The Longest Halloween, Book Three: Gabbie Del Toro and the Mystery of the Warlock's Urn. Frank Wood

together to see Florinda using her wand to propel Grawl up and down about the lawn’s periphery, to the horrible delight of the gathered children.

      “Do you see what I mean?!” Gabbie almost yelled at the principal, who started toward the door to return to the courtyard.

      A bright sheen of green light filled the Lady Grimm's room. Outside, a huge hand, all green, cut across the lawn, snatched Grawl from the air where Florinda had him dangling, and gently placed him down out of harm’s way on the balustrade of the school’s front door. With a snap of huge green fingers, the North Lawn returned to the original state in which Grawl had left it in that morning. Then the hand vanished into a million green bubbles, and from the sky three members of the Warlock Sentry floated to the lawn on their uber-cool brooms.

      “Walden!” Gabbie squealed in delight from the window of Lady Grimm’s office. She dashed down to the front lawn despite any protestations that the principal might have mounted.

      The Warlock Sentry, incredibly tall warlock-soldiers entrusted with safekeeping the House of Ghouls and enforcing the laws of the Halloween March, were the absolute coolest enforcement officers the students of Ghoul School had ever seen.

      Gabbie emerged from the school’s doors and plowed for the center sentry. It was his magic that had trounced Florinda’s machinations so definitively.

      She fell into his arms. “Walden, your timing is perfect!”

      He smiled down at her. At a mere six feet eight inches, Walden was one of the shorter members of the Warlock Sentry. Everyone knew him for the smoked purple glasses he wore and the bright lime green hair he sported; that, and of course his incredible recent history of heroically riding with Zeldabub herself during last Halloween’s Barbary Mansion adventure. Walden had held his own against the Needlander crew and been instrumental in rounding up the rogue witch, Leticia Corvalis, and her den of werewolves. That he managed to be so successful yet still keep his his avant garde style and drumbeats made him one of the favorites of the kids at Ghoul School. He managed to make being a nerd a cool thing.

      Gabbie was so proud that for her, he was even more. “When did you get back, Uncle Walden?”

      “Just today, Peaches,” he replied. That was his nickname for her ever since he had found her hiding in a barrel of peaches when she was younger during an outing to the Harvest Market. Walden was her uncle on her mother’s side of the family. He was adopted by Zeldabub and her mom’s mother, her grandmother Zeldamum, and her only uncle on her mother’s side of the family. “I had to come directly to your school to see how you were.”

      “Well that’s not true, but I love hearing it.”

      “Yo, Walden, thanks for saving me back there,” Grawl managed to say, a bit embarrassed.

      “You looked like you were in a bit of a fix there, dude,” Walden said with a smile. “Glad I could lend a helping hand, so to speak.”

      One of the other two sentries, a bit taller than Walden, black with a bush of brown hair tipped blond, cleared his throat and motioned to Walden to join them to enter the school. They were obviously here on serious business.

      “Well, I’d better go. Duty calls,” Walden said. “You two stay out of trouble.”

      “You’ll stay for a bit, won’t you? Mother will be dying to see you,” Gabbie said.

      “We’ll see, Peaches.” He gave her a wink.

      The first bell—a horrid banshee’s shriek—rang and the kids, all now appropriately excited by the early morning events, begrudgingly headed off to class. Gabbie met up with Grawl in the main courtyard. Bemused, Gabbie saw that Florinda was behind Grawl, struggling to carry his heavy scrollsack.

      “You sure there’s only scrolls in here, troll?” Florinda grunted.

      “What’s up with this?” Gabbie asked, a smile tracing her lips.

      “Grimm’s making Florinda carry my scrolls to class for the next week,” Grawl grinned. “Turns out that new teacher saw what Florinda was doing before Walden showed up, ratted it all to Grimm, and insisted that Florinda be made to pay.”

      Grawl nodded to the new teacher, a medium-sized witch with strawberry hair and round spectacles, who watched from the entrance to one of the kitchen wings.

      “We trolls need to stick together, eh, Mister Grawl?” she called out before turning into the wing.

      Gabbie remembered that the new teacher had been introduced as Lady Lois Hulcey-Hester on Introduction Night. She would be taking over for their father.

      “I think she’s being so nice to me because I helped with getting her room all wired up. She says she’s got troll blood, though from the looks of her I doubt it,” Grawl said. “Too tall.”

      “Oh, would you two please hurry up? This sack weighs a ton!” Florinda moaned behind them as the children lined up to enter the seventh grade tower where most of their classes were held.

      “Who’s the beast now, Florinda?” a male voice called as Florinda heaved Grawl’s sack to its resting place next to the lockers.

      Gabbie had to laugh, but then recalled she had left her own scrollsack in Lady Grimm’s office.

      “Come on, Gabbie,” Grawl said.

      “Oh bats!” she spat. “I’ll be right back. I forgot my scrollsack!” She headed back to Lady Grimm’s office to retrieve her sack.

      In the Teacher's Lounge

      Of all Gabbie’s faults, carelessness and an incessant curiosity were by far the most problematic. When the two faults surfaced together, they made for even more trouble for Gabbie. On her way back to class, thinking that she would save time by sliding down through the back closet’s connecting pole and cutting through the council room, she noticed there was a serious meeting going on in the teacher's lounge adjacent to Lady Grimm's office. She noted from her rather obscured position behind one of the sofas in the room that Walden and the other two Warlock Sentries—the cute one with the blond-tipped hair and another one, older with a serious face and a shaven head—were there, as was Lady Grimm and another member of the Warlock Sentry, even older with a mustache and goatee, who must have just arrived. Master Bela, the music teacher and now acting vice principal, and the McTavishes, Linda and Landon, who taught and coached ghoulsball and the screamleaders were also present. The male coach, Landon, wore a sling as he had reportedly injured his shoulder in recreational play that past weekend. A blue fire crackled in the corner and one of the school’s resident ghosts, Miss Blumington, served tea to the gathered teachers and officials.

      “Couldn’t the message have been misconstrued?” Lady Grimm asked.

      “Who knows, my dear Lady Grimm,” the sentry with the goatee and mustache responded, “but we’re tasked with making sure that the right people are in custody. Everyone is depending on the inspecting agents, which would be us, to get this right.”

      Lady Grimm looked as if she was undone…a look that Gabbie thought that she always seemed to have, but this time it was like undone to the nth power.

      “Thank you Blumington,” she said, sinking to the chair in front of the fireplace as the ghost placed a cup of tea on the small stand next to her. “It’s just a bit startling, Godric,” she said to the sentry with the goatee. “To think there might be someone on staff here that could be party to such malevolence. It’s simply sinister.”

      “Lady Grimm, we’re talking about a dead headmaster and the imprisonment of one of the most powerful warlock teachers at Ghoul School, whose guilt is at best in question,” Elton said. “There’s pressure from the queen herself that no stone is left unturned. Croft’s last message seemed to indicate that the school was a potential sanctuary