by Eva Chase
I blinked in a double-take, and the rest of the guy shimmered into being around his grin. The broad smirk didn’t falter for a second. I clapped my hand over my mouth to hold in a yelp of surprise.
“Chess,” Hatter chided. “I know you think that trick is funny, but it gives everyone else a heart attack.”
“Nothing they won’t recover from,” the guy who was apparently Chess said with a careless shrug. He turned his grin on me. “My deepest apologies, lovely.”
He didn’t sound the tiniest bit apologetic. His rumpled auburn hair slanted across his head as careless as his shrug had been, and his light blue eyes glinted with mischief. The shape of them and his prominent high cheekbones gave him a feline look, which was only compounded when his grin stretched a little wider and I noticed the sharp points on a few of his teeth. The dude had fangs.
Well, Hatter had said Chess was odd, and coming from someone like Hatter, that meant really fucking strange. He’d also said I could trust this guy to help me get home. So, I guessed what I did next depended on how much I trusted Hatter.
Hatter lifted his hat just long enough to rake his fingers back through the dark blond tufts of his hair. “This is Lyssa,” he said in a low voice as he set the hat back down. His gaze fixed on Chess as unwaveringly as it had on me when we’d first met. “She’s an Otherlander but not a Dreamer. She came through a looking-glass. I thought your man in the Tower might have some idea how to get her back home. Which is where she’d like to be, ASAP.”
“From a looking-glass,” Chess said, giving me another once-over. “You must have all kinds of stories.”
“I’m not sure how many of them are all that interesting,” I said. “Especially compared to what you must see all the time around here.”
He chuckled. “To the mad, wouldn’t sanity look like madness?”
“Chess,” Hatter said. His jaw twitched.
Chess gave him a baleful look. “I’m on the job. Next time bring me something I get to keep, all right?” He flashed another grin and then tilted his head to me. “Let us make haste to the Tower, lovely.”
“It’s Lyssa,” I said. I meant to walk in the direction he’d indicated, but my body balked.
Hatter tipped his hat to me. “Just think of getting away from all this actual madness to the comforts of home.”
Good point. “Thank you,” I said to him, and forced myself to set off next to Chess.
Chess crossed the park with a languidly muscular prowl. He pointed to the gleaming silver spire I’d noticed earlier. “That’s our destination. I hope you’re not afraid of heights.”
“As long as I’m inside that thing and not clinging to the outside, I think I’ll be fine,” I muttered.
Another short laugh spilled from Chess’s lips. He gave me a smile that looked a little less wild and a little more genuine because of that. “I believe we’re going to get along. What do you think of your jaunt through Wonderland?”
Oh, God, how to answer that? My gaze swept over the park. All the vegetation here was as vividly colored as the flowers and trees I’d seen when I first stumbled out of the pond. Over by the hedge, a woman with a golden retriever’s head in a sun hat was tossing a stick for a little dachshund that giggled like a baby. A giant turtle and two girls in dresses that looked like they were made out of pieces of disco ball stitched together were splashing around in the marble fountain, the water painting their skin in a rainbow of colors. Beyond them, a few figures sprawled in a ring, two of them kissing, another bobbing her head up and down over the one guy’s— Okay, looking the other way now.
Up ahead loomed even more of those off-kilter buildings. Maybe I shouldn’t have made that joke about the outside of the Tower. For all I knew, the front door was thirty stories up.
“It’s, um…” I bit my lip. “A little overwhelming. But also, I guess, kind of amazing. I mean, I’ve definitely never seen anything like this before.”
“And you haven’t seen everything yet,” Chess said. “It’s nighttime when Wonderland really comes to life.”
I wasn’t sure this place could be more lively without suffering from a coronary. It could be these people would all die of boredom back in the real world—the Otherworld, as Hatter had called it.
That thought reminded me of Melody’s comment about how I needed to go wild. I sucked the rich scents of the grass and the flowering bushes into my lungs and tried to “loosen up.”
