by A. G. Howard
The sprites drop from above, trying to run interference. Morpheus spreads his wings wide to block me and Jeb from the attack. Spears hit his wings, stretching them but not breaking through. My palms flatten against Morpheus’s back, absorbing the shock as his muscles strain with every swing of his mallet. His grunts drown out the clatter of guards hitting the floor.
“Get her out of here!” he shouts over his shoulder as he backs us toward the secret exit to the mirrored room, still using his wings as a barrier.
Jeb grips my elbow and drags me over the threshold.
“No!” I wrestle against him. “We can’t just leave him to fight alone. There are too many!”
Gritting his teeth, Jeb scoops me up over his shoulder. “He’s handling them. And you’re all that matters.” His arm locks around my thighs, my head and torso hanging upside down across his back. The winding black marble stairway bounces by beneath us, and blood races to my head.
I squeeze my eyes closed, listening to the battle in the dining hall grow farther and farther away.
The memory of how Morpheus and I played in our childhood, of the way he healed my bruises today, the sound of his beautiful lullaby—all of it boils over in a confusing brew of emotion. I think of the wish tucked within his jacket … the wish he wanted me to have for some reason. If I had it now, I’d wish to be in the dining hall, helping Morpheus fight.
I’m just about to make an escape attempt when I hear the sound of pots and pans clanging.
“Twinkle! Twinkle them all!”
Next there’s a rush of screeches and roars—the same bestial voices I heard at the feast. The beasts have returned from their chase, and Morpheus is no longer alone in his fight.
Jeb and I slip through the secret passageway leading up another flight of stairs. Soon, we’re far enough away that the only sound is his boots pounding the mirrored floor.
“You can put me down now,” I grump.
“I don’t know. It’s a lot easier to save your ass when I have it riding on my shoulder.”
“You don’t need to save me.”
Jeb barks a sarcastic laugh. “I don’t have much choice when you keep running headfirst into risky situations for this crusade of yours. Now you’ve gone and dropped us smack into the middle of a magical war.”
I pound him. Right between the shoulder blades.
“Hey …” He eases my feet to the floor so we’re facing each other and rubs his back. In spite of his frown, he looks impressed.
My knuckles are throbbing. The guy could put a boulder to shame. “I already feel bad enough for bringing you into this. Okay? If I had it to do over, you wouldn’t be here at all.” I shake out my fingers. Gossamer hasn’t come yet to open the mirror portal, and an urgency to get to the tea party jitters through me.
Jeb lifts my aching knuckles and presses his lips across them. “I’d still want to be here with you, even if we had do-overs. But if we’re going to make it out of this, you need to stop taking moth man at his word like he’s some kind of saint.”
“His name is Morpheus.” My throat clenches as I’m reminded of what’s happening some three flights down. “Do you think he’s losing in there? You think they’ll hurt him?”
“Why are you so worried about him?”
“I grew up with him. I care.”
“That makes no sense. It was in your dreams. Your friendship wasn’t real.”
“It feels real. Because he believes in me. He lets me take chances and learn from them. That’s something a friend does.” Clenching my jaw, I glare at Jeb.
His features darken, as if a shadow falls across his face. “So, because the freak boosts your ego, you’re willing to overlook all his lies? He hasn’t told the truth about anything since we’ve arrived.”
“Then he fits in well with you, seeing as you’re both liars.” I hate the accusation in my voice but can’t seem to contain it. I break our handhold, noticing the bag on the table—the one containing the jabberlock box. “Why’s this still here?”
Frowning, Jeb steps up next to me as I unwrap the box. “Probably the safest place. You shouldn’t mess with it.”
“I want another look at the inscription.” I’d like another look at the queen, too. What is it about her that holds Morpheus so enthralled?
Jeb covers the lid with his palm. “You know, you can’t just call someone a liar and let it drop. Maybe I wasn’t honest about London. But you lied, too.”
The moth spirits skim by in my peripheral vision, as if riding my racing pulse. “Not about my feelings. You waited until we came down here to own up to your so-called crush on me. Back in the real world, where it counts, you chose Taelor.”
