by Eva Chase
“Thank you,” I said. “Now you go, and leave us—”
A figure barreled out of the darkness, sword raised over his blunt head. I yelped, and the jabberwock wrenched away just in time to prevent the Knave from delivering a killing blow. As it was, his blade cut through the creature’s neck with a spray of orange-gold blood.
The jabberwock shrieked and whipped toward its attacker. Its legs wobbled under it. The Knave might kill it after all.
A lump of guilt clogged my throat despite the monster’s carnage. It was my fault; he never would have gotten that strike in if I hadn’t lulled it. But Theo was yanking me away, and I had to follow him. If the jabberwock won its duel with Knave, I wasn’t so sure I could calm the beast again if it turned on us afterward.
And if the Knave won, we definitely didn’t want to stick around for him to turn his sword on us.
Footsteps pounded around me. It was hard to make out much except a shaky view of the landscape just ahead as Theo’s lantern jostled in his grasp. “Do we have everyone?” I asked, taking a quick glance around. There was Hatter and Doria. Chess was still right behind me.
“Pulling up the rear!” Dee called, with a flash of the lantern he must have scooped up, and I could tell from his buoyant tone that his twin was with him.
All we had to do was put enough distance between us and the two vicious creatures behind us to make sure the victor of the battle didn’t find us. Easy peasy. Ha.
The muscles in my calves ached from the mad dash toward the tumbleweeds and now this new marathon. The uneven rocky ground stung the soles of my feet through my sneakers. I pushed myself faster anyway. The glimmer of the next daylight square came into view up ahead, expanding and brightening as we raced toward it.
A groan burbled up in the distance, trailing off with a painful gurgling. A shiver ran through me. I was pretty sure I knew who’d won the fight.
We burst from the darkness and nearly tumbled right over the jagged edge of a gully. Theo caught my hand and Chess my waist as we teetered on the crumbling rock.
A forest covered the landscape all around us, but the trees were so narrow and pointed they only provided streaks of shade from the sun glaring overhead. To our right, the woods stretched out over what appeared to be reasonably flat ground, the vegetation more sparse there. To our left, it dropped away steeply into a valley clotted with those narrow trees and other vibrant greenery.
My head reeled with the abrupt transition from darkness to light, open plain to forestland. The smell of blood lingered in my nose—had it gotten onto my clothes? My gut lurched at the thought. Images of the bodies the jabberwock had mangled darted through my memory.
But I couldn’t say it was necessarily a more brutal monster than the Knave who was still on our trail.
“We can move faster on even terrain,” Theo said, easing back from the gully.
As my gaze traveled down into the valley, the ring under my shirt heated with fresh energy. I inhaled deeply. Dry piney air filled my lungs.
I could do this. I could keep going.
“I think there’s something down there,” I said. “Another artifact, maybe. And it’ll be harder for the Knave to spot us in the denser forest, won’t it?”
I glanced around at my companions. They all hesitated, the three guys I knew best looking back at me with expressions that appeared a little dazed. Theo recovered himself first.
“If you feel there’s something down there, then down we’ll go. Quickly, everyone.”
We hustled along the edge of the gully to a rough path that allowed us to scramble and skid through the brush rather than tumbling right down. After the first several feet, as the trees closed in more densely overhead, the slope evened out a little. We hiked on, needing to hold onto the branches around us less tightly than before. A drone of insect life hummed around us. The sun continued to glint between the tall peaks of the trees.
“There,” I said, wiping sweat from my brow. “This isn’t so bad.”
“What the heck did you do back there?” Doria burst out. “You walked right up to the jabberwock—and it let you pet it.”
“It was pretty fucking incredible,” Dee said.
Oh. Right. That was probably why the guys had been looking at me so strangely.
I rubbed my mouth. “I don’t know,” I said. “It was like with the train. I just… felt I should do it, and the ruby got hot, and so far following it has worked out. There wasn’t any other way I could have stopped it from charging at you two.” My gaze slid from Doria to Hatter.
