by Rhys Ford
I didn’t need anyone to tell me she was old. She was practically Jurassic. It wasn’t that people in Wonderland didn’t age. They just aged at a rate so glacial they usually gave up on life and faded away before death came to collect them—if there was such a thing as natural death. Whatever it was that kept the Wonderland-born Duchess alive, youth was long behind her.
She was a tiny birdlike woman with the nervous habit of clacking her teeth together as she spoke, accenting her words with a castanet rhythm. A turban covered what little hair she had left and did double duty pulling her wrinkled face up and back, tightening her skin so she could see. Any variation of color was gone from her flesh, so her lips were indistinguishable from the rest of her face and formed a wrinkled pucker above her pointed chin. She had long nails that she used to stab at the tiny cakes on a nearby tea tray, and she waved the delicacies about as she spoke and then sucked them off one by one.
Today she had dressed in yellow from head to toe in an ancient court dress better suited for an evening ball than an afternoon tea with a five-foot-tall blue caterpillar, but I imagined she was at the age where she could care less about what anyone thought, much less me. Sitting on a pair of oversized beanbags under the dubious protection of an open-sided gazebo, the pair had the hookah going full blast, and from the smell of the smoke rings they were blowing, it was a potent mix of citrus, mushrooms, and pot.
I stayed upwind. If the juice was something to avoid, their secondhand smoke would probably prove deadly.
“Duchess, as always it is a pleasure to see you,” Jean Michel purred and affected an elegant courtly bow. Luckily she didn’t extend her hand for him to kiss. I would’ve had to knock him senseless before he would press his lips to her smoke-stained fingers.
“Do you know my particular friend, the Caterpillar?” She croaked as she coughed out a stream of smoke. “I do not believe you’ve met.”
The woman was more addled than ever, because as far as I knew, before the Caterpillar took up playing guru on an overgrown mushroom, he’d been one of Jean Michel’s childhood tutors.
“We’ve met, Viola. I taught this sprig everything he knows about tactics and strategy,” the Caterpillar drawled. He peered at me through a lorgnette and tilted his nose up when he realized who I was. “And I see you brought your attack dog with you, Your Highness. Have you come to kill us?”
“Of course he hasn’t come to kill us. The prince would never be so rude as to not give advance notice. How ill-mannered would that be? A lady needs to be dressed for the occasion of her own death, and etiquette would demand an invitation be sent beforehand.” The Duchess sniffed and took another drag from the hookah. “One does not kill during morning calls. It’s just not done.”
“Of course not,” I agreed and sketched her the briefest of bows. “Duchess.”
“Besides, if he were going to use the Ace of Spades to kill me… I would expect the Ace to be… in formal wear not… whatever it is he has on right now,” she proclaimed in spurts as she exhaled. “Also, I’m fading. What’s the use of coming to kill an old woman when she’ll be dead soon anyway.”
The woman was about as far from dead as anyone could ever be. I glanced over at Jean Michel and his expression was impeccably polite but the Caterpillar rolled his eyes.
“So, if you haven’t come to kill me, darling, why are you here?” The Duchess handed the hookah filter back to the Caterpillar. Her eyes went as wide with shock as they could, deepening the grooves in her face. “Tell me you’re here to take back the Kingdom and you want our help.”
“I do not want to take back the Kingdom,” Jean Michel said for probably the one-millionth time in his life, and perhaps one day I would believe him. I reminded myself that I would not be around when that one day came about. “But I do want to save it. It seems we have a problem. A little girl came through the looking glass yesterday.”
The Caterpillar fainted.
One moment he was upright and judgmental. Half an eye blink later, he was slumped over, as limp as a canned green bean fished out of an overcooked casserole. I caught the hookah before it toppled over, but I left the insect to slither off his beanbag and ooze out over the gazebo floor.
“Did you ever notice he wears shoes on half of his feet?” I pointed out to Jean Michel as I set the hookah back in its stand. “How does he decide which ones are feet and which ones are hands? That’s always confused me.”
