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.”