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” he said, his tone dry but his eyes warm. “I think you might be able to challenge Chess for the title of maddest one here.”
Chess harrumphed. “No one is ever going to top me for madness,” he said breezily. He brushed his hand over my hair, and his voice softened. “It was quite a sight.”
“Another testament to the ruby’s power,” Theo said.
Dum let out a sharp breath. “If only it worked on the Knave—or the Queen—too.”
I touched the vest where the ring was tucked behind it. “Yeah, I definitely didn’t get any impression I could tame him.”
“Maybe the artifact we unearth down here will lend a hand with that conundrum,” Chess said.
“If nothing else, I’m glad to get a breather after all that,” I said, skirting a rock that jutted into our path.
And then a giant gnat dive-bombed at my face.
Chapter Eleven
Lyssa
I ducked down, jerking my arms up to protect my head. The rubies on my vest glowed with a tingling heat, but if it was supposed to protect me, it wasn’t covering the currently important parts. The gnat’s hooked forelegs rasped across my wrist, scraping raw lines into my skin.
I barely had time to register the pain. As the gnat—which was big enough to take on a mid-sized owl—whirred through the air and whipped back around toward us, more massive insects careened out of the foliage. I spotted a few more gnats, creatures with glossy wooden bodies and horse-like heads that I guessed were the Wonderland version of horseflies, dragonflies longer and thicker around than my arm with prickly wings like holly leaves, and butterflies flapping fluffy bread slices on their backs and baring vampiric fangs.
“You’re fucking kidding me,” Hatter muttered.
I grabbed a fallen branch from the ground and smacked it into a horsefly that was careening toward me. The impact sent it spinning away, but two dragonflies zipped in to take its place, their wings clicking like knives.
Chess leapt up, batting bugs out of the air like a cat swatting at moths. Theo produced a baton that reminded me of the ones I’d seen some of the Queen’s guards carrying before, except his gave off an electric sizzle of sparks when it collided with one of the fanged butterflies. The twins spun around, Dee punching and Dum kicking with their elastic limbs. Doria took her cue from me and grabbed a stick of her own. She snapped off the end to form a jagged point.
“Come on,” Hatter said, waving us after him as he scrambled nimbly on down the slope. I skidded over the pebbled ground after him. The others followed in an avalanche of feet and rattling stones.
More bugs shrieked through the air. A gnat slammed right into Hatter’s bowler hat. He groped after it, but it went spinning off between the trees and disappeared amid the brush. The next dragonfly tried to take his scalp clean off. Doria leapt in with her branch, and Hatter pushed on with a grimace.
“There’s a cave up ahead,” he said. “We can hope those things won’t follow us in there.”
We clambered after him down the last steep incline to the bottom of the valley. A leap over a trickle of a stream brought us to the narrow mouth of the cave Hatter had spotted, its outer walls patchy with glowing yellow moss. He leapt in, and the rest of us hurried after him into the cool shadows.
Hatter stopped several paces down the cave, where the passage opened a little wider. Water dripped from the ceiling onto the spikes of his bare hair. He swiped
his hand over his head, still grimacing, and peered past us to the entrance.
The bugs hadn’t followed. I exhaled in relief. When I peered into the cave’s depths beyond Hatter, I couldn’t make out anything but darkness, but my ruby flared with renewed heat.
“I think this is where the ring wanted us to go,” I said. “I’m thinking a lantern or two would be nice?”
The White Knight fished his back out of his bag and passed it to Dum. Theo kept his electric baton in hand as we eased deeper into the cave. Hatter paused and hopped a gap that had opened in the floor ahead of us. He held out his hand to help me make the same jump.
As we walked on, he reached up instinctively as if to straighten the hat that was no longer there. His fingers curled around the air, and he yanked them back to his side. Going without something on his head clearly irked him.
A low rumbling carried from the darkness ahead. We all froze, our taste for caution finely honed after what we’d been through over the last two days.
