The Mad King (The Dark Kings)

by Jovee Winters

  Her touch was as tentative as the gossamer kiss of a butterfly’s wings against my chin. Dark eyes alive with pain and sorrow stared up at me.

  She said nothing, only nodded once, the movement brief and short, a mere flutter really.

  But my heart leaped in my chest. Bringing her palm to my lips, I couldn’t help but press a kiss against its very center.

  I knew I’d hurt her deeply.

  I didn’t expect Alice to forgive me for what I’d done with her great-grandmother. I didn’t even forgive myself. But I would be damned if I let her believe for a second that I did not truly love her with a love greater than any penned in literature before or after. Once upon a time, in a different reality, it’d been Alice who’d brought me back, who’d saved me.

  I could no less for her.

  Siphoning my magic through her, I created a beautifully ornate grand piano. The ebony beauty stood out like a sore thumb in the middle of a field full of wild and magical gardens, bursting with the sudden magic of Wonderland.

  In a scene very reminiscent of the day she’d found me, I sat at the bench and plucked gently at the keys.

  Galeta had told me once during her time in my cottage of how she’d recalled her own past. Her mention of her memories returning to her as visions in the sky formed my magic.

  The music was haunting, lyrical, filling the air with the strains of a heartsick ballad. And as it did, images formed on the winds.

  Alice looked at the visions. And I looked at Alice.

  Her eyes were wide as she twirled slowly round and round, studying parts of our life that I’d never been able to show her with the miniatures. This time the images weren’t of a woman built of moss, but of Alice herself.

  My beautiful, wonderful woman who’d suffered so greatly in this life.

  Falling into Wonderland.

  Me sitting at a tea table, floating teapot and all. But I didn’t show Alice the memories through her eyes but my own, letting her feel my emotions as they played on the breeze.

  That first glimpse of her and feeling my body light up in flames, bursting with the sudden knowledge that my life had forever altered. The way my heart beat in my throat at the sight of her in those ridiculously sexy sleeping clothes.

  How the wonder in her eyes had rekindled my own.

  The laughter that’d bubbled like angel song through her lips.

  My fear that she would see a broken madman and so I’d stayed away, obsessing, needing, wanting, and desperate to be by her side always, but so scared of my feelings.

  Her tossing the bun at the back of my head.

  She laughed.

  And not just the vision Alice, but the one standing before me, lost in the memories of another life.

  Her hands covered her shell-pink lips as that gloriously dulcet laugh that’d haunted my days since I reawakened spilled off her tongue. I jerked in my seat, desperate to reach her. To grab her up and kiss her senseless. To whisper my undying devotion to her, but she was lost to me now.

  Please, gods above, let this work. I knew what I’d said, that I could die happily knowing she was okay. But I didn’t think I ever truly could let her go.

  Alice was as much a part of me as I was of her. So I played harder, plucking at the heartstrings of my soul as I struck the keys, filling the night with more and more visions.

  Golden spirals of light began to swirl through the air. And I did not know what it meant, all I knew was I would never stop until she was returned to me.

  Me, pacing the length of my clock room, muttering nonsense to myself as my soul yearned to go and find her. To learn if she was truly the mate I’d waited all my life for.

  That damned bloody frog. Falling. Falling. Falling. Her terror of the water, desperate not to drown, and my own panic at the thought the crazy female might actually kill herself by holding her breath. Grabbing her. Moving her body against my own. Feeling each and every sexy curve of hers pressed to my hard and aching body. Sweat gathered on my brow as I prayed to the gods and continued to play.

  Alice began to sway, losing herself to the music. A smile tipped the corners of her mouth. And I dared to hope, to believe in a miracle.

  Her arms undulated as she danced for me. I wasn’t even sure if she knew what she was doing. Alice had always loved my music, saying that through it she’d felt my soul.

  Alice and I had always had a connection beyond the mundane. We were two halves of the same mad whole. She was my perfect companion in every way.

  I played the music, and now her song began to wind through the air, mixing with the visions playing out before us.

