Wonderland City

by Rhys Ford

  “Look, I know you’re crazy,” I interrupted and shook my finger at him. “But if you think what she felt for us was love, you’re farther over the deep end than I thought. She didn’t love us, Hatter. People who love you don’t try to destroy you. They don’t lay awake at night thinking of ways to break you. And I’m pretty fucked-up, but even I know that.”

  “She loved me.” He pointed the knife at me and shuffled forward so quickly I nearly lost my footing trying to get away. Hatter came to a shuddering stop, seemingly caught in a line of blue tiles that intersected the filthy white, someone’s halfhearted stab at adding a dash of color to the underground station. “But she was obsessed with you. I had to listen to her talk about you, wonder about when you would surrender yourself to her. Do you understand how hard it was to hear that? And you never appreciated her, never loved her like I did. Never gave yourself to her like I did.”

  “Hatter, you had a praying mantis relationship with that woman.” I took another step back. “And every time you grew your head back, she just chewed it right back off again.”

  “Well, now you’ve gone too far. You’ve brought a child.” Hatter spat again, a steamy storm of bitterness aimed at my face. “And when I’m done with you, I’m going to kill her next.”

  He laughed as he struck. Although maybe the word laugh was too normal for the sounds that poured out of his throat. It was more of a giggle strung together with razor blades. It dove and dipped in a seemingly endless wave of chitters and shrieks. Louder than a train whistle, it drowned out all the other noise in the station, including the train that rushed behind us, hurtling toward the next stop. The steam from the line fogged over the tile and hid the floor and our feet, but Hatter didn’t need to see where he was stepping to come at me.

  Of course he didn’t take into account Blue’s leg-tangling tendencies.

  The dog did his dirty work, and I concentrated on staying out of the Hatter’s reach. He was deadly with a pair of scissors. My left shoulder constantly reminded me of that. I struck out, hoping to punch at his wrist so he would let go of the knife, but my angle was wrong and the blow landed harmlessly on his forearm. I followed through with a jab to his stomach and twisted about as he flew past me. He went down like I did, a bundle of swear words and screams, but at least the giggling stopped.

  The train was just an echo of steam and noise, having left the station a few seconds before, so I could hear the distinct metal clatter on ceramic tiles from someplace in the dissipating fog when the knife left the Hatter’s hand.

  I dove in after it.

  I didn’t want to know what I grabbed the first time. It was squishy and made a sound kind of like a squeak. It felt more slimy than furry, but that meant nothing down here. Oddly enough I apologized, let it go, and went searching for the knife again.

  I was more successful the second time. My fingers found the handle within a few seconds of searching, and I triumphantly got to my feet, only to discover the Hatter had as well.

  And somehow he’d hidden a four-foot-long machete underneath his stained coat.

  Blue circled, his bark more of a distraction to me than the Hatter. The crazy man’s pupils were pinpricks, barely visible in his milky-blue eyes, and the smile was back on his face. It turned him into a white jack-o’-lantern as he mocked me from where he stood a few feet away. The machete was broken off at the tip and covered with God-only-knew-what, but Hatter was meticulous as ever with its edge. I could see its sharp side gleaming.

  He took a running leap at me and swung.

  I don’t know whether it was the livery or the talk of the queen, but I could feel the Ace rising up inside of me. It’d been so long since I’d become that, and the last place I ever wanted to resurrect that ghost was underground below Wonderland City’s Central District. I couldn’t lose sight of the humanity I had scraped back together once I woke up, not when I had things to do and a child to find.

  So I shoved that part of me back and prayed.

  I punched as I jabbed. Even with the Hatter’s madness fueling his strength, I still could out-fight him. I’d spent more than a few lifetimes battling my way in and out of trouble, so a single madman with a machete had nothing on me.

  Thing was, I didn’t want to kill him, but it didn’t seem like he would give me any choice.

  His strokes were wild and aimed at my head, which made sense because that was the easiest way to make sure I died. I could heal back anything to my body, even though some injuries would take me longer than others, but if he could sever my head from my neck or even split it in half, there was a good chance I’d remain dead.

