by Rhys Ford
It just goes to show—the dog was a hell of a lot smarter than I was.
The maze of corridors finally opened into the courtyard I knew would be at the end of our journey. It was exactly as I remembered it. A nearly emaciated woman sat and tapped her long nails on the high arms of an enormous black throne made of carved bone and ebony. She looked impossibly frail and so white she was nearly translucent, but her lips were as crimson as the strapless, form-hugging gown that covered most of her long torso and legs, its skirt split at her knees and flaring out to spill on the floor. The light played with the fabric, shifting it from blood to blush and back again. Her features were pointed, and her white hair was scraped back from her face and woven into the foot-tall filigree crown she wore perched on the back of her head.
The first time I’d seen her, her hair was streaked cardinal and cardamom and a wealth of curls tumbled down around her bare shoulders. She’d laughed back then.
She wasn’t laughing now.
I almost didn’t see the little girl standing next to her, mostly because it was impossible to take my eyes off the Red Queen. I was drawn to her in a way I couldn’t understand or at least didn’t like. It was different from my desire for Jean Michel. Even though he came from an insane bloodline, he still seemed human to me—at least most of the time—but she had lost her little humanity a long time before.
Where the Red Queen was a carved piece of alabaster with a semblance of life, the little blonde girl who trembled next to her was as breathtakingly, messily human as anyone could ever be.
Her hair was tangled and looked more than a little dirty, and she had her arms wrapped around herself to stay warm, but the thin gray jacket she wore couldn’t even hold back the wind that whistled through the courtyard. Her cheeks were bright red, her lips blue at the edges, and her eyes were wide, unfocused and nearly black with shock.
Still, she gasped when she saw me. She edged her sneaker an inch forward, and the Red Queen flung out a hand and gripped her by the hair.
“Of all of the people I expected to come, you would have been my last guess, Jean Michel,” the queen pronounced. Her voice rattled as a dry-husk tumble of words echoed over the empty courtyard. Her people remained in the shadows, clinging to the black draperies slung over the white columns of the palace’s outer hallway. “Although I did predict it would be the Ace who would knock on my door. I just didn’t expect it to be you holding his leash.”
“No one holds my leash,” I growled and crossed the enormous red marble squares of the courtyard to Naomi’s side.
I’d intended to wrap my jacket around Naomi, the Queen’s apparent hostage, but the woman had obviously decided I was the threat, because with a lift of her fingers, the palace responded to my presence.
Or rather, her wyverns did.
They came shrieking down from the skies, impossibly large stygian reptilian forms held aloft by wings made of bramble and gray moss. They grabbed at the air with their powerful back claws as they scissored through the cold to sweep through the vast arena of the courtyard. The palace spires twisted about and seemed to give way to the queen’s draconian vermin.
The rush of wind they brought with them held more than the bite of the mountain’s cold air. I felt the touch of hopelessness kiss my skin, and despair leached down into my blood. If I’d had any tattered thread of my soul left, it would’ve snapped under the weight of their oppressive presence.
Luckily for me, I didn’t have a soul.
I fought the storm they brewed with their wings, but the courtyard seemed impossibly long. It stretched out in front of me, and the tiles appeared to grow and shift despite my long strides. The Red Queen stood as I neared her throne and threw her hands up into claws much like her reptilian pets. I was more afraid of the woman than I was of the lizards, but even though I had nothing left in me to carry me into the afterlife, I was still human enough to pity a lost little girl.
“Here, put your arms through the sleeves,” I said as I shucked off my leather jacket. “It’ll keep you warm.”
Somewhere outside the palace, Blue was barking his head off. The snap of boot heels on the marble floor was enough to tell me Jean Michel had followed my footsteps. And he probably looked better doing it.
I turned to reassure him but kept my eyes on the wyverns that circled far above our heads, searching for their roosts tucked away in the eaves. Then the Red Queen struck.
