by A. G. Howard
“Doesn’t matter,” Jeb snarled. “She’s out of your reach.” He tugged against the elves, but there were too many holding him. “She must be inside the cemetery by now, and you can’t force her to do anything. You said it yourself—the Twids won’t let you in.”
“True enough. But she’ll find her way to the castle on her own. The moment she realizes I hold captive the one thing she treasures above all else in the world, she’ll come crawling to me, wings in tow.” Morpheus raised a hand in some sort of signal.
The elfin knights released Jeb. He spun on his heel and flung his backpack at them, scattering the group like bowling pins. Throwing out a fist, he cuffed Morpheus’s forehead and unbalanced him. One of the knights scrambled into place to maintain the mirror’s opening. Before Jeb could catapult after him and leap through, blue crackles of lightning snagged his skin and clothes like static electricity. They dragged him around, controlling him like a marionette until he faced Morpheus once more. The lightning was coming from the netherling’s fingertips.
Morpheus moved closer.
Jeb tried to step back, but his muscles shut down—paralyzed.
“Sleep,” Morpheus said simply, and he laid a blue-glowing palm on Jeb’s head. A pulse of light swept through Jeb. He tasted something sweet, like honey and milk, then smelled the scent of lavender. Fingers cinched in the silky weave of Morpheus’s shirt, Jeb struggled to stay awake. But the light was too comforting . . . too soft . . . too warm. Against his will, his eyelids grew heavy, and he fell to the ground, sound asleep.
MEMORY THREE: CAGED
Jeb’s skull throbbed, and blood drizzled from his hairline into his eyes.
He swiped away the stickiness to focus on his surroundings. Morpheus had brought him to the Red castle after putting the sleeping spell on him. Dumped him inside a birdcage in the dungeon. Jeb wished he hadn’t drunk the shrinking liquid when he woke up, but the bug man had given him an ultimatum.
At first, he’d threatened to kill Al. But Jeb had called that bluff, knowing she was indispensable. Then Morpheus had pulled out another big gun, threatening to send Al’s fragile mom completely over the edge of sanity. That he would do.
Al had fought so hard to save her mother. It would kill her to lose her to madness. So Jeb didn’t hesitate putting the bottle to his lips.
His body swayed, but it wasn’t from the woozy aftereffects of the potion. The platform beneath him was swinging from his attempts to head-butt his way through his prison’s bars—a desperate move that had resulted in nothing more than the gash at his hairline. A piece of Morpheus’s magic—a blue electrical thread—held the wire door of the birdcage immovably shut.
“Well, plenty of good that did, yes?” a nagging female voice intoned. “Morpheus chooses who has the power to coax his magic loose. Obviously, you’re not a chosen one.”
Jeb grimaced at his fellow captive. She was a lory—a parakeetlike netherling normally the size of a human. Since they’d both been shrunk, the only thing that set her apart from the birds in his world were the robes of creamy satin and red jacquard fitted over her wings, body, and bird legs, and her humanoid face slapped onto crimson feathers as if it were a mask. A beak that was more like a rhinoceros’s horn jabbed at him from where a nose should have been, and her lips flapped furiously.
Worst of all, her voice could topple the Tower of Pisa with one syllable. Whenever she spoke, it was as if someone had surgically implanted speakers in Jeb’s ears and locked the volume dials on “deafer than a stone statue.” She was one of the many reasons he’d been trying so hard to get out of this bird prison.
Flickering light from the candles on the wall outside the cage illuminated her scowl and cast the rest of the dungeon into shadow.
“Listen, Lorina,” Jeb said after her voice stopped echoing. “We wouldn’t be in here if it weren’t for your husband.” He pointed to the creature snoring below the cage, who was just as strange-looking as his wife, with the body of a dodo, the head of a man, and hands protruding from the tips of his stubby wings. “He kept Alice Liddell in a cage just like this one all those years ago. It’s his fault my girlfriend has what it takes to dethrone your queen. Did it ever occur to you that this is what you both had coming?”