  Always I’d told her she had the voice of an angel. I could listen to my Alice sing forever. If there was only one thing I could ever have of her again, this would have been it.

  Her truth.

  Her soul.

  And she gave it now without asking for anything in return. Tears dripped, large and fat, off my face, but I would not stop. Because so long as I played I had my lover, my heartbeat, back.

  Suddenly the sky was full of rain. And there I sat on a throne in the middle of a field whipping with frenzy and madness, clenching the neck of a bird I’d meant to end simply because I could no longer contain my insanity. My Alice stepped into the vision, stunning in her dress, drenched in rain and staring at me with love beaming in her eyes.

  Her haunting words echoed between us. Cancer. It almost killed her once before. But she’d called to me as a child and I’d come to her in that life just as I had in this one.

  I was her miracle, she’d said. The reason she’d fought. The reason she’d hung on.

  For me.

  For us.

  My gaze shifted between the vision and the Alice before me now. The golden, glittering threads of magic that’d simply sparkled before me now gathered tighter and tighter into a rope that drew closer and closer to her.

  This was either where I’d get my Alice back or lose her forever. I knew it.

  And if she left, if she left me, I would have nothing else to live for.

  I was pounding at the keys now. Banging with all the passion that beat within me. Using my music to reach deep into the very marrow of her, trying my hardest to make her remember what we’d once meant to one another.

  For a moment she stopped singing, clutching her hands to her lips as she trembled, crying at the vision of her walking away. Her whispered words of “I saw you, Hatter. I saw you” echoed like a roll of thunder in the underworld.

  She twirled on her feet, her eyes locking with mine as I shifted the memories yet again. To me. To the knowledge and panic that I’d lost her forever, and not because Wonderland hadn’t accepted her, but because I’d been too damned terrified to.

  The madness I’d sunk into.

  The depression.

  How the animals and gardens outside my home began to sicken and die, my own diseased, ravaged brain the cause of their destruction. Her loss, slicing through me anew as I remembered those days without her. The utter desolation I’d felt.

  The desperate need to simply die because each breath was an agony, each minute without her by my side so empty and void I’d no longer wanted to exist.

  Tears as thick and large as my own slid down her cheeks as she trembled. I didn’t dare stop playing, but I knew the time of reckoning had come.

  Moving as though in slow motion, she took one step forward. And then another. And another. The ropes of glittering gold now banded tight around her.

  That’s when I knew.

  That rope, it was her. Me. Us. It was our magic together. Who we were. Apart, we weren’t as powerful as together. I could not be Hatter without her, and she could not be Alice without me.

  Alice had to accept that fact herself, and only then could we be together again. Only then could this darkest of magic be broken. I slowed my playing down. But the winds picked up, sounding like the strings of a large choir all around us.

  This was not Wonderland but the underworld. And yet even here, the land brea
thed, it waited. It yearned just as I did.

  And then she smiled, and those bands of gold shot through her form like an arrow, piercing her heart, her soul, illuminating her from the inside out. Her long hair gathered like the coils of an ebony-skinned snake and danced around her trim shoulders.

  Her gown fluttered in the breeze around her ankles, the diaphanous movements ghostly and hypnotic.

  My Alice glowed like living flame.

  Radiant.

  Alive.

  And then it was over. The light vanished. The wind calm. The visions gone.

  I stopped playing.

  And everything grew heavy with silence.

  My hands shook.

  Her eyes opened. And the way she looked at me. I knew she remembered. Remembered it all. Agony crushed my soul.

  She smiled.

  Instantly the clouds parted. The sun burst through them. And the world came alive with the sounds of life. Insect chatter and bird song.

  “Henrick Silas Hall,” she murmured.

  I gasped. Only one person in all of Kingdom knew my true name. And I’d only ever given it to her in the other timeline.

  Voice scratchy and feeling my pulse beat wild on the back of my tongue, I said in a whimpered grunt of shock, “Alice?”

