Snow White Sorrow (22 page)

“So why did the prince want to take her away from the forest? Did he know her from before?” Loki said.

“Yes, when she was younger,” Fable said. “He talked to her at the well because she was beautiful, but she ran away because she was shy. Didn’t you ever watch the movie?”

“Again, this was the Disney version. This was never mentioned in the original story,” Axel said. “Neither did they explain why he wanted to take her away with him. You know the deal with charming princes in fairy tales. They never do anything to deserve the girl but they get her anyway.”

“Easy on the prince, don’t hold grudges because he got the girl,” Loki smiled. “So Snow White was just a vampire asleep in a glass coffin?”

Axel nodded.

“Wow. That’s not the story my mother told me,” Loki said. He hadn’t told them about his ghost mother, but it was true. Sometimes, when he was asleep in his car, she crept in and read fairy tales to him when he was asleep before she pulled the blanket tighter around him. Small things like these let him know that she cared about him. He never told her that he knew because he thought it was embarrassing that his mother still read bedtime stories to him when he was fifteen.

“I know, it’s very different from the tale we were told as kids,” Axel said. “For some unknown reason, someone sold the world different fairy tales.”

“I still can’t see how this could help me kill her?” Loki said.

“Because that’s not all I have to say; I have tons of surprises for you, guys.”

“What else?” Fable folded her arms. She was devastated. Axel had just shattered her entire childhood into pieces of a puzzle she didn’t have a clue how to put back together. Loki looked at her and wondered what it was like having childhood memories. He didn’t mind Axel messing his up as long as he actually remembered them someday.

“In the Brothers Grimm version, the reason why Snow White slept in the coffin was because of the apple, of course. But it was never implied that she was dead. Instead, the Brothers Grimm had a name for what happened to her after she’d taken a bite from the apple. They called it the Sleeping Death.”

“What?” Loki’s face knotted. The Sleeping Death sounded like it had to do something with vampires more than fairy tales.

“This is actually written in the text,
the Sleeping Death
, which is another strange expression,” Axel said, “It implies that she wasn’t dead, but sleeping like she was dead. This stuff is mind boggling.”

Loki found himself feeling the Dreamhunters notebook Charmwill had given him. He remembered reading that some scholars in the Dreamworld Arts called the state of a staked demon The Sleeping Death. In fact, the only way to enter a demon’s dream was when it was in a state of Sleeping Death. The name was derived from the fact that the demons could still be awakened by removing the stake, so it wasn’t considered dead, but sleeping like the dead.

“So there was blood, gore, glass coffins, and the Sleeping Death,” Loki counted on his fingers, giving it a thought—he wasn’t going to discuss anything about Dreamhunting with them now.

“What about the wicked witch who gave her the apple?” Loki asked.

“It wasn’t a wicked witch who gave her the apple,” Fable explained. “It was her stepmother, using witchcraft to appear like a peddler or a hag and give her the poisoned apple.”

“Which brings us to the scariest part of Snow White’s story,” Axel said. Loki sighed impatiently, exchanging looks with Fable. “We all know that the wicked stepmother sent her huntsman after Snow White to kill her, right?”

“The huntsman couldn’t kill her,” Fable said. “Because she was beautiful and he couldn’t bring himself to do it.”

Axel looked like he wanted to hit Fable with feathers; many feathers. Loki almost laughed, thinking it was a good thing Fable was the wanna-be-witch, and not Axel, or this could’ve been how the world ended in sixty seconds.

“Now, listen to me because this will blow your mind,” Axel said. “In the original story, the wicked stepmother asked the huntsman to bring her Snow White’s heart and liver after he killed her.“

“Interesting,” Loki said.

“Are you serious?” Fable leaned forward. The poor girl had given up after everything she knew about fairy tales had been shattered in a span of minutes.

“Not just that. Although it’s true that the huntsman didn’t kill Snow White, he brought the stepmother a boar’s heart and liver to convince her he’d killed her,” Axel said.

“Gross,” Fable said. “Is this really written in the original Brothers Grimm text? Why didn’t they just turn fairy tales into cheap penny dreadfuls?”

“I’m beginning to wonder why I haven’t read those awesome fairy tales long ago,” Loki grinned. It made him wonder if what Charmwill had said about the darkness inside him was true.

