Wicked Wonderland

by Eva Chase

  That answer didn’t completely sate my curiosity, but it did prompt a different line of thought.

  “When the Queen did that,” I said. “Trapping Time—it wasn’t very long after Aunt Alicia came here?”

  “No,” Hatter said flatly. “Not very long at all.”

  I tried to fit together all the pieces of information I’d gained and the observations I’d made over the course of the last few days, but they still didn’t quite form a picture I could comprehend. “Did you use to help out the Spades?” I asked. “Back then?”

  “I’m not sure how what I did or didn’t do however many decades ago is relevant.”

  Okay, I’d managed to lose his good mood almost as quickly as I’d induced it. Somehow I didn’t think offering him a refill was going to cut it. “I’m just trying to make sense of everything,” I started.

  Hatter set his cup down with a clunk loud enough to cut off the rest of what I might have said. “Lyssa,” he said in a weary tone. “All you need to know is whatever plan the White Knight gave you and how you fit into that. Could you please leave off the rest?”

  The strain in his voice made my heart squeeze. I wasn’t asking that much of him, was I? Just the barest basics of why I was even here staying with him, why he’d sent me to Theo, when his current connection to the Spades seemed to be mainly via his daughter and against his wishes at that.

  The question fell from my mouth before I could catch it. “Why don’t you like me?”

  It sounded so pathetic that I winced inwardly. Hatter blinked, his jaw twitching. “Sorry,” I said. “I shouldn’t—”

  “No,” he said. “What makes you think I don’t ‘like’ you?”

  It was my turn to blink at him. “You wanted me to leave. It seems to make you grouchy that I’m here, that I want to talk about anything that’s going on or anything to do with my grand-aunt. Sometimes I think we’re okay, but then— I don’t really know what I’m doing here, or what’s normal. If I did something that offended you or I’ve crossed a line or something, I apologize. You could just tell me.”

  He was still studying me with an inscrutable expression. At least he didn’t look pissed off anymore.

  “Why would you care what I think of you anyway?” he asked.

  I opened my mouth and closed it, my throat constricting. But that was a fair question. If I was asking him things like that, the least I could do was answer honestly first.

  “I just—” I looked down at my hands. Oh, come on, Lyssa. Gripping the arms of the beach chair, I tugged it around so I was facing him straight on.

  “Why wouldn’t I care?” I said. “I like you, okay? I mean, as much as you’ve let me get to know you. I like… that you offer little acts of kindness without making a big deal out of it, and that you don’t mind showing you’re annoyed when you are, and how much you obviously care about Doria. I like that you can joke around when you let your guard down. Out of everyone in this crazy place, you’re the person who feels the most real, and I need that, so if I’ve put my foot in it without realizing or—or…”

  I lost track of my words when I met his eyes again. Something in his face had brightened without an actual smile, but those eyes had darkened to a hungry shade that touched me like fingers being trailed over my skin. A shiver of anticipation raced through me, even though he hadn’t made any move to really touch me at all.

  His voice came out in its usual light tenor, without the slightest edge. He sounded almost amused. “And all it would take to make you happy is for me to like you?”

  My pulse skipped a beat. This wasn’t that crazy, was it? Even if it was, didn’t I owe it to myself to do at least one truly crazy thing in the short time I was here?

  I scooted to the edge of my chair. “You know,” I said, “I think I’ll aim a little higher than that.”

  Leaning in, I curled my fingers around his silky tie and tugged him to me.

  I didn’t have to pull very hard. Hatter met me halfway, his mouth colliding with mine and his fingers teasing into my hair, and God almighty, I didn’t give a shit whether he liked me or not if I could have him like this. No one had ever kissed me like Hatter before.

  He kissed like he meant it, like he’d never meant anything more. His mouth was hot and sharp with the taste of his tea, and the smell of him, bright lime and dark wood-smoke, washed over me. The graze of his fingers through my hair sent sparks over my scalp.

