Nothing happened.
“Dad took me to Ali Baba’s harem for my birthday once. This is so much more embarrassing,” Tedros mumbled, stomping towards the entrance hole to leave—
Uma coughed behind him. Tedros swiveled to see the princess levitating three feet off the ground, her skin filling out from pasty white to its usual rich olive color. Uma stretched her smooth, lithe arms into the air with a yawn, smiled at the fairy glassily . . . and collapsed to the ground, asleep once more.
“Here you were worried about your fairy dust being too old, Tink,” Yuba chuckled, patting the fairy’s head.
The fairy still looked gloomy and spurted squeaky gibberish.
“Don’t be ridiculous, Tink. You can’t expect to have the same stamina as when you were sixteen. Besides, we didn’t need Uma to fly from here to Shazabah; we just needed your dust to unpetrify her. A few sound hours of sleep and she’ll be good as new. Now where were we,” the gnome mulled, turning back to the Evers. “Oh yes, rabbit makes nine, Uma makes ten, I make eleven, and Tinkerbell makes twelve, so that just leaves—”
“Tinkerbell?” Agatha blurted.
“The real Tinkerbell?” asked Tedros, staring at the fairy’s mottled face, potbelly, and ash-colored hair. “But she’s so . . . so . . .”
Agatha gave him a lethal look, but it was too late. Tinkerbell burst into sobs and hid under an ottoman.
“He didn’t mean it, Tink,” Yuba huffed and smacked Tedros in the backside with his staff.
“I don’t understand,” Agatha said, bewildered. “What is Tinkerbell doing here?”
“Really found yourselves some smarties, didn’t you, Yuba,” said a bald, skinny man in a green vest with elfish ears and delicate features, knitting a lime-green sock. “Still can’t see who we are.”
“Maybe we need to count your rings like a tree,” Tedros muttered, rubbing his behind.
“Go ahead, make all the old jokes you want, pretty boy,” the bald man fired. “As if you won’t get to our age yourself someday.”
“Well, it seems our two amateurs need introductions after all,” Yuba scolded, giving Tedros and Agatha furious scowls before shoving them into two of the rocking chairs. He turned back to his League. “Who wants to go first?”
“Don’t see why we should introduce ourselves,” the sock-knitting man crabbed. “Don’t see why we should let these two stay here at all.”
Yuba exhaled impatiently. “Because these two Evers are our only hope to—”
“What’s the point? You heard the boy. We’re on death’s door anyway,” the bald man pouted.
“Oh come now,” Yuba said, softening. “What’d you say when I came to fetch you from Neverland? Holed up in your tree house all alone, refusing to join the League, even when I told you your life was in terrible danger. But then I told you about these two young Evers and you lit up like a little boy. Told me you’d do anything to be around young people again . . . that they were the only ones who ever truly understood you, Peter . . .”
Peter looked up at Yuba, blue eyes glistening. Then he looked back down. “Tink made me come,” he muttered. The fairy squealed in protest and pelted him with a lump of gruel.
Agatha and Tedros gawped at each other. Peter? Peter Pan?
“I’m with Peter,” boomed the huge, blue-haired woman, spinning from the mirror. “Not even out of school, these little brats. Should be lickin’ our feet and beggin’ for autographs! Instead they somehow get their own fairy tale—students! a fairy tale!—and now that tale’s got its panties in a knot, wakin’ our old villains from the dead and draggin’ us straight out of our Ever Afters—”
“Ever Afters! Ha!” chimed a gangly, high-voiced man in suspenders and beige breeches, with big, twinkly eyes, a long nose, and a full head of white hair. Tiny round scars marked all the joints of his long, tanned limbs, as if he’d once been screwed together. “First of all, Peter can barely leave his house he’s so depressed at growing up. Second, I’d never have wished to be a real boy if the Blue Fairy told me real boys end up with arthritis and bad eyes and permanent constipation. And third, Ella told me herself she preferred sweeping cinders to being a queen.”
“When did I ever say that?” the fat woman squawked.
“Last night,” the long-nosed man replied, looking surprised by her question. “You drank a barrel of wine and told me you miss cleaning for your stepsisters, because at least you felt useful and stayed fit and now you’re old and bored and big as a house—”
“WHO ASKED YOU?” thundered the woman. “YOU SPENT HALF YOUR LIFE AS A PUPPET!”
“First they get mad at me for lying. Now they get mad at me for telling the truth,” moped the long-nosed man, curling into a sofa.
Agatha’s and Tedros’ eyes bulged even wider. “Pinocchio?” said Tedros.
“Cinderella?” said Agatha.
“Don’t give me that face,” Cinderella sneered back at her. “For bein’ Camelot’s supposed future queen, you ain’t much to look at yourself.” Her hawkish green eyes shot down to Agatha’s clumps. “Bet no one wants to see those feet in glass slippers.”
“Hey now! She’s my princess!” Tedros jumped in.
“I don’t blame you, handsome,” Cinderella smirked, voice smooth as an eel. “Your daddy didn’t have good taste in girls either.”