The Last Ever After. Soman Chainani

      s midnight came and went, Sophie sat calmly in the School Master’s window, her hair wet, her ebony dress bunched at the knees as she pressed bare toes against the wall. She looked out at the fluorescent green bay, reflecting the shadows of two black castles, both dark and quiet.

      Just this morning, she’d been reeling with doubts: from a school that turned Evers into Nevers … from Agatha’s voice, impelling her to destroy Rafal’s ring … from a schedule that called her a teacher of Evil when she still didn’t feel Evil at all.

      She turned to the Storian over her storybook, painting a scene of Agatha and Tedros following a white rabbit through the Woods. With every minute, her friends were getting closer to school, closer to seeing her again, closer to convincing her to leave Evil behind forever …

      Sophie smiled, feeling the gold ring lock tight on her finger.

      Or so they think.

      How quickly things changed in a fairy tale.

      Twelve hours earlier, Sophie had been chasing after the School Master, as he crossed a green breezeway tunnel into the old Valor tower.

      “Teach Evil? Teach Curses and Death Traps?” Sophie yelped, gripping her schedule as she floundered after him in her black nightgown and glass heels. “Have you lost your mind!”

      “It was the Dean’s suggestion. Wish I’d come up with it myself, if only to prevent her the satisfaction of a good idea,” Rafal groused, ascending the staircase carved HENCHMEN. “Now that I’m young, she’s been treating me like I’m incapable of running my own school. Even had the gall to tell me that my flights over the bay are disruptive since students keep peeking out the window during challenges. I am the School Master, thank you. If I want to go for a spin, I’m perfectly welcome to—”

      “Rafal.”

      Sophie’s voice was so sharp that he stopped and stared down at her through the gap in the black staircase.

      “I wish we had time for adolescent rants, but whoever this Dean is, she expects me to be a teacher at this school, when a) all the students are my age, b) none of them like me, and c) I don’t know the first thing about teaching!”

      “Really?” He resumed his ascent. “I distinctly remember you hosting Lunchtime Lectures for the entire school.”

      “Teaching kids how to cure dandruff is different than teaching them how to be Evil!” Sophie said, chasing him towards the top floor. “Let me get this straight. Agatha and Tedros are coming to kill you and here I am in a nightgown, expected to give homework and grade papers—”

      But Rafal was already at the lone black-marble door atop the staircase.

      “Professor Dovey’s office?” Sophie asked, accosting him. “She’s who wanted me to be a teacher? She’s Dean of Evil?”

      But then Sophie saw that the door once inlaid with a glittering green beetle was now inlaid with two violet, intertwined snakes. Beneath the snakes, letters cut from amethysts spelled out a single word:

      “Deans?” Sophie wrinkled her nose. “There’s more than one? But who are—”

      The door swung open magically, revealing a thin, tight-jawed woman with a long black braid and a sharp-shouldered purple gown, studying a scrap of parchment at Professor Dovey’s old desk.