Wonderland City

by Rhys Ford

  “I guess our dear knave placed an order for a tart,” someone muttered, and the tittering flew around the crowd like sparrows fleeing a cat.

  I met the bull guard’s gaze, rolled my eyes, and smirked when he chuckled. A hard push through the heavily perfumed crowd got me to the admission dock where the maître d’ was checking names and fawning over a pair of gentlemen in powdered wigs and leather pants while a buxom, pigtailed woman in a short red dress unhooked the velvet ropes to let them in.

  “I’m going to go see Jean Michel,” I told the lizard. “Have someone tell him I’m in his office.”

  “Do you have an appointment? If you’re not on the admission list, you can’t come in.” The lizard motioned for one of the guards to come grab me, but neither of them moved. “You are not on the list. I will not let you in.”

  “You keep telling yourself that, Billy,” I said over my shoulder as I worked past the scarlet milkmaid, who held the rope hook to her chest. “And if you think your guards are going to stop me…. They look a hell of a lot smarter than you do, because we all know, where Jean Michel is concerned, I can go anywhere I want.”

  I trusted Blue to follow me, and without fail, the dog’s toenails clicked a merry rhythm a few feet behind me. Jean Michel’s office was on the third floor and accessible through a run of staircases only the staff were allowed to use. I went through the kitchens to get to the main one and snagged a trencher of roast beef and sourdough bread covered in a fragrant mushroom gravy. The cook didn’t blink an eye, but I still had to duck the pepper shaker she threw at my head as I went by. In retaliation I grabbed a handful of fruit pastries someone had left to cool on the counter and shoved them into my jacket pocket as I took the stairs at a full gallop.

  Surprisingly, Jean Michel was in his office, waiting for me.

  If Az was a fallen angel, Jean Michel was exactly what you think the devil would look like. With an artful tousle of black hair and glittering obsidian eyes, he was a handsome man, powerfully built, and he exuded confidence as easily as most men exhaled. We were nearly the same height, but he easily outweighed me by twenty or thirty pounds, and all of that was hard muscle. He had a strong face that I could look at forever—cheekbones sharp enough to cut my lips on if I risked a kiss and a mouth I knew from experience could make me wish for death because I couldn’t stand that much pleasure.

  He wasn’t wearing a suit, which was odd. At the club he normally dressed like the star of a late-night black-and-white movie. Tonight was apparently casual—a heather-gray sweater and a pair of black trousers that made his ass look really good. Standing in front of the wall-length one-way mirror that gave him a complete view of the gaming tables below, he’d partially turned when I opened the door as he kept one eye on his business and the other on me.

  I wanted him so badly it hurt.

  He took my breath away, and I wasn’t comfortable with that. I didn’t know how things were now back home, but I’d been beaten down into the ground more than a few times for letting my eyes linger on a man’s body, and despite my mother being born and raised during the freewheeling hippie generation, even she didn’t agree with me liking guys. Here it didn’t matter. Hell, being human here didn’t matter, but I was still hung up on how wicked Jean Michel made me feel and how much I needed to give up in order to be with him.

  He was kinda bossy, but I guess most deposed princes are.

  The office looked more like a rich person’s library or study than someplace where an overbearing former prince ran a successful casino and entertainment lounge. Dark-stained wood paneling went halfway up the walls, and what wasn’t covered with bookshelves was painted a dark hunter green. There were tufted leather couches arranged as though Jean Michel sat around with his friends and drank brandy from crystal snifters and smoked sweet-smelling cigars. It was a room meant to intimidate—much like its owner—and Jean Michel was the jewel in its setting.

  Still, Blue wasn’t taking any of Jean Michel’s dominant-male shit. He jumped up on one of the armchairs to wait for his portion of the meal.

  “If you’re going to feed that dog on my antique furniture, at least have the good grace to use a dish.” He even waved elegantly as he commanded me to fetch a plate from the sideboard. He had a full set of china stashed there, should he need to suddenly host a dinner for twelve.