  “Hatter!” she shrieked. Then, opening her arms, she rushed me, tackling me so hard that I fell off the stool. Weaving a quick bit of magic, I created a soft cushion for us to land on. “Oh my gods, Hatter. You came for me. You came for me. You didn’t forget me. But I forgot you. My Hatter. My beloved. You never gave up on me. You fought, just like you promised.”

  Knuckling the tears from her eyes even as my own fell, I could no longer speak. I was crying too hard. I’d lost her. I’d lost our other life. But Alice had saved me, believing I could do the same for her.

  And I hadn’t.

  “Alice. I did forget you. I’m so sorry. How can you ever forgive me—I can hardly forgive myself. So many years without you, my love. You suffered. You died. You—”

  “Hatter.” She shook her head, staring down at me with the type of burning love that rarely existed.

  We had the type of love that was built solely for fairy tales. Something so raw, so pure, it could destroy us or save us.

  “How can I blame you when I forgot you too? Oh, my darling. And I thought I loved you then. But there could never be another for me. Ever.”

  She lowered her lips to mine, pressing down so gently, our tears mingling upon our tongues. But I needed her, and she needed me.

  I wasn’t sure when it happened, but suddenly we were up again. And dancing. Our music playing through the breeze again. Together we swayed, bodies pressed tight as we kissed, as we reacquainted ourselves with the touch of each other’s flesh.

  The sweet tang of hers. Vanilla and honey and cinnamon. She licked and suckled at the hollow of my throat, causing my skin to prickle and ache.

  We continued to dance even as I vanished our clothes with a flick of my wrist. I ran my hands along her curves, sliding them slow and possessively down the soft swell of her arse, marveling in the prickles of her flesh beneath my hot touch.

  My skin did the same as she scratched and clawed at my back. We never stopped moving, our magic binding us tighter than ever, drawing us closer. I slipped inside her welcoming warmth and she gasped, arching back and exposing the long line of her swan’s neck and the softly rounded curves of her lush breasts.

  Dancing for me as I danced for her. We moved as one. Our music wound through our souls before dancing upon the air in bursts of kaleidoscopic colors.

  And when we’d finished, I looked at her and gravely said, “Now, my lovely rose, can we please leave here before I perish?”

  Breasts bouncing merrily, she peppered my cheeks and forehead with kisses before saying, “Yes. Please gods, get us out of here.”

  Epilogue

  Alice

  Standing now in the only place I’d ever felt at home, I stared at a world both familiar and foreign.

  As promised, Hades had given me back my life and given both Hatter and I stern instructions to never return to the underworld. There’d been great sorrow in his words, and I couldn’t help but worry about the god of death. Silly, I know. But I also knew we owed a very great deal to him.

  I only hoped that someday he too might find his own happily-ever-after.

  I wish I could say that with the return of my memories, all the sadness that’d blanketed me was gone. But there was a giant hole in my heart still.

  For our daughter and our grandchildren. Soon we would journey to find the Huntsman. It was a terrible pain to know that he existed without the great love of his life. And having so recently been void of any and all hope in my own life, I knew he likely fared no better.

  I didn’t know what was to come concerning our Chrysalis. But I would never stop hoping and believing that the magic that’d restored my lover to me would also give us back our daughter.

  The spiraling tunnel of deepest shadow finally opened, and instantly I knew where we were.

  The towering trees on all sides. The pretty blue cottage. The cherry-red door and the creeping vines of ivy and teacup roses crawling like fingers up the sides of the walls. But everything was topsy-turvy now and so very wrong. This was a pretty little English cottage that could be found anywhere on Earth.

  Not Wonderland.

  Clenching Hatter’s fingers tight, I shook my head. “What’s happened to our home, Hatter?”

  There was no magic, no life, no wonder to this place. There were no flutterbys to greet me. No flowers to sing hello. No mangy and sly cat to tease us as he fluttered in and out of existence.

  Hatter had kept a choke hold on my hand from the very moment I’d awakened. And he’d still not eased his grip. Using his free hand to loosen his black silk bow tie, he shook his head.

