Splintered (29 page)

Ivory struggles, but Morpheus holds the blade steady at her throat. Locking my gaze with his, he grimaces miserably. “Why didn’t you listen?” he asks, voice pinched. “The wish I gave you . . . if you had used it as I instructed . . . it would’ve saved you from this end. My challenge was for you to sit on the throne with Red possessing your body. I tried to offer you a way out.”

If the queen wasn’t holding me up, I’d faint dead away. My fate is to be a vessel—only one-half myself—tethered to Wonderland for all eternity? I want to tell him again that I hate him, to really mean it this time. I want to spit at him and scream that he’s a coward in the worst way, to sacrifice me for his own worthless soul.

I avert my eyes instead, using that ploy that worked so well earlier so I can bring him to his knees. Because he’s the only one with the power to free me now.

“Please, you must understand.” His voice takes on that pleading quality, and my heart—the one part of my body that I’ll never let Red have—picks up a beat, hopeful. “I’m not a coward.” He tries to convince me, as if I’d already called him the name. “It wasn’t the fear of death that drove me . . . it was captivity. Like you, I cannot be a spirit contained. I must be free. You understand, don’t you?”

I suppress any response, wincing from the effort of fighting Red.
“Would you hurry and get over here, you fool? I need the added power of Ivory’s crown to fight the girl. She’s very powerful, this one.”
There’s a hint of pride in the statement, which only feeds my resolve to beat her. Forget family ties. I’m not hers to be proud of.

Morpheus steps forward a few feet with his hostage. Red throws out a vine like a striking snake. It topples the crown from Ivory’s head; she screams and faints.

Slowing her fall, Morpheus lays her out of the way, his toe on the diamond-encrusted crown. Red’s vine rope tries to reach again but can’t get any closer without me stepping forward. I refuse to budge.

Red manipulates the connection between her ivy strands and my veins like puppet strings. I bite against the tearing pain, jaw almost cracked from grinding my teeth so hard. Still, I don’t relent.

“It was to be so perfect!” Morpheus all but cries the words, concentrating solely on me. “Your mortal suitor has already forgotten this journey. But you and I, we share memories of a childhood that I will never forget. You are the lady of my heart. My match in every way. I would’ve stayed at your side once we banished Queen Red, never left you to rule alone. We could’ve danced every night in the stars above your kingdom. For you, I would’ve given up my solitary life . . . been your loyal footman and cherished you eternally.”

Red forces my face in his direction, but I keep my gaze on the floor.
“I should make you my footstool with that admission of heresy. But I’m giving you one last chance. Bring the crown if you wish to have any part of her. I’m sharing one-half of her mind. I can offer you her body, force her to surrender to your desires. Use her as you will. Wed her, bed her. Be her mate. Just let me have Ivory’s crown.”
The sole of his shoe scrapes the jeweled circlet along the floor toward her. Rethinking, he moves it back even farther out of her reach.
An ember of hope stirs inside me, until I look up. He’s deep in thought, actually considering her proposition.
She can’t do that, can she? Force my body to her will? As if in answer, my hair escapes several of its pins and thrashes around me, the strands no longer platinum blond but flame red. They reach toward Morpheus, taunting him like beckoning arms.

“Do you want her for your own?”
“So very much—” His voice breaks.
“Then do my bidding. She’ll be yours physically, and there the heart

The expression on Morpheus’s face is torn between longing and a struggle for honor. The gems bejeweling his eyes flash from pink to purple. “Forever to win her.” He’s almost in a trance. He crouches to lift the crown but stops.

“Oh, for Fennine’s sake! If you’re too weak to hand it over, simply leave. The girl’s only remaining strong because you’re giving her hope. Begone, and I’ll overpower her. I shall get the crown for myself.”