  If he’d been hungry, then apparently I’d been starving just for this. I wanted to inhale him, to devour him—wanted it even more as he kissed me again with his tongue searing over mine.

  He was still too fucking far away.

  Hatter must have agreed, because his hand dropped down my side. Without breaking the kiss, he guided me up from the chair. His fingers caught my thigh in their deft grip. He hefted me onto the edge of the table, my legs splaying, his whole torso flush against mine.

  My hip bumped into a teacup. It toppled to the floor with a crunch of shattering porcelain.

  Hatter jerked back just far enough to stare down at the broken cup. He looked dazed, if he didn’t recognize what he was seeing. His chest heaved with a ragged breath.

  “I’m sorry,” I said automatically, though technically it was his fault the cup had fallen. Sitting on the table hadn’t been my idea. Even if I was totally on board with it.

  Hatter’s hand was still on my thigh. His thumb traced a slow arc through the fabric of the dress as he raised his head. Only about a foot of space had opened between us. As he hesitated, his eyes searching mine, I thought I saw the hunger overcoming the uncertainty in his expression. I could have sworn he was about to shift forward and reclaim my lips when footsteps thundered down the stairs behind him.

  “Dad!” Doria shouted before she’d rounded the corner, panic crackling through her voice.

  Hatter shoved himself away from me and around to face her. I hopped down onto the floor and swiped my dress straight just as his daughter came into view.

  “The Knave’s here,” Doria said in a frantic whisper. “He just went into the shop. I think—”

  A heavier set of footsteps rattled the stairs leading up to the apartment.

  Chapter Twenty

  Lyssa

  Hatter stiffened at the footsteps. He waved at Doria and me with a jerk of his arm. “Get yourself and Lyssa out of here,” he said to his daughter in a low urgent voice. “Onto the roof. Stay out of sight. Go!”

  He strode past me with his gaze fixed on the apartment door. I didn’t know what to do other than hustle over to Doria. She grabbed my arm and urged me up the stairs.

  We kept going past the third floor, up to the fourth I’d never ventured into before. It was set up like a separate apartment of its own. We darted through a little open-concept kitchen and into what looked like a master bedroom, the covers bunched as if two different people had been sleeping under them.

  I didn’t have much time to think about that. Doria shoved open the window at the other end of the room and motioned for me to follow her.

  She clambered out onto the roof, and I followed her. The cyan tiles under my feet felt like rubber, which at least was quiet.

  Doria eased the window back down, clicking it into the frame. “Dad will come get us when it’s safe,” she whispered, and scooted farther across the slanted surface. We were at the back of the house, looking onto a stumpier one with a top like an inverted vault, the kind of thing skateboarders might have enjoyed taking a spin on.

  Doria crept around to the side of the building and peered onto the street. Her shoulders were rigid, her face still pale as the warm wind whipped through her hair. I shoved my own hair back from my face as I sat gingerly on the tiles.

  A few strands grazed my lips, still tender from kissing Hatter. I was pretty sure Doria had been so distracted by her panic that she’d missed any shift in the dynamic between me and her dad.

  What was going on in the rooms beneath us now? Was Hatter going to be okay? Doria hadn’t seemed li
ke the type to be easily fazed.

  “Who is this Knave guy?” I murmured.

  She sat back on her heels, keeping her body low. “He’s the leader of the Hearts’ Guard,” she said. “He doesn’t usually come into town unless he’s investigating the Spades—or he’s got orders to take somebody’s head.”

  My mouth went dry. “But Hatter’s not— He hasn’t done anything.”

  “No,” Doria said quietly. “Not in a long time, anyway. But I’ve done plenty.”

  Oh. I groped for something to say and reached over to squeeze her shoulder. “He’ll know what to do, right? He’s gotten by all this time. He’ll be okay, and I’m sure he’ll make sure you’re okay too.”

  I suspected Hatter would have confessed to the highest crime in the land before he let the Queen’s guards pin Doria with it, but saying that wasn’t going to comfort her.