The sound didn’t get any louder, though. There was a pulsing rhythm to it, like some kind of heavy machinery. The ruby’s heat seared through my skin.
I headed toward the sound, ignoring the fresh drips of water off the ceiling and the slick texture of the rock against my fingers when I brushed the wall for balance, but still moving carefully. Dum caught up with the lantern just as the source of the rumbling appeared at the edge of its light.
The floor opened up again in front of us, but not in a chasm like before. This was a pit. And it literally opened—and closed, and opened, and closed, the rocky edges knocking against each other in a rough approximation of smacking lips. The floor of the cave seemed to be chewing on something very enthusiastically.
I eased closer. Theo stayed right beside me as the ground beneath our feet quivered. The lantern light fell into the pit, and my breath caught.
At the bottom of the pit, maybe seven or eight feet below us, a sword gleamed. Its grip was wrapped with some sort of pale cloth, but the pommel and the guard had a golden glint, and a large ruby shone at the top of the hilt. I wasn’t exactly an expert on olden-time weaponry—okay, or any weaponry—but I didn’t need to be to know it was gorgeous. And the sizzling energy of the ruby beneath my shirt insisted it was also mine.
As long as that freaking pit mouth didn’t chew me up the second I tried to grab it.
I circled the pit, absorbing the rhythm of the chomping rocks and the shape of the sword beneath them.
“If I had something to hook it and pull it up…” Theo said. “The rope I brought wasn’t made for this.”
“There are swords back in the city,” Hatter said. “You don’t have to risk your life for one.”
I shook my head. “The Queen is scared of this sword. She tried to make sure no one ever retrieved it. That means we need it.” A sword would get us a lot farther in a battle than the armored vest would.
Hatter shrugged off his suit jacket. “Then I’ll go for it,” he said, rolling up his sleeves. “I’m the fastest here.”
“I could hop down and spring right back up,” Dum put in.
“I could hold the rocks open as well as I can,” Chess offered.
That suggestion made me think of the sound of crunching bones. The rock was too relentless. And the same sort of prickling was creeping over me as with the jabberwock, as with the train.
“I think I have to do it,” I said. “I have the ruby. It might not… let anyone else take it. But that also means…”
I breathed in and out, focusing even more intently on the rhythm. My hand came up to the center of my chest over the ring, willing more of its powerful heat through my body. That was magic. While I had it, I had magic too.
“We can do the same thing we did with the pool yesterday,” I said, motioning to Theo. “Tie your rope around my waist. I’ll jump down and lie down flat under the rocks while I grab the sword. The second they open again, you haul me back up as quickly as you can.”
“Lyssa.” Theo touched my cheek, turning my gaze toward him. “Are you sure you want to do this?” he asked, his dark eyes holding mine.
“Wouldn’t you, if you thought you had the best chance?” I said.
His jaw tightened for a second, but all he said was, “I would.”
“Then there you go. Get out the rope.”
I stood braced at the lip of the pit for a few seconds after he’d secured the knot. Then I jumped.
My body tucked itself into a crouch instinctively. The second my feet hit the rocky base, I sprawled forward, my hand shooting out to clutch the sword’s hilt. The rocks chomped over me even closer than I’d bargained for, catching a bit of my hair and yanking. But the rest of my body stayed uncrushed. The rocks jolted open, and the rope jerked my body upward with a massive heave.
I swung around to push my feet off the pit’s wall and bounded back out. As I landed, a laugh tumbled out of me. My fingers clutched tight around the sword. I held it up toward the cave’s ceiling, unable to stop myself from grinning like a maniac.
“The sword of the blood-marked ruby. The Queen of Hearts had better watch out.”
“You mean you’re actually going hunting?” Doria said, looking from one twin to the other. “Do you even know what you’re doing?”
Dee grinned. “Our mom sometimes gets paranoid about what the butcher shop offers. She taught us a few tricks. It’d be nice to have something extra for dinner to celebrate, don’t you think? Why don’t you come with us?”
