The Mad King

by Jovee Winters

  Then I’d been able to manage the madness by the constant influx of Alices into my life. But I knew my Alice now. She was my beacon. My tower. My madness would only continue to grow and consume me, eventually obliterating me completely without her to ground me in the present.

  I wasn’t sure if I’d regained all my memories of her yet, but I recalled the very last one, where I’d given her nearly all my magic. Though I’d not understood why, I’d trusted her completely. But the giving had left me barely enough to be able to find her in this new life.

  Which might have been enough, had I not given so much of my reserves to the other Alice. Every day I grew weaker, and I knew there’d come a point where I’d no longer have enough in me to find my Alice again.

  That thought skated like black ice through my veins, turned my blood to crystal and made me feel dead inside. There was a tiny string in my soul, a golden thread that wound through her and me.

  I felt it now.

  Felt it the moment she’d died.

  But the presence was soft, barely a whisper of sound. I couldn’t lose Alice.

  Not again.

  If Hades didn’t agree to let me in soon, I’d do something insane. I knew I would. I had to hang on; it was the only way. But the madness pressed in on all sides, and I knew I could not last long without her.

  Crossing my hands behind my back, I marched to and fro as nonsensical words beat at my skull. Like a great rushing geyser of water caught behind a fracturing dam, the pressure of it consumed me. Opening my mouth, I gave the words life.

  “It was many and many a year ago, / In a Kingdom by the sea, / That a maiden there lived whom you may know / By the name of Annabel Lee; / And this maiden she lived with no other thought / Than to love and be loved by me.”

  I caught Galeta and Danika sharing a worried frown from the corner of my eye. But I could no more stop the words than I could stop the sun from rising in the morning. And for a moment, while I recited that poem, I could breathe.

  Chapter 8

  Alice

  I wasn’t sure how long I’d been here.

  The days just rolled and blended into each other. It’d been a shock when Hades, Lord of the Underworld—and total myth—had reached into the darkness I’d been floating in and snatched me out of the velvet embrace of death.

  I hadn’t known what to say or what to think, so I’d simply stared at him as he’d studied me. I’d known of the Greek myths, gone to college, read a few books about them, and had been convinced they were nothing more than ancient fairy tales.

  And yet the hulking beast of a man had snatched me away from that blessed darkness as easily as swatting a gnat.

  I’d had myself pretty much convinced by the time I’d croaked that all the Wonderland nonsense that’d filled my head had been nothing more than my disease-addled brain gasping its last. My parents had always told me I was wrong. My friends had even occasionally mocked my belief in something more, and eventually I’d come to the conclusion that I really was insane.

  The underworld proved otherwise. If this existed, was it really a far stretch to believe Wonderland did too? I didn’t think so.

  I should be happy in this new place I now found myself in. Raised with a loose Buddhist belief system, I’d expected my death to result in an eventual rebirth of some sort. But not this. Not an actual afterlife.

  My only hope had been that I wouldn’t return to the Earth some kind of disgusting bug. But I hadn’t wanted to be human again either. Being human sucked. It hurt.

  My life had been nothing but pain and doctors and illness. Screw that. I’d wanted a nice, safe afterlife. Something badass but simple, where life was little more than eating, sex, and babies. The blessed numbness of being an animal, that’s what I’d been hoping for. I hadn’t wanted to think about love. Lust. Pain. Sorrow. War. Pride. Disease. Fear.

  Basically I was hoping for a brain the size of a walnut where none of those poisonous emotions could ever affect me again.

  And though parts of Elysium were as beautiful as the name itself, with rolling rivers, blue skies, and lush fields of wildflowers, it did not bring me any sort of contentment.

  In fact, my moods were so dark that I’d scared off the other spirits who’d tried at first to get to know me. But I wouldn’t speak to them. Wouldn’t even acknowledge them, and if that was rude of me, I honestly didn’t care. Eventually they’d gotten the hint and drifted off to their safe and perfectly perfect afterlives, murmuring about me behind my back.