  “When you left me, Alice, so too went the magic. I had only a very little left, not nearly enough for the land to thrive as it should have.”

  Reaching up for his whisker-roughened cheek, I scratched at it delicately with my long, pointed nails now resembling claws. I was wild magic in this place again. Beneath my feet, I felt the tremors of this world, as though it stirred from a long slumber.

  The magic of this place beat inside me. I simply wasn’t sure how to give it back.

  “How did you give it to me in the first place, my love?” I asked him.

  His gaze was unfocused and morose as he stared into the thick grove of trees that now looked more like stately, mundane maples than the fire maples they’d once been, with leaves gleaming like a burnished flame in the sun. These leaves were simply green and waving docilely in the gentle breeze.

  “The land knew, Alice. And so it shared its soul with me to give to you. I no more know how to give it back than you do.”

  Closing my eyes, I silently commanded the magic back into the land. But it was like my feet were made of iron from which no magic could pass through. I was brimming over with it, but it refused to leave my body.

  Wonderland knew what I was doing. The wind whipped suddenly through the trees. The ground shook. And just as my body felt like a supercharged live wire of power, it all stopped. Frowning, I stared at my hands, which now glowed with the golden currents of Wonderland’s soul. With a growl of frustration, I whipped my fingers back and forth, trying to shake it off me like a dog shaking off bathwater, but it was no use. It clung like glue.

  Again and again I tried. But always with the same results.

  Nothing.

  “I don’t know how to do this.” I looked up at him, feeling helpless and hopeless all over again.

  Hatter framed my cheek with his palm, and though I knew he didn’t blame me for this, I read the keen faith in his eyes that I not only could, but would, do this. I didn’t want to let him down, ever, but I wasn’t sure I could do it at all.

  “I think I might could help with that.”

  An unfamiliar male voice thick with an Irish brogue inter
rupted our conversation, causing both Hatter and me to start and sit up quickly from our perch on the wishing well. We turned swiftly around to stare at a man I’d never seen before.

  Dressed in rags, he was an odd-looking creature with longish hair that gleamed almost quicksilver and sharp and radiant steel-blue eyes that burned with intelligence. He was, I had to admit, a very fine-looking male, though a little more on the hairy side than I preferred with a thick but meticulously trimmed beard on his square jawline.

  He wasn’t a youth, but he wasn’t old either—he looked to be in his midthirties. And the way he grinned at me—as if he knew a secret—there was an echo of familiarity to it. Like I’d seen it once before. Possibly even many times before. But that wasn’t likely; I could never have forgotten this face.

  “Who are you?” Hatter asked, voice steady but deep. And I couldn’t help but lean tighter into his side, clutching the back of his pin-striped jacket with my hand. I’d lost him once before. Call me skittish, but I wasn’t sure I trusted this good-looking lumberjack not to try to rip us apart again.

  The lumberjack bowed, the movement both regal and lithe, and I found myself murmuring, “I know you. How do I know you? ”

  Again, he grinned, as though he’d heard me, but I knew I’d not said the words above a whisper.

  “I am only a friend who wishes to see his world back in balance once more.”

  “And you think you know how to do that?” Hatter asked.

  Giving a one-shouldered shrug, the lumberjack glanced around. “I’d say I’d be a tad better at it than you are.”

  I growled, feeling feral at the thought of anyone denigrating my mate. It was Hatter’s grip on my forearm that kept my feet planted firmly beside his.

  A flash of humor blazed through the strange male’s eyes. “Temper, temper, Alice. And yet you always did have one, didn’t you?”

  “This is not the same Alice,” my lover said, gently rubbing his thumb in circles upon my elbow.

  We’d had a long chat about my dear great-grandmother during our travel home. A dear great-grandmother who we’d mistakenly believed had been kidnapped, or even murdered, so many years ago. To discover she’d actually been in Wonderland all that time, playing house with my mate... I remembered why I hadn’t much liked her in the other life either.