  I said good chance because I didn’t know. No one really understood what the Queen of Hearts did to me or how much power she poured into making me what I was. The Hatter wasn’t playing. He’d come to kill, and he was going to do his very best to make sure that happened.

  He also had a glass jaw.

  The knife’s handle gave me enough weight to break his long skinny nose with my first punch. I didn’t want to stab him, at least not at first, but when the machete came back at my head, I knew only one of us was going to get out of there alive, and I’d be damned if he was going to be the one.

  The nap of his livery was coated with a thick grease, and a few of the hearts had fallen off, but the wool was too thick to cut through. I had to go for his throat or even his face—any unprotected part of his body. I had danced away from him and put a bit of distance between us so I could better plan my strike, when Blue grabbed at his coat and tugged.

  The fabric was much worse off than I thought. It probably also tasted a lot worse than it smelled, because Blue hung on, his teeth clenched tightly enough through the coat’s tail to swing about as the Hatter whirled around to face me. Blue’s weight was more than what the fabric could take. It tore with a horrific sound as the coat’s seams ripped apart and its stitched-down hearts flew from their harlequin-diamond prisons.

  The Hatter wore nothing beneath the coat, and its panels flopped about on his shoulders, held in place by his still-intact sleeves. I caught a glimpse of his long pale torso, and if I thought he was ill before, I was sure of it then.

  He was fading. God help him, he was fading and determined to take me with him.

  The only thing that gave his skin any color was the sea of bruises that flowed up his abdomen and across his ribs. They weren’t enough to anchor him in reality anymore, but it was eerie to see the solid-purple marks surrounded by his translucent flesh. If I had to guess, I would say he was self-harming in order to anchor himself in reality long enough for one final act of devotion for his queen.

  I drove the knife into his chest and aimed for where his heart hopefully still beat. Then I stumbled back to watch him die.

  The Hatter crumpled in on himself as he clutched at the knife lodged beneath his collarbone. Gasping, he halfheartedly threw the machete at me, but it went wide and landed somewhere near the tracks. His kicked his feet and scissored his legs with the fury of knowing he’d failed, and once again his caterwauling filled the station.

  It seemed to go on forever. Then it suddenly stopped, and the madness left his eyes. He stared up at me and calm settled on his taut face.

  “You have to stop her,” he begged me, reaching out with a trembling hand, maybe hoping I would hold it for the few seconds he had to live.

  Part of me wanted to be human enough to not let him go alone, but the piece of me forged in Wonderland reminded me a dying man had nothing to lose by taking someone with him. I kept a healthy distance, crouching next to him to listen to his final words.

  “I told you, all I want to do is send her back home.” There was little reassurance I could give him. I didn’t know if he came across the looking glass like I did or if he’d been born to this reality’s mayhem. We were all very much aware of what would happen if I failed. “I promise you, I’ll find her and I’ll send her home.”

  “Not the child,” he gasped, almost choking on his own tongue. “You have to stop
the Red Queen. She has the girl, and if you don’t stop her, she’s going to use the child to end us all.”

  Four

  THE ONE thing about having a dog as a constant companion—relatively constant—was that it was supposed to alert you to intruders. Blue seemed to have missed that directive when he stood in line for his canine brain. I woke up to the smell of coffee being brewed and the sound of my dog loudly chewing on something juicy near the end of my bed.

  I kept my gun in the nightstand by the bed. Since I lived in a street-facing, four-wall studio apartment—two being banks of dirty windows and the other two solid brick—anyone in the place would see me reach for my weapon. Unless of course they were in the bathroom I had built out around the bare-bones toilet, claw-foot tub, and the sink the landlord shoved into one corner so he could charge me an extra fifty bucks. Since the smell of coffee was accompanied by the rattle of the spoon in a cup, I knew whoever it was definitely wasn’t in the bathroom.