Was this place actually real? Was I hallucinating? You couldn’t really trust your hallucination to be upfront with you on that subject, right? But either way, what I’d said was true. This place was so bizarre it took my breath away, and that didn’t have to be a bad thing.
There was no Brian here, no Mom, no Cameron, no anybody who knew who I was. When in Rome, do as the Romans do—and what the Wonderlanders seemed to do best was whatever the hell they wanted without a care about who was watching.
“So, everyone acts like this all the time?” I said, jerking to a stop to stay out of the path of a couple of kangaroos in evening gowns who bounded out of an alley and across the road in front of them. “They just run wild?”
“Fantastic, isn’t it?” Chess said. “What’s the point in wonder if you can’t revel in it? People have everything they need. All they have to worry about is what gets them off most right now, or the moment after that, or—”
“I get the point,” I said, but a little thrill shot through me at the same time. I wasn’t sure I’d ever only worried about what would make me feel good. My responsibilities and commitments had always been there looking over my shoulder.
They hadn’t followed me here, though.
“Just be careful,” Chess said with a waggle of his eyebrows. “Indulgence is a gateway drug. Once you get started, you may find you’re as mad as the rest of us.”
He dipped into a sudden bow, sweeping his arm toward a gleaming silver doorway. “Ladies first.” Somehow I hadn’t realized we were getting that close to the Tower.
I pushed open the first door, only to find a second door beyond it, and then a third … and suddenly I was stepping out into a narrow space about the size of the bathroom in my apartment, with more silver glinting all around and the ceiling so far above my head I couldn’t make it out. Was I looking up the height of the entire Tower?
“Elevator,” Chess said in a singsong voice. “Twenty-seventh floor. Cheshire coming calling with a guest.”
There was a brief pause, and then an invisible force beneath my feet heaved me upward. I gasped. Chess, who was gliding along beside me, caught my arm to hold me steady.
“What the heck is this building even for?” I said. It didn’t really look like somewhere you’d come to get yourself off—unless my companion had included getting off elevators in that statement.
“Oh, even a land of wonder requires a certain amount of management,” Chess said, in that tone that made it hard to tell how serious he was being about any of this. He flicked his fingers toward an arched doorway we were soaring past. “Department of Balloon Animals.” Another. “The Committee for Midnight Snacks.” Another. “The Flower-Painting Division. You get the picture.”
“Yeah. Who are we going to see?”
“The twenty-seventh floor belongs to the Inventor. You could say he’s our White Knight.” Chess gave me one of those sly smiles. “Don’t tell anyone I told you that. I’ll deny everything.”
“Right,” I said. “I’ll try not to spread the word to the many friends I’ve made here—all one of them.” And I suspected Hatter would have backed away from calling me a ‘friend.’
Chess could obviously figure out who I meant. “Hatter’s good,” he said. “Hatter knows, even if he likes to pretend he doesn’t. Whether he cares, well, I’m not sure if even he could tell you for sure.”
“You know, you have a confusing way of explaining things sometimes,” I said.
Chess grinned wide enough to show off those pointy canines. “What a lovely thing to say, lovely.”
The invisible elevator quivered to a stop. All four walls around me held a door, this one gold, that one silver, another bronze, and the last one iron. I glanced at Chess, but he just slung his hands in the pockets of his teal slacks. “They’ll all get you to your destination. Is it really a choice when every option gives the same result?”
I didn’t know how to answer that, but thankfully I didn’t think he expected an answer. My hand reached instinctively for the bronze door. I grasped the handle and shoved it open.
My steps rang out on a polished white floor. Everything around me was white, from the walls to the desk at one end of the room and the sleek high tables near the other wall—the surfaces so glossy a vague impression of my reflection wavered on them. After the chaos of color I’d been wandering through since I arrived here, the starkness was a completely different shock to the senses. I felt dizzy all over again.
