“I’ll never be your queen, Rafal,” Sophie whispered, a pink princess’s song swelling in her heart. She turned to the young School Master. “Because I’ll be someone else’s.”

Her pink fingertip glowed, lighting up TEDROS beneath Rafal’s golden ring. The School Master reddened in surprise, his hand slipping off his queen’s. Like a dove breaking free, Sophie leapt backwards out of his window, beaming radiantly as she floated into the last tail of glitterdust.

Agatha and Tedros swam through twinkling soot and caught Sophie in their arms, the three of them drifting over the bay like flowers in a sandstorm, as Merlin helmed the dust train towards the school gates.

Tedros draped his arms over the two levitating girls. “We’re together,” he marveled. “We’re actually together.”

“And finally on the same side,” said Sophie, hugging him.

Watching Sophie and Tedros as friends for the first time, Agatha smiled tightly, at once relieved and on edge . . . until her face deadened.

“What is it, Aggie?” Sophie asked.

Agatha squinted at the beautiful, white-haired boy in the window, letting them escape. “He’s not chasing us. Why isn’t he chasing us?”

“Ummm, because everyone else is?” said Tedros.

The two girls spun to see two hundred undead villains exploding out of the School for Old: witches, warlocks, ogres, giants, and trolls roaring and shrieking like banshees and hurtling after the fairy-dust cloud.

“Speed up, Merlin!” Agatha shouted at the wizard, who was turned away at the front of the cloud.

“What, what? Can’t be feeding you now, child,” Merlin bellowed, sucking on a lemon lollipop. “Tink’s dust’s already lasted longer than I expected.”

“Not feed! Speed!” Agatha blared.

But now the dust train sputtered with an ominous hiss and broke apart like a weak mist, sending the three students parachuting on sooty wisps to the shore, barely clearing the corrosive bay. Shell-shocked, they looked up from the ground and saw Merlin flying towards the gates in a piece of cloud, blissfully unaware that he’d lost his passengers.

Horrified, Agatha glanced back and saw the zombie army smashing towards them—

“RUN!” she yelled, bolting up onto bare feet and hot stepping towards the gates.

Sophie and Tedros thundered after her, the three of them waving and screaming at Merlin, trying to get his attention.

“Why can’t he hear us!” Agatha shouted.

“He’s old!” Tedros barked.

Hobbling in her stilettos, Sophie lagged behind, an ogre within arm’s reach, before she slung off a high heel and pelted him in the head, sending him spinning into a three-troll pileup. Flinging her other heel into the pestilent bay, Sophie raced after her friends, who were so far ahead she could hardly see them. “Wait for me! Already the third wheel and we’re still at school!”

Agatha and Tedros scampered side by side for the gates, whose green glow seeped through a patch of pine bushes. But as the gates came into full view, Agatha’s eyes bulged in horror. “They’re sealed, Tedros!”

“’Cause Merlin has Dovey’s wand!” he moaned.