Monstrous as a Croc (Daughters of Neverland Book 4)

by Kendra Moreno

  Even with all the pain, even with the grin on Alice’s face, I giggle.

  She has no idea what’s coming for her. The blackest hearts always die the worst.

  No matter how much power they hold in their bones.

  Chapter Three

  Alive Is Alive Unless You’re Dead Inside

  The days are blurring together. When was the last time I talked to a living person? When was the last time I spoke out loud?

  “Fuck,” I rasp, just because I can. How many cups of tea have I drank since the sun went down? Too many. The answer is always too many. Some days, I don’t know the day, the time, or how long Alice has been in control. Some days, I forget why the Hatter can’t come visit me and blame him for my loneliness. Some days, I don’t even remember my name. I keep a journal just in case, filled with nonsense mostly, but it’s also filled with darkness.

  How pitiful I am, mourning the loss of my friends, my freedom, my sanity. The Keeper of Memories shouldn’t hate being the Keeper. The Keeper should only Keep.

  I pull out the journal and stare at the writing on the first page, the evidence of my previous sanity just after I’d been locked in the prison of my own home by Alice. I want to escape my cage. I want to run, to do more than drink tea and wait for a prophesy to come to light. Wonder, where is this Clara Bee? How long must we wait for her to appear?

  The words scribbled against the page jump out at me.

  You are alive. You are alive. Don’t start thinking you’re dead when you’re alive.

  I sigh. I’m clever and foolish. Am I really living if there is nothing to live for? I flip the page and shake my head.

  Stop thinking there’s nothing to live for. Remember the prophesy. Remember the hope. Someone is waiting for you and you can’t let them down.

  “Good job, March. Why, thank you. I’m both clever and an imbecile.” I’m ashamed of how long the conversation goes on between my insanity and my brain, but there’s no one to stare at me like the monster I am. There’s no one to whisper. No one to say, “just like his mother, the poor creature”. I’m so tired, so desperate, and yet trapped in a limbo. I wish someone would come visit me.

  Standing from the sunken in chair where I used to hide as a child, I move over to the counter and turn the kettle on. Then, because I can’t stop the instincts from rearing their ugly head, I grab the vial in the cupboard and pour a few drops of red into the bottom of the teacup.

  Even now, I can’t escape my lineage. Even now, I crave the scent of blood, whether ingested from the small birds I manage to capture or by dragging a blade across my skin. The metallic tang tickles my senses and resentment slams into me anew.

  I hate them. I hate my father for looking at a true monster and loving it. I hate my mother for not being able to overcome her nature. Most of all, I hate myself for being half monster and half lunatic.

  “You are alive,” I whisper. “Fuck, you’re alive.”

  I no longer know if it’s a bad thing or a good thing.

  The days are blurring together. . .

  Chapter Four

  Four For A Massacre

  The day feels strange. At sixteen, I know enough of the world to know when things are wrong, when something hovers in the air that makes everything seem off-kilter. I linger in the kitchen, trying to decide if I should make some tea or not. Things are already bad. Why not drink some tea and forget the world for a while? Why not forget who I am for just a little while?

  I can tell today is a bad day the moment I get back from training with the Hatter, know my mother and father are in a mood just because the kitchen is in disarray. While none of the china is broken, it’s still set haphazardly around the room. A teacup hangs from the lightbulb. Another sits upside down on the floor, perfectly intact. I stare at the upside-down teacup, trying to make sense of it, as if staring at it will make things clearer. Why is there a teacup in the middle of the floor?

  I hear my father clomping up the stairs a moment later and tense. He recognizes me far less nowadays, as if he never had a monstrous son to worry about. Perhaps it’s for the best that he can look at me and see a mirror rather than all the worst traits of him and my mother. Perhaps, it’s best he doesn’t understand the monster being raised in his cabin. The Keeper of Memories losing his memory? It’s a strange concept, but not unexpected. Being the Keeper corrupts the mind. Too many memories in a single brain never do much of anything except crash against one another.

  One day, I’ll have to suffer, too.

