AN~ So. A new fic. Yay! 113

This is a next-gen story, which means it'll be focusing on Alison and Emma, though the characters we know and love will be featured a lot, too. I won't update this too regularly until Stuck on You is finished, but it will be floating around existing.

Warnings: THIS IS A STORY ABOUT A WAR. THERE WILL BE DEATH AND THERE WILL BE A HEAVY AMOUNT OF UGLINESS BY PEOPLE. IT'S RATED T FOR A REASON, DO NOT READ IF YOU ARE UNCOMFORTABLE WITH PEOPLE NOT BEING GOOD DEEP DOWN.

Disclaimer: Alison and Emma wouldn't EXIST if I'd written the books.

The words were still ringing in Aly's ear when the door slammed: "You're a fairy princess."

And even though she heard her sister squealing in excitement, Aly couldn't quite wrap her head around this. Her mother had just told her she wasn't human. She wasn't imagining things.

Oh, she wished she was. But there were a pair of very real fleshy bug-wings sticking out of her back, and they kept twitching.

It took her father yelling to snap her back into reality, because he only used his serious voice when things were really, really bad. The rest of the time her father was all smiles. In fact, the last time she could remember him being serious was the time she and Parker had run away together.

Now, though, his voice had lost all traces of humor as he shouted her mother's name up the stairs.

The three Grimm women ran down the steps in an urgent cluster. Aly's wings were streaming out behind her.

At the bottom of the steps, Aly's dad stood with his hands against the hallway walls, panting. "They're gone," he said, ignoring the girls. "Sabrina, the castle is empty."

Emma was furious. This largely stemmed from the fact that she was being ignored. Her house was full of people, most of whom she'd never met before, all talking over her, and nobody had even answered the question "What castle?"

She was sitting next to Aly on the couch, watching as a very pregnant Aunt Daphne bustled through the room carrying a bunch of necklaces and sticks. Aunt Daphne always wore a lot of jewelry, but this seemed like overkill to Emma.

Aly was trying to play the patient "good child," the way she normally did when Emma started to squirm, but it was sort of ruined by the way she kept fluttering her wings all over the place.

The weirdest thing about all the people in the house was that none of them even blinked when they saw Aly's wings.

That is, until one of them turned into a pig.

If she hadn't been so frustrated by the way nobody was answering her questions, Emma would have been excited. Real magic! In her house! In her family! But excitement could wait until her curiosity was satisfied.

Somebody turned on the TV to the news, but it was doing a funny thing where it showed about five different news channels at once on the same screen. Their TV was too old and boring to do things like that.

Emma wasn't sure why they'd turned on the TV until she saw the dragon fly across the screen.

The newscaster underneath it was saying, "Pedestrians in the western New Jersey area were stunned today by the sight of what at first was thought to be a large parade float overhead-" the picture switched to a burning field- "until it began torching crops. People are whispering that this might be a dragon, though we have no confirmation yet."

"So they're attacking," a quiet voice said.

Emma looked up and saw her aunt Red, a very quiet woman who wasn't actually related to them. "Who's attacking?" she asked, not really expecting an answer anymore.

"The Scarlet Hand," Aunt Red said. She gave Alison and Emma a pitying look and said, "I understand why your parents kept this a secret, but right now I really wish you two knew what was going on. Things would be so much easier." She pinched her lips. "I don't have time to explain it now, though, girls. I'm sorry."

"Someone will explain it eventually?" Aly asked.

Aunt Red nodded.

"All right," Aly said, "I can live with that."

Emma glared at her sister, but then her eyes snapped back to the TV- a beautiful woman with blonde hair and arched eyebrows had appeared on all the screens.

"Hello, humans," the woman said with a smile, "This is the day your lives are changed forever- this is the day Everafters take our rightful place as rulers."

When Sabrina saw the newscast, she knew what she had to do.

She'd been calling people ever since Puck had told her the news, because this was big. They'd need everyone. Now she had a few more calls to make. These would be even less fun.

She pressed her lips together and dialed the number she hadn't been able to make herself delete, even after sixteen years.

While the phone rang, she cursed herself under her breath. Having someone go to check on the castle was supposed to prevent this from happening! Giving Morgan and Mordred a phone was supposed to keep things safe! They were supposed to have warning if there was going to be a breach in their defenses! How had this happened?

