Because of this sacrifice, I’m starting to suspect that maybe he’s not the devil after all. That maybe, after all these years, I’m seeing a side to him bordering on vulnerable and caring. A side he kept locked away from me, other than a glimpse or two I might’ve forgotten over the years.
Still, I’m not ready to forgive him for using my daughter quite yet. Because to do that, I’d have to forgive myself for making her responsible for my messes to begin with. And as much as Thomas wants me to . . . I’m not sure I can.
Alyssa’s life will always be split down the middle because of me. She’s taken it in stride. No one could see her with her netherling subjects and deny that she was meant to be their queen. She loves the very world that I came to hate.
And because I love my daughter, somehow I have to learn to embrace that world again. Otherwise, I can never move past letting Morpheus and all of Wonderland’s lunacy into our lives in the first place.
My filmy reflection reels me back into the here and now. I spritz my favorite perfume across my collarbone and wrists—swimming in notes of passion fruit and blood orange—then blot my nose with powder, stepping out of the bathroom before the steam from Thomas’s shower can smear my makeup.
I slip pearl earrings and a matching necklace and bracelet into place, then sit on the bed’s edge and wiggle my toes, concentrating on our closed bedroom door. The sounds of cabinet doors and clanging pans drift in from the other side. The kids are in the kitchen, putting something together for dinner. I debate helping them while I wait for Thomas, but I’m not ready to force my feet into the pair of pewter heels on the floor next to me. The carpet feels too nice . . . plush and luxurious. Instead, I lie back on the fluffy comforter, spread out my arms, and close my eyes, relaxing muscles that still ache from our bout of fencing earlier.
Attuned to the rhythmic patter of water against the shower door, I allow myself to fall back into another day and hour, when I was thirteen, staring out at a rain-drenched world. When I embraced the nether-call during one of the bleakest and loneliest times of my life.
It was the day Morpheus came to me and offered power and vengeance in the palm of his manipulative hand. The day that would change who I was going to be, forever.
BOXED IN
Twenty-six years earlier . . .
Rain pounded the empty refrigerator box atop my head. I had turned it on its side and climbed in just minutes before the storm hit. The Dumpster beside me reeked of dead fish and decaying fruit, overpowering the fresh scents of wet asphalt and dirt. Puddles filled the uneven gravel street and water gushed out of the gutters that hung from the back of my eight-story apartment building on the other side of the alley.
A damp gust of wind blustered through my makeshift shelter. I hunkered down against the box’s back, tucking my canvas tote bag behind my neck like a pillow and holding the pages of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland so I wouldn’t lose my place. A few weeks before, I’d crossed out “Alice’s” in the title and replaced it with “Alison’s.” It was partly to make sure everyone knew the book belonged to me. But there was more . . . a part of me wished I could live those same adventures . . . that I could somehow be Alice and escape into a rabbit hole where a new world awaited—one where maybe someone as peculiar and mismatched as me might find a fit. A place to belong.
I’d never been good at understanding other people. Mostly because I moved around so much. At least that’s what I told myself. It had nothing to do with how hard it was to trust people, or my inability to relate to them on a daily basis.
Reading offered me friends enough, and my Lewis Carroll books were my favorite, being one of the few things my mother had left behind when she died right after giving birth to me. The stories made me feel closer to her, even though I never knew her. Maybe because I secretly understood how real the Wonderland tales were to her heart, considering our distant relation to the London Liddells.
Once, when I was staying at an orphanage while waiting for a new foster family, I broke into the office and read my records. It was the only way I could find out about my background. Alice Liddell, the real-life girl who inspired Carroll’s fictional tales, had a son who was involved with a woman before he went off to war and died on the battlefield. His lover ended up pregnant and came to America to raise their illegitimate child. That boy grew up and had a daughter: my mother, Alicia.
Somehow, all of this made my mom go crazy. My records stated she spent time in an asylum as a teenager after painting Wonderland characters on every wall of her home and insisting they talked to her in dreams. The day I was born, she jumped out of her second-story hospital room window to test the “fairy wings” the voices told her she had. She landed in a rosebush and broke her neck.