“Not now, Xander,” Jean Michel scolded lightly as he took up the Duchess’s stiff hand.
She was in shock, but the steel rod of her spine kept her in place, and she squared her shoulders and took a deep breath to compose herself. She lifted a trembling hand to straighten her turban and stammered, “I thought perhaps the chaos I was seeing in my visions were because the Ace was killing us all off—first the Rabbit and then the Hatter. That is why I thought you’d come for me.”
“First off, that’s not even the same White Rabbit that served the queen. That one bit the dust a long time ago, and I didn’t kill the one yesterday.” I nudged the Caterpillar with my foot and moved his seemingly liquid body back toward his beanbag. “And the only reason I killed the Hatter was because he tried to kill me first. I was just heading home.”
“Once you deliver death, that is all you deliver,” she moaned and wiped at her brow. “But a child. How could you let that happen? And now the prince has to clean it up?”
“I did not—” I bit the inside of my cheek. “Jean Michel, this is your circus. You figure out what you want your flying monkeys to do.”
“Duchess, I just need you to open your mind and tell me where the little girl is.” Jean Michel crouched down beside her and patted the back of her hand. “The Hatter told Xander where he thought she was, but the man was insane. I can’t trust any words that came out of his mouth, but I can trust you. Will you help us?”
“Anything for my prince.” She motioned with her free hand at the teapot beside the cake-filled tray. “Have your Ace fill my cup and put in three cubes of sugar. It will fortify me so I can see.”
“One, I’m not his Ace,” I muttered as I grabbed one of the bone-china teacups from the serving tray, “and two, apparently we can’t trust the tea either.”
I fixed her a cup of tea and ignored Jean Michel when he told me to shut up. The sugar was in rough lumps and speckled with rainbow glitter. The chunks cast off bits of light as I plucked them from the sugar bowl, and a disco ball of multihued beams reflected on the silver tongs. The tea let off a sour fragrance until I dropped the sugar lumps into the steaming liquid. Then it bubbled and released a pink-tinged cloud of steam I was careful not to breathe in.
It caught me anyway, and its sickly sweet perfume made me light-headed and burned the hairs in my nostrils.
The old woman took it like a shot of whiskey in a blues bar right at last call.
Since the Caterpillar wasn’t using it, I perched on the other beanbag and waited. Jean Michel paced and kept his attention fixed on the old woman hyperventilating a few feet away. I could see her heartbeat pounding through the thick fabric of her gown, and the spangles along the bodice flashed yellow and white as they rode the ripple of her pulse. The Duchess clenched the bag tightly when the spasms hit her, and her nails sliced through its fabric, letting tiny white beads spill out. The river of minute spheres flowed outward and away from her shaking body. As a froth began to form on her slack lips, the beads gathered together and formed a small white rabbit.
It blinked at me, twitched its tiny pink nose, and leapt out of the gazebo and into the overgrowth beyond.
“Great, another fucking rabbit,” I grumbled. “I better be gone before that fucker becomes one of your bounties, Jean Michel.”
“Hush,” he scolded. “The visions are about to hit her.”
The Duchess went stiff, her limbs stuck straight out around her, and her eyes were vast pools of kaleidoscope light behind her thick black lashes. A wind whipped around the gazebo, tore off her turban, and tugged her skirts
up, but neither Jean Michel nor I were affected by it. The storm only touched her. It ripped at her clothes and her face until tears ran down her cheeks—massive streams flowed through her wrinkles and cascaded down her shoulders.
“I can see the little girl.” Her arms were caught in midair, held up either by the wind or whatever it was she called up to consume her. Her fingers bent, seemingly independent of each other and in ways a snake would envy. It turned my stomach to watch, knowing her bones were slipping into a reality where solid matter didn’t exist. “The devil has brought her. No, the devil’s chasing her, and he has set the Ace on her tail.”
“I know that, Duchess,” Jean Michel said as he returned to her side. His leather pants were speckled with the froth pouring out of her mouth, and I wondered if the substance would burn through, but they seemed to hold up. “Where’s the girl now? Can you see where she is?”