  I liked to remind Jean Michel he didn’t own me, so I didn’t get a plate. Instead, I took a piece of sourdough bread, put a bunch of the meat on it, and then folded it in half and left the rest for Blue to eat on the tapestry-covered armchair.

  I could almost hear Jean Michel wince.

  “I suppose you want to get paid for the rabbit. The lieutenant tells me you broke his front teeth.” Jean Michel lifted an eyebrow, though it was nearly hidden beneath the fall of ebony hair across his forehead. “Was that really necessary?”

  “He did it to himself.” I pulled out my bounty marker and put it on his desk. “And yeah, while getting paid would be nice, I’m here for something else too.”

  “Unless you’re about to tell me that you’ll be moving into my suites, I can’t imagine you have anything to say that would interest me.” He smiled and bared the slightly pointed canines that made me question if he was truly purely human. “I’ll even let you bring the dog… providing it gets a bath.”

  “It’s good to see that you’ve kept your ability to dream,” I countered. “But no, that’s not going to happen. This is something bigger, so get your mind off of you and me. Okay? I got a visit from Az this afternoon. He accidentally let a little girl through the looking glass today. And if you remember what happened last time we had a little girl cross over, you know things are going to go to hell and shit pretty fast if we don’t find her and get her home.”

  Jean Michel paled before my eyes and muttered a profanity I never thought I’d hear him say—which proved I was a bad influence on him. “Well, fuck me.”

  “If I do this for him, he’ll give me back my soul and take me home.” I tried to swallow the lump in my throat, but it had nowhere to go, because the butterflies in my stomach were taking up all the room. “But even if he didn’t promise me that, you and I both know we can’t not find her. Because if we don’t, the chaos she’ll cause will tear Wonderland City apart.”

  Three

  “WHAT WAS Az thinking, letting a little girl come across?” Jean Michel’s attention was now fully on me, his back turned to the action below. “Human children bend reality. They twist and warp it. The last one who came nearly ripped the barrier between Wonderland City and Earth. Neither realities can survive that. What part of that doesn’t he understand?”

  Jean Michel in full prince mode was something to watch. His movements were tightly controlled and imperious, and he gestured with his hands as he paced, punctuating his points with an orchestral conduction. There were times when I could see his grandmother in him—slivers of the hard old woman peeked out from the urbane gambling-hell owner. She’d been a cold presence in his life, a glittering-diamond balance to the warm, absentminded king who raised him.

  I never knew what happened to his parents. Hell, I don’t even know if he was truly related to the queen and king, but in certain lights he looked like her, so anything was possible. And right then, silhouetted against the chandeliers that were visible through the mirrored glass, he reminded me so much of her that my chest burned with the memory of being her plaything.

  “Or is that his game all along?” Jean Michel turned, and his eyes seared me with accusatory doubt and simmering anger. “Does he mean to bring this place down? Is that why he keeps pushing people through the glass? So he can tear this realm apart?”

  “He can’t even exist here,” I reminded him. “And I never got the impression he would wipe out an entire reality out of spite. There are rules. I don’t know who made them, and I don’t know how they’re enforced, but there are definitely rules he follows.”

  “He’s a liar and a cheat.” Jean Michel shook his head and paced towar
d me. He stopped in front of the chair where Blue lay licking at the corners of the trencher. “He takes what’s most important to your existence, promises everything, but twists your words and puts you through hell instead of honoring his word.”

  “Literally his job description.” I chuckled at Jean Michel’s sour look. “The point is, there’s a kid here, and she’s not supposed to be on this side of the glass.”

  “What happened? I thought his kind couldn’t make deals with children. Or is that one of the rules he can avoid following?”

  “From what he told me, he was there for her father, but things went a little wrong. I don’t know what the man asked for, but it looks like Az intended to push him through. Naomi went through the looking glass instead.” I hid my smile as Jean Michel began to scratch behind Blue’s ear. “I don’t know when he was. I don’t know if time is running the same over there as it does here, because I’m not even sure when I am now half the time.”