As I regained my bearings, I realized not quite everything in the room was white. The white shelves mounted on the wall near the high tables held bits of metal and wire and glass, as well as some contraptions that looked as if they’d been built out of similar bits. I stepped closer to investigate, and a door I hadn’t even noticed, it blended so seamlessly into the wall, opened behind the desk.
The man who strode into the room was the kind of guy your gaze would snap to the second he entered any room, even if there were a hundred other people already in attendance. He stood taller than Chess, and if not as brawny, his frame had plenty of muscle under his collared white shirt and pale gray slacks. His penetrating eyes and his curly hair were the same shade of dark chestnut, the latter slicked back from his high forehead. The slight crook in his Roman nose only made his face even more compelling for its minor imperfection.
Most of all, though, what drew my eyes to him was the aura he carried with him in his stance, in the way he considered the room, as if he could have commanded anything around him to do his bidding and known it’d comply. This was a guy who got things done.
If this was Wonderland’s version of a White Knight, they could sign me up for saving right now.
“It’s good to see you, Chess,” the guy said in a smooth baritone, his authoritative eyes settling on me. The sensation of receiving all the attention at his command momentarily stole my breath. “Who’s your guest?”
“Allow me to present Lyssa of the Looking-Glass, my good knight,” Chess said with a grand gesticulation of his arm in my direction. “Hatter found her and brought her to me to bring to you. She’s looking for a way home.”
Something shifted in the guy’s expression at Chess’s first words, so quick and subtle I couldn’t read it before it vanished.
“Lyssa,” he repeated, with a similar care to the way Hatter had tested out the name, as if both of them had thought they might find something deeper inside it. He stepped out from behind the desk and took my hand in one of his. His grasp was firm and warm and made my pulse flutter. “Let’s set aside titles—call me Theo. I can understand why you’d be eager to return to the Otherland. I hope your experiences here haven’t been too unnerving?”
“No,” I said, drawing myself a little straighter with the urge to prove something about myself to him, even if I wasn’t totally sure what. “I’m all right. It’s been kind of an exciting adventure, really. I’d just like to know that I can get home.”
“I’m sure we can arrange that.” Theo glanced at Chess. “There hasn’t been any trouble?”
Chess shook his head. “Hatter would have mentioned. Clear to us and opaque to them.”
“Good.” Theo rubbed his square jaw, which had a five o’clock shadow even though I was pretty sure it was still morning. Who knew what kind of time Wonderland operated on, anyway?
“There aren’t many doorways to the Otherland left, and most are difficult to reach,” Theo said. “But there is still one in the basement of the club for Caterpillar’s use. Few will even know about it, so I doubt he keeps it all that tightly guarded these days.” He squeezed my hand and dropped it. “We can see you home tonight.”
CHAPTER FIVE
Lyssa
By night, Wonderland’s city flaunted its bright colors in streaks of streetlamp light, shifting as some of those lamps bobbed or swayed. I wasn’t sure I preferred the moving muting of the vivid hues over their vibrancy at full sunny blast.
As I walked down the street next to Chess, who was escorting me to the club and would be helping me get to my doorway home, I pictured the building layout Theo had shown me. My chest constricted with nerves. The hallways that made up the club’s inner depths had veered up and down and around without any clear logic. Theo’s instructions had included comments like, “Take the stairs up until you reach the bottom.”
I was going to be on my own once I started down those halls. What if my Otherlander brain couldn’t follow Wonderland architecture all the way to my goal?
How did the White Knight even know about this apparently secret doorway? I glanced over at Chess.
“Who is Theo, anyway?” I asked. “What does he do in that huge office when he’s not helping out stranded Otherlanders?” He’d given the impression of being someone important, but it wasn’t clear to me that authority had much of a place in this world.
“He does whatever he can, and some things he can’t too,” Chess said with his playfully enigmatic grin. “Dispensing advice. Constructing inventions. Planning plans. A figure highly respected by all who know him and many who don’t.”
