Wonderland (Deadly Lush Book 2)

by Harper Alexander

  It did not require much enticing. The creatures knew him. He had long ago befriended them and tamed them for transportation across the island. It was what the Founders had originally intended them for – hence the steel spines that reinforced their backs – but they had run wild since things went to ruin.

  If ever he trained a group of refugees to survive on the island long enough to learn to ride the beasts, he would readily share the secret. So far, the logistics of such a project would have been far too intensive to attempt while everyone was so focused on running for their lives, and given that he still thought it a valuable tactic to discourage them from spending more time on land than necessary.

  And so for now, it remained one of his many secrets.

  Jayx slid his palm up over the coarse fur of the creature's face as it reached him, moving alongside it to swing aboard. He mounted swiftly and turned the regal steed inland, and then they were off, galloping through the ferns.

  The usual, vibrant vegetation turned quickly washed-out as they went, the bark of trees becoming silvery, flowers blooming paler than normal, leaves coating themselves in a shimmering fuzz that gave a frost-like appearance. Winter was fast overtaking Paradise, everything taking on the Wonderland Effect.

  They blew through curtains of white wisteria, blossoms shredding on the stag's crystalline antlers. Clouds of dandelion seeds exploded under the beast's thrumming, cloven hooves. Large, icicle-like thorns broke off of a plant as they cut too close, crumbing into glittery dust.

  The wintry landscape intensified as they went, until every cluster of blossoms they brushed issued a soft, white pollen, casting the illusion of snow in their wake.

  Then the effect faded out again, and increased again, and it was like dashing between seasons, some pockets of the island slower to transform than others.

  Down into a small, dense valley Jayx rode, slowing his steed to navigate the crowded vegetation. Winter had not yet spilled down into this region, and he pushed aside rubbery green fronds and fiery red-and-gold willow tresses as they pressed deeper toward the wild little garden he sought.

  He was forced to come to a halt and dismount the stag before he got there, giving the animal an appreciative stroke on the neck as he moved to pick his way through the last, cramped twists and turns himself.

  The trees bowed together in these parts, old gnarled branches interlacing to create a sinuous maze of dark leaves. Through the cozy network he came to the centerpiece: the mother tree that had sown the ring of protective, jostling clones around her, elevated above the rest on a roping pedestal of her own buckling roots. Too long had they vied for space underground, tangling with the upstarts all around her, and it was as if they had grown claustrophobic, tired of the others encroaching on her space, and had erupted in a great liberated upheaval to rise above the lot of them.

  Sheltered beneath one of her gnarled root arches was the entity Jayx had come for. Clusters of mushrooms, moss, and cactus grew there, coated with luminous hints of sheen straight from the imaginings of a fairy's garden. It was the cactus he wanted. The needles, specifically. They were discernably absorbent, one of the medicinal tools the Founders had been developing to draw out toxins from the Mainland when guests retreated to Paradise. Needle Therapy; just one of the detoxing experiences they had planned to offer at the grand retreat, the idea laid out in the records in the ruinous archives – but this one small corner was the only place Jayx had ever discovered a surviving cluster of the stuff. He used it sparingly and tried to leave it largely undisturbed, but this was one such scenario that called for its expertise.

  He knelt among the roots of the old tree and flitted from cactus to cactus, taking care to only harvest a few needles from each stub, pruning them conservatively.

  Once done, he didn't linger, trying to leave the secret little nook as if he had never been there, hurrying to return to Shiloh before the toxin had any more time to fester and mutate in her body.

  The diamond-crowned buck was waiting loyally for him back through the gnarled tunnel of trees, munching on a decidedly lush patch of clover. Tasty green morsels would become harder to scavenge for in Winter, though Jayx had always thought the frosty vegetation took on a certain, extra sugary quality, not at all unpleasant.

  He remounted and sent the stag back the way they had come, making haste to the eastern shore.

  Shiloh was bound like a prisoner, sequestered below-deck in a restless fit of fever dreams. They had laid her on her stomach on a make-shift cot to accommodate her wings, and someone had cleaned her wounds and dressed them sufficiently with the salve Jayx had taught them to make.