“Are you guys starting to get my point?” Axel said. “I don’t know how much more proof you need to see that she was a vampire.”

“I’m still skeptical about if she is the real Snow White,” Loki said. “Tell me, why did the evil stepmother want Snow White’s heart and liver?” Loki asked.

“She thought that by consuming Snow White’s heart she could be the fairest of them all,” Fable answered voluntarily.

“I don’t think so,” Axel objected. “In my opinion, the heart was evidence that the huntsman had actually staked Snow White, the vampire. Or why would she ask for the heart. She could’ve simply asked for the princess’ blood-spattered dress as evidence.”

Loki scratched his head. He liked that explanation. “In a very weird way, all this makes sense,” he said. “As far as I know, people believed staking a vampire in the heart killed it once and for all in the older days. It makes sense if I ask you to bring me the heart of a vampire as proof for killing it. It was a plausible way for the huntsman to prove he killed her. Even nowadays, it still applies. So this explains the heart, but why the liver?”

“That one took me some time to figure out, but I finally found the answer, not in fairy tale books, but in history books,” Axel said. “Remember when we talked about the Vampire Craze in the 18
^th
and 19
^th
century?”

“Yes,” Loki nodded. “It was the first time historians ever mentioned, or suspected, the existence of vampires.”

“Exactly,” Axel clicked his fingers. “People reported that their relatives came back from the grave after they had buried them. They returned as vampires and bit their loved ones, turning them into vampires.”

“Where did that vampire craze start?” Fable inquired.

“In Europe,” Axel replied. “That’s why the Dracula story also originated from Transylvania. People in Europe went crazy, watching their loved ones come back from the grave with a dominant urge for blood and the inability to walk while the sun was out.”

“That’s interesting,” Fable remarked.

“Yes,” Loki confirmed. “Only these weren’t vampires. It was a disease—not that vampires didn’t exist, but the disease’s symptoms were similar to the needs and actions of,” Loki said.

“I don’t understand,” Fable shrugged her shoulders. “This is confusing.”

“It was a disease that spread in the 18
^th
century,” Axel said. “It was called Porphyria back in the day,” Axel read from a history book like a mad scientist. “’Porphyria was a genetic
liver
affliction that affected the biosynthesis of blood giving the sufferer severe reactions to sunlight and causing their gums and lips to recede creating a fang-like effect and pale skin.’”

“In English, please?” Fable said.

“The disease caused people to have pale skin, grow slight fangs, and its only cure was to get injected with blood through the liver,” Loki explained. “Of course, it was an old fashioned cure in a time when medicine was still primitive.”

“Really?” Fable said with an open mouth. “Sounds exactly like vampire symptoms.”

“So what does this have to do with the liver the evil witch wanted to cook for dinner?” Loki asked Axel, clapping his hands together.

“Don’t you get it?” Axel said. “The disease caused failure of one’s liver. The only possible way of relieving the problem back then was the ingestion of large amounts of blood, which can be absorbed into the bloodstream through the stomach wall and onto the liver.”

“So? You still didn’t’ answer the question,” Fable asked.

“When the rumor spread that the infected people were vampires people began exchanging advice on how to kill them. It was obvious that you had to stake them in the heart first because this was how you killed vampires. Ripping the heart out was probably even better; to make sure the vampire didn’t wake up from the grave again. But then people noticed that when the liver stopped functioning, the vampire died as well—”

“And of course this wasn’t the vampire; it was the dude with the disease that made him look like a vampire,” Fable clicked her fingers together.

“Ahh—” Loki struck his forehead. “They thought this was a manner of killing vampires, so they spread the idea that to kill a vampire you had to stake them in the heart or stake the liver?”

“Stake it, eat it, whatever. As long as the liver was destroyed, no one could infuse it with blood again to resurrect the vampire,” Axel said, his face shining bright. “If this was what was thought of vampires in the beginning of the 19
^th
century, then this was what the evil stepmother thought of Snow White, because Snow was a vampire.”

“But you base all of this on the assumption that Snow White was born in the 18
^th
or 19
^th
century,” Fable said. “I thought Snow White’s story was much older than that.”

