“Because you’ve lived here for years,” the feline agreed. “Meaning that, whoever snuck in here unnoticed, must’ve had inside knowledge of the castle, and it’s likely this was someone who lived here. Are you following my deduction, princess, or is it too hard for you?”
“I’m not a princess. And yes, I’m following, I’m not a complete idiot.” I crossed my arms in front of my chest.
“I was starting to doubt it.” The feline jumped down from the beam, landing on the floor. “But even if you’ve lived here, and you know the palace like the back of your hand, you need motive. Motive for two things. One, raise an army of cards that starts raiding towns for reasons unknown. Two, sneak into the bedroom of a princess—excuse me, lady-in-waiting—and kill her chambermaid, and leave behind the world’s creepiest calling card.” While he spoke, the Cat walked further down the hallway, forcing me to follow along. “Now, who was the motive, and the means?”
Again, my mind conjured up memories of Derrick. Of him performing card tricks so spectacular they bordered on magic, but nothing like this, nothing like creating an army out of life-sized cards.
“But Derrick is dead…” The sentence stretched on in the silence of the nightly hallway. There was only one person I could think of who was obsessed with playing cards, who might have possessed the magic needed for such a feat—with the focus on ‘might’—and who hated me enough to try and kill me.
When Derrick died, did he know it was Celia who talked him to the gallows, or did he think I did it out of jealousy? That they had hurt me so much when I caught them making out, that I had ratted them out to the King just to appease my own broken heart?
“And I told you,” the Cheshire Cat said, waggling its tail. “What is dead, if not the beginning. What if dead is not dead? What if dead is actually… alive?”
Just as it said that last sentence, the Cat disappeared again, leaving only its ear-to-ear smile.
Then, from behind that smile, I saw the contours of something breaking free from the wall. A shadow, similar to the one that had been stalking me in the maze. Towering above me, square shoulders, a flat body like a playing card…
I wanted to scream but no sound came out.
As the card, decorated with red hearts, freed itself from the wall, all the blood froze in my veins.
“D…” The name died on my tongue.
The first boy I had ever loved. It was him, but at the same time, it wasn’t. His head was attached to a playing card, the Knave of Hearts to be exact, and so were his arms and legs, poking out from under the card in a grotesque, sickening way.
He was an abomination, a freak, a circus act gone wrong. The glue keeping his head on top of the card had already started to become undone, and his arm hung next to his body limply, suffering from the same glue-deficiency.
“Wh—what happened to you?” I held my hands out in front of me, backing away, without being able to peel my eyes from him.
He had been beautiful once. Now, his skin was greying, sickly. Dead.
Like Frankenstein’s monster, someone had grabbed parts of his body and stuck them to this card, and given him life. Like Humpty Dumpty, someone had taken the broken parts of the boy I had once loved, and put them together again to form an abomination.
“What happened to me?” The thing that had once been Derrick repeated my question, followed by a dry laugh. “You know what happened to me, Regina. You watched it from your bedroom window.”
I backed away from him, locking my arms around myself. “No. No. You’re dead. You should be dead!”
“Yes,” Derrick agreed. “I should be dead. They killed me here on this very courtyard.” He gestured to the window. “Chopped off my head. The King likes to chop off heads for no reason in particular. It wasn’t like I had even done something wrong.”
“I know.” I licked my lips, trying to keep calm. If he had killed Bella, he was capable of anything, and I should avoid giving him any more reason to hate me. “I know you’ve done nothing wrong. We wronged you. My family wronged you.” Tears sprang in my eyes. “I’m sorry, Derrick. I’m sorry I couldn’t stop them.”
The man who had once been Derrick shook his head. “You didn’t even try. I thought you were my friend, Regina, but the moment I needed you the most, you were cowering away behind your bedroom window. No betrayal has ever hurt me that deep.”
I wanted to yell at him that his betrayal, with Celia, had hurt me too, that it had crushed my heart in more ways than one, but that seemed all so insignificant compared to what had happened to him.
“But I saw you die… How can you be here?” Part of me believed, or hoped, I had stumbled into a nightmare and I just needed to find a way to wake up, and then everything would be all right again. Frankenstein-esque monsters didn’t just turn up in the hallway in the middle of the night, not even in Wonderland. I would’ve been less surprised if a freaking Jabberwocky waltzed in through the door.
“A good Samaritan brought me back to life. Someone who understands Red Magic perhaps even better than I do. Who thought me how I could use the recently deceased to build an army of cards—I’m slightly disappointed you didn’t figure it out sooner, given how obsessed I was with card tricks when we were younger.”
When he spoke like that, and he seemed less like a monster, I saw glimpses of the old Derrick in him. Glimpses of the person he had once been, while he was still alive.