  “Time flows out,” Jean Michel said with a note of confusion in his voice, “and then it ripples back in. Everyone knows that.”

  I wasn’t going to get into how time worked. If there was one constant in Wonderland City, it was that time appeared the way you saw it. I was fairly certain my linear day was equally confusing to people who lived on a loop. By all reasoning, Jean Michel lived as I did and as most people did, but he seemed to have a better grasp on the Mobius strip of minutes and seconds as they ticked away on Wonderland’s clocks.

  It wasn’t the first time I felt stupid, and I doubted it would be the last, but it annoyed the fuck out of me to not understand something everyone on this side of the looking glass seemed to grasp as soon as they were able to think.

  “The thing is, he can’t stay here for very long, so he can’t find her. That’s why he came to me.” I had a bit of gravy on my fingers, and I licked them clean before continuing. I heard Jean Michel sigh and caught him looking at me, but I wasn’t going to ask him what his problem was. I was his problem. Going over the remains of that battlefield and picking at its corpses wasn’t going to get us anywhere. I had other things to deal with, like a little girl who was lost somewhere in Wonderland City. “I came to you because you’ve got connections to people who might have seen things. I know my limitations. If she’s down in the Stews, word will get back to me, but if she’s wandering around up here, I won’t get any traction.”

  He studied me for a long time as the wheels turned behind his dark eyes. Jean Michel was a calculating son of a bitch, and there were things he set into motion with a single word or action that made no sense to me in the beginning. Then he would play the game out in front of me, and after I figured it out, I was always amazed I didn’t see things sooner. Sometimes I wondered why he didn’t take up one of the districts that had been carved out of his grandmother’s realms, but he wanted to live a life of relative leisure following her downfall.

  I wondered if he refused because he didn’t want it to look like he intended to retake the throne. Jean Michel never liked things handed to him, which is probably why he liked me.

  “If I help you, you have to do something for me,” he finally said.

  “When this is over, I’m not going to be here,” I insisted softly. “Once I hand that little girl over to Az, I’m going back through the looking glass. You’re not going to see me again. It’s time for me to go home.”

  “When are you going to realize this is your home?” Jean Michel held up a hand to stop me from interrupting him, and I held my tongue. “But I’m not going to ask you to stay. If I help you, we have to do this together, because if you intend to leave Wonderland City, I want to spend as much time with you as I can before you go.”

  “Familiarity breeds contempt, remember?” I clicked my tongue at Blue to call him to my side. “So if you think that shadowing my every step is going to make me want to stay, you’re wrong.”

  “Or maybe…,” Jean Michel purred, crossing the room before I could even blink. He cupped my face, his fingers hot on my chilled skin. “Did you ever think I might need the time to get you out from under my skin, Xander? Perhaps the one who needs contempt more isn’t you but me.”

  IT WAS late by the time I got back to the Central District. Or at least onto a subway train headed there. Transportation in Wonderland was sometimes a problem. The subway hubs were fairly consistent, just crowded as hell during the day. As condensed as the city was, the subway was a good way to get around. There were stations at most larger street crossings, but it still meant I was usually stuck a few blocks away from where I needed to be. Taking a cab late at night from Regent Park would’ve been expensive, and the monies Jean Michel released to me wouldn’t be in the bank until the morning.

  I usually avoided the subway because the thought of being underground in a metal tube pushed at high speeds by magic and steam made my head hurt, but I sure as hell wasn’t going to walk, and I’d already taken one subway to get to Jean Michel’s place.

  What was one more trip?

  It was that kind of thinking that would eventually get me killed.

  If it wasn’t for Blue, I would’ve been found lying on the station’s dirty tile floor by whoever made the next security round. I had all sorts of excuses for not seeing the glint of the knife half hidden by the shadows. I was tired, wrung out from a long day and an even longer evening jousting with Jean Michel. I was surprised I could even see straight, much less recognize my stop.

