrong.

  I remember one night when she was eight. She came to my room while my husband was out in the battlefields.

  “Shew?” I wondered with sleepy eyes.

  She didn’t reply, approaching me in the dark as if sleepwalking. She stopped by my bed as her face shimmered in the candle light. I saw that tinge of gold in her eyes again like fireflies in the dark.

  She didn’t talk, but pulled my hand from under the sheets and sucked on my thumb after pricking it with the edge of her fangs. She smiled at me after sucking a couple of drops, her cheeks curving happily, looking more beautiful than she ever did before. I let her sleep in my bed, reminding myself that she was a beautiful monster.

  She didn’t want to hurt me– not yet. She loved me as much as I loved her – only then.

  “Mother?” she wondered as she tucked herself under the sheets and hugged me. ( To tell you the truth, she didn’t say mother. She called me by my real name, which I prefer to keep to myself for now. I don’t think you are ready for knowing my real name, and who I really am. ) “Do you remember the day I was born?” She asked.

  I wondered why she brought it up. It was a very strange day. I remembered it clearly, like looking into a pure crystal ball, but remembering the past instead of telling the future.

  “Do you?” I wondered, running my hand through her hair.

  “No. But I have these dreams where I am someone really important in this world like my father, a fearless warrior. In the dream, I have to choose between saving the world,” She stopped for a breath, closing her eyes. “or destroying it.”

  Then she went to sleep.

  ***

  By the time I finished my story, Jacob was dead.

  “That’s enough for a Deadtime story,” I whispered to him. I placed two mirror coins onto his eyes them to block them from looking back into our world from the afterlife. “Still you’d wonder about me, right?” I asked a dead man. “If I was so tender, and she was such a monster, how did I end this way?” I let out a painful laugh. “Well, that’s a long story, Jacob.”

  I made sure I placed the mirror coins on his eyes so everyone knew I was here when Jacob died. This was my trademark. The mirror coins were exclusively mine. I conjured them from the shards of a shattered mirror that had witnessed death. A mirror that witnessed death was as dear to me as a poisoned apple that steals breath.

  Turning around to leave the cottage, I stopped for a moment. I saw something. There were seven items on a round table beside the door: a fork, a plate, a cup, breadcrumbs, a chair, a knife, and some magical beans.

  Each item belonged to one of the Lost Seven.

  “Ha. So you did know who they are, Jacob,” I sighed, fiddling with the items. “I swear I will find them and make them remember. And when I do,” I said as I opened a small box with a dead heart inside. “This heart’s soul will weigh exactly twenty one grams. And this heart will be mine.” I closed the box, and tucked it in my pocket.

  I pursed my heart-shaped lips and killed the candlelight with the cherry scent of my breath. As the darkness came down slowly upon the room, I pulled out my copper hand-mirror, and gazed at my beauty. I looked at myself in the dark because this was the only way I could see my beauty. But soon, when I find the Lost Seven and kill her, I would change this and be able to see my reflection in daylight once again.

  “Mirror mirror in my hand,” I hissed in the dark. “Who is fairest in the Dreamland?” I said as the mirror started reflecting my beautiful face, glinting with pearls. I smiled in the dark, not expecting an answer. The mirror rippled like water. The glittering was enough of an answer from to me..

  Looking closer, I noticed that my skin was a little paler underneath the eyes, just a little. “All right,” I mumbled. “Time for a mix of blood, milk, and dark chocolate to fix that.”

  But I had one other important question for my copper mirror. “Mirror mirror of hell and heaven,” I hissed again. “Who else knows about the Lost Seven?”

  Even though the girl in the mirror scared me, I needed to hear an answer this time.

  The girl in the mirror was a girl you might know of, Wilhelm, but tasting her name on one’s tongue was deadly ever after. I preferred not to call her by her true name. When the mirror began to ripple again, I preferred not to look at her scary face.

  “The lost seven. They must die,” The girl in the mirror said in her squeaky voice. “One who could help you is a boy who can fly.” She explained and then disappeared.

  “Thank you, M—“ I was about say her
name. “Thank you.” I tucked the hand mirror in, pulled my chin up, preparing to leave.

  “Peter Pan,” I murmured. “How I hate to see you again.” I sighed. I had no choice but look for him. He knew about the Lost Seven, and I needed every clue to find them.

  Once I opened the door of the cottage, heading out into the snowy night. A shriek curled my lips into a bitter smile, for what I saw, I didn’t expect. Not tonight.

  As I stepped outside, snow fell upon me, splashing onto my face and my cheeks, tasting of cherry, apples, and every other red fruit or vegetable. This snow wasn’t white. It was red snow, and I knew what it meant.

  I knew it was a trick, her trick. Soon, the red falling snow would taste of blood.

  Ashes to Ashes &

  Cinder to Cinder

  A Grimm Diaries Prequel

  A teaser story for the upcoming release of

  The Grimm Diaries Series

  by Cameron Jace

  Copyright © 2012 Akmal Eldin Farouk Ali Shebl

  All rights are reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the author.

  This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the writer's imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locales or organizations is entirely coincidental.

  All facts concerning fairy tales publication dates, scripts, and historical events mentioned in this book are true. The interpretations and fantasy elements aren’t. They are the author’s imagination.

  Ashes to Ashes &

  Cinder to Cinder

  as told by Alice Grimm

  Dear Diary,

  The remains of the dead witch’s skeleton were found in a small town near Venice in Italy. To inspect it, I fooled my teachers in California and told them that my German grandma died, and that I had to fly overseas to attend her funeral. No one even requested my parents calling the school to confirm my claim. I was a descendant of Brothers Grimm, and everybody treated me like a modern-day Cinderella.