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I gestured down the path. “The gold for you is back there.” I let my gaze slide back to Rumpelstiltskin’s frozen, twisted face. “This isn’t a present. It was a fairy who tried to kill me.” Robin Hood’s eyes widened in surprise. “Your magic is strong enough to destroy fairies?” He took a couple of uneasy steps away from me. “My lady will remember that although I held up several stores in her village, I have always been her humble servant.” His nervousness made me smile. I didn’t clarify that Rumpelstiltskin had only been an ex-fairy. It wouldn’t hurt Robin Hood to worry about getting on my bad side.

He gave me a deep bow. “By your leave, my men and I will retrieve the gold you say is by yonder tree.” He turned and hurried into the forest and the Merry Men followed.

Once my arm was coated with sunscreen, I tried pulling it out of Rumpelstiltskin’s grasp. It didn’t work. “My hand is starting to feel like it’s going to explode,” I said. “Is there some way to cut this off?” Nick fingered Rumpelstiltskin’s grip. “Not with the tools we have.”

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Hudson took hold of my arm and pulled with no better results.

“Maybe the wizard can do something. I’ll go get him.” Without waiting for my response, he turned and jogged down the trail in the direction of the carriage.

I didn’t know if my arm could make it until Hudson came back with the wizard—and I also doubted the wizard would willingly help me, but I knew who might. “Clover!” I called, and didn’t bother explaining to my parents why I was yelling out random plant names.

“Clover, I need your help. I can pay you in gold.” The leprechaun appeared, standing on Rumpelstiltskin’s shoulder. He wore a different green jacket with olive-toned embroidered leaves and a matching bowler on top of his head. He looped his fingers behind his belt. “Gold, you say?” My father held his flashlight up so Clover looked like he was standing in the middle of a spotlight. “Is that the same leprechaun we saw before?”

I didn’t bother answering. I needed Clover’s help, but I wasn’t sure he would help me if he realized that was what he was doing. I had to make it seem like I was offering him another bargain. “Clover, if you tell me what moral to write in the magic book, you can have this golden statue.”

Clover rubbed his beard in consideration. “Statue, eh? Looks an awful lot like that ghoul of an ex-fairy, Rumpelstilskabob.”

“He’s a statue now, and worth his weight in gold. Think how rich you’ll be.”

Clover kept rubbing his beard. “ ’Tis a precious lot of gold, but it would be bad luck to play poker with coins made from an ex-fairy. And none of the shops would take it—can you see me tipping a waitress with part of a megalomaniac ex-fairy?” 313/356

I tugged uselessly at my arm. “Then I’ll change something else to gold for you if you’ll just help get this thing off of me.”

“Help you?” Clover pulled the brim of his hat down farther on his eyes. “I gave you The Change Enchantment to help you and got in a ripe lot of trouble from Chrysanthemum. She wrote me up for interfering in your story. All in a snit, she was.” He raised one of his tiny fingers at me, shaking it. “You weren’t supposed to tell her about it.” My hand was throbbing. I could feel my pulse drumming in my arm like a hammer. “Well, it wasn’t much of a bargain for me. The enchantment didn’t work. I wrote every moral I could think of, but none of them took us home.”

“Did you wait until the story ended before you went scribbling morals down?”

“The story never ended,” I said. “It just kept adding new pages.” He flicked his hand in my direction. “Well, that’s your problem then. If you had read books, you would know that you had to face the villain before the story could finish.” Clover tapped his foot against Rumpelstiltskin’s shoulder and it made a metallic clang. “As for the moral of Rumpelstiltskin, I already told it to you. It’s that you’ve got to figure things out yourself, but you shouldn’t worry because there will be folks to help you—in this case, me, seeing as you didn’t figure out the moral by yourself. Even though I told it to you.” He leaned backward on his heels in a self-satisfied manner. “When you get out your pen next, you could sum it up by saying, ‘Humans need leprechauns to save their sorry britches.’ ”

It didn’t seem like a very good moral, but I didn’t argue. If it would get us home, I’d write it word for word.

Clover tilted the brim of his hat. “I suppose I can use this gold to pay me union dues to the UMA. It’s enough to last a couple of centuries. And they’ll be stuck with the lot of it as nobody else will want 314/356

tainted currency.” Clover chuckled happily. “Serves them right for making me Chrysanthemum Everstar’s glorified errand boy.” Clover was still smiling when he disappeared from Rumpelstiltskin’s shoulder. The next moment, a wave of fissures spread through the statue. The metal cracked like ice breaking and crumbled to the ground in a rush of gold coins.

I rubbed my freed arm and watched the pile of coins shine in the flashlight beams. And then the pile disappeared too. The only trace that Rumpelstiltskin had ever been there was a heap of clothes and the pins-and-needles sensation in my hand as the blood rushed back into it.

Dad held his flashlight to my arm, examining the bruised skin.

“Are you okay?”

I nodded.

Sandra gave me a sideways hug so she didn’t squish the baby, then checked on him again. This involved more ooohing on her part.

He reached out for her, and she took him out of the sling, cooing as she held him. I took the book out of the diaper bag and flipped through the pages. New illustrations had been added. My showdown in the forest with Rumpelstiltskin lay on one page. On the next, he was a hideous gold statue. The last picture showed Hudson standing by my side and my family hugging me. It read, “And the miller’s daughter lived happily ever after. The end.”

Even though my family was reading the book over my shoulder, I called out, “It ended! I live happily ever after.” This sentence brought me a ridiculous amount of relief—like the book had put a stamp of approval on my life. I was going to live happily ever after.

I pulled out the pen but didn’t put it to the paper. “I’ll wait for Hudson to come back.”

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“Start it now,” my father said, “and you can write the last bit when he returns.”

Nick nodded. “Yeah, save the part about people needing leprechauns to save their britches until he gets here. I’m sure he’ll want to know what the real moral of the story was.” I sat down on the ground and spread the book out in my lap. “I should have known all along it would be a biased moral.” I didn’t start writing until I saw Hudson running back down the trail. He slowed to a walk when he saw the statue was gone. “What happened to our buddy Rumple?”

“Clover took him,” I said. “He’s going to use the gold to pay his UMA dues for the next century or two.”

“Ah.” Hudson drew a couple of deep breaths and walked over to me. “Greed pays off again.”

“There’s another good moral from the story,” Nick said.

I finished writing the sentence Clover had told me, but like the others, it faded from the book. I gripped the pen hard, then threw it onto the open page. “No!” I yelled.

Alarmed, Hudson took the book from my hands. He read the last page and looked at me quizzically. “You didn’t want to live happily ever after?”

“Not that. Clover told me the moral of the story and it still didn’t work.”

Nick shook his head and glanced at the book. “So much for leprechauns saving our sorry britches.”