Shew fell to her knees, Cerené dead in front of her in the distance, and Loki eaten by the thorns behind her. She only felt a little better when his dark voice returned and he started cursing her while the thorns tortured him.

Shew’s torture was never-ending, even when she knew in her heart that this long and heartbreaking dream had finally come to an end.

She walked to Cerené who was dead and pale already. She brushed her hair, asking her for forgiveness, “Bianca was right after all,” she whimpered. “I couldn’t take care of you.”

She cried her heart out as she started dizzying. She was about to wake up to a lonely world without Cerené or Loki. She supposed her suffering was her destiny.

A single image broke her sobs in one last trick of fate. She saw Cerené eyes creating sand, and then she saw her cry Tears of Beauty, which glided down her cheek and into the glass urn. And she saw her growing hands again while asleep. The Field of Dreams was real. It worked.

Shew’s eyed widened, and she felt slightly better, brushing Cerené’s hair again, “I understand now why Charmwill wiped my memory of you,” Shew whispered to her. “In order for Carmilla not to get access to the darkness of the world, the Clue had to be put to sleep,” she kissed Cerené’s forehead. “I’ll see you in a hundred years,” she said as the sky began raining tiny shards of glass.

39

Back to Candy House

Shew sat on the couch in Candy House, pushing the remote control’s buttons.

She wasn’t looking for something to watch. Just killing time. Each click on the button, a new channel appeared on TV that meant nothing to her. Like most people who watched TV in an attempt to escape reality, Shew was trying unsuccessfully to forget about Cerené.

It amazed her how she realized that remembering Loki wasn’t heart wrenching like remembering the ashen girl. Maybe because Loki’s darker side was too evil to neglect, or because he’d pushed Shew so hard she had to kill him. But that wasn’t it. Shew knew the real reason. She couldn’t forgive him for killing Cerené, cutting her hands so cruelly, even if it had been predicted in one of the Brothers Grimm fairytales. The look of betrayal in her eyes still haunted Shew. That look, when Cerené was wondering how she could die before knowing who she really was, and before she could create fire by will.

What did Cerené do to deserve this?

Shew couldn’t even forgive herself. They were supposed to take care of each other, and she hated that Bianca was right. You’re not going to able to take of me the way I take of you. And after all, Cerené died because of Shew’s reluctance to kill Loki in the beginning.

Click. Another channel.

Click. All TV channels sucked she wished she’d never been introduced to that hollow box. She had lived a hundred years without it in the Schloss, and it didn’t feel like she’d missed much.

Shew was lost. Quenching her Dhampir thirst didn’t trouble her much, although she was paling out since she got back from the Dreamworld.

The door banged open upstairs, and Fable came down, walking to the refrigerator. Since she’d been into Loki’s body, she wasn’t feeling good, let alone entering the Dream Temple and crossing the purple light. She was greatly shocked by her experience with Loki trying to kill her in Furry Tell.

Loki tried to kill Shew as well, so she thought the two girls could talk about it, but Fable didn’t want to. Since they came back from the Schloss Fable yesterday, Fable had occupied herself with the silly task of teaching the alphabet to her favorite tarantula—he had only been capable of writing the word ‘dork’ in the past, only because he wanted to madden Axel.

“Concentrate, Bitsy,” she told him as she rearranged the colored alphabet magnet sticking on the refrigerator.

Bitsy didn’t speak, but he was able to crawl on the refrigerator’s surface and arrange the letters. Fable would tell him to write ‘I love flies’ or ‘Axel is a dork’ and he’d crawl vertically on the refrigerator’s surface and arrange those magnetic letters.

“Smart, Bitsy,” Fable cuddled Bitsy in her arms.

Shew let out a feeble smile, listening to Fable.

Then the door to Candy House sprang open and Axel entered with a couple of his nerdy friends. They were holding Shew’s glass coffin and pulling it inside.

One of his friends, wearing over-sized glasses seemed iffed by the weight of whatever was inside the coffin.

“Hang tight, nerdfighter.” Axel encouraged him as they parked the coffin on the wooden floor of the living room. “Hye. Hey. Hellelujah,” Axel hailed, high fiving each of his friends. “No one can know about this,” Axel warned his friends with a serious forefinger. “We don’t capture an extraterrestrial everyday.”

“Sure, Axel,” one of his friends says. “Or the government will haunt us down. I’ve seen it on History channel.”

Shew, sitting on the couch, exchanged glances with Fable standing by the refrigerator. They didn’t quite understand what was in the coffin.

“Sure, boys,” Axel smiled back at them and showed them out. “Just keep your mouth shut and don’t tell anyone I caught an alien,” he closed the door and turned back to Shew and Fable and opened the coffin.

“You told him there is an alien in the coffin?” Fable said, pointing at Loki’s corpse inside it. He was suffering from his coma-like Sleeping Death after Shew had killed him in the Dreamworld. Axel had painted him green, and even had two antennas sticking out of his head.

Shew snapped and came closer, “What did you do to Loki?”

“You convinced your friends Loki is an alien?” Fable said, her mouth wide open.

“It’s not really easy smuggling a corpse around town,” Axel puffed. “Carmen didn’t work, and the two of you are acting like girls out of some sad soap opera. You’re welcome by the way.”

“I need to clean Loki and take care of his corpse right now,” Shew was about to kneel down.

“Wait,” Axel said. “Loki can wait. I have something important to tell you.”

“Not more important that Loki,” Shew said.

“How about I tell you something important about Cerené,” Axel said, knowing Shew would change her mind. “I thought so,” Axel cocked his head. “Now you girls sit on the couch while uncle Axelus the Great solves all puzzles for you. Most of them, actually.”

Hesitantly, Fable and Shew sat down. Axel had been good with his researches so far, so they thought they’d listen to what he had to say.

“Now look, girls,” Axel said, pulling out his most precious books, Loki’s Dreamhunter Guide and J.G.’s diary. “I’ve listened to all you two had to say about the Dreamworld, Cerené, the Queen of Sorrow, the Art, the Clue, Murano, Baba Yaga, the Wall of Thorns and all your blah blah blah.”

“Get to the point, Axel,” Shew sighed.

“The truth is there is no ‘point’,” he said. “Actually, I have no idea what is really going on. All I know is that I’m surrounded by fairy tale people, and frankly I enjoy discovering who they are and how they are interconnected to each other and our real world history. Well, most of them are lunatics, but who isn’t—no offence, Shew, but you know you scared the hilly billies out of us in the Schloss.”

“Could you just skip all this mumbo jumbo,” Fable said. “Tell us what you know.”

“Here is what I know,” Axel rubbed his hands. “On my way here with my fellow nerdfighters, members of the awesome Harum Skarum forum, and dear friends of Genius Goblin, I replayed all you told us happened in the dream in my head. I mean I understand that everyone is searching for the Lost Seven, and that the Phoenix is one of them, but some things you said were really strange and needed analyzing.”

“Did that help?” Shew wondered. “Did you come up with a way to bring Cerené back, maybe,” she said out of wishful thinking. She’d left Cerené to sleep for a hundred years.