“Not really, no,” I say, but before I can think to ask anymore questions, I see a house through the trees, smoke curling from a stone chimney. It's picturesque as fuck—at first glance anyway—but also … kind of creepy. The house doesn't seem to quite sit right, almost like it's leaning to one side. And the purple and black paint seems to make it sink into the shadows of the forest. There's a single dead tree in the yard with something … someone hanging from it. “What the hell?” I whisper as Tee puts a hand in the center of my back and encourages me forward.
The rope creaks ominously as we approach and I find my eyes glued to the corpse, rotted and bloated and just swinging there like rotten fruit. Bile rises in my throat and I look away, focusing on the dilapidated white picket fence and the crooked gate.
“Why is there a body in this man's front yard?” I ask as Dee leads the way to the front door and lifts a fist to knock, hitting a rusted metal plate with the words W. RABBIT on it. When I glance up at Tee, I can see that his violet eyes are dark and his mouth is twisted in a slight frown.
“Because he does whatever the king asks him to without question,” is the only response I get.
“Goddamn it, Mary Ann! I thought I told you to get lost? You want a fuck buddy then—” The door swings open and there he is, the rabbit-eared murderer with the bloodred eyes, blinking stupidly back at us. He looks at Dee first, then Tee … drags his eyes over to me and pales considerably. His skin's white enough as it is that when he blanches, he looks like a goddamn vampire. “Why is the Alice here and not at the palace with the fucking king?”
“Because you smashed the DRINK MEs and we couldn't get through the door,” Dee says, shoving the shirtless man out of his way and stalking into the house. Tee puts pressure on my lower back and I follow after, although I'm not sure how I feel about being in the house of a man who keeps dead people swinging in his front yard like macabre wind chimes.
“You didn't need those,” Rab says as I pause in his foyer and meet those chilly eyes dead-on, “you have Tee.”
“You just thought you'd smash up all the bottles and I'd suck some dick to get where I needed to go?” I snap, and I can already feel my hands curling into fists, my jaw clenching, memories of Brandon slumping forward into the grass replaying in my mind over and over again. Sure, the twins say he was an assassin, but … I just don't fucking know anymore.
“Actually, yes,” he says, his voice as cold as it was two days ago when he shot my classmate in cold-blood. “That's exactly what I thought. What the hell are you doing all the way out here?”
“We're taking the long way,” Dee says as he wanders out of the foyer with its purple and black striped walls and into a living room decorated with the same hint of gothic whimsy. Rab looks at me for a long moment, shirtless and wearing only a pair of rumpled slacks, unbuttoned and unzipped. They're sagging fairly low on his hips too, showing off all sorts of beautiful muscles that I don't need to see. “We thought you might want to give us a royal escort?”
“There aren't any escorts set to come out this way for weeks,” Rab says with an exasperated sigh, putting his fingertips up to his temples. That glossy black hair of his is mussed up, the white rabbit ears twitching on the top of his head. He narrows his red eyes at me. “Fuck, the king is going to be pissed.” He pauses and reaches into a pocket, pulling out a pocket watch and checking the time before slowly looking up at me. “Although I can't say I'm disappointed to see you again, Miss Alice.”
“It's Allison or Sonny, but it definitely isn't Alice. I'm not cool with being the chosen one. Too much responsibility, not enough reward.”
“Wow, caustic and jaded, aren't we?” Rab says, and I know within seconds of meeting him … that he's a psychopath. I know, I know, not a huge leap to make considering I saw him gun down an unarmed teenager. But still. “It's not like you have a choice on whether or not you're the Alice. That's like a lizard saying it no longer wishes to be a lizard. Too bad though, right? It can shed its tail, but it will always be a lizard.”
“I don't believe in fate or destiny or any that crap. I make my own choices, thanks,” I snap, feeling Tee bristling at my back, but ignoring him. I don't know what's got his panties in a bunch, but I know damn well how to expertly untangle a pair of lacy bits. Rab holds my stare and lets his mouth twist into an awful smirk, one that's as cold and cruel as his corpse decoration dangling in the wind.