  “I know you’re awake. I can see your entire body tense up,” Jean Michel said from the other side of the loft. “You need milk. You’re going to have to drink it sweet and black.”

  “That’s how I take my coffee, asshole,” I muttered into my pillows. “Why are you here? Better yet, just go away. Blue, you’re fired.”

  And just like Dana, the dog ignored me.

  I heard Jean Michel walk across the floor toward my bed. I could literally count the spots on my body that didn’t hurt or sting, and dealing with His Highness, the Prince of Control and Barking Orders, didn’t figure into the morning I’d scheduled to sleep through. The smell of coffee got stronger, and then I heard the clunk of a mug on the nightstand. The bed was large enough to accommodate four people if they were really friendly, but I’d never used it for anything other than sleep. I just liked the space. Still, I could practically feel Jean Michel lean over and sniff at the sheets.

  If I weren’t already making plans to leave, I would have devoted most of my life to reminding him that he didn’t have any say over who I slept with, even if it was just the dog curled up on my feet because he was cold.

  “I need you to get up. And was it really necessary to kill the Mad Hatter last night?” He scraped a chair across the floor, probably gouging the wood, but I didn’t care.

  A hippogriff lived in the loft before me, so the floor was already crap. It meant the door was double wide and there was a roof access right outside in the hallway, but mostly I took it because it was cheap and down the street from my office. It came with a refrigeration unit sturdy enough to hold a raptor’s weeklong supply of frozen meat, and the stove worked. Jean Michel probably hated it because it was spartan, but I liked living simply and cleanly.

  Well, except for the five-hundred-plus books I had triple stacked on the bookcases against whatever wall would hold them. I’d even shoved my bed under the windows and against the bathroom wall so I had more space for shelves. Still, I had about ten overflowing boxes to dig through and decide if I wanted to keep.

  The smell of the coffee was overpowering the sweet vanilla-and-leather aroma the books gave off, and my brain responded to the slick promise of ground beans and sugar, even if I didn’t want to. I was naked beneath the sheets, and the quick shower I’d taken before I fell face-first into my pillows probably hadn’t done much more than move the stink of the subway around my body.

  “Are you going to answer me?” Jean Michel poked at my shoulder and found one of the bruises underneath my skin. I swore at him, and he chuckled. “Why the Hatter? Did someone have a bounty on him?”

  “Not that I know of,” I grumbled as I gave in to his presence and sat up. Keeping the sheets wrapped around my hips, I blearily searched for the cup of coffee and mumbled a soft, not-really-sincere thank-you when he handed it to me. “He came after me. Hunted me down because he blamed me for the little girl coming across. We fought, and he lost. He told me the Red Queen has her, but I don’t know if I believe him, and I don’t have any way of verifying if it’s true. Half the things that came out of his mouth were twisted, so for all I know, she could be anywhere. And he might have said it so it would start trouble between me and Red. I don’t have the time or the power to do that.”

  “I know someone we can ask.” With hooded eyes and an enigmatic smile, Jean Michel watched me sip my coffee. “And as much as I hate to say this, you’re going to have to get dressed in order for us to go. Although you look horrible right now. You have bruises everywhere, and it looks like you hurt every time you move.”

  “Well, yesterday I took down the White Rabbit, had a visit from the devil who brought me here, got into a shoving round with a bunch of snobs and your head lizard, and then ended the day with a death match with the Mad Hatter in the subway,” I said, and I lifted my coffee cup in a mock salute. “And we won’t even talk about what I went through the day before. So you’ll pardon me if I don’t look fresh for you—not that I really give a shit.”

  “You don’t have to live like this, Xander. Just say the word and I can change everything.” Jean Michel leaned forward in his chair, and his breath ghosted over my face. He was too pretty, too delectable, and way too much trouble for me to take first thing in the morning. “You should be—”

  “I should be brushing my teeth and getting some clothes on. We’ve had this conversation more times than I can count, and I may not be the sharpest spoon on the table, but I can count pretty high.” I stared into the depths of his soulful black eyes and saw myself reflected back in their shine. “I don’t even know why you want me. I brought you nothing but pain and misery, and still you won’t let me go. What is it? Guilt? You hate losing? What?”