  Too weird.

  Odd.

  Mad.

  I scoffed, like I cared. They were nothing to me. I wasn’t here to make friends or dance and party my way through the afterlife. In fact, I still didn’t know why I was here. All I knew was the memories of who I’d once been, they were still in me.

  The dreamer.

  The loner.

  The baker.

  The lover of all things Alice and Hatter.

  My breath caught on a sob. Wasn’t death supposed to cure the hurt? Wasn’t it supposed to make it all better?

  There was no way for me to convey just how miserable I was.

  How bleak this otherwise beautiful world looked to me. How empty. I sat, surrounded by some of the prettiest flowers I’d ever seen, and felt absolutely nothing as I plucked off one petal after another after another, leaching them all of any sort of beauty, turning them as withered and dreary as I was inside.

  And each day that rolled by turned a little bleaker. A little more gray. Literally draining the colors from my surroundings, which had once been so pretty. When I’d first arrived, this place had been heaven.

  But it was now becoming my personal brand of hell.

  Above, the sky was turning a haunting shade of gray. The winds were no longer calm, but cool and beating at me. The flowers were nearly all stripped. And no life buzzed around me.

  Fat flakes of snow had begun to drop.

  I wasn’t sure how or why this was happening. When I looked at other portions of Elysium, they were still bucolic and nauseatingly fairy-talesque. It was only where I stood that the world died. I knew it wasn’t me affecting this change; I was pathetically human. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that I’d been brought to a place I didn’t belong. I should still be out there, floating in the darkness, waiting to turn into a dung beetle or something else. Anything else.

  The truth was, though, I actually preferred this bleakness to the too-perfect, sunshiny place it’d once been. I glanced to the left, my attention snared by a couple dancing and, yes, frolicking together.

  Remember those old cartoons, where time seems to move in slow motion and the couple running through a field of flowers never tear their eyes off each other as they run in ways that defy gravity, practically floating on air as little heart-shaped bubbles float around their faces? This was that, times a million.

  My upper lip curled with disgust.

  The lovers stumbled over into my side of the field, giggling stupidly as they fell into one another’s arms with a loud “oomph.”

  “Are you hurt?” she asked, shoving luscious locks of brown hair out of her deep blue eyes.

  Smiling up at her from where he still lay, he shook his head. “The only wound I could ever suffer again, Delilah, would be if you were to ever leave me.”

  And at first I wanted to laugh at how asinine that line had been. Like c’mon, seriously? That was more pathetic than Romeo and Juliet, and way, way too smooth. And yet I saw the way her eyes softened as she gazed down upon him and how gently his fingertips ran along the creaminess of her smooth cheek, and deep down I knew it hadn’t been a line at all.

  Something painful ripped through my chest, made me clutch at it with now-trembling fingers, and I didn’t stop to censor myself, because I was suddenly and profoundly angry.

  “He doesn’t mean it.” I bit out the biggest lie I’d ever uttered.

  They both looked over to me in surprised shock, and I curled my upper lip, feeling feral and crank
y. “Get off my lawn.”

  Jeez, all I needed now was a cane and a hunched back and I’d be the stereotype of the crotchety old grandma. I knew that, and yet I couldn’t seem to stop myself.

  “Well, I’m—” the girl started, but again I was in no mood to even pretend at playing nice.

  “I said, off!” And this time when I did, they suddenly went tumbling away, head over feet, back onto their side of the field, sputtering as they went. It’d been as if some great big wind had shoved them back.

  Blinking, and a teeny bit shocked by their sudden absence myself, I frowned. What the hell had that been? Almost like... magic? Turning my hand palm side up, I stared at it with horrified fascination, noticing the slight tremor to it that hadn’t been there before. Had I—

  No.

  “Don’t be stupid, Alice,” I murmured, but couldn’t quite get my heart to stop galloping in my chest. Giving my head a good shake, I rubbed at my brow. I was dead, I shouldn’t be capable of getting headaches, and yet I was. There was a doozy coming on.