  Such is the burden of being a Hare.

  I hover against the wall when my father slams the front door open, waiting for him to not recognize me, or worse, attack me. The attacking is new, and because I refuse to harm him, it never turns out well. My father is mad, completely off his rocker, but he’s still my father. I’d much rather him attack me than my mother. He looks around, his eyes landing on the teacup upside down on the floor first. With a grin, he kneels and crawls toward the cup on hands and knees, stalking it as if he’s some sort of jungle cat attacking prey. I realize why a moment later when he lifts the cup. A spider, trapped by the teacup, rushes out, but it isn’t faster than my father. I grimace as he scoops it up, chomping on the arachnid viciously, leaving behind only a single leg of the thing.

  Now I understand the teacup. It was a snack for later.

  My father stands and wipes his mouth, his ears twitching wildly back and forth, and when his eyes land on me, I tense.

  “Little friend, little friend, when will we meet our end? Today? Tomorrow? At the bottom of a barrel?”

  “I know not when we’ll meet our end, but until that time, I’ll remain your friend,” I mumble back. He always responds better to rhymes, just as Hatter always does. While Hatter still has intelligence in his eyes, his rhymes making more sense than not, my father is too far gone to make much sense at all. What a curse being the Keeper of Memories is. What a nightmare. Looking into the mirror of my father, seeing my future, terrifies me, and makes me wish I can run from it. I can’t—I know that—but the urge is still there. If I could outrun madness, I’d be the fastest creature in Wonderland, for sure.

  Father sniffs and grabs a teacup as if to make tea. He grabs the special concoction, the one that numbs everything for a while. Sometimes, he drinks reali-tea to feel alive, but that no longer helps. Instead, he numbs himself out. But that is dangerous when a creature like my mother is stalking around the cabin.

  I watch as my father’s hands shake when he tries to put the tea in the small strainer. “Here, let me help, friend.”

  “I can do it!” he snarls, his hands shaking harder.

  And then I hear her.

  My heart squeezes as the feeling of prophesy thickens in my throat, as I feel her draw closer, bringing the cold with her just as she always does. The temperature in the cabin drops, signaling her arrival. While my father suffers from growing madness, my mother suffers from growing savagery. She’d never been a warm creature, had never been a mother in the normal sense, but now, she’s barely more than an animal.

  There’s no time to hide and I’ve grown too big to hide myself in the seat cushion. I feel the danger in the air, know I’m going to die or something far worse if I don’t move. I waited too long to sense her. I press tightly against the wall, trying to seem as small and flat as possible, but that can hardly work. She slams the door open a moment later.

  My father turns and meets her eyes, studying her closely. There’s recognition in his eyes, along with other emotions that take me time to dissect. Relief, desperation, need, and something I can’t name. When he turns back to me, his eyes are a little clearer than I’ve seen them in a long while.

  “Run, little friend. Run, run, run.”

  Something in his voice makes me move. He’s never told me to run before, but the lucidity in his words are what make me move. My mother’s blocking the doorway, but maybe I can leap through the window. Maybe I can be faster than a chimera.

  I don’t hesitate. I take off
as fast as I can move and shoot for the window. Everything goes from still to a mad scramble in the span of a second. My father moves toward my mother. My mother shoots for me. I leap for the window, preparing myself to break through a pane of glass, only for sharp claws to dig into the skin around my ankle and yank me backwards. I slam into the floor so hard, it knocks the air from my lungs. I don’t scream, not yet. It’ll only excite her more if she’s locked in a bloodlust, in the idea that I’m food rather than family. This is it. This is the day. I’ve known it was coming for a long time.

  Something inside me snaps and I roll, trying to pry my ankle from her grip as my father attacks her. I’m not sure if he’s trying to protect me for my sake or if he wants her complete attention on him. Either way, it works for a split second, just long enough for me to drag my ankle from her grip. Mother’s teeth snap toward me and I jerk back but her claws wrap around my ear and pulls.

  I scream then. Pain blooms, so thick, I can’t fight it. Blood. The metallic tang of blood. Is it only mine? Or something far worse?