“Then make the right choice and come with me to see the king.”
“I thought you said there weren't any escorts out this way?” Tee breathes from behind me, and I can hear hatred thick and heavy in his voice. Again, I can't decide if that's for Rab or for the king, maybe?
“There aren't,” Rab says as a kettle whistles on the woodstove and he moves over to it, snatching up a knitted black and white striped mitt and pulling it off the heat. As Tee and I step into the living room, he sets it on a ceramic tile embedded into a small wood table and lays out four teacups.
“No tea for me, thanks,” I say, because I can already see where this is going.
“None for me either,” Tee adds and Dee groans from his position on Rab's purple sofa.
“Come come now, we've had several days of hard travel and it's time to unwind, is it not?”
“Contrariwise,” Tee says, his expression stern and his frown carved into his face like he was born wearing it, “if Rab can't help us, he can at least feed us and we'll be on our way.”
“Contrari-contrariwise,” Dee snaps back, taking off his peaked cap and tousling his hair with his fingers. “We've been crammed on a smelly, salty boat for days. I want some tea, a snack, a shower, and a nap—and in that order.”
“For a slave you're awfully demanding,” Rab says as he takes two tea bags from a tin and drops them into two of the cups. “Must be that princely blood that runs through your veins. What say you, Miss Alice?”
“Please don't fucking call me Alice,” I breathe with a small sigh, taking in the mounted animal heads on one wall with a wary eye. I recognize the face of a pig, a crocodile, but the rest … I have to blink several times to make sense of them all. One of them looks suspiciously like … a dragon. There's a bird with its massive beak open wide, pointed teeth glistening in the light from the roaring fire. It's almost cozy in here … almost. But then, like with the outside of the house, there's just something off, something not quite right.
“There's the stink of blood on you,” Rab says, slouching against the wall, his rumpled slacks sliding so low on his hips that I can see a dusting of dark hair leading down to his cock. Jesus Christ. He twitches one of his white ears at me and blinks bloodred eyes.
“Really?!” I ask, storming into the room and across the plush white rug on the floor. I don't look too closely at it because I'm fairly certain it's the skin of … something. It's huge, like it came off a damn polar bear. You know, except for the purple spots.
I stop in front of Rab and try not to notice how good he smells, like spruce and damp earth. Maybe he smells that way because he has to dig a lot of graves? He certainly seems good at killing people.
“I smell like blood?” I ask, trying not to fly off the handle. But I've always been just a tad confrontational so … I rip the dress from the leather satchel and shove it against Rab's deliciously muscular chest, shivering as my knuckles brush against the warmth of his skin, all those tattoos he'd so tantalizingly flashed between his gloves and shirt sleeves revealed in their full brilliance. “This is why—you killed my friend.”
“Your friend?” Rab asks, tilting his head to one side, his eyes wide and unblinking as he stares at me. “I saved your life—I killed your assassin. As it were, he was probably on his way to rape and kill you that very night.”
“I …” I shove the dress back in the bag, a blue and white bit of fabric stained with red hanging out the top. It's one thing to be told that Brandon Carmichael was someone awful, but I don't know these men from Adam. All I know is that I saw this rabbit-eared piece of shit shoot an una
rmed teenage kid in the head. They can say all they want about Brandon, but I knew the guy for like fourteen years and he was never anything but nice to me. “I was going to ask him to prom.”
“A rapist and a murderer? My, my, you certainly have low standards, don't you? What, then, exactly, was the problem with wrapping those pretty lips around Tweedledum's magnificent cock? If you had, you'd be at the palace by now. As things stand … Hearts and Clubs, you're late.”
“You shot him in the face,” I growl and Rab cocks a dark brow.
“You'd prefer I shot him elsewhere? In the intestines so he could suffer and die a slow, agonizing death from infection? In the spleen? The kidneys? The head seemed most efficient to me and quite frankly, it was more than the little worm deserved anyhow.”
I just stand there gaping and wanting to punch the White Rabbit in his smug, handsome face.
I settle for growling under my breath and turning back to face Tee and Dee.
“Let's get food from this motherfucker and go. I want to go home.”