  “Yeah,” she said. “It might not be anything serious at all. The Knave didn’t look angry or anything… I don’t know. It’s hard to tell. He has this face… You’ll see.”

  After what I’d heard about the guy so far, I kind of hoped I didn’t.

  “So, your dad used to be involved with the Spades?” I said, partly to distract her from the possible catastrophe below, but partly because I just wanted to know. “He’s not very interested in filling me in.”

  “He wouldn’t be,” Doria said. “He won’t tell me anything about what-all he used to do either. But I know he did things. I’ve heard the way he talks with Chess or the other guys sometimes.” She scowled. “He gets all worked up about me taking on the smallest errand for them when he was running around helping destabilize the Hearts for years longer than I’ve even been alive.”

  “He’s worried about you,” I suggested. “He doesn’t want you to put yourself in danger. I think that’s pretty normal parental stuff.” When you had parents who were functioning reasonably normally.

  “Yeah, well, he got to make that decision for himself, so I don’t see why I shouldn’t be able to make my own decisions too. We’re not going to take down the Queen if we’re playing it safe.” She cupped her hands together, massaging one thumb over the other. “They killed my mom and my other dad, you know. My birth parents. The guards came and grabbed them one night, dragged them out into the street, and—”

  Her voice broke. I’d momentarily lost mine. The bed downstairs with the empty hollows under the covers made a sudden sick sort of sense. It must reset every night as if the figures who’d used to sleep there would reappear even after death.

  “I’m sorry,” I managed finally.

  Doria grimaced at her hands. “He doesn’t like to talk about that either. It’s only a warning, telling me I don’t want to end up like they did. But I think… I think I’m a lot more likely to lose my heart while the Hearts are still in charge than if we can topple them. They deserve to fall after everything they’ve done, and if I can make that happen faster, of course I’m going to.”

  Funny how the exact same tragedy could make Hatter and his daughter veer in completely different directions. Other than that it wasn’t funny at all.

  Doria edged forward to survey the street. Her head cocked. “Interesting,” she said under her breath.

  “What?”

  She motioned to a woman who was walking by on the street, briefly visible to me in the gap between Hatter’s house and the next.

  I would have known the woman was one of the courtiers Chess had called “Diamonds” even if I hadn’t caught the glitter of the diamond brooch on her chest. She held her head at a haughty angle, more diamonds dripping from her coiled blond hair and the rims of her ears. The lavender fabric of her sleek fur-trimmed coat rippled around her with her sharply elegant strides. Her lips were pursed as if with distaste at her surroundings.

  “That’s the Duchess,” Doria whispered, tracking the woman’s path. “I’ve never seen her in the city at all before. I wonder where she’s going…”

  A wild glint lit in her eyes. She glanced at me. “What do you say we find out? We’re safer being somewhere else as long as the Knave’s here at home anyway.”

  My body balked automatically. Staying put felt a hell of a lot safer to me, but her logic made sense too. And there was something a little desperate about the gleam in Doria’s eyes. Maybe she needed a better distraction than I could give her on my own.

  “All right,” I said. “But I don’t think we should go down there. We don’t want her seeing us, right?”

  “Of course not,” Doria said. “No problem.” She scooted down to the edge of the roof, poised, and sprang across the two-foot gap to the neighbor’s, which was flat other than several protrusions that might have been chimneys bent at right angles.

  Gathering my courage, I crept after her. The jump wasn’t all that hard, really, just a thump of shock through my knees. Doria had already dashed to the other side of the roof. She sprang from there onto the next and peeked over one of its many dormers to check the road.

  “Still walking!” she called back to me in a hushed voice as I reached the gap.

  We went on like that across several buildings. As luck would have it, the Duchess turned in our direction at the next corner. We followed her around the bend. I eyed the next street up ahead, knowing there was no way we could keep up our amateur surveillance operation across the rooftops, unless Doria had some trick up her sleeve for leaping ten or more feet at a time.

  Doria snatched another glance below and hesitated, braced against a slice of metal-lined roof that appeared to have been tipped on its side. “She stopped,” she said when I came up beside her.

