The Hatter is Mad: An Urban Fantasy Novel (The Lillim Callina Chronicles Book 2)

by J. A. Cipriano

  My hands fell to my sides. My father’s face was contorted into a sort of sick glee that oozed out of him. “You were never wanted anyway.” I knew it wasn’t really my father, but it sounded like him, and for a moment… for a moment, it felt real.

  “Liar. My father loves me.” I spit the words at him. “He raised me even though he knew I’d taken the place of his daughter.”

  The Blue Prince tapped the side of his head with his index finger. “I’m pretty sure I know what’s going on in here. Now it’s time to say our farewells.” He grinned, and it split his face from ear to ear.

  He shook me once again, knocking my beat up black beret from my head. It fluttered toward the asphalt twenty stories below in a way that I was very unlikely to mimic. I liked that hat. It was a gift from my father. While not a shockingly rare event in itself, it was from the one time my father took me shopping in a real mall.

  The gritty touch of his hand against my flesh sent shivers running down my spine like a marathon of icy ants. My long lavender hair fell in front of my eyes, shielding the Blue Prince from view. I tried to glare at him through my hair and couldn’t even do it well. His hand clenched tighter, and my blood throbbed in my temples like a pair of giant bongos.

  Usually, this face didn’t bother me, but right now it filled me with fury. I hated the massive scar that split my father’s upper lip into a twisted scowl. I hated his milky, blinded left eye and his mal-formed left ear. I hated the large, black cowboy hat that hid the sections of scalp that were peeled away from his skull so many years ago. Mostly, I hated the look of pity in his good eye. It blazed with an eerie blue fire that took my breath away. To him, I was a fly in the ointment and nothing more. Soon I would be scooped away and forgotten. It made me hate him in a way I never felt before. It made me want to rip him to shreds.

  His other hand reached up to tilt his hat in a weird sort of salute, and the silver bangle on the front flashed in the moonlight. Perhaps this was where my obsession with hats came from. A hat for every occasion was something my father embodied. Of course, if my flesh was flayed from my bones by a pack of ravenous demons while I stood fighting at the summit of a mountain for three days, I guess I’d deserve a hat.

  This thing that held me was not, technically, my father. I knew deep down that his body was taken over, that he wasn’t in control. Still, tears I couldn’t stop spilled from my eyes. My hands slid from his wrought-iron wrist, my fingers spasming as they fell limply to my sides. This was it.

  “Good bye, Lillim Callina. I’d say it’s been fun, but it was simply inevitable.” He released me, and I fell in such a manner as to be completely unlike my beret.

  “Goddamn you!” I squawked. The words rasped against my throat like sandpaper on nylon, but I was glad I got them out.

  “Been there.” He tilted his hat toward me once more and turned away in a swirl of blue coattails. “Done that.”

  My body whipped around toward the ground below. The pavement loomed before me like a giant black frying pan, and in a moment I was going to be the egg. Could I flap my arms and fly? If I had the energy to do so, I might have tried. To be honest, I’d have tried most anything at this moment. Hell, if someone told me naked people survive twenty story falls, I’d have been naked as a jaybird in no time flat.

  I gulped and forced my eyes open. I hadn’t even fallen very far but this was like an eternity of falling. Falling, falling, falling, way too much damned falling. I reached inward and searched my frantic mental inventory for something, anything that could stop my descent. Now that I could breathe my power was starting to return. Still, it wasn’t coming back fast enough. I was going to die unless something happened soon. I needed help. I needed someone to help me. I needed someone to help me right now.

  Chapter 33

  Mattoc’s hand wrapped firmly around my collar, jerking me to a stop and nearly crushing my windpipe as my head snapped backward. The last time I checked, he was non-corporeal. Then again, we were in made up fantasy crazy world so maybe that had something to do with his decidedly corporeal state? Either way, I wasn’t about to complain.

  “You forgot all about me didn’t you?” he asked, smiling at me, and I was incredibly glad to see him here.

  “You think I’d let you take on the Blue Prince on your own? C’mon, let’s get you back up there,” he said.