There was a click as someone picked up the other end of the line. "Hello?"

"Hi, may I speak to Bradley?" Sabrina said hurriedly, before she lost her nerve.

"Speaking," the voice on the other end said.

Wonderful. She'd hoped for a chance to compose herself before she actually talked to him.

"Bradley, it's Sabrina," she said, keeping her voice as steady as she could.

Across the room, Puck gave her a quizzical look. She shook her head. She'd explain later.

On the phone, Bradley was saying, "This is a surprise. I haven't spoken to you since-"

"I know," Sabrina interrupted, "But not right now, all right? I need you to turn on your TV."

"Wha- I'm having a barbecue, Sabrina," Bradley said. "Can't it wait?"

"No," Sabrina said, looking at the TV, where Moth was still talking. She didn't know how the b- witchhad gotten out, but she had, and apparently she'd joined the Scarlet Hand during her stint in prison.

There was silence for a moment, and then Bradley said, "Oh, lord."

"I know," Sabrina said.

"That's one of your fairies, isn't it?" Bradley asked. "And- you told me it was safe!"

"It was," Sabrina said with a grimace.

"What happened?" Bradley demanded.

"We don't know yet," Sabrina said. "It just happened today. We had all the bad ones imprisoned, and someone broke into our prison within the past week."

"Oh dear," Bradley said.

Sabrina cringed. "Listen, Bradley, I... I need you to do me a favor," she said.

"What's that?" Bradley asked, sounding more uncomfortable than she'd thought he could sound (Bradley, who had always been solid, even when she told him her family was friends with Snow White and the Big Bad Wolf).

"I'm gonna need you to be calm," Sabrina said. "And prepare. Everyone else is going to be panicking when this gets around, and things are going to be a mess. You know how to protect yourself from a lot of this, and not a lot of other people do. You're going to need to be solid, and remember that not all of us are evil. And you're going to need to figure out how to keep yourself safe." She proceeded to give him a list of things that would probably be useful for him to have or know, and ended with, "It's going to be bad. I don't know how bad, but the only reason they didn't destroy anything in the last war is because they were stuck here. Now they're out, and they're angry."

"All right," Bradley said, and she was going to hang up when he said, "Be careful, okay?"

Sabrina almost laughed. He was worried about her? She'd only told him half the tight scrapes she'd gotten into. But instead of telling him she could take care of herself, she said, "You too," and hung up.

"Well, for the first time talking in sixteen years, it went pretty well," Sabrina told her husband, who'd come up next to her, brightly. She handed him the phone. "Have anyone you want to call?"

Puck laughed. "I haven't had any human friends in centuries." He gave her the phone back. "Call Marsha."

Sabrina sighed and dialed another number, wishing she could go out and just fight something. It was going to be a long afternoon.

"Come on, you two, we need to get going," Aunt Daphne said, shaking Aly awake.

She and Emma had both fallen asleep on the couch sometime after the people they didn't recognize made food and passed it out, chattering all the while about weapons and strategies and things like that. Aly didn't understand any of it.

"Get going where?" Emma asked, pushing her long blonde hair out of her face.

"I'll explain in the car," Aunt Daphne said. "Your mom already packed your bags for you, but we need to get out of here before we're traced."

"Traced?" Emma asked, but she got up and followed their aunt to the car along with Aly.

Aunt Daphne loaded her very pregnant self into the little silver car with a "whoof" and turned the engine over. The woman was only about five months pregnant, but she was enormous. Not that Aunt Daphne had ever been too thin to begin with, but apparently having twins made you swell up like a balloon. Aly didn't think she wanted kids if that was what happened to you.

Aly was already in the front seat next to her, ready to give a smug look to Emma, who was technically old enough to sit in the front, but not allowed if Aly got there first, but when she turned, Emma wasn't in the back of the car.

She was standing outside, giving Aunt Daphne her stubbornest look. "I'm not getting into this car until you tell me what's going on."

Aunt Daphne sighed and said, "I'll tell you, I promise. But we have to get going, and it'll take too long to explain everything to you."

Emma glared but climbed into the car, and Aunt Daphne left the driveway without turning on her headlights.

