Ensnared

by A. G. Howard

  Taking a few steps closer, I stub the toe of my boot on a baseball-size rock. I pick it up, rolling its smooth surface between my lacy gloves. “You’re not protecting him. You’re hoarding him. He’s your crown jewel. With the magic he rations out to you, everyone treats you like a king—” I stop myself short because it’s a role Morpheus will play again for real, if I pledge my eternal future to him one day.

  His deep chuckle curls up on a tail of smoke. “Does it ever disarm you, Alyssa . . . how well we see through one another? It does me.” His voice softens on the admission—a depth of vulnerability he doesn’t often use.

  Of course it disarms me; everything about him does. I toss the rock from one hand to another. “Birds of a feather. Yada yada yada. The cliché is kind of boring.”

  “I rather like to think of us more as moths of a flame. And trying to predict which of us might get burned first is far from boring, luv.”

  A trickle of excitement drizzles through me at the underlying challenge. “You realized Jeb had been touched by magic. That’s why you saved him.”

  Another chuckle thickens the smoke around the mushroom cap. “I saw crimson dribbling from the end of the vine and the purple light under his shirtsleeve. Somehow, the iron dome caused a magnetic reaction, merging my and Red’s magic into him. Yes.”

  “So, that’s when you came to the mountain?” I press.

  “Jebediah did a sketch with some mud out in the open. His creation came alive. So we made a makeshift paintbrush and paints. With those, he hollowed out the mountain and tamed the ocean and its inhabitants by altering the existing world. It’s how his landscapes work: He reshapes the water into lakes and moats . . . molds the terrain to mountains, hills, or valleys. Each time I venture out, he changes my surroundings to keep the wildlife confused and clear of my path. But this ability has emotional limitations. Though he has no trouble conjuring landscapes and crafting creatures, when it comes to his more personal paintings, he’s plagued by an artist’s block. And the less satisfied he is with the results, the deeper he falls into despair, which gives Red’s magic a tighter hold on his muse.”

  My eyes water, either from the smoke or my fear for Jeb’s sanity. His warning to Morpheus when I first saw them together in the studio makes sense now: Remember what happened when her face turned up in my paintings. “Something went wrong when he tried to paint me.”

  “He could never get you right. You were missing legs and arms. Gaping holes in your face. Just like the self-portrait he made.”

  My stomach knots. “But I thought the other paintings attacked CC.”

  “Sometimes the paintings attack one another. But that one was Jebediah’s doing. He can’t see past the broken image that his father trained him to see. So he cannot paint himself whole. It’s why he finally painted it as an elfin knight, in a last-ditch attempt. Same was true of you. His confusion and anger kept getting in the way of perfection. He hid in that willow-tree room, trying to get you right . . . trying to make an image ‘worthy of your memory.’ The only way I could get him to come out, to live again, was to abduct each of your facsimiles. I led them to the water and watched them dissolve to nothing. They were so horribly disfigured it was inhumane to keep them alive, but our tortured artist didn’t have the strength to destroy them. So I did it for him. I convinced him the best way to be free was to stay out of the willow room. To avoid reminders of you, and embrace his anger.”

  I lean against a tree and press the cool rock against the ring hanging under my shirt, to ease the pricking sensation in my chest behind it. No wonder rage and violence are ruling Jeb’s heart. He’s subsisting on powers siphoned from two of the most potent, brilliant, and manipulative Wonderland denizens. He’s at war with himself trying to contain it. Just like I used to be. Yet his struggle is greater, because he’s two parts netherling to one part human.

  I close my eyes. “He must’ve felt so alone.”

  There’s a grunt inside the cloud. “Truly, Alyssa. You wound me. I’m grand company.”

  My eyes snap open. “You lied to him. You didn’t want him to know it was Red’s magic that was making him hate me. How did you pull that off? He had to see those memories in the rose-petal room.”

  “In spite of the magic he wields, your mortal is out of his element here. He’s had no one to trust but me. No one to confide in but the source of his power. So when I told him the images in the rose-petal room were my memories, of times I’d spent with the royal family, he had no reason to question my sincerity.”

