Wrathful Wonderland

by Eva Chase

  She hadn’t come here looking to wear a crown, though. She hadn’t meant to stay more than a couple of weeks. She wouldn’t be the Lyssa who lingered in my mind even while she was gone if she hadn’t cared so deeply for her loved ones in the Otherland.

  And perhaps some selfish piece of me was niggling at me about where I could possibly fit into the life of a queen, if somehow she stayed.

  Chess sidled closer to me, rubbing his hand over his auburn hair. He appeared to have fully recovered from his lapse in that field of vicious grass, but then, I suspected this was the sort of revelation that would shock any other emotion right out of your system. His gaze kept creeping back to the cave entrance too.

  “Well, now we know why the Queen of Hearts was so obsessed with the idea that the Otherlanders named Alice were after her throne,” I remarked. “Even if she thought the princess was dead, it’d be hard to see that name as a coincidence. Especially when you’re a raging lunatic.”

  “But not a lunatic on that score,” Chess said glibly. “She wasn’t being paranoid. They really were the echoes of her past come to haunt her.”

  “Not on purpose,” I couldn’t help pointing out. I’d thought we were putting a lot on Lyssa just telling her about the Queen and the rebellion against her. This… She’d simply looked stunned as she’d followed the Red Knight to retrieve whatever he’d been keeping in that cave.

  Theo’s arms were crossed over his chest in a pose that looked uncharacteristically defensive, but when he spoke, his voice was as steady and assured as always. “Accepting this new role is a lot for Lyssa to deal with. We need to rally behind her, show her that she has all our support.”

  “White Knight?” Dum took a step back from where he’d been gazing across the field beyond the curved hill. “We might need to rally right now, for other reasons.”

  The ground shuddered as we spun around. A burbling cry carried across the field as not one but two jabberwocks charged across the thick grass toward us. Their eyes blazed with a white-hot fire, and smoke gushed from their maws like a rapid dog’s drool. Their huge feathered bodies shook with fury.

  We hadn’t provoked that fury. The Knave and his remaining guard rushed from the square of night after them, the Knave cracking a whip across one jabberwock’s tail and then the other. I didn’t know where he’d found the creatures or how he’d gained control, but he was driving them now as surely as the wind in that patch of darkness had driven us.

  At the next lash, flames belched from the jabberwocks’ jaws, charring the grass in front of them in an instant. The acrid stink of the smoke clogged my nose. Doria let out a shriek, more terrified than I’d ever heard her. With the thump of racing footsteps and the clank of aged armor, Lyssa and the Red Knight burst from the cave.

  My body went rigid. Two monsters—four if you counted the Knave and his man, which I would—were barreling toward every person in this world I still gave a damn about. My daughter, my lover, my friends…

  A dizzying surge of emotion crackled through my nerves right into my head, hazing my vision, jolting me into action in a way I hadn’t felt since I’d left the Spades, probably not since that last night—

  I threw myself away from the memory and out of the shadows under the hill. My fingers closed around the base of one of the hair pins tucked into my jacket and yanked it free. The hard thin length felt good in my hand, but it wasn’t going to stop a jabberwock.

  My legs carried me on instinct, close enough to one jabberwock to wave the hair pin almost under its snout, leaping out of the way when it snorted another sputter of fire. “Dad!” Doria yelled, but her horrified voice only propelled me onward.

  Now the jabberwock was pissed off at me. It thundered after me with a hissing rustle of its wings and another burbling moan. I was counting on the story I’d heard that those wings were only for show, that they couldn’t actually hold the creature’s massive body up. If that was wrong, well, in a minute I’d be cinders and jabberwock chow.

  I veered around the far side of the hill and scrambled up its slope. The jabberwock hurtled after me over the thinner grass. My feet slipped on the steepest section, sending me to my knees. I scrambled up and hurled myself onward as flames singed my heels. Up, up, and then skidding down past the crest of the wave toward the sudden drop…

  I almost misjudged my speed and toppled right over myself. At the last second, I tossed myself sideways and managed to grab hold of a ridge of rock protruding through the soil.