Morpheus stands, takes one last lingering look at me, then starts for the door.
A cry erupts from my throat as I reclaim my voice. “That’s it? You got what you want, and now you’re going to turn your back on me like you did Alice? You’ll leave me to my cage of ivy? Why not? It can’t be any worse than living in a straitjacket, and you’ve forced enough girls into those.”
He pauses, midstep.
“Don’t listen to her! She will be yours to hold and cherish within the hour. You can kiss her tears away, make all her pain a distant memory.”
As if in slow motion, he resumes walking, broad shoulders tense and wings low.
“You made a vow!” I screech, wrestling for control of my mind. “Not to leave me heartbroken and hurt again! You’ll lose everything!”
Morpheus stalls at the threshold, his back turned and head hanging down. “I would give up all my powers to have you in my arms. Your love is the only magic I need.”
Red forces me forward a step . . . then two.
“I’ll be a corpse in your bed!” I try to get through to him, one last time. “You’re killing everything that makes me who I am. The girl you taught, your playmate . . . the one you claim to love will be gone, with a puppet in her place.”
The leafy veins in my legs jerk on another unwanted step as if in demonstration.
Just as Morpheus reaches his hand to unbar the door, Red snaps out her vines and reaches the crown.
“Good-bye, Alyssa,” my one last hope says, his wings drooping in resignation. “I’m afraid neither of us is strong enough to defeat her.”
“We’ll see about that, Morpheus,” I hiss back, then turn my attention to the vines possessing me.
I’m done letting everyone else dictate what happens to my life. I’d rather be dead than an eternal pawn.
Exerting the last of my will, I force my hands to grip the vines that are dragging the crown toward me. Slamming to my knees, I tug against the ivy, holding it taut where it joins my skin. Queen Red’s scream rattles my brain. She drops the crown to concentrate on me. Her ivy winds around my palms and fingers until they’re covered with leafy mittens. She forces my arms together and binds them and follows with my legs and torso, incapacitating me just like the flowers did on the beginning of my journey, except the pain can’t compare. Any struggle against her shackles makes each bone in my body feel like it’s going to crack.
The only way to stop hurting is to go limp . . . give up. She’s won. I’m finished . . . I close my eyes and whimper.
I think of Jeb, Jenara, my mom and dad—all having to pick up their lives without me. It pierces my heart with a pain more acute than anything I’ve ever felt. And I’m glad for it. The intensity of the emotion proves I’m still alive . . . that I’m an individual. That I’m me.
Red has my body, but she doesn’t control my heart or mind yet. That’s where my magic lies.
Three of the elfin knight corpses lie only feet away. One’s arm is severed, one’s neck is buckled, and the other has a twisted leg, all from their encounter with the bandersnatch. They might be broken, but I can still use them.
Concentrating on their bodies, I picture them alive: Their brains become computers, hardwired to my thoughts; their hearts made of putty, pumping in time with my own; their legs and arms are pliant like pipe cleaners, moving on my command.
Shaky and awkward, they stand. Limping and swaying, they drag themselves toward me. Their fingers clamp around the vines and heave against Queen Red.
My ivy cocoon unwinds, spinning me on the ground. The vines grow taut at my ankles, wrists, and hands, where they’re joined with my body. The knights continue to heave with all their weight and the vines rip my skin on the way out, like electric cords being jerked from a plasterboard wall. A knife-sharp pain guts me—a rotary blade hacking through my organs.
I gurgle a scream and strangle on the taste of blood, losing control of my macabre marionettes. They droop, almost releasing their hold on the vines. Driven by the desire to be free, I command the knights to yank harder.
Crimson streams spurt from my wounds and puddle on the floor. I grit my teeth, using my body’s anguish to drive me, to give my creations the strength to fight until they’ve ripped Red out, until she’s connected only to my fingertips by a tangle of weeds.
I collapse, and my trio of knights crumple into a pile, inanimate and dead again.
I’m so weak, I barely realize Morpheus is at my side. Vorpal sword in hand, he severs the leafy stems from my fingers, then slashes the vines away. Another piercing screech jars my skull as Morpheus works off the crown and hairpin to disconnect me completely from my puppeteer.
Without a body to inhabit, Red’s spirit writhes in the ivy on the ground, dying like a mass of eels out of water.
Morpheus tucks the vorpal sword away in his jacket. I slump in a fetal position, drained of blood and energy. My wrists and ankles gape open, a thousand times worse than the wounds that slashed across my palms as a child. I wonder if I’m dying . . .
A black haze dims my surroundings.