  I tighten my fingers around the rock. “Sincerity. Like you know what that is. You let him get eaten up by her hatred just to drive a wedge between us.”

  Morpheus clucks his tongue from inside his clouded veil. “Had he known about Red, he would’ve turned her magic against me. Killed me with a flick of his wrist. It was self-preservation. The fact that it put distance between the two of you, that was simply a fringe benefit.” A tendril of smoke lifts free and breaks into vaporous shapes: hearts, rings, music notes.

  I growl. “Yeah. Anything that gives you an advantage.” I wave away a smoky heart, breaking it in half.

  A large, dark wing cuts the smoke and disappears again, enveloped in the haze. “You’ve driven me to it. You have that boy on such a high pedestal. It’s far too slippery up there for one so unprincipled as a solitary fae. It’s not as if I haven’t tried to drag him down. I looked inside his soul. Hoped to find his weaknesses. Only to discover that even those could be considered strengths under the right circumstances.”

  “Wait. What?” I glare at the cloud, wishing he would come out and face me. “What do you mean, you looked inside his soul?”

  “I rode the memory train a few months after you left Wonderland. Before you and Jebediah visited on the day of your prom. How’s that for sincerity?”

  Hot fury blossoms in my face. “You spied on his lost memories? You had no right!” The branches overhead start to shake, as if triggered by my outburst. The diary heats up against my shirt, becoming effulgent.

  “Oh, please,” Morpheus taunts. “Save your righteous indignation for someone who has not stood eye to eye with your manipulative side. You did no less, viewing your mum’s memories. Your father’s. Red’s. By the by, using a toy diary enchanted by a child’s love-magic to hold repudiated memories at a safe distance . . . bloody brilliant. If I weren’t already head over heels for you, that stunt would’ve pulled the rug out from under me and left me flailing flat on my back.”

  I clench the diary under my clothes. “How did you know it was her forgotten memories inside?”

  “The same way you know Red has poisoned your mortal toy’s muse. Netherling intuition and superior reasoning. Proving once again that you and I are alike in more ways than you care to admit.”

  “We’re nothing alike.” A lie, and I know it. Even worse, he does. “My motivations are honorable. I stole Red’s memories to stop her from ruining anyone else’s life.”

  “A queenly enterprise indeed. But it all comes down to this one truth: You are a lady of action, and I am a man of same. We excel at risks and trickery, and won’t hesitate to use them if it’s the only way to preserve what we love. Which is why, in spite of my ethical shortcomings when compared to your cardboard-cutout prince, you will ultimately choose me.”

  His certainty seeps into my brain, making a mockery of my own irresolution. “It’s more than that. It’s choosing which side of me to embrace, and which one to turn my back on. I will fix Wonderland. And I’ll be there each time the nether-realm needs me.” I’m almost woozy from the burn in my heart, as if it’s been scored down the middle with a hot knife. Red’s fingerprint is getting deeper by the hour. “But I can’t choose beyond that yet.” Not without falling to my knees from the pain.

  “And that, my plum, is where your selfishness comes full circle, and it’s confirmed without a doubt that you are a malicious queen of the Red Court through and through.”

  “Enough!” Control snapping, I chuck th
e rock into the hookah smoke. It sails straight through without stopping and clunks to the ground on the other side of the mushroom. Morpheus’s mocking laughter spurs me to toss another one, but two holes in the cloud offer little satisfaction. I want to launch every rock in my path as a missile until Morpheus is a piece of Swiss cheese.

  My magic has proven useless against Jeb’s creations, but Red’s memories can affect them. Maybe I can coax out the power on the diary’s pages, pit it against my magic. Like the Gravitron ride, use two forces against one another to elicit a volatile reaction.

  The harder I concentrate, the hotter the book gets against my skin. The red glow gushes through my sternum and into my veins. I breathe it in until it boils my blood and bubbles over, then redirect the force to lift the rocks from the ground. Overhead, the branches on the trees snap down and hit my makeshift ammunition with a satisfying thwack, sending it shuttling through the haze to leave ragged holes. The cloud begins to dissipate.

