Wonderland (Deadly Lush Book 2)

by Harper Alexander

  Since when did you compare yourself to Ophelia? Never had she felt the need before, and she hated that this little spark with Jayx suddenly brought out a whole host of insecurities that left her comparing herself to the girl she respected least of the bunch.

  Don't you ever bring Ophelia into this again. She has nothing to do with you, Jayx doesn't even like her, and you shouldn't care if he did.

  Ophelia wasn't the one who'd convinced Jayx to lead the rebellion. Wasn't the one to practice secretly breaching the island to better condition herself. Wasn’t the one to go out and fell herself a Tribal trophy to prove her ferocity. Wasn't the one to draw war paint like a statement across her body. Wasn't the one to survive a run-in with the savages without her Pulser working. Wasn't the one to battle the Tribal Queen and live to tell about it. Wasn't the one with wings.

  Wasn't the one traipsing through the jungles of Paradise now, unafraid, because she had more important convictions than sitting around sharpening weapons like it would make a difference.

  You sharpen your weapons, Ophelia, and I'll sharpen my fangs.

  *

  Settling himself in a corner of the fortress, Jayx draped an arm over a knee and waited, watching Mother Eve for signs of consciousness. So many voices screamed this was a bad idea, and yet he sat there, ignoring their warnings. Mother Eve slumped chin-to-chest, pinned and helpless and at his mercy, weak and pathetic on his turf. But a girl from across the sea had washed up on the shore of his hindered soul, drawing him out of the jungles that clouded his view of the world, and it was as if on her dying breath she had pled with him not to harm the one who had once been like a motherly figure to him.

  Cue the flashbacks to a time when he had, in fact, belonged to the Tribal Queen's fold, been part of her pack, felt her wise, guiding hands on his shoulders. To a time when his sentiments toward her had not been skewed by conscience. Once, she had fed his child mind with wonders and curiosities. Had informed him about the island, gifted him volumes of poetry, taught him about the currents – like underwater highways – leading away from the island.

  Once, she might have been grooming him to succeed her. After all, she couldn't live forever, prolonged though her life might be, and the others...the second generation Tribal were too animal to carry on the sophistication of her conspiracy. So who, if not an intelligent soul whose loyalty had been established due to his survival through them?

  And there he sat, her erstwhile prodigy, waiting for her to wake up caught in his snare.

  How the tides had turned.

  A cough rattled Mother Eve's form, and another, more bone-wrenching spell of dry-heaving followed. A string of concentrated spit was issued onto the floor.

  She was awake.

  Saying nothing, Jayx waited for her to take stock of her surroundings.

  It was not the first time he underestimated her senses. Without raising her head, she spoke.

  “One web to another. Not a transfer one usually expects to make.” Her voice was raspy and strained, but not much had been done to dampen her wit. “Dare I hazard the consolation that I find myself receiving your hospitality because you have come to your senses and could not let your queen rot at the mercy of the jungle?”

  “It wasn't me who cut you down.”

  That, at least, drew her partially out of her stupor. She peered at him through a curtain of musty dreadlocks and lingering cobwebs, hollow eye sockets lost in the ghostly grunge. Anyone else might have shivered under that creepy gaze, but he just found himself trying to remember viewing her as a maternal figure in his life.

  “And who besides my long-lost fated god-son do I find myself in the good graces of?”

  “The one who put you there.”

  If Mother Eve was surprised, it only showed in the moment it took for her to make the unexpected connection. “Lady Shiloh Asher. She's a fascinating case, isn't she? More and more so, it seems.”

  “She didn't do it for you.”

  “No?” A breathy laugh pushed through the strands of hair that fell in her face. “Who did she cut me down for, if not me? Wait, don't tell me. There's still hope that this comes down to your redemption. She cut me down for you.”

  Did she really think they didn't know about the child? More likely she was just grasping at wishful thinking, hoping she could turn this around. Manipulate him. Paint him back into someone compassionate toward her welfare.

  “Hardly.”

  “Then spare me the suspense. What notion has a hold of our slippery little Crosser girl now?”

  “Ungar's child.”

  He saw it click into place on her face, and then she ducked her head in a half-nod. “Ah. Yes. Of course, the child.”

  Jayx glanced out the fortress window, in some small way trying to distance himself from the matter at hand. But a disturbing chuckle bubbled up inside Mother Eve, drawing him back.

  “All that trouble,” The Tribal Queen mused, almost ruefully. “All that trouble to wipe my essence from the face of the earth, and now...she would preserve me so that I might give birth to something more animal than myself? And then kill the alpha that is the last thread of intelligence keeping them all from turning completely animal? Ha... Ha-ha-ha!” The chuckle turned to a cackle, all the more disturbing because it was the kind of sound that should be issued when one throws his head back and laughs, but she hunched farther in on herself as if the hilarity constricted around her very soul. It gurgled and keened out of her, beetles revving to life around her at the commotion, until it morphed into a coughing fit and at long last she recovered.

  “Poor, tormented girl,” she lamented, shaking her head and leaning it back against the pillar, askew and exhausted. “Trying to wrestle her conscience in a place like this. As if there were not already enough demons to wrestle with.”