The sting of her nails across my cheek lasted only a moment, and even then I wasn’t sure I felt the slice until the brief flash of pain came from the gush of hot blood that poured from my open wounds onto my cold skin. The little girl screamed and grabbed at my legs, and I nearly tumbled. I was caught in her tight embrace yet unwilling to break her hold because I might hurt her.
“You dare!” The Red Queen’s shriek was as loud as her lizards as she blasted my face with her fury. Her breath was cold—mist frosted over my lips and through my hair. She had lifted her arm up to strike me once more, but then Jean Michel closed his hand over her wrist.
“Hit him again and I will peel you apart where you stand,” he murmured, his tone matching the maelstrom brewing through the courtyard. “I’ve come for the girl because you know what her presence can do to us. Will you give her up freely? Or do we have to test the bonds of our bloodlines? I do not want to fight with you, Auntie. But if I have to choose between you and Wonderland City, I will use your bones for soup before I break a single window.”
“I have no use for the girl,” she snarled at him, and I saw their familial resemblance in her fangs and narrowed eyes. “I expected to trade her for him.”
Jean Michel released her, and she staggered back and gripped the arm of the throne to steady herself. The shadows rippled around the courtyard, and her guards slipped into the light, their livery as crisp and bloodred as the gown she wore.
“Xander is not a pawn in the queens’ games anymore.” He drew himself up, but she towered above him, a motionless statue of regal contempt. “It was one of the promises you all swore to. A promise you swore to me.”
“What?” I stammered as I pressed at the thin stripes clotting along my cheekbone. “What promise? What are you talking about?”
If the wyverns were terrifying, the Red Queen’s laughter was downright bone-chilling.
“Didn’t your precious savior tell you?” Her cackle hung in the air. “He forfeited his right to any throne in exchange for your freedom. You were as much his inheritance as any palace or castle. When it came time to divide up the realms, he swore off his legacy in exchange for freeing the Queen of Hearts’ Ace.
“But you see, nephew,” she rattled again, jutting her chin forward and pursing her lips until they nearly brushed Jean Michel’s cheek. “I grow weary of waiting for you to come to your senses and take your rightful place on the throne. You don’t want it and all it entails. I will gladly take it from you. So my price for the girl is your grandmother’s favorite toy.”
It was strange for me to have faith in Jean Michel. I shouldn’t have trusted him as far as I could throw him. And I knew how hard it was to throw him—I’d tried.
But I still trusted him.
I trusted him to do right by me, to do right by the realms he apparently walked away from… for me. Despite all of the tension and pushing we did against each other, there was a part of me that believed Jean Michel would always have my back.
It was about time I had his.
So it came as no surprise, at least to me, when Jean Michel kissed his aunt on the lips and said, “There is no fucking way I will ever let you have him.”
She threw her head back and howled, and her wyverns answered her call.
“Grab Blue and the girl,” I screamed at Jean Michel through the cacophony of the winged lizards descending upon us. “Make sure she’s safe!”
“I can’t leave you!” He dodged his aunt’s wild flails and shoved her spindly body back across the throne as he scooped Naomi up in his arms. He drew a long dagger from somewhere
under his jacket. Maybe I needed a new tailor, because everyone but me seemed able to hide long weapons under their coats. “We can cut our way through them. The guards—”
“Stay here and let me clear the way.” I didn’t need a new tailor. I didn’t need a jacket that held long weapons. I really didn’t need anything other than what I’d been given—what I’d been made into—when the old queen got her hands on me.
It had just been so very long since I’d been a weapon I was half afraid I couldn’t be one again.
The fear in Naomi’s eyes was enough to still the doubts that chewed away at my insides. If I failed her, she would end up like me, broken on a Wheel of Bad Fortune, a torture rack turned by the powerful and corrupt. And I sure as hell couldn’t fail Jean Michel.
Facing the descending wyverns, I flung my arms out and welcomed their battle cries. Then I unwrapped the humanity I’d pulled around myself and became the Ace of Spades once again.