  “At last,” Morpheus says in an overly exhausted tone. “Must it always take my goading for you to realize you have no limitations other than what you place on yourself?”

  I can’t see him yet, but the sprites are there, bouncing in midair and snickering. They stick out their tongues, then flitter away between branches, wandering off in the direction Chessie and Nikki took.

  The remainder of smoke dissolves like cotton shredding into the sky, fully exposing the mushroom. Balanced flat across the top is a large moth, dark wings flapping low and wide. Its proboscis sips from the hookah pipe and releases another chain of stars and hearts.

  “Wait,” I say, anger melting away to confusion. “You can’t be in moth form. You can’t use your magic. It’s all illusions.”

  “That it is, My Queen.” His voice tickles the cusp of my right ear, even though I’m still staring at him on the mushroom. “Just like you, using Red’s repudiated memories to give the illusion of power against our pseudo elf’s paintings. Well done, by the way.”

  I twist but can’t find anyone around me. “This isn’t real.”

  “It is as real as you want it to be.” His whisper teases the left side now, a flourish of tantalizing heat along my neck.

  I turn, but he’s nowhere to be seen.

  The moth flaps its wings, slow and lazy on its perch. At the same time, the feel of soft lips trails down the nape of my neck. Unwelcome pleasure blooms through me at his touch. “How are you in two places at once?”

  “Optical delusion,” answers his voice from behind. He draws me close with invisible hands around my waist.

  Invisible hands . . .

  “The simulacrum.” I trail my fingers along his unseeable arms. “That’s why the suits weren’t in the duffel bag. You stole them.”

  “And you made it all possible by stealing them first. You wise and wicked girl.”

  As much as I try to fight it, the netherling in me glows at his praise. My skin sparkles like starlight, reflected in tiny prisms on the ground and trees.

  Morpheus coaxes me to face him and slips the simulacrum hood off his head. His wild hair moves in the breeze, the jewels tipping his eye markings glimmer a passionate purple, and the smile that greets me is both savage and playful. The rest of him comes into view as reality bleeds through the simulacrum’s mirage—silver jacket over a T-shirt, black pants, blue tie, and magnificent wings folded against his back.

  I rest my palm on his chest to ensure he’s not a hallucination. “You took the suits so we could sneak past the graffiti guards after Jeb left.”

  He steps back, peels off the enchanted fabric, and bows with a flourish.

  “It was a good plan,” I admit as he straightens his clothes and preens his wings. “But we don’t have a means for you to fly, or to find our way back.”

  He smirks again. “Of course we do, silly truffle. Don’t you know I always think of everything?” Hands on my shoulders, he turns me to the giant moth at rest on the mushroom. “Look through your netherling lenses.”

  I refocus and find it’s not one single moth. It’s a hundred or more, clasped together to mimic a larger one. These are the moths that escorted Morpheus here under Jeb’s direction. And the mushroom isn’t typical, either. Its top is hollowed out, with a small door in its side and a harness connected to the moth.

  “That was going to be your ride?” I ask on a whisper.

  “Our ride.” Morpheus claps his hands. Giant wings beat gusts all around us as the moth tugs the mushroom free from the ground. Together they rise, like a hot air balloon and its basket—graceful and majestic. The tree branches open to let the contraption escape far, far up into the sky.

  I gawk at its ascent.

  “And,” Morpheus says, “we have tea service planned for the trip. The spritelings have gone to fetch us some victuals.”

  “But . . . how? The mushroom can’t exist outside of Jeb’s setting here. Right?”

  Morpheus pulls slick blue gloves onto his hands. “It can now that I’ve reassigned it.”

  “What?”

  “Jebediah’s creations are one-half magic, the other half artistic vision. So although I cannot change his masterpieces to another form, they are convincible, if one but imagines them a new purpose. Granted, it works better on the paintings that have no specific command from him. The mushrooms here have no assignments other than to look pretty. And his instruction for the moths to keep me busy was too open-ended. They accepted whatever scenario I imagined, so long as I was in fact keeping busy.”