  The jabberwock was too blinded by rage to notice the hill ended. It careened on over the edge—and plummeted down.

  Its wings flapped frantically but barely caught the air. It tumbled head first and hit the ground below with a skull-cracking thump. Its body sprawled, the smoke dissipating around its crumpled snout.

  Adrenaline from the dash coursed through me. I heaved myself to my feet. Down below, the others had scattered in the wake of the other jabberwock—and the Knave and his man were taking advantage of the chaos. Doria had ended up at the edge of the hill’s shadow, and the guard was racing toward her with sword drawn.

  Fuck, no. “Dee!” I shouted with all the air in my lungs. “Catch me.”

  His redhaired form appeared just beneath me. I sucked in a breath and jumped without a second thought.

  We might not have pulled off this specific move in over ten years, but it seemed our bodies hadn’t forgotten. My feet hit his arms in just the right spot, and he catapulted me toward Doria. I braced myself as I landed on the earth and whipped around.

  The guard had diverted to another target, but the Knave was lunging at us now, dagger clutched in his hand and a killing glint in his beady eyes. I only had an instant to react. In that instant, my arms shot up. I slammed the hair pin into the vulnerable flesh just above his collarbone.

  The Knave still managed to hack at me with his dagger. It raked across my sleeve as I jerked out of the way. Blood welled up through the cut he’d landed, but a lot more blood was bubbling from his throat.

  A gurgle escaped his bulging neck. His face turned even grayer. He tried to sputter something over his jagged teeth, but the words didn’t come. With a shudder, he slumped at my feet.

  “For the honor of the Reds!” the Red Knight was hollering. He stabbed his sword into the guard’s gut, and the other man keeled over. Lyssa had leapt in front of the jabberwock. Its head was weaving from side to side, that manic flame still dancing in its eyes, but she’d brought it to a halt.

  “Go!” she said, waving a large wand with a ruby at its end. The last artifact, I supposed. “Go back to wherever you came from. We don’t want to hurt you, but I can’t let you hurt any of us either. Go on!”

  I tensed as the jabberwock lurched toward her, but it was only heaving itself into a turn. It wheeled around and loped back across the field.

  Dum was lying on the ground, clutching a burnt spot on his side, but his gaze was clear, his breaths coming steady. From the bruise forming on Theo’s jaw, he’d taken a blow or two. Nothing too serious, though.

  We were all alive. We’d survived.

  Everyone on my side, anyway. My gaze fell to the blood-soaked grass around the Knave’s limp body, and my stomach flipped over. The adrenaline high that had carried me through the fight was fading, and queasiness churned beneath it.

  “Well, now,” Chess said with a grin, clapping me on the shoulder. “There’s the Mad Hatter we all loved. I knew you couldn’t have lost your grip on insanity completely.”

  Doria was staring at me. At the bloodstained hair pin still clutched in my hand. I dropped it. I had another one in my jacket.

  Resolve formed around my nausea. I hadn’t had a real choice. I’d protected her—I’d protected Lyssa, and all the others too. I had to keep doing that until nothing in this land still threatened them.

  If someone had to fall, better it was me than them.

  Theo had knelt to see to Dum, who was smearing salve on his burnt flesh now. The White Knight straightened up now. He took in o
ur fallen enemies.

  “We’ve bought ourselves a little time,” he said. “But there’ll be a new Knave risen; there’ll be more guards. If we want to make the most of this advantage, we’d better get on that train and back to the city while there’s still a chance no one there has put two and two together.”

  Night had fallen long before we made it back to the city. The clouds congealing in the sky overhead turned the landscape even darker. A faint drizzle came down through the damp air as we waited for Dee to return with the ally the White Knight had sent him to collect.

  Doria stepped closer to me, tugging nervously on her dark hair. This was her first rainfall.

  The twin came into view with a woman at his side whom I recognized from the recent Spades meetings. She studied our group with curious eyes where we stood amid the trees near the road outside town.