“What do you want from me?” I asked him. If he wasn’t working alone, then who else was behind this?
“Vengeance. Payback. I wanted you to suffer as I have suffered. But then Cheshire here, told me an interesting little story.”
He pointed his thumb toward the Cheshire Cat, who had materialized again on the floor next to Derrick. How had that feline gotten messed up in all this? And whose side was the Cat really on—good or bad? Were there even good or bad sides in this?
We’re all mad here, as my father would say.
“What story?” I asked, trying to keep my voice calm. Panicking wouldn’t do me any good right now.
“Do you know why the King sent me to die?”
I swallowed hard. “Because you were in love with Celia, and a crown princess shouldn’t date a commoner.”
“And has he ever executed any other of Celia’s boyfriends? I’m sure the line must be half an hour long by now, if not longer.”
I blinked, taken aback by his question. “I… I don’t know… I don’t think so, though.” Although he was right, Celia had waded through an impressive amount of boyfriends by now, half of them guys she made out with for one evening and then promptly forgot about the next. It was never more than a few kisses.
“You never bothered to think about that, eh?” Derrick let out a dry laugh. “Have you ever stopped to think about me for one second, after your uncle had me killed, Regina? Really?”
How could I tell him that I had spent many sleepless nights tossing and turning while thinking about him? That I had missed him like one would miss a limb? But the boy I had missed, and the man now standing in front of me, were two entirely different creatures.
“I did,” I said simply, hurt resonating in my voice. “I did think about you. A lot. But… I just figured it had gone too far, between you and Celia, and that then the King decided to do what he did.”
“No.” Derrick slammed his fist into the wall.
Someone had to wake up from all this noise, right? Why were none of the guards waking up?
“They’re all fast asleep, thanks to a mild poison, put in their wine already during dinner,” Derrick said, as if he read my mind. “It has a very slow working rate, but once it hits you, you’re out for hours. Everyone who even drank a sip of that wine, is asleep by now. But I picked red wine on purpose, knowing you would never drink that.” I hated red wine, and to realize he remembered that, made me feel inexplicitly sad. Because even if he was alive, in some form at least, he was far from the person he had once been.
“No one will come save you, so I have
all the time in the world to tell you why your dearest uncle killed me. It had nothing to do with Celia, or what happened between us. It had everything to do with something else.”
He flicked his wrist, and one of the candles on the wall lit up. “It had everything to do with that power lingering inside of me, that Red Magic eager to escape, to create and destroy.”
“Magic?” I frowned. “He killed you because of magic?”
“Stupid, right?” Derrick threw his head in his neck and laughed out loud. “I was killed because of a King, who is supposed to be the most adept magic-wielder in Wonderland, because he has no magic at all.”
I stared at him dumb-founded, my jaw almost dropping to the floor.
The King has no magic?
How come I had never noticed that? I mean, he had never bragged about it. In fact, if I thought about it, he had never even mentioned it. But I just figured that, because he was the King descending from a long line of Kings, he would have magic of some sort.
Truthfully, with my uncle’s moods being mercurial at best, I preferred to stay as far away from him as possible.
“All of you are so wonderfully ignorant,” Derrick said, his eyes sparkling in delight. “You have a King who never even performs an ounce of magic, and still you believe he can perform it, simply because tradition dictates it so. Hah!” Derrick threw his hands in the air. “You have a King without magic, and a crown princess without magic.”
My God, he was right.
Celia. If she could do magic, surely she would’ve bragged about it sometime during all those years already. Instead, she had never even mentioned the subject, avoided it at all costs.
“She came close to me on purpose,” Derrick explained. “She didn’t want me. She wanted the one thing I have, a simple commoner, that none of you royals have and you would be willing to kill for.”
Realization hit me like a thunderbolt in a storm. “She wanted your magic.”
“All of them did,” Derrick replied. “When they couldn’t get it, they killed me.”
So, he hadn’t just come back from the dead to torment and kill me. He had come back to torment and kill all of us. Everyone who had ever stood in his way, everyone who had tried to steal what was rightfully his, and when he wouldn’t give it, had murdered him.
“Will you kill me?” I was surprised at how strong my voice sounded, despite how terrified I felt. With all the guards asleep, Derrick holding a rapier and me being unarmed, and him having access to magic I could only dream of, I stood no chance against him.
“Don’t be so melodramatic.” The voice belonged to the Cheshire Cat, who was once again more preoccupied with tidying up its fur than with anything else. The cat licked its paw and then ran it through its fur. “Who said anything about killing anyone?”
