Free The Grimm Chronicles, Vol.1 by Ken Brosky, Isabella Fontaine Page A

chuckled. “Sorry, sorry. I’m getting worked up and letting my accent show. I don’t mean to offend.”
    “I’m not offended.”
    His whiskers twitched. “Well, that’s kind of you. But regardless, I shouldn’t get all excited. Just cause you’re listening to me all spout all this doesn’t mean you’re ready to believe it yet.”
    “Say I do,” I said cautiously. “What would it mean? Why are you tell me all of this?”
    “Because,” Briar said, “you’re the next hero.”
    I sat there, stunned. I mean, who wouldn’t? A man-sized rabbit wearing a swanky old-fashioned vest just told me I was supposed to wipe out fictional people.
    “You’re at a loss for words,” Briar said, and the white fur around his mouth pulled back just a bit to make way for a smile. “I don’t blame you.”
    “OK,” I said. “Say I am the hero …”
    “Alice?” came a call from downstairs.
    I hurried to the door as if I’d just been caught with a boy in my room. “What, Dad?” I called out.
    “Could you please, please do your chore before your mom gets home?”
    “OK,” I called back. I turned around, but the giant rabbit was gone.
    I crossed the hallway into the bathroom, turning on the light and rummaging through the cabinet under the sink for the cleaning supplies. When I got up, there he was again, standing by the toilet. I cried out in surprise, then quickly shut the door.
    “You almost gave me a heart attack!”
    “Disappearing and reappearing is never easy on one’s mental state,” he said. A little smile touched the corner of his mouth. “Good for a chuckle now and again, though.”
    “Well, I need to clean the floor. Stand in the tub.”
    Briar pulled back the forest-print shower curtain and hopped in the tub. He lifted one foot. “It’s wet.”
    “Just deal with it,” I said, spraying cleaning solution around the toilet. White foam gathered. “Are you going to keep talking or what?”
    “Where was I?” His tongue clicked against his large front teeth. “Oh, of course. You’re the hero.”
    “OK,” I said, using paper toweling to scrub the white foam away. “Let’s pretend I’m still going along with this. What, exactly, does that mean?”
    “It means you’ve been chosen to rid the world of the Corrupted,” Briar stated. “To put it another way: to fix the mistake of those fiendish Brothers Grimm.”
    “How do I do that?” I asked.
    “Any way you can.”
    I crawled backward on my knees, spraying the yellow tiles near the bathtub. “So I find these, these Corrupted, these fictional characters, and I kill them?”
    “Kill is such a strong word,” the rabbit said, clicking his tongue. “You simply cause enough harm to their physical manifestations that they burn away into the black nothingness from whence they came.”
    I looked up at him, smiling. “So I kill them.”
    A sigh from the giant rabbit. “So to speak.”
    “And I have to do this because they’re all evil,” I said, wiping down the tiles.
    “The longer they remain on this earth, the eviler they get. Might I get out of this tub now?”
    “Just hold on.” I pulled back the ugly white bath mat and sprayed another stream of foam across the tiles. “So there’s only one hero, right? I’m the only one in the world?”
    “As far as I know. And some day after you are long gone, another will appear. Then another. Until every Corrupted is removed from this world and the mistake of the Brothers Grimm has been fixed. Now, please?”
    I nodded. He hopped out of the bathtub, shaking the water away from his furry feet. “And so they’ve just been running around for hundreds of years and no one’s noticed?”
    “Oh, I’m sure some have noticed,” Briar said, examining my handiwork. “Hmmmm don’t forget to get that area right at the base of the sink cabinet … yes, right there.”
    “Thank you. About the Corrupted?”
    “Ah, yes.” He sat down on the toilet seat and crossed his legs in a very human sort of way,