  “What’s the word since I’ve been gone?” Theo asked.

  The woman’s lips pursed. “The Queen has taken more people from the city each day, as she promised. Three yesterday, five today.” Her gaze slid to Chess. “The guards are out looking for Cheshire now too.”

  Theo grimaced. “The Knave sent word back one way or another, then. They’ll be waiting to haul all of us in. All right, we’ll simply—”

  “No,” the woman broke in. “It’s just Chess. The call went out just this afternoon. They’re saying the Duchess made a claim that he’s a traitor.”

  I only caught Chess’s brief stiffening because I was already looking at him. A second later, it was gone. “Well,” he said, “if it was going to be anyone, it may as well be me, seeing as I’m the only one here who can vanish quite literally.”

  The drizzle picked up speed, droplets flecking my face. I adjusted my suit jacket. Chess’s shoulders hunched slightly under the rain, the only sign that it bothered him.

  “You could come back to my place for the night,” I said. “I have room. We have the White Knight’s alarm system in place. You still get wet even if you’re out of sight, don’t you?”

  Chess shrugged. “Not if I remove myself from the source of the wetness. Offer appreciated but unneeded, Hatter. I think I’ll go take a closer lay of the land.”

  He brushed Lyssa’s arm in a farewell gesture and faded away.

  “You would not believe what we found out on that trip,” Dee started saying to the woman, excitement dancing in his eyes. “The—”

  “Dee,” Lyssa said quickly. “I think I’d like some more time to figure out how I’m going to handle this situation before we tell anyone else. There’ll be a lot of questions… I want to be able to answer them.”

  Dee glanced at Theo, as if he needed the White Knight’s approval to follow Lyssa’s request. The request of his probable future queen.

  And Theo gave it, as if he had that authority. He dipped his head. “We’ll meet tomorrow. For now, I’m sure we all need our rest, in proper beds.” He turned to Lyssa. “You could stay in the Tower tonight if you’d like.”

  Lyssa’s arms came up to hug herself. “The Knave almost caught me there before,” she said. “At Hatter’s, I have an easy escape route. I think I’ll stick with that for now.”

  He nodded and leaned in to kiss her, clearly suffering from no doubts himself about how he fit into her life now. In fact, something in his stance gave me the impression he was staking a claim. I swallowed a prickle of jealousy.

  “Let’s go then,” I said. “Before anyone notices us standing around out here.”

  “Where Lyssa goes, I go too,” the Red Knight announced, clicking his visor up. He’d grabbed a helmet to match his worn armor before we’d caught the train. “She is my purpose.”

  Wonderful. “Fine,” I said, waving for him to come along too.

  When we reached my building, he eyed the shop and then the main floor of the apartment grimly.

  “There’s a guest bedroom free on the third floor,” I said.

  “No,” the Red Knight said. “I will stand guard through the night.”

  “You’ve got to sleep sometime,” Lyssa pointed out. “Theo gave us a device that’ll wake us all up if anyone comes up the stairs.”

  The Red Knight hesitated. “I will rest on the sofa,” he said, pointing across the room. “So that I may be the first line of defense for your Majesty if the occasion arises.”

  Lyssa winced at the “your Majesty.” Doria hurried on up to her fourth-floor bedroom ahead of us, but Lyssa paused by the bathroom door. She looked tired, and I didn’t think it was just from the long days of travel behind us.

  I stopped outside my bedroom door. “Do you want to talk?”

  She opened her mouth and closed it again. For a second, her expression turned so haunted it made my gut clench. She tugged her gaze up to meet mine with a smile that looked forced.

  “Does it change a lot, this whole thing about me being queen?” she asked.

  Between us? Hearts take me, was that what she was worrying about? The corners of my lips quirked upward. “It hasn’t lowered my opinion of you in the slightest, I promise,” I said.