  “Oh?” I asked. “How do you expect to do that?”

  “I’m going to throw you. We’re only a few floors down,” he replied, and the look on his face was one of pure glee.

  “Wait, what?”

  There was a whoosh as Mattoc swung his body around and launched me up toward the roof of the building. There was the brief sensation of falling before I landed hard on the rooftop. What I saw before me defied all rational thought. I mean my non-corporeal ghost had just saved me from falling to my death in a purely corporeal way. That was pretty irrational.

  The Blue Prince stepped backward, narrowly avoiding Grollshanks’ sword as it cleaved through the air between them. Yet even as he did, a sword burst through his chest. My eyes opened in shock as Caleb stepped through the shadows. Grollshanks’ fist lashed out and caught the Blue Prince on the side of the head, tearing him off the blade and sending him skidding across the floor.

  Caleb’s foot lashed out to stop the Blue Prince’s flight, catching him in the side with a horrendous crack. That’s when the lightning struck. A bolt of pure electrical death lanced out of the sky and crashed down on the Blue Prince. Above them, my mother called together more storm clouds. The heavens raged around her as she spun her javelin in a wide arc above her head.

  The Blue Prince got to his hands and knees and wiped off his mouth with the back of his hand. “If this was the real world, you might have stood a chance. Here, I am a god.” With an almost absent effort he waved his hand and my mother fell from the sky, encased in a blue bubble. “The fairies you trusted to bring you to me might have warned you about that detail.”

  “If there’s one thing I’ve learned. It’s that even gods can be killed,” Caleb said as his fist came crashing down against the side of the Blue Prince’s head, knocking him to the ground. The bubble exploded in a flare of electricity as my mother burst forward like an angry hornet and drove her javelin through the Blue Prince’s back, pinning him to the ground.

  She raised her hands and lighting erupted from the sky and slammed into the Blue Prince. Despite all of it, the Blue Prince tore the weapon from his flesh and stood, tendrils of steam rising off him as he whirled around to drive the javelin into my mother’s heart.

  Grollshanks was there in an instant, throwing himself in front of the blow. The Blue Prince’s weapon sank into the orc’s flesh as Grollshanks tackled the Blue Prince and drove him into the ground. The rooftop split with a staccato crack. Without missing a beat, Caleb drove his boot down on the Prince’s face. There was a wet smacking sound of impact.

  Even as it happened, the Blue Prince’s hand shot out and grabbed Caleb’s other leg. There was a horrible snapping sound as Caleb’s leg was wrenched to the side. He went down in a heap as the Blue Prince flung Grollshanks across the roof and stood, my father’s spear held casually in his left hand.

  “You have all come here for what? To die? For her?” The Blue Prince’s weapon arced through the air and Grollshanks’ body toppled forward while his head fell backward. “What fools you mortals are.” He waved his hands and iron spikes ripped upward from the ground, skewering my mother through the arms before wrapping around her so she was encased in metal. She screamed in pain and tried to rip herself free to no avail. The Blue Prince reached out to caress her cheek with the back of his hand and the sight of it made me frantic. I had to help, had to get back into the fight. I wasn’t going to let him hurt her anymore!

  “I can tell he loves you very much. It is going to truly break him when I use his body to kill you,” the Blue Prince said.

  “Yeah. That’s not happening,” I growled.

  I can’t quite explain h
ow it happened, but the next thing I knew the Blue Prince was looming over me. My father’s fist slammed into my gut. Pain shot through me as I drove my hand forward into his face. The blow struck with a horrible solidity, and he actually staggered backward. I dropped to my knees in pain, my hands closing unconsciously around something on the ground.

  There was a blur behind us. The Blue Prince reached out and blue lightning flew from his hand and slammed into Caleb. Thankfully, he managed to catch the bolt on the flat part of Incinerator. With a grunt of effort, he flung it off.

  “No, no little human. You’ve had your fun. You wouldn’t want me to actually hurt you,” the Blue Prince said.