  “She's wrestled with some of the greatest demons here and come away unscathed,” Jayx pointed out, making no secret that he implied the Tribal Queen herself.

  “Unscathed,” Mother Eve scoffed. “You give her too much credit.”

  Jayx felt strangely defensive when it came to Shiloh. Quietly riled, he staunched the temptation to overreact, lest Mother Eve realize she could faze him. “One day you will underestimate a survivor's affinity for doing just that. Remember, it is not those at the bottom of the food chain that have survived long enough to be invited to Paradise. Do not think yourself a greater adversary than the Apocalypse.”

  Mother Eve's amusement died. “She is too soft. You see it, or you would not feel the need to defend her. She should have killed me, and look where we are instead. The Savage Queen rescued from the brink of death so her innocent wolf pup might live. You, Jayx, Prince of Pirates, misplaced master of this wilderness...caving to her soft-hearted convictions and betraying everything you've evolved into, in order to support her humanitarian cause. She will not survive here. You know it. She is too soft. And you are turning soft for her.”

  While he was careful not to betray it, her words hit home more than she could have known. The same thing had settled in his mind when he found Shiloh cutting the Tribal Queen down. The same thing had nagged at him when he caved to Shiloh's pleading and agreed to help her. The same thing had soured in his gut when he found himself kissing her, inexplicably drawn to the fierce, exotic, passionate, unpredictable mess that was she.

  Over and over again he watched a gut-wrenching reel of the inevitable in his head: a girl he'd fallen in love with being eaten by the savages.

  A girl he'd fallen in love with being eaten by the savages.

  A girl he'd fallen in love with being eaten by the savages.

  It was enough to make anyone sick for all eternity, enough to make anyone slam the door on the possibility so forcefully that the bones of the earth shook from the impact.

  Bones. Shiloh's bones.

  Everything led to that. He couldn't shake it. A barely-caged disquiet fluttered deep inside him. He breathed carefully, keeping it at bay.

  He had to nip this in the bud. He
knew better than to let himself get attached to someone whose limbs might be strewn around the Tribal's campfires the very next day. It was an eventuality he could not stomach, could not withstand, could not...

  Nausea oozed up his throat for allowing himself to even get to the point where the premonition haunted him.

  He wasn't supposed to get to know them. If they were just the next batch of unfortunate souls he couldn't intercept in time, it was not as hard to convince himself it was just another round of casualties lost to the food chain. He wasn't supposed to get to see them try, watch them struggle like flies in a web, get drawn up in the personal conflict that made them tick, learn their favorite colors...

  He wasn't supposed to know her favorite color.

  And Shiloh...she'd proven she could survive alone on the island long enough that a foolish, tentative spark of hope had budded in Jayx's being that maybe, just maybe, she'd be around longer than the others.

  That spark of hope was all it had taken for him to view her differently than the rest. To envision the inevitable snatches of a future where she existed. To wonder what he would share with her that he never got to share with any of the others simply because there had never been the chance. To want to invest in her just a little more than he wanted to invest in anyone else.

  And that's all it had taken to find himself irrevocably drawn into the current of another human being, the intrigue of companionship. All it had taken to spend enough time with her to catch a scent other than fear, and she smelled...she smelled lovely.

  His senses were full of her. The curse of being raised like an animal in the wilderness. Whenever she was around, he could smell her, feel the radiance of her warmth, hear her heart and her lungs and feel the weight of her gaze.

  Like any other creature he had tuned his senses to profile, her essence had become imprinted on his mind. Woven into his most heightened awareness.

  'She is too soft. And you are turning soft for her.' Words that cut straight to his guarded soul.

  Glowering at the Tribal Queen, he fought the urge to leap across the room and strangle her then and there. A dormant twinge of loyalty curled inside him at the thought, but this could be over if he just finished it. Shiloh would hate him, but at least he would have spared her conscience the deed. And maybe it would be good if she hated him.

  And more than the spark of loyalty Mother Eve might have inspired, he resented the manipulation, the taunting way she held it over him. So sure he could never defy her assessment of him. So sure he could never choose his own convictions over owing the Tribal his life. So sure he would buckle under her guilt-trip.

  But he knew her for what she was – a master manipulator. She had probably been manipulating him from the beginning. Letting him live only because she needed a successor, and his moldable intellect was her best bet over the volatile minds of her offspring.

  It was probably the only reason she'd let him go untouched when he parted ways with the Tribal. So that her mercy might lodge in his head, his impression of the Tribal maintaining some ounce of integrity so she could arc his affection back their way in the future.

  “You are wild, Jayx. Confused by some long-lost memory of your origin, but we are not the ones who birthed us. We are not defined by our parents. When Shuma rescued you, washed up in the tides, she took her time bringing you back to us. She was still grieving the loss of Omi, devoted to a span of seclusion in the wilderness, and, of course, was not certain how we would respond to you. If we would accept you into our fold. Those three days she wandered the island with you under her wing, you proved a handful. In her grieving, she did not eat, did not think to feed you, but you were quick to fend for yourself. You strayed from your camp while she was sleeping, and she found you hunched over your kill, fingers and mouth dripping with fresh blood. It was a horned fox. Not human, certainly, but raw and bloody and no hindrance to your appetite.”