Doria glanced over at Hatter where he was standing with the rest of us contemplating the site we’d picked to spend the night. The hilltop gave us a vantage point all around the square in the starlight from the clear sky. With at least a couple of us standing guard at any given point in the night, the Knave wouldn’t have a chance to sneak up on us.
Hatter made a shooing motion at his daughter. “Stay close to them. They’ve proven they can take care of themselves; I’d imagine they can handle you too.” He shot the twins a look that said they’d better or there’d be hell to pay.
Dee saluted him, and they set off down the hill.
Theo grabbed a couple things from his bag. “Chess, why don’t you come with me to make sure there’s nothing else in the area we need to be worried about. I have a couple deterrents I’d like to set down too. If there’s one jabberwock on the prowl, there could be others.” He turned to Hatter and me. “Can you two get the cabins set up? Holler if you need anything. This might take some time, but we won’t go too far.”
“Cabin assembly it is,” Hatter said with a waggle of his nimble fingers. “Come on, looking-glass girl.”
I stripped off the metal vest, which was starting to weigh heavy on my shoulders, set it next to the sword by my bag, and got to work.
The assembly of the tiny but sturdy cabins Theo had brought for us to sleep in happened about three quarters through Hatter’s efforts rather than mine. In my defense, it was hard to keep up with him. His deft hands bent the folded structures into shape and snapped this piece and that into place as if he’d spent most of his life making temporary homes and not hats.
I managed to do most of the work on one, though. I stepped back to study it in the amber light of the lantern the others had left behind for us, making sure the roof was straight where it slanted around the height of my shoulders. When I decided it was level enough and glanced toward Hatter, he was watching me, an awed warmth in his gaze.
“What?” I said, abruptly self-conscious.
He shook himself out of his apparent reverie. “Sorry. I was just remembering that moment when you had the jabberwock bowing to you.” He let out a rough chuckle. “That was something special all right, even if it was mad.”
My cheeks heated. “The ring is special,” I said, and grabbed a couple of the blankets and the lantern. “I couldn’t have talked it down without that.”
Hatter made a dismissive sound as he ducked after me into the first cabin. He spread a blanket at one end while I took care of the
other. The spongy floor wasn’t as comfortable as a mattress, but it offset the hardness of the actual ground we’d had to sleep on just fine.
“I happen to be pretty familiar with people and their accessories,” he said, sitting back on the blanket. “I should know the impact has a lot more to do with how the person wears the item than how the item wears the person.”
My gaze leapt to the uneven spikes of his dark blond hair, still uncovered. “Or how the person doesn’t wear it? I guess you didn’t pack another hat.”
Hatter winced. “No. I suppose I’ll just have to hope everyone can remember my name without one until I get back.”
He said it like he was joking, but I could read genuine discomfort in his expression despite the softness of the lantern’s glow. I scooted closer so I could ruffle those spikes. He caught my wrist when my fingers had already grazed his hair. A different sort of heat washed over me, kneeling that close to him, his fingers encircling my arm, his hair unexpectedly silky beneath my own fingertips. I could almost hear Melody egging me on: Go get him, girl.
“I didn’t expect you to have to sacrifice so much, coming out here with me,” I said, half teasing, half serious. “I’m sad that it came to this.”
“I suppose I’ll survive somehow,” Hatter replied. “Better my hat than my head.”
His grip on my wrist loosened, and my hand came to rest not-entirely-by-accident on his thigh. It was a little hard to think, but part of me felt the need to be completely serious for a moment.
“Really,” I said, looking into his green eyes. “You didn’t have to come with me at all. You weren’t even sure the artifacts existed. I wouldn’t have blamed you if you’d stayed back in the city, and I hope the trip hasn’t been too horrifying.”
A smile twitched at his lips. “Lyssa,” he said, “loss of hat, sinkholes, blood-thirsty monsters, and all, there’s nowhere I’d rather have been. What we’re doing here is worth some unpleasantness.” He paused. “You’re worth going through some unpleasantness for.”