  My father drags her off me and within seconds, they’re on each other, tearing into skin. When had my father gotten a knife? Who does that lump of flesh sliding toward me belong to? I press against the wall, panting hard, breathing as if I can’t get enough air in my lungs. Panic. I’m in full panic mode but I can’t move, can’t do anything but watch as my mother and father rip into each other. My mother is a chimera; vicious, deadly, chimera. And I never understood how she could love my father, how he could convince such a beast to see him as more than food. Now I understand. My father is just as vicious, just as deadly, as he cuts and cuts and cuts. They rip each other to shreds, blood splattering across my face and the walls, staining the floors red with their life, coating it. I can’t do more than sit frozen, watching the display of brutality, of nature winning against urge, as they fall into the realm of no survival. There’s no way either can survive this.

  My father never chanted.

  Missing one arm, my father slams the large butcher knife into my mother’s sternum and twists. Her teeth clack together once more before she collapses in a heap of missing limbs and thick blood. And then my father turns to me, too many pieces missing that my mind refuses to focus on one thing.

  He’s missing an entire arm, an entire ear, pieces from his side and his shoulder, too much bone, too much pain, and yet he stands and stares at me as if he’s whole.

  “Father?” I rasp, unsure if he will attack me now. How he’s still standing, I don’t know.

  He takes a step toward me and I tense. The look in his eyes flashes from madness to lucidity, showing the man he’d once been. Sadness fills those eyes. Such overwhelming sadness. “I’m sorry, little friend,” he whispers. “I’m sorry, son.”

  When he collapses, the blood begins to ooze along the floor, drawing closer and closer to me. I scramble across it, to see if I can save him. He recognized me in the end, fought her for me. He saved me, but he hadn’t said the chant. My father planned to die today. The prophesy hanging in the air is for him.

  When I roll him over, it’s to find his eyes open in death, his chest not rising and falling. The Keeper of Memories is dead. Which can mean only one thing.

  The memories slam into me exactly four seconds later, throwing me backward into the blood coating the floor and making my back bow. I clutch my head, can’t stop the scream suddenly tearing from my lips as heavy pain rains down on me.

  Alone in a cabin in the middle of the woods, my father’s duties transfer to me upon his death, and though I have never been chosen, I will still be forced into the duty until the day I am. There must always be a Keeper, and with my father’s death, it is now my burden to bear.

  When the power transfer finishes, I sit on the floor panting for what feels like hours, trying to get my sanity back, but there’s something in my brain wiggling, niggling, threatening my sanity.

  The sharp scent of blood. The taste of flesh. The never-ending death surrounding my cabin, the bones of the creatures my mother slaughtered buried beneath the floorboards. She’d hid her evidence all these years, had buried them until the pile of bones grew too large, until she’d yearned for bigger prey.

  I shake the madness away, and it works, for now. But I know, soon, it will grow as bad as my father’s. I’ll be an empty shell, filled with madness and memories, and nothing else.

  Someone will need me one day. I only hope they come soon before I’m completely lost, before I’m no longer the March Hare but madness incarnate. How long? How long? How long?

  I turn and stare in the mirror, studying the bloody mess of my ear. My mother had ripped half of it away, and because I wasn’t the keeper when she did so, it won’t grow back. Because I couldn’t chant like my father used to before I’m Chosen, it’s lost forever. There are worse things than a Hare with half an ear, and I’m living it.

  I’m sorry, son.

  He hadn’t been apologizing for the massacre behind me. He’d been apologizing for this, for the madness, for passing his mantle to me. Too young. I’m too young, but I have no choice.

  Slowly, carefully stepping over the chunks of flesh littering my cabin, pieces and bodies I’ll have to bury soon, I go into the kitchen and grab a teacup hanging from the cabinet door. With slow, deliberate fingers, I press the tea into the cup and pour the hot water my father had already prepared. The numbing tea.

  I don’t need Reali-tea. I need to forget what I am, who I am, what litters the floor behind me.

  At least, for a little while. . .