They were halfway out of town when Aly realized something. "Why aren't mom and dad coming with us?" she asked.

"They have to stay here," Aunt Daphne said tersely.

"Why?" Emma asked, leaning into the front of the car.

"They have things to do here," Aunt Daphne said. "I'm getting you to safety, hopefully."

"Why you?" Emma demanded.

Ally rolled her eyes. "'Cause she's pregnant, dimwit. They want to keep the twins safe."

"That, yes, and because I have something to check on," Aunt Daphne said. "And it's far enough out of the way that they could send you with me without worrying too much."

"What is it?" Emma asked. "What you're checking on? For that matter, why are we leaving in the middle of the night? Isn't it more suspicious driving without your headlights? What are 'Everafters'? How can Aly make her wings go away? They're hitting me in the face. Why was everyone inside talking about a war? Who was that lady on TV?"

Emma's questions continued like that for a few minutes. When she slowed down, finally, Aunt Daphne said, "Let me start from the beginning."

The story Aunt Daphne told was a long one: The Brothers Grimm wrote down history, and then because people from fairy tales- Everafters, Aly reminded herself- were being persecuted in Europe, Wilhelm Grimm brought them to America, where they built a town.

But humans started moving in there, too, and the Everafters got upset. Some of them got so upset that they decided to destroy humanity and take over the world. So Wilhelm Grimm built a barrier around the town with magic, so no Everafters could leave as long as there was a living member of his family inside the town.

A couple centuries passed with a bunch of Aly's ancestors having adventures in the town, and then her grandpa got a girlfriend who was an Everafter. Her great uncle Jake (one of the weirder members of the family who didn't show up too often, an old guy in a trench coat who had a reputation for doing lots of things that almost got him killed) figured out a way to get the girlfriend- Goldilocks- out, but it released a bunch of monsters, too, and Aly's great-grandpa got killed.

When that happened, their grandpa moved out of town, where he met grandma Veronica. When she got pregnant with Aly's mom, he vowed to keep her safe by never telling her about Everafters.

It backfired, bad.

Some group called the Scarlet Hand kidnapped Aly's grandparents, and her mom and Aunt Daphne spent a year and a half bouncing around awful foster homes until their grandma found them and took them in. She told them about the family history, but then she got kidnapped, too- by a giant. Mom and Aunt Daphne got her back and met Dad, who it turned out, was actually a king.

It turned out that the people who were mad at humans to begin with were coming back in a big way, and they were trying to start a war. Mom, Dad, and Aunt Daphne played a really big part in keeping that from happening, and in the process they locked most of the really bad Everafters inside a castle less than a mile from Aly's house, and let all the other Everafters out. And then everything was fine for almost thirty years.

But now the Scarlet Hand was free.

Once the story was finished, Emma demanded, "So why didn't Mom and Dad tell us all this?" She had more questions, but this was was the most pressing at the moment.

She'd probably have believed this even if Aly hadn't had a ginormous pair of wings sticking out of her back. It explained a lot about her parents, especially mom.

Aunt Daphne sighed. "A lot of reasons. I didn't really approve, but it did make sense. Your mom- well, neither of your parents really had the best childhoods, and your mom wanted you to have a chance to be normal. Your dad thought it was a good idea. Besides, they couldn't tell you until you could keep a secret, and Emma... well, you're about the worst secret-keeper this family's had."

Emma wanted to be offended, but she couldn't quite manage it.

"Why didn't they tell me, then?" Aly demanded.

Aunt Daphne shrugged. "Something about fairness and favoritism," she said.

"So where are we going?" Emma asked. There wasn't much point in dwelling on their parents' stupidity.

"Canada," Aunt Daphne said.

"How come?"

"There are only three people living who know the spell that takes down the barrier," Aunt Daphne said. "One of them's me. So we have to go check on the other two- neither of them would share it willingly, so we have to make sure they're safe."

"Do you know where in Canada we're going?" Aly asked. "It's kind of a big place."

"Very far north," Aunt Daphne said. "The woman we're going to see doesn't like people, and she wanted to get as far from them as possible."

"Who are we going to see?" Emma demanded.

"The most powerful witch alive," Aunt Daphne said. "Baba Yaga."