  Farah was with her – perhaps the only one unperturbed enough by Shiloh's altered state to keep company with her – sharpening a new set of ivory blades as she watched over the troubled patient.

  Jayx set to work silently, taking stock of Shiloh's wounds and the phenomenon of the Seraphspan bonding to her back as he placed the needles. He inserted them gently, just light pricks underneath the skin all across her body, and sat back to let them do their job.

  Farah was watching him. “Do you think she will come through unaltered?”

  “Impossible to know,” Jayx replied, but his gaze landed on the fusion of wing-bone and flesh between Shiloh's shoulder blades. “But whatever good the needles do in extracting the poison, they won't extract wings from her back.”

  With that open-ended quandary hanging in the air, Jayx left the needles to work, hoping Shiloh would return to the land of the living at least mostly in-tuned with her old self.

  “Is she going to be okay?” Zack asked as Jayx emerged onto the deck, the first one in line to follow up on her condition.

  Jayx spared him a glance. Those big, child eyes were more perturbing to him than the danger-ripe forests of Paradise. Children...innocent creatures he did not know how to relate to.

  “Time will tell,” he offered, in what he hoped was a gentle enough manner.

  “Can I see her?”

  “Not yet. For now, she needs rest. And to be alone.”

  Alone – lest she have another aggressive episode in which she couldn't tell friend from foe, and bite the child’s well-wishing head off.

  21 – Dandelion Dreams

  In her dreams, Shiloh washed up on shore with the moonlit tide. She lifted her head, peering blearily toward the jungle. It was still, nothing unusual stirring over the sound of the ocean, but something was off.

  She squinted through the water running down her face, scanning the shadows, trying to peg what it was that tickled her senses. Nothing looked amiss.

  But something drew her up. Lured her out of the shallows and across the beach.

  She stopped at the edge of the trees, feeling uncertain about wandering into the woods without knowing where she was going.

  For a long moment she hesitated, dancing back and forth between moving forward and going back. But then she saw the stalks of dandelion seeds lining the threshold of the forest.

  A spark of kinship kindled within her. Her Spirit Essence! Clearly, they had flocked to aide her. To guide her.

  It was the obvious course of action to stoop down and pluck a stalk, and draw it up to her lips. She blew softly against its feathery cluster, and a stream of fleece danced off into the jungle.

  Come, the seeds seemed to whisper, continuing to drift upon some invisible current after Shiloh's single breath had long since dissipated. She stepped into the trees in their wake, taking up a slow trance-like pace and following absently where they led.

  Deep into Paradise they lured her, highlighting what seemed to be an already-traveled path across the island. Recently-trampled grasses and vaguely-mussed bushes, bent branches and tousled leaves. Whose footsteps were they retracing?

  The spores drew her curiously onward, whispering across the island like ghostly little fairies. The farther they enticed her, the more Shiloh was overcome by a creeping feeling of familiarity.

  She had almost pinned down the elusive memory when the spo
res drifted to a halt, hovering in one place. Waiting.

  Shiloh stopped just shy of their levitation, wondering over this being the conclusion of their journey. Was there something significant about this spot? Was there something she was missing?

  Then they wafted straight upward, and as Shiloh tilted her head back to watch their ascension, tingling familiarity turned to sickening clarity.

  The spider-ape web was strung above her, the unidentifiable mummy that was Mother Eve bound fast in the center.

  What...why had the spores brought her here?

  The vision above was at once keenly chilling. The dreamlike atmosphere soured abruptly into something much more nightmarish.

  She didn't want to see this. She’d walked away from the ghoulish spectacle with the consolation that she could put it from her mind, blocking out the fact that she’d condemned someone to a slow, terrible, tormenting death.

  And yet here it was, looming over her as harrowingly as a ghost come to haunt her.

  Her heart twitched in her chest, her breaths becoming anxious. Icy sweat beaded on her forehead, sliding down her neck. She didn't want to see this.