“Charlie did no such thing!” shrieked the lory, fluttering in midair in the cage. “Did it ever occur to you that Morpheus is a brass-faced liar?”
Only every minute of every hour. Jeb leaned against the bars. His knees gave out, weakened by his efforts to strong-arm the wire bars with every available muscle. He clunked to the metallic floor, nudging a browning pear slice sitting on its side like a small couch. The cage was an impregnable fort in his miniature state. But it didn’t matter. The bars could’ve been made of uncooked spaghetti, and he still wouldn’t be able to help Al. Even if he escaped, at this size he couldn’t take on anyone.
Charlie, Lorina’s dodo husband, wasn’t much help. He was bound in iron cuffs and manacles, napping against a wall. Though the birdcage hung on a peg just inches above the dodo’s head, there was nothing Charlie could do about it.
Morpheus must’ve treated the giant birdman to the same sleeping spell he’d cast on Jeb earlier, though Charlie was starting to come out of it.
Lorina settled on the perch in the center of the cage, swinging over Jeb’s head like an acrobat on a trapeze. Her face flamed as fiery as her feathers, which caused the red spade and heart stenciled on her cheeks to fade in comparison. “Since we’re to be exiled in this urine-stenched facility,” she bellowed, “you shall have plenty of time to hear the truth.”
Jeb rubbed his head to ease the splitting ache. “If you could take your voice down about two decibels, I’d appreciate it.”
“Take my voice down?”
“Augh.” Jeb cradled his face in his hands.
The miniature trapeze squeaked with each swing, adding to the noise pollution. “For your information, my queen adores the sound of my voice. Praises it, in fact.”
The dodo’s snoring paused, and he smacked his lips. “That would be because she stops her ears with beeswax, O Loveliest of Lunatics.”
“Fat liar,” Lorina snapped, rocking her swing so fast, Jeb thought he might get seasick.
“I’m wearing iron chains,” Charlie said on the tail end of a yawn. “I haven’t the strength to lie.” Then he dropped back off to sleep.
That seemed to shut Lorina up, at least temporarily.
Jeb took advantage of the silence to think. Morpheus must have told Al about her true lineage by now, about what was expected of her. She must be so shocked . . . so terrified. Jeb ached to hold her, to the point that his chest felt like an anvil sat on it.
That moth freak should’ve told her the truth from the beginning. She would never have chosen to stay. But Morpheus had known that, so he’d tricked her under the pretense that she could cure a curse on her bloodline. Jeb wanted to pluck off Morpheus’s black wings and stuff them down his throat for misleading her, because there was no cure for family, as he knew only too well.
“It was Red who put Alice in a cage.” The lory was off and running again. “Not Charlie.”
“But your husband chose to keep her caged,” Jeb inserted against his better judgment. He plugged his ears for the booming rebuttal, but Lorina only sighed.
“No. Charlie tried to do the right thing by the girl,” she said, considerably softer now. “He planned to send Alice back to the human realm behind Red’s back, but the queen found out and dragged them to a cave in the highest cliffs of Wonderland’s wilds, without any of us knowing. She left Charlie with her victim, so she could enact her master plan, knowing Alice would be tended by a captive who could never escape. Because, of course, dodos can’t fly. She stole my husband from me for years. He was a prisoner, just like the mortal was.”
“Whatever helps you sleep at night, Birdie.”
A flurry of dust-scented wings, jacquard, and satin dropped down and attacked him. “You will show respect and listen!”
Jeb held up his hands in self-defense. “All right. Sheesh. I’ll listen.” It wasn’t like there was anything else he could do. Morpheus had told him that as soon as Alyssa was crowned queen, she could open the portal to the human realm. Whether Jeb believed that or not, he couldn’t do anything other than hope. He had no power here. That knowledge gnawed at his insides with each passing minute.
Settled in front of Jeb atop a mountain of lush fabric, the lory looked through the bars and grumbled to her sleeping husband, “Worthless old fezzerjub. Leave me to do all your defending. Don’t know why I ever married you.”
The dodo snorted and murmured sleepily, “Because marrying the court jester was the only way you could have a spot in the Red Court, O Darling of Dirges.” The snoring resumed.