He forces me to face him, pushing the hatbox to the back of the table. “Where’s this coming from? Has that cockroach been swimming inside your brain again?”
“No. But Gossamer was in yours when you were knocked out. And she saw you dreaming of another girl. When you kissed me … it was just to convince me to give this up and go home so you could get back to Tae.”
“What?” His fingers feel hot and tight even through my sleeves. “The dream I had was of Jen and Mom. I’m worried about them.”
“Right,” I say, wanting to be convinced but not quite there.
He jerks away and strides to the other end of the hall, silent and stoic.
My arms chill with the absence of his touch. The pain is crushing, but I’m glad I said something. I would’ve had that doubt forever, thinking I was stealing kisses meant for another girl. I drag the pewter hatbox toward me again, concentrating on the lid’s inscription to keep the hot tears behind my eyes from flooding out. If I focus and unfocus through the blur, the letters move, forming legible text. I trail it with my fingertip and whisper the words:
“Behold the box of jabberlock’s, the fairest rests inside. But free the dame and ease her pain to slip into her tide. An ocean red from bonds of love, and paint the roses’ hearts thereof, applied with wisps of finest strand and guided by an artist’s hand. One trade of souls will shut the door, and blood shall seal it, evermore.”
“It is the key to freeing the queen if you’re not the one who imprisoned her.” Gossamer’s chiming voice pulls me out of my meditation. “Individualized to the box’s inhabitant.” She lights on my shoulder so I can see her up close—a woman’s perfect form, dusted green and naked but for the strategic placement of glistening scales. Her hands rest on her hips. “An ocean red from bonds of love.” Her dragonfly eyes glitter. “The roses must be painted with the blood of someone willing to trade places with her for the noblest of reasons. Love initiates the transfer.”
The famous Lewis Carroll scene passes through my mind—the card guards painting the roses red in the garden to keep from being beheaded. How ironic, that in this Wonderland, someone could lose their head forever by painting the roses upon this box.
“So Morpheus wasn’t completely honest,” I say. “There’s another way to free her and open the portal. It’s not just up to the person who put her there.” Jeb is standing behind my reflection, his expression smug. I can almost hear the “I told you so” emanating through his eyes.
“It isn’t such an easy decision,” Gossamer scolds, then lifts off my shoulder, wings buzzing. “Once the trade is made, no one can ever free the replacement soul. The blood makes the seal permanent, eternally. One trade of souls will shut the door, and blood shall seal it, evermore.”
“So, what you’re saying”—Jeb steps up—“is that it has to be an unselfish love. Which Morpheus is incapable of giving. He lacks that kind of courage.”
Gossamer flaps her wings in midair, arms crossed over her chest. “My master has a great capacity for courage. He saved my life once.” She glances at the hall’s entrance and back again. “No one knows what he or she is capable of until things are at their darkest. That is why the key to opening the box is the essence of the heart. Therein lies the world’s most potent power.” Her cryptic words hang in the air.
She ducks beneath the table and drags out my dad’s army knife, leaving it by Jeb’s foot. He tucks the weapon into his pocket. I want to ask what the sprite means about a heart’s essence, about the dark. I want to ask how Morpheus and the solitary netherlings are faring downstairs. But my tongue is tied up in the jabberlock poem and Jeb’s reaction to my questions.
Gossamer has us face one of the mirrors, and she touches the glass with a fingertip. The moth spirits vanish from the in-between plane, flying into other mirrors along the walls.
Palm splayed over the reflective surface, the sprite initiates that same splintering effect I saw in the cheval glass in my bedroom. A long table filled with pastries and teacups appears in the mirror, sitting under a tree in front of a country cottage that’s shaped like a rabbit’s head—complete with chimneys for ears and a fur-thatched roof. It looks as if the sun has overpowered the moon this time, because daylight shimmers on the surroundings. With a key almost the size of her forearm, Gossamer unlocks the portal, smoothing the glass.
Pounding footsteps echo from the adjoining hall. The fight has made its way here.
“Just go!” Gossamer prompts.