Six
I’D FORGOTTEN about the pain.
I don’t know how I could have. Everything about the Ace of Spades was pain. It was a ravaging monster made to inflict agony and destruction, a killing machine the Queen of Hearts wielded as easily as she wore her crown.
And I was that monster.
My chest burned where she’d branded me. The single spade sigil was a hot piece of iron seared into my flesh above my sternum. The keloid was the size of my hand and tinted ebony by the burnt blood and magical potions she’d rubbed into my weeping, smoking wound. I relived that moment every time I became the Ace. I carried it on my skin and suffered as it seeped into my marrow.
I became everything she’d wanted to inflict upon her subjects, including the ones who’d pleased her. Her cruelty knew no bounds. No one was safe from her machinations and certainly not from the wide range of tortures she could dream up with the snap of her fingers.
Except for Jean Michel. She loved him with an obsession as deep as the night sky and about as empty. But her love came with a price, and it was one he eventually couldn’t pay any longer. She never turned on him until the day he took me from her.
She fought him… and lost.
In the battle, Jean Michel stripped away everything she’d made me into, but there was no way to fully extinguish what she’d done. I was as much of a part of Wonderland City as its air, rocks, and its creatures. I held inside of me everything dark and terrifying in the realm and the power to unleash it on the lands once again.
I wanted to leave that life—those horrors—behind, but what the Red Queen had in store would bring about more pain than I could imagine or cause.
And I could imagine quite a lot.
The wyverns’ howling storm faded beneath the rush of blood through my ears. I was thankful I’d taken off my jacket. I really liked that jacket. I didn’t know if I’d be able to undo what I was going to become. If I strayed too far, I hoped Jean Michel would deliver me a quick death.
That is, if I didn’t kill him trying to save him.
I’d been through the transformation at least a million times, but I’d never gotten used to it. How could I? Every wound I inflicted came back inside of me once I was done, and the queen took great delight in digging out those memories and letting the conflict play out over my flesh before she tucked it back into the sigil on my chest.
God, it hurt so fucking much.
The Ace rose slowly, seemingly unwilling to break its slumber, but once awakened, it took me over, swept away my distaste for death, and left me with a razor-sharp thirst to bathe in mayhem. My skin stung, and the flesh on my arms parted first and crackled into grooves beneath my clothes. The fabric grew wet as it soaked up the viscous fluids that seeped from the fissures. The world shifted around me into a bend in Wonderland City’s already-sticky hold on reality. The courtyard slowed as the queen’s enchantment poured out of me and encased me in a slice of the universe outside of the thin tracks that time traveled on.
My armor emerged from my bones first and spilled through my skin with soft folds. Caught in the dead Queen of Hearts’ amber hold, the world skipped forward a second as the plates rose and stiffened into place. With each conflict I had gained power, and the exoskeleton she’d infused into my body flourished with every blow I gave, no matter how big or how small.
I wasn’t the first of her Aces, but I was the most successful, probably because I had nothing to lose and nothing to gain—a weapon with no other agenda than to serve her. I’d become Death’s Knight for a vicious, depraved woman, and now I was going to don that armor again to save her grandson and the lands she nearly destroyed.
I didn’t want to think about what would happen to the realm if Naomi became a weapon… like I’d been. Where I could walk through a hall leaving bodies in my wake, a child could do… untold destruction. I didn’t trust the Red Queen to turn her over. More than likely she would try to kill Jean Michel and do to Naomi what was done to me, but with much more horrifying results.
I knew how the queens’ minds worked.
My helm erupted from my cheeks and skull in a filigree of horns not unlike the Red Queen’s. I felt it grow and elongate into a forward hook, useful for impaling my victims. My greaves and gauntlets fell into place and hardened with the blink of an eye as the plates unfolded like petals emerging from a tight bud and the darkness overtook me.
I could scream uselessly in the emptiness within my shell, but I couldn’t fight what I’d been made into.