  I’d never been a hateful person in life, but I was quickly becoming a bitter one in death. No matter how many times I tried not to think back to the last thought I’d suffered in life, my thoughts always invariably returned there.

  Hatter hadn’t come for me.

  Of course, being dead and all, it was stupid to think he ever would have. I’d been so sure of him, even when the rest of the world had told me I was insane.

  When my friends refused to be my friends anymore. When my own family had turned on me, their faces angry and their tempers frayed when I dared to make mention of him. I’d been so sure, I’d built my entire self around him and that world.

  I’d memorized every line of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Had themed my cupcakery after him. Everything that’d been me had been centered around him.

  “A beautiful lie,” I whispered, and my voice sounded like the melodic strains of ghost song. “All a lie.”

  And just as they had every day since coming here, my eyes flooded with tears, which clogged up my throat with heat. Everything I thought I’d ever known had been nothing more than smoke and mirrors.

  I’d been sick. And I’d denied it for so long. But it had to be true. As much as I’d loved him, had he been real, he would have come for me. I knew that to be as certain as the setting of the sun each night. And so my mind flip-flopped as it always did. Just because Hades was real, didn’t mean Hatter was.

  Closing my eyes, I fisted my hospital gown and sobbed bitter tears, broken to my very core. Which was just stupid. I didn’t understand why a lie, or fabrication, or whatever the heck he really was, could mess me up this way.

  I didn’t understand why it was that I felt so achingly empty. Like less than half a person. All my life I’d been sure in the knowledge that there was more to me than what the rest of the world got to see.

  That it was only a matter of time before I discovered what that “moreness” really was. Even now, a spirit with far too good a memory, I still felt that giant moreness within me. Something buried deep, but very much living and breathing, just waiting on me to remember.

  I snorted. God, I was stupid. There wasn’t more to me. This was who I was, a giant failure at life who’d clung to a wasted hope of something that had never been real. I was nothing. No one. Just another human being who’d had her time and moved on and would soon be forgotten by all.

  I sniffed at the stupid tears raining down my cheeks again. The wind howled, and icy chunks the size of my thumbnail pelted my head. It stung, but I couldn’t seem to make myself move. I was sinking into an existential crisis of epic proportions right now. God, the afterlife sucked.

  And then a memory stopped my morose thoughts cold. A class I’d taken in college as a way to make an easy A, before it’d dawned on me that I had no desire to be white-collar anything and that my real passion lay with baking.

  The class had been religions of the ancient world. In it there’d been a section covering Greek mythos, but most especially the underworld.

  I blinked, then jumped to my feet and shook my head as that memory guided me as though by unseen forces forward.

  There were five rivers in the underworld.

  Acheron, the river of woe.

  Cocytus, the river of lamentation.

  Phlegethon, the river of fire.

  Styx, the river of hate and the unbreakable oath.

  And finally, Lethe—the river of forgetfulness.

  Swiping at the tears streaming down my cheeks, I picked up my pace, moving first at a trot, then a light jog, until finally I was at an all-out sprint. I pumped my arms and my legs as I barreled through the perfectly even terrain covered in golden rays of sunshine and full of perfectly happy, perfectly nauseating people.

  I followed the winding trail of the river until suddenly it began to bisect into different paths, turning into two, then three, four, until finally there were five separate branches spiraling off into different locations.

  Heaving for breath, I studied the people standing beside each of the tributaries. The river of fire was easy enough to figure out.

  As were Acheron and Cocytus when the people who’d drunk from them began to wail and gnash their teeth. Why in the heck anyone would willingly add more woe to their eternal sentence was beyond me; then again, maybe the big guys in black cowls standing behind them and looking vaguely reaperesque while holding those scary-looking sickles to their backs might have something to do with it too.

  I grimaced. Poor schmucks. Glad I wasn’t them.

  Which left only two choices.

  I watched the souls gathering around both rivers. Some stood, gazing on in longing but not moving forward. Others knelt and chugged the water, then looked up and simply stared dead ahead.