“It must’ve happened in that time because the Brothers Grimm wrote the first Snow White version in 1812,” Axel said. “The Brothers Grimm collected the story from the locals, who must’ve witnessed the stories themselves. I’d say the real story happened ten to fifty years prior to that date, sometime at the height of the vampire craze.

Don’t forget that Snow White was a princess, so maybe her king daddy didn’t want anyone to know about her being a vampire, because then she would have been killed.”

“I still can’t believe Snow White is a vampire,” Fable said, considering the facts.

“That’s some twisted logic, Axel. All I know is that I’m sure I saw a vampire yesterday, and your evidence, especially the liver thing, is considerable. Does that mean that her liver is a weak point? Should I stake her in the liver? I don’t understand,” Loki remarked, although he knew Charmwill had told him the only the only way to kill her was in her sleep, but he never told him if she should be staked in a special way, different from other vampires. Loki let out a laugh of mockery, remembering that he couldn’t even stake her in the first place.

“She is not a vampire!” Fable stomped a foot.

“She is,” Axel insisted. “You know what I also think? I think it’s a damn scary family she came from. You know what the queen did with the heart and liver that she thought were Snow White’s? She ate them,” Axel’s head lunged forward, as he chomped his like Jaws. “Yum. Yum.”

“Thank you for destroying my childhood, Axel,” Fable howled. “I hope you can do your homework from now on, because I quit.”

“It all makes perfect sense,” Axel totally neglected his sister. If he really cared for her like he’d told Loki, then he had a poor way of showing it. “All vampires were super beautiful and gorgeous. I saw her yesterday in the castle, so lovely, posing innocently when she wanted to, although she could be so mean when she wanted to. This is the perfect description of vampires.”

There was no doubt that the girl in the castle was a vampire, Loki thought. She was super powerful, super scary, super lovely, and super manipulative. But was she the real Snow White? The idea made Loki feel like there was something he should remember but couldn’t. Were fairy tales true? Does she even know who she is?

Loki let out a sigh. “Even though all you just said would make a perfect book, I don’t see how this could help me kill her.”

“This is what I wanted to talk to you about,” Axel tried to avoid Loki’s eyes. “I found this diary, which seems to me to be Jacob Carl Grimm’s diary, or at least, part of it.”

“Who is Jacob Carl Grimm?” Fable asked.

“One of the Brothers Grimm, the two brothers who wrote the Snow White fairy tale,” Axel looked irritatingly at her.

“How come such a book is in this library? Jacob Grimm’s diary? You’re talking about a precious one-of-a-kind-diary manuscript,” Loki said.

“I’m still not sure, but it has the initials J.G. on it,” Axel said. “I can’t think of anyone else with the same initials.”

“Wait,” Fable interrupted. “So you didn’t discover all of this by yourself, right? You got the information from this diary.”

Axel shrugged. “What do you care? I am helping you out here.”

There was a moment of silence when Loki and Fable exchanged looks again.

“Anyway,” Axel said, averting their eyes. “I haven’t read the whole diary, but it seems to me that whoever wrote it wasn’t fond of Snow White at all. Remember when she whispered in your ear yesterday?”

Loki nodded.

“This J.G. mentioned that whenever she feels a weakness toward one of her victims, like liking them or feeing attracted to them, she’d confuse them by manipulating their feelings somehow.”

“Manipulate?” Loki frowned.

“Like playing victim and asking them to
save her
. She keeps doing it until her weakness toward that person subsides and she can kill him eventually,” Axel wiggled his eyebrows at Loki.

“That’s what she told me, yesterday,” Loki said, almost talking to himself. As much as it was all he wanted to here, he was also disappointed. Something inside him made him wish she did need his help.

You’re better that way, Loki. Now you have no excuse to not let her play her games. All you have to do now is kill her and get back home. She’s like any other manipulative demon you’ve met before.

“What?” Fable sneered at Loki. “Did she really ask you to
save her
?” Fable’s eyes widened. “Really? I can’t believe you. What’s wrong with you, Loki? She needs your help.”

“She was only playing me,” Loki avoided Fable’s eyes. He thought that if he’d stared at her longer, he might have softened and changed his mind. Fable’s admiration for the vampire princess was contagious.