  As if in acquiescence to her distress, the dream began to unravel. The trees began to tremble, as if in a wind that wasn't there. Gravity seemed to reverse, leaves and strips of fern from the underbrush following the dandelion spores up into the treetops. They snagged on the web until the thing was covered, layers and layers collecting until it formed into a huge ball of vegetation. The ground was stripped barren, the trees shredded naked. All of Paradise seemed to pull itself apart, flocking to the web-turned-vortex.

  Suddenly Shiloh stood alone in the middle of a tumultuous wasteland, hair whipping wildly about her face as she looked up at the rapidly growing orb of vegetation. It rose into the tornado sky, heavy and hulking, becoming its own planet.

  And then the ground buckled and came apart around her as well, and Shiloh clamped her arms over her head to shield herself from the debris.

  A strange, bruising weightlessness washed over her. The ground became the sky. Her blood became the air. Nightmare became heaven.

  Became hell.

  Became everything and nothing. Blinding blackness. Violent breathlessness. Chaos and tranquility.

  Reality and illusion.

  Illusion and reality.

  Yet in the chaos Shiloh opened her eyes one last time, and all amidst the world coming apart around her, there floated a single snowy spore in front of her.

  With the same childlike wonder that had compelled her to prick her finger the first time, she reached up to touch it.

  In a surge of poisonous agony, Shiloh and all the pieces of the self-destructing world went abruptly limp. They levitated, suspended in a weightless, airborne grave.

  Like dandelion seeds released into infinity.

  22 – Tell the Angel

  Lysander was three luscious stalks into his harvest when the wind changed, and the sweet smell of nectar was overridden by a foul, meaty musk.

  He turned quickly to face the Tribal man who had come out into the meadow. A fearsome, bearded brute stared back at him, burly musculature framing his thick physique, a twisting pair of ram-like horns atop his head.

  A quiet fear gripped Lysander. Was he still exempt from the Tribal’s hit list? Clearly the savage hadn't stabbed him in the back the first chance he got, but anything could happen now that war had been declared on the island.

  The Tribal man's nostrils flared as he took a breath to speak. Lysander hoped it was to speak, in any case, because there could be few pleasant alternatives.

  “Ungar smells your fear,” ground the man's gravelly, guttural voice. His face twitched and rippled with unusual muscle engagement when he spoke, as if he hadn't been taught the proper technique to orchestrate sounds. Likewise, the awkward way he used his lips, slurring and curling, left spittle flecking his beard. “But today…fate smiles on you, Crosser. Today you remain intact, to deliver a message.”

  Dread washed through Lysander's limbs; he could almost feel the flowers in his grasp wither as it seeped down his fingers to their stems, poisoning them. It did not seem like it would be in the Tribal's nature to deal in messages. If they were going to send a message, it could not be a good one. At the very least, it was an unpredictable move, which made Lysander uneasy.

  “Tell the angel,” the man started, and Lysander speculated for a moment before realizing Shiloh had made such an impression while under the influence of the wings that she'd earned a title relating to them, “that she faces a fate worse than war.”

  The curiosity regarding what happened with Shiloh out in the wilderness doubled. What had she done to garnish personal threats?

  The wild man continued, “That mutant witch has taken that which a man can never forgive. A part of my very being, severed like a limb.”

  Grave intrigue surfaced at the accusations. Was this one of Mother Eve's lovers? Had Shiloh actually killed the chieftess, during her time missing in action?

  “And in turn,” the brute said, “Ungar will return the deed a dozen times over. Tell her Ungar is coming for her, like a wolf in the night. Ungar will catch her in any sky she flees to. Shred her wings from her back, skin her one limb at a time – prod her senses to keep her conscious while she is slowly devoured alive. Piece by piece, she will watch as her body is consumed by my hunger for justice. Ungar will harvest her organs, one by one, until she feels the hollowness she has carved from the soul of Ungar.”