  There was nothing obvious about either channel that would make me confident enough to move forward. I wrung my hands together. If I choose wrong, it would not end well for me.

  And as I stood there for what seemed an eternity, studying the souls, I felt movement to my left. Frowning, I turned quickly and spotted a petite, pretty woman with ivory skin and long, flowing hair of auburn.

  Her glass-green eyes were sad and haunted, and I couldn’t help but shiver at her obvious pain.

  “You’re looking for Lethe, aren’t you?” she asked, and her voice had a sweet, gentle melody to it.

  I’d not tried to get to know anyone the entire time I’d been here, not wanting to waste my time on any of them, but something about this soul made me instantly and weirdly trust her.

  Which made me rock back on my heels and not trust her.

  “I guess,” I said slowly. “I mean, I was thinking about it.”

  Blinking several times, her long red lashes oddly reminding me of fluttering butterfly wings, she turned to me head-on.

  Her skin was so pale it was practically translucent, and I could see the thin blue veins running behind it. But with her wild mane of curly hair, and waiflike features, she was nothing short of gorgeous. More than that, every so often when she’d move, a beam of light would strike her body, making her practically gleam like light refracted on crystal. She was also dressed in a style that didn’t seem in the slightest bit modern.

  Made me think of someone on the back lot of a Hollywood film. I wouldn’t call her teal gown a toga, but it moved like a diaphanous cloud around her and was held at her shoulders with ornamental pins. Clearly she was human, and yet she looked almost like a goddess. Humans didn’t glow.

  She sniffed. “What’s your name, girl?”

  There was a hint of authority in her voice that I responded to.

  “Alice Hu,” I said, cocking my head and wondering what it was about her that made me so readily want to talk.

  Her long, thin fingers lightly brushed at her chest. “My name is Amara.” Her lips curved into a fleeting smile. “I died a long time ago.” Eyes taking on a faraway gleam, she stared past my shoulder, looking into her past even as she continued speaking almost i
n monotone. “So long that there are none left who’d remember me. I had a good family. A happy one.”

  She sniffed again, the sound both wistful and longing. I wasn’t sure why she was telling me her life story, but I was morbidly curious, so I stayed put, even knowing I was bound to hear something I wouldn’t like.

  “We didn’t have much, but we had each other, and it was enough.” She wet her lips, halting and taking a deep breath before plunging on. “I was very beautiful, and my family very poor. Then he came.”

  My nostrils flared and my fingers clenched as I sensed whatever she was about to say next would be a terrible train wreck I should look away from.

  “Aegaeon.” A muscle in her jaw twitched, and a lone tear spilled out the corner of her left eye, rolling slowly, hypnotically, down her pale cheek. “Tall. Beautiful. Feminine features that were also surprisingly male. He was like nothing I’d ever seen before, and he stole my heart instantly. Incredibly wealthy, he offered to pay off my family’s debts for me. I was only thirteen.” She sniffed again, and this time there was humor mixed with shame.

  I gasped. “But that’s child abuse! I can’t believe he thought he could—”

  Frowning and snapping out of her trance, she shook her head. “Not in my world. Liaisons between youths and men were quite common and even accepted. I’m of the old world, you see. But though Aegaeon was rich beyond imagining, my family did not like him at all. And so they did something practically unheard of in that time. My father told him no, but I snuck out of my room, found him, and demanded that he take me away anyway. All he had to do was secure my family’s happiness. He vowed to do all that. And so I kept my word and followed him gladly. At first he was wonderful. And I did not think I could know any greater joy than to always be his.”

  She closed her eyes, swallowing hard.

  Her story sickened me. The fact that a grown man could see a thirteen-year-old girl and believe—at any point in history—that it was perfectly acceptable was nauseating. But Amara’s obvious pain beat at me. I still wasn’t sure I should trust her, and yet I found that I did. Though I sensed she wasn’t exactly what she seemed, I didn’t think her dangerous to me. Reluctantly, I stayed where I was.