  “I haven’t even begun to have fun yet,” Caleb wheezed. He was hobbling around on one leg and was still faster than me. It made me glad he was on my side. He whirled Incinerator in a wild arc and golden flames licked out from its tip. “Besides, I still owe her one.”

  “Enough.” The Blue Prince’s voice had a weird sort of gravity to it. Caleb’s weapon slipped from his fingers and clattered to the ground as the Blue Prince drove his knee into Caleb’s stomach. He moved so fast it was as though time itself had stopped, and he alone remained normal speed. Caleb was frozen in midair as the Blue Prince retracted his knee and strode toward me.

  That was the secret. He wasn’t actually fast. He was stopping time. When he moved, time actually slowed down. Every time he attacked, he might hit two, three, or a hundred times. It gave him the illusion of being all powerful. This time, for whatever reason, I wasn’t affected.

  I tightened my grip on the object in my hand and spared a glance at it, Rhapsody’s paring knife. It must be what was stopping the spell.

  “Now you die, Lillim. This time, it’s forever.” Even as he said the words, I was lashing out with the knife. A surprised look crossed his face as the blade slashed open his palm. White light exploded from the wound as he staggered backward clutching his hand. “What have you done?” he screamed as I rose to my feet.

  “Stabbed you, thought that was pretty clear,” I said as I took a step toward him.

  He took a step back. I took another step toward him. He stepped back again. A smile crossed my lips. “Scared?”

  That shook him. The light wormed its way all the way up his arm. Gobs of white fluid seeped from the wounds on my father’s body. A curious thing happened. Morgan and Zef appeared on either side of him and seized him by the arms. He tried to struggle, but they forced him to his knees in front of me.

  “Go ahead,” Zef said as he yanked my father’s head back to reveal his throat.

  “Don’t worry. It won’t hurt your father,” Morgan added when she sensed my hesitation.

  Rhapsody’s hand closed around my other hand as she led me forward. All traces of her earlier wound appeared to be gone. “This time, we’ll take him away from the world until he learns his place.”

  “Won’t that end badly for the world? I thought we needed a Blue Prince,” I said. The knife was very heavy in my hand.

  “Yeah, it will be bad until we let him out. You can’t keep your emotions bottled up forever,” Rhapsody replied. “If there’s one thing he’s good at, it’s making us think about things we’d rather ignore even when they are staring at us in the face.”

  Her words had a strange gravity to them, and in that moment, I realized what she had meant. I’d spent so much time being angry about everything. I’d been upset about being compared to Dirge, about how my parents treated me, but really, I was the one who needed to let it go. My mother and father had raised me knowing I had supplanted their real child. I could have tried to see that, but instead the only thing I saw was what I had wanted to see. The comparison to someone I should have been proud to be compared to. It wasn’t like this was an either or thing. I could be myself and still try to live up to the image of Dirge. She was a hero, after all.

  “He didn’t hurt you earlier did he? That was all for show, wasn’t it?” I asked as Rhapsody watched me with cool, calculating eyes. The intelligence behind them seemed old enough to give me the chills.

  “Well he thought he did. That’s what counts. Seeing is believing after all,” Rhapsody said. “We always believe what we want and see only what makes our beliefs true.”

  “Go on you coward! Kill me and see what happens,” the Blue Prince screamed and began to laugh. He held his neck out to me. “Do it! Rip me out of the world and see what happens, you petulant little—”

  My knife whipped out slashing across his throat and spilling blue blood onto the ground at his feet. I didn’t even mean to do it. I just reacted. There was a flash of blue light so bright it blinded me. I stumbled backward and fell on my butt as spots danced in front of my eyes.

  “Lillim… Lillim is that you?” I turned to see my father sitting on the ground beside Zef and Morgan as the ghostly form of the Blue Prince stood over the puddle.

  “Dad!” I cried and ran toward him, gripping him tightly as he wrapped his arms around me.

  “I had the strangest dream,” he said, shaking his head.

  “Touching, but we’ll be going. So long and thanks for the heavy lifting and all that,” Morgan said sort of offhandedly. All around us, time was starting to thaw. In another few moments, everything would be happening in real time. I watched Caleb slump to the ground in slow motion and that’s when it struck me.