  The Duchess certainly had. She swiveled in a slow circle, taking in the shops around her, her hand propped against her chin in a dainty gesture. With a sigh loud enough that I heard it from the rooftop, she shifted her weight from one foot to the other. She looked for all the world as if she were waiting for someone. Who would she have come here to meet?

  “This is really weird, right?” I murmured. “Her being here at all—even by Wonderland standards?”

  “Especially by Wonderland standards.” Doria made a face. “The only time I’ve ever crossed paths with a Diamond in the city, he looked at me like he thought I might stab him just for the fun of it. That was when I was ten. They don’t think much of Clubbers or Spades, and that’s about all you get in the city.”

  “Chess said something about the Queen blaming the Spades for her son dying,” I said. “Was he really murdered?” If the Diamonds bought into the story about the Spades having killed him, that could explain the kind of reaction Doria had gotten.

  “Yep,” Doria said. “It was way before I was born, but what I’ve heard from sources I trust is it looked like some thief broke into the palace, and the prince caught them in the middle of the heist. Whoever it was cut his head right off. Apparently the Queen found him—his head, lying there in a pool of blood, with broken pieces of pottery from the vase the thief had been going to take all around.”

  She shuddered as I cringed at the image. “Because beheading is the way she kills ‘traitors,’ she assumed it had to be a rebel who did it,” she went on. “But it wasn’t us. No one in the Spades would have done it. I’m sure of that. He was younger than me, you know? Thirteen and murdered over a vase they didn’t even get to take.”

  I might have questioned Doria’s certainty that it couldn’t have been anyone associated with the Spades, but Chess had been around back then, and he’d sounded certain the Spades hadn’t been involved too. Whatever I thought about the Queen of Hearts, losing a kid like that had to be awful. And that murderer must still be on the loose. Wonderful.

  Doria’s gaze jerked up. “She’s on the move again.”

  The Duchess strolled farther down the street at a more leisurely pace. I got the impression she was lingering as if still waiting for someone to catch up with her. She meandered past the next cross-street and started to travel out of reach. Doria was scanning the side of the building as if she were consi
dering climbing down to the street after all when a figure shimmered into view just in front of the Duchess. My heart stopped.

  It was Chess. I knew it before the sun even caught on his auburn hair and brawny shoulders, because who else could step out of the air like that?

  Doria went still, staring. She obviously found the sight as unexpected as I did. Why would Chess go speak to a Diamond?

  The Duchess didn’t look at all startled. She tucked her hand under her chin again and smiled coyly, grazing her other hand down his shirt at the same time in a very familiar way. Chess said something and batted her hand to the side, but he stayed there, tense yet ready to talk. The Duchess commented on something, and he nodded. They were too far away for us to make out even a hint of their voices.

  The realization settled over me: She’d been looking for him. Waiting for him. Knowing somehow that he’d find out she was there and come to her? He’d said he’d mingled with the Diamonds at the palace in the past, but he’d also sounded disgusted with them now. Yet here he was, gabbing away with one of them. Showing up as if he’d allowed her to summon him.

  My stomach knotted. He had to be up to something that the others didn’t know about. He couldn’t be helping the Diamonds somehow, double-crossing the Spades, could he?

  My legs wobbled under me. I dragged in a breath and sank down on a glossy black bubble that protruded from the roof. Even when I tipped my head into my hands, my thoughts swam around like too many fish crammed into a bowl, slippery and colliding.

  The head of the Hearts’ Guard was coming calling at Hatter’s house. Chess was chatting with Diamonds. Theo had made it sound as if I just needed to step in for one simple mission and everything would be fixed, but how could it be simple when their enemies were already at our heels and maybe luring in the few people I’d thought I could trust?

  How was I supposed to know what the right thing to do here was? This wasn’t even my world. Right then, with a knife of longing that cut straight through my chest, all I wanted was to be home in my regular predictable orderly Otherland again.