“She is in the Palace of the Crimson Squares. The Red Queen hunts her… lured the girl to her… a song of candy and spice.” The lights in the Duchess’s eyes were fading, and she blinked as her lashes were plucked one by one in the fierce wind that wrapped around her. “You have to find her, Jean Michel, and send her back before the Red Queen finds out her secret, before that secret kills us all.”
“What secret can a little girl have, Duchess?” Jean Michel asked. He flicked his gaze up to my face. “Do you know what she’s talking about, Xander?”
“No idea. What the hell can a little girl have that can be worse than her being here?” I racked my brains, but everything I knew about the situation was hearsay and bits of knowledge gleaned from other people. “It’s not like she has an army of demons with her.”
“No, it is much, much worse. She has a handful of your devil’s feathers in her pocket,” the Duchess gasped. She clutched at the torn beanbag when her vision ripped through her one final time. “If she gains that kind of power, the Red Queen will do what she’s always promised to do. She will resurrect your grandmother and punish us all.”
Five
“WE’RE GOING to need an army.” It wasn’t a suggestion. I was serious, but Jean Michel didn’t so much as blink as he let the motorcar idle and stared out at the Red Queen’s domain. “Are you even listening to me? An army. Look at that place.”
I hadn’t been to the outer reaches of Wonderland City since right after the queen’s fall, but it hadn’t changed much.
The woods creeping down from the mountains were still black, bleak, and crawling with monsters without names—the ones that had been identified likely had only been seen once and then ate their observers. A snow so cold it was blue lay in drifts along the craggy, stark countryside, and the edges of Wonderland City seemed to recoil from the icy touch of eternal winter.
The urban sprawl of the city was held back by boulders, menacing trees, and snow. I’d seen the city grow out from the palace over the years and push back at nature until it came to a rest at the foot of the mountains where the Queen of Hearts stopped her capricious advance. It was there at the edge that the Red Queen sat, carved her domain out, and waited while the other queens fought tooth and nail to gain more territory and influence.
No one moved against her.
No one dared.
Her twin sister, the White Queen, took up the other side of the realm and threw her gates open for any and all who wanted shelter. Her realm was a mess—the people starved, and the buildings were decaying, driven back down to the ground from neglect and looting. The beatific queen continued to order her harried courtiers to water the soup and scramble the eggs, but their bowls held mostly hot water, and only the weakest-willed remained. They likely reassured themselves the queen would eventually turn things around and they would prosper just by being in her presence.
She was as crazy as the entire Hatter family, but her loyal subjects didn’t seem to care.
I had a theory the twins had been a single person at one time, but Wonderland sliced them apart and gave one the heart and the soul while the other got the spine and the brain. If they’d sat on the throne as co-rulers, they would’ve ruled like Rhyme and Reason, a perfect balance of charity and steel.
Instead one held court in a desert wasteland, and the other sat in her icicle fortress, probably waiting for Jean Michel to make his move.
I’d been silent all the way over, having convinced Jean Michel to swing by the office so I could leave Blue with Dana. They had an uneasy relationship, but the dog was more than willing to stay with her when he was bribed with a very large bone. Dana was easily bought with a bag of tacos and the promise of a job at Jean Michel’s gambling hell once I went back through the looking glass. Personally I would’ve held out for pizza, but the taco shop was right across the street, and I think she had a crush on the guy who worked the grill.
“Either we go in or we go away.” I shifted in my seat and wished I’d brought more than a leather jacket with me. The seals of the convertible’s soft top weren’t great, since rubber sometimes had a dubious relationship with reality in Wonderland City. The cold seeped in and took up the challenge my socks threw out about keeping my toes warm inside my boots.
The cold was winning handily.
“You know, it’s pretty sad that you had to hear it from the Duchess’s cracked teapot and a smoke-addled caterpillar before you believed me.” I poked at him—literally. I stabbed my cold, slightly numbed finger into his side to get his attention. “I told you so. Just in case I die in the next few hours because we don’t have an army, I just want you to hear me say I told you so.”