Inventions—I had seen those contraptions on the shelves. Chess had called him “the Inventor” when he’d first told me about Theo. I might have pushed for more information, not that Chess was likely to give me a straight answer, but then he motioned to a building up ahead with one of his dramatic gestures.
“The Caterpillar’s Club.”
For a second I could only stare. A building shaped like a huge spinning top squatted over on a wide lot at the edge of town, as tall as the nearby three-story buildings and equally wide at its thickest. Beams of light in a rainbow of colors flashed from its outer walls.
It was also literally spinning.
Chess set his hands on his hips as he took in the whirling structure too. “It’s the most popular establishment in the land. If you dance where no one can see you, do you even exist?”
A jangling song that sounded like a blend of funk and country filtered out into the night. Several locals walked past us right up to the building. With a flicker, they vanished from view. I caught my jaw before it went slack.
“Um. How do we get in?” If there was a door, the building was spinning too quickly for me to identify it, let alone have a chance in hell of stepping through it.
“You will get to where you want to go by going there,” Chess said. “Assume there is a door. Decide to walk through it. And in you go! Shall we?”
He offered me his elbow. I slipped my hand around it, taking a little comfort in the solid bulk of his arm beneath my fingers. Chess might take some getting used to, but if I had to pick someone to have by my side, I was happy to go with the brawny dude with fangs. Not that I’d seen any reason to worry about my safety so far. Everyone seemed to be too busy enjoying themselves to bother hassling anyone else.
“Once you’re inside, just act as if you belong there,” Chess said in a softer voice that soothed some of my nerves. “You’ve got at least an hour. Relax. Enjoy yourself. Pretend it’s all a dream, no worries, no consequences. Why not make the most of what Wonderland can offer while you’re here?” He winked at me. “Just avoid the mushrooms is all I’ll say. You’ll need your sense of dimension on straight to find your way home.”
“Got it,” I said. “Thank you.”
We ambled together toward the spinning building. My stomach started to tighten as we got closer to its blurring walls. The lights glanced off my eyes. I focused my gaze straight ahead, imagining an open doorway there. I’d fallen up into a pond and ridden on an invisible elevator. I could believe I could walk right through a
wall.
My pulse stuttered, my feet almost stumbled, and Chess gave me a little nudge. With a popping in my ears, the building sucked us in. An instant later I was wobbling on a slanted dance floor, surrounded by revelers and lights and that twanging song. A crisp smell filled my nose, like dried herbs and pomegranate juice. Just breathing it in, a shiver of excitement raced over my skin.
Chess leaned close to murmur by my ear. “Have fun, lovely. You deserve it. I’ll be back for you when the time is ripe.”
I watched him disappear into the air with a tug of my heart. He had to scout out the club and make sure my way would be clear, but I missed his warm presence at my side instantly.
Have fun. Relax. Act like I belonged here. A rainbow of strobe lights that matched the flashing ones outside wavered through the dark room. The dancers undulated beneath them, the crowd seeming to rise and fall in time with the beat of the music. The first song I’d heard had faded into a thumping house beat with a screech of heavy metal guitars.
I was getting the feeling that nothing in this world was ever totally normal.
Even if screechy guitars weren’t really my thing, the bass reverberated through my body. When was the last time I’d really danced? Melody dragged me out to clubs back home every now and then, but I always felt a little stiff going through the motions there, all those observers either finding me wanting or deciding they wanted something from me.
None of that mattered here. Nothing at all from my real life mattered here. I’d never see any of these people or their wacko Wonderland again.
A smile curled my lips. I followed the slant of the floor down into the crowd, letting gravity and the mass of bodies sweep me along.
I spun and swayed with my hands in the air. The music wove around me, urging me on. After a few minutes, I realized the crowd wasn’t undulating—the floor did, rising and falling like waves all across the room. The frenetic drumming of the next song sent me whirling up over one shallow hill; the staccato rhythm of a violin brought me down into the dip on the other side.