“Home?” Rab asks from behind me, and I see Tee flick an amethyst gaze in his direction. “Oh dear, you haven't told her, have you?”
Closing my eyes against Dee's expression of alarm, I take a deep breath and turn back to face Rab.
“Told me what?” I snap, blinking and shaking my head to clear it. Could've sworn I just saw one of his tattoos move … But then I open my eyes and refocus and Rab's tattoos really are moving. He has several pocket watches and clocks etched into his skin, several of which have second hands that are ticking away the sands of time. “What the … fuck?” I ask, forgetting for a second what I was so angry about in the first place. My feet move back in the rabbit's direction without bothering to consult my brain.
“Oh, you like?” he purrs, his voice like bones and ice. There's something sinful but intriguing about it. I get close, too close really for propriety's fucking sake, but Rab doesn't seem to mind. His smile cuts across his handsome face like a scar. “This one,” he continues without waiting for me to reply, lifting up an inked finger at pointing at a black and gray pocket watch on the bulging curve of his right bicep, “tells me how long until I'm due back at the palace.” He slides his finger up his shoulder and onto his chest, to the face of a magnificent grandfather clock buried in the rest of his brilliant ink. “This one tells me how long until I'm executed.” And he says that without a hint of irony or a drop of fear, but like it's simple fact that he'll have his head lopped off one day. Or, at least I'm assuming that's how they execute people around here. Off with their heads, right? “And this one …” He slides his palm down the smooth expanse of his chest and belly and lets it rest over his hip. “This one tells me how long until teatime.”
As I stare at it, the second hand hits twelve and the minute ticks over, lining up with a single red heart on the face of the clock. After a moment, the heart fades away and pops up at a different time, almost twenty-four full hours later.
The hell …
Nice as his ink is though, his words beg another question, one that I can't let myself forget in the majesty of this place. It's fucking cool that this guy has tattoos that move … fuck, tattoos that predict events in time, but that doesn't change the fact that I'm not from here and I don't belong here, and the last thing I want to be is somebody's savior.
“Told me what?” I whisper, stepping away from Rab as he smiles lasciviously and goes about preparing his and Dee's tea, dropping a lump of sugar in each, adding a splash of cream.
“We were given to Allison as gifts and so we can only do as she asks. She wants to pass through the Looking-Glass, and we'll do whatever it takes to get her there,” Tee says, standing stiffly in the doorway, one hand hovering near his knife, the other clenched into a fist by his side. His purple eyes are dark with shadows, and the muscles in his shoulders are tense as fuck.
“Allison, huh?” Rab says with a laugh, picking up a saucer and moving over to Dee. He offers up the steaming teacup and then settles into a leather wingback chair in front of the window. “Well, you gave me choices and if you refuse to let me call you Miss Alice … I far prefer Sonny.” He winks at me as he lifts his teacup to his lips and takes a sip. Dee's already halfway through his. “Sonny, you do know the king is never going to let you use the Looking-Glass? Or were you planning on sneaking her through, Tee? Yes, that seems like something you might do, sneak the Alice through and then run away with her.”
“Why wouldn't the king let me use the Looking-Glass?” I ask and Rab laughs as Tee growls, low and menacingly behind me.
“Because,” Rab says, looking at me over the rim of his cup and grinning, “he wants you to be his bride.”
Brushing my hand across the surface of the mirror, I clear the steam away and lean in close, staring at my reflection's blue eyes, her wet blonde hair, the rainbow streaks woven into the right side. I'd expected the salt water to mess with the dye, but it's holding strong, the colors just as vibrant as they were last week when I put them in.
“His bride,” I scoff and roll my eyes. “Puh-lease. The King of Hearts can kiss my ass.”
Curling my fingers around the edge of the countertop, I sigh and drop my head, closing my eyes for a moment and letting the steamy, candlelit bathroom soothe away some of the stress I was unwittingly carrying around with me.
Knowing Edith, she's probably freaking all the way out about my being gone … and Dad? Fuck, Dad's probably losing his damn mind. I bet he's already talked to Mom and told her and now she's stuck in a cell wondering if one of her two remaining kids is lying sliced up and dead in an alley, too.