“Shut up. You’re never right. No one would blame me for not believing you and a madman who sniffed glue for fun.” Jean Michel hissed at me and bared those fangs. “I’m concerned about the feathers. The Duchess said they were powerful, but anything can be made powerful here. It’s just a matter of how you use it. They could be worthless to the Red Queen, but maybe in your hands—because you are from where the devil gets its power—that might be a different story. I just don’t know.”
I intimately knew the feel of Jean Michel’s fangs against my neck and the sting of them piercing my flesh, and I hated that I wanted his touch again. Poking Jean Michel meant riling up his prickly nature—a surefire way to dampen any desire I might have for him. Problem was, it didn’t seem to be working.
“When you sign away your soul, he plucks a feather from his wings and stabs you with it. It becomes a quill filled with your blood, and you sign away everything the stars gave you with that one single feather.” I hunched down in my seat and rubbed at the spot on my palm where the sharpened tip had pierced my flesh. I felt my soul leave me as the feather sucked up my essence, and I accepted the spreading numbness in my body when Az drank my mouth dry. “He burns the feather when you’re done, and then the contract is sealed. I would imagine those feathers could hold any manner of things, from someone’s soul to maybe even a magical city built on the bones of the dead queen.”
The press of a cold, wet nose on my neck told me the bribe hadn’t worked and Blue had come to find me, showing up out of the… well, blue, as he always seemed to whenever I needed him. Jean Michel glanced back and heaved a deep sigh.
“I told you it wasn’t going to work,” he admonished me with a light tsk of his tongue against his teeth. “That dog has a mind of his own.”
“I had to try. If I’m going to die at the hands of the Red Queen and your stupidity, I at least wanted my dog to have a good home.” I reached back and scratched at Blue’s upright ear and took a petty delight in getting fur on the thick carpet of the motorcar. “So what are we going to do? Whatever it is, we’re going to have to do it soon, because I’m freezing my balls off out here, and from what I remember, dying is at least warm.”
“You’re not going to die.” Jean Michel started up the motorcar with the crank of its key. “I forbid you to die until you’ve been mine for at least a thousand years. Maybe even beyond that. So buckle up, Xander, because we’re off to see the Red Queen.”
WE WERE an odd couple even for Wonderland City. Jean Michel was a prince, born and raised with a silver spoon in his mouth and blue blood coursing through his veins. There was no mistaking him for anything other than the pinnacle of royalty. And then there was me.
I certainly didn’t have his grace. I didn’t have his manners. After getting free from the Queen of Hearts, I would rather die than wear a suit or anything smacking of heraldry.
And I sure as hell wasn’t going to bow to another bloody queen.
We’d been ushered in as though she were expecting us, and knowing her, she was. Her people moved around us, as silent as Az’s shadowy wings. The outside of the palace was as icy white as the sky, and the mountains it fought against were crystalline spires jutting to impossible heights around an open courtyard where her enormous throne sat exposed in the frigid air.
As ethereal as the exterior looked—a sugar-spun mimic of a faerie’s dream—the interior was as lurid as sin.
Where the Painted Rose boasted a quiet elegance despite its bawdy nature, the Palace of the Crimson Squares looked like the largest whorehouse I’d ever seen.
There were chaises and couches in every nook—overstuffed monstrosities upholstered in purple-and-scarlet velvet. Whispering clusters of people occupied nearly every space. They were hauntingly beautiful, yet their brittle, sharp features were uncomfortable for the eye to land on. They moved in languid sweeps, poised and breathless, garbed in elaborate robes that seemingly hung on their thin shoulders and hips by the slightest of threads. Their sibilance followed us down every corridor like a wave of shifting sand beneath our feet.
Jean Michel acted as though the whispering were a reflection of their awe in his presence. It bothered the fuck out of me, because I felt trapped in an hourglass while time was running out around me. Blue paid it no mind. He darted from table to couch, sniffing at the foods and half-empty glasses he found here and there, but he never once took a bite.