  Lysander's stomach turned at the vile threat, but he wanted to make sure he fully understood the nature of the message. “A part of your own being...?” he hazarded. If Mother Eve had been terminated, he needed it confirmed.

  When Ungar spoke again, it didn't exactly confirm the deed beyond a shadow of a doubt, but it did justify the Tribal man's vengeful stance. “Whatever she has done to the Mother,” he said, “she has done also to my son.”

  23 – Conscience

  For what felt like the thousandth time, Shiloh awoke in a haze. She could hear the ocean, but it was muffled. She felt instantly claustrophobic, like she awoke in a box.

  She tensed, and immediately felt the restraints. What had they done to her?

  Or is the real question...what did I do to them? It was all a blur. Like watercolor fever dreams. Dizzy patches. Roaring flashes.

  She wasn't sure what clued her in, but suddenly she became aware she was not alone in the room. Some subtle shift, ghost of a breath, or waft of scent betrayed another presence. Craning her head up off the cot, she forced a stiff rotation to face the other way. Her neck protested with every fraction of an inch.

  Lysander sat watching her. Only then did she recognize the cabin of the Dauntless for what it was, and familiarity sank in around her.

  “What happened?” she asked, almost unsure she wanted to hear the answer.

  “Believe me,” Lysander said, “that's what everyone would like to know, right about now.”

  Shiloh blinked hard against the pounding in her head, testing the range of a searing soreness that tightened her jaw. “I don't remember much,” she croaked.

  “You were gone for two days. Came back to us in quite a state. Bedraggled. Unnaturally incensed. Jayx said you were infected by some toxin. I don't know if you can feel them, but you're covered in needles as we speak, extracting the poison.”

  Shiloh attempted to strain her gaze over her shoulder, but only caught sight of an unexpected bundle of feathers before a wave of nausea sent her head back to its resting place on the cot.

  That's right. The wings had come back. “They didn't let me go, this time,” she observed.

  “Not yet. But the first time...?”

  She searched her memory for the answers he sought. It wasn't just the wings he wanted to know about, it was...other things, too. She was having trouble piecing it all back together.

  “The first time…” The violent memory of the raid flashed through her head, and she relived the events leading up to being
snatched by the Seraphspan. Suddenly, she remembered she didn’t know how the raid had turned out for the rest of them. “Lysander – what happened with the raid? How did we make out?”

  They both had quite a bit of catching up to do.

  Lysander’s face tightened. The darkness of sorrow colored his eyes. “We lost Sol,” he admitted, and Shiloh felt like her stomach dropped out from under her.

  “What?”

  “Apparently a group of the Tribal was returning from a hunt. They came upon the raid from outside the worst of the Pulsers’ radius. Speared her from a distance. We held the funeral yesterday.”

  Only half-hearing him over the roar rising in her head, Shiloh grappled with the sudden onslaught of grief. Sol…dead?

  Jayx’s warning assaulted her conscience: “We start making our stand, someone is going to die. And when they do, you’ll wonder if you were right, if we were really ready, if there was more we could have done to prepare first, if we should have gone the extra mile just to be sure. It’ll eat you up.”

  The room faded out around her, her awareness withdrawing into a nauseous bubble of disbelief and denial. Jayx had been right. He had warned her this would happen, and she had ignored the possibility, and now Sol was dead. Sol, with her raven locks and porcelain skin, and signature dragon-brocade heirloom sash always tied around her waist.

  What have I done?

  She tried not to imagine the other girl’s last moments, but the vision wormed its way into her thoughts and played on repeat, a torturous guilt-trip. Again and again, she saw the likeness of the petite Crosser being struck down, a surprise shaft lancing through the air and piercing straight through her soft body…

  Gone. The first casualty of the raid Shiloh had pushed for.

  She tried to remind herself it hadn’t been her raid, that Jayx had signed off and taken the lead and everyone else had had their chance to back out – and that it was only one move in a much bigger war that they were all caught up in whether they wanted to be or not. But it didn’t lessen the sick feeling in her gut. Didn’t make her feel any less responsible for the girl’s death.