My blades came last—long, wicked swords, as black as the queen’s heart and jutting out of my shoulder blades. The agony of pulling them out made me sick to my stomach, but the bloodlust was taking over. I turned and coldly watched the Red Queen’s court scatter and stumble over themselves to get away. But I would find them. I would hunt them through the corridors and the forests and turn the snow crimson with their spilled blood. Their flesh would rot, and the salt of their bodies would render the fields barren for a generation or two; a long time, considering no one had children here.
I yanked at the hilts, forcing my weapons to break from their bony wombs, and unsheathed my blades.
The Ace in my chest blazed with an unholy black fire, the tips of the flames as ghostly blue and cold as the mountains framed in the open rooftop of the courtyard. I turned to find Jean Michel—my beloved prince—staring at me as he bundled the little girl to his chest, the sleeve of my jacket dragging on the floor.
He was so very beautiful. And I would kill for him as long as he wanted me to.
Tightening my hands on my swords, I let the spell’s hold on time fall way and faced the wyverns when they struck.
I was cold beneath my armor, so the hot rush of the flying lizard’s blood pouring down my upraised arms as I stabbed it through the neck was a welcome relief. The marble floor was slippery even before it was wet, but despite the wyvern’s blood on the slick surface, my armor was more than capable of retaining my balance.
It moved with me, and the plates sang a tenor death rattle as I slashed and stabbed my way through the first wyvern. Another tried to latch its teeth on my shoulder, but a quick swing split its nose in two and sent it back, shrieking in pain. The blood was all I needed to make the transformation complete. A single drop of the wyvern’s life fluids on the center of my sigil and I was reborn.
I could see everything, feel everyone—every heartbeat, every soft sob, every shriek from a lizard. And then the rantings of a Mad Queen echoed in my ears. I heard the screams of her court when they saw me. She’d brought Death to their door, and they were torn between their blind fealty to her and their fear for their lives. The shadows lurking behind the curtains became a rush of movement as her court was caught between watching the chaos or fleeing it. My senses caught and tracked every heartbeat, every thundering footstep on the marble to the outer perimeter where it was worn in places from countless people walking the same path every day.
The draconian storm surrounded me. Talons lashed out to score a shower of sparks against my armor, and long teeth sn
apped at my head and torso, impaling soft flesh on my horns or sliding away from the ethereal metal, unable to find purchase on the fluctuating shadows the Queen of Hearts used to forge my suit.
“I will own you,” the Red Queen screamed at me from her dais. She was horrifyingly glorious to behold, as hideously monstrous as I probably was. We were both creatures knitted together from Wonderland City’s darkest depths, the very scum lurking in its gutters and cisterns, held together by malevolence and powered by greed. “I will see you bent down before me. I will have you call me Mistress, and I will have you bleed and beg for the privilege of kissing my feet and lapping my hand.”
I wanted to take the armor off. I wanted to crawl into a ball in the middle of the courtyard and scrape it off of my flesh and bones until I bled from pulling it free. Instead I battled wyverns she’d sent for me because the Ace needed satisfaction, demanded feeding. I’d woken it, and I needed to pay its price, even as it rode my flesh and its armor twisted through my bones and tore apart my mind.
“Xander!” Jean Michel shouted across the courtyard. “I’ve lost the girl!”
“Then go find her!” I couldn’t spare the time, not with the wyverns on me. The flash of a wing blocked out the pale sun and warned me I was about to be attacked.
The lizard hit me hard when I turned, and its heavy weight slammed me down into the marble. The stone cracked beneath us. But I was an immovable force to its powerful hit. My armor protected me even though the impact rattled my brain about my skull. I planned to let go of one of my swords, if not both, to shove it clear… but Naomi happened.
Wonderland City and its surrounding lands were topsy-turvy most of the time. Things ran up when they should run down, and sometimes an extremely literal thing became reality simply by being spoken in the right moment at the right time. Despite its weirdness, it was mostly still bound by the laws of its physics, even though it would take smarter men than me to explain them.