“No,” Derrick said. “Not yet, at least. By the time the others wake up, I’ll have invaded the entire castle with my army. I will expose the King for the fraud he is, execute him and Celia, and execute those two White traitors.”
Caspian and Malachi. My breath got stuck in my throat. No!
“But they did nothing to you! They weren’t even here!” I yelled at him, finding my courage again.
Thinking about Bella, killed for something she had nothing to do with, fueled my anger. Imagining the princes being hurt by a man consumed by hatred, brought me to the edge of fury.
“No, and I’ll take no pleasure from their deaths,” Derrick said, as if that would make anything better. “But White and Red have to die, so that the game of chess can be wiped from the gameboard, and a new era can begin. A new game. A game of cards. With a lot more players, and with a role for a Knave as much as a King or Queen.”
So, that was his endgame. He was planning to obliterate the current world order and establish a new one. Wipe the board, start anew.
Ironically, in a way he wanted to do exactly what I had wanted to. But my plan had been built on working together, on unity, and his was built on destruction and pain.
“I won’t let you,” I said, sounding a lot more convinced than I felt. “I won’t let you kill them.” I balled my hands into fists and positioned myself right in front of him. “If you want to get to the King and to Celia, you’ll have to go through me first.”
“Urgh.” The Cheshire Cat groaned. “I was afraid you’d say that.”
“Grrr!” Derrick groaned, obviously upset with my answer. He grabbed the rapier from his side and slashed the weapon through the air, toward me.
No way was I getting out of here alive.
If I didn’t survive, no one could warn the King, or at least try to wake up the guards and raise the alarm, before the army of cards got the upper-hand on us, and before Derrick could exchange one tyrant with the next one in line.
When Derrick slashed the rapier at me again, I dropped down on the floor, rolled to the left, and slid right past him, all in one fluent motion courtesy of my father’s numerous hours training me in combatant skills: most importantly, the noble skill of self-preservation. Father never trained me for war, but he thought me enough tricks to get out of sticky situations with boys with bad intentions.
Derrick stumbled forward; he seemed surprised I had managed to sneak past him.
After shooting one last glance at the monster who had murdered my friend, I did what any daughter of a world-famous Jabberwocky-slaying hero would do.
I grabbed the Cheshire Cat and in one fluent motion, threw the feline against the playing card.
The Cat, as I had predicted, panicked and started clawing at Derrick, who in turn, dropped his rapier.
I bent down and grabbed the rapier, but when I stood up straight again, something pointy pricked in my back.
“I didn’t want to do this, Regina,” a familiar voice said. “But you’ve given me no choice. You’re either with us or against us.”
The blood turned to ice in my veins. Tears sprang in my eyes. No, no, no.
I didn’t want to turn around. I didn’t want to see the abomination standing behind me.
Derrick had discarded the Cheshire Cat, throwing the feline on the ground next to him. Even from his position on the floor, he was laughing, a wicked, terrible laugh that hurt me to my very core.
“Drop the weapon,” the voice behind me ordered me.
“No.” I balled my hand around the rapier, refusing to let it go. “No. I won’t.”
The sharp point of the stick pinched my side again. “I won’t ask again.”
When I didn’t move, a hand that looked awfully familiar, circled around mine and took the rapier from me. The weapon dropped to the floor.
“How can you be here?” I asked the question even though I already knew the answer.
“Turn around,” the voice said.
The voice of my best friend. The voice of the girl who had served me fatefully for years. We had grown up together, for God’s sake. I had cradled her cold, dead body in my arms just a few hours ago.
I didn’t want to turn around, but I did.
Whatever grotesque magic had turned Derrick into a monster, had done the same to her, to my Bella. Her head was stuck to a playing card, as were her arms and legs. Tears rolled down my cheeks, the pain so horrible I would’ve preferred death.
“Bella…” To say her name to something as wrong, as malignant, as this, was almost like blasphemy.
“Take her to the dungeon, with the others,” Derrick said from behind me. “Once they start waking up, you know what to do.”
Bella nodded, giving me a solemn look. What was scary was how much she seemed like my Bella—the same expressions, the same features. But she was clearly working for Derrick now…
Then, Derrick said the most sickening words I had ever heard escape his lips. “Once they start waking up, chop off their heads.”
End of Part One
Find out what happens next in
Coming soon
QUEEN’S FALL
RELEASING IN 2020
About Majanka
&n
bsp; Author Bio
Majanka Verstraete studied law and criminology, and now works as Legal Counsel. Writing is her passion ever since she learned how to read.
She writes about all things supernatural, her books ranging from children’s picture books to young adult novels, all the way to new adult academy and reverse harem books.
Check out her website for more information about her current series and her upcoming projects: http://majankaverstraete.com
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