Jeb won’t even look at me as he lifts the backpack onto his shoulder, his complexion almost as green as Gossamer’s. I leap through the mirror, more desperate to escape my hurt and confusion than anything Rabid White and the Red army could unleash.
My boots end up on a plate loaded with pastries. Once the dizziness subsides, I lift a foot and shake off some sugared crust.
Before I can explore the table I’m standing upon, something crashes into me from behind. I trip face-first into a pie filled with succulent purple berries.
“Al … I’m sorry.” Jeb lifts me by my elbows, pulling my shoulder blades into his chest. “You okay?”
I refuse to answer on the grounds that he didn’t specify physically or emotionally. With his help, I regain my footing between a plate of buttered bread and a bowl of candied violets. Some of the pie filling coats my mouth.
I lick it from my lips, then flap my fingertips, trying to get the sticky stuff off.
From our end of the table, the landscape we saw refracted in the mirror is in full view. The bunny-shaped cottage sits on a hill—a green and lush oasis smack in the midst of a desert. Sand dunes in the distance look like a chessboard—squares of black and white like the ones I’m always tripping over in my nightmare. I yearn for a canvas and raw materials so I can capture the warped vista forever.
A temperate breeze sways my braids, birds twitter in a mulberry tree overhead, and sunlight warms my shoulders. It reminds me so much of Pleasance that a wave of homesickness crashes over me. I wish I could talk to Dad; even more, I wish I could hug him.
It’s Saturday. At least I think it is. If I were home, Dad would be grilling steaks. I’d fix a fruit salad, because it’s my job to see that he eats well-balanced meals.
What if I can’t pull this off and get back home? Alison will blame herself forever and plunge into the deep end for real. Shock treatments will make her worse. Then Dad will be sitting alone in the kitchen eating cold cereal with nothing but his grief to keep him company. And then there’s Jeb’s mom and Jenara. His job at Underland helps pay the monthly bills. They rely on him. What will they do without him?
If I screw this up, I screw it up for everybody.
Jeb—still behind me—offers a napkin. I wipe my face and mumble, “Why didn’t you land at the other end of the table?”
“It was occupied.” Jeb turns me around.
I nearly choke at the sight of the tea party guests—Herman Hattington, March Hairless, and Door Mouse—all seated at the far corner and frozen solid beneath thick, glittering sheets of bluish gray ice.
“Mothra has a twisted definition of asleep,” Jeb says.
Morpheus has a twisted definition of everything. Shaking my head, I start toward them. As I step over the teapot’s spout, steam licks my calf, dampening my leggings. Hattington and his crew are suspended like glaciers, but the food looks fresh and the tea’s still hot.
“Where’s that pepper?” I hold out my hand. It’s awkward playing at teamwork. My family’s been in upheaval mode since I can remember, but at least over the last few years, I’ve had Jeb’s friendship to count on. Now it’s hanging by some weird emotional thread; I don’t know whether to believe him or Morpheus. It was easier to be mad up in the real world, when I knew for sure that he’d chosen Taelor.
Jeb digs the bag from his pocket. I loosen the ribbon while breathing through my mouth. I won’t chance inhaling any of it. Just the faded scent of the pepper on the fans and gloves was enough to make me almost sneeze.
Sneeze …
That must be what Morpheus intended with this little bag of spice.
“You’re not going to waste it on trying to make the hat guy sneeze, are you?” Jeb asks. “He’s an ice sculpture. There’s not even an opening where his nostrils should be. And there’s only enough pepper for one dose. We have to be sure.”
It’s uncanny how well he reads me at times, yet is so oblivious at others.
Tying the bag shut, I hand it back. He’s right. We’ll never be able to wake Hattington with pepper. He doesn’t even have a nose. I edge closer. He’s holding up a cup of steaming tea, as if he was in the middle of punctuating a point with it.
“Jeb, something’s not right with his face. It’s just a blank space of nothing.” The glittery, bluish gray void reflects my likeness, more unsettling than a stranger’s frozen snarl would be.
“Maybe the ice is so thick, it covers his features,” Jeb says.