“See how well that turned out,” she grumped, her rouged, heart-shaped lips pouting beneath the curl of her beak. “Bony little Rabid and his black heart of stone.” She preened the feathers on the back of her neck and tucked a sequined net around them.
Jeb reached over to retrieve the thimbleful of water their captor had left next to the pear slice. It was the size of a large coffee mug in his hands. He handed it off to his cellmate, who took it with her wings and gulped some down.
“Tell me something, Lori. If what you say is true . . .” Reading the defensiveness on her beaked face, he rephrased his question to save his ears. “Since you’ve chosen to share your side of the story, maybe you could tell me what role Morpheus played in Alice’s captivity.”
She patted water droplets from her lips. “He played no role at all. He was very fond of Alice and would’ve done anything to see her safely home. But the same hour he offered her advice as a caterpillar—warning her to avoid Queen Red’s castle at all costs—his metamorphosis came over him. When he emerged, fully transformed, and learned what had become of Alice, he was furious.”
“You’re trying to tell me he actually has a conscience?”
“He did where Alice was concerned.” The lory adjusted the regal robe that kept slipping from her lack of shoulders. “Morpheus used all his resources as a solitary fae and finally found her and my husband hidden away in the caves of the highest cliffs of Wonderland. Alas, it was too late for Alice by that time.” Lorina returned the thimble to Jeb, half full now.
Jeb sat up straighter, causing the cage to rock. “So why does he want to help Queen Red get another queen on the throne, when he should hate her for putting Alice in a cage for all those years?”
“Mayhap he’s angry that Grenadine didn’t try to find Alice herself once the child was captured. But Grenadine lost her memory ribbon and forgot about the child.”
“A good ruler would’ve had more than one ribbon to remind her, would’ve made sure everyone and everything was in its place.”
“My queen is a good ruler!”
Jeb winced at the ear-splitting roar.
The dodo’s snores stopped. “My vociferous wife speaks the truth, lad. Morpheus appears to be holding a grudge for what he perceives as neglect, even if it was simply an oversight.”
Jeb shook his head at all the holes in everyone’s reasoning. “No. There’s more to this than that.”
“You have good instincts, mortal knight.”
Jeb perked up at the tinkling voice. A glowing light floated through the small window in the dungeon’s heavy wooden door. Jeb stood and gripped the birdcage bars, angling his head to get a better look.
Gossamer.
The little sprite fluttered over and whispered something to the magical blue thread fixed around the wire door, letting herself inside the cage. The thread tied itself into a knot again after she’d reattached the latch behind her.
She sparkled like the lit fuse on a Roman candle as she hovered in place, studying Jeb with a sympathetic expression.
Since they were now the same size, she brought to mind a painting Jeb once saw by a Czech artist, Viktor Olivia. He was most famous for his depiction of a fairy who seduced men into getting drunk on absinthe. Gossamer embodied that creature: a woman’s perfect form, dusted green and naked with glistening scales covering her like a string bikini.
He had sensed when he left the mirrored hall that she was on his and Alyssa’s side.
“You came to help,” he said, hopeful.
A copper key, the same color as her eyes and almost the full length of her torso, swung from her neck. Her gaze dropped to her dainty feet, as if she were battling herself. “I would’ve been here sooner, but Morpheus is always watching in the looking glass. Now that he’s with Alyssa, preparing her for her coronation, he will be too busy to keep an eye on the rest of us . . . until the end.”
“The end?” Jeb gripped the bar next to her, intent on her dragonfly gaze. “You have to tell me—everything.”
The sprite glared at Lorina, who’d been inching toward the wire door. “You well know you haven’t the power to leave this cage unless I open it for you.”
Huffing, the lory fluttered up to the trapeze again.
Gossamer led Jeb to the pear slice, and they both sat down. The fruity scent overpowered the stench of the dungeon and calmed him enough to hear her out.
