Brendan Walker knew this story wasn’t going to have a happy ending.
He stood on the beach near his home on Sea Cliff Avenue with his sisters, Cordelia and Eleanor, and stared out at the San Francisco Bay. Not at the whole bay, but rather at the exact spot in the water where they had just seen their friend, a colossus named Fat Jagger, standing a few moments ago.
Cars were stopped on the Golden Gate Bridge. Several people peered over the edge, likely wondering if they had really just seen a massive, fifty-storey tall, overweight version of Mick Jagger in the middle of the San Francisco Bay, howling at the moon.
But it simply couldn’t have been possible. Fat Jagger wasn’t real, at least not in the same way that he and his sisters were. He was just a character in an old novel by Denver Kristoff. Or so Brendan had thought. Then again, the Walker children had witnessed enough “impossible” things in the past few months to convince them that literally anything was possible.
Most kids would probably run away screaming if they saw a huge colossus