A Happily Ever After of Her Own by Nadia Lee Page B

worry. If the judge had decided to declare it all just a big misunderstanding, or even just pardon her, he wouldn't have sent such a bristly bunch.
    "Stop!" one of her escorts said when she reached a heavy wooden double door. He scurried around and pushed it open with a paw, his shield between her and whatever was inside. "Don't even think about it," he said suspiciously.
    "All I'm thinking about is how much I want to get out of here and have some chocolate," she mumbled under her breath.
    He jerked his chin. "Go in. Slowly."
    She stepped inside. Slowly. As annoyed as she was with them, she didn't want to disobey and get pummeled with swagger sticks. Fairy Tale or not, it would hurt.
    A long dark cherry table occupied the center of the huge room, and uncomfortable looking high-backed black chairs surrounded it like crows around some oversized carcass. The judge sat at the head of the table with the Beast on his right and the prosecutor on his left. A triumvirate of doom.
    "I heard you wanted to see me."
    "You heard correctly, Miss Heavyfoot," the judge said.
    She forced a smile.
"Light
foot."
    "If you had been a true Lightfoot, we wouldn't have caught you," the prosecutor said, looking at her feet meaningfully.
    Everyone else followed suit, and she wanted to drop and hide her hideously filthy bare feet. Instead, she straightened her spine and adopted her sternest preschool teacher voice. "You have no real evidence against me. All you have to do is let me go back to my own apartment, and everything will be fine."
    "Oh, we'd love to get rid of you, Miss Heavy -- er -- Lightfoot. However, there's the matter of Beauty," the judge said. "You cannot return to the mortal world until she comes back."
    "What?"
    "The balance in our world was altered when you so carelessly snatched Beauty out of her story, so until she is here, you cannot leave."
    "What?!" So was that why she couldn't just imagine herself home? "But--"
    "Besides, His Highness the Beast needs his happy ending. All fairy tales do."
    "But--"
    "How can a fairy tale exist without a happy ending? Would
Hansel and Gretel
be the same if the witch ate them both? What if Prince Charming married one of Cinderella's stepsisters?" He looked around for support. Both the Beast and the prosecutor nodded gravely.
    "What you did -- taking Beauty away -- broke the unbreakable. It allows for a dastardly
tragic
ending now."
    "Oh God," Melinda said weakly, feeling the blood drain from her face. She loved reading fairy tales to her students, and they loved the uplifting endings. How would they feel if the witch had roasted children for dinner? Or Cinderella had to clean the hearth till the day she died?
    Worst of all, how was she going to bear it, knowing it was she who made such horrific outcomes possible?
    "So what you did is technically an act of murder."
    "Yes, but we can also charge her with" -- the prosecutor cleared his throat -- "high treason, terrorism and vandalism."
    Vandalism?
    The prosecutor continued: "The minimum sentencing requirement for all four crimes is two thousand seven hundred and twenty-three years in maximum security prison without the possibility of parole."
    "You want me to die in prison?"
    He took off his glasses and began cleaning the lenses with a white handkerchief. "My dear Miss Lightfoot. The decision to die is entirely up to you. We merely imprison."
    "I don't know about you Fairy Tale people, but I can't stay here for God only knows how long. We should do something instead of just waiting for Beauty to return."
    The prosecutor looked amused. She turned to the judge, but he shook his head. It was the Beast who finally said, "She's right."
    "Your Highness!" both of the men exclaimed.
    "I cannot wait. No one knows how long it will take Beauty to find her way back to her story. What if she's forever lost?"
    The men were beginning to look a bit green. "The possibility of that happening is--"
    "Quite high!"
    Everyone turned at the commanding soprano voice coming