Gossamer curled her hands over Jeb’s where they rested on his clamped knees. “I’ve already betrayed my master enough by being here, and his wrath will be great. All I can say is that, within the hour, Alyssa will be forever indentured—tethered to Wonderland for all eternity. Morpheus has planned all along to send you back, mortal knight . . . but without her.”
A vein in Jeb’s temple began to writhe like a snake on a hot plate. He leapt up and banged his head on the bars again, trying to shake loose the taunting blue thread, unable to control the helpless fury boiling through him. More blood dripped along his temple. “You have to get me out! I’ve got to stop this!”
“Yes, yes! Us, too!” the dodo and his wife piped up. “We must help Queen Grenadine keep her crown!”
“Of course,” Gossamer said, grasping Jeb’s hand to drag him back next to her. “You will all be given the chance to fight for your loyalties.”
“But I can’t fight like this.” Jeb kicked a pear seed the size of his foot. “Did you bring an amplifying pastry?”
“No. It is not the strength of your body that will save Alyssa, but the strength of your artist’s heart. Though I can assure you, you won’t be leaving this place in your present form.”
The lory dropped down from her perch and scowled at the sprite. “Now, you listen here, little mimsy silverfish. This boy has no part to play. He’s secondary at best. I am the queen’s handmaid, and Charlie is the court jester. We should be your priority. We’re honored members of the royal court, the only ones who can put a stop to this travesty!”
Accelerating her wings to a misty blur, Gossamer floated and placed her hands on her hips. “For your part, Lorina, you can unlock your husband’s chains, as I need to speak to the mortal alone and have little tolerance for iron.” She opened the cage’s door and handed off the key.
The lory went fluttering out in a flurry of flamboyance and ill temperament.
“Come, come, Sweetness of Savagery,” Charlie encouraged his wife as she fluttered all around him, bouncing up and down, unable to maintain altitude. “Hurry, would you? The iron is stinging. Oh, really! It’s not so very hard . . . do try again!”
Lorina’s face fired even redder. “You try using a key the same size as your head with a wing tip, flufflesnot! Some of us weren’t blessed with fingers, you know.”
While the couple was preoccupied, Gossamer sat next to Jeb again.
“You said my artist’s heart can save Alyssa,” he whispered. “In the room at Morpheus’s mansion, too . . . you said I have power within my artist’s heart—a light that can pierce any darkness. My girlfriend is about to be dead to me and her family. It doesn’t get any darker than that.” Frustrated tears singed the corners of his eyes.
“Would you die for her, mortal knight?”
Jeb’s spine stiffened. In th
e past, each time he’d protected Alyssa, he’d just jumped in without a thought. Would he die for her?
When his dad was killed in an accident, it was Alyssa who saved him. He couldn’t believe he’d ever considered living in London without her. He needed her, every day. Her understanding smile, the way she made his scars feel like medals of valor under her touch, and her incredible eyes. Even though she’d seen just as much disappointment in her life as he had, there was a light inside her that never dimmed. And not only did it make her beautiful on the outside, but that same light allowed her to bring life to the incredible mosaics she made.
It was that light—both inner and outer—that had driven him to sketch and paint her over and over again.
He looked at Gossamer, hardly able to contain his emotions now that they’d been given an outlet. “She’s my best friend.” My muse, my brush, my artistry, my heart. All of it’s dead without her. “I love her.” Scrubbing his face, he smeared the moisture that had crept from his eyes along his cheeks. “Yes, I would die for her. Is that what I have to do?”
The sprite stared back, unblinking. “Are you willing to go beyond death? To be lost to everyone, even yourself, in a place where memories wash away on a tide as dark as ink? For in order to free Alyssa, you will have to take the Ivory Queen’s place in the jabberlock box where she’s trapped.”
Jeb pictured the dark water in the box he’d seen in the mirrored hall at Morpheus’s mansion—the ghostly head inside—and his heartbeat stumbled. Self-preservation kicked in, his mind racing to find another way. But in the deepest part of him, he knew there was no alternative, and time was running out for Al. His only regret was that he wouldn’t get to tell her how he felt just once with his own voice before it was locked away forever. “I’ll do it.”