The doctor claimed she committed suicide—postpartum depression and grief over losing my dad months earlier in a factory accident. Whatever it was, one thing was never explained . . . the dime-size welts on her shoulder blades, too big and perfectly spaced to have been caused by getting pricked by thorns.
My opinion? She did have wings. Ones that never sprouted. If it made me crazy like her to think that, I could live with it. Because if I was off my rocker, it meant we had a bond. Something in common. As long as no one else ever knew.
My mother had also left behind a Polaroid camera—the kind that spits out completed pictures at the push of a button. I’d known how to use it since the age of five.
I snuggled deeper into the nest of photographs I’d dumped from my tote. It was something I’d become good at: hiding behind trees on playgrounds or parked cars at the mall to capture stolen moments of other people’s families and friends. I liked to surround myself with them—to cushion me from the absence of my own.
I lifted my denim jacket’s cuff to scan my watch. Only ten more minutes and school would be out. Then I could go to my apartment and pretend I’d been where I was supposed to be all day. I’d shown up at the beginning of my last class, long enough to be counted present, before “taking a trip to the bathroom” and never returning. With any luck, Mrs. Bunsby, my latest foster caregiver, would never know I’d skipped. I’d only been living with her for a month. I didn’t want to upset her and get thrown away again. Other than her being a forty-something-year-old vegetarian widow, she was the best keeper I’d had since I could remember.
I peered up at the sixth floor of the building. Our apartment was the farthest on the left, where the fire escape had rusted through and left a jagged black skeleton hanging askew and useless. I was aces at climbing, and had tried a few weeks ago to descend the railing and sneak out at night for a session with my camera. I had slipped and fallen.
Six stories was a long drop. I should’ve died, or at least broken multiple bones. But I lapsed into a dream state on the way down and somehow, when I woke up, didn’t have a bruise on me anywhere. I didn’t even ache. All I had was a strange memory of giant, flapping black wings.
Sorting through my pictures, I found one at the bottom of the pile: a sparrow-size moth with a blue body and black wings, splayed on a flower between a slant of sun and shade. I remember the day I saw it in the park, as if it was sitting between two worlds. I took the shot not only for the symbolism, but because I’d seen the bug before. My mother had sketched one that looked just like it on a slip of paper that she kept in her Alice books. The strangest thing was she’d also made a rough sketch of Alice from the Wonderland illustrations right next to it. Somehow—in her mind—they were connected. I’d lost the drawing during one of my many moves. So when I saw that identical moth, live and in person, I had to immortalize it with my camera.
Sighing, I tucked the picture into my Alice book to hold my spot. That shot was Mrs. Bunsby’s favorite. She said I had a gift, that if I kept improving, she would give me her late husband’s camera—a Yashica 44—along with his books on developing your own film.
She was one of the few adults who’d ever believed in me without being judgmental. But if Mrs. Bunsby knew that I thought this very moth had
played a role in my mother’s Wonderland fantasies, she would think my imagination was too vivid, like my teachers and caregivers always said. I’d done research at the library. Moths have a life span of months, certainly not decades.
Thinking about it even kind of gave me the creeps. But it also made me feel special, like my mom and I mattered to someone somewhere—enough to warrant watching. It wasn’t the first time I’d felt like bugs and plants were reaching out to me in a way they didn’t to other people. I’d been hearing their voices ever since I hit puberty close to my twelfth birthday a year ago. Still, I knew better than to share that tidbit with anyone for risk of ending up in a psych ward like my mom.
My stomach growled. I shoved a fist beneath my ribs. Mrs. Bunsby would be serving pickled beet and tofu casserole tonight. Just the thought made my taste buds want to run for cover. I had to stretch out my snack as long as possible. The package of peanut butter crackers I’d saved from lunch lay open next to me. I slid one out and munched on it. Crumbs gathered on the illustration of Alice fleeing from some card guards in hopes of keeping her head, and I shook the cracker remnants off so they fell on my thigh.