  Thank God for Blue, because I’d be damned if I died behind the looking glass just as I found a way to get back home.

  Blue’s hackles rose, his fur spiking up and down his spine, and then he tripped me.

  There were times when I doubted the dog’s intelligence. To be fair, there were times I doubted my own, but he loved getting between my legs so I landed flat on my face. He picked it up from a cat someplace and delighted in doing it to me at the most unexpected moments.

  This time it saved my life.

  The knife slashed at where my neck had been. I felt the metal brush against the side of my throat and caught the blunt end against my skin. I rolled forward and took a hit on the back of my shoulder. I curled into the momentum, hoping to minimize any bruising, but mostly to be able to get up on my feet. Blue’s barking echoed through the long empty subway station, and his harsh scold bounced about on the tiled surfaces. We were too far away for me to make the stairs, and they were narrow and would give any attacker an advantage if I couldn’t outrun them.

  I landed on my knees with my hand against the floor, and as I pushed back up, I saw who’d come out of the shadows to try to kill me.

  Actually I didn’t need to see his face. Not when he began to chitter while I was in midroll.

  “Hello, Hatter.” I reached for the gun I normally had strapped to my thigh, but Jean Michel disliked weapons in his gambling hell, so I’d left it at home.

  Once again, sometimes I’m not so smart.

  The Hatter was mad long before I ever arrived on the scene. There were a lot of theories as to why he went crazy, but I laid the blame on the queen herself. Pretty easy to do, considering she wasn’t around to defend herself, but she drove a lot of people mad. It was in her nature to destroy, and what she most loved to destroy was creativity and anyone who possessed it.

  The Hatter could conjure up elaborate headpieces so delicate that birds could live in their construction, so the queen definitely had to drive him mad. And damn if she didn’t do a fine job of it when she put her mind to something.

  He didn’t look good. To be fair, he’d never really looked good, but she at least kept him clean and gave him the full run of her palace grounds and a workshop where he could bespoke the hell out of anything he wanted. They’d had a sick relationship. Most of us had a sick relationship with her, but he worked to create the most beautiful things, knowing she would meticulously destroy them in front of him. He willingly gave in to her torture, and then he would sob for days afterward and snap back together to begin all over again.
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br />   Like I said, the man was mad.

  He moved like a broken marionette, a withered driftwood golem of a man with a wild mane of white hair and grief-reddened watery blue eyes. A too-large set of the queen’s old livery hung on his nearly skeletal body, and his long arms jutted out of the tattered, rolled-up sleeves. The shock of seeing the black-and-white harlequin pattern dotted with red hearts faded quickly, leaving only the sour tang of distaste in my mouth and his overwhelming stench clinging to the inside of my nose.

  “I’ve come to kill you, Ace.” Hatter’s voice crackled. It sounded unused and rusty. I wasn’t sure if the smile was supposed to be comforting, but it wasn’t. His teeth had been sharp and white at some point, but they were now black and rotting in his curlicue grin. “I hear you brought a child. It wasn’t bad enough you had to destroy us once. Now you try to kill us again? I can’t let you do that. You’ve already taken so much from us.”

  “I didn’t kill the queen, Hatter. I’d already been put down by the time they took her apart.” I warned Blue off with a shake of my hand, and the dog circled back and stayed out of the Hatter’s long reach. He could have had just the knife or an entire arsenal under his heavy wool tunic, but that didn’t do me any good unless I could get my hands on something to defend myself with. “And I didn’t bring the child over, but I have been tasked to send her back. You kill me, and she stays here. Is that what you want? Because you know what happens if a child stays here too long.”

  “Of course I know what happens.” Spittle flew from his mouth. He stretched his arms back with the tightness of his rage, and his knuckles went white as he clenched the hilt of his knife. “You could have stopped it back then too. You could have protected her, but you didn’t. You never loved her as much as she loved you.”