Lifting my head back up, I take another look at myself in the mirror, at the robin's egg blue of my eyes, my pale blonde lashes, my long hair. It's about halfway down my back now, but it used to be longer, like I would sit on it a lot at school. But then Fred died and … I cut off about a foot of it and put it in his coffin with him. Everyone—including my parents—thought that was weird as fuck, but I didn't care. I did it anyway, damn them all to hell.
“His bride,” I repeat again, stepping away from the porcelain sink and taking a look around the bathroom. I can't quite figure out where this world is on the industrial revolution scale. Like, Tee and Dee have cell phones and I swear that first night at The Pool, that woman was playing an electric guitar. But we traveled on a ship with oil lamps, like medieval sailors, and I haven't seen a car or electric lights, haven't seen a plane fly overhead, haven't heard the roar of an engine.
But then … the indoor plumbing? It was fucking fabulous. I think I just took a two hour long shower without ever running out of hot water. I glance at the toilet and then reach out and flush it. It works like any normal toilet back home, and it's a fuck of a lot better than that chamber pot I had to use on The Long Tale.
I throw on the red dress that Rab provided and purse my lips tight at the lacy panties and bra that he included with it. He told me it all belongs to this Mary Ann chick—whoever she is—but he also promised to have both my blue and white dress and the outfit Lory gave me washed and ready to go for when we leave in the morning. No clue who's actually going to do the washing considering both Dee and Rab are completely out of their minds on Earl Grey tea, laughing and playing one looooong, slow game of chess, but whatever.
The red dress is tight, clinging to my curves and falling to mid-thigh, a heart cutout over the cleavage that shows off the whiteness of my breasts. It's sleeveless with a plunging V in the back that goes nearly to my ass crack. Honestly, it looks like something meant for a night of clubbing, not for hanging out at some weirdo's house with a corpse dangling in the front yard. I feel like the body out there should disturb me more than it does, but frankly, as long as I'm sleeping in a room with a window that doesn't face the swaying body, I'll be fine.
When I open the bathroom door, Tee's waiting for me.
For a split second, I see his eyes widen and flick over the length of my body, taking in the tight, clingy fabric of the red dress with a
shimmer that he quickly hides by glancing away and scowling.
“I just wanted to let you that Rab's house servants—Pat and Bill—are here. One of them is in the kitchen preparing dinner and the other's washing your things. I just didn't want you to run into them and be alarmed.”
“Thanks,” I say, watching as Tee reaches up, like he's about to adjust the bill of his cap. Only, he's not wearing it right now, just a pair of black linen pants and a … ribbed purple tank? They have fucking tanks here in Underland? Well, shit. That's … very modern of them.
“You're welcome,” he says, hesitating for a moment like there's something he wants to say. Instead, he turns away and heads back toward the guest room the three of us are supposed to share.
“How come I got a snazzy red party dress to wear and you got pj's? I don't believe in gender divisive clothing so … could I like snag a pair of Rab's pants and a tank, too?”
Tee pauses with one hand on the doorframe and then nods his head.
“Follow me,” he says, moving into the guest room. There are two beds in here, both of them twins—hah, good pun—but I figure Dee'll end up stuck downstairs in a drug induced haze the rest of the night anyway. “We keep clothes here for when we're on long trips. Rab hates it, but King's orders so he can't complain.” He pauses and rummages around in the top drawer of the dresser. “You can have some of mine.”
He hands over a white ribbed tank with red hearts all over it and another pair of black linen pants with a drawstring, just like the ones he's wearing. Our fingers brush when I reach out for them and I feel my throat get tight. My body responds with a wave of unwanted lust, washing over me and making my nipples pebble. The change is immediately obvious in the red dress, but I don't bother trying to hide it. What's the point? I've been around plenty of slut-shamers and pearl-clutchers in my life and they're some of the most miserable human beings I've ever had the displeasure of coming across. Who cares if my nipples are hard? It's a natural biological function and I can't help it.
Allison's Adventures in Underland Page 8