“Brave, stubborn girl,” Morpheus whispers into my ear as he tenderly cradles me in his arms, lifting my body. “You were the only one who could free yourself of her possession and win the crown. I knew you would be victorious. All you needed was a push to anger. And who better to drive you to the edge of fury than me?”
“Liar,” I mumble, swimming in nausea and coughing up blood. My arms and legs feel weighted, and sticky streams ooze out of the gouges in my skin. “You left me.”
“I’m still here, aren’t I?” Morpheus guides me down beside Ivory and exposes her birthmark, touching it to mine. Heat flashes along my body. “I’ve always believed in your power. For the queen I saw in you even as a child . . . for the woman you could never see in yourself. My faith is as unchanging as my age.”
“I don’t believe you,” I murmur, half-conscious. My veins refill, healing my skin. The agonizing lacerations both inside and outside my body ease to numbness.
He strokes my head. “Of course you don’t. I’ve given you no reason to.”
I snap open my eyes as a roar breaks from the bandersnatch’s pen. The gate hangs off its hinges, the padlock crushed and useless as the monster rises over Morpheus’s shoulder with Queen Red’s ivy illuminating its veins. She found another body to inhabit . . .
“Morpheus!”
He leaps toward the monster to defend me. Two tongues and a lasso of vines cinch around his neck, jerking him high into the air. He loses his hat.
Still weak, I struggle to stand. “Fight back!”
But it’s over even before I say it.
Morpheus clutches his throat. “Better to take my medicine, luv,” he chokes out. “If you try to outsmart magic”—a strained cough breaks his words—“there’s always a price to pay.”
The creature swallows him whole. His wings slide down last—a flash of glistening black grace.
The creature is about to charge me but instead falls to the ground and rolls around, wrestling itself. Morpheus is still defending me from the inside.
When the bandersnatch rises to its feet again, it runs into the closest wall. Slamming its massive body against the rock until it crumbles and breaks open, the monster bursts out of its chain and leaps through the hole, escaping into the wilds of Wonderland.
I sit and stare at the giant gap in the castle wall—my hooped gown encircling my waist like a velvet globe—for what seems an eternity. As I breathe in the night air, I know it really can’t have been more than a few seconds.
The pixies arrive to gather the dead. They first appear in the distance, mining lights bobbing in the darkness before they clamber in over the rocky ruins and set to work.
I scoot forward to pick up the tiny caterpillar carving from the floor and tuck it into the top of my dress. I stop to look at Morpheus’s fedora, and a pang of regret stings my heart.
Crawling to Ivory, I tap her face to wake her so she won’t be mistaken for dead.
The pixie brigade passes us, sniffing as they go. “No smellum deadses. Move longish and wide.”
While they gather the corpses, Ivory and I help each other stand. I tell her everything that happened when she was unconscious.
I’m numb . . . my emotions rubbed so raw, I’ve become desensitized. “It makes no sense,” I whisper, holding my chest where the carving, cold and lifeless, presses against my heart. “Morpheus defeated Red’s Deathspeak, then gave himself up to the bandersnatch, the very fate he’d been running from—”
“To save you.” Ivory finishes my thought. “It appears he did have the capacity for unselfish love, after all. Just not for me.”
I rub at the tears and blood dried on my face, overwhelmed by the destruction surrounding us. “I came here to set things right. Instead, I made a mess of everything.”
Ivory straightens my gown and wings. Her eyes are kind as she catches a strand of my loosened hair, studying the fiery red color. “Sometimes a flame must level a forest to ash before new growth can begin. I believe Wonderland needed a scouring.”
I look down at my tattered and bloody clothes. “What happens now?”
She places the ruby crown on my head and repositions her own. “You are the rightful heir of the Red Court. You passed all the tests and received the crown. Grenadine is required by her court’s own decree to step down. Whatever you bid your subjects do next, they will abide by it as law.”
“Whatever?” I ask.
As she nods in response, the door bursts open with the help of a battering ram. Both courts pour in from the outer hall. Even the clams and zombie flowers have found their way through the hole in the wall.
Soon, I’m surrounded by a celebration of creatures both winged and wily, left to decide my own fate for what feels like the first time in my life.
“What will it be, Queen Alyssa?” Ivory asks.
I bend over to pick up Morpheus’s hat and place it on my head over my crown, tilting it at an angle. “Let us feast.”

In the realm of humans, a proper high tea would’ve better served negotiations between two kingdoms trying to reestablish peace, but watching my albino ferret friend pound the roasted goose into submission, and seeing all my guests plunder the giggling main course for its succulent, aromatic meat, I know I made the right choice.