  He had never heard this story before. It was tempting to throw it back in her face, denying its truth – probably just a conveniently-coined tale to further influence him – but a sudden, violent flashback glitched through his memory, spurred by the description.

  Hunger pangs. An ache in his belly so fierce he felt like he was caving in on himself.

  Running through the jungle driven by a certain hysteria. Perhaps hunger, perhaps grief, perhaps a dose of insanity from dehydration or choking down too much salt-water.

  The auburn flash of the fox, its small ram's horns catching on violet flowers as it tried to run.

  His fingers around the spiral of a horn, the quick break of its neck.

  Hunched over the small creature, its body rent open, raw meat between his teeth and blood dripping from his chin and fingers.

  Startled by the onslaught of the memory, Jayx twitched. Had he simply never had cause to remember it before? Had he blocked it along with other unpleasantries? Had it been lost in the haze of delirium that clung to him those first days, his mind grief-stricken and traumatized from being half-drowned?

  It was disquieting, having Mother Eve shed light on memories he had never accessed, suggesting she knew him better than he knew himself. Which was, no doubt, her goal.

  He tried to re-suppress the violent memory, telling himself it wasn't one that he wanted to remember.

  “Jayx, Prince of the Jungle,” Mother Eve purred in admiration. “You are wild at heart. You always have been. You may have glimpsed your reflection in the heat of a kill and run from the light in your eyes, but the light is there. You may jump into harm's way under the guise of defending others, but the truth is violence excites you. Your mouth waters and you mistake it for bile.”

  He felt the heat rising with every carefully-phrased word. She knew his buttons, his triggers, his insecurities – but the last thing he was going to admit was that she knew his soul.

  Rising in one calculated motion, he crossed the mosaic to where she was restrained. Her beetles spooked at his approach, buzzing in a static-like aura around her head. He stooped to uncoil her bonds, jerking at the tightly-coiled tethers.

  “Get up.”

  Something halfway between a grimace and a smirk wrinkled Mother Eve's face. Smug that she had gotten to him, perhaps, but uncertain as to the result she had influenced.

  As well she should be. He had warned her not to underestimate the Crossers' affinity for survival, but it was him she had underestimated. She thought to spark some latent taste of loyalty with her sentimental taunts, but Jayx's devotion would never be inspired by bullying. The nerve, that someone like her would try to guilt-trip him.

  She who slaughtered dozens.

  “I'm so glad you've come to your senses,” Mother Eve expressed as she rose gingerly to her feet. “Trust me, you needn't trouble yourself over drawing Shiloh's wrath for freeing me–”

  “I'm not freeing you.” He maneuvered behind her and wound her tethers tight around his muscled hand, pulling her firmly against him. Her shoulder blades tightened together, her back cracking from the force.

  Letting out a strained sound, Mother Eve sagged against the pain, but his grip held her up. She recovered quickly. “Then you should think twice about undoing my bonds.”

  “You should have thought twice before reminding me I'm a born killer.”

  He shoved her toward the entrance to the fortress, trying to get her out before Shiloh returned. The only way he was going to do this was to do it quickly, and not subject himself to another argument.

  “Is that what you think you're going to do? Kill me?”

  There it was again, the taunt. Projecting doubt onto him so that he would doubt himself.

  But it was time for her reign to end.

  “Walk.” He would not let her inside his head. Would not open himself to interacting with her.

  “If you were going to kill me, you would just do it here. Now. Why take me elsewhere? It just gives you time to rethink. Change your course.” There was a smugness in here voice, thinking she had him figured out. Thinking he didn't reall
y have the guts to do it.

  She was wrong. “This place is sacred to me. I would not defile it with your blood.”

  He held her so close that beetles from her hair crawled up his bare chest. Gooseflesh from their prickly little feet flushed down his arms. Stealing himself against the sensation, he hurried her across the tile fragments and pushed her out onto the plateau. Fireflies scattered at their emergence.

  The Tribal Queen was extremely weak, barely able to put one foot in front of the other as he ushered her down the winding bluff. But Jayx had carried her up, and he had no issue supporting her all the way back down. Her frail frame was light as a bird in his hold – though he knew better than to underestimate her strength. If she didn't try to escape, he would be surprised.

  They descended through the patches of mist that clung to different heights of the pathway, Jayx's flesh turning slick from the wintry vapor. Mother Eve's tethers gave a slippery creak, and he twisted them even tighter, all but cutting off the circulation to his hand completely. For good measure, he coiled the fingers of his other hand into her dreadlocks.

  She wasn't going anywhere.

  The fog cleared, a breathtaking view of Paradise unspooling around them again, and Jayx wondered what it was like for Shiloh, taking in this view with wings on her back. Did the urge to take flight over this glorious land completely overwhelm her? It must.

  Below eddied another patch of fog. Jayx thought nothing of it, was about to plunge Mother Eve headlong into its whisper-soft pall when an inky tendril slithered out of the gloom.