Read Online The Sisters Grimm: Book Eight: The Inside Story by Michael Buckley, Peter Ferguson - Free Book Online

creek bed, where a door materialized. The ball of yarn stopped in front of the door and hopped around as if eager to keep moving.
    “So there are doors inside the stories.” Sabrina smiled. “We can stop worrying about going all the way to the end before we find one.”
    It seemed as if something was finally going their way. She opened the door and the wind that came out smelled like burning wood and leather. It was oddly familiar. The yarn rolled forward into the void and disappeared. Sabrina took her sister by the hand and snatched Puck by the collar and together they followed the yarn.
    The first thing Sabrina heard was a crackling fire and the sound of someone flipping through the dry pages of an old book. When she blinked, she found herself lying on her back in the Editor’s library. Above her, sitting in his leather chair, was the man himself. He looked down and cocked a curious eyebrow.
    Sabrina scampered to her feet and prepared to fight.
    “Calm down,” the Editor said.
    “You sent those monsters to eat us,” Sabrina said. She helped Daphne to her feet. Puck was already behind her.
    “If that were true, why would I send a door and bring you here?”
    “Maybe you want to try and kill us yourself,” Puck said.
    The Editor sighed. “I do not want the three of you dead. I want to hire you.”
    The trio stared incredulously at one another as the Editor got up from his seat and poked at some dying embers in his fireplace. A dozen of his revisers scurried out from underneath his chair and scuttled across the floor. They clambered up the shelves like fat spiders and seemed to melt into the shadows on the far-distant ceiling.
    “You want to hire us?” Sabrina said.
    The Editor placed his hands together and lightly tapped his fingers as if in serious thought. “You are detectives, correct? The last member of your family I had in my book claimed it was a family business.”
    “Excuse me?”
    “The one who called herself Trixie Grimm,” he said.
    “Great-Aunt Trixie,” Daphne said. “She was Grandpa Basil’s sister-in-law.”
    “I find myself in a most peculiar situation that requires your kind of skills,” he said.
    “What do you want us to do?” Sabrina asked.
    “I want you to find a missing person,” the Editor said. “Detectives do such work all the time.”
    “A missing person? Who?” Sabrina asked suspiciously.
    “Pinocchio,” the thin man said as his face tightened into a scowl.
    “Pinocchio! I almost forgot he was here,” Daphne said. “He jumped into this book right before we did.”
    “And not unlike the three of you, he is causing a great deal of trouble for the Book,” the Editor replied. “While you three are running through one story, he’s causing mayhem in another. I’ve been working overtime trying to make sure these stories are put back the way they were meant to be before they can change history. Then it dawned on me—why not hire you three to chase him?”
    “How does that help you?” Daphne asked warily.
    “Setting you on Pinocchio’s trail will mean that all four of you will be in the same stories at the same time, cutting my work in half. Plus, you can help me prevent the boy from reaching his ultimate goal, which is to change his history.”
    “What does it matter, really?” Sabrina asked. “Anything Pinocchio changes you can rewrite with your little pink monsters.”
    The Editor shook his head. “The revisers work like white blood cells, seeking out an infection in the body. In this case, the Book is the body and you intruders are the infection. Unfortunately, they won’t recognize him as a problem if he finds his way to his story—in some ways he belongs there. They won’t be able to tell what’s wrong and what’s meant to be. They’ll erase everything but what he changes, so I’ll have to rebuild a new story around his alterations. I fear that despite the best intentions of the Everafter who used magic to manipulate this book, the spell isn’t