  Chapter Five

  A Bee And A Clara

  Laughter tumbles from my throat as I see Hatter stride through the tree line with a woman by his side. I can’t stop the laughter. Couldn’t if I tried. I don’t move from my porch as she studies me, as I recognize the power in her veins.

  “Hatter!” I exclaim, conscious that when I’m standing outside my cabin, I’m stuck in the flash of my appearance, but I can’t seem to bring myself to care. This is who I am, at least in part. I can’t change even if I wanted to.

  “March,” the Hatter replies, smiling warmly. “I’d like you to meet Clara Bee.”

  I gasp audibly. “It has begun?” Wonder fills me at the ordinary looking woman shifting on her feet beside the Hatter, nervous energy spilling from her in waves. If she is Clara Bee, Alice will be coming for her. Alice will want to kill her. “Then come, come inside. Come inside. Hurry.” I gesture wildly at the door and slip inside.

  I bustle around the room as they slip in after me, giggle as I move through the cabinets, searching, searching, searching. When her eyes linger on the missing part of my ear, I giggle again at her curiosity. Why, oh why, am I whole except for that one detail? How did I lose it? Where had I lost it? Now isn’t the time to tell the Clara Bee my history and origins.

  “It’s because it was gone before the Red Queen got to me,” I offer, pointing to my ear, and laughing a little insanely, even by my standards. The madness is well and truly set in, but I still am sane in some way, still can hold onto thoughts when I need to. I haven’t found anyone to push back my madness, not yet, not like Hatter suddenly has. The Clara Bee will help him. I know it. “I got that in a fight with a bandersnatch,” I lie, and the Hatter’s eyes narrow, wondering if I’m doing it on purpose or on accident. “Well, a different bandersnatch.”

  Hatter clears his throat and his voice is gentle as he speaks. I point to the table, gesturing for them to sit as he does so. “Clara Bee wants to learn the history of the Red Queen.”

  “Of course, of course,” I reply, moving around the kitchen, grabbing the ingredients I need. “Best to get to it before the bandersnatch head this way.” I giggle at the pure terror that flashes across Clara Bee’s face. I try to stifle it with my hand, but it still tumbles out. “The beasts like to hang around,” I offer. “Because the Red Queen set them on me.”

  “Is that what happened to you?” she’s brave enough to ask. I know she’s the right Clara Bee by the w
ay her eyes assess me, the way she’s trying to learn me. Did she do the same to the Hatter? Hatter already looks at her like he’s in love. Sordid fool. He should have waited at least a little longer. The Clara Bee could die.

  “You’ll see soon enough,” I murmur as I grab jars from the cabinets and fill a kettle with water. Carefully, I mix up the cup of reali-tea, the mixture one I haven’t made often. When trapped in a cabin, haunted by madness, you don’t want to see reality much. It’s best to sit in the madness and forget what’s actually happening on the outside.

  Carefully, I pour the boiling water over the ingredients and pass it to Clara Bee.

  “Is it safe?” she asks Hatter. Following the rules but not. We won’t hurt her, but she shouldn’t trust us, not yet. Is Clara Bee naive or a good judge of character? I’d like to think it’s the later but who knows? I certainly don’t. I’m mad.

  She takes a sip when Hatter nods and says, “Take a deep breath, Clara Bee. It’s going to be a rough and intense ride,”

  The tea takes a few seconds to kick in, and Clara asks, “Did it work?” before her back bows with power and memories.

  I can’t stop the giggle that spills out of my mouth. It has begun. It has begun. Clara Bee is in Wonderland and it has begun.

  A bee and a Clara, off to save Wonderland.

  Too bad it’s probably too late for me.

  Chapter Six

  Pretty Lillies And Destiny Collide

  Beautiful. She’s gloriously beautiful and everything in me tugs toward her, wanting her. Beautiful. While White hugs a woman throwing her arms around him, her happiness evident, my eyes are focused on the woman panting with rage in the center of the clearing. She alternates between staring at us with looking into the trees where the other one disappeared, her eyes sharp and fierce and, fuck, I want her.