  Lyssa’s smile relaxed a little. She stepped toward me, and I met her for a kiss that sent a thrill through me even though I could tell she wasn’t looking for more in this moment. It had been an honor to make this woman tremble with delight little more than a day ago.

  She walked up the stairs with more lightness in her steps than before, but my heart still squeezed as I watched her go. I’d helped some, but was it enough? I couldn’t shake the sense that I was failing her. Maybe failing her and Doria both. I might have already failed them by stepping back from so much of who I’d been before either of them had really needed me.

  No more hanging back. No more shying from danger. From now on, I ran straight toward it.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Lyssa

  I’d had plenty of restless nights in Wonderland, but none of them half as bad as this one. The rain drummed against the window like the thoughts that wouldn’t stop nagging at me even as I buried my face in my pillow. The warm metal of the ring pressed against my breastbone under the blouse I was wearing as a nightshirt.

  I was something like the great-great-great-great-great-granddaughter of Wonderland’s rightful queen. The land fucking recognized me as its ruler, responded to me like it did no one else. There was a man resting downstairs who expected me to challenge the Queen of Hearts and then take back my family’s place on the throne. Possibly some of the people who’d been with me for that revelation expected the same thing.

  Back home, I couldn’t even convince my mom not to fret about me constantly. How the hell was I going to command an entire country?

  Could I just run away from all this like Aunt Alicia had? My stomach knotted at the thought. Ten innocent people were sitting in the Queen’s dungeon right now waiting to have their heads chopped off. Hatter, Chess, Theo, and the others could have lost theirs just for helping me in my quest, which they’d done before they’d had a clue I was anything other than a wayward Otherlander. What kind of person would I be if I let them keep suffering when I had the ability to change that?

  Also, there was the slight complication of having no available means to get home at the moment.

  Stewing over it wasn’t making my mind any clearer. If I could just get to sleep, maybe I’d feel less confused in the morning.

  I tipped from my front onto my side, and a sharper rapping joined the patter of the rain against the window. My heart stuttered. I jerked upright, my hand shooting toward the ruby-set sword I’d left on top of the covers next to me.

  Thunder rumbled, and a flash of lightning caught on auburn hair and high cheekbones as the figure outside leaned close to the glass. It was only Chess.

  A short laugh sputtered out of me. I scrambled off the bed and unlatched the window to push it open.

  Chess slipped inside, his wet clothes plastered to his brawny form, his darkened hair sending droplets over his pale face. When I grasped his elbow to help him in, the fabric chilled my
fingers. A puddle of rainwater formed on the floor beneath him in an instant. He held his body tight, but a shiver he couldn’t restrain rippled through him.

  “I rethought Hatter’s offer,” he said, with a click of his teeth as if he’d snapped them shut to stop them from chattering.

  “Stay right there,” I ordered him. I switched on the bedside lamp and hustled down the hall as quietly as I could. No need to wake up the whole apartment.

  I grabbed a couple of towels from the stack in the fourth-floor bathroom and carried them back to the bedroom. Chess tugged one tight around his torso and rubbed the other over his hair. A little color came into his cheeks as he started to warm up.

  “You know, there are these things called doors,” I said.

  He gave me a crooked grin. “I figured it was better to come in the back way rather than set off the White Knight’s alarm downstairs and throw you all into a panic.”

  Okay, he had a point there. “You couldn’t find anywhere to get out of the rain?” I asked. He’d never actually mentioned any kind of a home. Where did he usually spend his nights?

  Chess shrugged. “Nowhere with company I wanted to keep. I have to admit, rain is not quite as delightful as I recalled. Maybe there’s a better sort, but this kind is entirely too wet.” He made a face at his still-drenched clothes. Another shiver ran through his body. I touched his hand and winced at how cold his skin felt.

  “Come on,” I said, deciding this wasn’t the time to be worrying about modesty or people getting the wrong idea. “Take those wet clothes off and get under the covers before you catch hypothermia.”

  Despite his shivering, Chess raised his eyebrows, mischief glinting in his bright blue eyes. “You’re asking me to strip and hop in bed?”