A roach skittered out from under one of the box’s flaps and climbed onto my pants to gobble up the residue without so much as a please or thank-you. In my opinion, they were the rudest of all the insects. I’d had conversations with houseflies and mealworm beetles that were civil and interesting. But roaches never had much to say, other than to grumble about the lack of trash piles and dirt now that humans populated their world, claiming garbage bags and vacuum cleaners were the bane of their existence.
I waved my hand, shooing the bug away. It skittered back into the folds of the box and scolded my bad manners.
“I’m trying to help you, moron. You want to get squished?” I gathered up my canvas tote, shoving my pictures and books inside, then bounded into the storm, making a run for the skinny space between my apartment building and the run-down barbershop next door.
The only way in was from the front. Our landlord, Wally Harcus, kept the back door to the building locked for “safety reasons.” Or so he claimed. He just wanted to gawk at all the single moms and young girls who lived in his low-rent building. His door was the first one down the hall from the entrance, meaning he had the ideal situation from any perv’s perspective.
Shards of rain, laced with ice, pelted me. The denim of my jacket and jeans absorbed every droplet, and I felt ten pounds heavier and twenty degrees colder by the time I pushed inside the building.
My hands were too wet to hold on to the knob, and the door slammed shut. I cringed at the sound.
I’d barely skirted by Wally’s room when his door flung open. I backed slowly down the hall toward the stairway, keeping him in my sights.
His sweaty face appeared first, then the rest of him, rolls of flab barely contained within a tight blue T-shirt and grease-stained khaki pants. I could smell his distinctive odor even with my eyes—the scent of rotting cabbage and meat. Pools of perspiration formed uneven circles beneath his armpits, darkening the blue to navy.
He’d always reminded me of a walrus—bald head, deep folds of skin over his brow, double chin, and a handlebar mustache that looked like a half-chewed kielbasa dangling over his sausage-fat lips. The wheezes and clicking sounds he emitted with each breath only added to the illusion of a beached sea mammal.
“Hey there, Alison. Get a little wet, did ya?” His gaze glittered—watery and dark like liquid charcoal—as he took a bite of an overripe apricot. The juices drizzled down his chin and he offered a sleazy smirk. His incisors—two sizes too big for his mouth—hung low like underdeveloped ivory tusks.
My stomach twisted with disgust as he stepped full into the hallway and made an obvious appraisal of my chest where my shirt clung to me. He looked famished, as if he wanted to gobble me up. I snapped my jacket closed and shoved ringlets of dripping blond hair off my face.
“I’ve got some hot chocolate on the stove. Wanna cup?” he asked.
I’d caught him staring plenty of times, but he’d never had the guts to ask me in. I swallowed and held tighter to my bag’s straps. “Nah. Mrs. Bunsby’s waiting.”
“Nope, she’s not. Had to make a run to the grocery store.” He flashed a note at me.
I only had time to see a tiny triangle torn from the top, right above the words I’ll be back in an hour, before he shoved it into his pocket.
“In fact,” Wally wheezed, “she told me to keep you company. Says you’re too young to be on your own and stay out of trouble. I can come to your room instead, if ya like.” He jangled the keys that hung on one of his belt loops and smirked bigger.
Idiot.
I hated him, and hated myself more for being scared. I’d faced monsters like him before. Two foster families ago, I had a fourteen-year-old foster brother who trapped me in the basement and stuck his tongue down my throat while his hands found their way up my shirt. Yet I was the one who got sent back to the children’s home for biting off the tip of his tongue and breaking his thumb. I was the one with issues.
Unfortunately for me, Wally Harcus wouldn’t be as easy to fend off as a skinny teenage boy.
The bottom step hit the back of my heels, stalling me. It was fight or flight. One thing I knew: Mrs. Bunsby wouldn’t have asked the walrus to keep me company. He probably saw her leave and decided it was the perfect chance to make a move. So there he stood between me and the only way out. And even if I locked myself inside our apartment, he had the keys to get in.