  “Can’t it be just that I love you?” He traced down the length of my thigh with his nails and left furrows in the thin sheets.

  “No. Because you don’t do anything just for love,” I reminded him as I set the coffee cup back on the nightstand. “It’s not in your nature. You’ve taught me that. So as pretty as that sounds, it’s not the truth.”

  “Suppose it is? Can’t you believe that I’ve changed?”

  “About as much as I believe you love me.” Sliding off the bed, I left the sheets behind and headed to the bathroom. “Give me a few minutes. And do me a favor—try to stop yourself from making the bed while I take another shower. For once in your life, let me control mine.”

  “YOU’VE PRETTY much taken us to the biggest drug addicts you can find in Wonderland City.” I looked around the overgrown former park Jean Michel had driven us to, carefully closing the car’s passenger door. Blue peered out of Jean Michel’s long convertible, yawned, and went back to sleep on its plush leather seats, and I wished I’d stayed with him. “And you expect one of them to help us find a little girl? Most of them can’t even find their own toes. Some of them don’t even have toes.”

  “After all this time here, you still can’t see that some of us take different paths to get where we need to go,” Jean Michel said as he strode along the walkway next to me. “Some of my best pieces of information come from people who intuit the situation with their minds rather than their ears. If the Mad Hatter was right, someone here can verify it. That way we don’t storm the Red Queen’s castle looking for a little girl she doesn’t have.”

  “Or we alert her that we’re looking at her for this because one of them can’t keep their mouth shut,” I argued. “Nobody here has loyalty to you. And we won’t even get started on what they think about me.”

  “Quit complaining, and let’s just go inside.”

  “What inside? This is an open-air commune. These people live in trees and mushrooms.” I made sure to put an extra dose of whine in my tone just to annoy him. “And no matter what you say, I’m not going to eat anything they offer me. The last time I was here, I had some juice and was stuck being six inches tall for almost two weeks.”

  Technically he was right. There was an inside. The area was surrounded by high cinder-block walls and wrought iron gates. In the center of what had been a mass
ive park was a gazebo and courtyard that served as the commune’s hub. I’d been there before, and after the goose chase I’d been led on, I promised to never come back. But we all break promises, especially when it looked like it could give us everything we wanted.

  “That’s what you get for drinking the juice.” He had little sympathy, but then I did know better. “I imagine we’ll be served tea, but don’t drink it until I tell you it’s okay. I can’t afford to have you any other size than what you are right now.”

  I was never sure if Shady Acres was an insane asylum, a commune, or just a group of rich people who liked being hippies. There were servants—of course—but they appeared more nursemaids than anything else. Their uniforms were a light-pink cotton and cut along the lines of an upstairs maid’s uniform, but their manner was definitely clinical. The woman who met us at the entrance to the courtyard was a lantern-jawed battle-ax with beefy arms and thick hands. Her mousy brown hair was scraped back from her hard face, and the thin smile she gave Jean Michel was anything but subservient. Still, she moved at a fast clip through the vegetation and deposited us at the feet of the woman we’d come to see.

  The Duchess.

  She wasn’t alone. Society had been turned upside down following the Queen of Hearts’ demise, and odd bedfellows were the result. The Duchess’s boon companion was a former anarchist who slithered his way into the old woman’s good graces and stayed there. He’d introduced her to a number of things, including the hookah and the various ways she could alter her mind using whatever he had on hand.

  Luckily for us the Caterpillar had been at Ground Zero the last time a little girl stumbled through the looking glass, so he didn’t need a lot of convincing about how dire our situation was.

  The Duchess had seen some things. I’d heard rumors that she predated the Queen of Hearts’ Court, but there was no one to ask if it were true. The King of Hearts faded away soon after the queen died, and any other noble who’d been around back then was either dead or not talking.