  I shake my head. The master of word manipulation strikes again.

  The moth carrier bounces atop the air currents, carrying my curiosity to new heights. “But you’re a full-blood netherling. You don’t know how to use your imagination.”

  “On the contrary. I do. Thanks to you. I followed your example in our childhood. I absorbed it without even realizing. Then, when I was stuck here deprived of my magic, I had to find something to while away those weeks and hours. Perhaps that was the silver lining to this entire debacle. The lack of magic is what leads humans to fantasize in the first place. And Alyssa, what a wonderfully powerful force an imagination can be.”

  His expression is awestruck, exactly the way he used to look at me during our childhood escapades. How inconceivable, that I was his teacher, too. He once told me I was, but I never grasped what he meant until now.

  Ivory’s words about Wonderland from weeks ago rise and bounce on the wind, much like Morpheus’s flying apparatus: For so long, innocence and imagination have had no place there . . . Morpheus experienced those things via you . . . Through your child . . . our offspring will become true children once more; they will learn to dream again. And all will be right with our world.

  Morpheus has always had dream manipulation; he’s different from any other netherling in that respect. Now that he’s learned to harness imagination, too, it makes him the only full-blood netherling who could father a dream-child.

  The diary warms against my chest. Such a child would fall right into Red’s plan. Discomfort itches my throat as it hits me: She’s had so many pawns lined up on her chessboard. Her husband, her sister. Rabid White, Carroll, Alice, Mom, me. And Morpheus. Most of all, Morpheus.

  “Do you want her for your own?” Queen Red’s words resurface in my memory from that agonizing moment over a year ago, when Red inhabited my body and tried to make Morpheus help her break my will.

  “So very much—” he had said.

  “Then do my bidding. She’ll be yours physically, and there the heart and soul will follow in time. You can romance your way into her good graces. You shall have forever to win her.”

  Red was using Morpheus even then. She was holding all the cards. He didn’t know about the child at that point. Not until he saw Ivory’s vision just a few months ago. Ivory specified that, and out of all the netherlings, I believe in her honesty the most.

  But how can a child that Morpheus and I share give Red power?

  “Alyssa?”

  I must
be gaping again, because he taps my chin, nudging my mouth closed.

  “Where did your mind wander just now?” he asks.

  I need to tell him that I’ve seen the vision of our son. I need his input on how this could tie into Red’s revenge. But I have to analyze the wording of my vow to Ivory. There must some way around it . . . some way to tell Morpheus without telling him.

  The tinkling sprites return and drop a silky cloth on top of my head. Morpheus drags it off and holds up what appears to be a garment bag. He scowls at the sprites. They clap and twirl in midair, as if they’ve discovered buried treasure.

  “Naughty little spritelings,” Morpheus admonishes. “That’s not what I told you to fetch. I sent for a picnic basket, yes?”

  They flitter around my head, pointing at me, their cheeks growing fat and red as they throw aerial temper tantrums.

  “Well, I suppose this is the time to give it to her,” he concedes. “But I should be the one to open it.”

  The sprites unite in a wave and shove the bag toward me.

  “Fine.” With a sigh, Morpheus hands it over.

  “What is this?” I ask.

  “Just be careful,” he instructs.

  I loosen the drawstring and thousands of thin, shimmery monarch wings billow out from the opening. It’s a hoard of scorpion flies!

  A scream erupts from my throat.

  Morpheus takes the bag back as the sprites’ laughter rings in my ears—a melody of mocking jingle bells.

  “I told you to be careful,” he scolds, and peels off the bag. The wings aren’t attached to bugs at all; they’re part of a gown, each wing meticulously hand sewn to form tiers. Jeweled centipede legs are embroidered along their razor-sharp edges to make them safe to the touch. The fringe adds a green, glitzy glimmer to the red, orange, and black display. The bodice is sleeveless and fitted, while the skirt poufs out to a knee-length hem.

  The tiers shimmy in the breeze and produce a metallic jangle like a hundred tiny chains.