I could prop something against the door and buy myself time to clamber down the broken fire escape. I’d probably fall to my death, but that had to be better than the alternative.
I spun around and hightailed it up the four flights of stairs. The sound of his footsteps followed, slow and plodding. He was in no hurry. Everyone minded their own business here. No one would stop him, which made the chase about as challenging as a fly already stuck in a spider’s web.
Tears blurred my vision as I made it to our door. A piece of Scotch tape dangled the missing puzzle piece from Mrs. Bunsby’s note where she’d stuck it next to the peephole. Wally had taken the letter she left for me.
Gulping back bile, I struggled to fit my key in the lock. Adrenaline used my heart like a punching bag, slamming it until it quivered uncontrollably in my chest. I’d just managed to get inside, shut the door, and lock it when Wally cleared the final step onto our floor.
Straining every muscle, I wedged Mrs. Bunsby’s favorite wing-backed chair into place under the knob and raced for my bedroom, dropping my bag just inside the threshold after I shut myself in. The overcast afternoon hazed the light to a gray fog, and with my heavy curtains covering the window, shadows cloaked the room and painted eerie shapes along the bare walls.
Keys jangled outside our apartment, loud enough I could hear them through my closed door. Sobbing, I stumbled over to the window, shoved the curtains apart, and opened the pane. A rain-drenched gust caught my hair and slapped it around my face. Tears burned trails down my cheeks as I flung one leg over the sill, about to throw myself out.
“Tsk, tsk. Now, that would be a tragic waste.” A deep cockney accent froze me in place there, straddling life and death. “Surely your existence is worth more than that oily rat’s.”
I snapped my head toward the voice. In the left corner of my room, the shadows moved and took on the indistinct silhouette of a man.
A gasp broke through my lips. “Wh-who’s there?”
“Introductions aren’t necessary amongst friends.” My intruder leaned into the dim light, revealing a face both beautiful and terrifying. He wasn’t human. No, he was far too perfect and mystical for that. Markings, resembling tattoos, flashed with jeweled colors beneath his dark, fathomless eyes. His blue hair swayed, out of sync with the wind gushing through my window. “I believe I’ve merited the title of friend, don’t you? Considering the last time you almost cracked your skull clambering around on that fire escape.” Giant
wings splayed out from behind his shoulders, glistening like black satin in the grayish light.
Adrift somewhere between terror, disbelief, and hope, I eased my leg back into my room and leaned against the juncture of the window frame and the wall. “You . . . you were the one. You saved me.”
He smoothed the wrinkles from some red gloves on his hands. “Not quite, Alison. You saved yourself by daring to defy the natural laws in the first place. The fact that you even tried to make that climb merited a second chance at life, yes? Courage paired with folly becomes abandon, which is an honorable trait where I’m from, and should always be rewarded.”
I squinted at him. “You were rewarding me for my folly?”
He held a top hat in front of him and stroked it as if it were a cat. “Your abandon.” A deep chuckle rumbled in his chest. “You’re an odd duck, aren’t you? You haven’t balked at me yet, nor have you questioned if I’m real. Or even how I know your name. It doesn’t matter to you one way or the other, does it?”
I clenched my hands into fists at my sides. “It doesn’t matter if I’m crazy, as long the madness helps me survive.”
He raised an eyebrow, obviously pleased and surprised by my answer. “Ah, spoken like a true netherling. Madness, like any other facet of irrationality, can be used as a tool and a weapon, in the right hands.”
I didn’t have the chance to ask what a netherling was because in the other room, the wing-backed chair’s wooden feet scraped across the tile floor and clawed through my nerves like talons. Wally was in the apartment.
My throat dried. I glanced outside at the slippery rails, then back toward the man with wings, now standing in full view next to my door. He was tall and graceful, around the age of nineteen or twenty, and dressed in lace and velvet, like a gentleman from another time and place.