Hand in hand, they run from the thunderbolts. There’s no time to consider the potential risk or wonder where he’s taking her. All she knows in this moment is that she has to run. Even if that means running off with a stranger. Sorry, Mum!
More thunderbolts strike the ground around them, but they duck and weave, luckily avoiding being hit. A bolt crashes between them, separating the two from each other. But when the smoke clears, Filomena finds the boy frantically waving at her.
“This way!” he yells, heading toward a half-hidden alley.
She follows him, running as fast as her last-person-picked-for-the-team legs will allow her. He takes a sharp right, and she almost trips over nothing other than her own fear.
They continue to run as more thunderbolts shoot from the sky, and it feels like the strikes are tracking their steps through the deserted alley. The cackling gets louder and louder, bouncing off the brick walls of the buildings on either side of them.
Things look dire, and despite the sheer adrenaline and her rapid heartbeat, Filomena decides she has to do something. If this is an Ogre’s Wrath—and it certainly sounds and smells and scorches like one—there might be a way to stop it. And if this boy in front of her, who is guiding her through the pandemonium, is a fellow Nevie, he won’t think what she’s about to say is all that weird. Maybe he’ll even know the words.
As her feet pound the pavement with each step and her breathing becomes heavier, she goes over the spell in her mind a few times. Fumbling over the words will only lead to failure.
Filomena reaches out to the boy and tugs on his cloak, signaling him to slow down. “Repeat after me!” she yells.
“What? Now is no time for talking!” he replies curtly.
She glares at him in response, yanking his arm to force him to stop. Because if there’s a tiny chance she may be right, then he’s wrong.
Quickly, she takes hold of both his hands, knowing that their combined energy will do better than hers alone. She practices the fairy spell in her head, envisioning the words she’s read so many times.
Then: “Ogre, ogre, cloaked in clover, I cease your wrath, three times over! Go back to the bog where you belong, go back to Orgdale and don’t be long!” she chants, and after a brief moment, he follows her lead, adding his voice to hers.
Just as quickly as it started, the attack stops. The thunder quiets, disappearing in the distance of her memory. The cackling softens until it fades completely.
“How did you know that would make it go away?” the boy asks, a look of wonder in his eyes.
“Because a fairy spell stops an Ogre’s Wrath, just like in the books, duh!” she replies. “And sends the ogre back home.”
“What books?” he asks.
Filomena wants to talk about why and how—and whoa!—they were just attacked by an Ogre’s Wrath in North Pasadena, where nothing ever happens, but there’s genuine confusion on his face, so it appears she will have to put aside her own confusion temporarily.
Oh well. So much for thinking he was a fellow Nevie.
She shrugs out of her backpack and removes a book from inside. “This book, of course!”
It’s a massive golden tome with a treasure chest on the front and a vine pattern tracing all around. The twelfth and penultimate book in the series.
He stares at it. “Where did you get that? It’s a spellbook.”
Filomena rolls her eyes and wonders whether she should humor him. Is this a test? Is he trying to quiz her on her knowledge of the series? Little does he know she’s read all the books front to back, countless times over, not just favorite scenes but the entire series. At this point, she could nearly repeat the stories word for word, as if she’d written them herself.
Yeah, she’s not buying it, his playing-dumb demeanor in this deserted alley after they were just attacked with magical thunderbolts and heard the laughter of the ogre queen that every fan knows about.
Um, could they talk about that? What happened just a minute ago?
But he’s still staring at the book with a concerned look, so it seems like they’ll have to talk about the series. Which is fine! Filomena loves talking about the books.
“You’re telling me you’ve seriously never read this?” she asks him as she hands him the book, doubt lacing her tone as her eyes trace the vine around his arm. The one that matches the vine on the cover of the book she’s showing him. He certainly looks like a Nevie.
“Read it?” he repeats, like it’s a mystery to him, as he flips through the pages.
She shakes her head and offers an irritated sigh. But she explains that the book is part of a very popular fantasy series, adventure books based on fairy tales.
“Fairy tales?” asks the boy as if he’s never heard the words.
“Yeah, it’s about a bunch of kids and their adventures with princesses and frogs and witches and stuff like the lightning strike that just tried to kill us … here. I mean, what was that? Some kind of promotion, do you think?”
“Promotion?”
“Why do you keep repeating what I’m saying?” Filomena demands.
“I’m just trying to understand what you’re talking about,” the boy says, crossing his arms.
“That makes two of us. I mean, doesn’t it even bother you that we could be ogre toast right now if I didn’t know the spell? By the way, that really happened, right? I’m not dreaming? This is real?”
“Of course it happened,” he says, as if she’s not making any sense.
“But it can’t have! Ogres aren’t real.”
“Of course they are.”
“In books, yeah,” she responds. “But fiction and reality differ.”
“Fiction?” he repeats.
“Stop doing that!” she says, getting fed up. “You’re acting like you have no idea what I’m talking about!”
“You’re absolutely right. I don’t. Beg your pardon for not introducing myself sooner. I’m Jack the Giant Stalker. Jack Stalker for short,” he says, taking a bow.
She laughs in response. “Oh, the same name as the dashing hero of the series. Classic. Nice try.” She snatches her book back. “And you’ve never read the books. Right,” she says under her breath.
“Dashing?” he says under his, with a quirk of a smile.
“Huh?” she asks.
“Nothing.”
She is about to walk away, but he stops her once more. “Wait,” he tries, reaching for the book again. “May I?”
With a disgruntled huff, she hands it over to him. “If you stop being weird, yeah.”
“What did you call this again?” he asks, studying the book.
“A fantasy book,” she says.
He laughs now, but it’s disbelieving. A shake of his head, and then, “These books aren’t fantasy. The world of Never After is real. As real as those scorch marks over there.”
Filomena looks to where he’s pointing, at the blackened ruins in the middle of an otherwise perfectly ordinary sidewalk. She literally cannot believe her eyes. “But everyone knows they’re just stories!” she wails.
“Just stories?” he says, thumbing through the pages. He doesn’t look up at her as he continues to scan the book. “This looks like a history of the fairy tribes. If you’ve read this, then you know about the war we’ve been fighting for years against the ogre queen of Orgdale and her legions of villains and henchmen. How they’ve relentlessly attacked us, from poisoning princesses to cursing mermaids. And how her army of ogres has been invading our lands as well.”