“I don’t know. But check out that hat.” It could be a medieval torture device—part top hat/part cage—made of metal pins with a hinged flap at the crown that’s open like a lid. On second glance, the metal’s actually growing out of his head like bones. The cage pokes through holes in his flesh, just like the chess piece in Morpheus’s room.
“A conformateur,” Jeb says, his voice tense. “He’s got a conformateur sprouting out of his head.”
Most people wouldn’t know about a nineteenth-century tool used for customizing hats to fit specific head shapes, but Jenara has one in her room. Persephone ran across it at an estate sale once and, knowing Jen’s love for anything fashion related, bid low on it and just happened to win because no one there knew the value of the artifact.
The ribbed metal frame molds around a customer’s head where a hat brim would sit, and the pins conform to the ridges and bumps of the skull. An oval of cardboard is inserted into the hinged lid and pressed into place at the crown, causing the pins to punch holes in the shape of the head. It forms a pattern the hatmaker can use to custom-fit a hat to that individual.
Why this one is physically attached to Herman’s skull is beyond me, and I don’t even want to imagine how he uses it in his craft.
I force my attention from his reflective face and turn to the “hare,” who is twelve kinds of hideous. Mostly because he seems to be turned inside out—no fur, only gaunt flesh. It’s like looking at a skinned rabbit. But at least he has a face. His expression is demented, with a wild glint in his white eyes. A teacup balances atop a pastry on his plate. His paw is tucked into the cup from his wrist down, as if he’s dunking something.
Of the three guests, the mouse is the only one that looks normal. If a mouse wearing a doorman’s jacket could be considered normal.
“I don’t know how to solve this,” I say. “They’re all frozen, so how do we make them all sneeze with one dash of pepper?”
Jeb shakes his head. “Let’s look at the book.” He wades through place settings and steps from the table to an empty chair. Pushing aside a rickety, three-tiered tea wagon, he drops to the grass. “Come here,” he says, urging me to take his hand as he sits at the table and settles the backpack next to him.
I let him help me down but pull free the instant my feet hit the ground. Blotting the remaining berry juice off my face with a cloth napkin, I check my clothes to make
sure they’re clean. “I’m hungry.” An understatement. I’m famished. And I can’t remember the last time I ate something.
“Well, we shouldn’t eat this stuff.” Jeb gestures to the tea party spread. “Who knows what it might do to us?” He finds an energy bar in the backpack and hands me half. He motions to an empty chair next his. Instead, I take another one two places down. He stares hard at me while we eat; the only sounds are the rattling wrapper, the birds, and the breeze.
Avoiding his gaze, I count the peach and gray stripes in my leggings. My legs are starting to remind me of peppermint sticks. Tasty, curvy peppermint sticks.
My mouth waters.
What’s wrong with me? I need to be helping Jeb figure things out, but all I can think of is food.
After I wolf down the last of my bar, the hunger still hasn’t abated. I remember how good that purple stuff tasted and wish I’d never fallen into that pie to begin with.
On the other hand, it must’ve been hilarious to watch. I picture myself tumbling into the pastry and snicker out loud.
“What’s so funny?” Jeb asks. He has the Wonderland novel open on his lap and drops the last of his snack into his mouth.
“Nothing.” Another bout of giggles tickles me. This wave is so strong, I bite my inner cheeks to keep from giving in.
Oblivious, Jeb flips a few pages. “It says in chapter seven that the Dormouse kept falling asleep at the party, and the Hatter poured hot tea on its nose to wake it. The passage is underlined, so maybe that’s a hint. What do you think?”
“I think the mouse must’ve had a nose for tea.” I slap a hand over my lips, embarrassed by the senseless reply.
“Okay. Enough pretending everything’s cool.” Jeb drops the book into the backpack along with the wrapper. He comes over and catches my chin, lifting my gaze to his. “You really think I faked wanting to kiss you?”
An odd sense of playfulness blossoms inside me, completely inappropriate for the seriousness of our situation. “Ah-ah-ah, elfin knight.” I peel out of his grasp and jump to my feet—flirty, giddy, and totally not myself. “You’re not to touch my precious booty, remember? Get thee behindeth me, Jebbeth.” I swivel my back to him.