  “The Blue Prince still needs a host right?” I asked as I turned and looked at the Lords of Death.

  “Yes?” Zef said cautiously.

  “I know just the person.”

  Chapter 34

  “This is officially the worst idea you’ve ever had. Officially.” Caleb enunciated the last word as he spoke with heavy sarcasm.

  “By worst idea, you mean best idea ever, right?” I nudged him with my elbow.

  “Not really. Not really at all,” he said.

  We were sitting on the edge of a lake with our feet dangling in the cool water. All around us birds chattered and squirrels ran around chasing things that squirrels chased. I wanted to get away from everything, to spend time alone with Caleb. Now that he had merged with the Blue Prince, I didn’t know how often I’d be able to see him. I didn’t know what the Lords of Death actually did, nor what their day jobs entailed. I was sure it was something important though. It had to be something important.

  At first, everyone else had thought it was a horrible idea too. Well, everyone but Rhapsody, and since she had seniority, what she said pretty much went. I’ll admit it was a little odd since she looked six. The Blue Prince had more than enough staying power to guarantee Caleb wouldn’t fall victim to the poison. The thing that would really matter would be if Caleb and the Blue Prince could live together. I was inclined to think Caleb possessed that special blend of insanity that would make it work. Even Zef grudgingly admitted it wasn’t the worst idea he’d heard since eternity began. Part of me wondered what worse ideas he’d heard, but he hadn’t elaborated.

  “So what’s it like?” I asked Caleb as I leaned my head on his shoulder.

  “It’s sort of like having two thoughts at the same time, like seeing two sides of the same coin at the same time, but for every coin in existence.” He smirked.

  “But you’re alive now. And you’ll be alive for years,” I said.

  “Unless I burn up, like all the others.”

  “Does that really seem like something that is going to happen? You ought to be able to tell by now,” I said.

  “Honestly, it doesn’t, but that may not mean anything. The Prince and I still have a lot to learn about each other. It’s taken the others years to get to the level of symbiosis they have. We’re starting from scratch,” he said with a smirk and for some reason I wasn’t quite sure if he was still talking about the Prince.

  “I’m sure you’ll do fine. If you were going to freak out, you’d probably be doing it by now,” I said, leaning my head against his shoulder.

  “That supposed to make me feel better?” he asked.

  “Yup
.” I smiled at him.

  “Just wait until you have a whole other being running around in your head. I mean, ever have the feeling you were being watched? It’s like that all the time. When I do anything, how do I know it is really me? Like did I mean to pick up that stick at just this time or did he want to do it? That’s what I feel like.”

  “Uh huh. Well I suspect that as long as you aren’t having your voices tell you to kill all humans, you’re probably fine.” I meant it as a joke but the way Caleb looked at me told me he didn’t find it very funny. Maybe I came a little too close to the mark. That made me shudder. Maybe the voices were really telling him to kill us all.

  “You’d be surprised at how often the voices tell you to kill when you can feel all the emotions of everyone in the immediate vicinity. I can see how it could drive someone crazy. The key is to not obsess about it,” Caleb said and kissed me on the forehead.

  “If you aren’t grateful, next time I’m just going to leave you to die. Go on, get poisoned again. See if I help you out,” I replied.

  He reached out and touched my face. His fingers were warm as they trailed along my skin. Wherever he touched, his heat seeped into me and sent tingles across my body. I tried to take a deep breath, but as I stared at him, I totally forgot how to actually do that breathing thing. Looking at him was like watching a sunrise. Ethereal in its composition and so indescribably beautiful it took my breath away.

  I nuzzled my face against his hand, and he smiled at me. I tried to take my eyes off his lips, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t do anything as he leaned toward me, his lips brushing against mine for the barest of moments. Things low in my body tightened, and my heart thumped so loud in my chest, I was sure he could hear it.

  Caleb’s hand trailed down my shoulder and came to rest on my left hand. He leaned in close, his warm breath tickling my skin. His lips brushed against my neck, so warm, so soft. That was when the tears came.